By Giannis Aposkitis

A nightmarish retrospective of Greek comedy

 

A bullet to the head of a long-dead soul transports us to the squalid backdrop of "Café Arcadia," a derelict traditional café that boasts a tiny theatre stage once home to wandering troupes of old. Here, a demonic revelry of comedy and carnage unfolds—an infernal spectacle devoted to the grim absurdities of present-day Greece. In this national Grand Guignol, the audience bears witness to a series of grotesque, dark, and "randomly numbered" acts, where today’s comedy collides with the comedic legacy of the past: troupes that put on twisted renditions of classic farces featuring slaughtered actors from the golden age of Finos Film; bear trainers who, in place of bears, drag the ghost of King Arcturus, grieving for a Greece ravaged in wildfires; hellbound comedians of recent decades that suffer grotesquely hilarious punishments and torturing; Nosferatus-like and Frankensteinian creatures of all stripes that sweep the stage, in a twilight zone that compiles all the beauty and terror we come across in the typology of the Greek comedy—from the days of the Shadow theatre to the present.

From the improvisational slapstick sketches and farces to the era of modern Greek television, Simos Kakalas and Sofia Paschou reexamine this reservoir of comedic material with a wholly subversive spirit, determined to make the middle-war and post-war comedy “rise from its grave.” Naturally, in keeping with the nihilistic and post-apocalyptic flavour of our days, the comedy here wears its darkest outfit—mocking and satirising not from a vantage point of optimism, but one of despair. This is where the biting comedic voice of Giannis Aposkitis steps in to complete the performance.

The creators “revisit” comedic stereotypes by mangling gruesome comedy figures through an extreme and distorting filter. They return to the raw fundamentals of theatre, such as the makeshift stage of the wandering troupe, masks and metamorphoses, the breaching of the fourth wall, and direct engagement with the audience. 

By flipping comedy’s traditional orientation, Nasty Scenery poses a crucial question: In a country where we witness the bizarre, the surreal, and the outright “nasty scenes” unfold daily before our eyes, how could comedy be anything less than "to die for"?

 

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