Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974 (Classical Presences) [Illustrated] 9780198718321, 0198718322

Table of contents :
Cover
Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967–1974
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
A Note on Translations and Transliterations
Introduction
HOW TO STAGE A COUP: PROMETHEUS UNBOUND
STATE OF EXCEPTION, STAGE OF EMERGENCY: “THE GREEKS REHEARSE THE UPRISING”
A Theoretical Positioning
Agamben’s Theory: Possibilities, Challenges, “Better Scripts”
THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK
SOURCES AND RESEARCH CHALLENGES
1. The Theater-Historical Context and the Turn to New Greek Theater
FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC GREEK PLAYS, ALLIED AGAINST A STATE OF TYRANNY
THE TURN TO THE NEW GREEK THEATER: THEATER’S PARALÓGOS EMBOLDENED BY THE THEATRO TOU PARALOGOU
YOUTH, DISSIDENCE, AND THE STAGE OF EMERGENCY: BREAKING DOWN FENCES AND DEFENSES
NEW THEATER LAUNCHES AND COUNTERCULTURAL SPACES: EXPLORING NEW SPACES FOR A RADICAL CRITIQUE
STAGE TROUPES AND THE TROOPS OF THE STAGE: PERFORMING DEMOCRACY IN A STATE OF TYRANNY
2. “These bonds of freedom hurt: ”The Logos and Silence of Censorshipand Self-Censorship
HELLAS HELLENON LOGOKRIMENON: GREECE OF THE CENSORED GREEKS
SILENCE AGAINST CENSORSHIP: THE BOOK INDEX AND SELF-IMPOSED SILENCE
PREVENTIVE CENSORSHIP LEGISLATION
HORTATORY CENSORSHIP, SELF-CENSORSHIP, AND CENSORSHIP UNLEASHED
PROMETHEUS BOUND AGAIN
PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, CLOSING ACT
SEFERIS’S FIRST AND LAST INTERVENTION
PLOTS OF TRANSGRESSION IN PLAYS OF THE NEW GREEK THEATER
Textual and Ideological Cleansing
Who’s Afraid of Marietta Rialde?
Making Terror and Torment Visible: The Greek Performative Turn
A MODERN GREEK CASE STUDY: THE TROMBONE OF MARIOS PONTIKAS
Production Data and Censorship Restrictions
Art as Alibi: One Man’s Music Is Another Man’s Misery
RESTRAINING THE REVUE: MADE TO THE MEASURE OF THE MOMENT
CONCLUSION: MONOPOLIZING NATIONAL CULTURE: CONSTRUCTING BARRIERS AND TABOOS
3. Monopolizing National History: Performing Tyranny and Constructing Myths
DISPLAYS OF ORDER: CONSTRUCTING TYRANNICAL MEANING
DISPLAYS OF DISORDER: DECONSTRUCTING MEANING
SPECTACLE IS POWER
What Happens in the Arena? Sporting Uniforms and Uniformity
Teaching Patriotic Self-sacrifice for the “Revolution of April 21, 1967”
Reflecting Back on Greek History in Rapid Motion
OUR GRAND CIRCUS: GREEK HISTORY IN COMMOTION
“[M]oments from our past, mobilized to help us through a difficult moment of the present”
Remembering and Dismembering a Plot: Of Dreams and Deprivations, of Losers and . . . Losers
The Polytechnic, November 1973: Showdown and Regrouping
CONCLUSION: HISTORY AS CREED, HISTORY AS ACTIVISM
POSTSCRIPT
4. Individual Responsibility before Tyranny as the Capitalist Enemy
THE NANNIES OF GIORGOS SKOURTES: MONEY, MATERIALISM, TRAMPS, AND THE CAPITALIST BOSS
STRATES KARRAS: THE TRADECRAFT OF CAPITALIST OPPRESSION
THE AESTHETICS OF MISFITS AND FAILURES IN THE LATE CAPITALIST SYSTEM
THE STORY OF ALI RETZO: BRECHTIAN THEATER IN GREECE UNDER THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP
Theater as Process, Acculturating Brecht as Process
Brecht in Greece under the Junta
The Free Theater: Theater as Collaborative Action
THE STORY OF THE STORY
“THE WORLD IS BURNING AND YOU ARE COMBING YOUR HAIR”: . . . KAI SY CHTENIZESAI
CONCLUSION: CHAINS AND CHOICES
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Stage of Emergency Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967–1974

G O N D A VA N S T E E N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Gonda Van Steen 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014955266 ISBN 978–0–19–871832–1 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

To my students, past, present, and future, Ôo Rosemary Donnelly

Acknowledgments This book has been a long time in the making and has incurred many debts of gratitude. In Greece, the long road I have followed in search of informants and sources has been full of surprises and unexpected twists and turns. My first debt is to the numerous Greek interviewees, formal and informal alike, who volunteered stories and opinions. Only a limited number of them are quoted here, but each one has contributed to my understanding of the key issues presented in this book. Additional credit must go to my interviewees from the Greek theater world, who continue to work, produce, and create under far from ideal circumstances. The record of theater life under the Colonels would be woefully incomplete if it were not for the many playwrights, directors, actors, artists, and spectators who patiently let me extract verbal information and remembrances. I thank the stage practitioners who generously contributed archival materials as well. The late Iakovos Kambanelles granted me extensive interviews. Spyros Euangelatos lent a rare manuscript and Yorgos Kotanidis, who seasoned his recollections with contagious humor, let me use his pictures. Spyros Tzoras and the staff of the Greek Television Archive helped me uncover the kind of audiovisual materials that changed my perception of spectacle under the dictatorship. Philip Hager and Antonia Karaoglou kindly shared the results of their doctoral research with me. Caring friends and colleagues supported me during the many moments I searched for insights, connections, or the perfect formulation of ideas difficult to express. By doing so, they offered unwavering encouragement as well. Among them are Dimitris Asimakoulas, Anastasia Bakogianni, Eleni Bozia, Leonidas Cheliotis, Helen Dendrinou Kolias, Kaiti Diamantakou-Agathou, Dimitris Gondicas, Georgia Gotsi, Heinz-Uwe Haus, Mary Pittas-Herschbach, Valentini Kalfadopoulou Mellas, Kostas Kapparis, Neovi Karakatsanis, Michaela Karampini-Iatrou, Kostis Kornetis, Ilia Lakidou, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Artemis Leontis, Anastasia Marinopoulou, Spyros Petritis, Walter Puchner, Frank Romer, Richard Thomas, Dimitris Tziovas, Robert Wagman, and Cynthia White. Some of them are experts in entirely different fields, but they illuminated for me the ways in which other disciplines look at the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, and they made me rethink the topics

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I was trying to breach. I also greatly value both the friendship and the scholarship of the many thoughtful colleagues with whom I have had the honor to serve the Modern Greek Studies Association of the United States and Canada. These colleagues’ responses over the years have added much to the argument this book seeks to make. Working intensely with them has been a privilege and a pleasure. I thank them for maintaining strong collaborative and professional links. David Christenson has modeled for me the art of being a mentor, colleague, and loyal friend. His trust, enthusiasm, and incisiveness are very precious to me. Patricia Kokori made me see aspects of modern Greek theater in a new light, always shared in comforting tones. Peter Mackridge and Margaret Kenna, who attended performances of Our Grand Circus and other productions, volunteered much useful information. Peter also read an earlier draft with the care and the attention that characterize him and made singularly apt suggestions for improvement. Shelley and Dan Carda, Apostolis Papageorgiou, and John Zervos have been trusted allies, whose sound and motivating advice has meant much to me. I deeply appreciate the invaluable comments of the anonymous referees of my book manuscript, who helped clear the way for the final revisions and pushed me to make better sense of my discoveries. The faults and deficiencies of this study are mine, but their number has been reduced by the assistance of these many colleagues and friends. I owe special thanks to the Department of Classics at the University of Florida, to Leo Polopolus and Karelisa Hartigan, and to the Cassas family members who raised the funds to establish the Cassas Chair in Greek Studies. Without these generous funds, research trips to Greece and other extended visits to archives and specialized libraries would not have been possible. A Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies from the Seeger Center at Princeton University provided me with the ideal time and space to draft the final chapters of this book in spring 2012. The Center’s generous funding and its vibrant atmosphere, under the astute guidance of Dimitris Gondicas, allowed me to conduct my research in the company of working groups, students, and visitors, and to delve into the exquisite resources of the Princeton Library for long, uninterrupted hours. David Jenkins and other librarians and staff members graciously provided assistance in locating some elusive bibliographical items. In Greece, librarians too numerous to mention made the task of digging into the archives a more fruitful and enjoyable one.

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I acknowledge the volunteers and staff at the ASKI, the Contemporary Social History Archive, the Athens Theater Museum and Archive, the Parliament Library (and newspaper archive), the Greek Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA), and the Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Over the years of research and writing, I had the opportunity to present my findings to diverse university communities, learning much from questions, criticisms, and advice proffered by my listeners. Some materials on modern Greek plays have previously been published in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (October 2007 and May 2013). A portion of Chapter 2 was published, in its very early form, in the Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora (2001), as was the first half of Chapter 3 in the International Journal of the History of Sport (August 2010). I thank the journals and their editors for permission to reprint and expand on these publications here. I am grateful for the chance to contribute once again to the Classical Presences Series. I remain indebted to the series editors, Lorna Hardwick and James I. Porter, for their helpful suggestions, every one of which marked an improvement. Hilary O’Shea took a keen interest in this project and offered advice on multiple occasions, as did Annie Rose, Assistant Commissioning Editor for Classics. I acknowledge copy-editor Rowena Anketell for her attentive and wise editing and for prodding me with insightful comments on matters of substance as well as style. In Rebecca Francescatti, I have found the ideal, reliable, and knowledgeable specialist to compile the indices to my books. My husband, Greg Terzian, remains my most loving friend. He has been an untiring source of wisdom and generosity. I thank him for his love of scholarship, his passion for antiquities and history, and his unqualified support of my research. Greg can always be counted on, too, to ask the questions that go straight to the heart of the matter. To him I owe gratitude beyond measure. An enormous debt of love goes also to Rosemary Donnelly, whose generosity has been as unfailing as it was unsurprising. Her sensibility, irrepressible optimism, and enduring friendship have been inestimable gifts to me for more than a quarter-century. It is to her that this book is dedicated. My students raised the questions that started me out on a trail of discovery leading to the completion of this book. It has been my greatest joy to see them, too, go out to turn over stones of the Greek past. May this book be the beginning and not the final word on the many discussion points brought up in the following pages.

Contents List of Figures A Note on Translations and Transliterations Introduction How to Stage a Coup: Prometheus Unbound State of Exception, Stage of Emergency: “The Greeks Rehearse the Uprising” A Theoretical Positioning Agamben’s Theory: Possibilities, Challenges, “Better Scripts” The Scope of This Book Sources and Research Challenges 1. The Theater-Historical Context and the Turn to New Greek Theater Foreign and Domestic Greek Plays, Allied against a State of Tyranny The Turn to the New Greek Theater: Theater’s Paralógos Emboldened by the Theatro tou Paralogou Youth, Dissidence, and the Stage of Emergency: Breaking Down Fences and Defenses New Theater Launches and Countercultural Spaces: Exploring New Spaces for a Radical Critique Stage Troupes and the Troops of the Stage: Performing Democracy in a State of Tyranny 2. “These bonds of freedom hurt”: The Logos and Silence of Censorship and Self-Censorship Hellas Hellenon Logokrimenon: Greece of the Censored Greeks Silence against Censorship: The Book Index and Self-Imposed Silence Preventive Censorship Legislation Hortatory Censorship, Self-Censorship, and Censorship Unleashed

xv xvii 1 2 14 14 18 25 35 45 45 53 63 75 88 91 91 97 106 116

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Contents Prometheus Bound Again Prometheus Unbound, Closing Act Seferis’s First and Last Intervention Plots of Transgression in Plays of the New Greek Theater Textual and Ideological Cleansing Who’s Afraid of Marietta Rialde? Making Terror and Torment Visible: The Greek Performative Turn A Modern Greek Case Study: The Trombone of Marios Pontikas Production Data and Censorship Restrictions Art as Alibi: One Man’s Music Is Another Man’s Misery Restraining the Revue: Made to the Measure of the Moment Conclusion: Monopolizing National Culture: Constructing Barriers and Taboos

3. Monopolizing National History: Performing Tyranny and Constructing Myths Displays of Order: Constructing Tyrannical Meaning Displays of Disorder: Deconstructing Meaning Spectacle Is Power What Happens in the Arena? Sporting Uniforms and Uniformity Teaching Patriotic Self-sacrifice for the “Revolution of April 21, 1967” Reflecting Back on Greek History in Rapid Motion Our Grand Circus: Greek History in Commotion “[M]oments from our past, mobilized to help us through a difficult moment of the present” Remembering and Dismembering a Plot: Of Dreams and Deprivations, of Losers and . . . Losers The Polytechnic, November 1973: Showdown and Regrouping Conclusion: History as Creed, History as Activism Postscript

120 125 133 136 136 139 140 145 145 146 151 154 159 159 161 162 172 183 187 189 194 201 215 220 225

Contents 4. Individual Responsibility before Tyranny as the Capitalist Enemy The Nannies of Giorgos Skourtes: Money, Materialism, Tramps, and the Capitalist Boss Strates Karras: The Tradecraft of Capitalist Oppression The Aesthetics of Misfits and Failures in the Late Capitalist System The Story of Ali Retzo: Brechtian Theater in Greece under the Military Dictatorship Theater as Process, Acculturating Brecht as Process Brecht in Greece under the Junta The Free Theater: Theater as Collaborative Action The Story of The Story “The world is burning and you are combing your hair”: . . . kai sy chtenizesai Conclusion: Chains and Choices Conclusion References Index

xiii 227 233 243 248 250 251 258 265 272 280 287 293 305 361

List of Figures 1.1. Scene from the Free Theater’s 1970 production of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.

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3.1. A parade float drives down the Panathenaic Stadium during the “Festival of the Military Virtue of the Greeks,” Athens, 1967.

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3.2. A parade float celebrating the first anniversary of the “Revolution of April 21, 1967,” Athens, Panathenaic Stadium, April 1968.

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3.3. Poster: At the festivals of the dictatorial regime of 1967–1974, Greek actor-recruits and allegorical figures embody the known sets of “historical” slogans and victory cries.

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3.4. Cover of the playbill of Our Grand Circus, 1973, staged by the Kareze-Kazakos Theater Company.

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4.1. Scene from the Free Theater’s staged readings of two one-act plays of Brecht (October 1971, Goethe Institute, Athens).

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4.2–4.3. Members of the Free Theater reflect on the identification with and distance from their roles as farmers in The Story of Ali Retzo.

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4.4. Scene from the Free Theater’s production of The Story of Ali Retzo.

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4.5. Ali Retzo grants an interview to the news reporter.

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4.6. Cover of the playbill of the Free Theater’s production of And you are combing your hair.

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A Note on Translations and Transliterations All translations or paraphrases from the original modern or ancient Greek sources are my own, unless otherwise noted. I generally follow the monotonic system for sources published after 1982 but also in some older phrases that the context might not otherwise reveal to be in modern Greek. I have also translated the original titles of modern Greek primary and secondary sources. On the vexed problem of transliterating from the Greek, I have adopted a more conservative spelling unless a Greek name has a well-established form of its own in English. In the continued absence of organized bibliographical tools and databases covering sources written in modern Greek, this conservative system, while not phonetic, is still the best way to guide nonGreek readers/researchers to a critical reexamination of the materials presented here, when they rely on collection catalogues following the principles issued by the Library of Congress. For ancient Greek proper names, I adhere to the conventional Latinized forms broadly used in the English language. For the names of Greek scholars publishing in languages other than Greek, I maintain the preferences of the authors (therefore, for instance, Yorgos Kotanidis and not Giorgos Kotanides).

Introduction
N ŒÆÆØ  ºØ æŒ Æ in a state of siege (official proclamation of April 21, 1967, the Government Gazette of the Kingdom of Greece) One doesn’t care whether the owner [of a coffee shop] beats his wife so long as the coffee is good. (Michael Balopoulos, Secretary-General of the Greek National Tourist Organization, quoted by Joe Alex Morris, Jr., 1970)

This study of Greek theater under the military dictatorship of 1967–1974 argues that the alternative Greek stage, in particular, constructed new cultural and political spheres and was conversing with Western and global trends in many more ways than has traditionally been assumed. It provides a framework for understanding, too, where this theater is situated within our thinking about Greek and Western culture. The book documents and analyzes a wide scope of performative acts, ranging from the Greek state’s military and church-supported censorship to its own massive outdoor spectacles, to theater events that took place on newly founded experimental stages. Thus this book examines the Colonels’ propagandistic use of performance at festivals “proving” that the Greek military had repeatedly saved the nation, but it focuses primarily on the innovative modern Greek plays created and performed by a new generation of playwrights, directors, and actors in alternative venues. It explores how the best of the radical new plays helped the Greeks understand the modus operandi of the repressive dictatorship and its long-lasting ramifications. These plays came to bear a tremendous local and contemporary relevance, paradoxically for tapping into currents

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Introduction

that dominated the international stage, such as Brecht’s epic theater and the Theater of the Absurd. In focusing on new Greek plays and their role in raising critical awareness, this book privileges modes of discourse that highlight theater’s kaleidoscopic value and seize upon many other threads in the fabric of Greek cultural life of the 1960s and 1970s. The chapters further illustrate how Greek actors and audience members assimilated their personal experiences to the 1960s cultural revolution and to the Western, participatory stage, and how they came to think of themselves as empowered and (globally) acting agents. Thus this study engages with theater reception as well as performance criticism and history and combines such facets with a cultural-study approach to one of the most controversial eras in the recent Greek past, perhaps the most important juncture in the interplay of stage and society that has distinguished Greek theater since the modern state’s inception.

HOW TO STAGE A COUP: PROMETHEUS UNBOUND In the early morning of April 21, 1967, “Prometheus” became unbound in Greece. This Prometheus was the code name of a topsecret contingency plan approved by NATO for Greece, a member state since 1952. It had been drawn up to protect the rear of the NATO alliance from subversion in case of a Warsaw Pact invasion. In the event of a war between Greece and a communist country, “Operation Prometheus” provided guidelines and measures to swiftly arrest communist leaders and “subversives” and, as insurance against sabotage, to occupy strategic points and key administrative and communications centers. As deputy chief of operations, Georgios Papadopoulos (1919–1999) implemented “Operation Prometheus” to counteract “disorder” in the domestic sphere, and he was backed by Gregorios Spantidakes, the chief of the Army General Staff in Athens.1 Subsequently, however, Papadopoulos was never able to produce hard evidence of the supposedly imminent threat of a 1 See Karakatsanis (2001: 38) and Woodhouse (1985: 12). Woodhouse (1985) provides an older but still standard introduction to the history of the military dictatorship of April 21, 1967. Regos, Sepheriades, and Chatzevasileiou (2008, in

Introduction

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communist coup that his military takeover had “forestalled.” He had activated the Prometheus Plan to cut off Greece’s “spring,” its liberal “intermission” of 1963–1965 under Georgios Papandreou’s government.2 His intervention had been to avert a victory of Papandreou’s Center Union Party in the elections scheduled for late May 1967. For an immediate pretext, however, Papadopoulos and his “junta” collaborators, “Colonels” Stylianos Pattakos and Nikolaos Makarezos, exaggerated the threat of the communist bogey and proclaimed a “state of emergency”—in what was later aptly called “the last gasp of the mythmakers.”3 A related “justification” for the military’s takeover Greek) offer up-to-date discussions on the historical, political, and cultural parameters of the junta period and the preceding “short” decade of the 1960s. Recent, specialized bibliographies can be found in the various chapters of this edited volume. For an earlier reevaluation of many of the era’s sociopolitical aspects, see Athanasatou, Regos, and Sepheriades (1999, in Greek). Alivizatos analyzes the legal apparatus of the Greek dictatorship (1983: 273–334, 601–695) while Sakellaropoulos probes the sociopolitical causes that led to the sudden regime change (1998, in Greek). Meletopoulos adds much-needed reflection on the new rulers’ ideology (1987 and 1996, in Greek). Meynaud, Merlopoulos, and Notaras detail the political developments of the two decades prior to the coup through the dictatorship (2002, in Greek). See also Richter (2013). The comprehensive study of Sotiris Walldén, entitled Unseemly Partners (2009), shows how and why, ironically, the anticommunist military regime entered into negotiations (often motivated by economic factors) with its Balkan communist neighbors. The anniversary dates of the coup or of the Colonels’ fall prompt Greek journals and newspapers to publish special issues on the dictatorship. See the special issues of Anti, April 17–23, 1987, entitled “April 21, 1967: Twenty Years Later”; He Lexe 63–64 (1987), “Intelligentsia and Dictatorship”; ArcheioTaxio 8 (2006), “April 21, 1967”; and To dentro 24, nos. 161–162 (spring 2008), “The Radio Is Playing Military Marches.” See also the special issues of Eleutherotypia, April 19, 2001, entitled “April 21, 1967: Works, Days, Consequences,” and April 20, 2007, “April 21: Forty Years after the Dictatorship.” 2 Greek sources from the years leading up to the April 1967 putsch convey a sense of a society that remained socially divided and that was particularly vulnerable to authoritarian abuse. Telling are the writings of Giorgos Theotokas, a politically moderate intellectual who served for a short stint as a progressive general director of the National Theater (from February 1945 through May 1946). Theotokas’s collection of six newspaper articles (originally published in To Vema), entitled The National Crisis (1966, in Greek), tried to exorcize a Greek dictatorship by predicting how it would come into being. See Doulis (2011: 20, 39–40, 57–58, 62–63, 66–71, 81) and Van Steen (2011: 43). 3 Demetrios Lambrakes, owner of the newspaper group of To Vema, quoted by Mazower (1997: 138). The Colonels, as they became known, disliked being referred to as “fascists” or as a “junta,” a term that linked them to their brutal counterparts among Latin American dictators. In common parlance, however, “the junta” has been by far the most frequently used term to denote the political anomaly of 1967–1974. From the 1960s through the mid-1980s, many South and Central American countries witnessed dictatorships and state terrorism (among them Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,

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Introduction

was the 1965–1967 crisis in constitutional government (under weak “caretaker” administrations) and the chronic lapses in public order (as manifested in rancorous strikes, street demonstrations, and pacifist youth activism, which the establishment denounced as a form of trafficking with the enemy). Far from hiding their antipathy for the Athenian political and social elite, the Colonels referred to the mid1960s constitutional crisis and the many months of governmental paralysis as the years of the “phaulokratia” (çÆıº ŒæÆ Æ), the “corruptocracy,” or the politically corrupt state (Meletopoulos 1996: 156; Mikedakis 2007: 150, 160–164). They contended that Greece’s parliamentary democracy had become unworkable, especially after the mid-July 1965 standoff between Papandreou and King Constantine over the appointment and the powers of the country’s defense minister. The real issue was, however, whether the royal house would be allowed to interfere with the workings of the elected government. The crisis escalated when, in early April 1967, the king appointed Panagiotes Kanellopoulos, the leader of the right-wing opposition, to the post of prime minister charged with overseeing the May elections. Just when the Greek Right appeared to be on the political upswing, ultra-right-wingers turned to the Prometheus Plan as a blueprint for seizing power:4 in a matter of hours, army officers and troops

Honduras, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay). Their military regimes, which typically claimed to have intervened in a “state of emergency,” were commonly known as juntas and were largely products of the Cold War. Many of their left-wing opponents shared principles of a Marxist ideology, despite the vast domestic and regional diversity that characterized the dissident movements. Like the juntas of Latin America, the Greek military regime, too, made every effort to control information and to “manufactur[e] consent” (in the words of Herman and Chomsky, 2002). The Greek junta’s call for consent and unity in the press, literature, and the arts can thus be seen as part of its demand for approval from all levels of society “in a state of siege” (
N ŒÆÆØ  ºØ æŒ Æ, as per the official declaration in Decree No. 280, ¯˚ `’ 58/ 21.04.1967, or the April 21, 1967 issue of the Ephemeris tes Kyverneseos tou Vasileiou tes Hellados, the Government Gazette of the Kingdom of Greece; also the epigraph to this Introduction). See also Alivizatos (1995: 323–331) and Meynaud, Merlopoulos, and Notaras (2002: 2:709–712). While fruitful, Stanley Cohen’s 1972 notion of a “moral panic” (2002) is less applicable in the Greek case, in that the Greek “state of emergency” was, rather, a contrived anticommunist panic. Avdela delineates the 1950s through early 1960s “moral panic” provoked by the impertinent “tediboides” (“Teddy boys”) (2005 and 2008). See also Kornetis (2013: 16–19, 55). Cf. Theodorou (2010). 4 This is not to say that the Colonels enjoyed the uncritical support of the Right. The reactionary dictators repelled a large portion of the traditional Greek Right, a socially diverse group of politicians and citizens with conservative sympathies or

Introduction

5

rounded up hundreds of local opponents, leftists, communists, and others, whom, they suspected, would react or go underground.5 Later that day of April 21, King Constantine and the Greek populace were faced with the fait accompli of a military putsch. Papadopoulos made great play of the fact that the coup had been executed without bloodshed and called “Operation Prometheus” a resounding success.6 In quick succession, Papadopoulos had himself appointed minister to the prime minister, prime minister, regent, and finally president of the new “presidential parliamentary republic,” which was proclaimed in June 1973 (which meant that the Colonels deposed King

affiliations that underwent significant changes in terms of membership and ideology during the course of the twentieth century. The majority of the Right, however, had vested interests in preserving the political and social status quo. The Colonels rapidly lost support among the Right but still found followers among old-time royalists, traditionalists, and the military ranks. For a recent history of the Greek Left, in English, see Panourgia (2009: esp. 12–14 and 117–122, for her view on the historiography of the history of the Left; 15–16, for a definition of the Greek Left and Right; 22–23, 114, on the creation of the notion of the Left as the “internal enemy”; 23–29, on the Greek legal framework that made the decades-long persecution of the Left possible; and 218–219, for a long list of what the umbrella term, “the Greek Left,” can possibly cover). 5 Organized left-wing opposition against the military regime was slow to appear for various reasons. The Old Left had been defeated or driven abroad or pushed underground. The postwar years of anticommunist state persecution had decimated or fatigued the left-wing ranks. With the 1967 coup, a new wave of anticommunist terror and torture ensued. Anticommunism served to justify the coup, but it also provided a spurious, blanket justification for further oppression of the Left. Longstanding tensions led to the split of the Greek Communist Party in 1968. The party split into the Communist Party of Greece of the Interior and a second camp that remained loyal to the Soviet Union. See further Panourgia (2009: 265–266) and Voglis (2002: 230). The Colonels’ security forces intimidated members of the Right as well and caused them to pursue some of the interests that they shared with the Left. Kornetis (2006 and 2013) expands on the emergence of the young New Left, or the generational overhaul of the political class of the Greek Left (accompanied by a thorough rethinking of its international strategies). For an overly negative verdict on Greek student opposition in the international press, see Shuster in The New York Times (hereafter NYT), February 28, 1973. Cf. Kornetis (2006: 11, 21; 2013: 95, 96, 115–116, 123). The term “opposition” was, in the Greek case, again an umbrella term: it covered exponents of the political Left but also the Right that was not reactionary, liberal intellectuals, students, artists, workers, foreigners, and many others. There was always plenty of friction, flux, and diversity among the Greek leftist opposition against the Colonels, while decades of internal strife had already left undeniable demarcations. In the same way, the term “young” Greeks is meant to denote a broader group than that consisting merely of those who were young of age. 6 Papadopoulos (1968–1972: 1:11, on April 27, 1967); see also the April 21, 1967 statement quoted by Meletopoulos (1996: 155–157).

