Theatro Domatiou - Θέατρο Δωματίου

Angela Brouskou’s new project was inspired by the diaries of Margarita Karapanou, published as Life is wildly improbable, and by the author’s most recent novel, Mum, which she addressed to her mother, the novelist Margarita Lyberaki. The director follows the thread of the two women’s lives in a dizzying sequence of metamorphoses played out on the cusp of fiction and reality. Bound together by a relationship encompassing love and hate, empathy, antagonism and transcendence, mother and daughter will experience the anguish of being, of art, gender, motherhood, love and death. Video, creatively used, is a core element in the production, as is the music written for it by Monika.

Direction & Costumes: Angela Brouskou
Dramaturgy-Acting: Angela Brouskou, Parthenopi Bouzouri
Set Design: Guy Stefanou
Music: Monika
Lighting Design: Nikos Vlassopoulos
Video-Editing: Alexandros Seitaridis
Underwater Video: Angela Brouskou
Assistant to the Director: Sophia Papadopoulou

Production: Onassis Cultural Centre

Ten years after the major success of “Yes”, Angela Brouskou returns to the mental landscape of Margarita Karapanou and once again tries her hand at the dual role of director and actress, by examining the torturous relationship between mother and daughter which is an idée fixe in the works of this author.

The performance is based on both Karapanou’s last novel “Mum” written after the death of her own mother, Margarita Lymperaki, in an attempt to recreate her in literary terms, and on the author’ s diaries which were published with the title “Life is violently splendid” . The director builds the performance around extracts from these autobiographical texts, seeking out a way to present the personal mythology of Karapanou on stage.

Two actresses, Angela Mprouskou and her long-standing associate, Parthenopi Bouzouri, alternate between the roles of mother and daughter, like broken pieces of an unattainable whole. The two figures - forms of one document about the life of two authors and at the same time pieces of the universal mythology underlying the archetypical mother-daughter relationship -  penetrate into each other in a dizzying ongoing round of transformations. Angela Brouskou transforms Karapanou’ s psychoanalytical creation into a work for the stage where relationships of adoration and hate, identification, competition and transcendence dominate. The dramatis personae break down, are crusherd and reformed, in order  to follow the fluctuations in the “close to the edge”writing style of Karapanou and to convert it into authentic on-stage expression, while reflections of this psychoanalytical frenzy also exist in the world of images thanks to the extensive use of videos. The show’s original score was composed by Monika.