I've never really been able to get used to humans, but that's just another one of my disabilities Dimítris Dimitriádis
(...) « That year, not a single woman gave birth. » Thus begins Dying as a Country, the first of three works by Dimitris Dimitriadis to be scheduled this season. Lying in the background of the play is an antique curse, much like the one that struck Thebes during the last days of Oedipus's reign. Like Sophocles, Dimitriadis is Greek - and as his translator Michel Volkovitch points out, « it would be difficult not to see here, in this shout of hatred against a country that is rotten to the bone, crushed by the weight of the church and the army, a parallel with the Greece that Dimitriadis lived in under the Colonels' dictatorship - even if this portrait, published in 1978, at a moment when Greece was breathing a little bit after years of tragedy, is anything but a realistic account of the events of the time. »
If there is any realism, it consists in reinventing, from what imagination has to offer, « a complete portrait of all the perversions and subversions possible...a synthesis of evil from all of bygone history, the present and the future... » The Greece of ancient myths and the Greece of History, violently collide and overlap and in their collision, what emerges, is a « country » that no longer has a name and whose people have irremediably entered a period of decline, « exhausted by the intertwining of their own history and incapable of resisting the pressing injunctions of an instinctive egoism and uncontrolled but conscious contempt for everything that has contributed to the survival of the nation, that has assassinated the native land with premeditation, and signified, nothing less than the fact that the idea of the nation had already disappeared with no chance of returning. » This fragmented, emerging text is of such enormous density, violence, richness of language, that it calls for proferation. Perhaps it is a testimony ; that of an historian - because the subject seems to change half-way through the story - who lived several centuries after an inconceivable catastrophe. These few pages look like the remains of a very ancient manuscript, half eaten away by the ravages of time, where suspension points signal the missing passages. Taken like this, this truncated book has neither a beginning nor an end, and appears to have been bound by error (or was it ?), with a poignant love letter, which ends - but the end is missing - with an imprecation of despair. Ever since its publication, Dying as a Country, a text that is haunted with echoes of the Bible and great tragedies, has fascinated directors. After the beautiful version spoken as a monologue, created by Anne Dimitriadis and acted by Anne Alvaro, the monumental directing by Michael Marmarinos and the Theseum Ensemble, that was already performed at the Wiener Festwochen, the Athens festival and the Kunsten-Festival des Arts in Brussels, gathers thirty actors and over a hundred extras on stage for a remarkable performance at the Odeon Theater.
