Modern Greek Theatre: A Quest for Hellenism (review)

With Modern Greek Theatre: A Quest for Hellenism, Stratos Constantinidis contributes a handsome and readable volume to the growing number of book-length studies in English on modern Greek drama. He deserves ample credit for covering innovative—in addition to representative—plays from the last two centuries. He links plays by Greek female dramatists to better known works by European and Greek male authors. He situates the discussion of the forty plays that he selected in a coherent ideological framework, and makes a compelling argument for the recovery and rediscovery of Modern Greek theater.

A brief iteration of major trends in a handful of book-length studies on Modern Greek theater written in English will show why and how Constantinidis's book is an important one. The well-known introductions to Modern Greek literature have treated the subject of Modern Greek drama in a step-motherly fashion. Many of the critics and historians writing in English and in Greek about Modern Greek theater tend to theorize and stray far from the original sources. They also do a relatively poor job of acknowledging the work of prior contributors to the field—with the welcome exception of the prolific Walter Puchner and Thodoros Grammatas. In Modern Greek Theater: Roots and Blossoms (1978), Aliki Bacopoulou-Halls placed her analysis of contemporary Greek theater (the product of the fervor of the 1960s through mid-1970s) next to those periods which have received plenty of attention—Renaissance and Cretan drama, the revivals of classical Greek tragedy, the Karaghiozis Shadow Theater, and the plays of Palamas and Kazantzakis. What strikes me as most admirable in Bacopoulou-Halls is her willingness to reconsider, years later, her positivist, evolutionary positions. She recently steered away from the attractions and pitfalls of the search for continuity in Greek drama, and has displayed a growing confidence about studying postmodern Greek drama in all its destabilizing ambiguities. Her enthusiasm for presenting this little-known theater to international audiences remains unshaken, as is evident in her twenty-page balanced introduction to Greek drama which was published in Don Rubin's World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. Thomas Gressler's Greek Theatre in the 1980s (1989) is the product of spotty research and—avowedly—rushed writing. It perpetuates ethnic stereotypes, if not slurs, and mutilates some Greek names to the point where they have become unrecognizable and therefore useless for the reader's further investigation. Linda and Kostas Myrsiades's Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance: Complexity and Construction in Greek Guerrilla Theater (1999) unearths the facts and even some of the texts of the (mainly) leftist guerrilla theater "of the mountains." This theater thrived in the 1940s but has since been neglected by nearly all the histories of Greek drama and literature. My own Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece (2000) elaborates on native and popular Greek theater alongside and in conjunction with the revival history of the ancient comic playwright (a revival forgotten both by classicists who have studied Aristophanes as a fixture of antiquity and by modernists who have paid almost exclusive attention to revival tragedy). These books approach contemporary Greek theater from an oblique angle—and deliberately so—as a way to unravel the processes of modernist canon-formation. They counter the continuity-thinking that has been shaping the study and dissemination of Modern Greek theater while it is still taking its course. These processes have resembled some of the pressures of the quest for canonization that determined the preservation of plays from classical antiquity: Hellenistic and later scholars selected the very few tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles and the slim repertory of Aristophanes which subsequently were saved for future generations.

Constantinidis is the first scholar to treat Modern Greek drama directly in a book-length study in English. He makes a convincing case for the importance of this theater to Greek and international...