Even Water Has a Place to Go
Between the old walls, an iron staircase, a few pots of flowers and a mattress for bed, one wonders what the miracle is. Iakovos Kambanellis’ play, The Backyard of Miracles, gives the opportunity to the Greek audience to stand in front of its own lives and history, and eventually find the answer to this question.
Played for the first time in 1957 by the Karolos Koun’s Art Theatre, in Athens, Kambanellis’ piece is drenched in everything that’s Greek, then and now, indifferently. Set in the capital’s poverty-stricken neighbourhoods, among nostalgic refugees from Asia Minor, working-class not-so-much heroes, wanna-be TV stars and the unavoidable gossipmonger, The Backyard of Miracles describes a feeling rather than a single story – the eternal struggle of the unprivileged, the unavoidable precariousness of those who live among the dust, and their irrepressible will to live. As famous theatre director Karolos Koun once said, «Kambanellis’ theatre is first and foremostly Greek. It’s a theatre that concerns us all the while making our concerns shine ever brighter, projecting them onto clearly Greek images, in a world where their stimuli touch us and move us».
This backyard and its people welcome us with light, colours, songs, voices and laughs. With an authenticity that one can only enjoy. While the heroes and stories unfold before us with the simplicity and spontaneity of their daily routine, the audience too gets busy and remembers their grandfathers asleep under the stars in the summer months, their grandmothers putting sugar on the bread and the reserved youths of another era. The open hearts and the closed curtains. Men smoking and women embroidering.
And it is right there, through their lives, that the story unfolds and shows its signs. Through their lost dreams and their hopes, which, however lost, remain so, nevertheless. Because people are their own homeland. The soil and its smells. The eradications, the divisions and the revolutions. Each and every one of us carries all of this inside, even tough we have not lived it personally. Just like Kostas Tsianos’ actors carry their possessions, now that nothing else if left for them. And one next to the other, they do not yield, but keep walking onward with acceptance, power, a tight punch, a smile, a dream, a loss and, finally, love.
There is the miracle.
The show is still playing at
Theatre Moni Lazariston
Kolokotroni 25-27, Stavroupoli – Thessaloniki
from 7 October 2017 to 31 January 2018
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 20.30
Wednesdays at 18.00
Sundays at 19.00The Backyard of Miracles
by Iakovos Kambanellisdirector Kostas Tsianos
sets-costumes Ioulia Stavridou
music Dionysis Tsaknis
lyrics Lina Nikolakopoulou
lighting Stelios Tzolopoulos
video supervision Kleanthis Karapiperis
music supervision Kostas Tsianos
assistant director Kiki Strataki
second assistant director Ilias Berberis
assistant set-costumes designer Chryssa Serdari
production co-ordinator Marleen Verschuuren
photographs Tasos Thomoglou
cast Eleftheria Aggelitsa, Ilias Berberis, Natassa Daliaka, Thanassis Dislis, Theodoros Ignatiadis, Dimitris Kalantzis, Sofia Kalemkeridou, Pandelis Kalpakoglou, Maria Karamitri, Dimitris Kolovos, Lefteris Litharis, Eirini Mourelatou, Charis Papadopoulos, Evi Sarmi, Aristotelis Zacharakis
