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'The Persians†of Aeschylus, directed by Thodoros Terzopoulos, with Greek and Turkish actors, opened exultingly the 15th International Festival of Theatre at Istanbul. We record the shocking experience from this bold, artistically and politically, Greek-Turkish theatrical meeting.
'They moved, they upset, they puzzled, they were deified. ` It was a really shocking experience to watch Greek and Turkish actors to recount together the defeat of Persian army in Greece - in two languages, yet as one body and one soul - set to mourn timelessly, sometimes with Byzantine melodies and sometimes with Anatolian threnodies, the inequity of the wars and the battles. With one explosive form of theatre that links the bodily paroxysm with the sobriety of articulation, Thodoros Terzopoulos directs Aeschylus’s tragedy as one extreme rite of lugubriousness.
At Istanbul, the actors of ' Attis' tag team, practiced exceedingly, with an admirable precision in movement and speech and almighty scenic presence, changed the Byzantine church of Saint Peace - where the theatrical play was performed - in a battlefield and at the same time landscape of meeting. The play begins with a concussive scene: the 14 male actors of “Attis', half Turks and half Greeks, hold black and white photographs of dead and missing people, victims of the modern wars (Cypriote, Kurdish, Greeks and Turks). At all the duration of the play, the actors fight, in order to embrace a little afterwards, swirling in Dervis dances and cold war dances and they mourn ceaselessly- sometimes in Turkish and sometimes in Greek – for the missing people and the war victims of entire humanity. 'Gittiler!' half, of them cry out, 'έφυγαν†(they are gone) scream the rest of them and suddenly, apart from the myth, the story and the naval battle of Salamine, under acclamations and behind violent embraces you listen a perpetual lamentation – for ourselves and the others. In the exit, with the Greek and the Turkish actors withdrawing with mutual bereavement , was like we were not watching actors on a stage. It was as if were seeing two populations thrown in the arena of centuries, narrating and twirling in the diachrony and the historicity of the real political events, in an endless conflict and reconciliation.
The fiery speech of Aeschylus, reaches from the 472 B.C. to today in order to reminds us that 'now, for everything ,we must fight', but - attention - 'now, for everything we will mourn TOO†Turn inversion, panting and however continuing, the actors share between them and with us this shocking experience of meeting and confrontation, in order to declare to us what Thodoros Terzopoulos signals with this particular theatrical play: 'When we meet the other, the foreigner, and we see him in the eyes, that dreadful moment two choices are erected in front of us: to either reach love with it’s existential meaning or to be leaded to a war with it’s literal meaning. Perhaps finally the deeply political is counterbalanced with the deeply erotic '.
Source: Athenorama
(I translated the article, so please excuse the mistakes in it :-S )
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