6

Introduction

Constantine, who had fled after the disastrous countercoup of December 13, 1967). Papadopoulos was elected president in a farcical referendum held under martial law: he was the only candidate. He did not hesitate to rig nationwide elections to give credibility to his regime (Clogg 2002: 162–163, 165; Close 2002: 117). Usurping military roles and political positions, Papadopoulos held absolute sway over Greece for more than six years. Buoyed by a sense of selfconfidence, he abolished the relevant articles of the constitution that protected civil liberties and democratic rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of association or assembly (Katephores 1975: 141–156), and declared a state of martial law for extended periods of time. Thorough purges took place in the Greek army, the civil service, the universities, and the judiciary. Papadopoulos employed with impunity all the methods of organized state persecution of dissidents, especially of communists. He found most of these methods still in place and revamped others, drawing on a more than thirty-year-long tradition of institutionalized anticommunism.7 The political “therapy” or “cure” to which the dictators and right-wing pietists clung 7 Voglis situates the emergence of the Greek Left as a new political player in the late 1920s. The first legislation that penalized communist activities, ideas, and intentions was issued in 1929. It marked the beginning of Greece’s excessive state and parastate anticommunism, complete with prosecutions and deportations of political exiles to prison islands in the Aegean sea (Voglis 2002: 34–36). The Right routinely typed political enemies as communists, regardless of their actual position within the political and ideological spectrum. General Ioannes Metaxas (who ruled 1936–1941) had not been the first—or last—Greek politician to play up the menace of a communist subversion. During his dictatorship, new definitions of Greek patriotism and nationalism set the Greeks apart along the lines of the polar opposites of Right versus Left. The nonnegotiable standard of patriotism, around which the Right solicited a consensus of a moral-religious nature, became a reality of threat and violence paired with blatant propaganda. Anticommunist harassment ran the gamut from buggery to outright assault with heavy-handed torture techniques. When prosecution ensued, it was often with insufficient regard to hard evidence. For more detailed discussions of the long political exclusion of the Greek Left, imposed by the right-wing establishment “in defense of the nation,” see Voglis (2002: 63–64, 66, 74–75, 102) and Voglis and Bournazos (2009: 51–54). See further Bregianne (1999); Carabott (2003); Mazower (1997: 129–132, 143–149; 2000); and Panourgia (2009). Mazower confirms that the interwar period saw a Greek state apparatus develop that aimed at the “surveillance and repression of large sections of the population in the name of anti-Communism.” These objectives, he claims, stayed the same for the following forty years (1997: 139; also Bournazos 2009: 9). From the 1920s through the mid-1970s, too, suspicion of engaged intellectual activity and of pluralist criticism ran deep within the Greek reactionary establishment. The domain of criminality included crimes of opinion and mental commitment, which was indicative of the long-lasting government frustration with the domestic and international support that communism enjoyed from

Introduction

7

had to eliminate the dangerous “disease” or “virus” of communism with which the Greeks might still be “contaminated.”8 State anticommunism had long used a vacuous discourse to fill in for the ideological basis that it otherwise lacked, and this discourse was revived in full force by the Colonels. A new wave of the pathology of paranoia swept over Greece, in the name of a self-righteous ethnikophrosyne, “national conviction” or “national-mindedness.”9 This “high” ground of nationalist patriotism, upheld by the regime as the obverse of treason, proved, however, much more self-serving than patriotic. In the eyes of strongman Papadopoulos, the Greeks had to first acquire certified “patriotism,” ethical immunity against leftism, and cultural “maturity” (however vaguely defined) before they could be allowed to govern themselves. Equally self-seeking was the official demand that Greek individualism be curbed and intellectuals, artists, and “fellow travelers.” Mazower notes, too, that the Colonels were quick to blame any discontent on the influence of leftist and communist agitators rather than on the long-overdue need for social and political reform. Georgios Georgalas, an ex-communist turned ideologue of the junta regime, published extensively on the topic of communism to help undermine it (1968 and 1971; Meletopoulos 1996: 211–234). Thus anticommunism became a facile rhetoric for the dictators to assert and retain legitimacy (Mazower 1997: 141). In his novel, Usurpation of Authority (in Greek: Antipoiesis Arches), the writer Alexandros Kotzias coined the phrase of the “Greek Thirty-Year War” (1979: back cover) to denote the long and repressive Civil War and post-Civil-War era (that is, 1944–1974). See also Kornetis (2006: 39; 2013: 11). 8 For as long as the Greek right-wing establishment had fought the “red menace,” reactionary opinion statements had reverberated with value judgments cast in pseudo-medical verdicts of illness and metaphors of sanitation: the “infection” of communism needed to be extirpated urgently to safeguard the “purity” of the privileged Greek nation. On this terminology of “cleansing” the “infected” or “polluted” in the national security discourse of the early Cold War period, see further Hamilakis (2007: 214, 232); Panourgia (2009: 10–11, 13, 32, 106, 160); Voglis and Bournazos (2009: 68–69); and Yannas (1994). King Constantine called communism a miasma or “infection” in his New Year’s address of January 1, 1966, raising a storm of protest. See Bournazos (2009: 19, 24); Doulis (2011: 96–97); and Lountemes (1972: 350). 9 On the charged notion of ethnikophrosyne and its use during and after the Greek Civil War, see Close (2002: 12); Papademetriou (2006: esp. pt. 3); Van Steen (2011: 9, 85, 142, 147); and Voglis (2002: 66, 101, 227–228). The postwar and Cold War rightwing governments of Greece continued their fight against communists as “antinationals” who lacked “patriotic spirit” and who were also branded as “internal enemies” and “anti-Greeks.” Poulantzas (1976 and 2000) contextualizes the term “antinationals” for communists. Bournazos offers a detailed introduction to the Greek terms (linguistic as well as ideological) that defined this “antinationalism” in the decades prior to the dictatorship period (2009: 17–19, 21–22; also Voglis and Bournazos 2009: 65–69). Gregoriades (1975: 1:115) and especially Noutsos (2009) elaborate on the demand for ethnikophrosyne in postwar educational institutions.

8

Introduction

that the quest for personal gain or pleasure yield to the national interest.10 Under the dictatorship, anti-leftist and anticommunist morality retrenched and strove hard to eradicate critical disagreement, seen as disloyalty. The Colonels were eager to document a “consensus” on Greece’s rediscovered ideological priorities, the ones that sustained the “Greece of Christian Greeks” ( Eºº Eºº ø æØØÆH).11 They claimed to defend the “eternal values of the Helleno-Christian civilization” against detrimental cultural and political influences. The loaded concept of “Helleno-Christian civilization” merged the—not necessarily complementary—pagan Greek and Orthodox-Christian traditions and thus vouched for the continuity of Greek culture from antiquity through Byzantium to the present.12 The dictators filled the ideological void with a reactionary version of the long-exalted triptych of respect for the fatherland, religion, and family (Ææ , ŁæÅŒ
Æ, ØŒ ª
ØÆ), or the paradigm of the Orthodox nation as a unified family.13 The revamped ideology was based on 10 Carabott analyzes Metaxas’s pre-WWII message of self-discipline and antiindividualism, on which he expounded for the sake of building the culturally and racially “superior” “Third Hellenic Civilization” (2003: 25–26). He speaks of Metaxas’s “collectivistic nationalism” (2003: 25). It was again Metaxas who first made aesthetic and moral persuasion part of anticommunist political and patriotic credentials. Metaxas’s rise to power did not rest on a military coup but on the backing of the Greek royal house. Koliopoulos and Veremis state that King George II “plunged Greece into dictatorship . . . by taking Metaxas’s advice to suspend a number of articles of the constitution” (2010: 103). 11 On this infamous aspect of the junta’s “ideology” and its anticommunist motivations, see further Meletopoulos (1996: 160, 230, 243, 256, 336, 337, 338; 2010: 15); Roufos (1972: 152–153, 154); and Sakellaropoulos (1998: 160–161). 12 The concept of the “Helleno-Christian idea” (¯ººÅ åæØØÆ ØÆ) may have been coined by the nationalist 19th-century Greek historian Spyridon Zambelios (1852: 464). I owe this reference to Mackridge (email communication of May 30–31, 2012; also recently Mackridge 2011–2012: 15, 19–20). After the coup, nation and Church entered into a relationship of mutual legitimation. On Easter Sunday 1967, which fell on April 30, signs went up in Athens proclaiming Greece’s “resurrection” along with that of Christ: «æØ ÆÅ—¯ºº ÆÅ», “Christ is risen—Hellas is risen.” I thank Mackridge for sharing this testimony with me (email communication of May 30–31, 2012). The same propagandistic symbolism tainted Easter 1968, which coincided with the anniversary date of the coup (Gkolia 2011: 158). 13 Gazi (2011) has researched the history of the notorious triptych: since the 1880s, this ideology had captured official conservative values; it helped to legitimate the subsequent anticommunist campaign and codified the notion of “national-mindedness.” See also Phrankoudake [Frangoudaki] (2003: 206, 209). Hering (1996: 304–306), Kallis (2007: 237–238), and Petrakis (2006: 225 n. 172) remark on the power of those old ideals under Metaxas. For an analysis of how claims to “honor,”

Introduction

9

an odd amalgam of slogans, ethical principles, secular as well as religious credos, public aversions, and myths, yet had to vouch for the infallibility of the “regime of truth” and cover up its corruption. The Colonels saw their tight control of power, not as a repressive measure, but as a “historical necessity” («Ø æØŒ ÆƪŒÆØÅÆ», Spanos 1973: 364), and they substituted moral explanations for the political ones they owed. At any time, however, their skewed sense of Greek generational continuity, historical prefiguration, and religious sensibility could touch down in damaging condemnations of the victim-subject, typically a suspected leftist or communist. In the 1950s, Papadopoulos had received thorough training in national security and counterintelligence and had served in the Greek Central Service of Information (KYP). Close connections linked this tool of state anticommunism to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).14 For as long as the upstart Greek regime lasted, “patriotism,” “democracy,” and “sacrifice” speciously covered up Argentina’s terror by the mid-1970s, see Feitlowitz (2011: p. ix), in her aptly named and seminal book, A Lexicon of Terror. 14 See Close (2002: 109–110, 114) and cf. Iatrides (2003: 92–95). Stefanidis studies the Greek political culture of the postwar period, which engendered a strong antiAmerican sentiment (2007: 27–54, or his ch. 1). My use of the term “American” in this book is confined to people in the United States. Research into the role of the CIA in Greece is ongoing and remains controversial, as more, though not all, US intelligence information has been declassified. I leave aside any unfruitful speculation and refer to the volume edited by Maragkou (2015) for a gamut of recent viewpoints (some more balanced than others). Maragkou (2009) situates NATO’s tolerant acceptance of the Greek unconstitutional regime within the context of the Cold War era, which raised the need for the organization to keep its southeastern flank as stable as possible. Maragkou (2010) discusses Britain’s passive acquiescence, which made the regime’s consolidation of power possible during the first few years after the coup. Wills (2010) concentrates on the reactions of British travelers and observers. Robert Keeley provides a US diplomat’s insider account and speaks of the United States’ initial “surprise” but subsequent “alliance with a repressive right-wing authoritarian regime” (2010: book cover). Keeley notes the CIA’s wonder at and subsequent support for a colonels’ coup (because it had been expecting a coup by higher-ranking Greek generals): “the American CIA station in Greece was filled with Greek American officers . . . who were right-wing in orientation and totally committed to the Papadopoulos coup once it occurred, and who have remained its ardent defenders ever since” (2010: 88, also 260–261 n. 2). It remains true, however, that the Colonels drew on a preexisting network of repressive institutions and security and police forces, and that some of these forces had established important connections with the United States (CIA) well before the coup (Mazower 1997: 147, 148). Besides, the dictators, who found it easier to inspire fear than to instill respect, welcomed some rumors of American-condoned brutalities, which would intimidate, they hoped, many more potential dissenters (Close 2002: 116). The belief in CIA involvement enjoys common

10

Introduction

the Republican Nixon administration guardedly favored the Colonels and became their main supporter, apologist, and ally. US Vice-President Spiro Agnew (of Greek descent; born Anagnostopoulos) became the late-blooming Greek “expert.” As early as September 1968, Agnew delivered one of the strongest speeches by any US politician endorsing the Colonels and branding their opponents as communist conspirators (Iatrides 2003: 93). In 1971, he became one of the few foreign dignitaries to visit Greece; the days of his visit, October 16–23, saw elevated levels of political rhetoric (Vidalis 2009: 166–170). The intransigent regime was, nonetheless, popular in some circles that benefited from the populist reforms it pushed through. It remains a fact, however, that the junta transformed Greece into a military state that relied on a machinery of terror, control, and surveillance and whose practices recalled the repression of the Nazi German Occupation (1941–1944) and of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949).15 Reports of torture did not come out immediately currency in Greece of the 21st century as well; the tenet holds, too, that Greek resistance against this interference was as necessary and as noble as resistance in Vietnam. See, for instance, Karavidas (2005). The “foreign finger” of disproportionate US interference was long perceived as a major factor that conditioned Greece’s sociopolitical order at the expense of the Left. See further Botsiou (2006); Maragkou (2006); Miller (2009); and the work of Neovi Karakatsanis and Jonathan Swarts (2008). The latter have embarked on a critical study of both popular and more scholarly sources that accept American complicity in the coup as a fact and that lament the apparent unwillingness of the US to subsequently dislodge the dictators from power. The “American Factor” pervaded theatrical and literary representations as well, along with a prevailing view of the United States as a predatory, capitalist, and imperialist power. See, for example, the 1967 book by Stephen Rousseas, entitled The Death of a Democracy: Greece and the American Conscience, and a Greek study published thirty years later by Alexes Papachelas with the telling title, The Rape of Greek Democracy: The American Factor, 1947–1967 (1997). Kotanidis (2011) routinely suggests that the United States staged the coup and that the Greeks themselves had been reduced to mere pawns in the foreign game-playing. See further Meynaud, Merlopoulos, and Notaras (2002: 2:486–493). 15 Recent studies in English on the Greek Civil War and its aftermath include Carabott and Sfikas (2004); Close (1993 and 1995); Danforth and Van Boeschoten (2012); Gerolymatos (2004); Hatzivassiliou (2006, with focus on the Cold War); Iatrides and Wrigley (1995); Kalyvas (2006: 246–329, with focus on the Argolid); Mazower (2000 and the edited volume of 2000); Panourgia (2009: 81–116, or her ch. 5); and Voglis (2002). Noteworthy is also Kalyvas’s “firebrand” chapter of 2000, titled “Red Terror: Leftist Violence during the Occupation,” which generated a lot of Greek reactions as well. In German, see Richter (2012). Recent sources in Greek include: Eliou (2004); Fleischer (2003); Koutsoukes and Sakkas (2000); Marantzides (2010); Margarites (2000–2001); Nikolakopoulos, Regos, and Psallidas (2002); and Van Boeschoten et al. (2008). Paschaloude (2010) studies the shaping of the Greek

Introduction

11

after the coup and, when they did, they were often met with varying degrees of disbelief and rejection, or with futile comparisons with the violence of previous Greek regimes or of more brutal dictatorships elsewhere. In turn, the Colonels alleged that the “exaggerated” complaints about their “disciplinary actions” originated with leftist and communist elements in Greek society.16 They had some success, too, with their relentless propaganda (Meynaud, Merlopoulos, and Notaras 2002: 2:656–664). Some foreign papers declared that the Greek government was not unique in resorting to violent tactics and that, in the spectrum of global history, the terror in Greece was not as ruthless or widespread as, for instance, in Argentina. Others presented modern Greece as less deserving of a democratic state system simply because its

collective memory and political speech of the 1950s through mid-1960s. Sfikas and Mahera (2011) offer an example of the ongoing sharp critique of the “new wave” represented by Kalyvas and Marantzides. The junta authorities and its large apparatus of security and police forces doled out a range of familiar punishments that were based on the regime’s own interpretation of the law or on provisions of the special courtmartial that then administered justice. Among the preventive and retaliatory acts were: round-ups; (nighttime) arrests; surprise attacks and torture during repeated interrogation sessions; internment without due process; sexual maltreatment, molestation, or rape (the Greek word for “rape,” viasmos, shares the same root as the word for “violence,” via); psychological intimidation, indoctrination, blackmail, and terror; solitary confinement; fatigue duty or forced labor; harassment of the prisoner’s spouse, children, or close relatives; and deprivation of sleep, food, or basic hygiene conditions. Show trials, too, were among the regime’s favorite strategies, demanding displays of compliance. Greek torturers tended to violently beat the soles of the victim’s (immobilized) feet with a stick or iron rod, following techniques practiced from the interwar years through the dictatorship. Panourgia describes this method known as “bastinado,” which has a much longer history in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (2009: 260–262). Under the Colonels, this favorite torture tactic was most often referred to as the phalanga (Koroveses [Korovessis] 2007; Kotanidis 2011: 329, 336–337). The advantage of this technique from the torturer’s perspective was that it caused excruciating pain to the victim but left only few traces afterward. Thus the torturer could later deny his (unlikely: her) acts, if challenged. As Voglis has observed, the physical mistreatment of men and women alike was a way for the tormentors to enhance their masculinity (2002: 137); some went in for acts of theater, psychological conceit, or the violent performative language of threats and promises. Taylor (1997), Theweleit (1989), and other scholars have opened up an important discourse on the subject of fascist and other torture practices and its relations to gender roles and patriarchal notions. The fascist patriarchal model is further discussed by De Grazia (1992), Martin (1993), and Spackman (1996). 16 See the statements by Greek officials printed in an (untitled) article in the leading newspaper To Vema, July 9, 1967. See also Corry (1969: 77); Doulis (2011: passim); and Wren (1969: 21).

12

Introduction

people had failed too many times to keep up this tradition “inherited” from Golden Age Athens.17 In its own patronizing ways, the West expected the Greeks to draw on their classical past as a deep cultural resource for stabilizing their country—or regarded the classical past as the country’s only stable foundation.18 Thus many outsiders reduced the Greeks to the role of actors on a stage to be watched and barely let them be agents or authors in their own right. Papadopoulos was ousted in late November 1973, after his government had faced an abortive naval mutiny as well as student uprisings. But the dictatorship was to last through July 23, 1974, under Brigadier Demetrios Ioannides, the sinister former head of the much-feared and much-resented Military Police (ESA).19 Then the military, faced

17

A controversial voice in this debate was David Holden, whose 1972 book, Greece without Columns: The Making of the Modern Greeks, pointed to flaws in the Greek national character to explain a history of social and political instability. Clogg (1973) criticized the book, as did Couloumbis (1972), who revisited the controversy in his 2004 collection of notes and interviews from the early 1970s. Robert Keeley elaborates on the question, “Was Greece ever a democracy?” (2010: 190–191). 18 Even Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman saw modern Greece mainly through the lens of ancient Greece, the latter being the only Greece they chose to mention in their 1979 book, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. They did include modern Greece in their frontispiece map of countries using torture “on an [a]dministrative [b]asis in the 1970s” and traced a parent–client relationship between the United States and Greece. However, the only reference to Greece in the book’s actual text is to the naval empire of classical Athens (1979: 66–67). See also Faubion (1993: 132). 19 The last dictator, Ioannides, had been a torturer on Makronesos, the most notorious prison island of the Civil War (Anon., He Auge, August 17, 2010). Not coincidentally, brutalities were often enacted by the same cast of characters that had been terrorizing leftists long before. According to Close, at least twelve out of fifteen leading members of the junta had been through officers’ training academy under the anticommunist rule of Metaxas, that is, they had received formal training in the 1930s strategies of suppressing communism (2002: 116). The dreaded body named by the acronym ESA, or the Greek Military Police (Hellenike Stratiotike Astynomia), was the most barbaric one of three bodies that carried out the junta’s repressive functions. Its Special Interrogation Section (Eidikon Anakritikon Tmema, EAT-ESA) was feared as the equivalent of a torture chamber. The other two were the National Security Service (Asphaleia) and the Central Service of Information (KYP). See further Arvanitopoulos (1991: 101, 110, 113). More than in previous decades, however, the 1967 dictatorship was being watched and questioned by international civil rights groups and had to repeatedly justify its brutish treatment of dissidents and opponents as well as its reuse of some of the notorious prison camps and island detention centers. This explains, too, why the situation in Greece at first received global attention, which soon dwindled. Elaine Scarry’s seminal work of 1985, The Body in Pain, repeatedly remarks on the Colonels’ torture practices. Christopher S. Wren, senior editor of Look Magazine, featured the horror stories of actors

Introduction

13

with imminent war with Turkey over its invasion of Northern Cyprus, turned over the reins of power to a civilian government under Konstantinos Karamanles.20 The state of the post-1974 metapoliteuse (literally: “change of regime,” that is, the process of redemocratization) brought a renewed sense of liberation and appeased initial fears.21 With the gradual transition into a democracy, even the Colonels’ supporters embraced new political beliefs and chose not to dwell on their past. The first months and years of this metapoliteuse saw an (incomplete) process of “dejuntification,” but they also saw a mass hysteria on the stage and, in particular, an explosion of haphazardly-made revue shows that no longer showed theater’s strength. Nonetheless, this period of exhilaration merits further study as well.

tortured by the security police (1969), including that of Perikles Koroveses, who wrote the widely known La Filière: Témoignage sur les tortures en Grèce (1969; translated as The Method in English and `Łæø çºÆŒ
 in Greek, literally: Guards of the Humans). The personal testimony of actress Kitty Arsene, who was also politically active, drew international attention as well (Anon., Le Monde, December 18, 1968). See Arsene (1975); Becket (1970); Benake (1999: 162, 164); Doulis (2011: 87–89); Gkiones (1999: 75); Kotanidis (2011: 85, 495); Minis (1973); and Schwab and Frangos (1970: 77–78, 95–96). See Giourgos et al. (2009) for a collection of pertinent older documents. 20 Chatze-antoniou (2007) discusses the Colonels’ self-destructive interference in Cyprus, their coup against the Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios, and the ensuing Turkish invasion that triggered the junta’s downfall. The regime was unable to handle the crisis it had provoked on Cyprus and its mobilization failed miserably. Greece reached a national impasse and the dictatorship folded. After the Colonels’ demise, Greece hastened to return to a state of political normality and appeasement. For more details on this transition period, see Kassimeris (2005) and Kornetis (2006: 350–387, or his ch. 5; 2013: 292–303). Diamandouros (1983) studies the societal dynamics and the role of new elites involved in the transitional processes of Greece to democracy. See further Diamandouros (1986); Featherstone and Katsoudas (1987); Fleischer (2006); and Voulgares (2002). See also the recent special issue of ArcheioTaxio 15 (2013). Samuel Huntington places Greece’s democratization process in a southern European and Eastern perspective (as part of a “third wave” of democratization) and stresses the stabilizing influence of the country’s 1981 accession to the European Economic Community (later European Union) (1991: 20, 21–22, 42, 88, 102–103, 191, 220–222). 21 Alivizatos compares the sense of liberation in 1974 to that of 1944, claiming that the Colonels set the clock back by several decades (2008: 11–12). Liakos underscores: “The year 1974 is not the other end of 1967 but the other end of the postwar period. The dictatorship does not simply end but, rather, the post-Civil-War period has come to an end” (2012: 5). See also Liakos (2010) and Meletopoulos (1996: 152).

