- The Bowl,
- 2012
- 2 male - 1 female
Playwright: Eugenia Dagla
- The Fishbowl was written in the summer of 2012, at the height of the economic crisis in Greece. It was prompted by a suicide in broad daylight in Syntagma Square, which the playwright heard about on the news. Instead of crying, she wrote. Over the course of nine nights, the figure of Lucy emerged amid the queues for soup kitchens and the rubbish piling up in the streets. The monologue is written almost in a single breath, and this is what gives it its urgent, breathless rhythm. The text is essentially an interior monologue, a mind speaking aloud. These are thoughts voiced as they arise, not polished, carefully constructed sentences intended for an audience. The play is written using the stream-of-consciousness technique. Lucy is deeply shaken by the suicide of Stelios, a former schoolmate. She “resounds entirely with another person’s death,” as she says in the play. The tragedy brings back memories of Stelios in extraordinary detail: she even remembers “the pale mark left by his watch on his wrist,” because “the soul always takes notes.” Her alter ego is little Lucy, the goldfish in the bowl, whom at one point she calls “MISS GREECE” — a bitter allusion to the difficult times the country is going through. Lucy herself is like a goldfish trapped inside her own bowl, struggling between a private pain — her dead-end relationship with a married man — and a much greater one: the crisis devastating the country. Like her namesake, she swims inside her small, frozen world, until a sudden bang jolts her out of the bowl and propels her into the wider world — a world she now wants to change. The Fishbowl speaks of the anguish of a people struggling to survive in the harsh and inhuman circumstances they have been forced to endure. And even if the crisis has not knocked directly on our own door, we should not deceive ourselves: we all feel its reverberations. We are all swimming in cold, troubled waters.