Performances

Fairytaleheart - Philip Ridley

“...one day they’ ll be out for real.
The audience...”

 
This phrase of Philip Ridley’s from his original text has me wondering: can art and creativity be seen as a purely personal condition? Because, for me, the dream of art only becomes a reality when an audience is there to receive it. The phrase in question, along with everything else Ridley wrote, also declares theatre’s social nature—for the theatre is a community in which actors (and, indirectly, all the other creatives involved) and audience come together. And I am convinced it is precisely this social dimension that makes theatre so central to every era. It’s something I try to bear in mind as I embark on a new play.
 
Teenage and adult theatre differ only in so far as the former may choose to focus on subjects of direct and intense relevance to young people: love, sex, addictions, career orientation, relations with parents and peers, bullying and cyber-bullying, etc. We are at our most sensitive during our teenage years. It’s when our socio-political views assume their initial shape along with our philosophical and existential credo. When we mature by discovering the world around us.

Fairytaleheart is a teenage play. It deals with love, with single-parent families, with emotions, social impasses and existential dilemmas. It’s the story of two teenagers who are changing, who feel pain and believe and question, who throw themselves into everything they do. When you’re 15, you turn the dial up to 11 and everything you feel and experience, as well as the problems you face, can seem larger than life and often too much to handle. Kevin and Sandra, the protagonists, both have their problems, both have their creative urges. And it’s the latter that provide the emotional backdrop that helps bring them close, and which later fuels their love—however different they may seem at first sight.
 
Of course, Ridley’s story also sheds light on aspects of our contemporary social reality. And while the play is set in England, the situations it portrays are just as familiar to us here in Greece—what it has to say is still current, still up-to-date.
 
The songs by LEX, who granted permission for their use in this production, convey the socio-political context in Greece today, which is anything but ideal for our young people. But this is the context in which they’re growing up into the adults of tomorrow. This is the world in which they will have to try to get by and stand on their own two feet, the reality in which they will dream and love.
 
It’s extremely healthy for teenagers to channel their inexhaustible mental and physical energy into arts and into love. And true to the spirit of the text, the production is jam packed with art and with love; it is full of art in all its forms and imbued with romance. Full of creativity. An amazing team. Superb young actors. Marvellous collaborators new and old. And freedom, lots and lots of freedom. The rest on stage...