The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Greek Plays by Lena Kitsopoulou et al. (review)

Unlike the abundance of translations of Greek poetry and lately of prose, the publication of an anthology of contemporary Greek plays in English is quite an exceptional occurrence and happens at best every twenty years. Meanwhile, new versions and adaptations of ancient Greek tragedies are a dime a dozen, so-to-speak, per year. Hence, we have to start by congratulating Oberon Books for putting forth (at the instigation of Athina Sokoli) a compilation of plays that captures the vibe of the eventful first two decades of the twenty-first century in Greece. Although the beginning of the third millennium was spiced with a lot of celebration and fanfare, including the 2004 European Football Championship and the Athens Olympics, the country's downward turn after 2009 led to mass bleeding of its active workforce, both for those who remained in Greece and for those who exited (both paid heavy, albeit different, tolls for their decisions). The five plays included in this volume refract issues of gender, power, desire, family, human existence, or imaginative combinations thereof, imbibed by the malaise of a relatively affluent European society facing social and economic challenges with palpable personal repercussions.

Let me begin with some statistics. Two of the five authors are women and three are men. Three of the playwrights were born in the 1960s and two in the 1970s, slightly before or after the Metapolitefsi. All five plays are predominantly dark and, although they contain flashes of humor, none is a comedy, as per the perennial perception that comedies are a lesser genre. Three of the authors have been fixtures of both the experimental and mainstream Greek stage for at least a decade. Two of the plays are monologues. Two of the authors have translated their own plays. One author has lived for long periods of time in the United Kingdom and has written and rewritten her play in both Greek and English. All of the translations are laudable as they preserve the flavor of the original while being user-friendly to the English reader.

M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. (2009) by Lena Kitsopoulou (introduced by Maria Karananou and translated by Aliki Chapple) is the overflowing monologue of a woman in her late thirties who is sitting in her kitchen waiting for her lover to drop by at any moment. Her ramblings revolve around the quandaries of a woman's life—men, sex, mental health, family, societal prerogatives, boredom, disgust, suicidal despair, and death—followed by an encore from the hellish underworld. The Greek text has an amazing rhythm, which is a prominent quality of Kitsopoulou's prose and dramatic texts, with lots of humor and brutal—and often vulgar—sarcasm; Kitsopoulou's technique in M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. involves the use of names, nouns, and various common acronyms whose signifiers are donned with a whole new signified, while the protagonist searches for more meaning in life. Aliki Chapple's translating task was next to impossible because of the multitude of Greek allusions, sayings, proverbs, and song lyrics whose orality has been rendered wonderfully by her conscious choice for "natural sounding" and "utterable," as opposed to literal, translations (32).

Angelstate (first version 2006, final version 2016) by Nina Rapi (introduced by George Sampatakakis and translated by the author) is a play woven with various threads ranging from Greek tragedy to Maeterlinck's lyrical symbolism, and from the boldness of in-yer-face theater to a distinct queer political agenda. Rapi populates her play with characters that question the violent confinement imposed by societal models and conventions; they linger between the angelic and the demonic, representing stereotypical power figures—a Priest, a Warden, a Bodyguard with gender twists, but also a Dominatrix and an Anorexic—and sharing their experiences of love, loss, pain, guilt, and expiation. Rapi's dialogue achieves a lyrical effect through seemingly violent exchanges, as those craving power...