“The man who passed or it interests me Roula”

…a performance entirely dedicated to the brain.

The play “The man who passed or it interests me Roula” by the Babushka theater group and directed by Reveka Tsiligkaridou, returns to KET for a third run of performances.

The play revolves around Alzheimer’s disease and progressive memory loss, as experienced within a family, through the story of a father who is ill. The disease is not merely the subject of the play, but seems to take on a stage presence, becoming a figure that constantly alters memory, speech, and relationships.

In the face of this gradual loss, the performance serves as an act of resistance against oblivion: through fragments of memory, narratives, and scenes that oscillate between the tragic and the tender, moments from the father’s life are reconstructed—moments that are joyful, intense, everyday, or even tragic.

Little by little, through this collaborative process of staging and writing, the story of a “family like any other”—yet at the same time unique—comes to light: the story of a family in Thessaloniki in the 1980s, and at the same time a portrait of memory that, even when lost, continues to exist through others.

The performance constantly balances between bitterness and tenderness, humor and emotion, transforming a deeply personal story into a shared experience of memory.

Note from the group

“Memory. The loss of memory. The role of memory in human identity, in the human soul. This is at the heart of the performance we are putting on. We explore the human being who withdraws from his memory. We record it, analyze it, dive into it with guides that are scientific, emotional, poetic, surprisingly humorous. Memory. A core of existence with multiple interpretive perspectives and implications. Who am I? The observer? The narrator? The scientist? The attendant? Who is the person who has accompanied me and is accompanying me? A chorus of narrators investigates, questions, testifies, tries to put words to their experience and observations. The person steps into roles and returns to the now and the before to continue. The aim of the performance is to question the joints of memory. To discover what it means: ‘Everything was going well until…’. What “well” means. At what point exactly “well” changed. What does “until…” mean. We focus on the small things to ask about the big things. We make conscious the fact of everyday life. We experience what memory is, what its “lack” is. We awaken to the lack. In the “something is wrong”. Is it memory that makes us who we are? Are we without it? And what? The stakes of the performance are freedom on stage: to give space to the aspects of the accidental in order to have the event, the one that will bring up a memory deeper in us and in the audience. The event will bring the deep memory. That is what we will try to do.”

— Babushka Group

*The performance is in the greek language.