Verdict: Sublime! I don’t want Banushi to explain the dream. I want to surrender to it.
Kate Gaul
5 Stars
Venue: Church Hill Theatre
Edinburgh Fringe Festival
2026
I first came across Mario Banushi’s work from Greece and, two years ago, finally caught Goodbye, Lindita at Adelaide Festival. It was one of those theatrical encounters that stays somewhere in the body. Now, at the Edinburgh International Festival, I have finally seen Taverna Miresia – Mario, Bella, Anastasia and I am reminded again just how extraordinary Banushi’s particular theatrical language is.
Sublime is the word I keep coming back to.
Banushi is a Greek Albanian actor, director and theatre-maker, born in Albania and raised in Greece. His work sits between theatre, installation, cinema, ritual and dream. His Romance Familiare trilogy: Ragada, Goodbye, Lindita and Taverna Miresia draw on family memory, displacement, death and mourning. But to call these works autobiographical grief theatre is to miss what makes them so powerful.
There are stories here. Of course there are.
In Taverna Miresia, Banushi’s father has died. The family gathers around the absence he has left behind. The title comes from the neon sign from his father’s restaurant in Tirana. Miresia, meaning kindness in Albanian. Mario himself performs alongside Katerina Kristo, Rita Lytou, Eftychia Stefanou and the extraordinary Greek singer Savina Yannatou.
The narrative is a doorway.
What Banushi does is create theatre that seems to bypass the rational part of the brain and tap directly into the unconscious. You can spend the evening trying to work out who is who, what has happened, what a particular gesture means, why a body is behaving in a particular way, what the mud, the food, the bathroom, the grave, the restaurant sign or the sudden transformation of a domestic space might signify.
Then you have stop trying to solve it. You are dreaming.
That is what I found compelling about Goodbye, Lindita and now Taverna Miresia. The works are wordless, but they are not silent. They are dense with sound, bodies, objects, light, music, ritual and repetition. A room can become a memory. A domestic gesture becomes a ceremony. A dead person can remain violently present through an empty chair, a coat, a bed, a sign.
In Goodbye, Lindita, the family mourns the death of Banushi’s stepmother, following closely on the death of his father. Banushi was recently awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, where the jury recognised his rigorously visual, non-verbal theatrical language and its ability to move between intimacy and myth, memory and family.
We don’t make much work like this in Australia. Or perhaps, more accurately, we don’t often give artists the conditions to make work like this. A seventy- or eighty-minute, wordless, deeply personal, visually obsessive piece that asks an audience to surrender rather than follow a plot is a difficult proposition for our funding and producing ecology. Who would support it? Who would take the risk? Who would commission it? Who would market it without reducing it to “a haunting meditation on grief”?
Banushi’s own explanation of the work is refreshingly uncomplicated: childhood memories influence us whether we are artists or accountants; the void, he says, does not necessarily need to be filled it can be allowed to exist alongside silence and embarrassment. That idea of the void feels fundamental to Taverna Miresia.
The father is absent.The absence becomes the architecture.
The family doesn’t inhabit grief – beautifully, grotesquely, absurdly. There is food, bodily mess, mud, nakedness, ritual, tenderness and something approaching the animalistic. The work moves between the mundane and the mythic without warning.
Banushi’s work reminds me that theatre can operate like a dream. Dreams don’t require exposition. They don’t need to explain why the dead suddenly appear, why a familiar room becomes somewhere else, why an ordinary object carries an impossible emotional weight. We recognise the logic even when we cannot articulate it.
That is an extraordinary theatrical gift.
And there is a lineage here – Greek tragedy, Balkan mourning rituals, folk traditions, contemporary European visual theatre, cinema, installation and the physical vocabularies of the body. It feels like an artist trying to find a form for something that cannot otherwise be said. I don’t have an Albanian father who owned a taverna in Tirana. I don’t share Banushi’s family history, his rituals or his cultural memory. But I recognise the strange domestic choreography of grief. I recognise the way families continue to eat, wash, sleep, argue and sit together while someone enormous has disappeared from the world.
I recognise the void.
And I think that is why these works get under the skin.
Visual, wordless theatre is an extraordinary thing.
It asks us to do something increasingly rare in contemporary theatre: stop being told what to think and allow ourselves to feel our way through an experience.
I left Taverna Miresia thinking not about what I had understood, but about what had somehow happened to me. That is theatre doing something remarkable.
Kate Gaul, Theatre Now