14

Introduction STATE OF EXCEPTION, STAGE OF EMERGENCY: “THE GREEKS REHEARSE THE UPRISING” ¸ªø Å ÅØ ıæªÅŁ
Å
ŒæŁ ı ŒÆÆ
ø, Æ  ı 
 ıŒ ı æÆ ÆºÆ
Å ØÆŒıæÅÅ Å åæÆ . . . Due to the irregular situation that was created, from midnight on the army has taken up the governance of the country . . . (Radio announcement by the Armed Forces, April 21, 1967, 6:30 a.m.) You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. (Rahm Emanuel, November 2008)22

A Theoretical Positioning The military coup of 1967 was only one in a long series of Greek crises in which the usurpers invoked a “state of emergency” and, on this particular occasion, even a “state of siege” («
N ŒÆÆØ  ºØ æŒ Æ», “in a state of siege,” as per the official proclamation of April 21, 1967).23 Whereas an emergency or crisis, however, is not immediately suggestive of conditions of longue durée, the “state of exception” becomes the permanent and normalized condition of power. The Colonels’ “state of exception” eroded the foundations of democracy and reduced Greece to a military state. The communist bogey of the late 1960s was, arguably, less frightening than the dictators’ disingenuous panic about a national security crisis. Concealed by a verbal and visual smokescreen, the Greek military coup must nonetheless be elucidated from a more theoretical perspective. I use Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (2005 [1st edn 2003]) as a roadmap for my positioning of the import of theater and cultural production engaged with the socioeconomic realities of a late

22 I owe this section’s apt subtitle to an anonymous referee of my book manuscript, and am very grateful for this and many other valuable suggestions that are reflected here. The subtitle plays off Günter Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, a play that conveys the author’s fascination but also his disillusionment with Brecht. 23 A “state-of-siege” law was not new to Greece, although the historical circumstances that generated previous versions of such a law were very different. From 1917 through 1920, the Greek government resorted to a “state-of-siege” law to combat security threats during and after WWI, but older instances of the law had been in existence prior to these dates. See further Mylonas (2012: 127).

Introduction

15

capitalist dictatorship.24 Agamben presents the “state of exception” as a contemporary paradigm of government characterized by the suspension of the normal juridical order and of the existing constitution (2005: 5), thus creating a space in which the rule of law has been lifted. He characterizes this legal void and makes further distinctions as follows: The [post-Napoleonic] history of the state of siege is the history of its gradual emancipation from the wartime situation to which it was originally bound in order to be used as an extraordinary police measure to cope with internal sedition and disorder, thus changing from a real, or military, state of siege to a fictitious, or political one. In any case, it is important not to forget that the modern state of exception is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one (2005: 5).

The post-1970 Greek stage problematized the degraded status of Greece, southern Europe, and other countries held by juntas; it looked for explanations to the discourse of Third Worldism, focusing on the United States’ disproportionate power that allowed these juntas to continue to exist.25 From the lens of Third Worldism, Greece was another exploited country held by a US-backed military regime, whose dismal conditions pressed or should have pressed the global citizen’s intellectual and moral credentials. The following chapters discuss relevant plays and their contexts inspired by the theoretical possibilities and challenges that Agamben’s theory opens up. They reconnect with the absolutist but no less “created” tradition of Greece’s “temporary” dictatorship, which provided its citizens with the illusion of a valid explanation and solution for the crisis that had “necessitated” the coup. These plays attest to an early 1970s outburst of creativity and audacity that led to a drastic reshaping of the Greek Fredric Jameson elucidates the term “late capitalism” and its origins and suggests as appropriate synonyms “multinational capitalism” and “spectacle or image society” (1991: p. xviii). See also Kornetis (2013: 316). 25 The term “Third Worldism” expresses the belief that developing nations’ interests are at variance with the economic and political priorities of the wealthy West. This thriving ideology pointed up the Third World’s emancipation and the crisis of European nationalisms, and appealed to youth’s desire to identify with the struggles of the weak and the exploited worldwide. The movement defined the global New Left and spurred radical social rebellion during the third quarter of the 20th century, the time span in which the Greek dictatorship was situated. See recently Garavini (2012: 33, 92, 98–109) and Kornetis (2013: 24, 47–48, 133–134, 139–140, 248–249, and passim). 24

16

Introduction

theatrical landscape, whose effects are still felt today. The stage offers a new perspective on Greek cultural politics, one that changes our appreciation of cultural activities under the junta and offers more general insights into the workings of censorship; the strongmen’s appropriation of the classical patrimony; the impulse to make history part of the stage dynamics; the impact of Brecht’s theories in Greece; and the expression of absurdist trends through an aesthetics of (Third Worldist) marginality. Agamben (1942– ), the Italian political philosopher, is widely known for his critique of illegitimate authority through the usurpation of extra-constitutional powers and for his analysis of the “logic of sovereignty,” itself drawn from Carl Schmitt, the prolific Nazi jurist and political theorist of the interwar period. Agamben’s 2005 book also reflects his involvement with Walter Benjamin, the liberal German philosopher and literary critic of the same era, whose interest in drama (and especially Brecht’s epic theater) ran much deeper than that of Schmitt.26 The post-9/11 climate has rendered Agamben even more influential as a guide explaining “emergency powers” and as an admonitory voice against the repression of civil liberties. His State of Exception reconstructs contemporary sovereignty using a range of critical and interdisciplinary methods, and is the culmination of his earlier work on the “bare life” or the “naked life” created in a state of siege (symbolized by the refugee camp, the prison camp, the concentration or extermination camp, which he has called defining characteristics of twentieth-century modernity; Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998: 181). Usurpers in Greece, as elsewhere, have claimed that the 1967 state of exception was a pragmatic and provisional response to a perceived but exaggerated or “willed” emergency, to allow themselves more leeway in attacking their enemies. In alliance with Agamben, this book shows that the Greek dictators tried hard, for at least six years, to transform their state of emergency into a state of “normality” (despite the obvious paradoxes inherent in the development of a prolonged state of exception), replete with rhetorical and theatrical underpinnings, and even an awareness of the

26 Agamben’s 2005 book is very short at 91 pages, but it encapsulates a complex tradition of politico-philosophical thinking. The rich web of connections with and influences from Schmitt and Benjamin (and Hegel) has been unraveled by Kisner (2007) and McQuillan (2011), among others. For introductions to the philosophies of Schmitt and Benjamin, see Hooker (2009) and Gilloch (2002) respectively.

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17

humiliating force of the “bare life.” As head of the Military Police, Colonel Ioannides threatened one of his torture victims thus: In 1967, many people didn’t believe that we’d last more than six months, and . . . here we are in our sixth year. And do you know why? Do you know where our strength lies? In the fact that we give only second or third priority to the human element. (Quoted and translated by Anastassios Minis 1973: 30)

Agamben has devoted relatively little attention to youth’s global aspirations or protest acts of the 1960s in general. The recent book of Kostis Kornetis, however, does justice to those topics and deservedly places Greece in the spotlight (Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the “Long 1960s” in Greece, 2013). I largely follow Kornetis on the topics of direct action tactics or the revolutionary recipes that Greek students borrowed from Western countercultural youth movements, but I additionally stress the importance of theater in consolidating youth’s resistance profile. My exposure to Kornetis’s book came late in the research and writing process. On many occasions, I therefore returned to specific plays and circumstances and followed the gravity points, not of the Greek student movement, but of the performances marked by my source materials. I am aware that I cannot let theory encroach excessively upon my analysis of Greek theater’s counteroffensive, that is, of the “stage of emergency,” precisely because theatrical life under the junta demands further archival and new-historicist study. Therefore, many of the themes raised here will receive further clarification and proper illustration in my close examination of plays and conditions. The Greek military dictatorship offers a particularly apt context or case study with which to rethink Agamben’s theory: the sense of “extreme necessity” of late April 1967 was, notably, a sense of déjà vu as well. The post-coup situation was not, however, one of lesser urgency for the opposition to address. After a full thirty years of leftist oppression, which disproportionally targeted the younger generations, the students and actors living under the Colonels’ thumb perceived a unique kind of emergency: they wanted to finally turn the tide for good, not only the tide of the recent military overhaul, but also that of three decades of unfreedom sometimes of a literal, sometimes of a symbolic order. With their sharpened consciousness of being denizens of an international world in turmoil, the Greek

18

Introduction

student and youth movement developed modes of direct communication with this global world and availed itself of the foreign attention that had turned to the country. This movement thus reappropriated the latest sense of urgency and folded it into its dissident language by conversing with the realm of the stage. Thus, too, the movement delivered the “other” side of the sociopolitical confrontation that resulted from the emergency or state of exception (which, in Agamben’s articulation, represents only the one side of the usurpers). Greek theater, too, sought liberation after decades of curtailment, not just after the most recent crackdown, even though the latest crisis was the one to trigger the public awareness of an emergency. The resistance staged by students and youth of the first three years, however, appeared as a kind of slow-release opposition (a reality that has since been contested by the subsequently lionized generation of the 1970s). Against this backdrop, I argue that the new Greek plays of the early 1970s were, therefore, catalytic tools that put rediscovered Greece-in-crisis on display through performance (a trend, incidentally, reinvented in the post-2008 Greek world of economic woes). The panoply of reinvigorated Greek theater was able to combat or subvert the “state of exception” in modes that proved to be more successful than those of any other genre or medium. When Greek youth, students, and actors desperately wanted to keep pace with the rest of the West, and when they wanted to finally achieve the moment and momentum of change, stage performance proved to be the fastest, most outspoken, and most effective way to reach, and especially to grow, a critical audience.

Agamben’s Theory: Possibilities, Challenges, “Better Scripts” The works of Agamben and Kornetis equip me with valuable tools to frame my thinking about the Greek dictatorship. They challenge me to advance Agamben’s conclusions and to speak to a twenty-firstcentury international readership. Agamben wrote the first history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States. His 2005 book represents a series of post-9/11 crisis and cultural studies (and the fear of the rise of states of exception), but is short on older historical examples. Unfortunately, Greece is not on this critic’s radar screen. In the

Introduction

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past, however, Agamben has often drawn on Greek language terms (zoe and bios, or the simple fact of living versus a way of life, in Homo Sacer, 1998: 1) and on Greek law and political philosophy (Aristotle and Plato), but these borrowings have been limited to concepts from ancient Greece (in addition to those from ancient Rome). Regrettably, Agamben has misapprehended his theory’s significance for Greece as a modern nation that has been innately performative. This trend, too, is a scholarly inclination that the following chapters acknowledge but do try to subvert. Agamben’s 2005 book steers toward an essentialist definition of the state of exception, but eschews standard evidentiary accounts and empirical research. Contemporary incarnations of the public law phenomena he describes merit further and especially interdisciplinary investigation. My archival study of theater under the Greek dictatorship may furnish an example of the kind of documented empirical reading that is wanting in Agamben. The Greek case cannot but assert the need for thorough archival research and for a comprehensive analysis of the disparate finds. Moreover, while Agamben’s legal and philosophical discussion rests on solid ground, the critic neglects to interpret the state of exception from the perspective of cultural studies and from social structures intersecting with legalities. The State of Exception and Homo Sacer do not engage with sociological explanations. The Greek case advances Agamben’s conceptions by delivering examples that foster a better understanding of the larger symbolic and societal import of the state’s emergency measures. Agamben does not sift through the minutiae of legal procedures and developments. This approach certainly augments the bigger picture he projects, but begs the question about the nature and repercussions of concrete legislation. Chapter 2 of this book delves into the legal and practical dimensions of the censorship rules and the general climate of normativity instituted by the Colonels. It shows what a state of exception looks like when it trickles down to the stage and to life through laws and punitive measures. Pre-2003 studies of the Greek dictatorship have not had the benefit of interacting with Agamben’s State of Exception. Since the book’s publication in English, however, it has generated lively debate in Modern Greek Studies. The very few earlier studies focused on other areas of cultural production, distinct from theater. Karen Van Dyck’s book, Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry since 1967 (1998), has affirmed the value of a cultural studies approach to

20

Introduction

modern Greek literature, and has admirably engaged with matters of censorship, self-censorship and sexuality, novel writing strategies, youth’s favorite music, and so on. To discuss censorship and its gendered colorations, Van Dyck has drawn on the Foucauldian argument about power imbalances as an incitement to discourse and its implications for sexual politics (Van Dyck 1998: 4–5, 15, 56; Foucault 1990: 27). She also deftly redeploys Lyotard’s legitimating principle and neologism of the “paralogy” of instabilities, anomalies, or paradoxes, which reinstitute the game-playing or imaginativeperformative aspects of language (Van Dyck 1998: 28, 29–30, 31–33; Lyotard 1984). “Paralogy” or the “paralogical” “destabilizes the capacity for explanation” (Lyotard 1984: 61) and goes “beyond” or “against” a fixed, immutable way of “reasoning,” which, in the Greek case, was the regime’s stifling logos or its nationalistic metanarrative, which served to boost (the myth of) political and social harmony. Thus the paralogical rehabilitates the heterogeneous-performative dimensions of language, which are distinct from the straightforwardly productive sides of scientific or economic performance. Van Dyck positions Greek poetry since 1967 as a literary and activist movement, whose paralogy acted in concert with the poets’ ideological orientation, their use of the page as a heterotopia, their careful selection of texts to translate and adapt, and their publishing agenda. I propose that Lyotard’s principle pertains a priori to the creative, unpredictable world of the stage, where “just gaming” (Lyotard and Thébaud’s 1985 book title) can always transform into “just playing.”27 To Lyotard’s and Van Dyck’s readings, however, I add that Greek theater’s alternative paralógos, in concert with 1960s political premises, plays off the meanings of the sinister parakrátos (the “parastate” or secretive “parallel state,” stressing the unseen actions and the hidden ground shared with Agamben’s state of exception), while invoking theater’s turn to the absurd (parálogo) to be able to do so publicly (see Chapter 1, pp. 55, 59).28

27 For further analysis of the theories of the French philosopher and author of The Postmodern Condition (1984 [1st edn 1979]), see Malpas (2003: esp. 31–32, 33, on paralogy). 28 Van Dyck takes into account the “local specificity” of the term “paralogy” in Greece. Introducing the connotative sense of “paralogical,” she clarifies that this sense “emphasizes the discursive process of undoing logic, rather than the absurd effect itself” (1998: 31).

Introduction

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Diana Taylor (1997 and 2000) has expanded the study of Western political theater to include Latin American drama that mobilized against Argentina’s military regime (1976–1983), and she has addressed the Argentine actors’ and producers’ deployment of Brecht to stage opposition and rebellion. Her pioneering book of 1997, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” discusses the seven-year period that began when Greece had started to recover from its traumatic “heptaetia.”29 Taylor has reconceptualized terror and performance offstage under a US-condoned regime, and has highlighted the role of actual theater affirming itself during crises. She also shows herself passionately committed to constructing “better scripts” as “better politics” (1997: p. xi). With comparative references to Taylor, I deploy performance and crisis studies and demonstrate how the new Greek plays strengthened a grassroots movement that expressed or reinvented ideas about leadership, mobilization, and strength in numbers—and that, similarly, used many of its own military metaphors. I see theater, then, not just as a tool to detect trauma and to fight problems, but also as a “weapon” meant to weaken or overthrow oppressive regimes (Taylor 2000: 176). “Revolutionary theatre,” claims Taylor, “was conceived as a pragmatic, educational, useful theatre, a practical exercise in learning about the revolutionary process” (176). Theater under Greece’s junta pushed the limits of official tolerance by modeling a dissident ideology. Under the Greek dictatorship, which prefigured conditions and reactions subsequently observed in Argentina, the early 1970s stage distinguished itself from cinema, music, and literature by laying bare the greater porosity of performance and politics, and by representing a hybrid discourse drawing on both art and ideology: theater and politics appeared to have been made of the same raw material, which the stage did not hesitate to disclose. Greek theater was intricately interwoven with the realm of political and social crises to an extent unattained or unattainable by any other artistic medium. The long tradition of nationalist-philological burdens that constrained Greek poetry and prose did not weigh down on new plays. Theater could go

29 Argentina’s military regime instituted a state of siege that went by the name of Proceso or the “National Reorganization Process,” which similarly paid lip service to order and legitimate procedure while enacting a regime of terror for full seven years. Feitlowitz (2011) delivers a searing account of Argentina’s Dirty War. See also Graham-Jones (2000: 60, 75–76, 128–130).

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Introduction

right to the heart of what it meant to act; it let play-acting become acting per se or acting politically. Theater posited a voice in a public forum, letting actors and audiences inhabit a multivocal stage. The script put history and the sociopolitical relations it contained out in the open. Additionally, theater presented a collective statement that responded to the need for the kind of moral clarity that students and youth were urgently seeking. True acting, hypokritike (ı ŒæØØŒ ), had to replace hypocrisy, hypokrisia (ı ŒæØ Æ). To this end, theater took a performative rather than a descriptive, let alone normative approach. Amid censorship and with only prerecorded broadcasts and/or vetted publications on offer, theater was still the quintessentially live show, capable of making the unpredictable and the “invisible visible once again” (Taylor 1997: 137). Acting on stage was far more than a pastime or a side activity; it was about promoting a new worldview, about transforming stage language into real action, about fighting for the power to create and represent, thereby providing an antidote to the many prohibitions of real life. Actors expected more from language and from their interaction with the spectators (and vice versa) than writers could ever have asked of their readers: key was the unabashed demand that, together, they bring a new world vision to life. Greek theater boosted the process of critical subject formation: it enacted the identity transformation of the subject as subordinate into the subject of co-actor. Through the mid-1970s, Greek performance broke cross-cultural ground and remained substantially different from other fields of cultural production for various reasons: rehearsing and negotiating performance before an audience, new plays became stage events that aimed to grow both the theater and resistance community. These plays rehearsed and reperformed revolution, turning the regime’s proclaimed “revolution” on its head and linking the local term to its complex global context. Reperformance became a process of constant reevaluation and polyphonic critique, an interactive and self-reflexive praxis, and ultimately a daunting force. Greek literature, which had traditionally been more contemplative, shared oppositional inclinations, but its community-growing functions were far more limited. When literature was raising awareness about the junta’s oppression, its success was replicated by the issuing of (slightly revised) new editions or sequels. When theater was mobilizing a growing public, it challenged with new, bolder reperformances and productions of provocative scripts defined by countercultural spaces,

Introduction

23

both literally novel spaces and intellectually “other” realms, as when theater went exploring absurdist and Brechtian drama. The junta’s “spectacular politics” resorted to censorship as another means of confining its public to a (mentally) more restricted space and of curtailing its ability to act. Significantly, early 1970s Greek plays preferred not to fall back on the locales of old, where space was legally restricted or most visibly conditioned (as in the productions of classical Greek tragedy mounted in prestigious outdoor settings). For many young Greek actors, absurdist and Brechtian theater was symbolic, not only of different aesthetics, but of an altogether different intellectual space. This path of innovation led to an artistic and mental heterotopia, which could, however, be transplanted to, or rewritten for, an informed Greek stage and be given concrete shape in new physical sites. These spaces, both literal and psychological, were of the utmost importance because they countered the Greek regime’s deliberate elimination or “disappearance” of the regular locales associated with civil society (an idea provocatively launched by Taylor’s 1997 title, Disappearing Acts; also 1997: 72, 99). In turn, Agamben’s state of exception marked out a space in which, once the rule of law had been annulled or “disappeared,” the citizens themselves disappeared into a “bare life.” Moreover, the upstart Greek government established its own, charged “spaces of exception,” in which normal, legitimate audiences were “disappeared” (Taylor 1997: 72), and where the remaining attendees instinctively displayed consent or “disappeared” their critical thinking skills. Theater, on the contrary, “presenced” its audiences and committed to a “reappearing” act (Taylor 1997: 61, 221). Therefore, Greek theater’s counteroffensive extended to the creation of its own augmented or “exceptional spaces,” where new ideas, heuristic guidelines, and production methods could be tested out and shared with actors and viewers. In its turn to new sites and modalities, alternative performance reorganized social space as political space in—literal and metaphorical—ways that literature could not possibly emulate. When the Colonels reassigned space as propaganda, theater rewrote it for socializing, mobilizing, and resisting. These oppositional thoughts, strategies, and relocations find meaning and expression in a theater of liberation (partly in the sense of a political theater from the developing world). Especially in junta-held countries like Greece and Argentina, theater and literature have done some of the work that more stable societies would expect history-writing to accomplish. Under the Greek

24

Introduction

dictatorship, when heavy prepublication censorship constrained literary works and histories, and when most literati and scholars chose not to publish, theater began to do more and more of historiography’s work. Penelope Papailias has remarked that Greek fiction has often stepped in for Greek history-writing. She makes important observations about the “reality-effect of Greek war literature,” or Greek readers’ openness to accept literature as history, especially when it pertains to periods such as the Civil War that have suffered from a lack of both public debate and historiographical critique. This perceived duty of Greek literature to supply history-writing with additional evidence also explains why novelists could face exclusion as if they were the writers of an unwanted history of a contested period (Papailias 2005: 144–145; also Taylor 1997: 211–212). The first years of the junta regime, however, must be excepted from Papailias’s elongated perspective on the postwar decades, not because the dynamics between literature and history changed, but because theater displaced fiction in the equation. This book argues that, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Greek theater assumed the role of fiction and offered itself up as a site of cultural and political renewal. Agamben and Taylor have provided me with an overarching theoretical framework with which to address the Colonels’ power-grab, their unrelenting attempts to extend their reach, their emergency measures and censorship legislation. These critics’ works also enrich my thinking about anti-Americanism, anticapitalism, and (Third Worldist) dissidence. With Taylor and Kornetis, I reconsider the formative impact of the worldwide counterculture cum performance culture of rebellion by looking beyond Greece to the stage dynamics created under other juntas and to Brecht’s centrality in grassroots political theater. While these concepts and terms now have global validity and reach, many of them were new to late 1960s Greece. Significantly, the Greek stage afforded the experience of speaking these charged terms, practicing them, and embodying them through rehearsal, (curtailed) performance, and ever-changing “final” performance. It also showed how internal conflicts and even ostensible failures—normally regarded as negative qualities—could still be constructive on the road from process to product. Taylor’s work helps me to better articulate how experimental resistance strategies may overlap with experimental theater strategies, and what is important about both for the international scholarly dialogue on performance studies. Focusing also on Brechtian theory and its implications for discussions

Introduction

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about rehearsing and enacting uprisings, Taylor’s research urges me to posit the comparative value of early 1970s Greek theater for crisis and cultural studies with a global outlook. With Van Dyck and Papailias, I value the relevance of the specifics of Greek cultural production, the burdens placed on evolving performances, youth’s counterculture, anticonsumerism, fiction, film, music, and activism’s growth by way of paralogy. I reassert, however, theater’s dynamic grasp beyond poetry or prose for being (in) a stage that was always merely the process of the developing production, that was always only as good as its next performance. Unlike what mainstream theater has come to signify in the West, I define theater in early 1970s Greece as follows: an act of performing that was forever a rehearsal, that performed extrovertly (to reach beyond the stage, the city, the country), that did not pursue perfection but was only a step in the process of enacting revolution. Thus Greece developed its own version of 1970s political theater, admittedly a theater of local liberation but one that also deployed an international discourse. Whereas cinema, literature, and the publishing world of the time still delivered finished products, arbitrarily perfected by a fixed point in time, the stage, unencumbered by pressure for finality, tried out ideas in group settings, bounced them off on its first, somewhat random audiences, then aimed to grow these audiences and to cultivate more committed groups of critical theater-goers. By taking its energy to the new spaces before attentive urban and cosmopolitan spectators, Greek theater also made clear that it did not intend to rehash “old” controversies, but sought, rather, a cross-fertilization between art and politics. Thus my study establishes the central role of theater in opposing the dictatorship, but widens into a study of Greek visual culture and cultural politics of the junta years, with references to cinema, the literary scene, and the publishing world.

THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK Is it true that your great Greek tragedies and tragi-comedies are now being performed daily in police stations? (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Forty Odd Questions for the Greek Regime and One Cry for Freedom,” 1973)

26

Introduction

Much has been written about the rule of the Colonels that pertains to the military, institutional, and political dimensions of the regime. The floundering economy of the early 1970s has frequently been noted, as have the junta’s disastrous foreign policy decisions. Diverse genres of literature and art have been discussed productively, but the domain of theater leaves ample room for expansion. The need to study Greek drama of the dictatorship period is all the more urgent since, arguably, the early 1970s flourishing of drama counterbalanced the absence of leftist prose fiction, up until a more subjective type of fiction started to proliferate in the late 1970s. Under the pressures of censorship and self-censorship, progressive writers gave up on publishing prose fiction for the first three years of the junta rule, while modern Greek playwriting evolved and thrived.30 By late 1972, a new “generation of the 1970s” had begun to emerge in poetry at least, with representatives such as Giannes Kontos and Giannes Patiles.31 Roderick Beaton identifies an important characteristic of this poetry that applied to many plays as well: they explored the “contemporary meeting of traditional Greek culture, including language, with the internationalism of pop culture and the electronic age” (1999: 265). As mentioned earlier, Van Dyck’s Kassandra and the Censors (1998) examines the poets of the 1970s generation, women’s writing, literary resistance, and the making of a feminist protest poetics. Van Dyck also shows how the mythical Cassandra, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and other female figures were adopted by the discourse of the opposition 30 Loukas Axelos reiterates that, until 1973, writers and publishers representing the Old Left did not take, or were not able to take, any significant initiatives to bring out new Greek books (1984: 44–46, 48, 52–53; 2008: 55). An exception was the 1972 book Plague (¸ Ø), which Andreas Phrankias wrote and published on his own account on the taboo subject of the prison camps of the Civil War. Ares Alexandrou began writing his best known work, the novel The Mission Box ( ŒØØ ), in 1966, but he only published it in 1974. The second, commercial edition of the insubordinate novel The Third Wedding Wreath ( æ  
çØ), by Kostas Tachtses (Hermes, 1970 [1st edn 1962]), became a success (Papanikolaou 2010b: 185). Giorgos Ioannou’s collection of short stories entitled The Sarcophagus (1971) struck a chord as well. The censors, however, were less likely to frown on short stories and one-act plays, which were deemed more “innocuous.” Beaton (1999: 274–276), Katsan (2013: 2), and Kotzia (2006: passim) discuss the general impasse in the realm of prose fiction under the junta. See also the special issue of ArcheioTaxio 14 (2012); Argyriou (1988); Chatze-ioannou, To Vema, April 26, 1987; and Mackridge and Yannakakis (2004: 9–10). Delegiannes (2008) focuses on post-1974 literary reflections of the 1960s. 31 See Alexiou (2001) and Beaton (1999: 264–269). Calotychos states that the phrase was coined by the poet Vasiles Steriades (Calotychos 2003: 227, 235 n. 38).

Introduction

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(1998: 100–139). She stresses that the Colonels, with their entrenched ideas about cultural unity and ideological clarity, could not cope with the ambiguities of allusion, allegory, or uncertain meaning—a weakness that the opposition was quick to exploit with the countertools of complexity and heterogeneity. Stage practitioners soon found ways to redeploy the very premises or constituents of theater: action, contrast or conflict, and disparateness. Literature, drama, music, and cinema muddled the tidy categories that the dictators and their censors imposed on Greece. Dimitris Papanikolaou investigates popular music and literature in his 2007 study, Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece. Maria Oikonomou (2008) studies the intellectual exchanges and the aesthetic debates between French and (expatriate) Greek artists in the formative decades of 1950–1970. The topic of the antidictatorial struggle has only recently been integrated into standard scholarly narratives of the Greek past. Research in this area is, however, still heavily dependent on mixed memoirs and dispersed archival collections.32 Scholars have also scrutinized the state-determined value system or the single cultural vision that the Colonels imposed and that continued to hold sway (Meletopoulos 1996). Kornetis (2006 and 2013) has researched the student movement and youth culture of the junta years with great scholarly precision. Earlier academic studies on these subjects were lacking, with the exception of the thorough analysis by Olympios Daphermos, The Antidictatorial Student Movement, 1972–1973 (1999, in Greek), who downplays, however, the students’ cultural life.33 Kornetis and also Katsapes (2013, in Greek) rightly place the 32 Brief descriptions of archival collections have been presented by the contributors to Dromoi tes Historias (issue 62 of April 22, 2011), the historical section of the Greek newspaper Dromos. See also issue 61 of April 16, 2011. The 1970s saw a spate of books in English that took the form of personal or political memoirs and that cast infamy on the Colonels. Some of these books bear dramatic titles: Greece in the Dark, by Kevin Andrews (1980); A Piece of Truth, by Amalia Fleming (1972); Eyewitness in Greece, by John Katris (1971); I Was Born Greek, by Melina Mercouri (1971); Escape from Amorgos, by George Mylonas (1974); Andreas Papandreou’s Democracy at Gunpoint (1970); Margaret Papandreou’s Nightmare in Athens (1970); and Helen Vlachos’s House Arrest (1970). Bayard Stockton’s Phoenix with a Bayonet (1971) offers a contemporary view that is sympathetic to the dictators. Princeton University’s library copy of the latter has the Greek word for “fascist” written all over it. 33 See also Angeles and Daphermos (2005). Kretikos (1996) discusses a range of student and resistance organizations. Liakos (1988) and Zapheires (2000 and 2011) describe the formation of youth organizations in Thessaloniki. Papadogiannis (2009) presents youth movements of the mid- to late 1970s.

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Introduction

Greek student movement in the paradigm of the international “Long Sixties” and argue for an intricate global network of cultural and intellectual communication. The Greek students, in effect, prolonged the 1960s by staging their most conspicuous protests in 1973. Overall, cultural life under the Colonels has received minimal attention, whether in the regular historical studies, in personal memoirs, or in the current press coverage. Even though the theater culture has been recognized for its importance, it remains to be studied in all its complexity and particularity.34 Most general histories of the dictatorship have little to say about the nature and development of contemporary dramaturgy. Studies intent on producing the facts of this era shy away from its sustained engagement with theater, with the result that the odd play is at best reduced to the role of documenting a given historical or political specificity. The topic of theater under the Colonels has only recently found its way into doctoral dissertations, namely those of Philip Hager (2008) and Antonia Karaoglou (2009, in Greek).35 I share the objectives of these two young scholars to provide 34 Typical articles such as the one by Georgios Anastasiades, entitled “The ‘Culture’ of the Junta” and included in the 2001 special issue of Eleutherotypia, barely mention theater life. The same is true of the special section of Ho Polites 99 (April 2002), entitled “Culture during the Years of the Dictatorship: Interruptions and Continuation.” Exceptions are Loverdou, To Vema, April 20, 1997, and Papanikolaou, Ta Nea, April 17–18, 2010 (2010a; expanded in 2010b). The recent work of Thomas Doulis (2011) focuses mainly on the dissident print culture and on the resistance enacted by Greek intellectuals at home and abroad, but leaves the domain of theater unexplored. 35 Before the completion of Hager’s dissertation, no monograph in English had even tried to address the evolution of Greek theater under the junta and its literary, theatrical, and cultural significance. Hager’s dissertation is the first full-length study in English and is entitled “From the Margin to the Mainstream: The Production of Politically-engaged Theatre in Greece during the Dictatorship of the Colonels (1967–1974)” (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2008). The Greek dissertation of Antonia Karaoglou sheds—long-overdue—light on Thessaloniki’s theater life: “Theater in Thessaloniki during the Years of the Seven-Year Dictatorship” (2009). Hager analyzed seven plays, which were performed between February 1970 and July 1973: Giorgos Skourtes, The Nannies; Iakovos Kambanelles, The Penal Colony (an adaptation of Kafka’s short story, In the Penal Colony; original title: In der Strafkolonie, 1919); Paulos Matesis, Biochemistry; Petros Markares, The Story of Ali Retzo; Loula Anagnostaki, Antonio or The Message; Kambanelles, Our Grand Circus; and Kostas Mourselas, Oh Dad, What a World!. All these plays premiered in Athens, except for Mourselas’s play which opened in Thessaloniki. Hager’s dissertation is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory (to postulate fields of power as well as a resistance field in light of Bourdieu’s concept of cultural production) and by the notion of Hellenikoteta, which Vangelis Calotychos succinctly defines as “a marriage of Hellenism and aestheticism” (2003: 161). Roilou (2009) offers a comprehensive reflection on Hellenikoteta and Greek performances of ancient drama. Bourdieu’s

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29

an in-depth perspective on the theater history of the junta years and add my own study as a complementary one. I have deliberately looked beyond the analytical categories and selections of plays and stage companies that they have adopted. Also, I aim to balance the critical demands of reconstructing theatrical experiments with my attempt to draw up an appropriate cultural-historical framework that relates Greece to the late 1960s youth revolution. At times, however, my efforts intersect with those of Hager and Karaoglou. This book analyzes important stage productions whose broader sociopolitical themes manifest themselves in a variety of contexts that, against the Colonels’ wishes, connected Greece to the counterculture of the Western world. Chapter 1 provides a concise political and theater-historical overview, to then discuss the turn to the New Greek Theater and the role of youth and student activism of the 1960s through early 1970s. It defines New Greek Theater as a performative movement that opened up oppositional platforms or “free” spaces fostering a radical critique. The alternative stages allowed young playwrights, directors, and actors to perform democracy in a state of tyranny. Thus Chapter 1 argues that early 1970s Greek theater was situated at the confluence of four factors, some of which overlap: its dialogue with absurdist and Brechtian drama, the function of emerging Greek plays as sites of cultural and political renewal, international youth’s dissidence, and the movement to “occupy” alternative, liberated spaces of rebellion. It is, however, nearly impossible to

theory on the importance of symbolic and cultural capital in the field of cultural production can be conveniently accessed in English through the edition and introduction by Randal Johnson (Bourdieu 1993). Karaoglou examines the full repertoire produced by Thessaloniki’s two leading theater companies during the dictatorship years (or a total of some eighty productions): the State Theater of Northern Greece (its main stage and also its Experimental Stage and New Stage) and the Theatrical Workshop (Theatriko Ergasteri) of “Techne” (founded in January 1970). In their own choices of plays to discuss, both scholars prove that diverse narratives can be told and a variety of plays can be adduced to illustrate Greek theater activity under the Colonels. There is a wealth of theater plays to choose from, and I have tried to avoid, as much as possible, examining the same plays as my predecessors. Also, it is important that this remain a short book that can be both analytical and informative about an otherwise very large and multifaceted subject. Konstantza Georgakake (2009) supplies a long list of the production data on the approximately 350 modern Greek plays that were staged during the dictatorship years, but the overwhelming majority of these are comedies and musicals. Similarly useful is the Guide to Modern Greek Dramaturgy by Georgakake and Puchner (2009, in Greek).

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determine which factor or factors contributed most to the appearance of New Greek Theater. If, however, Greek dramaturgy’s subsequent decades and also other geographical locales (such as Argentina’s sites of performance studied by Taylor 1997) offer any indications, the second and the related fourth factor may, arguably, best explain the long-term impact and appeal of this theater and its allied counterculture. Chapter 1 further prepares for the key themes developed in the subsequent chapters and reiterated in the Conclusion, defining the path of the New Greek Theater as the growth of a political movement. It fleshes out the dynamics of this theater’s production methods and experiences and also its relations to the new mobilizing structures of student and youth groups. These relations define independent, radical performance as a vector for a totalizing experience: student audiences did not passively watch plays but took the energy of revolutionary performances back into the streets, thus abetting the formation of a resistance movement. Chapter 2 contextualizes the phenomenon of the military regime’s censorship legislation and opens up new and unexpected entry-points into the world of the alternative stage. Because this legislation was seen as a direct affront to the freedoms of speech and expression, it drew ample attention in the foreign press (allowing me to incorporate references to articles from The New York Times, The Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde). Theater of the dictatorship era had to serve a variety of sociopolitical purposes that determined how past history and contemporary conditions could be portrayed. Run-ins with the junta censors became a fact of life for many playwrights, directors, and actors. Chapter 2, therefore, examines the specific constraints of the censorship rule under which the Greek stage had to operate. It debates the paired issues of censorship and self-censorship and shows how the regime’s control mechanisms also affected the performance of the press, television, cinema, literature, and criticism of the arts. It further addresses the paradoxical mixtures of the uses of the classics and contemporary concerns, noting ancient tragedy’s resonance under the junta. A historically layered reflection follows, treating the pervasive reappropriations of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the longest classical attack of a lone but defiantly suffering hero against an abusive superpower. Tensions and clashes over the function of art and over who controlled the ancient legacy marked the dictatorship era perhaps more than any other period in Greek history. By the early 1970s, however, productions of modern Greek plays

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managed to better negotiate the performative realm in which the relationship between state and subject was constructed—and contested: the stage favored greater dissemination of information and enhanced cultural and political alertness. The public role of modern Greek theater became more pronounced as the regime somewhat loosened the grip of censorship. To argue this, the latter half of Chapter 2 adduces specific examples of plays and also analyzes the case study of The Trombone by Marios Pontíkas. The Greek military rulers constrained Greek theater but wanted to be seen cultivating other and related forms of the arts. Seeking validation, they stage-managed their own performances and festivals (giving new meaning to the many connections that the Greek language makes between performance, calculated pretense, and conspiracy plot, starting with “Operation Prometheus”).36 Those who did not collaborate when asked found themselves in what Taylor has called “bad scripts” or political scenarios (1997: 183). The first half of Chapter 3 analyzes the regime’s contentious efforts to perform its legitimacy: it presents a detailed picture of the state-sponsored, nationalist spectacles that brokered Greek history through the ages for citizens whose role was limited to that of applauding spectators. It discusses the “Festivals of the Martial Virtue of the Greeks” and focuses the longer cultural-historical perspective of the preceding chapter on an event of regular recurrence in a similar, stultifying form. Fusing theater and the nation’s rituals, these festivals constituted identity-forging acts of performance and were the fascist equivalent of classicizing, historicizing, or patriotic drama in its reactionary definition.37 They gave a fixed form, content, and space

36 The historian Konstantinos Tsoukalas promptly responded with his book by the aptly chosen title of The Greek Tragedy (originally published in English in 1969, to reach an international reading public). 37 I do not label either the Colonels’ dictatorship or Metaxas’s rule as strictly “fascist” but prefer to characterize both regimes as ultra-right-wing, reactionary in their ideology (a partly secular, partly religious fundamentalism), violently anticommunist, authoritarian and brutal in their methods, but populist in their rhetoric. Voglis notes that Metaxas tried hard to mobilize a mass fascist movement but did not succeed (2002: 39); also Kallis (2007: 234). Bregianne (1999: 171–172) and Carabott (2003) discuss the theatrical qualities of Metaxas’s rhetoric. See Clogg for a respected historian’s positioning of the Greek junta within a political spectrum that incorporates fascism (1972: 51–53). On p. 53, Clogg calls the definition of “pseudo-fascist paternalist dictatorship” perhaps the most apposite label for the junta rule. He notes obvious parallels, too, with what has been dubbed “clerical-military semi-fascism.”

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to the otherwise diffuse workings of the military government’s ideology. Thus Chapter 3 allows insight into the dictators’ official attempts to regenerate the nation and to redefine their own takeover against a backdrop of spectacularity: the usurpers imposed their own “society of the spectacle,”38 which, aided by the mechanisms of terror and torture, conditioned their audiences, telling them when, where, and especially how to respond. The chapter unmasks the hegemonic side of a theater industry that shaped public and national culture from the perspective of the regime itself. In short, both Chapter 2 and the first half of Chapter 3 show what Greek theater was up against. The second half of Chapter 3 analyzes Our Grand Circus ( 
ªº Æ  æŒ ) by Iakovos Kambanelles. This landmark play presented a revisionist inversion of the primary motifs of the junta spectacles: it entered into an agon with the regime’s nationalist conception of the past and demythified the official grand narrative. The chapter assesses the play’s production process and illustrates its carnivalesque authority against the backdrop of the tightening censorship restrictions of late 1973. Our Grand Circus is a good example of a play that qualifies for that rather overworked label of “political play”: it exposed tragic tensions in Greek history and delivered incriminating truths about the current rulers. The production’s arresting take on Greek history and, through history, on contemporary circumstances, raised important questions about performance Kallis assesses the Metaxas regime in light of these terms (2007). Roger Griffin has isolated “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” or “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” as the fundamental ideological element of fascism (1998: 13). This definition of an ultra-nationalism that looks to the past in its quest for regeneration while also craving popular support applies to the Greek dictatorship as well. For a US diplomat’s perspective, see Robert Keeley (2010: 172–173). 38 The reference pertains to The Society of the Spectacle (Paris, 1967), written by the French critic and activist Guy Debord, which was translated into Greek in 1972. This neo-Marxist critique of capitalist culture attacked modern society’s alienating spectacularity and explained, more specifically, that society had turned into (nefarious, capitalist-driven) spectacle that co-opted and commodified all else. Because life had become spectacle, it had started to annihilate human dignity. Greek state politics, too, had become an ongoing spectacle, presenting endless photo opportunities for the dictators—as a look at the television news blurbs or the journal Epikaira of the time confirms. Debord’s theory influenced radical youth movements of the late 1960s through 1970s and still proves its usefulness to Hager’s analysis (2008) and to my own notion of the authoritarian nature of the Colonels’ spectacle: the normative spectacle state enacted the power of representation by staging its self-congratulatory festivals and by manipulating the mass media and surveillance practices. Theater and public life necessarily overlapped.

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and the past, that is, about the former’s ability to construct alternative histories and thus to spawn radicalism. In the immediate aftermath of the student uprising at the Polytechnic University of Athens (November 1973), the immensely popular production delivered an acute sense of theater reflecting (on) history repeating itself. This continuous unfolding of repressive history further demystified the past and posited its performative demands for a revolution in the present. Revolutions tend to assess the past anew, and modern Greek theater was a catalyst to that process. Other plays, too, started to subvert canonical representations of Greek history to extend rebellious gestures and youthful optimism. Public mobilization around theater plays or issues of stage censorship engendered a political culture that fueled dissidence: events onstage and offstage spilled over into the public’s new reality. Plays such as Our Grand Circus rallied activist forces, even though other, external factors (among them the 1974 Cyprus crisis) provoked the regime’s final overthrow. Chapter 4 digs deeper into the problem and the solution of foreign influences shaping modern Greek dramaturgy. It argues that Greek playwrights creatively rewrote, rather than imitated, foreign material for the target culture of a state in emergency. The chapter first focuses on The Nannies of Giorgos Skourtes, which was produced by Karolos Koun’s Art Theater in February and March of 1970. The play is a compelling specimen of the New Greek Theater that raised consciousness among different groups (Koun’s older as well as younger audiences) and across various genres (integrating echoes from Beckett but also from the Karaghiozis shadow theater). The play’s analysis centers on the themes of capitalism, money, and materialism, which Skourtes aptly defined as scourges of the time exacerbating human alienation and the tyrannical subjugation of one person by another. Other modern Greek plays discussed in Chapter 4 deliver, with more absurdist methods, satirical or near-existentialist onslaughts on capitalist oppression, social conformism, and moral complacency. No discussion about modern Greek theater, however, can be complete without at least a brief introduction to the indelible impact of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Many performers and writers of the junta era sought to produce revolutionary art and literature after the model of Brecht. The second half of Chapter 4 discusses a Brechtian play of Greek make: The Story of Ali Retzo of 1965, which became the signature play of the young Petros Markares and was staged by the Free Theater in 1971 and again in 1972. Markares had been among

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the first to introduce 1960s Greece to Brecht’s theories of a socially responsible and historically grounded theater. Up until the year of its stage premiere, however, The Story of Ali Retzo had not received the attention it deserved. Distancing itself from the stilted Greek cultural establishment (with the National Theater as an iconic body), the—not coincidentally named—Free Theater (Eleuthero Theatro) made an auspicious debut. It challenged the orthodoxies that limited the canonical Greek repertoire (whether through commercial priorities or traditionalism) and deconstructed the old hierarchies of the stage world, and it did so with a play that was called more Brechtian than Greek. One could therefore turn the criticism of young playwrights, directors, and actors losing themselves in foreign fashions inside out: because the closed Greek theater world had, up until 1970, extended very few opportunities to young playwrights and producers and had become even more exclusive under the junta’s censorship, the young actors’ turn to the foreign and non-indigenous was the only available way to break with the bleak domestic past. The production of The Story of Ali Retzo exposed tales of exploitation and treated this dramatic material in a novel, less recognizable or “distanced” mode. It conveyed a sense of the urgent issues pertaining to politics, society, and performance that needed to be reevaluated under the dictatorship. Marginalization, therefore, transformed itself into radical empowerment when the Free Theater creatively adopted the foreign, or the realm in which radicalization had already been able to prove itself. Conversing with foreign dramaturgy was a viable way, too, to transcend the ideological antitheses between the (Old) Left and the Right, in which Greek cultural life had been mired for decades and which persisted in the government’s Cold War rhetoric. This section of Chapter 4 analyzes the Free Theater’s performance experiment as a collaborative act and countercultural intervention. The young stage troupe’s practice of “collective directorship” modeled a new ethos of citizenship, privileging issues of social ethics and political morality: it engaged with questions of civic responsibility and undermined the absolutist assertions and capitalist motivations of the state.39 The section follows how personal and collective histories

39 Bradby and Sparks present Ariane Mnouchkine’s experimental Théâtre du Soleil (founded 1963) as a “model collective” that exerted a profound influence (1997: 21). In 1968, members of this theater group agreed to take an equal salary. Bradby traces the method of collaborative creation, or création collective, which reduces the power of the playwright and the producer, via Mnouchkine (especially her production of 1789)

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entered into the laborious creative process that became the trademark of the Free Theater, which developed into a thiasos that initiated its actors into a common cause and engaged them totally as people. This thiasos or committed theater group stood at the forefront of Greek theater’s blossoming of the early 1970s. The study of its operations, strategies, and choices opens a unique window onto the internal world of student and actor communities. The Free Theater invented novel acting codes, infused traditional dramatic paradigms with new contents, and elicited the kind of debate that bridged aesthetics and politics. Masters of consciousness-raising, its performers challenged spectators to extend their critical look not just to the process of play production but also to their own society and their individual role within it. They negotiated issues of personal freedom and insisted on expanding political rights while fostering Greek youth’s dialogue with the global movements of the 1960s. The Free Theater’s practice of collective directorship, therefore, functions as an interpretive key that invites detailed analysis but that also raises further questions, especially about the actors’ roles as activists and about the methods of Brechtian theater versus Greek dramaturgical traditions. The choice of one Brechtian-style production, however, does not alleviate the need to illuminate the Greek reception of Brecht’s experimental productions, dissident poems, and theoretical writings as a whole.40 However, given the recurring and wide-ranging discussions about foreign influences in Greek dramaturgy, it seemed worthwhile to attempt to hang such theoretical debates on a more concrete case study.

SOURCES AND RESEARCH CHALLENGES The plays singled out here show the value of studying theater on the margins of Europe. The modern Greek works presented in Chapters 3 back to Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble (1991: 142, 191, 195). See also Karaoglou (2009: 295–297); Nitsos (1973b); and Soldatos (1974). 40 This need, however, has been admirably addressed by Dimitris Asimakoulas, whose multiple studies provide a robust analysis of Brecht’s reception in Greece during the dictatorship period, with emphasis on the opposition’s deployment of Brecht to voice dissidence and to stage rebellion. Asimakoulas pays ample attention also to the important role that publishers and bookshops played in the dissemination of foreign-imported reading material among young people growing up under the regime.

