F*ART part deux

And they generally talk about all the things everyone that is in the art world thinks and talks about within little groups but never admits in public. Lines such as Art is Important and Art Changes Your Life etc etc...After a point they turn into animals (they dress as animals as well as act like animals) and in this way they aim to show the brutal, cruel side of the artworld and consequently the world in general. They end up killing eachother. kind of. :)

The characters are very much accurate and i would say they are a Big Brother version of all of us that are in one way or another in the athens art world. Anyone that will deny that i believe is kidding themselves. I was thrilled to see the play commenting on the curator's knowledge on Louis Vuitton bags and shopping, as well as her fixation on repeating SHE curated such and such project.
The host of the show, that wickedly resembles Marina Labraki Plaka (the director of the National Gallery), looks like a mid-seventies school teacher with her ample bossom and dark kaftan, the curator that is sooooo fashionable and egocentric it is hilarious, the artist that looks like a retard, with his funny glasses and his rock t-shirt, and the gallerist also very fashionable, ice-cool and snobby, and best of all the collector, with his crisp white shirt and trendy white shoes. I am firstly describing the exterior, aka the costumes designed by Rosina Baltatzi, since they enter the viewer in a specific mood and are themselves a very succesful parody of how clothes are important even among the people of art.. :)
The actors were quite good, i have to admit that the host and the collector were among my favourites. The host with her pseudo-graveness and a feeling she is indeed producing "cultural food" for the audience. And the collector with his noble background and "old money" but slight indiference to anything that does not involve money. His philosophical babble and quotes from "important" theorists and so on, was also very funny.
I found the character of the artist to be very intriguing as well, but the actor was slightly too loud in my opinion. The script portrayed him as a poor little mouse -he disguised as one later on in the play- and i thought they kind of left out the darker side. The artist was a mouse, manipulated, raped and guided by all the other characters, and he lets say tried to manipulate but was unsuccesful since he was weaker than the others. However, he felt like an innocent whore and not a manipulative one. Which is also one side of some artists with power in the artworld.
The funniest part for me was to see the gallerist (played by Loraini Alimantiri that is the owner of gallery Gazon Rouge) with one shoe, and an electrical saw running after the curator. It was Freddy Kruger meets Hussein Chalayan (her costume kind of reminded me of his clothes).

All in all, i think it was a succesful play, i would only comment on one description of ass-licking (translated into greek into buttering someone up -oh so rare in art worlds internationally!)
where the curator describes the best way to lick someone's ass. I wasnt offended by it, it was funny but i thought it was unecessarily crude. The peeing scene where the collector pees on the artist and accidentally on the gallerist was much more succesful i thought.
Also, the time where the artist describes his childhood trauma via a performance and then all hell breaks loose and they all become animals and start raping eachother was a bit over the top. But i guess that was the point. There was Brechtian patina on the whole effort of trying to portray something extra-vagant and therefore alien so as the viewer cannot relate to it but only mock it or laugh at it. But the satira was so caustic that it was also like a political ancient comedy.

The direction was very good in my little knowledge of theatre. But i loved the lighting, and the positioning, and their brief dance routine, as well as the way they stood on stage.