Mother Tongue

An English-language stage beside Athens town hall

Theatre of the NO opened in April 2024 at Konstantinou Palaiologou 3, opposite Athens city hall, billing itself as the first English-speaking theatre in the city. Its opening production was Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It runs as a nonprofit under managing and artistic director Dionissis Potsolakis, programmes absurdist, classical and contemporary work in English with Greek surtitles, supports artists through collaborations and residencies, and fills the rest of its calendar with more than a hundred music nights a year across jazz, blues, world and Greek traditional music. The room is small, and the venue makes a point of the short distance between performer and audience — something that matters to Mother Tongue more than to most of what plays there.

Into that room, on Friday 5 December 2025, came Georgia Tsangaraki with a solo piece she had written, directed and performs herself. The route to it was long. She left the Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece with honours in 1994, spent 1995 on a postgraduate course at Arts Educational Schools in London, and has worked as an actor since 1996 both at the National Theatre of Greece and across the independent scene, in ancient tragedy and in newer writing, with film and television alongside. In 2024 she added a postgraduate degree in dramatherapy from the Herma Institute of Play Therapy and Dramatherapy — training that sits close to the surface of the show she then made.

Skyler Doukas, and the years it took to hear her

The figure at the centre is Skyler Doukas, a middle-aged Greek stand-up comedian who has built a life and a career in London and comes back to Greece after years away. What she returns to is less a homecoming than an inventory: a difficult mother, a father she has lost and remembers with tenderness, and the man her mother married, who abused her. The piece moves her through that material and out the other side, towards forgiveness and a re-drawing of who she is.

Speaking to news247 in an interview published on 8 December 2025, Tsangaraki said the text had been written over many years and had passed through several different forms before settling as a monologue. She described the character arriving uninvited — the story of Skyler Doukas, as she put it, inhabited her without her realising it, until the voice grew strong enough that she had to finish it and then expose it. She frames the subject not as autobiography but as belonging to any real woman who lived through sexual abuse and managed to rebuild a life. The structure, by her own account, alternates narrative speech, stand-up sections and experiential flashback episodes that put the audience inside the protagonist's world rather than at a lecture about it.

The organising device is bilingualism. Skyler moves between Greek and English, and the switch carries weight rather than colour: the mother tongue holds the childhood memory and the wound, the acquired language supplies distance and the nerve to speak. Both runs have been surtitled in Greek and English so that nobody falls out of the piece when the language changes under them. Tsangaraki has called the result a stand-up dramedy; the production describes itself as a hybrid of stand-up comedy, spoken word, storytelling and animation.

The directing and teaching behind the solo

Mother Tongue is the latest entry on a directing list that has been building steadily. Recent credits include In Between_A Dithyramb at Bios in Athens in 2022, Las Bacantes Flamencas at the Thalia Theatre in New York in 2019, The Light of Apollo at Kalesma on Mykonos and ONEIRO at The Farm, both in 2023, Hotel Nemesis at Polis in February 2024, The Cursed Circus in Buzau, Romania in 2024, and The Shadow Self and Eumenides in Patras in December 2024. An adaptation of Novecento, staged as Lemon, has been running since 2018. At the Comic 7B International Festival de Teatru in Buzau she took Best Direction and Best Play, in 2019 and again in 2022.

She also writes beyond this one show: the comedies The Magic Island and Hotel Nemesis, the devised piece The Cursed Circus, The Field, and two co-written works with Angelita Tsougou, Paperback Romance and Mary End John.

The teaching sits alongside the making. Since 2014 Tsangaraki has taught at universities and drama schools internationally, building workshops around a methodology she calls The Spiral Effect, which puts ensemble work and self-awareness through theatre at the centre. Recent attachments include twelve years with One Year Lease Company across India, Japan and Greece, plus Carnegie Mellon University, Vassar College, Pace University and SITI Company in New York. That background explains a good deal about how the monologue is built — it is a piece that keeps a firm hand on the actor's exposure rather than letting it run.

Where the work stands now

The first run opened on 5 December 2025 and played every Friday and Saturday at 20:30 until 14 February 2026, at €15 a ticket. It was reviewed during that run, not just previewed, and the notices were warm: in a review published on 18 January 2026, Rita Boutsi called the performance radically present and absolutely controlled, and the production essential, courageous and deeply human, singling out the way humour works as a counterweight to fragility so that the emotion arrives without coercion.

The revival opens on Monday 9 November 2026 and plays every Monday and Tuesday at 21:00 for a limited run of ten performances, again with Greek and English surtitles. Tickets are €15, €12 for students, the unemployed and people with disabilities, and €10 for actors and drama school students, with a €1.50 per-ticket online service fee; Ticketmaster Greece is the only official seller for this run. The Monday-and-Tuesday slot is the awkward end of the Athens week, which is a fair indication of how the venue shares its calendar between theatre and music rather than of the show's standing.

The hour in the room

Mother Tongue runs 60 minutes. Nothing opens for it, and nobody else appears live: Tsangaraki holds the stage alone, with recorded voices from Themis Panou, Isabella Louiza Kyriazi and Eva Germanidi filling in the people Skyler is talking about and talking to. Victoria Kokkiza is assistant director and supervises costume; Haris Germanidis designed and built the set; Zina Papadopoulou is responsible for design and animation; Maria Athanasopoulou lit it; Stefanos Giakoumakis composed the music and built the soundscape.

The animation is what distinguishes the staging from a straight solo show. It carries the flashback passages, so the childhood material can be looked at rather than described, while the stand-up sections keep the performer in the present tense and in direct contact with the audience. The lighting design is aggressive enough that the production carries a warning for intense flashing lights, and the show is recommended for ages 16 and over on account of the subject matter.