AEF2026: Lina Majdalanie – Rabih Mroue: Four Walls and a Roof

This summer, Athens Epidaurus Festival's main city venue, the former industrial complex in Pireos 260, celebrates 20 years as one of the city’s most vital cultural meeting points. Under the artistic direction of Michail Marmarinos, this year’s landmark programme unfolds across two months of theatre, dance, music, performance, and multidisciplinary works, bringing together more than 50 events by acclaimed international artists alongside some of the most exciting voices from Greece’s contemporary scene. Pireos 260 will live through the Athenian summer as a dynamic space where emerging creators, established names, and curious audiences come together to explore what contemporary performance can be today. New collaborations, technology-driven works, and immersive experiences sit alongside bold theatrical productions, live music, and cutting-edge choreography.

Amongst these political and conceptual productions is the return of Lebanese creators Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroue with their work Four Walls and a Roof, presented under the festival's "Voices of the Arab World" strand. The two artists, who were honored in 2026 with the prestigious Theaterpreis Berlin for their outstanding contribution to contemporary theatre, are internationally renowned for their hybrid lecture-performances. Drawing from their own personal experience of exile after moving from Beirut to Berlin a decade ago, and set against the global rise of the far-right, the piece directly confronts the realities of living and working in exile. It questions the true extent of free speech in Western societies when faced with censorship and state propaganda.

The performance cleverly mirrors modern speech-control mechanisms by connecting contemporary experiences of censorship with an iconic historical document: the 1947 interrogation of Bertolt Brecht by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the United States. Utilizing the absurd list of questions the German playwright was forced to answer, the creators develop a deep, timely reflection on political persecution. Featuring original musical compositions by Hanns Eisler based on Brecht's texts, the production masterfully combines critical humor with pressing questions about an artist's responsibility toward history.