Athens has the highest number of theatres per capita in the world, from traditional venues to warehouses, cellars, coffee shops, and bars—anywhere a stage can be made.
The stage as a civic space
Theatre and politics were inseparable in ancient Athens, where attending performances was a civic duty, and playwrights like Aristophanes, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides challenged audiences to think critically and confront moral dilemmas. Greek theatre thrives and is infused with the same ancient spirit, with Chortatzis, Katsikonouris, and Tsiotsiopoulos exploring gender, inverting traditions, and reimagining ancient motifs. A network of actors, writers, directors, designers, and educators keeps the city’s stage vibrant, innovating relentlessly, often sacrificing higher-paying work to serve their chosen muse, Melpomene.
This is the world of Dora Chrysikou. Acting is her career and her refuge; it is where she explores herself by becoming the canvas upon which other lives write themselves. “I am all my roles and they have never left me.”
Chrysikou is now working on 18/9, a monologue about the assassination of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas by Nazi members of Golden Dawn. The work also takes in the subsequent trial which led to the fascist party being banned as a criminal organisation and 17 members being convicted for his murder.
From ballet to the boards
Acting was never part of the plan; she had promise as a ballerina until she grew too tall. With ballet closed to her, she shifted her focus to the stage.
Theatre, she says, is important because “it doesn’t give answers; it provides questions…and the space for an audience to take what it needs”. Theatre doesn’t judge; it allows you to react in your own way. Art gives great freedom.
Although she was obliged to leave dance, it never entirely left her. Her first training remains with her in her bone-deep grace, her intense body awareness, and the way she morphs into her roles. This, allied to the muscular intellect, sensitive probing of emotion, and superb comic timing she brings to her art, makes her entirely present on the stage, allowing her to play a vengeful wife or a traumatized rape victim with the same conviction.
“The difficulty in theatre is not to speak but to listen…to allow the others to have their moment, because everyone on the stage must have the same worth.”
This requires trust, “in yourself, your colleagues—it’s ping pong—in the context.” It is the opposite of self-aggrandizement.
“Theatre reduces your ego and narcissism…you discover other elements of yourself—you are always you, but you must make space for the character you play.”
As a backup she never actually used, she got her master’s in psychology, but it has deepened her approach to her art, “because actions are nuanced, although patterns are different.”
Chrysikou speaks warmly about all her roles. Currently, she is part of an ensemble production of Vaginahood, in which every role was written based on the woman who plays her, except for Dora, who plays against type, an alcoholic.
She has a special affection for the obnoxious Arête in The Land of the Olives, whom she credits with having seen her through her dark year of cancer treatment. Wildly underwritten, more caricature than character, Chrysikou sees Arête as fundamentally good but stupid, consumed by her desire for revenge. She should have been a shrill secondary presence, but Chrysikou infused her with so much humanity and humour that Arête became an unexpected favourite and remains much missed by her fans.
At the age of thirteen, Chrysikou got a graphic lesson in the nexus between theatre and politics when she was cast in Theodoros Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork, and she, as part of the production, was excommunicated by the Bishop of Florina.
The daughter of Melpo Lekatsa, herself a Hero of the Polytechnio, politics formed the bedrock of her upbringing. She wears her politics like armour, not to defend herself but to confront the bile of the “little men” who carry their racism, bigotry, and misogyny as a standard to march behind, and to defy the mockery and death threats which are their predictable response to her activism on behalf of refugees.
Art, activism, and 18/9
Her affection for Arête notwithstanding, it is nothing compared to the passion she brings to 18/9, the monologue she commissioned about the assassination of rapper Pavlos Fyssas by members of Golden Dawn. Although she never met Fyssas, she sees parallels between them as ardent antifascists.
“He was two years younger, but we were born in the same month. I never met him, but his mother is convinced he would have wanted me to do this.”
Chrysikou stages the tragedy through the intense vacillation of an eyewitness torn between terror and self-preservation and the desire to defend the fallen hero. As she builds the tension, she breaks the fourth wall, coopting the complicity of the audience and providing the tension “without which theatre would be nothing” to recreate a critical moment in the battle between the left and the right for our souls, living up to theatre’s original purpose: to challenge, to educate, to make you think.
18/9 will be featured as part of the Greek Festival at the Tom Mann Theatre in Surry Hills on March 14.