‘THE GREAT CHIMERA’

Stage Adaptation: Stratis Paschalis
Direction: Dimitri Tarlow

The phenomenal performance The Great Chimera, by M. Karagatsis, which has not stopped to be totally sold-out since its very first show, was attended by more than 100.000 spectators, has been critically acclaimed and honored with the highest and most prestigious awards in Greece!

This powerful, epic and erotic melodrama is a 20th century Greek tragedy. It is a co-production of the Poreia Theatre and the Athens and Epidaurus Festival 2014, conceived and directed by Dimitri Tarlow, who is the grandson of the eminent novelist M. Karagatsis and artistic director of Poreia Theatre, Greece’s so-called “Dostoyevsky”. The Great Chimera is renowned among Greek-speakers all around the world and is read today as widely as when first published. It belongs to M. Karagatsis’ trilogy of novels, that explore how foreigners fare on the rough and dramatic land that is Greece, full of conflicts between its ancient traditions and its war‐torn modern history.

In The Great Chimera, Marina, the main character, a French woman passionate about classical Greek culture, moves to Greece after having fallen in love and married a Greek ship-owner, carrying her deep psychological traumas with her. Greece, with its austere implicity, leads one to confront oneself; this sensual, fatally alluring place, will drag Marina into a passionate vortex with no way out, leading her to self-destruction. Karagatsis creates a bourgeois drama with deep ideological quests about Greek identity and the relation between Ancient and Modern Greece and the West. Within the canvas of a love-story in the form of an Ibsenian triangle, the perceptions of life, tragedy, realism, romantic reverie and, sometimes, paradox are intertwined. In this production, in which theatre interplays with cinema, human relationships in all their difficulty, passions and acts become snapshots of reality and fragments of a dream.

Cast
Marina: Alexandra Aidini
Yiannis: Maximos Moumouris
Minas: Dimitris Mothoneos
Reizena: Sofia Seirli
Lilly - Kalliopi - Vietnamese whore: Irene Fanarioti
Anna, Marina’s daughter: Manio Tarlow
Annezio: Rasmi Tsopela
A Stranger: Dimitri Tarlow

Creative Team
Stage Adaptation: Stratis Pashalis
Direction: Dimitri Tarlow
Set and Costume design: Eleni Manolopoulou
Original music: Katerina Polemi
Lighting Design: AlekosAnastasiou
Movement: Zoe Chatziantoniou
Film Direction: Christos Dimas