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Children's theater in Greece had no advocacy for a long time and was neglected. Playwrights believed that children's theater did not challenge their skills, actors felt that it did not engage their talents, critics thought that it offered boring or socially naïve entertainment, while the state government was indifferent to its needs. Several Greek playwrights and actors, however, who were influenced by some successful West European explorations into children's theater, contributed to the revitalization of children's theater in Greece. They steered away from naïvete and didacticism and aimed at bridging the world of technology with the world of fantasy. Didacticism did not disappear altogether, but now co-existed with poetry and imagination, stimulating the thought and sensibilities of young audiences. At the same time, children's theater marginalized the presumed seriousness of the adults who escorted the children to the theater.1
The iconic Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis returned to playwriting with Othello Returns (1937) after a break of almost ten years. During this period he had carefully observed developments on directing in Europe and had translated a series of plays for the Royal Theater of Greece. Othello Returns has been characterized as "Pirandellian" for a long time, but the in-depth analysis undertaken here shows that it is the product of Kazantzakis's sui generis, yet conformist, theatricalism. His theatricalism is not a departure from the traditions of Greek drama during the interwar years, but a reaffirmation of a crisis in Greek drama and theater that manifested itself in a downturn in the output of Greek playwrights, followed by an upsurge of creativity, the emergence of a new theater-going public, the rise of the director as a key player, and the impasse of modernism both in terms of playwriting and stage direction.
The ideological and political climate during the Greek Civil War had a negative effect on the staging of Shakespeare's plays in Greece. Between 1946 and 1950, the English dramatist came to be associated with conservatism and escapism. This impression was largely due to the way Shakespeare's plays were performed by the state-funded National Theater of Greece in Athens and to the new repertory policy of private theater companies that favored the production of contemporary Greek plays. This new policy, which was ideologically-inspired, was seen as a sign of cultural progress. The production of Shakespeare's plays during this period declined and so did the culture that supported it.
Several modern Greek dramatists staged plays about the various types of the Greek emigrant experience in the aftermath of the Second World War in which they debated issues of national origin, cultural identity, and assimilation or alienation. One of them, Petros Markaris, dealt with the Greek emigrant experience in West Germany in his play, The Guests. This play dramatizes the difficult living conditions of Greek emigrants who struggled for survival and integration in their host countries. Loula Anagnostaki took a different approach in three of her plays, Antonio, The Victory, and To My Listeners. In these plays she presents Greek emigrants who are political dissidents with serious psychological problems, haunted by their past experiences in Greece and by present difficulties in their host countries. My focus here covers only a fraction of the problematic status of the foreigner and his/her representation in modern Greek drama.
In this paper I investigate the formative and ideological roles that drama competitions have played in Greece since Ambrose Rallis inaugurated a poetry competition in 1851 and assigned its management to the University of Athens. The Rallis Poetry Competition provided the blueprint for similar competitions in Greece with the faculty of the University of Athens playing a leading managerial role in all of these competitions until 1910 when the Averov Drama Competition was established. In this competition the judges evaluated the plays in performance, not just as scripts. Finally, I draw a number of conclusions about the relationship between the art of drama and official ideology.
Initial scholarly research on early Modern Greek drama was largely philological, but also entertained the possibility that these plays had a stage history. Evidence of a stage history for early modern Greek drama came to light in recent years indicating that there was more activity than anyone previously suspected. Evidence for theater performances in early modern Greece is now quite abundant and so are the indirect clues in the texts of the extant plays. The issue of whether each specific extant play was intended for performance or was actually performed has to be addressed for each play separately. That task is beyond the scope of the present essay in which I provide a structured synthesis of much new research that has been reported mainly in Greek over the past 25 years. I also survey all of the extant plays of early modern Greek drama in order to make a case for their performability and stage history.
In this essay I examine the importance of theater in the communities of the Greek diaspora around the Mediterranean and in southeastern Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Greek translations of European plays and original modern Greek plays were both published and produced from Odessa to Vienna and from Constantinople to Alexandria. The onset of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 had an adverse effect on the public performances of Greek plays in the Ottoman Empire for several years, but performances resumed in 1856 with the Hatti-Hümayun (Imperial Edict). Theater at this time was used as a means to raise the consciousness of the Greek diaspora. It was supported by the touring professional companies, local amateur companies, and by intellectuals, teachers, and journalists who translated or adapted foreign plays into Greek but also wrote original plays. The demise of prosperous Greek communities during the twentieth century put an abrupt end to this all this activity.
The eighteenth century was "long" because the maturation of the ideals of the Enlightenment in Greek culture was a slow, protracted process. The quest for innovation led to fundamental ruptures with existing traditions, but, at the same time, it turned to the ancient Greek heritage for inspiration. A number of key methodological issues, including the precise nature of the quest for renewal (especially in drama during the Greek Enlightenment), merit closer inspection. Therefore, in this paper I focus on continuity and discontinuity in modern Greek theater and on the major landmarks in its development during the Greek Enlightenment.
The unusual play and production of Our Grand Circus by Iakovos Kambanellis placed history and myth squarely on the Greek stage of 1973. As a mix of dramatized history and historicized drama, the play offered up a critical mirror-image or answer-in-kind to the proliferating military parades, victory festivals, and historical reenactments sponsored by the regime of 1967–1974. The production won over mass audiences that warmly welcomed Kambanellis's presentation of alternative ways of telling and displaying Greek history. The playwright effectively created a leftist ideological genealogy out of historical vignettes of continuing hardship and persistent lack of freedom which became palpable on stage. Kambanellis and his lead actors used an abundance of comic, popular, and folk ingredients to signal, under the restrictions of censorship, that they understood and dared to show Greek history in a new, critical light from below. Especially after November of 1973, the past of their play often erupted into the present in its opposition to the military regime and the regime's treatment of history.
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