Review of the performance “Rayman Screamed” by Yiannis Mavritsakis at the Sphendoni Theater directed by Pericles Moustakis
Yiannis Mavritsakis is a writer who works tirelessly on his works, wanting not only to write them, but also to “finish” them. With the double meaning of the word “end”: completion of the form and perfection of their writing. Something not self-evident in our days of heterospecification of purposes and their quick transition to useful fees. The new work of Yannis Mavritsakis has these qualities, which makes it particularly attractive.
A theoretical physicist here, named Rayman (enlightened or luminous?), accomplishes the impossible: to articulate not by the accumulation of knowledge, but through a sudden mental “ignition,” inspiration, or divine grace, fulguratio in the scientific term, the unity of the fundamental forces of nature, such as gravity, with its other forces and quantum mechanics. In other words, that gravity can be expressed quantumly. The ultimate consequences, of course, of such a discovery cannot be perceived with the tool of Newtonian physics, but only with quantum.
This is the genius finding of the work of Yannis Mavritsakis. Professor Rayman on the eve of his award from a supreme intellectual institution is driven, after this discovery, into a quantum field of personal indeterminacy, where he no longer knows whether he desires his award, but not even who his true self is. And begins his endless wandering in the Pythagorean world of spheres, culminating in the unexplored astral space. We learn the story of his wanderings from his driver, as he tells it to the passenger. Both are equally lost, like a pair of proto-makers, in a dark dental “forest” with no way out.
The play carries the mantle of a philosophical question about the conundrum of creation, human or divine, and the destiny of man in a godless and meaningless universe. However, the author goes further, in the groundbreaking opinion he expresses in a recent interview, that “many things can be explained more easily if there is a god, than if there is not.” Like the problem of death, I add, which Western metaphysics has separated from life, with which it has always been inextricably linked. I want to conclude that in this work G. Mavritsakis does not dwell on metaphysics, as many may say, but, on the contrary, he denies it, wanting to show that the most metaphysical idea ever born to man is that the physical world was created by itself, automatically, without contrivance, inspiration, fulguratio, or grace! And she achieves this with the play’s inspired poetry, which reunites suffering life with exiled death, restoring the “sequence of meaning” that the “co-driver”, enchanted by the swinging of her juggling partner’s balls, desperately seeks for herself. The work closes with the resurrection hymn 20 from Handel’s “Messiah” and the sacrificial elevation of the primordial Creto-Mycenaean serpent goddess.
The direction of Pericles Moustakis found the right key, where the Heracleian bow (“bios” in the dialect of Ephesus) of the body and the piercing cry of the human being join together, to tune his musical scales on it. An exuberant and dazzling music-dance performance, with various variations of physical rhythms, fugues, loops, pauses, dips, elevations. Like the invisible juggler’s “magic” corins and spheres tending to the universe. The excellent actors and the excellent lyricist Leto Messini give the measure, the colors and the temperatures of their Dionysian pulsating bodies. Haris Frangoulis (Rayman), Kostas Nikoulis (driver), Frangiski Moustakis (co-driver) and Leto Messini (priestess) play together. Maria Alexopoulou, Haris Karydis, Ioanna Kritouli are participating. The sets and costumes by Niki Psychogiou and the lighting by Alekos Anastasiou participate in the Dionysian drama. The hand-made music of Telemachos Moussa is an embodiment of sound, an organic element and autonomous material of the performance.
