Stage Adaptation: Kyriaki Mitsou, Renata Sofrona and Romina Spyraki
Director: Kyriaki Mitsou
Kyriaki Mitsou’s shocking slice of verbatim theatre For Three Refrigerators and One Washing Machine explores real-life events that saw thousands of Greek children sold for adoption by American and Dutch parents. The practice reached its apex in the 1950s and ’60s, earning corrupt officials and institutions many millions of dollars. Greek babies met US adoptive requirements perfectly, being white and mostly female.
The facts are extraordinary. Infants were often voluntarily left at “baby hatches”, rotating wooden cylinders installed in church walls where children could be placed anonymously. Some babies were the offspring of sex workers, but mostly their mothers were simply poor and unmarried or the victims of rape and incest. Mitsou’s clever set sees wicker baskets descend from above to represent the locations where children are abandoned.
When supply could not keep up with demand, healthy infants were stolen from their mothers by hospital doctors, declared dead, and then sold. In one location, it was the job of the hospital cook to taxi purloined newborns to the foundling homes from which they were traded. Shady officials scoured rural villages in search of poor families who could be persuaded to give up babies. Many American adoptive parents were coached in the lies necessary to overcome Greek bureaucratic hurdles; “Make sure you’re convincing”, the lawyers instruct.
Drawing on a decade of painstaking academic research by Gonda Van Steen, Mitsou combines documentary-style filmed inserts with live scenes. The dialogue is mostly taken directly (or adapted) from interviews with adoptees and the ageing parents who lost children. Surtitles translate Greek and Dutch into English.
The live onstage scenes are the most convincing. One vignette recreates a discussion between a shady intermediary and a healthcare worker, the urgent demand to “ramp up production” echoing through orphanage corridors. Another between two sex workers explores the mechanics and effects of giving up a child, highlighting the claustrophobic conservatism of a male-dominated society that seemingly turns a blind eye to baby trading. Konstantinos Delidimoudis pens a heart-breaking letter to a stolen sibling in America he will never get to meet. Laura Shipler Chico enacts how one American adoptee learns of her origin at the age of 58, years after her birth mother dies.
The one oddly discordant note in the piece emerges in a comic parody of dumb American parents interacting with a crooked Greek judge. Most babies, though traded as if they were commodities, ended up with loving families.
Nefeli Stamatogiannopoulou’s soft atonal cello and jerky percussion provide a suitably unsettling musical backdrop to unfolding events. The piece is eye-opening and deeply affecting.
Runs until 26 October 2024
