The new production from the Experimental Stage for Emerging Artists, Ma Gran’ma, directed by Dimitris Charalampopoulos, premieres on 14 December at the Katina Paxinou Stage of the Rex Theatre. It is a play dedicated to the relationship between grandmother and grandchild, a lyrical journey through memories, love, and parting. It explores what we lose as we grow up, what there was never enough time to say, and how those who are most important to us will live inside us forever.

“The promise that I won’t forget you.”

Ma Gran’ma is an original work for the stage, inspired by the relationship of the director with his grandmother; it quickly transcends the personal to become a collective world of make-believe, magic and realism, in which someone is only truly gone when they are forgotten. Five actor-narrators return to Gran’ma’s home. Sometimes speaking as one voice and sometimes playing different family members, they relate events and stories and make confessions. The house may not look the way it used to, but all it takes is a single trigger, just a feeling, and the wall that divides the past from the present comes tumbling down. There is nothing now to hold back the memories. The passage of time, inevitably bringing old age, isolation, and goodbyes; warm recollections; the things we never got to share. They are all here.

Who was Ma Gran’ma? 
A girl born during the Second World War, who emigrated at an early age to Australia, and returned to Greece a wife and mother. And then became a grandmother. A woman who, years later, lost her husband and afterwards her son. Who walked the path of old age, experiencing profound solitude and the crushing inevitability of death.

How can we talk about family ties? About the first gifts of tenderness, a lullaby, a gentle touch? About grandma? That cherished figure? About the invisible traces of her life? About that second mother? Who looked the other way when you broke the rules. Who was always there. Who told countless stories, but rarely, if ever, about herself. How well did we truly know her? Is it possible to imagine her outside that grandmotherly role? What was she like when she was young? Did she have the same dreams as us? The same insecurities when she fell in love? Did she joke around with her friends? What kind of life did she live, in the end? And what about her declining years? How did she have room inside for all that loneliness?

A last meeting and a letter written on the day of her final farewell are the inspiration for a theatrical world that is both a lovingly-made handmade collage and a deeply personal confession.