Matchbox: The Musical on the Onassis Stegi

“Matchbox” is being made a musical on the Onassis Stegi Main Stage. A lower-middle class apartment heaves, fit to burst. The AC unit’s stopped working, the TV’s always on. Frappé coffee and cigarettes. The workaday strain of a coffee shop-owning father, and a mother’s overwrought voice. The rhythmic rants of a sexist son, and a brother-in-law’s grand aria. Searing words and burning questions, all re-expressed in musical ways: “What you gonna do about Linda, Vangelis?”

This crushing family massacre – centered on Dimitris, the owner of a coffee shop – soon flares up and, in the space of a single Sunday in August, everything blows sky high. Violence rockets, through the roof. The characters enter and exit this “matchbox” trailed by the desperate songs and strains of their despair. The spouse Maria, the children, assorted other kith and kin – everyone rages against everyone else. And performing solo at the heart of it all: the paterfamilias.

The “Matchbox” by Yannis Economides is a ‘Colosseum of Heroes’, an ideal hotbed to tackle such questions. Emotions so absolute that touch the fringes of the symbolic, and characters so – beautifully – grotesque that can only remind you of something – terrifyingly – familiar… The fusion of these two worlds, ‘musical’ and ‘Economides’, however unconventional and ‘wrong’ as it might seem, turned out explosive in the end. In a work where the collision of characters is its fuel, its musical rendering could not but include the collision of musical styles.

The Greek family we’ve come to love and hate remains unchanged, 20 years on. Its members all “scream” their own theme – each to their own music. The conflicts and dreams, problems and ills that afflict the “sacred” institution that is the Greek family all feature in this polystylistic, high-risk musical spectacle: “War! War! This is war!”

If people didn’t speak but rather sang, what would that be like? And how might “Matchbox” be made a musical? Yiannis Niarros takes up the gauntlet, attempting to answer these audacious questions in the most extreme and groundbreaking of ways. Nine musicians, eleven performers, and an extensive creative team magnify the grotesque realities of Greek family life and – steered by Yiannis Niarros and Alexandros Livitsanos’ original music – present an incredible new version of the legendary “Matchbox”.