Roula Pateraki

Roula Pateraki was born in Thessaloniki. She has said that the choice of theatre was not originally hers: when she was about ten, her teachers noticed her talent and her parents steered her towards the stage. Her first appearance was at that age, as Isaac in Η Θυσία του Αβραάμ (The Sacrifice of Abraham). She graduated in English literature from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, trained at the drama school of Kyriazis Charatsaris and acted with the professional company Ελεύθερο Θέατρο (Free Theatre).

In Thessaloniki she was a founding member of the Theatre Workshop and then created her own Επιθεώρηση Δραματικής Τέχνης (Drama Art Review), which ran from 1978 to 1985 as both a drama school and a professional company. There she directed and acted in plays by Tom Stoppard, Samuel Beckett and Henrik Ibsen, among others. After moving to Athens she founded the Roula Pateraki Drama Theatre in 1990.

As an actress she has played leading roles such as Rebecca West in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camellias and Molly Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses. She has also appeared in films, including Lakis Papastathis’s Το μόνον της ζωής του ταξείδιον (The Only Journey of His Life). In 2016 she directed and performed in a stage version of Breaking the Waves at the National Theatre of Greece.

Pateraki is known for demanding, text-centred theatre and for rehearsals that can last many months. The actor Giannis Palamiotis, who trained and worked with her in Thessaloniki, has linked her approach to stylised Scandinavian acting, Grotowski and Peter Brook, and to film-makers such as Bergman, Dreyer and Tarkovsky. She says she developed her own system of acting exercises through August Strindberg, whose Προς Δαμασκόν (To Damascus) she staged at the Onassis Stegi in 2016 as the play’s first Greek production.

Her work with ancient texts is especially relevant for learners. For the National Theatre at Ancient Epidaurus in 2008 she combined Οιδίπους Τύραννος (Oedipus the King) and Οιδίπους επί Κολωνώ (Oedipus at Colonus) in one performance. She prepared a new Modern Greek version with Giannis Lignadis instead of using an existing translation, trimming only repetitions and keeping the choral odes and Oedipus’ monologues. In 2014 she adapted Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War as Το μανιφέστο του πολέμου (The War Manifesto), Part I, for the Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus, ending with Pericles’ Funeral Oration.

She has also championed modern Greek playwrights. In 2018 she directed a three-hour “red performance” built from eleven plays by Loula Anagnostaki at Peiraios 260, and in 2019 she completed a trilogy based on Dimitris Dimitriadis’s Πεθαίνω σα χώρα (I Die as a Country) with a performance inside an unfinished metro tunnel in Piraeus.

Pateraki’s productions show how Greek theatre keeps ancient and modern texts alive by speaking them in today’s Greek. The National Theatre’s digital archive preserves the programme and photographs of her 2008 Oedipus, and the Athens Epidaurus Festival keeps pages for her Thucydides and Anagnostaki projects. Try a small rehearsal at home: choose one sentence from this page’s Greek passage, for example Οι ηθοποιοί διαβάζουν το κείμενο (The actors read the text). Read it once normally, then follow two directions from a partner: πιο αργά (slower) and πιο δυνατά (louder). Swap roles. These directions are our own practice exercise, not words from her productions.

• Her first stage role, at about ten, was the boy Isaac in The Sacrifice of Abraham.
• Before training as an actress she graduated in English literature.
• Her 2018 Anagnostaki project ran alongside a separate “white performance” in another hall of the same venue.
• One of her 2019 performances took place in an unfinished metro tunnel for an audience of only 60.