The Little Prince (2000-2001)

Production: Ithikon Akmeotaton
Music-Sound: Studio 19

"The Little Prince" (2000-2001)
by Antoine de Saint-Exypery
(Synergeio Technon)

Direction-Adaption-Translation:
Thanassis Sarantos
Video Art: Nikos Zappas
Lights: Linos Meidanis
Costumes: Lina Motsiou
Choreography: Stathis Mermiggis
Animation: Larry Bakiroglou
Sound: Iordanis Tsolakian
Makeup: Simella Kalaitzidou
Director Assistant: Spyros
Vlahakis
Actors: Dimitra Karali, Sylvia Delikoura
Narrator-Pilot: Thanassis Sarantos

Production: Ithikon Akmeotaton
Music-Sound: Studio 19

The Little Prince (French: ''Le Petit Prince''), published in 1943, is a novella and the most famous work of French writer, poet andaristocrat aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944, Mort pour la France).[N 1] It has been translated into more than 190 languages and has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books ever published.
An earlier memoir by the author recounted his aviation experiences in the Sahara desert. He is thought to have drawn on those same experiences for use as plot elements in The Little Prince. Saint-Exupéry's novella has been adapted to various media over the decades, including stage, screen and operatic works.

In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry talks about being stranded in the desert beside a crashed aircraft. This account clearly draws on his own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal he described in detail in his memoir Wind, Sand and Stars.
On December 30, 1935 at 14:45, after 18 hours and 36 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his navigator André Prévot, crashed in theLibyan Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the record for the Paris-to-Saigon flight and win a prize of 150,000 francs.[7] Their plane was a Caudron C-600 Simoun, n° 7042, registration F-ANRY. The crash site is thought to have been located in the Wadi Natrun. Both survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous. Lost in the desert with a few grapes, a single orange, and some wine, the pair had only one day's worth of liquid. They both began to see mirages, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third day, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, aBedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment that saved Saint-Exupéry and Prévot's lives.
The rose was inspired by his Salvadoran wife Consuelo de Saint Exupéry and the small home planet was inspired by her small home countryEl Salvador which is also known as "The Land of Volcanoes" due to having many volcanoes.
In the desert, Saint-Exupéry had viewed a fennec (desert sand fox), which most likely inspired him to create the fox character in the book. In a letter written to his sister Didi from Cape Juby in 1918, he tells her about raising a fennec that he adored.
Saint-Exupéry may have drawn inspiration for the little prince's appearance from himself as a youth. Friends and family would call him "le Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King"), due to his golden curly hair. He had also met a precocious eight year old with curly blond hair while residing with a family in Quebec City, Canada in 1942.
The little prince's reassurance to the Pilot that his dying body is only an empty shell resembles the last words of Antoine's younger brother François: "Don't worry. I'm all right. I can't help it. It's my body" (Airman's Odyssey).
The literary device of presenting philosophical and social commentaries in the form of the impressions gained by a fictional extraterrestrial visitor to Earth had already been used by the philosopher and satirist Voltaire in his story "Micromégas" (1752) – a classic work of French literature with which Saint-Exupéry was likely to be familiar.
Upon the outbreak of World War II, Saint-Exupéry, a successful pioneering aviator prior to the war, initially flew with a reconnaissance squadron of the French Air Force (the Armée de l'Air). After France's 1940 armistice with Germany, he and his wife fled occupied France and sojourned in North America arriving at the very end of December 1940 with the intention of staying only four weeks.
Between January 1941 and April 1943 the Saint-Exupérys lived in a penthouse apartment on Central Park South[9] as well as another location in New York City, plus the The Bevin House mansion in Asharoken, Long Island, N.Y..[10] The couple also resided in Quebec City, Canada for a time during 1942, during which time they met a precocious eight year old boy with blond curly hair, the son of the De Konincks, the family the Saint-Exupéry's resided with.
Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince in New York City and Asharoken in mid-to-late 1942, with the manuscript being completed in October.[13][11] He later rejoined the Free French Air Force and resumed flying as a WWII reconnaissance pilot in 1943. Saint-Exupéry died in action during an unarmed reconnaissance flight in late July 1944, in preparation for the Allied invasion of occupied France.

