Shay Mace
Descending below the pulsating beats of a DJ set playing in To Pikap Kato, we follow a figure in a yellow raincoat deep into an immersive underworld. The audience takes their seats either side of the promenade stage, as this figure crawls along the ground in an oblique journey ending at the feet of a figure dressed all in black. She represents her Mother, and over the following hour we excavate their relationship, a world of conflicting desires and differences, through a testing live art performance.
CRAVEyard is a demanding piece of theatre – part installation, part movement piece, part multimedia projection. There are long pauses, breaths, processions and partakings that see this pair weave the tapestry of their relationship into something equal parts figurative and literal. The child seeks permission to be from this mother figure, but she stands circuitously performing rituals that cannot be understood through a child’s eye.
Suffocation and release bulb together and apart as the dialectic of the narrative, alongside themes of longing, belonging, inheritance and entrapment. Neither character develops beyond their mould until the piece’s final moment of catharsis, and this will challenge the conventions of theatre that many audience members may have entered CRAVEyard expecting.
Greek contemporary company In contACT look to explore how identity is formed through what is remembered, forgotten, inherited, and silenced in this form-breaking work, that in truth may well only give back to you what you are willing to put into it. The characters are not as such in the traditional sense; they are constructs to explore what creator Smaro Platioti calls an ‘emotional architecture’. There are points where this dramaturgy is highly salient and engrossing, and others where it is foreboding, isolating, and discombobulating.
Nafsika Karakomninou-Tsigkopoulou’s performance of the Mother figure is chilling and intoxicating. A moment where a child’s toy accidentally lands on the foot of an audience member sees her snap her fingers at them to demand its return, placing the audience in the same posture as the child in that instant. As we witness the duo proceed up and down the performance area, with flashes of childhood holidays projected onto them with grainy dew, there’s a menacing distance created between us and the world that these figures inhabit despite the immediate physical proximity.
Self-revelation is only enacted in a deep and scurrilous interrogation of the processes, moments, and rituals that have made us the person we are today. CRAVEyard pushes many boundaries, at moments to the point of difficult extremity, and lands a little on-the-nose in its finale. It is, nonetheless, fascinating work that blurs the boundaries of performance, media, and installation with verve and depth.
Recommended Drink: Pair this show with a Dark ‘n’ Stormy cocktail.
Performances of CRAVEyard have now concluded at Thessaloniki Fringe 2026.
