To kick off our critical tour of Europe’s cultural hotspots, Michael Billington reports on thrilling theatre in a post-slump Greece – from a minimalist Doll’s House to Beckett like he’s never seen it before

After a three-day visit, it would be presumptuous to sum up Athenian theatre. But in that short time, I saw five productions, met numerous artists and learned a lot. My immediate impression was that Athens is a hive of theatrical activity: some 1,500 productions a year covering everything from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Pinter and Albee. Interestingly, musicals are a relative rarity and new writing, although abundant, lacks the infrastructure to do it justice – Athens did once have its own equivalent of London’s Royal Court, but the building is now a supermarket.

That is significant, because the topic of money is inescapable in Athens. Greece has had a well-documented economic crisis, which roughly spanned 2009 to 2019. Paradoxically, a decade described as a manageable catastrophe saw an explosion in theatre, even if artists didn’t always get paid. You can see the effects today in that money is tight but ticket prices are low.

Dimitris Lignadis is director of the National Theatre of Greece, which mounts 15 productions a year on five stages. His annual subsidy is €6m. The top salary for actors is €1,200 a month, but the highest ticket price is a modest €25. By Athenian standards, however, the national theatre is well-off. Everywhere I went, I met artists working for peanuts but playing to packed houses.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Beckett like I’d never seen before’ … Billington on Winnie’s chair beneath an image of a pistol on the set of Happy Days.

Where does one start in such a hyperactive scene? My first port of call was the Attis theatre, where 10 years ago I saw an astonishing piece called Alarme about the correspondence between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. It was the work of director Theodoros Terzopoulos. On this visit I saw his adaptation of A Doll’s House, called simply Nora. It is a mystery to me why this great 75-year-old auteur is acclaimed in Russia, China, Germany and the US but unknown in Britain.

When I inquired why his work had not come to the UK, he told me it was because he’d never been asked. If I had to describe his style, it would be one of ritualistic minimalism: influenced by the Bauhaus and having worked in Berlin, he conveys the essence of a text through speech and movement. In Nora, he reduces Ibsen’s play to 70 minutes and three characters: the fraught heroine caught between two men, her husband, Torvald, and the blackmailing Krogstad.

Terzopoulos describes the play as a battle between “the frightened ego and the strangled true self”, and that essential conflict was brilliantly embodied by Sophia Hill, who acts with every fibre of her being. She even makes vivid use of a tumbling mane of hair. As Ibsen’s doll-wife, she screamed in English, “Shampoo for me! Conditioner for me!” as a symbol of her materialism. At the end, she escaped from the male pincer movement of Torvald and Krogstad – who both at various stages clawed her body – by crawling to the front of stage and diving headfirst over its edge.

This was a Nora whose bourgeois surface concealed something feral and highly sexual. When I saw Hill play Elizabeth I in Alarme, she invested the character with a similar physicality, gliding over the stage as if she were a predatory serpent. On the strength of that and her Nora, I would say Hill is one of the world’s great actors – imagine a feline Billie Whitelaw – who deserves to be known far beyond Greece.

You don’t have to walk far in Athens to discover the influence of the Terzopoulos style. Across the road from his theatre is the tiny Attis New Space, where one of his former actors, Savvas Stroubos, invited me to watch a rehearsal of his new production of Happy Days. I thought I had seen every possible variation on Beckett’s play, but this was like nothing I had witnessed before: a mixture of musical performance and art installation, where Winnie was not buried in earth but seated on a white chair beneath an image of an overhanging pistol.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Modern-day Athens … Of Mice and Men by the theatre collective Cartel. Photograph: Stavros Habakis

The words were still Beckett’s, but they were sung as well as spoken by Aneza Papadopoulo as Winnie, accompanied by a visible alter ego in the shape of the violin-playing Ellie Iggliz. This was Beckett hauntingly reimagined, but I was intrigued by the circumstances of the production. The director and actors had worked on it since September and the minimal budget was €18,000. It was theatre of dedicated perfectionism.

Athens offers a theatre of violent contrasts. One night, I travelled to a depopulated area full of warehouses where an old machine shop has been turned into a theatre run by Cartel Artspace. Its co-founder is Vassilis Bisbikis, an actor-director who describes himself as a “would-be anarchist”. Entering this found space, I was immediately reminded of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil in Paris and I was not surprised to learn that she is a role model to Bisbikis. What also struck me was that Cartel, a genuine collective working in a remote part of Athens, now attracts a well-heeled, fashionable audience.

The show I saw was a version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men set in modern Athens, in which the equivalents of George and Lennie became employees in a dilapidated factory where the workers were housed in isolated cells. This was theatre of anticapitalist protest played in a visceral, in-yer-face style full of raw sex and violence. Nikoleta Kotsailidou as the factory owner’s girlfriend, in tight shorts and torn stockings, provided a constant provocation to the thwarted lust of the workers before being strangled by the Greek Lennie. And when one of the workers insulted an immigrant employee, his colleagues exacted revenge by savagely beating him up.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lively … Dinner of Fools

Sitting in the front row, one felt in constant danger from flying fists and hurtling bodies. But at the heart of the show was the molten friendship of Bisbikis as the burly protector, and Dimitris Drosos as the sad, scuttling Lennie. It was a production of immense physical power that has already played for 170 performances. Once again, I was struck by how much is achieved in Athens with only a pitiful subsidy: a project-grant of €15,000, with ticket prices at €12.

You can, of course, find commercial theatre. I caught Dinner of Fools – a lively version of the French play and movie Le Dîner de Cons – now in its fourth year. But even here, its producer, director and co-star, Spyros Papadopoulos, told me that 75% of the show’s profits went in taxes to the government.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Surreal … Dimitris Lignadis, right, as Macbeth at the National Theatre of Greece. Photograph: Marilena Anastasiadou

I also saw a new production of Macbeth at the Greek National Theatre where the company’s chief, Dimitris Lignadis, directs and plays the lead. It was a good example of actors’ Shakespeare: the emphasis was on the unbreakable bond between the Macbeths, with occasional surreal touches, such as the pair of them seated on thrones projecting from a blood-soaked wall. Lignadis, who inherited a debt of €1m when he took over the company last September, wryly told me: “I feel as if I’m running, on a smaller scale, the Greek government.”

Theatre in Athens clearly has to exist in a post-crisis world. But everywhere I went – accompanied by my invaluable guide, Ioanna Blatsou, founding member of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics – I was impressed by the amount of creative energy that is generated on minimal resources. While new writing may struggle to make itself heard, I was told of one living dramatist, Yiannis Tsiros, who has addressed questions of Greek identity, the refugee situation and sex trafficking.

Although Greece, where the average net income is thought to be around €800 a month, is still wrestling with economic hardship, theatre provides a relief, a recreation and, occasionally, a vehicle of protest. Athenian theatre, dominated by male producer-directors, may not be perfect, but it shows that minor miracles can be achieved on minuscule amounts of money and that Greek audiences still have an ungovernable appetite for theatre.