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and 4 are not exclusive preoccupations but operate more like conduits leading to a gamut of cultural and intellectual issues. My preference has gone to high-quality independent plays, which appealed most to the younger generations of the time. These works have been published and some (such as Skourtes’s Nannies) have even been translated into English. The detailed discussions provide the reader with a chance to vicariously sit in the audience and to experience the plays’ time-specific dimension. My quotations from these works, too, are motivated by my intent to make them better known to Englishspeaking audiences.41 This general strategy, however, should not 41 The standard introductions to modern Greek literature have only minimally treated the subject of 19th- and 20th-century Greek theater. The sections on theater under the junta are woefully short (Vitti 2001: 394). Beaton pays regrettably little attention to Greek drama in his standard study of modern Greek literature. His argument is based on the lack of quality in pre-1940s theater (1999: 17). Borghart invokes a similar rationale (2012). The number of book-length studies in English on (aspects of ) modern Greek dramaturgy is small but growing. In Modern Greek Theater: Roots and Blossoms (1982), Aliki Bacopoulou-Halls places her analysis of contemporary Greek drama next to those periods that have received much more scholarly attention: Renaissance and Cretan drama, the revivals of classical Greek tragedy, the Karaghiozis shadow theater, and the plays of Kostes Palamas and Nikos Kazantzakis. In the view of Bacopoulou-Halls, too, contemporary Greek dramaturgy was the product of the fervor of the 1960s through early 1970s. Her own work shows that the study of this drama began to be valued only when 1980s postmodernism belatedly caught up with trendsetting modern Greek theater itself. For balanced surveys of Greek dramaturgy geared toward an international reading public, see the chapters by Bacopoulou-Halls: “Greece,” in the first volume of Don Rubin’s The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre (1994: 401–426), and “The Theatre System of Greece” (1998). In 1999, Linda and Kostas Myrsiades published Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance: Complexity and Construction in Greek Guerrilla Theater. This book unearths the facts and even some of the texts of the leftist guerrilla theater “of the mountains.” This stage thrived in the 1940s but had since been neglected by nearly all Greek theater historians. My own Theatre of the Condemned (2011) examines the forgotten productions of classical tragedies that were staged by political prisoners of the Greek Civil War. The last two books approach contemporary Greek dramaturgy from an oblique angle, to unravel the negotiation processes that the modernist canon underwent in mid-century. Some special issues of journals treat modern Greek theater: Acteurs Auteurs 81–82 (1990); the recent L’Annuaire théâtral (2010); an anthology of plays in The Charioteer 26 (1984); and two issues of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 14, no. 1 (1996) and 25, no. 2 (2007), both initiatives of Stratos Constantinidis. Constantinidis’s concise book-length study, entitled Modern Greek Theatre: A Quest for Hellenism (2001), offers a very readable analysis of modern Greek drama leading up to the 1970s. The author makes a convincing case for the importance of this theater to Greek and international audiences. He approaches the emerging drama of the modern Greek nation-state from the purview of a feminist and multiculturalist inquiry. Constantinidis’s study again reminds us that more work remains to be done, particularly on the past five decades of Greek play production.

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obscure modern Greek theater’s enormous expansion and decentralization in the early 1970s, the burdens of which were shouldered by new troupes working at great risk and without sufficient resources. The quantitative wealth of Greek drama of the 1960s through mid1970s complicates the selection of plays analyzed in this book. The chapters, therefore, make concise references to many more stage companies and works, which responded to the call for sociopolitical relevance in more oblique ways but still strengthened theater’s part in raising awareness. Many of these plays, however, have not yet been published, let alone studied in depth, limiting the options for perspicacious readers to return to the original scripts and sources.42 Thus the chapters document the state of Greek dramaturgy at pivotal moments in its rapid, post-1968 evolution, as it was mustering its forces to become a legitimate, broader forum of exchange about history, society, and politics.43 42

Publication of modern Greek plays was often long delayed. Published plays are not readily available in the United States or remain relatively unknown outside of Greece. Even fewer revues or epitheoreseis were ever published. Some revues have only recently met with new interest (and plans for publication). Many more original Greek plays deserve translation in full because they hold the keys to an era during which the world of the stage deeply impacted on society. Also, when more published texts and translations of these plays will be available, they will make it possible for younger scholars to engage in their own analyses of theater and culture under the junta. 43 Recent books in English on modern Greek drama of the 1960s through 1970s are few and far between. A comprehensive, theoretically-informed study devoted exclusively to this, perhaps the most formative period in 20th-century Greek theater history, remains lacking. Still missing, too, are English-language monographs that shed a truly aesthetic light on key figures among Greek stage directors and playwrights, such as Karolos Koun and Iakovos Kambanelles. On the latter, see the Greeklanguage studies by Giorgos Pephanes, entitled Iakovos Kambanelles: Explorations and Approaches to His Theatrical Work (2000), and Walter Puchner, Landscapes of the Soul and Myths of Polity: The Theatrical Universe of Iakovos Kambanelles (2010a). See also Chrysochoos and Reniere (2006); Horton (1984b); and Pephanes (2005). Delveroude provides a concise but richly illustrated history of the Greek theater from 1922 through 1940 in the multi-volume series History of Greece in the Twentieth Century (2003, in Greek). Kangelare follows up by covering the years 1941–1953 in the same series (2007, in Greek). Useful, too, is the chapter that deals directly with the stage of the 1950s and 1960s: Spathes’s “Theater: Reconstruction and Heyday of the Greek Stage” (2003b, in Greek, but the theater of the dictatorship is treated in only two pages, 255–256; also Spathes 2010). On the interwar period, see also Vasileiou (2004). Glykeria Kalaïtze’s comprehensive PhD dissertation (2001, in Greek) places 1940s dramaturgy in its artistic and historical contexts and devotes entire chapters and chapter sections to the revue spectacle of the war years and of the euphoria of the liberation, the Theater of the Mountains, the 1942 foundation of Koun’s Art Theater, the 1940s history of the National Theater, and the progressive initiatives that newly founded stage companies took by the mid- to later 1940s. N. Papandreou (2002)

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All too often, theater’s political function is assumed to be selfevident, but it remains to be demonstrated and theorized. The theory and also the praxis of Western European political theater have been subjected to extensive analysis by, for instance, Michael Patterson (2003). A similar study that places modern Greek playwrights in the context of concurring international artistic and political developments remains lacking. Such a study must necessarily navigate the fluid concept of “political theater” (a term that often connotes a theater of agitation and propaganda, or “agitprop”) and must cover the supporting roles of television programs, daily newspapers, periodicals, public and scholarly lectures, revival productions of ancient drama, or academia and the media and print culture at large. Most of the articles and book chapters in Greek fail to consider the stagings that were contemporary with the production that they discuss, or the range of reviews generated by the production, or the historical and political conditions that shaped those reviews. Often, too, information deduced from later-in-life interviews with playwrights, directors, actors, and artists has not entered the discussion of the historical productions. Under the usual circumstances, written and especially visual source materials from the time of the productions remain scarce, and the steps of the censors’ interference are sometimes hard to retrace. With news reportage severely limited and controlled by the regime, the quality of the theater critiques of the period leaves a lot to be desired. Whereas some older reviews unabashedly displaced aesthetic analysis with political discussion, critics laboring under studies the 1950s Greek “alternative theater” (his characterization in the chapter’s title). With her chapter, “Theater 1974–2000: A Contemporary Artistic Achievement,” Helene Varopoulou provides a succinct overview of Greek dramaturgy of the last quarter of the 20th century (2003, in Greek). Mauromoustakos surveys modern Greek theater of the 1940s through the end of the century (2005, in Greek, with very detailed bibliography), but devotes relatively few pages to the plays of the junta period. Grammatas’s survey of 20th-century Greek drama focuses almost exclusively on playwrights (Loula Anagnostaki and Strates Karras) representing the Theater of the Absurd (2002: 1:203–207, 401–410, in Greek) but leaves underexplored other trends of the formative decade 1964–1974 (in his section “Transcending Greekness”). While fully engaged with playwriting and directing himself, Michaelides wrote one of the earliest studies of the emerging dramatists, but he never updated his “prosopographic” work (1975). See further Kotzamani (2001); Lygizos (1987); Puchner (1990 and 2010b); and Velissariou (1996–1997). Readers seeking additional information about Greek theater logistics, its modalities, records, and archives may now consult Anna Mauroleon’s handy manual, Research in Theater: Questions of Methodology (2010, in Greek).

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junta censorship resorted to various levels of double-speak to convey political viewpoints that they hoped to pass by the censors.44 My study aims to evoke the visual culture of theater, pairing it with an examination of the military regime’s own production of public spectacle. Such an approach requires reading techniques and strategies that differ substantially from those developed for analyzing written documents (Postlewait 2009). The reader will, hopefully, bear with me as I introduce newspaper reports and theater reviews, references to scripts, pamphlets, playbills, photographs, posters, and other promotional materials, television blurbs, audio cassettes, and videotapes. I also carefully draw from popular anecdotes, good and bad poetry, speeches and official reports, memoirs, personal accounts, and oral testimonies and microhistories. For an in-depth study of the responses of the contemporary press, I extensively used Greek newspaper archives and the holdings of the Athens Theater Museum and Archive. The recent documentary directed by Panteles Voulgares, The Chronicle of the Dictatorship (1967–1974) (2013, in Greek), proved to be helpful as well. The thirteen-part Greek television series produced by Photos Lambrinos, with the parodic title of It’s a Junta: Will It Pass? (2011–2012), consists of restored state news bulletins or Epikaira of the dictatorship era and shows how the regime touted its achievements (also Lambrinos 2011). These Epikaira or “‘educational’ film journals” were prepared and distributed by the General Secretariat of Press and Information, which featured them prominently on television and also pressured movie theater owners to play them before regularly scheduled films (Botsiou 2006: 292). Sources such as Lambrinos’s series let us deepen our understanding based on

44 Many of the research problems and complications that I noted in my book of 2000 apply a priori to the context of theater under the junta and they, therefore, bear summarizing: the lack of substantive reviews (or the sheer loss of records), the power and partisanship of some theater critics, the convoluted institutional structures and hierarchies, the politicized nature of the summer drama festivals, the commercialization of the print culture of popular plays and translations, the allocation of state prizes, the favoritism that determined the selection of actors, artists, or plays and that guided subsidy policies, etc. Hager discusses Greek critics’ role as gatekeepers of the hegemonic tradition (2008: 84–88). Karaoglou notes the discrepancy between the large numbers of reviews that speak to productions staged by the State Theater of Northern Greece and the very few that focus on the accomplishments of the Theatrical Workshop (2009: 299). Demetriades (2010) and Hadjikyriacou (2013: 87–91) have recently probed the Greek star system.

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multi-archival research in written records with a finer-grained study of (sanitized) images from daily life. For me, the time of the Colonels is an object of study but I hasten to acknowledge that many of my informants have actually lived it—and that there is a difference. Today’s interviewees remember the circumstances in which they first discovered the radical modern Greek plays and started to follow their actors and authors; they nostalgically recall the defiant spirit of youth’s assertion that they and their friends found in alternative theaters. Theater-going with one’s parea became something of a cult activity, and it entailed trying to spot and skirt the junta agents, who might ask for names and papers. Nonetheless, questions about the dictatorship era still raise suspicions about the questioner, especially about the interviewer with an American affiliation and with an obvious interest in the political realm. This realm includes American foreign relations, the history of the Greek mass media and their assimilation of Western ideas and cultural goods, and Greek politics and culture of the twentieth century at large. My conversations with playwrights, directors, actors, artists, and audience members aim to provide insight into Greek dramaturgy from a variety of vantage points, which may enrich future scholarly work as well. Also, they help us comprehend how individual as well as collective responses to certain productions are to be measured and evaluated. A few transcripts of interviews conducted by contemporaries of the 1960s and 1970s were published in journals and periodicals of the time, and they constitute a valued resource. The popular journal Theatro, issued by leftist editor and theater aficionado Kostas Nitsos, was a front runner when it came to publishing interviews, reviews of experimental plays, and progressive commentaries and essays. It also made important contemporary scripts available in print, with the playwrights’ permissions, and devoted regular, constructive articles to the new troupes’ ideology and praxis.45 This lively forum reflects far better than the

45 Gerasimidou (1997) and Kotanidis (2011: 88, 150). In addition to Markares’s play, The Story of Ali Retzo (published in the March–April issue of 1965), Nitsos published the full text of a classicizing but antiroyalist modern Greek play, When the Atreids . . . (ΌÆ Ø `æ

 . . . ), written by the young Vangeles Katsanes (in the May–June issue of 1964). Markares and Katsanes appeared at a time when Greek cultural life allotted young playwrights hardly any space to earn recognition. Nitsos’s influential Theatro ran from 1961 through spring 1967 and, in a second series, from 1973 to 1981. He was forced to suspend the journal’s circulation immediately after the coup (testimony by Nitsos, July 7, 2000). Nitsos’s Theatro must be distinguished from

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newspaper press that plays were debated not only for their artistic and aesthetic strengths but also as expressions of political and philosophical questioning. The annual volumes of the broadly conceived chronicle of cultural life, Chroniko, issued from 1970 onward by the dynamic group of artists and writers associated with the Cultural Center “Hora” (“Time” or “Hour”) of Asantour Bacharian, confirm that the arts, and theater no less, were steeped in the ideological and political ferment of the dictatorship years. These volumes strike home, too, how many cultural events were still happening and how varied in nature they were. As was the case with Theatro, several of Chroniko’s issues were banned by the junta censors. But these two venues left an important message: among the ways to express dissidence was the commitment to printing quality articles and scripts. Many sources sustain the ironizing tone in which the retelling of the history of the junta years has been conducted, in personal memoirs and literary works alike. Historian Antonis Liakos has identified the pervasive irony of the “historiographical” record as an ongoing problem.46 I cannot do justice to all the (strong) opinions, tall stories, popular poems, telltale songs, skits, jokes, or gems of street wisdom that countless Greek informants have shared with me. What they do prove, however, is that the Greeks kept up a sense of humor and an attitude of resilience even through the worst days of the repression. The anecdotal evidence provides me with a means to occasionally describe the world of unofficial politics or the micro-rebellions of the Greeks’ daily lives: more than one informant insisted that the Colonels were essentially “laughed out of office.” Laughing at the periodical by the same title published by Theodoros Kritas (from 1957 through 1969), which took a more guarded stance and presented less criticism and analysis but more raw production data and pictures of performances. The periodical Theatrika, launched by Giorgos Chatzedakes and Helene Papasoteriou in 1971 (monthly from 1972 on), provided information on contemporary Western European dramaturgy and on modern Greek productions of representative plays. 46 Liakos (2012: 3); also Liakos (2010: 89) and Liakos and Papatheodorou (2002). Examples are the humorous and self-critical political memoirs of Nikos Bistes such as his Moving on and Reassessing (2010, in Greek); the semi-fictional and self-ironizing work of Tasos Darveres, A (His)story of the Night, 1967–1974 (2002, in Greek); and the memoirs/novels of Chrones Missios, Well, You Were Killed Early on (1985, in Greek), which expresses the author’s disenchantment with the communist leadership and takes the form of a correspondence with a dead comrade, and its sequel, Smile, Man . . . What’s So Damn Hard? (1988, in Greek). Liakos (2011: 391–392) shares further thoughts on the work of Darveres, who coined the ironic self-reference of “dramatis personae in the thiasos of History” (2002: 393).

42

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the dictators was a form of asserting collective superiority on the psychological and spiritual level: the display act of people ridiculing the strongmen and withholding their support was a reaffirmation of the Greeks’ insistence on democratic-style public criticism (Van Steen 2001: 171–172). Research into theater of the dictatorship years is most hindered, however, when its exponents memorialize their own personal history and broadcast their resistance “credentials.” Many historicizing and autobiographical works present the author’s “heroic” commitment to revolution as his (less commonly: her) main motivation for writing and recording, against the backdrop of “true” and “false” political axioms rather than of complex cultural and ideological conditions. Many obviously wave the banner of opposition after the fact.47 Some all-too-boisterous modes of dissent simply provided an alibi for not taking real action. We cannot posit a black-and-white antithesis of junta supporters versus junta opponents, or the binary polarity of conformity versus dissidence. We necessarily have to accept that fetishization of the resistance set in with the regime’s decline, and that this trend did not bring out the best in people. When resistance became the expected norm, it also became the mold in which personal narratives were being forged. Another noticeable tendency, which has not yet received any scholarly attention, was the masculinization of the opposition against the junta. This tendency, which perpetuated hegemonic patterns it claimed to subvert, deeply affected the ways in which this era was represented and continues to be misrepresented: Loula Anagnostaki becomes the token female playwright; Marietta Rialde is the enfant terrible of the theater world; and Athena (Nana) Kallianese, the director of the leftist publishing house Kedros who coordinated important dissident publications, vanishes behind the large majority of male contributors to the famous protest volume Eighteen Texts (1970). Kay Cicellis, Anny Koltsidopoulou, Magia Lymberopoulou, and Anna Phrankoudake are too often seen as translators in auxiliary capacities, not as the authors of creative literary and/or critical

47 «— ª Æ
 Ø  ºº Ø ÆØÆØÆŒ , æ
ÆØØ;» Kotanidis wonders caustically, pressing the legitimate question of how, over the years and decades past, the numbers of those who resisted the Colonels grew so large (2011: 493). See also Kornetis (2013: 298–299, 301, 327) and Papageorgiou (2001b: 258). Rialde has sharply criticized this pseudo-heroic behavior in the world of theater (1974: 39).

Introduction

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contributions. In fact, all four belonged to a larger group of female activists and writers (including Nora Anagnostake, Katerina AnghelakiRooke, Maro Douka, Rea Galanake, Lina Kasdagle, Margarita Lymberake, Jenny Mastoraki, and Alke Zee), who left their mark on (1970s and later) poetry, prose, and other genres and art forms that were perceived to be less public, less male-dominated, and therefore more inclusive (Van Steen 2000: 214–215; also Van Dyck 1998). Only very few of these talented women, however, ventured into the world of the stage, and then typically did so after the fall of the Colonels. The female actors and co-founders of the Free Theater, the Theatrical Workshop of “Techne,” the Contemporary Greek Theater, and the Stoa Theater are not the ones who are being asked for interviews, memoirs, or any other contributions to conferences or media projects, but their male counterparts are and make frequent appearances. When in 1970 Giorgos Pelichos conducted a survey for the newspaper Ta Nea and interviewed about a dozen representatives of the Greek theater world on the subject of “Does the Modern Greek Play Exist?,” all the interviewees were male. Anagnostaki, who would go on to establish one of the longest and most productive careers in playwriting (now approaching half a century), is referred to in the third person, in a caption underneath her picture (January 5, 1970). Scholars subsequently remarked on the absence of a Greek feminist theater during the critical decades of the 1960s and 1970s (Sakellaridou 2006: 312–318, 331–332). Van Dyck has noted that the Colonels “feminized” the Greek people with methods of restraint that have been more characteristic of the private male abuse of women, such as enforced silence and physical mistreatment (1998: 121). This book, then, adds a warning that the resistance against the junta has subsequently been read and shaped in a male-gendered key.

1 The Theater-Historical Context and the Turn to New Greek Theater FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC GREEK PLAYS, ALLIED AGAINST A STATE OF TYRANNY
Pb ıæ
ı ı   æ
  º Ø Nothing is more hostile to a city than a tyrant (Euripides, Suppliant Women 429)

After the coup of April 21, 1967, the Greeks were faced with a new regime that practiced violence on the pretext of safeguarding national security, but that shared many characteristics with prior oppressive regimes. The Colonels told the Greek people that the absence of individual freedoms was the price to pay for state security. During the first years of the seven-year-long dictatorship many accepted this justification. Soon, however, the younger Greek generations started to rebel against the political and cultural deadlock that the junta imposed. Many like-minded young people and especially students found intellectual meeting places in popular music, revisionist cinema, and experimental theater and gathered in the physical venues of these forums: clubs, alternative movie theaters, and the nontraditional playhouses or new stages of the early 1970s. This chapter situates the new plays in their historical production context and aims to determine the cultural and political work that they performed. Under the dictatorship, as under the Nazi Occupation and the Civil War, many student actors and some more established theater professionals were, once again, among the first to step into the fray and to help fashion a culture of resistance against the oppressors. Student

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and amateur stage companies became very popular and continued to shape Greek theater life long after the 1974 collapse of the junta. Student theater at this time was not just theater by students but also theater that expressed the political ideals as well as the aesthetic values of students. Typical innovations that emerged from the student theater groups seeking to abolish hegemonic dramaturgical modes included experiments with collective directorship of plays, with the groups trying to implement democratic principles at least in the theater world. If the modern Greek theater of crisis and, subsequently, the theater of political liberation was constrained by the junta’s censorship rules, how could it speak so loudly and so effectively to common sensibilities? This apparent paradox prompts our quest for the new stage discourse that Greek playwrights developed in their eagerness to communicate with audiences in more direct and more sincere ways. Some theater practitioners reinvented an older Greek standby: the classical dramas or, more broadly, the mythical-metaphorical plays that, in their eyes, mirrored the contemporary predicament; others felt that imported plays could best help them put Western radical theory into practice. Taken together, the two categories actually outnumbered the productions of modern Greek works. The dictatorship years saw an increase in the number of stagings of foreign plays (in Greek translations), typically of those that mediated Western leftist ideas and avant-garde styles, because they presented a foreign foil against which actors and audiences could read domestic Greek politics and culture. Works by Artaud, Beckett, Brecht, Camus, Ionesco, Kafka, Lorca, Pinter, Sartre, Weiss—in other words, “serious” drama—had spawned the thorough modernist transformation of the theater culture that dominated the Western stages of the late 1940s through mid-1960s and, with a slight delay, entered Greek urban centers, where these works were promptly invested with local political significance.1 Greek theater people and their audiences made the imported plays undergo a new, topical reception and frequently, 1 Other major European theatrical influences of the 1950s and 1960s were Arthur Adamov, Arrabal, Dario Fo, Dürrenmatt, Genet, and Grotowski. Further sources of inspiration were the works and controversial activities of the Living Theatre and those of the post-Brechtian British socialist theater, both engaged with stark images as well as with texts. The Living Theatre was founded in 1947 by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, two committed anarchists and pacifists. In Greece, the group drew most attention for its 1967 adaptation of Brecht’s antifascist Antigone of Sophocles of

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too, the foreign authors publicly endorsed the Greek rereading of their work.2 The boom in productions of imported plays and the ensuing debates about Western theater’s rapid transformation inspired the Greek preoccupation with two trends that had been driving the international stage culture of the postwar decades: the fascination with political theater in the style of Brecht and with the enigmatic performance modalities of the Theater of the Absurd (profoundly influenced by Artaud).3 Greek stage practitioners grew aware of the symbolic capital (to use Bourdieu’s terms) of Brecht and of other exponents of Western schools of political thought and theater. They valued the plays that represented these two trends as milestones in the development of European theater and, in turn, wanted to gain exposure to the authors and their works. As a pillar of modern dramaturgy and as a central figure in anti-authoritarian history, Brecht was for many young Greek actors a direct link to the West and its youth rebellion. Brecht’s plays and theoretical writings along with those of representatives of the Theater of the Absurd stood at the crossroads of exciting new aesthetic and political currents. By the early 1970s, these tendencies assisted the Greeks in bridging the old gap between foreign and native Greek plays: Brechtian and absurdist experiments were juxtaposed and infused with Greek neorealist traditions. Greek spectators could still recognize much of themselves in the actions portrayed onstage despite the elevated levels of apparent neutrality or existential cynicism. The more abstract quality of the political message of Brechtian and absurdist theater let itself be applied to Greece’s societal dynamics throughout the junta years. Actor Yorgos Kotanidis, who keenly followed Western stage developments, singled out the allure of Brechtian theater (2011: 88, 1948 (itself heavily dependent on Friedrich Hölderlin’s adaptation), which it turned into a call for civil disobedience during the Vietnam War. Kotanidis attests to the Living Theatre’s influence in Greece (2011: 111, 195, 310, 512). On the Living Theatre, whose work was shaped also by Piscator, see further Foley (2012: 132–138); Houchin (2003: 173–224, or his ch. 5); Katsapes (2013: 517–518); Martin (2001: 159, 172–184); Marwick (1998: 342–344); and Tytell (1995). 2 Stephanos Lenaios, for example, a Greek producer/manager and actor, is shown in pictures with Grotowski, Dario Fo, Franca Rame, and Günter Grass, some of whom visited his theater, attended performances of their plays, and answered the public’s questions (Lenaios and Photiou 1990: 34–35). 3 Bradby notes the influence that Antonin Artaud’s visceral theater, known as the “Theatre of Cruelty,” exerted on the Theater of the Absurd (1991: 53, 61; also Bradby and Sparks 1997: 8).

