{"id":718,"date":"2025-08-27T21:37:57","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T18:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analogio.pcinfo.work\/play\/prost\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T16:11:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T13:11:21","slug":"prost","status":"publish","type":"play","link":"https:\/\/analogiofestival.org\/en\/play\/prost\/","title":{"rendered":"PROST"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The play<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The play takes place in a hermetically sealed space that looks like a decaying manor or a cathedral, where a weird, dysfunctional family has found refuge after a somewhat unexpected (or entirely apocalyptic) nightmare for the world at large.<\/p>\n\n

The centre of the narrative focuses on awaiting the death of Father \u2013 a 199-year-old intubated man, who remains wilfully alive. His children, a futuristic gallery of monstrous characters, have gathered for a mysterious \u201cceremony\u201d: Ben, the alcoholic politician; Rosa, the ghost wife; the artificial twin daughters; doctor Meg; Hieronymus the paedophile; Lulu, the singer who owns brothels; Jack, the dwarf pimp; Frank, who is pregnant; and all the rest, equally bizarre relatives. <\/p>\n\n

Matisse, the servant, who is between a superman and a mechanical comptroller, handles the everyday details: medicines, booze, submission, dosages and the TV remotes. The play is dominated by paranoia, linguistic distortion, sarcastic satire of power, family and the institution of the father, parodies all form of hierarchy and ritual, obsessively deconstructs the urban bourgeoisie and the human body. <\/p>\n\n

Time appears to have frozen \u2013 or perhaps has already erupted. The lake is dry. The air is polluted. The exits are barred. The protagonists recycle through the same sick ceremony, with humour that balances between Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jacques Copeaux and Grand Guignol. <\/p>\n\n

Directorial Note<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

(or: The ceremony, the cage and the end of a world)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

PROST is a work that on the surface appears to talk about a family. In reality, it is the anatomy of a world that has already collapsed. A house that looks like a temple. A ceremony that takes place again and again, not because it has meaning, but because there is nothing else to do. <\/p>\n\n

The characters in the play do not function as natural subjects but as symbolic forms, distorted by the very structure that creates them – they are not people but fragments of archetypes: the Father who never dies, the shadow-Mother, the Servant-Comptroller, the Child-Product. All move within a hermetically sealed system: institutional, familial, existential. And just like any other closed system, here too the lack of flow, the lack of escape, the lack of breath \u2013 lead to stagnation, decomposition, death. <\/p>\n\n

The directorial approach seeks to reinforce this dystopian condition, not by realistic means, but under the terms of visual arts excess and distortion. The figures in the play appear to be shapes taken from Max Beckmann paintings: flesh-eating, dissolved, loaded down with weight and significance. They are characters that bear the burden of History without comprehending it. They talk, move, perform. They do not act. <\/p>\n\n

The set is not a locus. It is a symptom. A place that appears to be a manor, but which has the features of a booby-trapped laboratory, a psychiatric hospital, a bunker or a chapel. It is a visual arts environment replete with details of decomposition and megalomania, that doesn\u2019t allow the audience to \u201crest\u201d inside it. Light functions as an operating theatre lamp. The sounds make references to ceremonies or artefacts that have broken. The narrative is interrupted by cries, motifs, deviations. The entire system is in the death throes of a comedic element that does not offer salvation and a tragic element that has lost its orientation. <\/p>\n\n

PROST takes place in the future, but isn\u2019t science fiction. It is a metaphor about the present, told in a manner from the future. Its goal isn\u2019t to describe a post-apocalyptic world, but to bring us face-to-face with the apocalypse, which has already taken place within the very forms we bear with us: political, familial, ritual. <\/p>\n\n

From a directorial standpoint, the challenge doesn\u2019t lie in \u201crepresenting\u201d this world, but in constructing it as a condition through which the audience will observe something taking place ritualistically, not something that is being played. There is no exit from the play \u2013 not for its protagonists and not for the audience. And that is what we sought: that we all remain within the same closed room, until we can perceive the coming of the end. <\/p>\n\n

Because at its crux, PROST is a farewell ceremony: Not to a person or a family but to an entire model of a world. And behind the laughter, the horror and the excess, we can infer the coming danger: not from without but from within, that very same inside that rotted. [Nikos Chatzipapas]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Nikos Chatzipapas<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Nikos Chatzipapas studied theatre, film, set design, costume design and graphic arts.<\/p>\n\n

In 1979 he established the Dodecanesian Theatre Company; in 1987 the Magical Theatre; in 1997 HELIX ACTION THEATRE. He has taken part in a variety of international festivals and European Events with performances of his plays in the United Kingdom, Poland (Malta Festival), Belarus, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, India and China (31st <\/sup>Festival of Nations). <\/p>\n\n

He served as Director of the Municipal Regional Theatre of Rhodes; collaborated with the National Theatre in his capacity as a stage director; was a collaborator of the Thessaloniki Experimental Art Stage and many Regional Theatres. Since 2009 he has organised the International Festival of Street Theatre in Athens. He has implemented the European program Helidra (as a leader) and the program Circus as a way of life (partner). He has been Artistic Director and producer at the Proskenio Theatre (2014-2016). In 2015 he ran the Athens Suitcase Theatre Festival in 2015. <\/p>\n\n

He has directed plays by Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, Moliere, Carlo Goldoni, Anton Chekhov, Federico Garcia Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Beth Henley, Michel de Gelderode, Michael Frayn, Yukio Mishima, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Kazantzakis, Theotokas, Ziogas, Matesi, Bost, Skourti, Kehaidi, Moursela, Lymberaki, Euthymiadi, Doriadi, Montseleze, Hourmouzi and others. <\/p>\n\n

He is a member of the Association of Greek Directors and the International Theatre Institute<\/p>\n\n

PROST<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Playwright \/ Director: Nikos Chatzipapas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"class_list":["post-718","play","type-play","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analogiofestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/play\/718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analogiofestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/play"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analogiofestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/play"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analogiofestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}