That National Theater opens this year Epidaurus Festival with “Hippolytus” by Euripides which will be presented on July 7 and 8, directed by Katerina Evagelatos, with a great group of collaborators and a dynamic 24-member troupe of actors and musicians. The play, which informally inaugurated the Epidaurion institution in 1954, rises here in a bold performance that highlights the wild universe of Euripides’ work, the catalytic power of passion in people’s lives, the bareness of existence, the destructive consequences of intransigence but and transcending natural laws and human limits.

THE Hippolytus, illegitimate son of Theseus and faithful follower of Artemis, is obsessed with chastity, devalues ​​love, insults the female sex. The goddess of love, Aphrodite, wanting revenge on him for disrespecting her, organizes a plan to exterminate him, inspiring intense love for him in his stepmother Phaedra. The show focuses on the figure of Aphrodite who sets up a game of revenge and watches with a voyeuristic eye as the human species becomes the gateway to her desires. Her eye becomes our eye and the faces are stripped bare. Naked bodies convey the explosion, the lust, the lust but also the purity of the human race.

“Who is to blame for the tragedy?” Euripides seems to be wondering. “God or man?” In Euripides’ hands the mythic motif of a woman’s sexual desire for a younger man is elevated to an inexorable conflict between human will and divine power. At the core of this dilemma dives the direction that accurately and sensitively explores all the dipoles, thus highlighting the complexity of the psychological and moral issues that are touched upon. On one hand temperance and on the other lust, on one hand the sacred and on the other the profane, on the one hand revenge and on the other sacrifice, on the one hand speech and on the other silence.

The show’s setting, a swampy dystopian landscape of grassy plants and water, reflects the desolation of human existence. In the performance, Aphrodite (played by Elena Topalidou) holding a camera, and amidst evocative music, films and broadcasts live in monoplane all the action, presenting aspects and details to the audience without editing. The troupe moves across the length of the ancient theater, in, around and behind the orchestra, between dream and reality, tracing the obstacle course between purity and lust, between ignorance and knowledge, between the same the fall of man and his atonement.

“Hippolytus” was presented for the first time at the National Theater in 1937, directed by Dimitris Rodiris, with Alexis Minotis as Hippolytus and Katina Paxinos as Phaedra. In 1953, it was staged again by the National Theater at the Conservatory of Herodes of Atticus, again directed by Dimitris Rodiris, and the following summer in Epidaurus, with Hippolytus by Alekos Alexandrakis and Phaedra by Elsa Vergis, informally inaugurating the institution of the Epidaurians that the following year ( 1955) was officially established with the same performance.

The translation is by Kostas Topouzis. The dramaturgical editing and adaptation is handled by Katerina Evagelatou, the sets by Eva Manidaki, the costumes by Eva Goulakou, the musical composition and orchestration by Alexandros-Drakos Ktistakis, the lighting by Eliza Alexandropoulos, the choreography by Alexandros Stavropoulos, the video design by Pantelis Makkas and the sound design by Kostas Pavlopoulos.

Starring: Diamantis Adamantidis, Kora Karvounis, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Maria Skoulas, Elena Topalidou, Yiannis Tsortekis, Orestis Chalkias and others.