“Sweet Ophelia” is a play looking for and “discovering” Ophelia in the body of the city and in the bodies of four actresses: in the streets of Athens, in our loves, in our childhood. In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” there are some (few) things said about her: she is “fair”, she is the daughter of Polonius and the sister of Laertes, she is in love with Hamlet and vice versa, lives in the palace, and at a certain moment Hamlet denies that he loves her and kills her father. Then she gets crazy and is drowned in the river.
We want to know more about her, we have many questions to ask. How was her childhood, where is her mother? Where will she go after the unspeakable things she heard by him? (maybe in an old bar hidden in an arcade in the city?) What does despair-mercy-tenderness mean? What will happen at the end?
The performance has the structure of a sonata, with three parts: the Sonata, the Garden and the City/Forest. The basic motive is being continuously restated, transformed and changed (up to madness). The actors change roles all the time, and we see the main scenes of her in Shakespeare two times each, from a different actor in a different frame, combined with personal/public material. We change the time/space: it is Athens 2010 or Elsinore 1600 or the hometown of one of the actors, or the back-yard of the theatre, which for us is the garden of their secret love and our childhood, as well as the forest.
The text of the performance is thus a puzzle with many fragments: Shakespearean words, narrations of the actors and other people, descriptions of streets/squares, articles from newspapers and so on. Another very important piece of this puzzle is the element of “pause”: many times during the performance, one actress says to the other, who’s speaking, “pause”, and she stops for a while or begins to say something totally different. Sometimes she says it to herself, too, with the same function.
The set contains a bench, a white-red police tape (tied on the cross from the left to right hand), some objects on the windows, like museum’s exhibits (seeds, letters, a shawl, a ball, glass-stones from the sea, a rubber band, a pair of old children’s shoes, and a video projection (in the beginning).
The three parts
In the first part, the Sonata, we hear the sonata “Fantasia” in C minor by Mozart, the so-called “broken sonata”, while three actresses are reading very fast all the parts of the Shakespearean text where we find Ophelia speaking. On the wall we have a projection of a video taken from a ‘famous’ closed athenian playground in Saint-Panteleimonas’ square (this is a place where many immigrants live, and the inhabitants decided to close the playground so that the children of the immigrants could not play). In certain moments an actor says “Acacia”, and the three actors turn back and look at the acacia tree in the back-yard of the theatre.
The second part, the Garden, beginns when the music stops. We turn to the video and say: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark/The Copenhagen climate change conference”. The projection stops, and in the same wall Hamlet writes the beginning of his letter (“To the Celestial, and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia”, act 2, scene 2). Memories of trees of our childhood are combined with the parts of “Hamlet” where she describes to Polonius how he came to her in a ‘crazy’ way. Then we untie the police tape and get out to the back-yard, asking the audience to come close to the windows and see. This is their garden, where imaginary letters that she and he exchanged are being hidden. After that we see their dialogue (“The fair Ophelia/Good my Lord”, act 3, sc. 1), as a game with the ball in a circle of light, which later will become the forbidden square. We two Ophelias speaking here, one after the other, in a kind of repetition (“She says that…”).
During all this, the forth actress, sitted up to a ladder, reads some fragments from newspapers (she will keep on doing this untill the end).
The third part, the City/Forest, begins with a dancing/singing Karaoke, with the song “Sibonney”, which also speaks for a great love (“morire de amor”). Then one actress is interviewing the other two Ophelias, using the police tape as a microphone. She goes on describing the situation in the closed playground. Ophelia is standing there, wondering for the bars and the denial, although she is familiar with such prohibitions. She is an immigrant too, since her own country is love, and she is exiled from it. But in our case, she will enter the forbitten playground, and she will play.
We see for the second time their shakespearean dialogue, combined with descriptions of the playground. And here is also taking place, during their games as children, her mourning for the death of her father (or is she mourning becouse he/Hamlet left (her))? In this context the actors issue the audience with seeds of daisies (one of her flowers) which they can plant, if they want, in the programme of the performance, which is a flower-pot.
Ophelia is also a tree burned from the fire. Last year almost all of the remaining forests of Attiki became ashes. So is she, burned by the facts that made him say: “I did love you once/I loved you not”.
We have asked people to tell us a story of their own, regarding a tree in Athens. We hear those stories now. This is our forrest, and we reconstruct it through memory (our ambition is, for every story we collect, to plant a tree in the city).
After that, as we listen to Nick Cave’s ‘Fifteen feet of pure white snow”, Hamlet says to her, sliding slowly down, "in your face, in your body are being reflected the forrests that no longer exist”. He goes on with the words of Hamlet during her funeral (“I loved Ophelia. Fourty-thousand brothers could not…”, act 5, sc. 1).
One of the actresses proposes an alternative end, according to which Hamlet just injures Polonious, takes Ophelia and they travel together all over the world (there are among the first who visit America). Anyway, we choose some things to ‘dress’ her for her last journey: a shawl, some glass-stones from the see, a pair of old children shoes, that somebody left outside the playground.
But finally Ophelia will go on. We hear “Sibonney” for second time, and she begins to speak/walk/dance in the streets of Athens, among stray dogs, ancient walls, cars, homeless people, first kisses. She has survived। Somewhere, somehow he is waiting for her. She asks the actors and the audience for places in the city where a tree should be. After all, what we all need here, in this ‘city’, is an “acacia”, a “pause”.
Ophelia is walking down the streets of Athens, Panepistimiou street, Stadiou street (mainly in the night). She’s having a drink in the old bar Galaxy. She is standing in front of the bars of the closen playground in Saint-Panteleimonas square. If homeland is love, she has no homeland (yet), she is an immigrant.
Ophelia is a small girl walking the streets of the city. She has roots, trunk, branches. Hamlet told her once: “I did love you once”. But she didn’t drown in the river. Besides, the two of them are very similar. A father decided for both of them, he separated their lives. But she is still walking, and she stands where a tree was or should be. Hamlet could tell her today: "In your face, in your body are being reflected the forrests that no longer exist”.
Ophelia is a woman walking the streets of the city. The streets have earth below, her roots are bleeding but they insist. She came out of the book and began to walk. Without Hamlet, that’s true, but you never know. Girl-woman, she lets the wind play with her (once) long hair.
Sweet Ophelia
(Febr. 2010-Apr.2011)
Concept-Direction
Ioanna Remediaki
Text
Shakespeare, Hamlet (transl. by G. Heimonas)
Texts from Ioanna Remediaki, the actors, newspapers, narrators
Actors
Hara Karatziou
Argyro Logara
Ioanna Remediaki
Vicky Volioti
Costumes
Calliopi
Lights
Filippos Koutsaftis
Video-Fotos
Simos Sarketzis
Choreography
Antigone Gira
Poster/Programme designer
Leonidas Oikonomou
Duration: 80 min. approx.
Space Hamlet + Sweet Ophelia
“Sweet Ophelia” is the second part of a diptych, including Hamlet and Ophelia. Last year we staged “Space Hamlet” in public/open spaces of Athens. We keep on searching this idea of the text ‘projected’ on the body of the actors and the city, while the audience creates with us a common rhythm/space to do it.
