With “Desmotis”, a play that deals with the concept of debt and was written in July 2015, in the aftermath of the “bra de fer” between the governments of Greece and Germany, as the playwright, short story writer and translator characteristically says Natasa Sideris won the first prize in this year’s international competition of contemporary Greek theatrical writing of the Regensburg theater in Germany “MYTIOS ?!” in collaboration with the State Theater of Northern Greece.
“A less open-minded committee could read it as a critique of the current situation, instead of investigating the circumstances that gave birth to it, and choose not to get involved with a project that could cause discomfort to both the public and its sponsors. “Something like that did not happen, and that is why I take my hat off to them”, says Natasa Sideri to the Athenian / Macedonian News Agency.
The political news of the summer of 2015 – the debt, the negotiations, the uncertainty, the bad debtors and the good lenders or vice versa, depending on the country, the newspaper, the worldview – were one of the starting points of the project. Another starting point was the ladder that Sideris wrote – around the same time – as part of an exercise in the Writing Studio of the National Theater, on a subject that would somehow involve the Merchant of Venice, while the trigger for “Desmotis” was also a conversation with the artist Alexandros Kaklamanos, through which he imagined a figure a bit like the man of Da Vinci’s Vitruvius, Jesus or, exactly, Prometheus Bound.
“It was then that I saw the image of Nifos for the first time. Later, when I started writing, self-sacrifice was added as a means of resistance against an authoritarian power, the secret that must be kept and some other elements that make the connection with the tragedy of Aeschylus more direct “, Ms. Sideri explains, adding that the final foundations for the project came after the political developments, in the summer of 2015.
The plot of the project is as follows: A man borrows money from a friend to pay the installment of his mortgage and promises to repay the money in two months. As a token of gratitude, the borrowed friend suggests to the lender friend to help him with the work that the latter has planned to do in his own house. Somehow so sweet and civilized, with little glasses and crystal glasses on the table, begins a process of gradual enslavement of the borrower friend to the lender friend, which, shortly before reaching its logical conclusion, reveals the foundations of its moral basis.
“Ruthless in cutting habits”
This is not Sideris’s first award. In 2013, her first play, “On the Bridge”, won first prize in the competition organized by the Origins group, and then toured in England, in various theatrical scenes.
Her next play, “The Island of Immortality”, after winning a theatrical competition at the Ronald Duncan Literary Foundation, was presented in the United Kingdom in September 2014, under the direction of The Certainty of Chance Theater Company. In June 2015, her solo work “Titans Battles” was distinguished within the Writing Studio of the National Theater, and was presented on a podium at the Stage “Nikos Kourkoulos”, while in 2019 she received the award for debut novelist of “O Anagnostis” magazine, for the collection short stories entitled “Dominant Evil Accounts”.
Is there a secret to these discriminations? “Maybe the fact that I am ruthless in cutting habits,” she replies.
From the pages to the board
She watches with interest the evolution of her text on the theatrical board. “I like more and more to be involved in the rehearsal process. Not, however, to maintain control over the project. On the contrary, I would say, what I like is that in this way I am given the opportunity to permanently lose the illusion of control. The tricks on the page are nice, but the questions of the actors are the ones that will reveal the mistakes and failures of the text. This is the logic of “workshopping”, ie a first stage rehearsal that takes place in the presence of the author, which is a fairly common practice in countries with strong contemporary theatrical painting “, he explains.
This season, together with Nikol Dimitrakopoulou and Anastasia Kotsali, they have prepared a performance on the occasion of the murders, entitled “Witches”, which is scheduled to be presented on Mother’s Day in collaboration with the Athens Region. At the same time, he is working on a new collection of short stories, which he hopes to complete in 2022.
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