Ευρυδίκη

Two chairs, a train station, and two people who have not yet met — the stage at Rabbithole is stripped to the furniture of chance encounters, and when Orpheus and Eurydice lock eyes for the first time, the room on Germanikou Street contracts around them.

Jean Anouilh wrote Eurydice in 1941, transplanting the Orpheus myth into a 1930s French train station and stripping it of everything divine. His Orpheus is a travelling musician. His Eurydice is an actress in a struggling touring company. They fall in love in a waiting room, and the play becomes a study of whether love can survive knowing another person completely. Iro Bezou and Christos Thanos adapted and directed this production for Rabbithole, with Thanos also composing the original score. The staging merges theater and music in what the production describes as a timeless, dimensionless environment — the lovers exist outside ordinary space, bound by a single condition: Orpheus must not look back.

The cast is four — Bezou, Thanos, Maria Chaniou, and Fotis Stratigos — performing in a space intimate enough that every gesture carries. Rabbithole seats fewer than a hundred, and the proximity between performer and audience turns Anouilh's dialogue into something closer to overheard conversation than projected theater.

The Rabbithole crowd for a Sunday-night Anouilh is specific: people who follow independent theater in Metaxourgeio, who know the Nostalghia Theater Company's work, who are drawn to productions that choose difficulty over comfort.

| Aspect | Details | |--------|---------| | **Setting** | Rabbithole, Germanikou 20, Metaxourgeio — intimate black-box, under 100 seats | | **Vibe** | Concentrated, literary, emotionally direct — chamber theater at close quarters | | **Sound** | Original score by Christos Thanos, performed live, music woven into the drama | | **Door** | Ticketed, walk-in possible, gallery seats available at €5 |

The eighty minutes unfold as Anouilh intended — a love story that questions whether love is possible once two people truly see each other. Bezou's Eurydice and Thanos's Orpheus build their connection physically and vocally, and the condition of the myth — do not look back — becomes a metaphor that the production earns rather than explains. The moments of tenderness are real; the moments of cruelty are equally real.

If you prefer theater with clear resolution and emotional catharsis, Anouilh wrote something more ambiguous — the play refuses to let you leave satisfied. But if you want to sit close enough to four performers to hear them breathe, watching a seventy-five-year-old French play about Greek myth performed in a room that makes intimacy unavoidable, Rabbithole is the right size for this story.

Rabbithole is at Germanikou 20 in Metaxourgeio, a seven-minute walk from Metaxourgeio metro or ten minutes from Kerameikos metro. Performances run Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays at 21:00. Tickets are €18 general, €13 reduced for students, seniors, and unemployed, and €5 for gallery seats — the cheapest way into serious theater in Athens. Book through the venue or walk in, but the room is small enough that selling out is a real possibility. The run extends through April 5.

Anouilh's Eurydice has not been staged often in Athens at this scale — four actors, eighty minutes, a room where the myth fits in your hands.