Performances

Petro's, an elderly person today, recalls memories, animating snapshots of his childhood and teenage life in a difficult period of history, when his homeland was held by a foreign conqueror, causing deprivation, hunger and death. With his tiny lens, he sheds light on people, relationships, ideas, he changes opinions, he demolishes facts and stereotypes, and through his wandering, he makes us look at the children of the war on our planet, the hardships, the hunger and the deaths, the hot spots full of children of our neighbouring Syria and he valiantly and vigorously encourages us not to lose faith in the battle we have to fight “... for a new life”, to find the optimism and the smile that we lose little by little. It reminds us that in difficult times, when ideas and values dominate, we can be excited about our country’s “little things”.

Our performance, following the footsteps of my former productions of this play in Cyprus and Athens, has an obligation: to shed light, through the eyes of Petros, on the paces of the children of the Greek North and children all over the world, children whose life is turned upside down, from one moment to another, and who have become witnesses and victims of a world that is becoming more and more violent. How tremendously great “History” defines little “history” and how it deregulates social life and affects the experience of a family.

In this third staging, the director aspires to maintain the elements of the power and the vigour of the two previous attempts at a textual (adaptation by Savvas Kyriakidis and Takis Tzamargias) and an artistic level (music by Dimitris Zavros, sets by Edouard Georgiou) in Athens and in Cyprus and to infect it with the ethos and the passion of the NTNG’s actors and collaborators, deepening even more on Alki’s timeless messages ...for a better world!

Takis Tzamargias