Little Red Riding Hood - The First Blood

Lena Kitsopoulou’s “Little Red Riding Hood” will be presented in Paris at Théâtre des Abbesses on 18 June 2014 as part of the international “Chantiers d’Europe” program organized by Théâtre de la Ville.

A graduate of the Karolos Koun Greek Art Theater (“Theatro Technis”), Lena Kitsopoulou (born 1971) is an actor, director, dramaturg, and lyricist, as well as a singer with a weakness for the Greek rebetiko repertoire. She has managed, in under seven years, to be acclaimed as the most multi-faceted, radical, impulsive, and perhaps even blasphemous artist of the younger generation.

Her first collection of short stories – “Bats” (Kedros Press, 2006) – was awarded the prize for Best Debut Book by the Greek literary periodical “Diavazo” (“I Read”). She went on to release a second book of short stories, titled “Major Roads” (Metechmio Press, 2010).

Kitsopoulou’s first major success in the theater came with the sarcastic, meta-feminist monologue “M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.” at the Greek National Theater in 2011, directed by herself, and starring her close collaborator Maria Protopappa as a 37-year-old Greek woman talking alone a little before taking her own life.

Lena Kitsopoulou’s daring adaptation and direction of Gregorios Xenopoulos’ romance play “Hail Bride”, starring Maria Protopappa and Giannos Perlegas, garnered rave reviews. The play ran for two seasons at the Karolos Koun Greek Art Theater (“Theatro Technis”) on Frynichou Street in 2012, and was presented last year at the Théâtre St-Gervais in Geneva.

Her theater piece “Athanasios Diakos – The Return”, which she directed, caused a storm of controversy when presented at the Athens & Epidaurus Festival in 2012. In this anti-heroic parable, Kitsopoulou transfers the hero of the 1821 Greek Revolution to the present day, has him open a grill in Psyrri, and transforms him into a lousy individual who curses, beats, rapes and, in the end, slaughters his wife who, incidentally, is cheating on him with his Kurdish hired hand. “Athanasios Diakos made cuckold, griller, wife-killer” screamed the front-page headline of a Greek Sunday newspaper that railed against the artist.

At the 2013 Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Kitsopoulou directed the absurdist musical performance “Ludus Lucta Illusio”, in which the mezzo-soprano Lenia Safiropoulou and the Ex Silentio early music ensemble performed music by the major medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut, while a trio of actors (Giannis Kotsifas, Ioanna Mavrea, and Kitsopoulou herself) used extreme solo improvisations to bring the plot of Heinrich von Klaist’s novel “The Duel” to life.