Nina Rapi


Nina Rapi is a Greek award-winning playwright and short story writer. She has lived in London for many years but has recently returned to Greece and now lives in Athens.

Style and themes

Rapi's writing focuses on power, desire and freedom. In an interview with The Scavenger she described her core themes in her latest trilogy of plays as being surveillance, censorship and power on the one hand, with intimacy, resistance and freedom on the other. In a more recent interview with Samuele Grassi, and regarding her aesthetic approach, she says: 'The place from which I write is very intimate and personal but the situations/dynamics, characters and stories I create are fictional and often intellectually worked out writes of 'Rapi's use of a multi-layered structure...focusing on freedom and/or desire as freedom.'

Plays

Nina Rapi's first play Ithaka was initially performed as a staged reading in 1989 at Riverside Studios by the Women's Theatre Workshop. Dimple Godiwala referring to Shadow,one of the key characters in the play, wrote: 'Shadow is where we begin to recognise the depths of sexuality we all possess...To invite an introspection which rests on the shadowed self we need to recognise that our sexualities, however they may have been moulded, are based on a certain opacity of self.' The play went on to get published in Seven Plays by Women, Aurora Metro, winner of the Raymond Williams award,1991; and to win Best Play Award at BITS Theatre Festival, Pirani, India, 1995.
Dreamhouse & Dance of Guns followed, both performed at Oval House Theatre at 1991 and 1992 respectively.
Lovers was performed, in its short version, at Gielgud Theatre, part of West End Shorts, London New Play Festival 2002.
Edgewise had a performed presentation at Gate Theatre in 2013.
In 2010, Rapi's play Kiss the Shadow had a performed presentation at Soho Theatre Studio. In the same year, extracts were performed at the Lyric Theatre Studio; and Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival. Also in 2010, her play Edgewise/Ακροβασία was presented at the National Theatre of Greece, Festival Analogion.
She has since written Άγριες Νότες/Wild Beats produced at Aggelon Vima, Athens, Greece 2014 & 2015. It was published by Sokolis publishers. Her play Angelstate had a performed presentation at Theatro Technis, Athens, Greece, Festival Analogion 2015. Angelstate was also included in the Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Greek Plays, published in 2017. The same year, her play Splinters was performed at theatro Argo in Athens. In 2018, it was also produced at Theatre T in Thessaloniki & at Simpkins Lee Theatre, University of Oxford. It was published by Sokolis Publishers, Athens, Greece Also in 2018, her play Α/βεβαιότητες had a performed presentation at dithepi, Municipal Theatre of Piraeus. And her libretto Raven revisited an opera by the composer Kostis Kritsotakis was performed at Theatro Voyiatzis, Athens
Nina Rapi's play Angelstate was published in three languages in Spring 2019: in Greek as a single edition, by Sokolis publishers; in Slovakian in the anthology Grecka Drama by Divadelny Ustav, Bratislava; in Italian in the anthology Viaggio Nel Teatro greco contemporaneo by ETPbooks.

Short stories

Full-length plays