On the right side of the streambed / War session
by Giannis Palavos / By Aris Alexandris
Inspired by Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus / Inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

Contemporary Ancients Cycle introduces us this year to two female monologues inspired by Ancient Drama and directed by Giannis Skourletis while acquainting us with their creators, Greek authors Giannis Palavos and Aris Alexandris. Commissioned by the Festival, they both turn to the well of ancient myths for guidance and succeed in unearthing their contemporary dimensions through a pair of imaginative and thought-provoking plays.

Author of the short-story collections The Joke (State Prize for Short Story 2013) and The Child, Giannis Palavos relies on Oedipus at Colonus to cast a new light on the archetypal father-daughter relationship. Through the monologue of a woman who traces the life of her father—a wandering folklore musician in the Greek countryside—the play paints the portrait of a man persecuted and outcast, much like his mythical counterpart, with his daughter as his sole refuge.

Having just released his second book, Tria epi Psychis (2024), Aris Alexandris (winner of the State Prize for a Promising Author 2023 for his novel How Ignatius Karathodoris lost everything), on his part, revisits Lysistrata to offer a hilarious monologue on the decline of sex in the digital age, reframing it as an unprecedented and peculiar war—one fought on the battlefield of the human body.

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On the right side of the streambed

In Giannis Palavos’ On the right side of the streambed, a work loosely woven around Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, the story of two figures, a father and a daughter, unfolds. The father—a folklore musician who, on the strength of his art, untangles the riddles of others yet remains blind to his own—is wandering ousted and helpless, with his daughter as his only anchor. A year after his death, she holds an informal memorial in his honour, recounting the pieces of his personality while also casting a bitter yet tender look upon their relationship.

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War session

Can abstinence from sex bring war to a halt? Aris Alexandris’ Lysistrata is a frustrated psychologist who is fed up with listening to her patients whining about the shortcomings behind their relationships and choices. Convinced that we are in the midst of a peculiar war—with the human body as its battlefield—she sets up an online group therapy session to share with the participants her most critical advice: complete sexual abstinence. In an era of sexual overexposure, what place does it truly occupy in the lives of people? A hilarious monologue in which determination collides with doubt and traditional notions of love strike a conversation with the thorny realities of the digital age.