Reni Pittaki

Reni Pittaki was born in Athens; reference works usually give 28 October 1945. Her father was an army officer, and his postings meant frequent moves between towns and schools. It was her mother who urged her to audition for Karolos Koun. In the basement theatre of the Art Theatre she recited poems by Cavafy before a panel that included Koun, Giorgos Lazanis and Mimis Kougioumtzis, and she was accepted into the drama school. She also studied philology at university, but chose the stage.

She first stepped onto the stage at Easter 1966, as a student, in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, directed by Koun. Her first leading part, she recalled, came in Pinter’s The Homecoming, also directed by Koun; the production closed about a month after its premiere, when the dictatorship of 1967 brought tanks and censorship. Of her first fifty years in theatre, she said in 2015, forty were spent at the Art Theatre.

After Koun died in 1987, she shared the running of the theatre with Lazanis and Kougioumtzis. In 2003, a few months after Kougioumtzis’s death, she resigned from its board, disagreeing with what she saw as short-term planning. In 2016 she returned to the basement stage after fifteen years for Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, marking fifty years since her first appearance there.

Under Koun, Pittaki worked across the whole repertoire of the Art Theatre. Archive cast lists place her in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1971–72), in which she played Titania, and in Gombrowicz’s Operetta (1972–73), a performance she has linked to her Kotopouli Award, named after the actress Marika Kotopouli. In ancient drama she played Io in Prometheus Bound, appeared in Aristophanes’ Birds at Epidaurus in 1975 and was Electra in The Libation Bearers (Χοηφόροι) in Koun’s 1980 Oresteia. Modern plays were just as central: Genet’s Οι Δούλες (The Maids) in Odysseas Elytis’s translation, Lorca’s Yerma, Beckett’s Not I, and Katia in Loula Anagnostaki’s Ο ήχος του όπλου (The Sound of the Gun), a role she names among the high points of her career.

In the 1996–97 season she played Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opposite Kougioumtzis, who also directed the production. Away from the Art Theatre she played Clytemnestra in Euripides’ Electra, her first collaboration with the director Spyros Evangelatos, in 2015, and Annie Wilkes in a stage version of Misery in 2018. On screen, her role in Alexandros Avranas’s film Miss Violence (2013) won the Hellenic Film Academy award for best supporting actress in 2014.

In October 2023 the Greek Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics gave Pittaki its Grand Theatre Award; its president, Savvas Patsalidis, said she loved the stage as much as the stage loved her. Her career also lives on in the Art Theatre’s online archive, whose production pages list translator, director and cast. Open the page for Ποιος φοβάται τη Βιρτζίνια Γουλφ (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1996–97). Find the line Μάρθα…Ρένη Πιττακή and notice that Μίμης Κουγιουμτζής appears twice: as σκηνοθέτης (director) and as the actor playing George. Then report the production in one precise sentence: Τη Μάρθα την υποδύθηκε η Ρένη Πιττακή, σε σκηνοθεσία Μίμη Κουγιουμτζή (Martha was played by Reni Pittaki, directed by Mimis Kougioumtzis). Repeat the exercise with a second programme from the archive.

• At her drama-school audition she recited poems by Cavafy.
• Her first leading role, in Pinter’s The Homecoming, closed about a month after its premiere when the 1967 dictatorship arrived.
• Genet’s The Maids, in which she played one of the three roles in the 1967–68 season, was translated into Greek by the poet Odysseas Elytis.
• In 2016 she returned to the Art Theatre’s basement stage after fifteen years away.