Art & Culture

Ta Omonyma Elkontai — A Different Kind of Talk About Relationships

Nikolas Smyrnakis performs a 90 minute talk-play about relationships, then takes questions. In Greek.

Somewhere between a one man show and a lecture, Nikolas Smyrnakis walks through the wreckage of a relationship and asks whether the two permanent combatants inside us, reason and feeling, can ever be reconciled. The figures of his childhood surface on stage as he goes: the father, the mother, the former partner, the child he still is. It is billed as a therapeutic confession rather than a drama, and its central provocation is right there in the title, which translates as "like attracts like": everything you were taught about opposites attracting, forget it. The piece runs 90 minutes and is followed by an open conversation between Smyrnakis and the audience, which in practice is the part people stay for. Performed in Greek, so language matters here.