The Last Asprokorakas, the landmark work by the great director, writer and theatre scholar Alexis Solomos, premieres on 27 November at the Horos Theatre in a National Theatre of Greece production. Directed by Elena Mavridou, it offers a refreshingly unconventional approach to Mylonas’s wickedly acerbic comedy about the hypocrisy of the upper middle class and the ‘sacred’ Greek family. Periods of crisis come and… don’t go. At a time when all our certainties have been called into question, is love the one thing that endures? Or is even that an illusion?

The last members of the bourgeois Asprokorakas family meet around the imposing statue of the late patriarch, Efstathios, a biologist who dedicated his life to the discovery of a five-legged fly. They decide that his son, Nikiforos, should carry on his research into the rare insect that will surely be named after them.  That is the last thing that Nikiforos wants, however, because he has fallen for Rosa, a young woman who works in a disreputable nightclub, a lively place full of music and dancing where he takes refuge from his strict home. The question is whether he will ultimately choose love or duty?

People yearn for lives they do not lead, for fleeting triumphs to feel a sense of importance. The Asprokorakas family, keen for recognition, create an entirely fabricated image of themselves that feasts upon love, affection, and any other emotion. Their surname, which means ‘white raven’, shows that they consider themselves different, superior to others, in a world of common black ravens.

Alexis Solomos wrote The Last Asprokorakas in 1943, at the request of Karolos Koun, who directed it a year later at the Art Theatre. This was towards the end of the Nazi Occupation of Greece, a period of oppression and metaphorical devouring that feels all-too familiar today. Eighty-one years later, the NTG brings The Last Asprokorakas to the stage in a production that blends allegory, irony, and uproarious humour to explore our abiding and irresistible urge to consume one another emotionally. And if cruelty and brutality are all around us? If love has disappeared? No matter. When a ray of light pierces the darkness, hope cannot help but be reborn.

About Alexis Solomos
Alexis Solomos was born in Athens in 1918. He breathed new life into Greek theatre through his wide-ranging work as a director, teacher, translator, theorist and scholar, and as the head of various artistic institutions. His career will always be closely linked with the National Theatre of Greece, where he directed more than 100 productions, and which he twice headed as Artistic Director, from 1980 to 1982 and then again from 1991 to 1992. In 1997, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Athens Department of Theatre Studies. He died in 2012.