(Source: Wikipedia)

The Ugly One (2008)

The Ugly One (2008)
by Marius von Mayenburg
National Theatre of Greece

(Photos: Lina Motsiou)

Translation: Giorgos Depastas

Director: Thanassis Sarantos

Scenography-costumes: Lina Motsiou

Choreography: Hermes Malkotsis, Eddie Lame

Music-Sound: Studio 19

Lights: Sakis Birbilis

With: Bessie Malfa, Gerasimos Skiadaresis, Sokratis Patsikas, Panayiotis Panagopoulos

The work's translation was donated by Goethe-Institut Athen.

Marius von Mayenburg is a German playwright of the young generation and his plays are frequently staged throughout Europe. Von Mayenburg is known in Slovakia for the successful productions of his plays Fireface,Parasites and Eldorado.

Von Mayenburg´s play The Ugly One (Der Hässliche) is a currently being staged at major European theatres. The hero, Lette, is incredibly ugly. He is not too bothered about it, since his is a world of inventions and a loving wife. Everything should be well. However, it is not. Why is an assistant sent to present Lette´s brilliant invention at a congress and not Lette himself? The boss´s answer is devastating. It´s because of Lette´s face. You cannot market anything with such an ugly face. The company cannot afford to lose its clients. The bitter recognition goes even deeper. Lette´s wife also thinks his face is horrible, although she has never said so before. Lette decides to act; there is nothing to lose. Away with the old face, here comes the new one! The metamorphosis is successful, opening possibilities, which Lette has not even dared to dream about. His relationships, his social status, income, they all undergo a dramatic change, even his sexual experiences. But the fairy tale comes to an end, and beauty, as a marketable commodity, changes into a nightmare. Once Lette´s face turns into a sales article, things start rolling and the face becomes unbearable again.

The Ugly One is a brilliant satire, full of fantasy and course, but liberating humour.

A Number (2005)

"A Number" (2005) by Caryl Churchill

Co-production:"Ithikon Akmeotaton", Theatre Empros

Translation in Greek: Tasos Mpantis, Thanassis Sarantos

Director: Tasos Mpantis

Scenography-costumes: 

Eleni Manolopoulou

Composer: Akis Daoutis

Lights: Elias Konstantakopoulos

With: Tasos Mpantis (the father), Thanassis Sarantos (the sons)

The playwright Caryl Churchill

Mark Ravenhill, The Guardian
Wednesday September 3 2008

'She made us raise our game'

The essence of the moment ... Caryl Churchill's work remains fresh and inspirational. Photograph: Jane Bown

