The House We Inherit

It begins quietly. A door opens onto an empty room, and the air still carries the sound of those who once lived there. You can almost hear the argument before it starts—a familiar one, about inheritance, about memory, about how much of the past can be kept when the future insists on being sold.

When 170 Square Meters (Moonwalk) opens at Melbourne’s National Theatre in early November, that argument will unfold in Greek, with English surtitles glowing softly above the stage. The words belong to Giorgis Tsouris, one of Greece’s most distinctive contemporary playwrights, whose work has filled the Ilyssia-Volanakis Theatre in Athens since 2018. Across six seasons and more than four hundred performances, the play has drawn an estimated seventy-five thousand spectators. It is widely regarded as one of the most successful new Greek works of the past decade—not for its spectacle, but for its intimacy.

The story could happen anywhere. After their father’s death, two sisters return to their childhood home in a provincial Greek town. One wants to sell the house; the other wants to stay. A partner, a pregnancy, and an unexpected visitor shift the balance. The house—one hundred and seventy square metres of it—becomes the measure of love, resentment, and the uneasy inheritance that binds a family together.

In Athens, the play is directed by Giorgos Paloumpis, with dramaturgy by Valia Papakonstantinou, and set and costume design by Konstantina Mardiki and Eleni Papadaki. The cast—Giorgis Tsouris, Elena Mavridou, Christina Kopsini, Antonis Tsiotsiopoulos, and Kostas Kassapis—has remained largely unchanged through its long run. The production is naturalistic yet edged with absurdity, a style that places Tsouris among a new generation of playwrights mapping what one critic called “the emotional geography of today’s Greece.” His dialogue, built from the rhythms of ordinary speech, carries the pulse of modern tragedy: every joke seems one breath away from confession.

The Melbourne staging comes through Creative Drama & Arts in collaboration with the Greek Australian Film Society, two organisations that have long championed Greek-language theatre and film. Directed by Jeremy Artis, who also appears on stage alongside Ioanna Gagani, Yakinthi Makka, Giannis Lyris, and Efrosini Theodosiou, with technical support from Ioanna Kothroula and Katerina Poutachidou, the production draws its strength from precision rather than scale.

Creative Drama & Arts Centre, has spent recent years developing theatre that speaks across generations of the diaspora. Its 2025 production Girls in Crisis—a sharp, satirical ensemble work—sold out before adding extra performances. The company’s work sits between tradition and reinvention: theatre that begins in community but reaches outward.

To stage 170 Square Meters in Studio 2 at the National Theatre is to preserve its original closeness. The small black-box venue, housed within the old St Kilda building, seats fewer than a hundred people. The proximity between actor and audience leaves no room for distance; the house becomes immediate and inhabited. “It’s a play about how families inherit more than property,” Artis says. “They inherit silence, love, and the weight of what’s left unsaid.”

Performing in Greek with English surtitles is not merely practical but essential. For Greek-Australian audiences, the sound of the language—the cadence of argument and affection—is part of the recognition the play invites. For others, the surtitles open a window into its emotional logic. Either way, the language itself becomes a bridge, carrying emotion across borders.

Greek critics have called 170 Square Meters (Moonwalk) “a family ring”—a domestic arena where humour and heartbreak trade blows. The Melbourne production sustains that tension but refracts it through the lens of migration. For audiences in Australia, the story of a family returning to a house filled with ghosts resonates with the wider condition of the diaspora: how we carry places within us, how memory clings to walls even after the furniture is gone.

What the audience will see is simple—a single set, five people, and a conversation that cannot be finished. But within those narrow boundaries, the play expands. Its silences are its pulse: the pauses where the characters search for words that no longer exist. When the lights fade and the door closes again, the room will seem smaller, yet fuller—a house remade in another country, still echoing with everything that refuses to leave.

Details:

• 170 Square Meters (Moonwalk) by Giorgis Tsouris, directed by Jeremy Artis.
• Presented by Creative Drama & Arts in collaboration with the Greek Australian Film Society.
• 7–9 November 2025 (Friday 7 November, 7:30 PM, Saturday 8 November, 7:30 PMSunday 9 November, 5:00 PM
• Venue: Studio 2, The National Theatre Melbourne, 20 Carlisle Street, St Kilda
• Tickets: Book online here
• Info: Call 0424 432 373