AEF2025: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella

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.

Fresh from winning the Silver Lion at this year’s Venice Biennale, Brazilian theatre powerhouse Carolina Bianchi lands in Athens with a performance that’s equal parts poetic, political and a punch to the gut.

The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella is the first instalment in Bianchi’s Cadela Força trilogy — a raw, genre-defying piece that begins with the tragic true story of Italian artist Pippa Bacca, who set out hitchhiking to Beirut in a wedding dress to spread a message of peace, only to be murdered en route. The second half draws on Brazilian slang for a date rape drug, diving into questions of memory, consent, and the blurred space between survival and forgetting.

One of the festival’s most talked-about performances. Not for the faint-hearted — but essential for anyone drawn to bold, boundary-pushing theatre.