Greek National Theater Koutrouli’s Wedding: The Imaginative, Sets and Costumes of Marie Noelle Semet
Jul 25 2012 ·
Marie Noelle Semet, the French set and costume designer uses motives from the modernism of the beginning of the 20th century. With clear influances from the Dadaism and the abstract poetry of Ugo Baal as well as of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia Marie Noelle is crreating a Fools celebration with colors falling down from the sky.
A tailor, Manolis Koutroulis, falls in love with Anthousa, the daughter of a middle-class family, but she only has eyes for Leonidas, a young policeman. To avoid the prospective groom without opposing her father, Anthousa says that she will marry the illiterate Koutroulis on condition that he becomes a minister of state. Koutroulis launches his election campaign, uses every means at his disposal and appears to have achieved the impossible. And so the ambitious Anthousa marries him. But it soon transpires that the tailor has not in fact been made a minister and that he has fallen victim to cunning exploiters of his naïveté.
Alexandros Rizos Rangavis wrote Koutroulis’s Wedding in 1845, but for 21st-century audiences the play might have been written today. It is a political satire that exposes all the ills that have accompanied the state of affairs and the mentality prevailing in Greece from its foundation to the present day. Cronyism, slavish deference to all things foreign, lack of authenticity, vested interests, corruption and bribery are just some of the issues addressed in Rangavis’s comedy, the timelessness of which now gives a tragic edge to a reality that to a great extent is no different today. This acerbic and topical play is brought to the Main Stage of the Greek National Theatre by one of the country’s most important directors, Vasilis Papavasileiou, assisted by a fine cast of established actors and exciting new talents.
A thirteen party Theatrical Company undertakes the task to “play” a work written by Alexander Rizos Ragavis words in the language in the 19th century. The author is stigmatizing the suffering of the newborn Greek state. In many cases this situation resembles the one that Greece is facing even today.
The Moliere and Aristophanes are providing the form to be parodied the criminal levity and weakness of the Greeks to form a state. The director Vassilis Papavasiliou puts the show in a carnival environment and shows through the banter of a political cabaret that in a dreamy place, based on money and credit, the awakening is painful and necessary. Just as a tailor (Koutroulis) wanted to become minister to satisfy the vanity of his beloved.
Marie-Noelle Semet has done an inspiring work in order to serve the director’s approach to the carnival set that the plot is being unfold. See some more pictures from the design process below
- Directed by Vasilis Papavasileiou
- Adapted by Vasilis Papavasileiou and Sotiris Haviaras
- Set and costumes designed by Marie-Noelle Seme
- Music composed by Dimitris Kamarotos
- Lighting designed by Eleftheria Deko
- Movement by Sinequanon
- Video by Vasilis Kontouris (studio 19)
- Music coach Melina Peonidou
- Assistant to the director Nikoleta Filosoglou
- Assistant to the lighting designer Manto Melachroinou
