Theodoros Terzopoulos’s production of Heiner Müller’s Mauser: Metaphoric political theatre through space, body and dialogue

This article examines the metaphoric characteristics of Theodoros Terzopoulos’s production of Heiner Müller’s Mauser by analysing its metaphors of space, body and dialogue. It analyses how Greek director Terzopoulos transformed German political theatre rooted in Brechtian aesthetics into Greek political theatre rooted in Greek tragedy. In this adaptation, the director’s utilization of space and sets played an essential role in staging his artistic vision; the utilization of space not only closely restrained the actors’ performance but also defined the historical relations among Greek people in the theatre including the actors, narrators, audience members and their ancestors who were symbolically represented through portraits. To trace the process of this adaptation, this article, first, refers to Terzopoulos’s apprenticeship in the Berliner Ensemble and his relationship with Müller and analyses how these two artists influenced each other through their common interest in Greek tragedy. Next, it analyses how Terzopoulos adapted Müller’s Mauser based on an episode in Greek history, the Greek Civil War, and then recreated it visually through experimental sets and metaphoric movements as an extension of his major Greek tragedy productions. Signifying a microcosm of Greek society, the space and sets revealed veiled meanings one by one as the actors deconstructed the sets and the audience defined their position in the space by observing the change of sets. Terzopoulos’s production ultimately gives us an example of the way directors stage political theatre for spectators in their own time and place.