THE FOOD

Maria Laina’s play “The Food”, after a successful cycle of performances (2018-19), is staged again, at PLYFA, directed by Dimitris Lioliou.

This play is performed in Greek.

15, 17, 22, 23, 29 & 30 March 2024
5, 6, 12, 13 23 & 30 April 2024

Eating in the theater is usually not allowed. Beyond the purely biological, the human need for food reveals and refers to more than one form of hunger. A powerful and idiosyncratic text of modern Greek drama for six unique performances.

Director’s note

An open dialogue about what we define as food. “Food is our innocent victim and we have to acknowledge that.” A death, the affirmation against life. How do we perceive this loss and how violent can the moment of coming of age be for each of us? What did we have to sacrifice and what did we substitute? The cannibalism of the self. The projections, the symbols and how abusively we swallow all that we feel in order to survive, to be satisfied. Two parallel and completely different testimonies that, while at first glance, do not converge, compose a pattern for how man perceives and deals with a traumatic experience.

The poet Maria Laina, on the occasion of the first upload of the show, said:

“However, I am impressed that a young man, with a lot of appetite, like Dimitris Liolios, was interested in such a text; wild, by the way, that has to do with loneliness and madness, with what we say or what others they say two in one. In the text, of course, the opposite happens, we have one in two, a schizoid condition. I confess that his glance excited me with curiosity and astonishment, and his overflowing enthusiasm persuaded me to leave it in his hands.’ (Interview on Sunday’s BHIMA)

For “The Food” they wrote

Katerina I. Anesti “Food, love, dominion, death, annihilation and again food, pleasure and rejection, and the unknown, the familiar and the unspeakable. Pollutants from the stage and Liolio and Lilikaki. You don’t see blood, flesh. But it’s there.” (protagon.gr)
Ioanna Vardalahaki “And after everything has been eaten, others, time, love, man turns to himself.[..] The heroes and their speech are the meaning, the performance and the scene.” (clickatlife.gr)

Kostas Zisis “A melancholic but deeply and essentially focused performance: a hymn to the Sisyphean suffering of man, to his eternal hunt for survival in the world: to the conquest of food and love. Because that’s the only way we survive.” (all4fun.gr)

Maria Mari “Without any image or stage object, it presents the viewer with this salivation, which accompanies the feeling of hunger and need, the vital need for food.[…] Sensation, pleasure, morbidity, melancholy , utter solitude, desolation.” (theatromania.gr)

Argyro Bozoni “Excellent work. Nice to get ahead of those who will say that such texts are difficult in the theater. No, they are poetic and easy, they tell a story that concerns us and we all know it.”

Dimitris Fallieros “You are struck by a show that talks about things that are not easy: about all forms of hunger, about love, about human psychosis, about the power of habit, about loneliness[.. ].’