The Athens theatre season without Aliki Vouyouklaki is as unthinkable as the tourist season without the Parthenon. Like the Parthenon, Vouyouklaki is so familiar in so many ways that it is for all practical purposes impossible to judge her as a work of art. She is above all a phenomenon: she is so overwhelmingly there.
Being, however, very much a lady of the theatre, she feels obliged to play a role, or more precisely, to play at playing a role. This year she is Mando Mavroyenous. If one doesn’t get a very vivid picture of this revolutionary heroine, it is only because one comes away with the impression that Mando Mavroyenous has given a splendid impersonation of Aliki Vouyouklaki. It doesn’t matter: her choice of the the role is merely a concession to public taste. The gain is all ours: the image of this vague character out of the past has now been forever imbedded in our minds.
What exactly is the Vouyouklaki magic? This is impossible to answer, because if we could describe it exactly, it wouldn’t be magic. It has first of all, to do with that rapport she creates with her audience which is almost tangible. Her appearance arouses in her spectators an inexplicable urge to rise and sing the National Hymn. What is so delightful about this rapport is that it is essentially the sharing of a secret, enhanced by the fact that it is open and can be shared by all. It is not just that ravishing wink she gives us every now and then, it is the whole manner. In this particular case, the secret is this: though we may have Kolokotronis, Dimitri Ypsilantis and Papaflessas on our right; Kolettis, Mavrocordatos and Capodistrias on our left; here, down stage centre we have Aliki Vouyouklaki playing straight out to her admiring public. It is the most honest of hoaxes.
Once this is established — and it is established at once — we can sit back, relax and enjoy the many-sided subtleties of her performance. We have seen most of it before: Aliki, the innocent girl; Aliki, the seductress; Aliki, the dutiful daughter; Aliki, the winsome comedienne; Aliki, the rejected woman (beware!); Aliki, the grande dame; Aliki, the ethnic champion.
Within this plenitude, however, there are marvelous modulations. By example: Aliki (alias Mando) has just been told that Ypsilandis has abandoned her. It’s a lie, of course (who could ever abandon Aliki?) but it adds piquancy to our wildest dreams. ‘You are crying,’ her informer tells her. Ί, cry? I never cry,’ she retorts, turning away from him swiftly. Then suddenly she sits, at the other side of the stage, alone, and stares out at us across the footlights in an enormous, devastated stare, with eyes literally ‘beyond tears’. It is a superb moment. We know it — she knows it — and we are mutually happier for the knowledge.
It is hardly surprising that Vouyouklaki is appearing in a second George Roussos play in three years. His historical costume-dramas are a perfect vehicle for her, giving her that kaleidoscope of sudden situations and moods so suitable to the variety of her talents. What Aliki can do with a costume is itself a revelation. It is strictly a case of Woman making the Dress. The energy she consumes is nothing less than heroic, she must be one of the fastest costume-changers in theatrical history. She must take backstage corners faster than an Athens taxi. Here we have the Red Aliki, there the White, suddenly the hopeful Pink, the Desperate Purple, the pathetic Brown.
Acting may be the most external of arts, but to be fine it must conceal something. In the case of Aliki Vouyouklaki what might this be? She scans the auditorium with the utmost familiarity. It is after all, hers. She wins us all, but we are not at all sure whether we win her. Together, perhaps, we do: this winning smile is unspecific. We sense that she is more aware of the occasional empty seat than by the many occupied ones. She has a way of dividing us up as she looks at us. She accepts our applause. It pleases her. But we feel that she never asked for it. How does she divide us up?
First of all as men and women. Women admire Aliki more openly. Men tend to be circumspect. In fact her whole attitude on stage towards men is curiously enigmatic. A single man she sees through quite easily — but to what? — another man? Other men? Or perhaps another image of herself? This enigmatic quality we have seen in some of the greatest actresses: in Garbo and Dietrich, to take only the most glaring examples. Aliki however, is no femme fatale. If anything she wants to give us the ingenue. But there is something inaccessible about her. Men find something untrustworthy about her, a quality she encourages. She is clearly not a man’s woman. She is her own woman. There is a coldness about her, a certain hardness, which intrigues us more that it repels us.
Note her curtain calls: how she brusquely throws her supporting actors forward for their applause, disposing of them as if they were infinitely recyclable. Then she comes forward for her own. She sets herself apart. This is not the self-loving star. It’s an essential part of herself. She is at heart la princesse solitaire.
Vouyouklaki does not want us to solve this enigma — and, who knows, she may not want to solve it herself. She arranges her productions accordingly.
By and large these productions are several cuts above those one sees around town. They are elaborate, well-done, highly professional. She assembles excellent actors.
In both Roussos plays she has acquired the sizable talents of Manos Katrakis. Anyone who has seen him in King Lear and Prometheus Bound will recognize him as an actor of absolutely the first rank. Yet she has chosen him and he has accepted her. So we might best look at them together. To say that his back has more real dramatic force than her front is entirely beside the point. Vouyouklaki has that innate sense of theatre to realize that one cannot stack the cards all one way. Their scenes together are a rudimentary drama of the stage — a confrontation between a Great Personality and a Great Actor, in which neither wins but both are enhanced. It is as basic as Aeschylus.
So should it be surprising that Vouyouklaki can make even the music of Theodorakis into a vehicle to launch herself into a role which we have never seen her play before: Aliki, the Heroine of the Polytechnic? Can it matter that when she takes up the flag of liberty she shows herself as a fabulous, heartwarming fraud? And is it not delightfully to the point, that with forty theatres in Athens, each staging its own revolution, that the coup down at the Aliki should be strictly de theatre?
