Alexi Kaye Campbell: 'I knew I had to write a play about Greece'

• Published in: The Guardian (London)
• Main Author: Alexi Kaye Campbell
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 01.06.2016
• Subjects: Campbell, Alexi Kaye
• ISSN: 0261-3077

When the National Theatre commissioned me to write a play a few years ago I knew that, implicitly or explicitly, it needed to be about Greece. I have spent the last few years witnessing the endless drama of its spiralling descent into economic turmoil and sociopolitical chaos. On my many trips back to the country, I watched friends losing their jobs, relatives struggling to keep their businesses afloat, people having to move abroad in search of employment and a better life. And they are the lucky ones. In the early hours of the morning I have witnessed people scavenging through bins to feed their families and heard accounts of children fainting at school due to lack of food. A couple of years ago I found myself walking into a demonstration against what many Greeks regard as the new German occupation, Berlin's insistence on austerity as the only answer to Greece's economic woes. In the faces of those demonstrators I saw a wide range of emotions: patience, despair, rage and determination. I was by now living in the UK but all these things urged me to write about the country I grew up in -- the country that infuriates me but that I also love with a passion. I remember Greece in the 80s and 90s -- deluded, corrupt, profligate, hungry for all the material goods that had evaded it for so long and addicted to the highs they provided. Drunk on the illusion of its new success, and steadily building up the Olympian mountain of debts that would later cause its catastrophic downfall, it seemed to have lost any self-knowledge and wisdom it may have acquired through years of occupation, poverty and adversity. And it was during these years, when the streets of Athens were paved with gold, that I remember thinking that something was being lost. I didn't know quite what that something was, how to define it or describe it. But if there is one good thing to come from the suffering and struggles that the people of Greece are now enduring, perhaps it is to do with regaining that ineffable thing that had disappeared. I suspect it exists somewhere between the two extreme poles that the 20th century offered as the only viable alternatives. It is an equilibrium, a profound and determined effort to ask the right questions; to find the connection to our better selves and the people we share the planet with. The roots of a healthy democracy in the place where it all started. The kind of Greece that my father may have found some happiness and stability in.