Director Tomaz Pandur upon King Lear project in Athens:

 

At the beggining - there was a Dream. A dream of George Kimoulis about King Lear, a masterpiece work by Shakespeare; a story of tragic king deprived of his crown, conspired against by heaven and earth, nature and men. A dream about decay and fall of the world. King Lear is a brutal play, filled with cruelty and seemingly meaningless disasters, questioning the justice of the world; the truth, loyalty, moral and ethitcs;is about political authority as much as it is about family dynamics - it is story of the two families which fall apart; about father and daughters, father and sons; a sensitive portrait of abadonence, “blindness”, solitude, revealing the basic understanding of human being, his needs, memories, dreams, visions, his unity with the Nature and the Universe; and of course ART. Now, theatre illusion always begins and ends in the very theatrical performance as a cybernetic game between our brain and the stage. Transforming the Lear’s legend into the intellectual and emotional climate of our own time I enact an alchemical process, where everything entering the theatre space transforms itself, and thus constructs its own stage language, its own “Poetry and Truth”. My theater always searches for the other side of the seeable, the other side of the known and the familiar. It spies for the meaning of unspoken lines, unwritten monologues and silenced dialogues. The calligraphy of my direction draws the bloodstreams of the characters and guidelines for the actors´ journeys through the inner cosmos. Whenever an artist dissolves himself into an art piece and in the process he himself vanishes without a trace - then this is truly ultimate poetry. Until one carves a verse into one’s own flesh, one cannot speak of poetry. George Kimoulis has proven this throughout his life.