The Greek Play Project | Phaethon Safe and Secure

Playwright: Konstantinos Markellos

Taking the few surviving fragments of Euripides’ tragedy Phaethon as his starting point, the playwright uses collage and devised theatre techniques to compose a postdramatic text that moves between poetry and realism. The myth is reshaped to reinvent, or reintroduce, the dimension of the tragic in the present. A violent passage into adulthood. A descent into the darkness of the mythical “self”. A multifaceted choral performance centred on the desire for the unattainable and the potential cost of transcending limits. The characters of the myth and the dramatic motivations give way to the dispersal of dominant meaning and to self-referentiality. Language, allusive and subversive, moves between the poetic and the everyday, seeking to reclaim its autonomy through ritual and polyphony, in the hope of a new—and attainable—form of catharsis.