This short essay on Greek-Albanian director and actor Mario Banushi (b. 1998) was written in 2023, commissioned by the National Theatre of Greece. Banushi was at the time concluding his first trilogy of works, comprising of Ragada, Goodbye, Lindita, and Taverna Miresia - Mario, Bella, Anastasia. These three physical theatre plays, created between 2022-2023, were characteristically small productions (“home-made” almost: the first one having been put together in a flat, with Banushi doubling up as performer and host). They were performed almost in silence, each one confined in a small domestic space: a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom. They focused on the family, on rituals of belonging and, most importantly, on loss and mourning. They also, in a very oblique yet no less assured way, addressed issues of Balkan, Greek-Albanian, and queer identity. The audience’s reaction to this trilogy, first in Greece, and then in numerous festivals around the world, has been phenomenal since 2023. Banushi’s performances started touring big capitals to enthusiastic reviews and even more enthusiastic social media responses, making him, almost overnight, the fastest rising talent of European theatre and performance. 

His new and bigger production, MAMI, was hailed as one of the most eagerly anticipated shows in the 2025 Avignon Theatre Festival, and its premiere in July 2025 has cemented Banushi’s central position on the world stage. 

Written with Goodbye, Lindita as its main example, the following essay presents the main devices and thematic preoccupations that keep shaping Banushi’s work, providing an early analysis of his distinct voice and viewpoint.

^{Still from Taverna Miresia - Mario, Bella, Anastasia (2023)}

 

IN THE WORLD OF MARIO BANUSHI

In the world of Mario Banushi, you've seen everything before - and this is a memory that you know is shared. The well-made bed, the posture of an older person's body in the chair with a hand on the table, the mother you find sitting in the dim light, almost in the dark, the embroidered tablecloth, the television playing on a low volume for hours, the piles of folded laundry, the sweat. You also know the silence - you hear it so often in homes where we have learned to build our family intimacy – this silence that is slow, viscous, full of memory, that contains everything that is not said and yet feels as if it has been said; the silence that does not cancel speech but is saturated with it, the silence that is a suitcase, a trunk, an archive, a repository of feelings. And somewhere there you realise that all these things are so familiar but also so numerous, so accumulated, so bound together, but also ready to burst out, that they end up strange and unfamiliar.

Because in the world of Mario Banushi, in that world where everything starts from house and home and everything seems so familiar, the unfamiliar also exists as something fundamental, adhesive and integral. Cupboards suddenly open to let out dreams, fears, fantasies, creatures of the mind and creatures of suffering. You never know who or what might pop out of a refrigerator. Which memory will emerge, which first image, when a door suddenly opens, which ghost will appear from under a bed, which trauma will appear from a body that is stripped bare, from a neon light that snaps on, from a wall that splits in two, from a bathtub that overflows with water out of nowhere, from a small movement that is repeated and flows from one scene to the other. We live with dreams; we live with dreams; we live with dreams. And the crafts of the quotidian, our small everyday movements, are but what survives of them, every movement being thus a little anchor capable of dragging endless nets of memory, trauma, fantasy. As you move through them, trying to craft a story, you realise you are the one being crafted. 

I can imagine nothing more realistic than the scenes Banushi puts together in these physical performances. And here's why: in this unfurling world that surrounds us in his theatre, it is foolish to talk about realistic, allegorical or imaginary elements. You gradually realise that everything you see on stage is realism in the sense that it is part of an existential reality, so solidly built and generously shared, so coherent in its honesty. If, indeed, the deepest honesty, the most difficult and most realistic confession, is an account of the self that insists on rethinking, repeating and ultimately sharing the terms of its construction.

There is a simple reason why the Athenian public first felt these domestic spectaculars, this extravaganza in a matchbox, to be so familiar. After years of the (Greek) family being treated, in theatre and cinema, like a bomb ready to explode (remember films like The Matchbox by Giorgos Economides and Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos), here we had a return to the family as refuge, the family-cocoon. Not of course that things were simpler or even less traumatic in this scenario. In the trilogy formed of Ragada, Goodbye, Lindita and Taverna Miresia - Mario, Bella, Anastasia, Banushi invited us into his dollhouses. "Just look at that," he told us. "that's how I survived." "Just look and you will see," he also told us, "the strange process by which home is not a harbour, it is not where you arrive or return to; that home is where it hurts. And where you learn how to heal."

