At the La Grange Theater in Dorigny (Lausanne), on May 23 and 24 as part of the Les Ravines Festival, actress Flavia Papadaniel is looking for a great uncle who disappeared at the end of the Second World War. Or how to tell the tragedies of Greece through the destiny of a young student. Exciting.
It’s a Greek house by the Aegean Sea. The Papadaniel family lived there, settled in Kavala since the great disaster of Smyrna in 1922. This house, “the best of houses”, the actress Flavia Papadaniel knew it as a child. It has the salty scent of summer vacation and wind-smoothed walls. It also houses a ghost: Thios Takis, Uncle Takis. For years, his first name appeared in large letters traced in whitewash on the front door. For years, Flavia’s grandmother waited for the return of her brother, who disappeared in 1943 and whose first name was given to Flavia’s father, as if to recall his memory again and again.
“My grandmother could never talk about him without crying and saying, ‘When the doorbell rings, there’s always a part of me that hopes it’s him.’ Heir to a bundle of letters kept in a box, Flavia Papadaniel decided to find this ghost. Carried out over two years, his investigation became a play. Takis will never return to the family home, but the show “Thios” gives him extra life and flesh.
The twists and turns of administration
On stage, Flavia and her accomplice, actor Cédric Simon, first reconstruct Kavala’s home. A few removable panels that are planted or moved on channels placed on the ground. The memories are blurred, the walls are mobile and this architectural plan draws a labyrinth. In search of Takis who has disappeared since his stay in a prison in Thessaloniki, Flavia gets lost in the twists and turns of the Greek administration.
The archives are scattered or incomplete, even burned or unreachable. This period, which runs from the German occupation to the end of the Greek civil war in 1949 and beyond, remains a burning wound in Greek society today.
“I discovered contradictory stories, silences, absences of documents and unsaid things which were not confined to the family sphere, but extended to the scale of an entire country (…). I recognized in others the disquietude, the emotion, which I had long felt within myself (…) By questioning the past, I became aware of the intensity of its presence,” notes Flavia Papadaniel.
A breadcrumb trail of paperwork
On the theater stage, between sound effects, reconstructions of meetings and recordings, we follow the actress in her research, a bit like Theseus guided by an Ariadne’s thread full of paperwork. A young left-wing activist, Uncle Takis was the victim of a roundup, thrown into a dungeon, then deported to the North. He will not have experienced the civil war and its hundreds of thousands of victims between 1946 and 1949. The end of “Thios” reveals to us a dark and rather hidden episode of the debacle of the Third Reich.
“In my family, they said of Takis that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says Flavia Papadaniel. The formula can be applied to the whole of Greece. “Thios” tells us History on the scale of a man. And the show offers Takis, this young idealist from EPON (the youth organization of the Greek resistance) a memorial in the absence of a burial. It’s precious.
Thierry Sartoretti/ld
“Thios” by Flavia Papadaniel at the Les Ravines Festival, La Grange theater, UNIL campus, Dorigny, Lausanne, May 23 and 24, 2024.
Les Ravines Festival, La Grange theater, UNIL campus, Dorigny, Lausanne, from May 23 to 26, 2024.
