Thēbae Desertae
By Kiriakos Charitos

Inspired by Sophocles’ Antigone

Now Thebes has the floor
These ruins you see
Are my scared walls
High temples and halls

Memory is nothing but language. In the long-forsaken countryside, a voice searches for a girl once called Antigone. The city awakens and begins to remember, shifting in and out of dreaming. Its pieces flicker with life and linger on fleetingly, only to turn to dust again.

Awarded writer and screenwriter Kiriakos Charitos (State Award for Children's Literature 2023) forges a folk fable inspired by the myth of Antigone, directed by Olia Lazaridou. Eschewing the linearity of a work that the audience knows by heart, Thēbae Desertae manages to move both forward and backward, possessing the form of a murmur and the shape of a song.

Oscillating between verse and prose, the narration remains in close rapport with the music performed live on stage. Actors and musicians assemble a dreamlike band that at times speaks, sings, or chants, transporting us to a land strewn with fragments of memory, like other burial offerings. The performance is conceptually linked with the inaugurating Festival production at Epidaurus (Sophocles’ Antigone, directed by Ulrich Rasche).