^{Still from Goodbye, Lindita (2023)}

Banushi invited us to follow a child who plays, a child who is afraid, a child who lives with the terror of the mourning that will come and who knows this well, because new mourning comes tangled up with the mourning that already exists. Here is a child who has succeeded, who has survived. In this world, the child has now built a huge set, little by little and with tenacious craftsmanship, handmade finds and performative drills. Through all this crafting, re-enactment becomes representation. It becomes reparation. Pharmakon. In the same way, silence, that most basic element of these performances, becomes a voice, a narrative, a song, the howl that was once not permitted to be heard when it should have been and now demands that its soundless scream finally be recorded. Just as re-enactment becomes remedy, just as it becomes representation, so, in this trilogy, silence becomes parrhesia.

And I make this last point because, while I could reel off just as many more lyrical and theoretical paragraphs inspired by Banushi's theatrical practice and imagery, I find it harder to broach the other major subject of these performances, which is their political stance. Somewhere in the middle of Goodbye, Lindita, for example, Banushi leaves his seat in the audience and gets up on stage - to assist, to care, to help finish this long and silent dirge; but also because these performances are part of his body. He thus gives us space, allows us to participate, to be moved, to identify, to appreciate together the lyrical aspect of this ceremony. In its autobiographical intensity, however, in the increasing prominence of signs that do not smooth things over, the performance also constitutes a dramatic record of survival, resistance and incredible perseverance, as well as an epic, communal story of migration, companionship, hard work, financial difficulty and mute pain.

In the stretch marks, in the curves and stiffness of the bodies, but also in their proud perseverance, in the maternal sounds of kappa, lambda and rho of this capacious Greek-Albanian language, in Banushi's own movements and little touches when he comes on stage, in the cracks in the walls, in the fleeting songs in Albanian, in the surface of simple objects - see how a vacuum cleaner, a table, a bunch of flowers now shine... - you can hear another story, one to do with social class, migration, ethnicity and inter-ethnicity, a story that is also sexually non-normative and temporally eccentric. Together with Lindita, the mother, stepmother, brides and fairies that populate Banushi’s spaces, centre stage is also taken by the working class, Albanian migration, oblique desire and queer time - that irregular timeline that so easily confuses past, present and future, precisely because its subjects have not been entered into the official record and the long linearity of "big" History.

^{Still from Goodbye, Lindita (2023)}

This is a trilogy not just of mourning, memory and remembrance. It is also about ethnic, gender, kin and racial identity and is, in this too, generous. It takes what could be the result of exclusion, racism, oppression and marginalisation experienced by Albanians in Greece. It absorbs it, and offers it back as an ethical gesture - especially if you take into account that these performances were first created for audiences in Greece. Once you’ve seen the whole play, think back to the first scenes of Goodbye, Lindita. Silence is not (any longer) a denunciation for all those people who were condemned for so many decades to speak in hushed tones; it becomes. instead, the space that invites us to speak together, to recognise one another as (unfamiliarly) familiar. The snatches of songs and the few phrases in Albanian do not expose (or at least do not only expose) the banning, essentially, of a language and a culture from the Greek public sphere for thirty-odd years. They are, instead, shared like fragments of poetry, inviting you to reassemble them as a language of memory and coexistence. They become a pharmakon, employed so that, at least for a little while, one does not feel the wound, the walls of nationalism and racism that were once built to marginalise and exclude these scenes. Long­ standing migrant exclusion, oppression and racism are deconstructed by the parrhesia of these bodies who insist on not reminding of how little they were respected; but on showing how much they, themselves, can pay respect. And the loneliness of the boy is not (any longer merely) the result of bullying, discrimination, fear, patriarchy; it has been transformed into a courageous grammar of survival, into a complete, magical and now utterly communal, shared, world.

 

* Phrases in italics come from the song "Home is where it hurts" by Camille (in the third paragraph) and from the poem "Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander, Poet in Commagene, 595 A.D.“ by C.P. Cavafy (in the last paragraph).

** This essay was commissioned by the National Theatre of Greece and published in the programme notes of Mario Banushi’s Goodbye, Lindita (2023 onwards). Original version in Greek; this English translation by Paul Edwards was revised by Dimitris Papanikolaou.

 

^{Still from Ragada (2022)}