GOODBYE
LINDITA
Original Concept & Director Mario Banushi Dramaturgy
Sophia EftychiadouSets
& Costumes Melanos Music Emmanouel Rovithis Lighting Tasos Palaioroutas House
Dramaturg Aspasia-Maria Alexiou
Directing Assistants
Cast (in alphabetical order) Afroditi
KapokakiTheodora, Mario Banushi, Babis Galiatsatos, Alexandra Hasani, Erifyli Kitzoglou, Katerina Kristo, Helene Habia Nzanga, Eftychia Stefanou, Chryssi Vidalaki
Dunstan
Playhouse. Adelaide Festival Centre. Adelaide Festival 2024
Reviewed
by Peter Wilkins
Writer and director of Goodbye Lidita Mario Banushi
An old
woman sits gazing silently at a television set. She drinks slowly from a cup. A
man sits opposite her at the table. He slowly folds shirts. The old woman rises
and walks slowly across the room to the bed and nudges a sleeping figure. A
woman rises. No words are spoken. The man contrinues to fold the shirts in
silence. It is a sparse and wordless opening to Mario Banushi’s Goodbye Lindita, performed by the
National Theatre of Greece . The man finishes folding shirts and places them on
a cabinet. The young woman joins him and
they wheel the cabinet to the centre of the room. She brushes the shirts onto
the floor and together they open the cabinet
into a bed to reveal the naked body of a dead woman. It is at this moment in
director Mario Banushi’s wordless work that our perceptions undergo an
unexpected jolt. Goodbye Lindita is
no longer a vision of mundane domesticity. It assumes an air of funereal grief.
Stifled sobs can be heard from the old woman as a bizarre ritual takes place.
Voyeuristic fascination replaces docile observance and Banushi’s gripping
display of death’s impact on a family becomes a conduit for a sombre awareness
of our own mortality. Banushi sounds an alarm with each resonant image. Goodbye Lindita becomes a homily to
death .
The
corpse slowly rises and stands motionless in the centre of the stage in
preparation for the ritual of preparing the body for the funeral. The visitors
gather round and begin to cleanse the corpse and place her in the bath before
drying her down and clothing her in bridal wear. Banushi’s direction is
meticulous, reverential in its timing, precise in its ceremonial ritual. His
actors respond with unerring truth in every gesture and every emotional
response to the solemnity of the occasion. Naturalism gives way to symbolism
and religious iconography. Pieta- like Lidita is laid in the arms of a black
Madonna before being laid out and surrounded with flowers by her lover, played
by Banushi.
Peaceful
solemnity turns to a pagan manifestation of grief. Clothes are removed or torn
off in a biblical act of grief and loss The old woman follows Lindita’s descent into the bath and being cradled in
the Madonna’s arms. One after another they succumb to the tumult of their
desolation. The masked corpse moves through the howling gale to the eternal
darkness. The rest is silence.
Goodbye Lindita is visceral theatre at its most
profound. Masterfully directed with remarkably intuitive insight and
magnificently performed by actors of the National Theatre of Greece, Goodbye Lindita left an audience stunned
and speechless as the lights dimmed on a production that held them enthralled
for just over an hour. Only then as realization dawned did the theatre erupt
with applause. In a play without words they had been moved to silent
contemplation and the understanding that they had witnessed a performance of
deep personal significance.
