Nikos Hatzopoulos

The Sky a Glorious Red
by Loula Anagnostaki

«…Here I am, an old woman in a dry month…»


Eliot’s “Gerontion” is female here; Anagnostaki’s distant, utopian, ironic heroine surveys her own personal history and History from on high as one century gives way to another. In a metadramatic field, she marshals black humour and a memory of Beckett’s Winnie and speaks of her “beautiful; and somewhat dangerous” days through the ill-matched duo of her dead Communist husband and the son jailed for his part in a prostitution racket. Roula (Loula) Anagnostaki and Reni Pittaki, two grandes dames of the Greek theatre who first worked together in Koun’s historic Underground theatre, renew their acquaintance at the Athens Festival. [D.Κ.]