The Melina Mercouri Open Air Theatre located in the suburb of Vironas, Athens is embraced by steep cliffs that give it an imposing look. The semi-circle of risers appears temporary but does give the impression of an ancient theatre. There Theatre Roda staged Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
It is an interesting production
with some thought-provoking choices by the director, Maria Peretzi. She has decided to include live music
accompaniment throughout the performance. The production begins with a flutist
on stage and ends with a piece for piano. The Tempest, with its
magic, spirits and other-worldliness, can certainly use music and for much of
the performance the piano music as background worked well.
At the end of the play Prospero
asks the audience to release him with its applause. Stamatis Logos as Prospero
finishes the Epilogue and kneels. The piano player keeps playing…and playing...and
playing. The audience starts getting
restless and applauds to make him stop. He does not. Another round of applause.
No result. Finally, we get up and start leaving the theatre. He does stop and
the cast comes out for a curtain call. What was the director thinking when she
allowed this?
All the characters are miked and
often the only way to distinguish the speaker is by watching for whose lips are
moving or who is moving his hands. I feel that words coming out of a loudspeaker
in the theatre lose some of their nuances or emotional impact. And you can
count on one mike not working and several rubbing against a costume and making
a screeching racket. It may be my imagination, but I make no secret of my
dislike of miking except in situations where reaching the audience is just too
difficult.
The production for most of the
time felt like a concert performance rather than a fully staged one. The actors
looked at and spoke to the audience for an inordinate amount of time. King
Alonzo (Dimitris Nellas) rarely looked at the other characters and appeared as
if he had been nailed to the ground. He may be the worst example, but my comments
hold true for almost everyone, including Prospero. Interaction was more
coincidental than planned.
Shakespeare never stinted on
comic scenes and characters and in Trinculo and Stephano he has provided a
couple of doozies for The Tempest. Trinculo (Christos Valaoras) is a jester and
Stephano (Alexandros Batsis) is a butler who run into the wild and stinking
Caliban (Stavros Kappas). They get drunk and are supposed to be hilarious, but
they produce only a handful of twitters.
Logos as Prospero is reasonably
impressive, but he lacked a powerful presence. My thought was “no wonder his
brother booted him out of Milan.” He is dressed in a heavy, silver robe that
seemed anything but easy to handle.
The lovers Miranda (Tzela
Anagnostopoulou) and Ferdinand (Thomas Gotsis) have our support from the start
and we wish they would look at each other all the time instead of the audience.
Peretzi has three Ariels (Ioulia
Ventikou, Mania Metaxa and Patty Papageorgiou) and I have no idea why.
No effort was spared in the
design of costumes. There are more than a dozen costume designers listed in the
program. Much of the effort went into designing the costumes of the spirits and
nymphs including Ariel. We get colourful, elaborate costumes that are quite
impressive.
It is a production with minimal
interaction among the characters, maximum delivery of lines with little
movement, accompanying music that works well until overdone and gorgeous
costumes. The loudspeaker may have made the actors sound more monotonous than they
really were but all of these issues reflect the director’s choice.
______________________ The Tempest by William Shakespeare in a production by Roda Theatre, in a translation by Dimitris Peretzis was performed on September 1, 2019 at the Melina Mercouri Open Air Theatre, 58 Neapoleos, Vironas, Athens, Greece.
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