Salonika

poster design for a production of Louise Page's play
at the South London Theatre

ink drawing & computer-set type, 1993

Louise Page's play Salonika is about an English woman and her adult daughter who travel to Greece to visit the father's war grave. The two Britishers abroad are out of their depth, culturally and emotionally. The black comedy is sometimes surreal, with strong sexual undercurrents.

Since the play is set on a beach near Thessaloniki, the lonely Macedonian shore of the Northern Aegean Sea (which has never enjoyed a tourist boom) sprang to mind for the poster design. At night it is a place of dreams, memories and falling stars. The very British cup and saucer is the falling soldier, with the teaspoon as rifle falling from his shoulder. The spilling tea is his blood, his seed, but also the coastline of the three peninsulas of Halkidiki, east of Salonika, around which innumerable wars have been fought over millenia.

During the twentieth century, several places along the North Aegean coasts were places of pilgrimage for comrades and relatives of those who fell in both world wars. The most famous is Gallipoli where thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops died in World War I.

Here I have brought two oft-recurring pictorial elements of my work - the sea and the teacup - together in one design.