Angelique Rockas quotes
I myself have experienced the volcanic existential depths of the Greek language. It was during a performance of Medea by Tzeni Karezi at the Herod Atticus theatre in Athens, when she was pleading to the callous Jason to take pity on her and she used the word ' splachniasou'. 'Pity' is too weak a word to describe the emotional and psychological depths ' splachniasou' expresses. 'Splachna 'is the part of the body where a woman carries her unborn children, the very root of ontological existence. How deep can you get!
Angelique Rockas
...this is not the only time that I have stuck out my neck for a Greek film director. With Nikos Nikolaides I introduced him to Mr Constantini as well, and undertook to send his XXX-rated movie "Singapore Sling" to two of the top film agents in the UK, Jenny Cassarotto and PDF who have now changed their name on account of a merger. Ms Cassarotto was indulgent, but the other agent was so shocked that he treated me as if I was peddling porn. The things I've done for Greece!
Angelique Rockas
Many of the Greek journalists and TV presenters also seem to share this "progressive intellectualism" which leads Greeks to having to apologize for being Orthodox- What a load of rubbish! Prof Yiannaras with whom I have corresponded then continues with the frightening story about 'the predicted and inevitable and desirable Latinization of our Greek alphabet" quoted by an anonymous source in a periodical Samizdat. Let's get this straight both Greece as well as the Balkan countries that have Kyrilic alphabets should fiercely resist Latinization.
Angelique Rockas
I arrived at as an undergraduate with two driving passions: a consuming interest for a politics of justice grounded in a Christian theology and acting, as a ‘revelation of the treasures of the human soul' not as a form of exhibitionism. My search for justice grew out of the pain I experienced when I saw the ridicule my malformed brother elicited. I became aware of the evil that is prejudice, a form of injustice. My urge to redress this prejudice took a more social dimension during my years as a boarder at St Dominic's Convent, where the great Barbara Hogan matriculated a year later than me though I only got acquainted with her at Wits.
Angelique Rockas
At the end of my course I realized there was no place for me in South Africa because I found it difficult to function in a society that considered 75% of population inferior, that my community frowned on me as an actress, and my beliefs for a non-racial society now incorporated a fight for the equality for women an anathema to my conservative Greek community. I did not want to spend my life apologizing for who I was.
Angelique Rockas
Voulagris asked me to find film funding for what was to be the last but unfinished film project of Elia Kazan, a personal friend of Voulgaris. The subject of the film was the immigration of the Kazan family from the beleaguered Greek minority communities under Turkish rule in Asia Minor to the safe haven of the USA where the Kazan family settled. I arranged a meeting between Elia Kazan and the London based film financier Frixos Constantini of Poseidon Films at the Grand Bretagne Hotel in Athens. What followed from this meeting is that Mr Constantini put Elia Kazan in touch with Martin Scorsese a personal friend of Mr Constantini and who also runs the production company Cappa films. And so it was that these two giants of US cinema met for the first time.
Angelique Rockas
Our first play in 1981 was Jean Genet's The Balcony, a prophetic choice, set in Paris in turmoil, just as London was being torched during the Brixton riots, an explosion of racial tensions that had been simmering for some time. I insisted on casting a Caribbean actress to play the lead, Irma the Madam of the Brothel.
Angelique Rockas
The ground breaking production of the company, and the point at which the cross-cultural casting began to bite, was Brecht's anti-war play Mother Courage. Just one comment in a review by critic Malcolm Hay jolted us into the realisation that we were making history: Why is an Indian actor playing the Pastor?
Angelique Rockas
Apart from the greatness of Bizos for his role in the dismantling of apartheid, defending Mandela etc, he also manifested a genius in his role as a leading member of the conservative South African Greek community, by drawing historical parallels between the 400 years of slavery that Greece had suffered under the Ottoman Turks and the 300 years or so of repression and cruelty suffered by the Southern African black tribes and mixed race people under the British and then under the Nationalist Afrikaner rule. By using this strategy Bizos was able to balance his fight for justice in South Africa, and synchronously lead the very conservative Greek community in a more progressive direction.
Angelique Rockas
The reason the Internationalist Theatre productions demanded attention was that the directors who had already worked at top theatres like the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company had agreed to take the risk of directing classical plays with multi-racial casts, that the performance was of a very good standard, and furthermore that many prominent members of the arts establishment, Lindsay Anderson, Cameron MacKintosh, John Barton, Richard Eyre, the great casting director Mary Selway, Stephen Berkoff, Nicolas Roeg, came to see performances by Internationalsit Theatre.
Angelique Rockas
The breaking of casting cliches also broke boundaries. A short, Latin-looking actress like me playing classical roles such as Miss Julie, and playing them well, made casting directors uncomfortable. It was unheard of that a short, dark-haired actress of Greek temperament could play the aristocratic Miss Julie. Not beautiful or tall enough etc. It proved one of the best productions of Miss Julie ever seen in London.
Angelique Rockas
