PLATO´S REPUBLIC 2017
Plato’s Republic is a contemporary mystery play unfolding across the streets, squares, and spaces of Kallio – a Helsinki district whose population mirrors that of Ancient Athens. In this participatory performance by Reality Research Center, 21 citizens gather over five consecutive days to ask what it means to build a just republic, here and now.
The work reanimates Plato’s Republic not as a philosophical relic but as a living, collective inquiry. Blurring the boundaries between theatre and polis, performance and participation, it reclaims theatre as a civic ritual: a space where the political is not debated but embodied, enacted, and experienced.
At the heart of Plato’s Republic is the assembly – not as metaphor, but as form. The citizens are not an audience but an active body politic, shaping the republic through dialogue, movement, and presence.
The performance unfolds over five acts, each situated in a different space and addressing a fundamental dimension of collective life. It begins at the marketplace — the agora — where participants are invited to reflect on the nature of goodness (Aletheia). From there, the journey moves into the realm of the body (Physis), exploring how we inhabit space together and how physical presence shapes our being-with.
In the third act, Pneuma, the focus shifts toward spirit and resonance — the possibility of sharing something greater than the self through ritual. The fourth act, Logos, turns to thought and language, seeking ways to think together, to give form to the intangible.
Finally, in Politeia, the citizens step into the theatre — reclaiming it as a political space, where imagination meets power and the possibility of the republic is enacted, here and now.
Premiered in August 2017 during the centenary of Finnish independence, Plato’s Republic concludes Reality Research Center’s platonic trilogy – following Plato’s Symposium (New York, 2013), which pursued beauty, and Plato’s Cave (Copenhagen, 2016), which sought truth. Here, the focus turns to the good — not as abstraction, but as shared potential.
As part of the larger body of work Mysteries of Love, the piece responds to contemporary crises — ecological, existential, political — through tangible, embodied, and communal proposals for living and thinking together.
Reality Research Center
Multiple locations, Kallio (Helsinki)
Working group
Maria Oiva, Tuomas Laitinen, Jani-Petteri Olkkonen
