“I walk in the forest… when there is no wolf…”. Already in 2006, we find a serious proposal for the modernization of the teenage theater with the production of the play “The Sleeper Awakened” by Xenia Kalogeropoulos and Thomas Moshopoulos. “Sleeping Beauty” is really pierced by a poisonous spine, she falls asleep with a sweet dream, but not so briefly as in a classic fairy tale. Her dream lasts for eons, the feeling of achronism stretches for centuries, and the heroine wakes up in a new world where she has to adapt to a technologically advanced culture.

Thanos Tokakis “followed the thread” of modernizing fairy tales that gently lull us to sleep, and staged “Stories That Will Keep You Awake” as a single performance not only for teenagers, but also for adults. This is a particularly interesting stage composition and a completely new directorial proposal in the field of this dramaturgy. It includes three of the most poetic works of Briton Noel Gregg (1944-2009), a playwright highly influential among young people. Iulia Diamantopoulou translated into a warm and youthfully sensual language the plays The Tin Soldier, The Hood in the Forest and Tasty Fairy Tale, which are actually adaptations of the classic fairy tales Lead, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood .

Allegories and symbolism

The direction highlights elements of allegory, symbols, myth and archetypal oppositions of good-evil, right-wrong, beautiful-ugly, in an inherently expressionistic, phobic and dystopian atmosphere. Gradually, this distorting character is modified by the director’s manipulations with realistic and expected stage forms. What the director proposes is a complex combination, a function of elements of horror and comics, with a clear influence of the gothic style of Tim Burton films, a combination of demonism and sensuality, excellently crafted on a visual, sound and interpretive level.

The thread of modernizing the stories that accompanied us at night has led to a show for those who are or feel like teenagers.

Twelve actors, creatively made up by Olga Faleychik, sometimes move like puppets, transform into a noisy anthropomorphic forest or disassembled toys that move like one face, and sometimes silently glide like terrible shadows along the walls of a harsh scenery, abstracted by Paris Mexis. . Stage furniture such as the grandmother’s bed and table in the rotunda, the evocative woodland environment, brought a dark and frightening element of fairy tales. Harmonious coordination of sounds, voices, body movements and especially hands, curated by Cecil Mikrotsiku.

Nicholas Papadomichelakis uses all the possibilities of the paradoxical role of the wise Kyrios Papias, he meets us dressed in leggings with geometric patterns, realizing a buffoonish and slightly harlequin figure. Dionisia Balamotis as Gretel with an “angelic” face and “devilish” soul, Christos Kragiopulos as the cruel and menacing Wolf, Efstatia Lagiokapa as Little Red Riding Hood’s hysterical mother, Fani Xenudaki as Grandmother and Asimina Anastasopoulou as Little Red Riding Hood are worthy of their performance. they throw out all the psychoanalytic ramifications and stylistic details of fairy tales.

Lambros Constanteas stars in a particularly dramatic, by no means pleasant, but dynamic finale, with superb theatricality: as a leading soldier, with a leg amputated, in love with a ballerina (Eleni Moleski is great as the “doll”), he melts into the shoot slowly and silently. All that remains is an arrow that was once a lead heart… The liberating power of love sends a redemptive message to young viewers: “I love, therefore I am. Live”. And so “they will live well, and we will live better” …

Ms. Rhea Grigoriou holds a PhD in History and Drama from AUTH and is Professor of Greek Culture at EAP.