“Life is merciless. It’s much more vicious than we think”. So says Dimitris Dimitriadis, the internationally lauded author and thinker from Thessaloniki who wrote the landmark text Dying like a country. And it is the merciless quality of life, and the mercilessness of love, that occupies the playwright in this masterful work whose twists, reverses and repetitions are to play out on the stage. This erotic equation of passion and despair was staged by the talented young director, Dimitris Karantzas, and a select cast, in a production of the Onassis Cultural Centre – Athens, Greece. It was presented at the 68e Avignon Festival, with the support of the Onassis Cultural Centre – Athens. It is the first time that a Greek director is invited at the Avignon Festival. The innovative 26 year-old Dimitris Karantzas, treats the play as an eternal song of expectation and disappointment, maintaining the relationship between narrative, movement and sound. The Circle, which the playwright dedicates “to those that live”, is an erotic equation of passion and despair which presents eleven people of different genders, generations and sexual preferences but an irresistible shared need: to be loved. But as one of the characters, Mauve, says: “We always want something that doesn’t exist. We’re never satisfied with what does. That’s our mistake, but there’s no avoiding it. It’s in our nature. We’re throwing our lives away like this, but there’s no other way to make them ours”. Which is how Dimitriadis expresses the inevitability of our existence as he pushes his heroes to the very edge, having them set themselves ablaze and kill one another only to resurrect them a little later with a single, shared hope: that maybe this time they will find love.