High and low—A murderer in Tokyo

Just before midnight, the sound of the telephone shatters the quiet at the mansion of Gondo the industrialist. At the other end of the line, an unknown voice informs him that his ten year-old son, Jun, has been kidnapped and demands a ransom for his release. Gondo doesn’t have to think twice about complying to save his son and has a large sum of money brought to him which had been set aside for a business deal. But then he realizes that it is not Jun in the hands of the kidnapper, it is his chauffeur’s son. Which confronts he industrialist with a dilemma: what should be sacrifice, a lifetime’s hard work or the life of an innocent child?

Inspired by Ed McBain’s cult novel, “King’s Ransom”, Syllas Tzoumerkas and Youla Boudali revive the phantasmagoric futurism of Sixties Tokyo and stage a taut manhunt at the Onassis Stegi, throwing fragments of film and installation art, concert and juggling tricks, fashion and televisual illusions into the mélange of their on-stage creation. In fact, the entire fifth floor is transformed into a crime scene for an exciting thriller which combines the garish aesthetic of a pulp novel with the psychological shocks of a middle-class character drama.

Five years on from “Homeland” and two since the international plaudits for A blast—two cinematic dissections of a chaotic Greek reality—Syllas Tzoumerkas and Youla Boudali join forces and return to the theatre to comment on the perpetual cycle of reversals that describe the triptych “wealthy—middle class—poor”.

McBain’s parable on the links between the social classes provides the two artists with the raw material they need to speak “with a good deal of humor, compassion and boldness about how we live together in our cities, how the three social classes are close, blind, paralyzed or full of teeth, read to bite out of fear and distress. And about something more valuable, too: that beneath it all, in our heart of hearts, there’s something else, something profoundly free, extremely stubborn and ready to live and surprise. Something that’s probably good”.