Recently, I was talking with a young German playwright. "I love the British playwrights of your generation," she said, "Sarah Kane, Debbie Tucker Green, Caryl Churchill." Smiling, I told her that Churchill had her first stage play performed more than 35 years ago and is 70 this week. "But how," spluttered my colleague, "can she write like such a young author and be such an old lady?"
How indeed? Over the past 35 years, Churchill has created some of the most iconic moments in contemporary British theatre: the cross-dressing colonials of Cloud Nine; the meal shared by a collection of female historical figures in Top Girls; the swaggering, foul-mouthed yuppies of Serious Money; the grotesque parade of designer-hatted prisoners in Far Away, and the cloned brothers of A Number. Her plays have perfectly expressed the anxieties and possibilities of the moment in which they were first performed, and yet have managed to seem new in subsequent revivals.
Of all the major forces in British playwriting, I can think of no one else who is regarded with such affection and respect by her peers. Maybe it's because Churchill has kept a low public profile over the years - she rarely gives interviews - while always supporting new writers. Maybe it's because she has quietly and consistently built up an impressive body of theatre work, largely through a relationship with one theatre, the Royal Court in London. But it's her ability to continually reinvent the form that most writers would identify as her genius. In Churchill's plays, there is a constant search for new kinds of language and theatrical structures: devices that can reveal the essence of a moment. As the playwright Wallace Shawn said to me: "So many of us have great affection for the theatre, but so often we find it rather dull. But when you see a play of Caryl's - rich, inventive plays like Fen, or The Skriker, or A Mouthful of Birds - you realise how exciting it is to be a playwright."
Nicholas Wright, who directed Churchill's 1972 Royal Court debut, Owners, remembers their first meeting. "We met in a pub near the theatre. My first impression was of this very beautiful woman, a bit shy but sharp and funny. She said, 'Would you like me to rewrite the play?' which surprised me. It was something we didn't think about back then. Caryl is always rather ahead of her time."
To celebrate her 70th birthday this month, the Royal Court is inviting a number of playwrights, myself included, to direct readings of Churchill's work. Over two weeks, a chronological selection will be presented, from Owners - with its tang of Joe Orton and its prescient portrait of an obsession with ownership - right through to her plays of the past decade, including the disintegrating anti-plays that make up the double bill Blue Heart, and the disturbing fable of a world at war with itself, Far Away.
My own first encounter with Churchill's work was a student production of Cloud Nine. As a young man still hesitant about my own sexuality, I found the play's journey from a 19th-century colonised Africa to a modern urban park where the characters explore new sexual freedoms a dark and disturbing experience. Seeing the play again 10 years ago, in a revival at the Old Vic, I was impressed both by the authority with which it held a huge theatre, and how fresh and troubling its questioning of sexual roles still was. And the gentle candour of a speech in which an older woman describes her discovery of masturbation still seems - nearly 30 years after the play was written - as if it is being spoken afresh. Wright, who saw the play's first production, recalls being struck "not so much by the sexual explicitness on stage - we'd all seen pretty much everything by then - but the moral frankness of the play. Caryl's plays say things that we're all thinking but haven't yet expressed."
For the Royal Court readings, I have chosen to direct 1976's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Written for the leftwing company Joint Stock, the play charts the disintegration of radical political possibilities during the English civil war, skilfully balancing individual and communal experiences. It is a play that is rich in language: prayer, debate, ecstatic meetings, the stumbling attempts of the newly empowered to find a voice. April de Angelis, who will direct Owners, speaks of that play's "vertiginous sense of possibility - every line gives you a surprise". Joe Penhall, directing A Number, praises Churchill's gift for the demotic: "She captures the elisions and confusions of real speech. I read a pile of contemporary plays when I started out as a playwright and they were all full of characters who sounded like Oxbridge graduates talking to each other. Then I read a copy of Churchill's Ice Cream, and it was - wow! When somebody like Pinter or Churchill comes along, you listen for the first time to the way people actually speak."
De Angelis believes Churchill changed the landscape for women writing for the theatre. "When I began writing plays in the 1980s, people would still say to you that plays are all about structure and women can't do structure," she says. "But now you could point to plays like Cloud Nine and Top Girls and say, 'Rubbish. CarylChurchill's doing the most incredible things with structure.' She made us raise our game intellectually. My politics at the time were pretty simplistic, really just about writing bigger parts for women. But you saw Churchill's work and it really made you question why you were writing." De Angelis recalls a group of female playwrights performing the opening scene of Top Girls on the Royal Court stage in the early 1990s, partly as a way of acknowledging the possibilities Churchill had created for other women in theatre. "There was a group of us, including Sarah Daniels, Winsome Pinnock and myself, in the scene. I felt nervous and uncomfortable in the costume, but I really appreciated the chance to experience the writing from the inside. It's a complex piece: she develops a new way of overlapping dialogue. The women in that scene are all people who've achieved so much, but in such a competitive society that they can't listen: they're not a community of women, they're individuals telling their own stories."
"Politics are incredibly important to Caryl," says Wright, who will direct a reading of Top Girls. "I think she's had so much of her work premiered at the Royal Court because she sees it as an anti-establishment place. That makes it very different from other theatres for her." For Marius von Mayenburg, resident playwright at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre, it is Churchill's ability to capture the "reality of political emotion" that makes her such a distinct voice. "Many German playwrights of the same generation became didactic in their writing," says Von Mayenburg, "but she has taken political theatre to a new level. Her plays ask the important questions. We produced A Number in Berlin, and it captured the audience's anxiety about the dissolution of identity."Wallace Shawn will direct Ice Cream, a black comedy of Anglo-American relationships. He observes that, in America, "she's never become enough of a household name to lose her cult status. But it's a very big cult. We fans have a secret handshake. If you find someone who also likes her work, you know you have a special connection."
Of course it's possible to trace recurring themes in Churchill's work - alienation between parent and child, the possibility and failure of revolution. But it is the variety of her work that is most striking. As Von Mayenburg says: "With each play, she discovers new genres and forms. She then discards them and moves on, opening up possibilities for other playwrights to explore. I think many people writing today don't even realise they've been influenced by her. She's changed the language of theatre. And very few playwrights do that."