Synopsis
Around the family kitchen table, a Mother, a Father and their teenage son sit down to eat together, in an atmosphere where everyday life turns very quickly into a field of suffocating psychological pressure. Lena Kitsopoulou’s post-dramatic text (2012) focuses on ways of power and on the dysfunction of a family, where the two parents oppress one another and, together, their child. Under the pretext of looking out for him, they constantly criticize his every choice, from his diet and behavior to his interests and athletic achievements. Parental expectations escalate to absurd, violent and surreal demands. A gut-punching play, about family and social neurosis, authoritarianism and oppression, that reveals the limits of human tolerance and leads its characters towards an inevitable, devastating climax.
In our interpretation, the family enters as part of the society. The family drama unravels behind closed doors. In a neighbourhood full of life and activity, no one finds the time or the will to hold out a helping hand to a household caught in a deeply toxic situation.
Accessibility
- In Greek, with German and Greek surtitles
The playwright
Lena Kitsopoulou was born in Athens in 1971. She graduated from the Drama School of Theatro Technis in 1994 and began her career as an actor in theater and film, winning the Best Actress Award at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 1997. From 2006 she turned to writing, publishing three collections of short stories, among them Bats, which won her the Best New Writer Award of the magazine Diavazo.
She has written seven plays, which she frequently directs and performs in herself, and her writing has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish and Polish. Among the best known are the monologue M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A., Little Red Riding Hood – The First Blood, presented at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, and Antigone – Lonely Planet, staged at the Public Theater in New York. In 2013 she received the Internationaler Autorenpreis at the Heidelberger Stückemarkt. As a director she has worked on both classical and contemporary texts in Greece, Germany and Switzerland.
Credits
Performed by
Creative team
After the performance · 21.00
Talkback with the audience
In conversation with the playwright Lena Kitsopoulou
Moderation: Violeta Lupis
Following the performance, the playwright of “N–EURO–SE” talks openly with the audience. A mother, a father and a teenager around a kitchen table. How far can parental care go before it turns into something else? How relevant is today, in 2026 Europe, a play about obedience, authoritarianism and the limits of tolerance? What does it mean to write, in the middle of the 2012 economic crisis, in such a way that the title cannot be translated, when what matters most is hidden in the middle of the word? The conversation takes its course from the questions of those present.