A "coffee talk" about love and theater




One early spring evening in a cozy coffee-bar in Thessaloniki people gathered to see a musical about romance and how courtship has evolved threw the years.

Spicy stories, mesmerising songs from different decades and feelings of unconventional romance were set to the "table" and eventhough the actors were accompanied only by a piano,they made an impact in the hearts of the attendies bringing true joy and oblivion.




In the interview that follows the actors, Alexandros Zafeiriadis and Eleonora Aivazidou answer to four questions about lovestories in Theater and real life.


Do scripts of Theatrical plays in Greece have lovestories as leading parts of their themes?

A.Z.-Love stories in Theater have the principal role during times, from ancient times to nowdays. Either as comedy,tragedy or even as a farse or joke, love is always there.

E.A.-I believe that love is always a matter of current concern regardless the time and place. Love and what love includes  is a crucial field of mental scouting. Hence authors of theatrical plays could not be an exception to this.

Do they (the love stories) have happy endings at the end of a play nowdays?

A.Z.-I can't really say that I know all modern theatrical plays in Greece whose topic deals with love, a happy ending seems likeable to some writers as also bitter or cruel ending to others and there are those that prefer to let the audience imagine the continuance of the love story. However I'll say something about lovestories that I read and liked: "If an intimate relationship comes to an end then this ending can not be happy".

E.A.- The greatest love stories have hardly happy endings. The plot of the drama is mainly supported from the difficulties and the barriers of the environment or even the lovers’ s inner selves. Just as it happens in real life.                                                                                                                 

Does the audience want to see lovestories?

A.Z.-Nowdays we are going through many kinds of disappointments, many people as a result of the economical crisis feel disoriented at the time, lives turned out to be different from what they had dreamed of.Theater now and maybe more than ever has become a shelter and of course the love stories can be touching to everyone because we all find something in them to relate with. Fiction that contains love as its subject was always something that we were concerned about and even more nowdays.


E.A.-  I am not familiar with the audiences’ s opinion on that, but I believe that as long as the humankind exists, love will not stop to motivate and define our choices and actions. It is a “birthmark”, that empty spot inside us, that has to be filled with the subject of our fantasies.

Is there absence of imagination about love and love stories in Theater and in real life?
A.Z.-They have been said a lot about love in theater , poetry, painting, literature...but real life is always the one that gives us the unexpected!

E.A.- Nowadays relationships have come to a different level.  We would probably not be witnesses of great dramas in love as we would in the past times. The excessive use of the internet and the social networking, has brought people in a state of physical and emotional loneliness and this, makes them deny giving themselves to another, risking and dare to sacrifice their comfort an peace in the name of love.


Theater is a sacred space for actors and audience, a lense of our society with stories that will keep on unraping those intimate feelings that people have and face in their lives.






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