A Tribute to Yannis Ritsos

Χωρίς Τίτλο


The 2009 Athens Festival is to open with a tribute to Yannis Ritsos honouring the one hundredth anniversary of the great Greek poet’s birth. Outstanding actors will be playing poetic figures from the Fourth Dimension, the collection Ritsos began in 1956 with The Moonlight Sonata, which is now regarded as a landmark work: “Let me come with you. What a moon there is tonight!”.


ΔDramatic compositions drawing on ancient tragedy (as in Phaedra, 1978), the epics (Eleni, 1972) and contemporary reality (The Moonlight Sonata, 1956) in which a persona addresses a silent listener. The poetic monologue is preceded by a prose preface which, filling the role of stage directions, sets the time and place and introduces the characters, and is followed by an epilogue. When the Stranger comes, in which the stranger arrives uninvited in a time of mourning to speak about time ‘lost’ and ‘regained’, employs a different form, alternating between the first and third person.


Myth blends into today and personal experience into History. As Chrysa Prokopaki notes, “the almost essay-like deliberations are overlain by the confessional sincerity of everyday speech”.


The Moonlight Sonata










2/6, 23:00





3/6, 23:00





4/6, 23:00





5/6, 23:00


“Let me come with you. What a moon tonight! The moon is kind – no one will sense my hair’s turned gray. The moon will make it blond again. You will not notice. Let me come with you.”


When the Stranger comes










1/6, 23:00





2/6, 21:00





3/6, 21:00





5/6, 19:00


“The Stranger came, uninvited as we sat, shut in the big chamber with the covered mirrors – what could he want? […] It’s always a birth – the Stranger said – and death an addition, not a subtraction. Nothing is lost”.


Phaedra










1/6, 21:00





3/6, 19:00





4/6, 21:00





5/6, 21:00


Haziness always marks something profound and specific – in all likelihood tragic and even animalistic – a sacrificed desire, an unvanquishable, Hydra-like desire.


Peiraios 260

  • 01/06/2009 at 19:00
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