AEF2025: Comemadre

The Athens Epidaurus Festival celebrates its 70th edition in 2025, with 95 days of artistic brilliance featuring over 3,000 artists from 14 countries. From iconic venues in Athens like the Herodeion, Pireos 260, and the revived City of Athens Lycabettus Theatre, to the grand finale in Epidaurus, the festival brings the world’s top performances to Greece’s stages.

This year’s programme includes world premieres, new commissions, and exciting artistic strands such as Contemporary Ancients, which reimagines Greek tragedy, and Fierce Women in Performance, exploring gender and power. The GRAPE – Greek Agora of Performance platform highlights emerging Greek talent, while the Subset Festival brings experimental sounds to the stage. Cycles Roots revisits folk traditions with a fresh twist.

Check out our curated picks from this year's programme here.

Welcome to the sanatorium. It’s 1907, just outside Buenos Aires, and a team of scientists is about to push the limits of science, ethics, and sanity. Based on Roque Larraquy’s cult novel, Comemadre unfolds like a surreal fever dream: medical horror, pitch-black satire, and theatrical dissection of toxic masculinity.

With sharp humour and a distinct sense of the grotesque, this stage adaptation explores a world ruled entirely by men, where authority, ego, and absurd ambition spiral out of control. Sounds familiar? In a world where everything is clinical but nothing is under control, Comemadre peels back the skin of science and self-delusion to ask: what’s left when all meaning is gone?