170 Square Metres (Moonwalk)

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Date Reviewed: 07/11/2025

Most non-Greeks associate Greek families with the exuberant chaos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

170 Square Metres (Moonwalk) shatters that stereotype, offering instead a raw, intimate portrait of a family at breaking point. It’s a space where humour and heartbreak coexist, and where love doesn’t always heal.

The stage at Studio 2 of the National Theatre at St Kilda is barely a stage at all. It’s a small, lived-in space, the audience pressed close enough to smell the real coffee served, the cigarettes burning as characters unravel their lives, and the aroma of home-cooked food, some of which is violently scattered when emotions reach their tipping point.

Director Jeremy Artis invites the audience into the home of a fractured family in a small Greek town. When their father dies, two estranged sisters reunite, joined by a partner and a nosy neighbour, as tension simmers into confession, chaos, and violence. The audience, seated on all sides, becomes complicit in every argument, secret, and betrayal. At one point, an elderly audience member walks through the stage to reach the bathroom, collapsing the line between performance and reality. In that moment, we are no longer observers; we are complicit houseguests. This is theatre at its most intimate.

Subtitles projected on a wall make the performance accessible to non-Greek speakers, while the same wall doubles as a cinema screen, playing clips from The X Factor Greece, where Artis’ character, Grigoris, once appeared. These multimedia layers mirror the play’s themes of illusion, performance, and the desperate need for validation; within families and within ourselves.

Stylistically, the work evokes the emotional intensity of Tennessee Williams. The characters are fragile yet fierce, their interactions oscillating between tenderness and cruelty. Tsouris’ poetic rhythm soon gives way to raw confrontation, culminating in a violent crescendo so close and real it feels like a punch in the chest, leaving the audience breathless.

The ensemble, Ioanna Gagani, Hyacinth Makka, Giannis Lyris, Efrosini Theodisiou, and Jeremy Artis, deliver deeply grounded performances. Their naturalism, coupled with real food, drink, and cigarette smoke curling through the air, makes the experience immersive and immediate.

Written by Cypriot-Greek playwright Giorgis Tsouris, this award-winning play has been hailed as one of the most successful works of modern Greek theatre in the past decade. The Melbourne production by Creative Drama & Arts (CD&A), performed over three sold-out nights, gave Australian audiences a rare opportunity to experience a contemporary Greek playwright of international calibre, proof that Greek theatre is evolving well beyond the ancient tragedies for which it’s best known.

This production is more than theatre; it’s an act of cultural continuity. For Greek Australians, it reconnects language and identity through a living art form. For non-Greek audiences, it offers an authentic, unvarnished look at modern Greek life, far from, revealing instead a family held together by love, resentment, and fragile hope.

Foreign-language theatre in Australia remains vital. It challenges audiences to listen differently, to feel beyond words, and to connect through shared humanity. Productions like the ones performed by CD&A, founded by Katerina Poutachidou in 2014, remind us that cultural diversity on stage doesn’t divide, it deepens.

In the end, 170 Square Metres (Moonwalk) leaves you shaken but grateful for its honesty, for its courage, and for the rare chance to witness a slice of Greek life so vivid and truthful, you forget where the stage ends and life begins.

Highlights

• A powerful and professional performance using the Greek language
  
• The perfectly orchestrated fight scene that is so real, that for a moment we wonder if Jeremy Artis is hurt
  
• The X-Factor cinema screen
  
• Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, performed by Jeremy
  
• The use of real food, real cigarettes, real drinks onstage
  
• The intimate venue, made even more intimate through the audience seating almost on the stage.
  

Who it’s for

• Lovers of foreign language performances
  
• Anyone drawn to European realism
  
• Audiences curious about contemporary Greek theatre.
  

 Reviewed by Mary Sinanidis