My first port of call was the Attis theatre, where 10 years ago I saw an astonishing piece called Alarme about the correspondence between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. It was the work of director Theodoros Terzopoulos. On this visit I saw his adaptation of A Doll’s House, called simply Nora. It is a mystery to me why this great 75-year-old auteur is acclaimed in Russia, China, Germany and the US but unknown in Britain.
When I inquired why his work had not come to the UK, he told me it was because he’d never been asked. If I had to describe his style, it would be one of ritualistic minimalism: influenced by the Bauhaus and having worked in Berlin, he conveys the essence of a text through speech and movement. In Nora, he reduces Ibsen’s play to 70 minutes and three characters: the fraught heroine caught between two men, her husband, Torvald, and the blackmailing Krogstad.
Terzopoulos describes the play as a battle between “the frightened ego and the strangled true self”, and that essential conflict was brilliantly embodied by Sophia Hill, who acts with every fibre of her being. She even makes vivid use of a tumbling mane of hair. As Ibsen’s doll-wife, she screamed in English, “Shampoo for me! Conditioner for me!” as a symbol of her materialism. At the end, she escaped from the male pincer movement of Torvald and Krogstad – who both at various stages clawed her body – by crawling to the front of stage and diving headfirst over its edge.
This was a Nora whose bourgeois surface concealed something feral and highly sexual. When I saw Hill play Elizabeth I in Alarme, she invested the character with a similar physicality, gliding over the stage as if she were a predatory serpent. On the strength of that and her Nora, I would say Hill is one of the world’s great actors – imagine a feline Billie Whitelaw – who deserves to be known far beyond Greece.
Michael Billington, Guardian, March 2020
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/02/triumph-from-tragedy-how-greeces-theatre-roared-out-of-a-national-crisis
“The challenge was very interesting. Terzopoulos’s theater is opposed to realism, so what could be his approach to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House? First of all, perhaps exactly because the original material is already known, the impact was very immediate, even for an audience unfamiliar with the scenic language of the Greek director. Although the novelty is completely recognizable, it was received enthusiastically by the audience who applauded for ten minutes!
The atmosphere is almost dreamlike and abstract, as if we are inside Nora’s mind. {…}
The material of realistic drama βεχομεσ the material of tragedy. Sometimes Nora reminds us of the primitive power of Medea and sometimes she reminds us of Antigone who claims her rebellion but is buried alive. In those magical moments when the body “speaks” on stage, we see Terzopoulos revealing himself as a master in this rewriting of the Ibsenic drama.
The end is the touch of a genius. Nora announces her departure, she should be victorious: she has found the breath of authenticity that was in danger of being suffocated. She is wrapped in a black dress, a composition of veils and pleats wrapped tightly around her new self. The dress is her cocoon: Nora disappears “devoured” by its wide pleats, crawling, struggling. {…}
What matters to Terzopoulos is to show the struggle, the contrast, the tragedy of existence. This version of the Scandinavian drama is colored with deep Greek and ecumenical references”.
Gilda Tentorio, PAC, paneacquaculture.net, May 2022
http://www.paneacquaculture.net/…/e-ibsen-diventa…/…
“It’s rare, very rare to see on stage actors of this caliber: Sophia Hill (Nora), Tasos Dimas (Krogstad) and Antonis Myriagkos (Torvald) are formidable. It’s touching to see them at the end respond to the growing applause of the audience applauding in turn the master Theodoros Terzopoulos, who came on stage to applaud them too. This is a gesture of mutual affection and gratitude, something very rare, which should always happen between the participants in a joint artistic creation.
But what will stay in my mind and heart above all is the last scene. The Sophia Hill, speechless, descends into the proscenium and gradually, with almost imperceptible movements, disappears between the feathers of her dress, until she becomes a shapeless mass: no doubt it is Nora who, having left her husband, falls asleep in the arms of her new-born freedom, just as a nightingale (we know Torvald called her like that) would do with her head under her wings. However, it is also the actress who is liberated from the character to become a woman again, but also the character who dies, to be transformed outside the theater into a light breath for life and the world.”
