MARSHES / CEMETERY

MARSHES / CEMETERY

Giorgos Seferis partially translates the allegorical farces of the French Nobel laureate André Gide, Marshes and Prometheus Unbound, leaving them unpublished in his manuscripts. These texts provide the material for a performance that explores the clash between two worlds: the world of literature and the world of bestial labor, set within the fairy-tale universe of Little Red Riding Hood. The animals are trained to fear themselves and to sympathize with the humans who oppress them—a vicious cycle that awaits disruption by a Prometheus who is always on his way.

“We must try to bring a little variety to our existence.”

In a bourgeois Parisian salon, four writers meet again and again to discuss the writing of a book. While they prattle, a pack of animals labors ceaselessly to serve them. When these animals knock at their door—just as the wolf knocks at the grandmother’s—the salon is shaken. Trapped on opposite sides of the wall, humans and animals alike await a revolutionary act to liberate them from themselves. Among the writers arrives Prometheus, the mythical figure who has just been freed from the Caucasus, and the vicious cycle is broken. Who will survive this emancipation? Whose eulogy does Prometheus ultimately deliver?

“Why are we so obedient? Why are we so incapable of recognizing our enemy?”

Following the productions oRt I. A Man Can Break and Sacred Agony: On the Loom of Eva Palmer Sikelianos, the theatre company Protasi brings to the stage for the first time the political allegorical farces of André Gide, Marshes and Prometheus Unbound, through the incomplete and unpublished manuscript translations of Giorgos Seferis. An excerpt from the performance was distinguished in the 24 Hours Rush Project competition, organized by Mikri Academia (September 2024).

Director’s Note
Trapped in their literary salons, André Gide’s characters survive thanks to the toil of the animals in their garden. Their incomplete attempt at writing and the animals’ incomplete attempt at self-liberation mirror Seferis’ own translation—its errors, omissions, and poetic choices are transposed into the actors’ choreography. The act of translation itself unfolds on stage. The refined poetry of fin de siècle literature creates a suffocating necropolis where the animals tend to their own graves. A political allegorical farce about a city that ensnares its inhabitants in unfinished ideas and unfinished lives, forcing them to serve others and to place their hopes solely in the arrival of a messiah who is always coming.