Interview
Sulla Tzoumerkas talks about his collaboration with the Greek National Theatre
Sulla Tzoumerkas talks to me about his first collaboration with the Greek National Theatre and the direction he undertook for the production of "Rabid Cat" by Tennessee Williams. His love for this play, the complex elements that characterize it and the difficulty of truth to be expressed.
Would you like to tell me a few words about your first collaboration with the KTHVE?
The most important thing for me in this collaboration is the meeting with a group of 12 wonderful actors from the theatre's staff, of different generations, with whom we entered this adventure with all our hearts and experienced truly exciting and sometimes - for me at least - shocking moments in the making of the show. Melina Apostolidou, Loukia Vassiliou, Lila Vlachopoulou, Yannis Karamphilis, Dimitris Kolovos, Anna Kopaka, Vassia Bakakou, Vassilis Besiris, Lillian Palantza, Orestis Paliadelis, George Papadakos, Vassilis Spyropoulos.
Why did you choose to work on this particular work by T.Williams?
Because I love it more than a few. Because beyond its themes, which move me deeply, The Rabid Cat is a work that is bursting with romance, humor, desperation, love of unbridled human passion. "It is not just a play," as Williams himself says, "but what it ought to be: a trap for the capture of the human experience." Also, secondarily, but with some special significance for me, about its relationship to specific cinematic genres such as the American melodrama of the 1950s and 1960s, and the special place that the film of the same name has in our collective unconscious.
Give me a sketch of the characters in the film.
I sketch and profile the characters in the play in far more complex ways than I could and would make sense in an interview, but briefly let's just say that for me in Brick, Williams writes one of the most shocking descents into the abyss of despair, grief, betrayal, and self-destruction ever written. In Maggie, he builds an unrepeatable, incredibly resilient persona that pulses with life, with tenacity, with love, with conscience, with knowledge of life and people in all their fullness. The Father, the third major figure in the drama, sweeps through the second act with a portrait of a patriarch full of contradictions and shadows, a face in which violence, anger and frustration alternate instantly (and extremely) with true, unadulterated, fierce love and rare parsimony. He shares many characteristics with Maggie. It is no coincidence, after all, that, as they both say, they really like each other. Then the Mother is very animalistic in love, very instinctive, comically tragic and wounded, struggling with forces that exceed her throughout the play, yet almost in absentia she often throws some of the most fatal blows. In May and Gooper, Williams also plays with what we call "types" to touch on heartbreakingly familiar stuffiness of everyday life, before giving them all their guns in the third act as well. In May especially, with the actors' synergy, we attempt something that both embodies and inverts the typical take on the role.
What are the underlying elements of the play?
The most striking thing for me, of all, is how a play of such a realistic texture as this one manages to be so deeply dreamlike, that is, how it manages to act out on stage such great tensions of the subconscious. For me, that was the core of the staging.
Is it a play that at its core alternates cruelty with tenderness?
Clearly. In a way that shakes textually very deeply, hopefully in a way that shakes stagecraft as well. The embodiment of this alternation without dust is our great struggle.
Tell me about the family issues in the play and how timely they seem?
The themes of the play are eternal to man, in every age, so it's a great play. You leave richer than the Mad Cat. And at a time like today, in a changing world, and where public debate has its own characteristics and contradictions. And in terms of family, I think it teaches you to see, to look in the mirror. To prefer the truth as much as you can, and to avoid evil as much as you can.
What are the autobiographical elements of T. Williams that we see here?
As Stella Adler says so well: "Tennessee Williams is the Poet of Failure. He writes about people who fail. He has a love and understanding of failure, even his own. He is a poet and he knows the truth. He can't find the truth in the America of '45 in which he lives. But he knows there is a truth.
Comment to me on the difficulty of the heroes we see in expressing their true feelings towards each other.
I can answer for the heroes of Rabid Cat: two of them, Maggie and Father, are possessed at the point in their lives where we meet them, by a real rage of expression of their feelings and thoughts. And this makes them in a way both cruel, but also deeply comforting, refreshing, bright. With Brick it's the other way around, the whole battle is to talk. When he speaks, of course, he knows how to tear down well, both inside and out.