A Voracious Shadow | Mariano Pensotti

One experience, two versions. A mountaineer who lived through an incredible ordeal on a mountain. And an actor who portrayed his story on film. Mariano Pensotti returns to Onassis Stegi for his third staging, offering a narrative charged with intensity and tenderness, unrelenting suspense and biting sarcasm.

Fathers and sons. Ascents and falls. Icebergs, ghosts, the truth and its cinematic retelling, shocking revelations and comic twists, all brought to life by the tour de force duet of Giannis Niarros and Kostas Nikouli, in their first theatrical collaboration.

Following a premiere in Avignon in 2024 and its distinct versions in Austria and Argentina, two actors in Greece now take the stage to speak about, among other things, as Pensotti characteristically puts it, “missing fathers whose children mythologize and present fathers whose children despise. Just as climate change is melting the world’s ice, time seems to undo the myths that families forge around them.”

The experiences that divided us, the shared journeys that united us, our desires and hardships, truth and fiction, all set against a story that ties human lives together with an unbreakable bond. Drawing inspiration from Stendhal, Balzac, and Tolstoy, Pensotti set out to write a play resembling an unattainable novel, a story that contains a palimpsest of other stories, like cracks opening pathways to forgotten lives and unspoken truths. Because the ascent of a mountain and the making of a film ultimately become an existential challenge: to confront height and embrace depth.

In recent times, I found myself obsessed by the increasingly frequent news of climbers who disappeared decades ago and whose bodies are appearing in mountains around the world due to the melting of ice caused by climate change. It is as if nature, violated to the extreme, is returning the dead that for so long it has hidden from us. In the last five years, in places as dissimilar as Switzerland, the Himalayas, Canada, and Argentina, bodies frozen in time became visible as snow and glaciers disappeared.

Climbing a mountain was always much more than a whimsical physical effort of climbing rocks. It was always a metaphor for something else: a change of point of view, a look beyond, an ascent towards the sky, a different link with the challenging side of nature. Inevitably, in recent times, capitalism has made climbing into something very different and also highly metaphorical: a predatory and competitive tourism full of sponsors, where it is common to let the weak die along the way in pursuit of reaching the top.

Petrarca is considered the father of mountaineering. His book “Ascent of Mont Ventoux” narrates his ascent of that mountain in 1336. It is a fascinating book for many reasons, especially relevant to our work for one reason: even though Petrarca presents his expedition as absolutely real, it has been proven that it was fictional, it did not happen beyond the imagination of the Italian writer. And something else, he writes that he climbed the mountain as one person and came down as another.

It is often said that, regardless of the personal implications in his life, Petrarca went up the mountain as a medieval man and came down as a Renaissance man. The future promoter of a humanism that, although rightly questioned in many aspects, would not seem a bad idea to recover for the dark contemporary world.

“A Voracious Shadow” is also a story of fathers and sons. Missing fathers whose children mythologize and present fathers whose children despise. Just as climate change is melting the world’s ice, time seems to undo the myths that families forge around them.

In “A Voracious Shadow,” we see only two people on stage: a real person to whom something extraordinary has happened and an actor who played that person and his story in a movie. Both tell us and represent their experiences, at times interacting with each other, generating an exchange between the original and its reflection.

I have always been fascinated by films that portray the stories of people who are still alive. What happens to those people when they see their fictional portrait? What happens to the actors who play the real person? To what extent are both lives modified? Thinking about how fiction transforms reality is also a way to reflect on how a life is told, how we narrate ourselves.

“A Voracious Shadow” is, precisely, a project that investigates the format of the ‘fictional documentary story,’ something that is presented to the audience as real but whose fictional component is almost total.

-Mariano Pensotti