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and passim). His personal account of his life and work with the Free Theater in the early 1970s (2011) is interspersed with references to readings, discussions, and research on the newest trends in theater and cinema. Greek dissidents considered “homegrown” modern Greek plays to be closest to their agenda. Many native works addressed the urgent topic of the individual’s moral dilemma when challenged by authority. The plays also responded to the long-standing Greek belief in theater’s transformative powers:4 the reinvigorated Greek stage promised to reveal the people’s many faces and the various sides to the nation; it aimed to present diversity and plurality when cultural gridlock reigned. The domain of modern Greek theater opened up more room, too, for a type of agonistic and combative performance culture to take shape. Only this domain proffered the chance to stage a play for the very first time, unburdened by tradition, and to realize its shock effect. Few productions of ancient drama in 1960s and 1970s Greece could have had a similar impact. If the Greek revival stage of the classics can be called a theater of continuity under the junta, then modern Greek theater provided the sought-after stage of discontinuity, disturbance, and disruption. Therefore, modern Greek plays written during the dictatorship or slightly prior to it were the first to be regarded as innovative, progressive, or politically left-wing. Several dramatists entered into firm alliances with young actors and artists and defined their work in opposition to the regime; their productions became public tribunes for voicing that opposition. Conversely, a new stage troupe committing to a modern Greek play signaled its pursuit of artistic innovation and radical praxis. This commitment implied real courage on the part of the troupe’s young members, given that the censors’ suspicions rested more heavily on new Greek plays and given also the common Greek conviction that “foreign” meant “of better quality.” During the dictatorship years, the upper-class-oriented National Theater of Greece (refounded in 1930; inaugural production 1932) remained inhibited by the interference of state representatives whom 4 The special bond between the Greeks of the 20th century and their theater had its roots in the role that theater played in the 1821 revolutionary war and, during the decades prior, in the thriving Greek community of Odessa, on the north shore of the Black Sea, and in the Transdanubian principalities, where sizeable groups of Greek expatriates lived. In the intermediate one-and-a-half centuries, theater had joined in the Greeks’ broader efforts to reassert their language, culture, and political autonomy.

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the regime had placed at the helm but who were far from experts in the field. These conservatives insisted on restaging tired productions of ancient Greek tragedy, which had to instill the solemn grandeur of classical culture, complete with the trademark signs of the directors’ schooling in the German tradition of theatricalizing the classics. The ponderous legacy of German idealism in Greek dramaturgy, reinforced by the pressures of nation-building (or “nation-saving”), led to a reactionary tokenism in the “official” Greek approach to ancient drama (Glytzoures 2001). Nonetheless, the Greek revival stage continued to lay claim to cultural prestige and it often overshadowed the natural evolution of modern Greek dramaturgy. The National Theater also produced Western classics and even the occasional modern Greek “classic” (that is, a play from the earlier and proven history of modern Greek drama), but typically selected nationalist cultural and social narratives.5 Because modern Greek theater was never vested in the cultural prestige that had long sustained revival drama, it became the natural site for outspoken opposition to the dictatorial government. This does not mean, however, that producing classical tragedy was never fraught with risk. (References to) ancient drama still offered a solution to those worried about the difficulty of finding topics that were not crudely political, on the one hand, or ostentatiously non-involved, on the other.6 Typically, however, established directors serving the state-sponsored theaters found safety in mounting productions of classical plays that suited the rulers’ nationalist agenda and operated as the perfect tourist draws at the summer drama festivals. Thus classical tragedy became a routine staple of the National Theater, which treated the stage of Epidaurus as its own guarded precinct and made it into the most prestigious but 5 Constantinidis observes that Greek totalitarian governments have glamorized local culture but “have not walked the way they talked” (2001: 14). The dictatorship perpetuated and actively sponsored the National Theater’s predilection for conservative, even “restorative” stagings of ancient tragedy and for foreign drama in translation at the expense of modern Greek plays (2001: 14, 112, 151). Puchner lists conservative patriotic plays performed under the junta, some by the National Theater (2000: 233–234). He adds that many of these works were written for school and children’s theater. Hager, too, refers to national holiday celebrations hosted by the National Theater that supported the “hellenocentric theme” (2008: 90; also Hager 2010: 164–165). Frangi (1989) expands on the workings of the National Theater during and after the dictatorship. On the National Theater’s early years, see Kapsales (2013). 6 Chapter 2 (pp. 123–124 and 133–134) presents the protest statements of Anna Synodinou and George Seferis based on ancient drama.

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also the most conventional ancient theater setting.7 The Colonels perpetuated the National Theater’s monopoly of Epidaurus in order to control theater at the establishment that they regarded as its head and in the venue that they considered to be the most important one. The drama festivals of the dictatorship years generally presented regulated productions of trusted directors, and did so with selfadvertising liberalism, but they proved intolerant of the experiments of independent companies. In a purist approach, ancient drama, hallmark of classicism, served the Colonels’ antiquated linguistic, didactic, and ultra-nationalist agenda. During the junta years, too, the State Theater of Northern Greece (founded in 1961) mounted ten productions of classical tragedy, most of them directed by the conservative Thanos Kotsopoulos (Karaoglou 2009: 40 n. 123, 284–286, 291). Conversely, directors who reused the classics could criticize the dictators with greater liberty, because their practice ostensibly supported the rulers’ insistence on a return to the proud Greek legacies. The dull conformism that descended over the summer festivals contrasted sharply with the spirit of inquiry and excitement that sustained informal but often marginalized theater circles (testimony by Kambanelles, February–March 1994). Most Greeks still embraced Aristophanes, however, whose comedy they touted as an ideal socially leveling genre. The conservative impulses that classicists have often associated with ancient comic theater were not at all prominent in Greek revival comedy of the latter half of the twentieth century, a rich tradition that turned the playwright into a skeptical and progressive, if not “obviously leftist” hero (“Aristero-phanes”) with strongly perceived democratic principles (Van Steen 2000: 131–132, 185). Greek drama’s mid-twentieth-century development took its most important step forward with the singular achievements of Karolos Koun (1908–1987) and his Art Theater (¨ Ææ
åÅ, founded in 1942). The success story of the Art Theater is also the story of an emerging Greek avant-garde or, as Patricia Kokori defines it, of “the Greek version of theatrical modernism” (1989: 34; see also Kangelare 2010: 119). The Art Theater pursued artistic integrity over commercial profit and, in the course of several decades, transformed the postwar Greek stage by introducing new aesthetics and modern sensibilities. Koun created a progressive theater circle in Athens of 7 See Hager (2008: 88–91); Koltsidopoulou (1975: 50–51; 1976a); Mauromoustakos (2007); and Van Steen (2000: 195).

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the 1950s and 1960s, built on the ideals of a more democratically organized company structure, and fostered audience participation. His company delivered work and quality that went far from unnoticed, especially since Greek theater connections have always been extremely close. Koun drew international attention with his pioneering productions of ancient tragedy and comedy but his greatest domestic contributions lie in his discovery and promotion of young playwrights such as Iakovos Kambanelles, Demetres Kechaïdes, Loula Anagnostaki, and Giorgos Skourtes.8 Koun’s stagings of innovative works of the contemporary Western repertoire (psychological drama and poetic realism, in particular), which started as early as the 1950s, further transformed Greek dramaturgy. Indeed, Koun placed select modern Greek playwrights on a par with experimental and far more fashionable Western European ones. Early on, he had embraced the psychological principles of acting defined by the school 8

Kambanelles can be seen as the precursor of the postwar generation of young Greek playwrights. He did not restrict himself to an illusionist or purely aesthetic realm and dared, rather, to penetrate into ideological antagonisms and to comment on class conflicts. His pathbreaking work of 1957, The Courtyard of Miracles (˙ Æıº ø ŁÆıø), which was staged by Koun’s Art Theater, introduced a new, leftleaning trend of social (neo)realism and critically depicted the life of the struggling Greek lower classes. It laid bare a raw nerve for showing the postwar society still divided against itself and it is, to this day, considered a watershed in the history of modern Greek dramaturgy. See further Bacopoulou-Halls (1982: 114–118; 1994: 412, 414); Bakonikola-Georgopoulou (2000: 68); Blesios (2007: 363–393, or his ch. 12); Grammatas (2002: 1:202); Hager (2008: 72–73); Kalaïtze (2001: 335); Kangelare (2010: 139); Michaelides (1975: 15–17); Puchner (2010a: 22–25, 321–359); Spathes (2003b: 252); and Varopoulou (2003: 244). Kokori (1992) stresses that Kambanelles’s play continued the indigenous theatrical tradition while also cautiously appropriating Western avant-garde innovations (among them Brechtian theater techniques and existentialist and absurdist sensibilities such as the desperation provoked by frustrated hopes and dreams). Other early plays of Kambanelles further contributed to the social construction of the recent past and negotiated modern identity roles and power relations. A younger generation of dramatists followed in Kambanelles’s footsteps with neorealist plays but soon sought to establish its own theatrical identity while exploring European models. For more details on Kechaïdes’s plays, see BacopoulouHalls (1982: 142–143); Blesios (2007: 315–331, or his ch. 10); Felopoulou (2009); Grammatas (2002: 2:259–260); Horton (1984c); and Koilakou (1984). Backgammon and The Wedding Band were first produced in 1972 by Koun’s Art Theater and were translated in the mid-1980s (1984 and 1985, resp.). See also Georgakake (2009: 161); Karter (1978: 155–156); and Michaelides (1975: 84–87). For more information on Loula Anagnostaki, the exceptional female playwright of this early period, see Exarchou (2009); Kokori (2004); Puchner (2001: 394–445, or his ch. 10); and Sakellaridou (1996; 2006: 322–325). Anagnostaki’s first plays delivered clinically cold analyses of human pathologies (see further pp. 60–61). On Skourtes, see Chapter 4, pp. 233–243.

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of Konstantin Stanislavski but, as the years passed, he grew more attuned to indigenous and popular Greek traditions and explored absurdist acting codes as well. His work inspired a house style that remains recognizable in the production and acting styles of his disciples.9 Koun and his circle built loyal and better educated Greek audiences. In the early 1970s, theater’s importance in the cultural imagination of the Greek nation continued to loom large, even when the competition of the new and seductive medium of television had become palpable. While still in its infancy, the novel medium of Greek television was controlled by the military government (one of the two state channels belonged to and was operated by the Armed Forces).10 Popular broadcasts started to keep many former and potential theater-goers at home. Box office earnings were negatively affected also by the Colonels’ arbitrary rules and regulations and eventually by the faltering economy. Prophets of doom predicted the demise of Greek theater, but theater survived and bounced back. With the newspaper press (barely) functioning under strict state surveillance, the stage appeared as second only to the press among the mass media that did not belong to the government.11 By late 1973, theater attendance had risen dramatically. Scores of Greeks who did not otherwise frequent playhouses, flocked to the theater to participate in its performances and in its new discussion forums such as post-play debates, film screenings, public lectures and readings, 9 On the foundation and the 1940s history of Koun’s Art Theater, see Kalaïtze (2001: 268–275, 276–277, 332, 335); Spathes (2003a; 2003b: 249, 251–254); and Van Steen (2000: 158–159). See also Delveroude (2003: 388–389); Grammatas (2002: 1:274–280); and Kretikos (1973a: 200). The section “parastasiographia” in Kangelare’s edited volume on Koun constitutes the most recent long list of the Art Theater’s productions (Kangelare, ed., 2010: 265–315). Kangelare’s own chapter in the same volume discusses Koun’s poetics (Kangelare 2010). 10 On the development and influence of Greek television, see Theologidou (2002); Valoukos (1998); and Zaharopoulos and Paraschos (1993: 42–45). 11 Hager addresses the late 1960s crisis of interest in Greek theater, which he insightfully redefines as dramatists pondering the need and best place for political activism (that is, the question of whether such activism would be better at home in journalism than in the stage praxis) (2008: 66, 70, 73–84). He concludes that theater people resorted to amplifying the crisis and its symptoms as a way to discuss censorship and other structural changes affecting the domain of play production (2010). Hager refers to Pelichos’s survey for Ta Nea published in January 1970 (nearly daily from 5 through 20 January) and also to a series of interviews with younger and established stage practitioners, which was published in Chroniko 1970 (1970: 46–63) (Hager 2008: 74–84; also 2010: 163, 165–168). Charalambides (1973a) adds another perspective on the presumed crisis.

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and themed exhibitions and displays set up in foyers.12 Such informative and educational events forged new gathering venues as well as new, participatory cultural programs and delivered additional proof that modern Greek theater had successfully reinvented itself. These alternative meeting places became social spaces that “facilitated exchanges between different groups and also the planning of strategies of action” (in the words of Kornetis 2006: 255).

THE TURN TO THE NEW GREEK THEATER: THEATER’S PARALÓGOS EMBOLDENED BY THE THEATRO TOU PARALOGOU “Theater” means play, and “Greek Theater” means Greek play. (Kostas Nitsos, quoted by Giorgos Lazarides 2011: 50) No force is greater than a performance whose time has come. (Anonymous Greek interlocutor)

Before discussing the impact of junta censorship or any stage production in detail, however, a fuller assessment of the early 1970s New Greek Theater, of youth involvement, and of the emerging countercultural spaces is necessary. The New Greek Theater’s flourishing was the achievement of one generation, which must recognize Koun, Kambanelles, and Anagnostaki as inspiring pioneers. After a similar outburst of creativity in high-quality Greek cinema, which is now commonly called the wave of the “New Greek Cinema,”13 we may 12 Movie theaters, too, welcomed broad audiences and became meeting points for students and young people. They kept their doors open for discussions that took place after many of the screenings. The Thessaloniki Film Festival, which was inaugurated in 1960, grew into a major gathering in September of every year: it offered a group experience that television viewing could not equal. See Katsounake (2002); Kokkale (1997); Kornetis (2013: 179–181); Kotanidis (2011: 142–143); and Zapheires (2000: 198–205; 2011: 116–123). 13 The 1966 Thessaloniki Film Festival marked new directions in Greek filmmaking and prompted the critic Photes Alexiou to coin the phrase of “New Greek Cinema” (Gounaridou 2000: 151–152). Andrew Horton has been most instrumental in establishing the term of “New Greek Cinema” in English-language scholarship. Horton offers a brief introduction centered on the work of pioneer filmmaker Theodore Angelopoulos (who wedded Brechtian methods with radical, forbidden content) (1997: 74–76). The recent book by Vrasidas Karalis further establishes the

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refer to this new, more mature accomplishment in dramaturgy as the “New Greek Theater.”14 While the term “New Wave” has been established for the Greek art cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the same is not true of “new wave theater.”15 Nonetheless, term of “New Greek Cinema,” analyzes the genre, and lists works by its representatives (2012: 107–113, 143–163). This “new wave” of Greek cinema precipitated the decline of the studio system, which specialized in romantic comedies and tearjerker melodramas and had been extremely popular and lucrative in the 1950s up through the early 1960s. By the early 1970s, those genres seemed badly out of touch with the harsh realities that the Greeks were experiencing. See also Georgakas (2002: 4); Koliodimos (1999: 19–20); Komnenou (2001: 117–153, or her ch. 3); Kornetis (2013: 169–174); and Tomae (2006). Kyriakos (2005) studies New Greek Cinema’s daring use of issues of gender and the body. See further the special issue entitled “Greek Cinema” of Film Criticism 27, no. 2 (2002–2003) and the recent double issue of the Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 37, nos. 1–2 (2011). Constantinidis (2000) offers another collection of essays on Greek cinema. John Papargyris aptly describes New Greek Cinema as follows: New Greek Cinema has since been regularly characterized by its intention to emphasize the artistic aspects, its political involvement, its innovative drive and, up to a point, its devotion to the fate of the nation, often explicitly revealing concerns that may have resided in the Greek psyche for decades without ever finding expression . . . The significance of the emergence of New Greek Cinema lies not only in its artistic achievements but also in its revisionist approach to historiography and politics (2006: 100). Among the revisionist filmmakers were Michael Cacoyannis, Nikos Koundouros, Panteles Voulgares, Theodore Angelopoulos, Kostas Ferris, and others of the “new wave” who had been trained internationally and who had rejected the self-restrictions of the commercial Greek movie business. Angelopoulos used past history (the eve of the Metaxas dictatorship) and ancient myth (the myth of Orestes) to deflect the censors’ scrutiny in his films Days of ’36 ( æ  
ı ’36, 1972) and The Traveling Players (ˇ ŁÆ
, 1975) respectively, which indirectly presented right-wing repression and thus Greece’s current predicament. Under the junta, Angelopoulos formed a film community whose members met regularly to plan “new wave” feature films with political bite but also with a camouflage to bypass the censors. See Horton (1997: 20, 64–66, 74–76, 103, 121–122, 124–125); Soteropoulou (1989: 44–56, on contemporary and older laws and regulations pertaining to the Greek film industry); and Stassinopoulou (2000: 38–39). Kornetis (2006: 223; 2013: 191–192) and Papanikolaou (2007: 115–118) discuss the use of the term “new wave” (
ŒÆ) in the 1960s and 1970s Greek music world and its intersections with French models (the Nouvelle Vague). 14 Doulis used the phrase, “New Theater of Greece,” in the title of a short article presenting Anagnostaki’s early plays (1969: 83). 15 Horton referred to what was happening in the Greek theater world as “the ‘new wave’ of Greek drama” (1984f: 201). Bradby invokes the term “New Theater” (nouveau théâtre) for early 1950s French developments, focusing on the Theater of the Absurd (1991: 45, 52–65). The term was coined by Geneviève Serreau (Bradby 1991: 56). Taylor resorts to the collective concept of El Teatro Nuevo to denote the Latin American theater of revolution in the Brechtian vein (2000: 173). She used the phrase “theatre of crisis” to describe the stage of the years 1965 to 1970 in her earlier book,

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with the New Greek Cinema, early 1970s theater shared a zest for the critical and the experimental and a bold sensitivity to restrictive social codes and taboos. It resorted to artful means to treat forbidden topics, to assert its paralógos (Ææƺ ª
), its discourse operating on the sidelines of the official discourse (the Greek para- meaning “beside, past, beyond” and, by implication, “against”). Often the New Greek Theater presented the themes of existential angst and despair through a parody or pastiche of worn dramatic forms. Also, this theater displayed a postmodernist readiness to accept volatile doubt and destabilizing ambiguity, as well as a determination to covertly express political messages (including self-reflexive critical points). Both performers and spectators rediscovered the hybrid language of contestation and inquiry, which was diametrically opposed to the moral and political dogmas of the self-styled “regime of truth” (see Our Grand Circus in Chapter 3). They affirmed their personal and collective right to choose. As a distinguished Greek educator stated: “They [the dictators] are suspicious of quality or excellence in any field and fearful, most of all, of the spirit of free inquiry.”16 Cinema and theater now told of episodes of the Greek past that the nationalist master narrative of the previous three decades had systematically suppressed. In oblique ways, they deconstructed time-hallowed certainties. Doubt and uncertainty reinstated the multiple points of view and the conflictual voices that are intrinsic to drama. Modern Greek theater rediscovered sociopolitical conflict as a legitimate form of drama and vice versa and motivated audiences to ponder issues such as oppression, injustice, treason, and violence from different, more outward-looking perspectives. As conventional and governmentsponsored stage companies came to be discredited, the restless New Theater sounded in a Brechtian-style rethinking of drama and performance and intensified its search for new codes and paradigms (Chapter 4). It valued scripts as performances rather than as texts put on stage, as had long been the case with revivals of ancient Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991). There, she argued that the Theater of the Absurd, in its Latin American forms (but in terms that apply to modern Greek theater as well), “reflect[ed] a crisis ideology, the personal sensation of decomposition, within a stable, bourgeois context” (1991: 9). 16 Anonymous quoted by Friendly, NYT, June 7, 1970. Vitti invokes the term amphisvetíes (ÆçØÅ ) to describe those contesting (2001: 402). See also Calotychos (2003: 228, 235 n. 38); Kotanidis (2011: 109, 111); and the special issue of Diavazo (1995), entitled “The Culture of Contestation.”

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tragedy. Following the New Cinema’s lead, the New Greek Theater, too, embraced the concept of auteurism, the French notion of the import of the creative vision of the artistic director as auteur, while trying to avoid the trappings of intellectual elitism.17 For Greek playwrights of the early 1970s, auteurism implied that they could affirm their claims as authors whose best works merited publication, performance, and recognition. A more assertive platform, the New Greek Theater set more liberal parameters for Greek culture and society. It is important, next, to briefly chart the modes in which this theater entered into the 1970s. The 1971/2 season proved to be the time when Greek theater’s political mobilization took shape. Critic Kostas Georgousopoulos affirmed that modern Greek drama flourished in the three-year period of 1971–1973 and he counted, by January 1974, more than fifty Greek play productions (1982–1984: 2:111). Hager has described the transition from 1971/2 to 1973 as one that moved the Greek stage from the “claustrophobic nightmares” of the earlier years to the “rebellious theatrical celebrations” of 1973 (2008: 238), or from “pessimistic visions of destruction” to “optimistic invitations to action” (2008: 239). The two fashions that thrived among the young troupes, namely the Theater of the Absurd and Brechtian drama, had, by 1973, joined forces to undermine conservative paradigms and stilted representations of reality. Greek stage practitioners drew on tactics from these two important “schools” to criticize conventional theater and traditional society. They produced more hybrid shows such as Our Grand Circus that proved their efficacy as “dramatic visions” of rebellion that appealed to a mass public.18 In the mid-1980s, Stratos

17 Stoddart (1995) elaborates on the auteur theory, which was promulgated by the seminal French periodical, Cahiers du cinéma. The Greek-American film critic Andrew Sarris gave the term currency in the English language (1996: 269–278). Four decades later, one may question if the notion of master author is still relevant. The bare facts drawn from Greek publishing records and the meager numbers of plays translated into foreign languages provide some unexpected answers to the question of which authors lived on in print and which ones did not. Giorgos Skourtes is well established but the talented Nikos Zakopoulos seems long forgotten. Zakopoulos’s play, The Traveling Salesman (ˇ ªıæ
º ª
, ca. 1972), attacked the consumerism and moral degradation of a society enthralled with comfort and leisure. See Chapter 4, pp. 227–228. 18 Hager (2008: 239). Bradby posits that, in the older French models of the Theater of the Absurd, revolt was the only possible response to the disorienting absence of created meaning (1991: 48–49).

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Constantinidis distinguished between interwar Greek plays of existentialist commitment and the plays of existentialist protest, which appeared during the postwar era up through the seven-year dictatorship and avoided facile realism.19 Building on Constantinidis’s distinction, scholars who examine the Greek plays of existentialist protest within their broader European context observe that these plays follow patterns similar to those in seminal works such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (begun in 1948; premiered 1953) and Endgame (1957) or Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming (1965) (Constantinidis 2001: 150–151; Sivetidou 1988). Indeed, several of the Greek existentialist protest plays belong more formally to the widespread movement in postwar Western European dramaturgy that goes by Martin Esslin’s appellation of “Theatre of the Absurd,” or by its shorthand, “absurdist theater.”20 Esslin defined a “sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition” (1991: 23–24), which he saw first expressed in The 19

Constantinidis (1985 and 1986) rightly modified categories established by Bacopoulou-Halls in her 1982 book (she did, however, revise these categories in 1994: 412–414). In Constantinidis’s definition, the plays of “existentialist commitment” present self-willed, superhuman idealists who show a readiness to sacrifice themselves and others for their noble cause or mission. The early 1970s plays of “existentialist protest,” on the other hand, portray insecure, self-interested individuals, who often appear as physically disabled (Constantinidis 2001: 145–146, 148; also Chapter 4, pp. 232–233, 248, 291). The protagonists of Constantinidis’s first category of plays continue the legacy of—or remain in the shadow of—the still-authoritative figures of classical drama’s tragic heroes, as in the mythical embodiments of Antigone or Prometheus. Constantinidis counted works by Kostes Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos, and Nikos Kazantzakis in this first group. The latter characteristically chose to present his Prometheus as the philosophical and aesthetic incarnation of the self-aware (fighter for) free will that will liberate the human race from divine and other subjugation. See further Constantinidis (1985: 141–142; 2001: 145–151). 20 Esslin coined the terms in his book, The Theatre of the Absurd, which was first published in 1961. The last chapter of the 1991 edition describes the absurdist theater’s development from its 1940s origins in Paris through the 1970s. Esslin’s 1961 book was one of the most influential texts of the decade and left its impact on Greek intellectuals as well. A Greek translation by Magia Lymberopoulou was published in 1970. Esslin’s book fascinated Kotanidis, the young actor who shared many of his readings with the Free Theater’s members. Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) left Kotanidis very impressed, too (2011: 399–400). Another seminal text was Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (originally published in communist Poland in 1961; first English-language edition, 1964), which was translated into Greek by Alexandros Kotzias (1970). Kott argued for Shakespeare’s continuing relevance in the 1960s and pleaded with directors and actors to bring their own experiences of life to bear on their interpretations of the plays. Kott’s readings of Shakespeare’s history plays, in particular, stressed issues of power abuse, political repression, and loss of freedom. These topics resonated with 1960s youth and with Greek students living under the dictatorship.

