Metatheatrika, 1985-95 (review)

Patsalidis presents, in one volume, 31 essays previously published in twelve separate journals between 1985 and 1995. Metatheater 1985–1995 is divided into two parts. The first consists of eleven essays that mainly discuss stage revivals of classical Greek tragedy; the second has three sections: (1) fourteen brief reviews of theater productions in Athens, Thessaloniki, and Nicosia, (2) five short commentaries on Peter Brook, Julian Beck, AIDS, postmodernism, and interculturalism, (3) a transcript of his interview with Lee Breuer.

The eleven essays in the first part are uneven in quality and importance. In “Text and Presentation: Aristotle and Artaud in Conflict,” Patsalidis postulates that the 1984 productions of Antigone (National Theater of Greece, directed by Y. Remoundos) and Alceste (State Theater of Northern Greece, directed by Yannis Houvardas) marked yet another turning point in the production of classical Greek tragedy in Greece because they abandoned Aristotelianism.

“The Theatrical Cliché as a Structural and Ideological Construct” explores why everyone condemns clichés but nevertheless repeats them. Patsalidis’s answer is that clichés operate as markers that help the understanding and orientation of spectators, accelerating their “reading” of a performance and facilitating the construction of illusion.

Patsalidis proceeds to discuss the legal and interpretative rights of playwrights and directors in his essay “The Play and its Reversal,” basing his observations on the production of Last Cities, an adaptation of Euripides’s Phoenician Women and Herondas’s Mimiambi directed by Yannis Houvardas (National Theater of Greece, 1986–1987).

His next essay, “Theater, Cinema, and Ideology,” depends on the film theories of Christian Metz and the aesthetic/ideological theories of Walter Benjamin as it explores how ideology, through the mechanical reproduction of art, operates in the theater and the film industry.

Roman Jakobson’s linguistic model of communication and Bert States’s phenomenological model provide the framework for “A Sociosemiotic Approach to Theater.” This essay explains how phonetic writing replaced the oral tradition, changing the poetics of theatrical production in a way that affected the relationships and the experiences of theater artists and theatergoers, especially their conventions of “reading.”

In “Spectator and Spectacle: The Meaning of Dramatic Metaphor,” Patsalidis rewrites his thoughts on the production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest directed by George Mihaïlidis (Open Theater, 1988). He surveys the influence of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence on Nicholas Udall, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe. He does so in conjunction with the ideas of Plato, Horace, Seneca, Augustine, Clemence, Curtius, and Boethius.

The status of theater criticism as an amateur and an academic enterprise is discussed in “Contemporary Theater Criticism in Greece.” Criticism remained largely journalistic and was primarily confined to plays produced in Athens. During the 1985–1995 decade, Athens had about 100 permanent theater companies that produced a total of about 150 plays a year. Nearly 60% of these productions were of foreign plays in translation. Patsalidis thinks that many Greek critics still cling to the idealistic views of Kostis Palamas, and he attacks those critics who impose their own ideas of what theater ought to be in Athens.

In a poststructuralist era, Patsalidis advocates the elimination of binarisms such as women’s theater and feminist theater. In “Greek Women’s [Feminist?] Theater: A First Approach,” he looks at French and American feminist theater (from Hélène Cixous to Megan Terry) before grouping Greek women playwrights into five categories: (1) those whose plays are regularly produced and published by professional companies and publishing houses, (2) those who had at least one play produced by a professional theater company, (3) those who won at least one playwriting competition, (4) those who had at least one play published, (5) those who were formerly novelists or poets.

Joel Spingarn and Brander Matthews provide the impetus for “Theatrical Space as a Cultural Example.” Patsalidis examines the twists and turns that theater research took in the second half of the twentieth century; he also surveys the theatrical space from ancient Athens and Rome to modern Athens and Thessaloniki. He concludes that the internal structure of the theater has been more democratic, frugal, and technological...