A lamentation: Taverna Miresia – Mario, Bella, Anastasia

On the concluding piece in Greek director Mario Banushi's trilogy of grief.

Hello and welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.

I just returned to the UK from Athens, where I attended the Grape Agora of Performance and had the opportunity to visit the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus and watch Tiago Rodrigues’ Hecuba, Not Hecuba seated on 2000-year-old stones. (Here’s my review in The Stage). I also got to watch the final chapter in Mario Banushi’s trilogy, Taverna Miresia - Mario, Bella, Anastasia, arguably the stand-out production of this year’s and last year’s showcase, more on which below.

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Taverna Miresia - Mario, Bella, Anastasia. Photo: Nasia Stouraiti

Mario Banushi hurls a handful of earth at the white-tiled wall. It hits hard, leaving an ugly brown smear behind. It is moment of tonal rupture in a piece steeped in grief.

Taverna Miresia – Mario, Bella, Anastasia is the third part of a trilogy by the young Greek director, who in just a couple of years has already made a mark on the international scene. His debut Ragada (Stretchmarks in English), brought him to the attention of the National Theatre of Greece in 2022. They went on to present his second show Goodbye, Lindita, which has since toured everywhere from Adelaide to Amsterdam. After featuring in the inaugural Grape Agora of Performance last year, this third piece has also started to tour, playing the Euroregional Theatre Festival – TESZT in Timisoara in May. Here’s Arifa Akbar in the Guardian on last year’s showcase.

Its popularity was such that they brought it back for this year’s Grape showcase, which took places between 21^st-25^th July, as part of the Athen Epidaurus festival. Banushi’s piece was one of two returning works (the other was Zoe Chatziantoniou’s Amalia Melancholia: Queen of the Palm Trees).

Death runs through Banushi’s work along with the ritual, mysticism and imagery of his Albanian heritage Goodbye, Lindita was inspired by the death of his stepmother. In Taverna, he focuses on his late father, a man who was absent in life, returning to Albania following his divorce, before death made his absence permanent. When I interviewed Banushi last year for Kosovo 2.0 he said that the piece started with the image of an empty chair, a symbol of the man who remained present in his children’s lives despite not physically being there. The piece, he explained, takes its title from the taverna run by his father back in Albania – miresia means kindness in Albanian - which he named after his children.

Theatre of the thin place: Mario Banushi, fast rising star of the Greek stage

The show takes place not in a taverna, but a white tiled, windowless bathroom - a very recognisably Balkan bathroom, complete with washing machine and one of those pedestal squat toilets. There is a flat object lying in the middle of this space. This turns out to be the neon sign of the taverna. Banushi, who trained as an actor and always performs in his work, lifts this up to reveal a grave, a rectangle of earth in the clean white expanse. He lifts a man’s jacket out of the grave and caresses it, tenderly, before draping it on the back of the chair. This large, illuminated sign serves a double duty. It’s both a title card and a handy way of creating misdirection. When he lowers the sign, the stage is populated by weeping women in black, seated around the grave. One of them, played by the renowned Greek singer Savina Yannatou, begins to wail in a distinctive ululating manner. It’s suitably uncanny sound, part keen of grief, part songbird trill.  Music and mourning are intertwined in Albanian culture (she says with authority having spent 10 minutes on Wikipedia), the lamentation of the dead part of the funerary process, and here it is woven into the soundscape of the piece.

One of the women brings a bowl of food to the graveside and starts to eat. After a while she attempts to feed her sister, lifting the spoon to her mouth only for the food to be spat in her face. This happens repeatedly. This gesture of kindness, this attempt at nurture, literally spat back at her.