From 10 to 17 September, for a third year, the National Theatre of Greece is jointly organising Cypriot Theatre Week with the Department of Contemporary Culture of Cyprus’s Deputy Ministry of Culture and the Cyprus Centre of the International Theatre Institute (CCITI), with the support of the House of Cyprus Cultural Centre in Athens. Three hit productions seen in Cyprus in 2024 will take to the stages of the Ziller Building, with the aim of promoting contemporary Cypriot theatre in Greece, encouraging Cypriot producers to be more outward looking, and creating a fruitful artistic dialogue between the two countries. 

This year's Cypriot Theatre Week concludes on 17 September at the Nikos Kourkoulos New Stage with a dramatisation of Georgios Vizyenos’s classic autobiographical short story, My mother’s sin, adapted and directed by Marina Vrondi and produced by the Limassol Theatre Development Company (ETHAL). 

The narrator, Giorgis, looks back on his childhood as one of four siblings in the town of Vize in Eastern Thrace, remembering how his widowed mother’s futile attempts to save his sickly sister, Annio, caused her to neglect her three other children. The mother responds to her daughter’s eventual death by rushing to adopt another girl; and when she leaves to get married, yet another, despite the resentment of her sons and the family’s straitened circumstances. In the end, the mother confesses to Giorgis that her obsessive adoption of little girls arose from her guilt for a sin she committed in her youth and her struggle to atone for it. 

Director’s note
After Alexandros Papadiamantis’s The murderess, Georgios Vizyenos’s My mother’s sin is the second of three plays I wanted to direct focusing on trauma and the female psyche. In that sense, it is the central part of a theatrical narrative that I began to work on first on my own and then on stage, exploring my general interest in trauma and how it defines our subsequent actions. 
 
There is individual and collective trauma: that which we carry with us, often from childhood, like Giorgis’s, or Despinio Michaliesa’s when she smothers her child in her sleep, and that borne by society. The murderess and My mother’s sin, although written by men, are the stories of two women, and I wanted to give my own reading of them to explain why the characters end up behaving as they do. 

I believe that these works are highly relevant today, when women are still attempting to stand their ground in a male-dominated society that allows them to be bosses and make decisions as long as they behave like men. I look forward to the day when no woman has to be “allowed” to do anything, and is able to lead a group of people or a cause by being a woman with a female psychology and not because she conforms to a male stereotype. 

My mother’s sin is a step closer to the truth – my own and that which society always wants to hide. 

Marina Vrondi