By Panos Liakos

Classicist-Translator-Film Historian

The year 2026 was a successful one for the staging of ancient drama—and specifically the works of Euripides—in our country.

Kicking off its run at the Argolic Theater—as part of the Athens Epidaurus Festival—on July 17 and 18, Euripides’ “Alcestis,” a National Theatre of Greece production adapted and directed by Dimitris Karantzas, successfully concluded its run on September 13 at the open-air theater “School of Athens—Irene Papas.”

With the actors arranged in a choreographed formation on a stage set dominated by metal (Konstantinos Skourletis), the production highlighted in the most striking way both the way in which human life slips through our fingers—with that life veering at times toward happiness and at others toward misery— as well as the nature of Euripides’ play itself, which always seems elusive.

And yet, Karantzas succeeds fully in conveying the Dionysian nature of the figure of Heracles, and the artificiality of Admetus’s lament, shaking us with the interventions of Death (how the ever-disciplined Theodora Tzimou emerges from Ioanna Tsami’s terrifying—in the ancient Greek sense—costume!).

By contrasting the pairing of Yannis Niarros (in the role of Admetus—what a voice!) and Iro Bezou (statuary in the titular tragic role), and employing a subtle irony, in the verbal duel between Admetus and Pheres—a moment of decisive importance for the progression of the Thessalian king’s mourning (Konstantinos Avarikiotis ritually bursts forth from the trapdoors of the set)— Karantzas, until the very last spotlight illuminating the stage goes out, manages to shatter our very thoughts as well, through the deafening silence of the one who has returned from far away.

And one final image to conclude this late-summer theatrical experience. An image accompanied by the sound echoing from one end of the open-air theater to the other—a troupe celebrating after the final curtain call, heading off in different directions—how intoxicating for those of us who love the most ephemeral “present” that of the Theater.