The Story of Ali Retzo: Brechtian Theater in Greece under the Military Dictatorship

Brecht’s epic theater offers a valuable platform for examining the intense political drama that unfolded in Greece of the late 1950s through mid-1970s. Petros Markaris launched Brecht’s reception with the comprehensive approach of “rewriting” the German author. In 1971, the Free Theater staged The Story of Ali Retzo, a 1965 play that Markaris had composed in the Brechtian vein with poetic overtones. The production became a collective effort to subject the military regime of 1967 to the probing lens of dialectic theater. Set in a mid-twentieth-century Turkish village, The Story of Ali Retzo captured a postmodernist ethos of ambivalence, which questioned oppressive power structures and social inequities. Markaris used the “distant” setting to investigate the problems posed by capitalism, mechanization, and exploitative means of production. The Free Theater’s show became a tremendous success for expressing the frustration of unreconciled audiences and of an “unruly” youth movement. Also, it laid out a model for a new, radical understanding of theater as process. The Story of Ali Retzo is remembered to this day as a definitive Brechtian moment in Greek theater under the dictatorship. It marked a sociocultural as well as a theatrical breakthrough, if not a (modest) revolution.