Anna Kokkinou

Anna Kokkinou was born in Shubra, a district of Cairo, and grew up in the city’s Greek community. In a 2012 interview she remembered watching the shops of a busy crossroads from the family balcony and said that she was, in the end, “made of Cairo materials”. She came to Athens at the end of the 1960s to study, enrolled in Greek philology and soon left it for drama school. Performances at Theatro Technis, the theatre of Karolos Koun, beginning with Beckett’s Endgame, decided her path.

Her first stage work was in Xenia Kalogeropoulou’s children’s theatre. Lefteris Vogiatzis then invited her into the group that became Η Σκηνή (The Stage), on Kykladon Street, a company she later credited with shaping the way she looks at things. After it ended, she found it hard to fit into other companies. In the winter of 1990 she came across a collapsed, roofless warehouse in Makrygianni owned by the Koutlidis Foundation, asked to rent it and, by her own account, sold her only home to turn it into a theatre. The name Σφενδόνη (Sling) was suggested by Vasilis Dioskouridis. The theatre has been both her base and a long struggle: in 2019 she published an open letter asking the government to help save it from eviction in a dispute over rent.

Kokkinou has often worked with texts that were not written for the stage. The theatre opened with her solo production based on the stories of Georgios Vizyinos, documented under the title Μορφές από το έργο του Βιζυηνού (Figures from the Work of Vizyinos). She did not feel ready to perform alone, she later said, but the theatre had to open; she expected about twenty days of performances, and it ran for two and a half years. In 2014 she directed and performed Εγώ ο Θουκυδίδης ένας Αθηναίος (I, Thucydides, an Athenian), built from passages of Thucydides in N. M. Skouteropoulos’s Modern Greek translation, including the Melian Dialogue, the civil strife at Corcyra and Pericles’ Funeral Oration. She was the narrator, designed the set and costumes, and toured the production to secondary schools across Greece.

Later work at Sfendoni includes REM/κήπος (REM/Garden, 2018), inspired by a journey to Vizyinos’s birthplace in Eastern Thrace and by a garden from her Cairo childhood, and Οι Μίμοι (The Mimes) of Herodas in Theodoros Stefanopoulos’s translation, first staged in 2019, in which she also acted. What drew her to Herodas, she said, was the language. In April 2020 she recorded Vizyinos’s story Ο Μοσκώβ Σελήμ (Moskov Selim) in her dressing room for the online series Αναγνώσεις (Readings) of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. In January 2022 she first presented Αφανισμός (Extinction), her stage version of Thomas Bernhard’s last novel, largely one long monologue.

For more than three decades Sfendoni has kept a small independent stage alive in central Athens, and Kokkinou’s work there shows how Greek prose, from nineteenth-century stories to ancient history in translation, can become spoken theatre. Her 2020 recording of Ο Μοσκώβ Σελήμ (Moskov Selim) was presented as a reading for young people and students in the SNFCC’s Αναγνώσεις series. Try a short task: listen to the first minute and mark with a slash every place where she pauses or takes a breath. Vizyinos writes in a nineteenth-century literary Greek, so treat this as listening practice for rhythm rather than full comprehension. Then write one sentence of your own about a place from your childhood, underline its stressed syllables, mark its pauses and read it aloud twice, moving one pause the second time.

• She sold her only home to create Theatro Sfendoni in Makrygianni.
• Her solo Vizyinos production was expected to last twenty days and ran for two and a half years.
• Her Thucydides production toured secondary schools across Greece.
• She first decided on acting after seeing Beckett’s Endgame at Theatro Technis.