Director’s Cut
Having lived and created in Berlin for the past 16 years, in a city that carries the memories of Europe’s major historical traumas, at the same time, a meeting place for different languages, cultures and political narratives, I feel an ever more pressing need for a festival dedicated to contemporary Greek-language drama.
The theater we care about is not reassuring, it raises questions. It is political in the broadest sense of the word: it asks how we live together, which social conventions we accept, what compromises we make every day, and what responsibility, desire, power and resistance actually mean. In Europe that once again seems to be drifting towards authoritarianism and the rise of far-right and fascist thinking, theater can act as a mirror, but also as a space for critical reflection and collective vigilance.
Contemporary Greek and Cypriot drama engages with these questions constantly. In these plays we often recognise the same tragic condition we find in the figures of ancient drama: people caught between their own truth and the demands of society, between the need for love and the exercise of power, between the longing for freedom and the cost of their choices. This kinship is neither imitation nor obligatory homage. We understand contemporary dramaturgy as an autonomous artistic act, one that stays aware of where it comes from while continuing to engage creatively with the tradition of ancient drama, carrying its timeless questions into the present.
Beginning with Berlin’s Greek-speaking artists, and aiming to include groups and artists from Greece and Cyprus in the coming years, we envision an accessible and inclusive festival: a meeting place for texts, artists and audiences, a space where stories born in Greece and Cyprus can be heard in Berlin not as exotic cultural products but as essential narratives that concern us all.
Because theater remains one of the very few public spaces where we can still look each other in the eye and ask ourselves, together: how, ultimately, do we want to live?
Elena Sokratous,
Artistic Director
Autumn 2026