We saw in the Theater / A monologue-acting feat

Argyris Xafis takes in his hands the work of the award-winning Catalan writer Josep Maria Miró “The most beautiful body that has ever been found in this place”, “hands over” his acting tools to the directing hands of Zoe Xanthopoulos and steps on the stage of the Theater Thision to bring to life in a stormy monologue the story of a boy and all the heroes involved.

The play, which looks like a way to have swallowed the era through a hard history, which retrieves the modern memory withdrawn into the chests of oblivion, is exactly that: A theatrical resistance to all those attempts to hide and silence so many abusive and gender-based murderous attacks.

A teenager, the most beautiful boy in the whole rural area of ​​Catalonia, is found dead in the middle of nowhere and this fact becomes the motive and cause for the inevitable unfolding of the whole pathology of the closed society of a provincial town that has learned to swallow and to hide everything under the rug to maintain her clean and untainted image.

With a unique authorial directive that neither the gender nor the age nor the physique of the actor are of interest for the staging of the work, Zoe Xanthopoulou, in a directorial universe dedicated and focused on words and history, leads Argyris Xafis from one end of the stage to the other in a ritual theatrical moment, with him throwing one hero after another out of his pockets.

The notes of Fotis Siotas, which complete this theatrical frame, spring from the words and the story, a fact that testifies that Siotas leaned gently over the text and the story and thus gave birth to the necessary stage musical allies for Xafis.

Argyris Xafis undertakes the sensitive task of serving the words of the text that artfully carve the fresh wounds of our current affairs without needing any direct reference to it. Bringing all the heroes of the story to life all alone on the stage, with the sole aim of a thunderous narration of the story itself, he manages to lead our hearts and minds from the stage to give birth to the necessary references to the modern Greek reality.

This demanding theatrical venture, which boldly reminds us of the laboratory and rather irredeemable flaws of the human species, leaves its final result on the backs of an actor who knows very well how to manage his living acting tools and freely place them before our eyes without no anxiety to show them off. He disposes of them by creating in a crescendo of costume acting heroes who unravel a very dark and unfortunately now familiar thread of human existence, ultimately delivering a performance experience that sometimes gently and sometimes violently carves out our wounds. A look, a light, a different movement, a different stage point, a different pronunciation of a word, a simple gesture are enough for the stage transformations to which the author subjects the actor, materials that Argyris Xafis has masterfully swallowed.

This theatrical moment clearly brings powerfully back to the fore the contemporary daring drama that is out there and fearlessly takes its inspirations from real life, but at the same time leaves a legacy and the performance of Argyris Xafis to remind us of an actor who, in addition to the lucid management of his acting tools, he now has that rare stage experience of telling stories with that hard-to-find innate respect for words, far from vanities and latent tendencies for showmanship.