Past appearance
7 November 2024
Municipal Theatre of Piraeus
Omega Scene
Athens, Greece
Premiere
Project Description
‘CYANKALI’, written in 1929 by the German playwright and physician Friedrich Wolf, is presented to Greek audiences for the first time.
The play was a response to the infamous paragraph 218 of the German Penal Code, which made abortion illegal and punishable by up to five years in prison. The term ‘Cyankali’ corresponds to ‘potassium cyanide’, a dangerously toxic substance used to induce abortion.
The performance attempts an imaginative ‘conversation’ between Friedrich Wolf’s original German play and new dramatic material that emerges from original research in western countries where women’s reproductive freedom is being violated and abortion is once again illegal.
‘CYANKALI’’s production today highlights not only the questioning of the institutionalized right to abortion in countries such as Poland, Ireland, the USA, etc., but also the attempted regression in the entire Western world, which is linked to the stigmatization and incrimination of women who claim the right to decide over their bodies.