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Myth of Sisyphus (1942) by Albert Camus and subsequently in the plays of Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Genet, and others of the postwar generation. But, Esslin emphasized, the Theater of the Absurd tried also to “achieve a unity” between the sense of futility and irrationality (with gratuitous violence) and the play’s form and style (1991: 24). The depiction of human disintegration in a world rendered inexplicable manifested itself in the playwrights’ manipulating of language as well. This Theater of the Absurd distorted conventional representation to reveal human life as a universal trap and to stress people’s inability to communicate with one another. But what defined Greek absurdist plays? And how did those plays represent innovation that did not break with viable forms of theatricality? The Greek version of the Theater of the Absurd, first espoused by Koun’s Art Theater, became quickly known as the Theatro tou Paralogou (¨ Ææ

ı —Ææƺ ª
ı) and adopted the ontological insecurity and profound pessimism of its Western counterpart.21 Among the other themes that the new Greek plays shared with their absurdist models were: the absence of logical consistency and psychological causality; the heavy burden of the lack of unbridled freedom; the suffocating atmosphere of enclosure, death, or burial; the use of dark allegory and phantasmagoria; and the constant threat posed by authoritarian structures. Individual and societal fragmentation was reflected in stark images of dislocation, incarceration, or putrefaction caused by faceless oppressors or by an insidious “system,” which relished in the language of life and death, health and handicap or disease. Hager’s analysis of three 1970 plays representative of “Greek Absurdism,” Skourtes’s Nannies, Kambanelles’s Penal Colony, and the futuristic Biochemistry of Paulos Matesis, is guided by their central themes of conformism, imprisonment, and death (2008: 113; also 2010: 168–169). He posits a “frame of extreme violence and totalitarian oppression” as another common characteristic of this Greek Absurdism (2008: 117). Kambanelles’s work, staged by Marietta Rialde’s Experimental Theater in October 1970, depicts the cynical commodification and exhibition of violence (Hager 2008: 132–133; Puchner 2006: 93–96). Matesis’s Orwellian play Biochemistry 21

On the Greek reception of the Theater of the Absurd, see Mardas (2004); Petrakou (2004: 365–380; 2006); Puchner (1999: 156–167); and VapheiadouTauridou (1980). Kokori studies the critical reception of Beckett in Greece (unpublished MS).

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(also staged by Rialde in fall 1970) is set in a grim future of imminent environmental destruction, which the various incompetent and ruthless governments are unable to ward off. The characters entrapped in this technologically overdeveloped world show signs of suffocation while they are also constantly being watched (by the all-seeing television set that represents state surveillance and indoctrination).22 Because the tenor of Greek “high art” had, for decades, been about logic and harmony, the absurdist theater’s irrationality and tragicomic nature shocked the Greek establishment. The Greek version of the Theater of the Absurd subverted the long-prevailing narrow conception of mainstream drama and shook the foundations of conservative culture, that is, it undermined the dictators’ desired status quo. The French line of influence did not preclude the Greek avant-garde from creating its own distinct stage products, which foregrounded the singularly “absurd” incongruity that the Colonels’ rule had inflicted on Greece.23 The absurd world of the New Greek Theater was the world of misrule: because dictatorial power and power abuse could not easily be presented on stage, the realm of the absurd offered an apt dramatic forum, metaphor, and critique. The new Greek plays, therefore, vividly pointed up what “absurd” (parálogo) connoted in common parlance as well. Homegrown Greek absurdist plays became more readily accepted and the first productions raised the stakes for subsequent ones. Thus the Theater of the Parálogo paved the way for the New Greek Theater’s more versatile voice to operate as a paralógos, to exercise the parallel, ironic discourse of unofficialdom opposed to a violent parakrátos (the “parastate” of the usurpers).24

22 See Hager (2008: 142–150); Michaelides (1975: 93–94); Pankoureles (1974: 109; 1983: 25–26); Thrylos (1971a); and Varikas (1972: 370–374). The dark image of literal and metaphorical asphyxiation is central also to Skourtes’s plays, The Noose (˙ ŁÅºØ) and The Nannies. Bacopoulou-Halls reiterates that “lack of air” became the “cryptic expression” for contemporary plays to denounce the regime’s tight grip (1982: 137). 23 According to Peter Mackridge, the influence that the Theater of the Absurd exerted on the Greek stage was “particularly appropriate, because everyday life in the Colonels’ Greece was itself absurd” (unpublished MS, 8). 24 Dimitris Papanikolaou’s notion of constructive “mimicry” as a dynamic, dialogic process of emulation, which rejects bland surrogates or soulless imitations (2007: 137), may usefully be expanded to include the long-contested relationship between the Greek absurdist plays and their Western prototypes. Homi Bhabha has laid the theoretical foundations of the concept of mimicry and its ambivalence in the colonial discourse (2004 [1st edn 1994]: 121–131).

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Authors of Greek absurdist plays such as Loula Anagnostaki belonged to the broader ranks of an intelligentsia opposing the growing autocratic character and the alarming militarization of Greek politics from the mid-1960s through 1974. Like Kambanelles, Anagnostaki set out to deconstruct official, manipulative Greek history and to explore the various levels of human victimization through terror, in trenchant early plays such as The City (˙  ºÅ, 1965), The Parade (˙ Ææ ºÆÅ, 1965), Keeping Company (˙ ıÆÆæ
ç, also translated as Social Occasion, 1967), and Antonio or The Message (` Ø

ıÆ, 1972).25 Anagnostaki became one of the prime voices to express the neurasthenic mood of the past bearing down on eternally restless characters. These characters agonize about the uncertain present and perceive threats from unnameable circumstances or nameless people who, in the style of Pinter, become the brutal but anonymous tormentors of human beings reduced to machines (testimony by Anagnostaki, July 18, 1998). Seemingly innocent games played out in the privacy of the family home are transformed into cruel rituals. The skewed family politics and sadomasochistic rites prefigure the truly unfathomable violence inflicted by a repressive society.26 Anagnostaki’s work, imbued with the

The City is also the title given to the trilogy of Anagnostaki’s first one-act plays, consisting of Staying Overnight (˙ ØÆıŒ æ ıÅ), The City, and The Parade (1971), which was first produced by Koun’s Art Theater in 1965. See Kokori (2004). The Art Theater produced Antonio or The Message in 1972, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of its founding. A threat of violence dominates the play, and this violence penetrates the sheltered spaces of the family and the private sphere. All of the characters are waiting for Antonio or for the message that he will bring, but neither arrives to deliver resolution. The play leaves some hope vested in youth. See further Georgakake (2009: 160–161); Hager (2008: 159–161, 182–195); Karter (1978: 153–155); and Michaelides (1975: 48–51). Sakellaridou (1996: 103, 105, 107–108; 2006: 322–325) offers a more detailed analysis of Anagnostaki’s revisionist critique of the traditional concept of victory. Anagnostaki’s play, The Victory (˙ ŒÅ, 1978), is the subject of an extensive discussion by Constantinidis (2001: 151–161; also Bacopoulou-Halls 1982: 145–146). The Parade, The City, and Antonio receive attention in Tsatsoules (2011: 62–66, 71–73, and 76–78, resp.; see also Tsatsoules 2007: 279–303, or his ch. 3, on the playwright’s recent work). An English translation of The Parade was published in the first volume of Contemporary Greek Theatre, issued by the London Theatre Lab Company (1999). Two volumes but a mere total of seven modern Greek plays have appeared in this translation series published by Arcadia Books. These renderings are the work of Theatre Lab Company members and have served as stage scripts for company productions. 26 Anagnostaki’s use of violent rites may be better understood in light of GrahamJones’s cutting analysis of Argentine theater (2000). Graham-Jones has proposed that 25

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absurdist theater’s metaphysical reflections, draws on intense human and group observation; it is at its best when it theatricalizes oppression that degrades and uproots human identity. Even as her characters feed private obsessions or guilt feelings, they acquire a strong symbolic value; their individual plights reflect societal crises with existential repercussions. Anagnostaki’s modernist plays delve into psychoanalysis while retaining Greek domestic intensity, when the protagonists’ haunted sensibilities become symptoms of the pathologies engendered by the political anomaly. Most of Anagnostaki’s early plays premiered at Koun’s Art Theater, whose basement locale helped to conjure up the atmosphere of claustrophobia and traumatic exhaustion that pervades these works. From 1954 on, Koun’s small theater-in-the-round was situated in the cramped basement of the Athenian movie theater Orpheas (Kangelare 2010: 128; Spathes 2003b: 249, 251–252). A fitting alternative location, Koun’s stage prompted young directors to consider using similar venues, which created a more intimate relationship between performers and viewers. Many Greek playwrights went on to challenge the dictators’ military exhibitionism and terror-fueled authoritarianism, which the younger generations of the late 1960s regarded as the Greek versions of global afflictions. The global climate of the 1960s committed to a civil rights watch and grew more and more intolerant of military rule and of neofascist and capitalist-imperialist oppression. To name just a few of those young dramatists whose early plays are still invoked as points of reference by Greek critics and now aging audiences, let me present the following “shortlist”:27 Strates Karras (The Nightwatchmen, ˇØ ıå
çºÆŒ ; The Strongmen, ˇØ ƺÆØ ; The Attendant, ˇ ı
 ; The Troupers, ˇØ 
ıº
ıŒ ); Demetres Kechaïdes (The Wedding Band, ˙  æÆ; Backgammon,
ºØ, two poignant one-act plays of selfishness amid social despair and self-deception, Argentine theater under the dictatorship of 1976–1983 (the Dirty War) “metaphorized” reality by way of certain (meta)dramatic structures: the stage world re-creates and can thus “revise” the “real” world (2000: 9). Among those structures, she counts the recurring or ritualized (violent) play or the technique of incorporating an (often unfulfilled) ceremony (2000: 28–29). Dramatists employed the game or diversion, too, to “stage the violent struggles occurring outside the theater hall” (2000: 28). 27 This list presents playwrights in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. Their most important plays, given in parenthesis, follow the chronological order of their first appearance between 1967 and 1974.

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which illustrate how quickly power relationships among human beings can shift); Paulos Matesis (The Ceremony, ˙  º ; Biochemistry, BØ
åÅ Æ; Mr. Ramon Novaro’s Ghost,
çÆÆ 
ı Œıæ
ı Æ  ˝
æ
, plays that attest to the author’s masterful use of scoffing language, black humor, caricature, and the fluidity of ritual, dream and reality, life and death);28 Giorgos Michaelides (Autopsy, `ı
łÆ); Kostas Mourselas (Dangerous Cargo, ¯ØŒı
ç
æ
; Oh Dad, What a World!, , Ø Œ 
 Æ!, two tragicomic plays about social alienation and loss of personal freedom); Marios Pontikas (Panoramic View of Night Work, ˙ Æ
æÆØŒ Ł Æ ØÆ ıå æØ æªÆÆ; Something Fishy, ˇ ºŒŒ
 ŒÆØ Å çÆ; The Trombone,
æ
 Ø);29 Marietta Rialde (Mao Mao, 
-
; Oust or The Mean Little Song, ˇ, 
æ ıå
æƪ
ıŒØ; and the post-junta satire Shit, Œ . . . ); and Giorgos Skourtes (The Nannies, ˇØ Æ ; The Musicians, ˇØ 
ıØŒ
; Karaghiozis Almost Vizier, ˇ ˚ÆæƪŒØ ÇÅ Ææ ºª
B ÇæÅ; Commedia, ˚
 ØÆ). Michaelides’s Autopsy, for instance, a play of few words that was staged on the second stage of the Orvo Theater in December 1970, captured the violence of the junta’s terror and torture and posited the dilemma of keeping silent versus speaking out.30

28

Matesis’s Ceremony (1966) pivots on the theme of the (unfulfilled) ceremony (Graham-Jones 2000: 29) and captures its power to expose, with plenty of black humor, the stereotypical social patterns of the immediate pre-coup era. With distinct echoes from Vasiles Ziogas, Matesis ridicules the preparations for a funeral and especially the petit-bourgeois superficiality of the women involved, whose behavior degrades human action to the level of an absurdly mechanical game. Sivetidou analyzes The Ceremony in conjunction with The Nightwatchmen of Karras (Sivetidou 1995: 399, 406–412). Puchner engages with Karras’s work in a chapter entitled “The Laughable and the Nightmarish in the Scenic World of Strates Karras” (2000: 313–324). More details on Matesis’s theatrical output can be found in Bacopoulou-Halls (1982: 118–123); Bakonikola-Georgopoulou (2000: 73–76, 132–139; 2002); Grammatas (2002: 2:260–261); Pephanes (2001: 324–328, 330–331); Puchner (2003); and Varveres (1984). Four of Matesis’s plays (Guardian Angel for Rent, Nurseryman, Roar, and Towards Eleusis) are included in the translation series, Contemporary Greek Theatre (Theatre Lab Company 1999–2002: 2). 29 The translation of the title of Pontikas’s play, Something Fishy, which is based on a popular Greek expression, is taken from Andrew Horton’s encyclopedia entry on Greek drama (1984a: 397), one of very few English-language survey articles on modern Greek theater. Horton contributed short entries on Mourselas (Horton 1984d) and Skourtes (Horton 1984e) as well. For more on Mourselas, see Pephanes (2008: 189–272, or his chs 5–8). 30 For brief references to this fascinating play, see Kotanidis (2011: 154–155) and Chapter 2, pp. 141–142.

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YOUTH, DISSIDENCE, AND THE STAGE OF EMERGENCY: BREAKING DOWN FENCES AND DEFENSES What . . . disturbed me was the air of the soldiers who surrounded him [Che Guevara in the famous photograph of his dead body, of October 1967]: it was the dirty, the slimy, and the vulgar, before the honorable, the pure, and the beautiful. It was the triumphantly bragging Colonels before the corpse of Greece. (Nikos Alivizatos 2008: 11)

To reach beyond the new theater trends and to expand this study’s theoretical framework, this section draws on insights derived from current research on the 1960s youth movement and countercultural revolution. The international student rebellion in Paris of “May 1968,” in conjunction with the broader discovery of performativity, left a profound impact on young Greeks.31 The filmmaker Nikos Koundouros recalls that, when the riots of May 1968 broke out in Paris, “we carried with us the shame of our defeat without resistance; we looked with envy at the French, who were rising up in revolt against an authoritarian, yes, but a legal and democratic power” (1987: 387). Young Greeks felt that their government had turned the clock back precisely when the Western world was undergoing frenetic changes and moral and social liberation struggles were the order of the day.32 They looked with envy at the freedoms that 31 Kornetis (2013: 61–65, 68–69, 319–326, 330–331). The literature on the worldwide student-led unrest and on the global cultural revolution of the 1960s is steadily growing and treats the telltale indicators and events, from the student protests and factory occupations to the outbursts of Beatle-mania and the frenzy of Woodstock or the hedonistic search for pleasure in sex and drugs. See Bloom (2001); Katsapes (2013); Klimke (2010: esp. 5–7); Klimke and Scharloth (2008); Marwick (1998); McWilliams (2000); and Schildt and Detlef (2006). See also the March–April 2008 special issue of the Greek periodical Outopia and the 2009 special issue of Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories, entitled “Historising: 1968 and the Long Sixties” and dedicated to the events of May 1968 and their intellectual legacies (the spawning of social movement theories and of the postcolonial critique) from a comparative and transnational perspective. 32 This sensibility runs like a red thread through Kotanidis’s memoir (2011). Notable among the changes in the West were the battles for integration and sexual liberation in the United States, the worldwide campaign against the Vietnam War, the execution of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (October 9, 1967) and the backdrop of the Cuban uprising, the continued fascination with Latin American and African independence movements, the outcry about the Soviet invasion of

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Western European and American youth enjoyed. Kotanidis, a torture victim of the regime, constantly chafed at the conditions of a daily life full of tangible reminders of the restrictive order (2011). By 1970, the Free Theater’s “group-based principles echo[ed] a post-May 1968 consciousness of radicalism,” according to Hager (2008: 196; also 2010: 170). The impact of May 1968 compels a reading of the dissident segment of the Greek theater world as the urban Greek version of the global youth movement and student revolt, which leads to a better understanding of the New Greek Theater as an intercultural phenomenon.33 This is not, of course, to equate the 1960s cultural revolution with the genesis ex nihilo of a Greek theater of liberation. Rather, scholarly insights into the cultural revolution offer a theoretical grounding for what the chapters will then demonstrate on a case-by-case basis, without dimming the specific context and historical background to early 1970s Greece. The selected plays and Our Grand Circus, in particular, illustrate to what extent the performativity of 1960s-style street protests fueled stage performance—and vice versa.34 Instead of closing in on itself (as Greek theater had all too Czechoslovakia (when in August 1968 Soviet tanks quashed the “Prague Spring”), and youth’s revolt against the establishment, patriarchal tradition, and parental authority. Greek youth bestowed revolutionary prestige on iconic political and cultural products coming from Central and South America, for whose populations, oppressed by juntas, it felt a kindred kind of sympathy. Kotanidis’s numerous references speak to the sense of shock that the assassination of Che Guevara caused in Greek countercultural circles (2011: 66–67, 87, 106, 109, 110, 235, 308, 390). Bistes takes a more critical attitude (2010: 59, 62). Alivizatos makes the connection with the Greek predicament immediate (2008: 11; also the epigraph to this section, p. 63). Lambrinos notes that Che’s assassination, the May 1968 events, and the Vietnam protests were conspicuously absent from the Greek state news bulletins of 1967–1970 (Lambrinos 2011: 87 n. 3). 33 Kornetis has introduced this line of thought in his 2006 dissertation, which succinctly tested its applicability in the realm of modern Greek theater. His recent book expands on theater as a forum of international exchange (2013: 181–189). See also Katsapes (2013: 516–528). 34 Klimke and Scharloth (2009) address the discovery of performativity in the 1960s protests and show that symbolic and theatrical actions have the potential to undermine a given sociopolitical predicament. They interpret acts of performativity as dramatic variants of the speech act theorized by the British philosopher John L. Austin, author of How to Do Things with Words (1962). They can, therefore, speak of “protest performances” in the double meaning of the words (2009: 49). Elin Diamond, who laments that “performance discourse” has dominated scholarly debate “almost to the point of stupefaction,” concurs that there is ample room left for “explor[ing] performances as cultural practices that conservatively reinscribe or passionately reinvent the ideas, symbols, and gestures that shape social life. Such reinscriptions or reinventions are, inevitably, negotiations with regimes of power”

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often done before), the New Greek Theater dropped fences and defenses, explored new sociopolitical modalities, and borrowed tactics from novel action repertoires. This theater’s innovative form, provocative content, and globalizing vocabulary mobilized younger audiences and furthered their objective of contestation. External events, even if they occurred at the other end of the world, resonated with the theater community back in Greece, which provided the sociopolitical network ready to dissect and analyze those events. Kotanidis’s allusions to developments in Vietnam, China, and Thailand are frequent and well informed (2011; the conflicts in Southeast Asia were also the first wars to be televised live). Václav Havel, Czech playwright and dissident icon (and twice elected president), insisted that his work was, first and foremost, a call to communal action. He stated in his aptly entitled book, Disturbing the Peace: My ambition is not to soothe the viewer . . . I’m trying to . . . propel him, in the most drastic possible way, into the depths of a question he should not, and cannot, avoid asking; to stick his nose into his own misery, . . . into our common misery, . . . reminding him that the time has come to do something about it (1990: 199).

Kornetis refers to the “imagined community” of protesters worldwide (2009b: 38). This community delivered to urban Greece the common mobilizing structures and practices of direct action such as teach-ins and sit-ins, which are remarkably akin to stage dynamics. The performativity of demonstrations and standoffs at institutions of higher learning, especially, which received much global news coverage, strengthened Greek protesters’ aspirations of playing an active role in participatory democracy and civil society. The rise of student protest was accelerated by Greek youth’s adopting of the countercultural symbols and codes of the global youth movement of the late 1960s. Kornetis has defined this process of adoption as one guided by “cultural transfers,” which functioned as links to international protests and which were propagated by the foreign mass media, (1996: 2). This book follows Diamond in acknowledging the important part that “cultural history” plays in the study of dramatic production. Students of Greek performances from the early 19th century onward recognize that theater (and, in particular, classicizing drama or performances of ancient tragedy) grew to become a central cultural institution of the Greek-speaking world and that (educational) performances dovetailed with the nation-building project. See further Puchner (2011) and Roilou (2009).

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rock music, pop concerts, and other sixties’ phenomena (2009a: 11; 2009b: 39–40, 42; and 2013: 314). Greek students and youth saw themselves as the long-awaited bearers of modernization; they internalized countercultural markers and currents that radicalized world music, cinema, publishing, and the stage.35 In the early months following the coup, Greek resistance elements found each other but kept to their small circles, which did not have many opportunities to change current events. These basic organizations, which showed little cohesion or unified direction, commonly associated with the older left-wing ranks. Many members of the Old Left, however, had been arrested and imprisoned during the first days of the putsch. Thus these groups’ initial lack of resistance (which has, however, been overstated) was an understandable response to conditions that they were almost powerless to overhaul. One of the major problems that these groups faced was the challenge to counter the Greek population’s apathy and fear. It took about three years, then, for the Greek student and youth movement to develop into a cell or cells of political fomentation amid complacency. New Greek Theater opened up a parallel sphere of ideological agility. Many students and young people who refused to live the lie of conformism found their voice in the dissent of radical theater, which did not offer, however, any coordinated plan to subvert the regime. Several playscripts of the early 1970s voiced the concern that Greece’s general state of oppression was only the onset of the country’s problems. A more damaging peril lay in the people’s reluctance to address the deeper crisis of a lack of individual responsibility-taking, which eroded the potential of united action. Over time, however, actors, students, and other youth groups managed to harness popular rage and to jolt the Greeks from their long torpor. Dissident theater became a choice platform for Greek students and youth, and it was their movement that galvanized other social groups that had remained passive (Regos 1999: 246). The Greek students’ resistance activity came out into the open in 1973, and then tested the regime in one crisis after another: students applied the protest methods that had carried the unrest that swept through Western Europe and the United States and they occupied university Hager reaches a similar conclusion: “The identification of alternative (to the national) collective narratives that corresponded to wider global communities led the emerging generation to an understanding of social struggle in global rather than local terms” (2008: 44). See also Papanikolaou (2007: 131). 35

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buildings, first the Law School of the University of Athens and subsequently the Polytechnic University of Athens. In mid-November 1973, a growing dissident movement provoked mass protest demonstrations and acts of resistance against the military government at the site of the Polytechnic: over the course of three days, the students were joined by many workers, trade-unionists, high school pupils, and ordinary citizens. The regime’s crushing of the student revolt at the Polytechnic set the stage for its collapse in July 1974.36 It is tempting to translate the early 1970s “New Greek Theater” as the “Young Greek Theater,” playing on the double meaning of the Greek word neo (
).37 Greek youth’s theater activity laid bare layers of Western cultural styles and acquired cross-cultural dimensions. To the extent possible, it became a transnational forum that demolished geographical and cultural borders and pursued the free circulation of ideas. Not coincidentally, 1973 was also the year in which the boldest Greek plays were performed on the urban stages of Athens and Thessaloniki. The incidents of this pivotal year finally mobilized the Greek populace and marked the beginning of the end of the dictatorship. The military crackdown at the Polytechnic, which was denounced in the worldwide media, discredited the Colonels’ policies of “controlled liberalization” (a much-advertised period of thaw

36 For vivid descriptions of the Polytechnic episode, see Bistes (2010: 257–267); Kornetis (2013: 225–311, or his ch. 5); Kotanidis (2011: 423–437); Panourgia (2009: 142–149); and the testimonies collected by Papachrestos (2004). For more personal or semi-fictional accounts, see Douka (1991: 259–272); Kasdagles (1985); Lymberake (1976); Metropoulou (1982); and, most recently, Natalie Bakopoulos’s debut novel, The Green Shore (2012: 317–333). See also Close (2002: 122, 150, 152); Doulis (2011: 226–234); Kassimeris (2005: 745–750); Kornetis (2006: 279–349, or his ch. 4); and the special issue of To Vema, November 9, 2003, entitled: “1973–2003, The Polytechnic File: The Unknown Documents.” The bloody clashes at the Polytechnic have led to powerful Greek associations of the contemporary student movement with the demand for increased political participation, and of education in general with a possible road to social reform. Kornetis avers: “In Greece, the hagiography of student resistance and its ‘epic’ conclusion [in the Polytechnic] was used inter alia in order to whitewash the lack of systematic dissent and the relative consensus that the Junta enjoyed among the Greek population during the . . . years of its existence, a fact which has been obliterated as a result of refoulement and collective amnesia” (2006: 11). 37 Georgousopoulos refers to the “ ‘theater of the young’ ” («Ł Ææ
ø  ø») to denote the wave of small theater launches by the younger Greek generations (1982–1984: 2:62). Hager explains that the term “youth” “reflects the ideological ties of this generation with the student movement; it also reflects the construction of a community of youth, which was the result of the interaction of the theatrical field with the social space” (2008: 7 n. 1).

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culminating in September–October 1973 under the premiership of Spyridon Markezines, who announced leniency measures; Tzortzis 2012). The standoff shattered the strongmen’s confidence but also pulled hardliners out from the wings. The era of liberalization had begun in 1970, had opened up opportunities for the resistance to draw in new blood, and had made the radicalized student movement of 1973 possible.38 In its immediate aftermath, however, the Polytechnic crisis aborted further steps toward liberalization and restricted the space for action that students and youth had staked out in the previous years and that conversed with the hard work done in theater. Testimonies by my own informants and others show the significant extent to which memories of the junta period have, to this day, been informed by play production, that is, by the cultural production or, rather, the countercultural production of the time. The Free Theater recruited a loyal student public through methods that had successfully brought youth groups together worldwide. In addition to organizing debates, readings, and film screenings, Kotanidis adopted the counterhegemonic discourse of Marxist (and later Maoist) youth to act as his revolutionary guide. He was active both in the student movement and in the New Greek Theater, and his personal account underscores the many connections between the two: the rebel became an actor; the actor took on the role of rebel (2011: 86–88, 109). Kotanidis’s memoir brims with references to foreign books, movies, songs, and music. He repeatedly refers to the cult film, The Strawberry Statement, a 1970 production of Stuart 38 Kornetis (2006: 161, 206–208, 210–211; 2008: 263): he observes how this era’s “less policed public sphere . . . offered the student body the cohesion and optimism it lacked” (2006: 163). Many of my informants agree that the year 1970 was a turning point. Any wave of old-style resistance had met with the regime’s ferocious reprisals and failed to muster the broader social classes; a new resistance needed to find new outlets as well as strength in numbers. Chatzedakes (1991) lists the highlights of 1971, when Greek theater life was on the upswing. The perceived turning point of 1970 in Greek theater history follows, with a slight delay, the chronological boundary of 1968/ 9, which Edith Hall has documented in her co-edited volume, Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley 2004). Bradby previously posited the 1968 dividing line, based on his study of French theater (1991: 12; also Bradby and Sparks 1997: 8, 17–18). Hall’s introduction highlights the late 1960s so-called Performative Turn, that is, the performance methods that favor “physical” theater over theater of the spoken word (2004b: 27). New, more broadly conceived performance that drew on multiple means sidelined theater of the logos. Chapter 2, pp. 143–144, notes how stage principles akin to those of the Performative Turn applied to some early 1970s Greek plays.

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Hagmann based on a book by James S. Kunen chronicling the 1968 student riots at Columbia University.39 The movie’s title ominously translates in Greek as Strawberries and Blood. Significantly, Kotanidis’s contribution to the student protests at the Polytechnic University was inspired by his role in and the slogans of the Free Theater’s first production, John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (opened 1970; see Figure 1.1): We reached the fence [of a side-street to the Polytechnic]. . . . Then I shouted . . . “All together,” and we began to move the fence back and forth with thousands of hands, until it gave way and fell, opening up an escape route. . . . What a fantastic [slogan], that “All together,” which I used to shout onstage in the Beggar’s Opera and, in a coordinated act, we threw down the symbolic wall separating us from the public—and now that was happening in real life (2011: 433–434).40

Figure 1.1. Scene from the Free Theater’s 1970 production of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. Courtesy of Yorgos Kotanidis.

39 Kotanidis (2011: 181, 391). See also Katsapes (2013: 393–398, 518) and Kornetis (2013: 177–178, 278, 285). 40 The title of Kotanidis’s book, All Together, Now! (2011), acknowledges this pivotal moment. Liakos’s (online) review of the book highlights the links between life, performance, reconstruction, and resistance, as well as the late 1960s intense relationship between the personal and the political (2012: 1–2).

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In the maelstrom of countercultural activism, the Greek youth movement defiantly embraced political militancy and the romantic quest for social justice and transnational solidarity along with a hybrid popular culture. Young Greeks sported the globalizing protest language, semantic codes, and syncretic symbols of the international popular culture (whose origins were, however, predominantly AngloAmerican), such as pacifist slogans, flower-power tokens, hippie hairdos, and exotic dress styles. Flaunting American hippie fashions became a direct way to suggest unrestrained sexuality, lack of commitment, and a dearth of patriotic spirit, and thus to provoke the Colonels who shamelessly courted American military aid and economic investment.41 Greek youth’s pursuit of radical content and form in popular tactics, colorful fashions, film, books, theater, and music is significant both for sociopolitical and artistic reasons. Greek students cultivated radical literary tastes in “unorthodox” modern political theory and history and also in sociological literature of the postwar era (Regos 1999: 232–233). Kornetis notes the early 1970s excitement about the diffusion of sought-after books, the “ritual” of acquiring books from left-wing bookshops or street vendors, who could barely satisfy the students’ voracious appetite for reading and debating books (2006: 216 and 2013: 160–169; also Kotanidis 2011: passim). A much-discussed book was From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (1967), by the radical David Horowitz (who later became a neoconservative). The book features a leftist interpretation of the Greek Civil War (1967: 63–66) and was translated into Greek by 1971 (by Demetres Kaïses). Greek students and youth voiced the sentiments of an antitechnocratic rage, along with the rhetoric of self-discovery, individualism, and subjectivity. Generational revolt and countercultural indulgence (typically through adversarial comportment, promiscuous behavior, or ostentatious informality) are common themes in the modern Greek plays of the early 1970s.42 Theater approximated music’s role in galvanizing 41 Botsiou comments on the paradoxical nature of Greek protesters’ “self-Americanization” by way of “demonstrations of political anti-Americanism using American cultural instruments of expression” (2006: 297). See also Kornetis (2013: 58–59). 42 The intergenerational tensions of the late 1960s marked Greece’s new youth identity as well. These tensions played out in conflicts between Greek parents, who had lived through the Occupation and the Civil War and who experienced the traumatic defeat of the (Old) Left, and adolescent or adult children, who were hungry for new revolutionary ideologies and were drawn to the theory and praxis of a New Left or Center Left, a Left without the onerous baggage of the previous decades.

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a critical young audience: young Greeks attended pop concerts and hyped their tastes in rock music but also in Greek political songs (such as those of resistance icon Mikis Theodorakis, to whom they listened clandestinely, and of the New Left “subversive” Dionyses Savvopoulos, the Greek exponent of the global medium of the singer-songwriter performance of the 1960s and early 1970s).43 Also, Greek youth rediscovered indigenous folklore as a source of authenticity and skillfully deployed it to undermine from within the regime’s own, spurious quest for authentic popular culture. Music fans vaunted the countercultural resonance of the nonconformist rebetika songs from the Greek “underworld,” claimed the popular authority of such songs, and exploited their special affective registers.44 The dictatorship infantilized the Greek people. Play production, on the contrary, helped them grow. Cultural activities in general educated the Greeks, not in the traditional dogmatic system, which reinforced top-down authority, but in an open dialogue that sharpened critical thinking skills. The Colonels imposed their own cultural and aesthetic tastes on the country and laid down rules of social and individual conduct. They even inflicted their ideas on what Greeks could and could not wear: they railed against miniskirts for women and long hair and beards for men, denouncing them as symbols of Western “decadence” and “hippie corruption.”45 The junta’s censorship tried to dislodge the ongoing and popular “cultural transfers,” blocking important elements of transcultural communication in the miniskirts and the long hairdos that betokened the global counterculture. The regime’s dress code was another tool of its intrusive 43 Daloukas (2006), Katsapes (2013), and Kornetis (2013: 189–202) further contextualize Greek music and youth culture. See also Chapter 2, n. 30. 44 See further Kornetis (2006: 22, 47–131, 205–277, or his chs 1 and 3, resp.; 2013: 117–118, 119, 169–170, 189–190, 192–193, 196–202) and Papanikolaou (2007: 94, 106, 130–131, 132–133), who shows how Greek youth reappropriated radical popular traditions and made them convey liberational messages (2007: 134). 45 See Kornetis (2013: 176–177, 213); Murtagh (1994: 117); Van Dyck (1998: 25, 104); and Van Steen (2001: 178). Colonel Ioannes Ladas, director of the Military Police and a vocal ideologue for the dictatorship (whose demonology the regime later discredited), harbored a deep-seated dislike for men’s long hair as a sign of gender-bending “decadence.” He branded such men as exponents of “the degenerate phenomenon of hippyism,” calling their hairdo “the hirsute flag of their nihilism.” In his eyes, hippies were “anti-social elements, drug-addicts, sex-maniacs, thieves, etc.” Ladas is quoted by Clogg, in Clogg and Yannopoulos (1972: 42). See also Anon., NYT, February 4, 1970; Daloukas (2006: 253–256, 257, 259); Katsapes (2013: 211–259, 327–344, 390–400, 511–516, and passim); and Meletopoulos (1996: 56–57, 187, 191).

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social control and an act of censorship of the body. It also underscores that the rulers defined subversion as a social and near-criminal category, thereby “domesticating” political dissent. In the public opinion of Greek youth, strongman Papadopoulos had illegitimately usurped the cura morum and related powers to penalize private conduct, as when an authoritarian father or schoolmaster inflicted corporal and other punishments on his misbehaving children. With quasi-paternal tropes, Papadopoulos was claiming a moral authority over “his” nation that was, at the time, sanctified by Orthodox religion.46 He was often heard saying that the Greeks were “childish,” “irresponsible,” and “quirky individualists,” who needed the iron hand of restraint and discipline. The antics of those “ungrateful” children or “immature” subordinates seemed to cause him untold heartburn. Papadopoulos was also prone to write off the voices of protest as “subversive agitation” or “anarchy,” thereby further criminalizing and depoliticizing dissent. Enforcing silence and discipline-as-punishment were some of his preferred modes of operation, blunting critical consciousness. The dictatorship’s rhetoric of teaching and castigating hid punishment and disciplinary acts behind the mask of education, and it aspired at churning out obedient subjects. Meanwhile, official reeducation efforts were based on linguistic and moral conservatism.47 Also, “reeducation” (anamorphosis) was the officialdom’s common euphemism for torture, which targeted mainly young people. Patronizing politics conflated cultural, social, and moral rectitude with patriotic righteousness, and this political self-righteousness with ground for cruelty. Greek youths deeply resented the many ways in which the Colonels impinged on or ruined their private lives; they pushed to reverse the infantilizing status to which they themselves and the entire

46 See Papadopoulos’s speech given as if “by a parent to his children” (in his words) on the occasion of the regime’s second anniversary: “Prepare Yourselves to Become Marathon Runners and Stay the Course of the Nation,” printed on the front page of To Vema, April 22, 1969. 47 In the domain of education proper, the Colonels’ new but backward-looking legislation annulled the progressive reforms of the early to mid-1960s and abolished the teaching and use of Demotic Greek in all but the first three grades of primary school. The results of the renewed official emphasis on the Kathareuousa language were disastrous: students were forced to learn in an artificial tongue that many could not understand. See further Anon., NYT, October 8, 1967; and Roberts, NYT, December 3, 1974. Mackridge (2009) treats language issues through 1976.

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nation had been reduced. The “stage of emergency” of the New Greek Theater found its dynamism in youth’s shared experience of pressing societal concerns and in its sense of being at the center of revolutionary ferment. Amid the cacophony and the hollow rhetoric of public life, theater led a new radical and aesthetic discourse that retained its validity through the regime’s demise. Tired of the political theatrics, young audiences went to hear the truth spoken on the alternative stage, ironically under the guise of dramatic illusion. They wanted a theater free of hypocrisy but accepted that, under the strict censorship conditions, truth did not come in undiluted form but became a function of the dramatic play. They delivered aesthetic blows to shock a system that they perceived as antiquated, duplicitous, and deeply compromised by bourgeois complacency as well as by the strongmen’s power-grabbing. The growing Greek middle class, however, seemed more interested in enhancing its lifestyle and level of comfort at the cost of increased commercialization and commodification. Like student politics under the junta, the New Greek Theater articulated collective rebellion and resentment, and it did not break down easily along the conventional lines of creators and spectators. Theater assisted also in defining the shifting perspective on personal as well as collective responsibility. The Greek student and youth movement offered a cathartic experience that involved the direct participation of theater practitioners and their audiences, who displayed a motivation that reached well beyond the artistic rationale. Many activists of the early 1970s referred to committed art (French: art engagé) or to “engaged theater” with the older, leftist terms of “strateumene techne” (æÆ ı Å  åÅ) and “strateumeno theatro” (æÆ ı 
Ł Ææ
). The word strateumenos refers to someone who has been drafted to serve in the armed forces, and its figurative uses have more militant connotations than the French engagé.48 These 48 See, for example, Kotanidis (2011: 257), speaking for the Free Theater, but also the older Phrankopoulos (1978: 145). Stathis Gourgouris traces the sense of the French engagement to Sartre’s popularization of the term, as part of his philosophy of existentialism. He confirms the Greek rendering of strateuse (æ ıÅ) or “militant commitment” (Gourgouris 2000: 47). The existentialism of Sartre and Camus developed into one of the most important postwar movements and influenced playwrights and producers such as Beckett and Mnouchkine: it offered up a blend of Marxism and existentialisms to address postwar angst. Daigle supplies a very readable introduction to Sartre as a critical thinker and advocate of committed literature and authenticity (2010: 98–125). See also Bradby (1991: 34, 37–39) and Bradby and Sparks (1997: 9).

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metaphors of mass mobilization and calls to arms deployed military terminology or “military semiotics” to respond to a military regime, but they also reified the language of World War II battle and leftist resistance.49 Followers picked up the banner and occasionally the paramilitary tactics of this “historic” liberation movement, marking a political theater with historical resonances of militancy. It is in this radicalized response to the dictatorship that Greek dramamade-militant found common ground with other, Western political theaters and especially with those operating under repressive regimes (whether in Spain, Portugal, or Central and South America). “[T]here is a combat role for each citizen,” Taylor affirms (1997: 69). Political theater modeled after that of Brecht, in particular, fired the imagination of Greek theater troupes/troops. When the collective Free Theater emerged in 1970, it functioned (or at least tried to function) as the theatrical equivalent of a political grassroots organization. Significantly, the Hellenic European Youth Movement (EKIN, Helleno-europaïke Kinese Neon) claimed a formative role in the shaping of the Free Theater’s first production, the adaptation of the eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera by John Gay (September 1970). A statement issued by EKIN endorsed the Free Theater’s inaugural production and proudly declared: “Truth and integrity, we decided, will distinguish our activities on the frontlines (Æ  øÆ) of the theater, the music world, the cinema, lectures, discussions, and printed materials.”50 Kotanidis admits to striving to enlist the entire Free Theater into the radical communist student organization in which he himself had become very active (2011: 286–291, 299–300). He was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and granted amnesty on a number of occasions between April 1973 and the fall of the junta, or in the months that followed upon the actors’ discovery of Brecht and that spawned their most revolutionary performances. The military

49 In his study of Matesis’s plays of the junta period, Puchner observes that the Greek theater’s system of “military semiotics” reflected “unknown dictatorships, prohibitions, interrogations, terror, and weapons that frighten the people locked up in their homes” as well as the primitive instincts of “treason, torture, and murder” (2003: 38). Greek audiences recognized this semiotic system precisely because militarism and authoritarianism had long been part of Greek life and affected cultural production (Hager 2010: 169). 50 This statement is reproduced by Vernikos (2005: 231). See further Kotanidis (2011) and Vernikos (2005: 180, 230–233). Daloukas (2006: 301–302) and Kornetis (2013: 110, 116, 118–122, 185–186) dwell on EKIN’s emergence and mission.

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terminology, the sought-after association with a perceived militant Brecht, and the mimicking of global left-wing activism moved the early 1970s Greek theater circles into the orbit of political struggle. The New Greek Theater urged its fighters to detect and combat problems; it demanded an ever-growing mobilization of its public, which it then steered toward further radicalizing processes. Theater and performance became weapons for the rebellious younger generations to use when waging war against tyranny.

NEW THEATER LAUNCHES AND COUNTERCULTURAL SPACES: EXPLORING NEW SPACES FOR A RADICAL CRITIQUE Gentlemen, . . . I wish to let you know, once and for all: never in my life have I set foot in a theater. (Papadopoulos at a meeting with representatives of the Greek theater)51

New, liberated spaces staked out political as well as artistic freedom. The winds of innovation swept even through the establishment of the Greek National Theater: in the winter season of 1970/1, its longawaited New Stage (Nea Skene) began to operate with the stated goals to “present new playwrights, Greek and foreign alike” and to mine the available “artistic talents in the fields of acting, producing, and set and costume designing” (quoted from the New Stage’s “founding charter” by Kanakes 1999: 513). The Experimental Stage of the State Theater of Northern Greece was inaugurated in July 1969, with a production of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae staged by the promising young director Spyros Euangelatos.52 The New Stage of the State Theater of Northern Greece was established in December 1970 and was housed at the Aulaia Theater. These new stages were not supposed to be smaller copies of the central stages but were intended, rather, to serve different aesthetic principles. They had to broaden the home institution’s

51

Papadopoulos is quoted by Anon. in Theatro (ed. Nitsos) 2nd ser. 7, nos. 38–39 (March–June 1974): 111. 52 See Karaoglou (2009: 43, 106–112, 286–287, 290, 293, 309–310); Spathes (2003b: 250–251); and Van Steen (2000: 215–216).

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repertoire and vision, to include works by contemporary Greek playwrights, and, despite conservative inhibitions, to reflect current concerns for wider audiences. Thessaloniki’s New Stage was better able to respond to the mission of fostering local talent than the one in Athens, which quickly reverted back to staging foreign playwrights or, at best, “safe bets” among modern Greek plays. As a general rule, the National Theater did not produce plays representative of the New Greek Theater until the mid-1970s, when the reputation of some works had become better known.53 Why the difference? The New Stage of the State Theater of Northern Greece enjoyed the benefit of the more progressive climate that reigned in its central institution and could present young directors and bolder choices in repertoire and performance styles.54 For being government-sponsored, the State Theater of Northern Greece was not per definition a juntified theater. Nonetheless, its directors, actors, and artists had to be watchful of those who based Greek national culture solely on the classical past. The conservatism of Greek revival tragedy prevailed at the National Theater, however, where the choices of plays were all too often determined by

53

Pontikas relates his very negative experience with the New Stage of the National Theater in 1974 (1981: 66). 54 See further Karaoglou (2009: 26, 46, 281–282, 283–284, 290, 293–294). Among the bolder selections of plays staged by the State Theater of Northern Greece were Ionesco’s The Gap (La Lacune, 1965) (directed by Euangelatos), Exit the King (Le Roi se meurt, 1962), and The Killer (Le Tueur sans gages, 1959) (staged by Mary Vostantze, one of few female directors). The first play ridicules the intellectual establishment, whereas the second and the third are meditations on inexorable death. The State Theater of Northern Greece further mounted Oak Tree and Angora Rabbit, a 1962 absurdist play written by the German Martin Walser that reflects on the individual’s stance under a totalitarian regime (which brands the nonconformist as insane), and Count Oederland, a 1951 parable play of the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch that thematizes violent urban resistance against the bourgeois establishment. According to Butler, the latter work prefigured the 1968 riots of disenchanted youth across Europe (1985: 68–69). All of these plays were produced between February 1970 and January 1974, and half of them participated in the theater’s extensive touring program to provincial cities and towns of Northern Greece. See Karaoglou (2009: 313–314, 322, 330, 332; on the theater’s touring program, 47–54, and on its outreach efforts and lecture programs, 292, 335–339) and Van Steen (2000: 212–215). Conspicuously missing from the repertoire of the State Theater of Northern Greece is the political drama of Brecht (Karaoglou 2009: 284). Also, the State Theater’s conservatism in the realm of ancient drama and Shakespeare was embodied by director and tragic actor Thanos Kotsopoulos (Karaoglou 2009: 40 n. 123, 284–286, 291). Karaoglou offers a summary assessment of the “ideological and artistic identity” of the State Theater of Northern Greece (2009: 280–295). Gaensbauer (1996) provides a very readable introduction to Ionesco’s plays, as does Butler (1985) to Frisch’s works.

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directors’ political tenets and individual ambitions. Besides, the institution’s general director was not necessarily a theater person. For many Greeks reflecting back on the dictatorship period, the openings to the new stages at the state-sponsored theater establishments offered too little too late. “For us, the conservatism of the junta and the conservatism of the established theater were identical notions,” asserted Kostas Arzoglou (in an interview with Varoucha 1999: 4). Menas Chatzesavvas confirmed: “The two went hand in hand, that is to say, the resistance against the political establishment and the resistance against the theatrical establishment” (Varoucha 1999: 4). Not coincidentally, both actors were affiliated with the Free Theater. Stelios Goutes took the lead of the Theatrical Workshop (Theatriko Ergasteri) of “Techne” (founded in January 1970, after prior efforts with various affiliations), a collaborative thiasos of young people and students that was later renamed the Theatrical Workshop of Thessaloniki (1973–1989). Techne itself was the name of the Macedonian Cultural Association, an organization led by the watchword of “Art” that was overseen by the literary scholar Linos Polites and that had been contributing to Thessaloniki’s cultural life since 1951.55 The Theatrical Workshop shared the territory of Thessaloniki with the State Theater of Northern Greece but was far more inspired by the Free Theater’s achievements and likewise appealed to a younger public. The testimony of lead player Helene Makisoglou illustrates the Workshop’s sense of mission and, specifically, its quest for a politicized Adamov that entailed a rebellious rejection of the State Theater’s “meeker” Ionesco and Beckett.56 Her comments betray the intertwining of aesthetic questions with topical and political concerns: Beyond our artistic curiosity and anxiety, we took a political position as well. The situation was such that it was impossible not to take a stance. . . . The junta strengthened our conviction: given that some were in prison and we were still free, we could not possibly sit still and be

55 See further Gakides (2003); Gerasimidou (1997); Kotanidis (1973a); N. Papandreou (1997a: 25); “Techne,” Macedonian Cultural Association (1985); and Zapheires (2000: 131–132, 153; 2011: 113–116). Karaoglou’s summary assessment of the Theatrical Workshop’s “ideological and artistic identity” is again very helpful (2009: 295–299). 56 Under the dictatorship, the State Theater of Northern Greece did not actually perform Beckett but made his work the subject of two cultural events (December 1969 and January 1970) (Karaoglou 2009: 292, 336).

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well-behaved children, so that nothing would happen to us.57 We would have been ashamed of such an attitude. Therefore, we tried to do what we could and our vantage point was political. That is, we did not make a random selection with Adamov’s The Politics of Waste from the Theater of the Absurd. We did not put on Ionesco or Beckett. We put on Adamov, who is not one of the playwrights to last through time. But, at that time when we faced social and political problems, Adamov’s play was what suited us—not the existentialist works. The existentialist plays were left aside.58 We were a close-knit group of friends (Ææ Æ) that did theater. The reading of Adamov took place in the taverna Domna, with the entire thiasos and our friends present—because all of them gave their input as to which play we should select and voiced their opinions. And once we were done with the reading, behind closed doors, we stayed on to drink wine—a lot of wine!59

Many progressive Greek theater companies made their first appearances in the early 1970s and confidently professed a newfound artistic subjectivity. Fresh impulses proliferated and engendered performances also in literary circles, studio theaters, and amateur or private clubs. Working in new and smaller groups offered the chance of staying under the censors’ radar—though not for long. The Contemporary 57

Makisoglou describes the conduct that the regime expected of young people in the terms of an authoritarianism undergirded by a century and a half of punitive pedagogy. 58 Makisoglou’s testimony is quoted by Karaoglou (2009: 62), albeit in a different context. In collaboration with the kindred Amicale, the members of the (soon to be named) Theatrical Workshop of “Techne” presented Adamov’s The Politics of Waste (La Politique des restes, 1962) in a double bill with his Professor Taranne (1953), in February 1968. The former play attacks racism in the United States and the latter combines a sociopolitical critique with the structural framework of the dream. See Gakides (2003: 43); Karaoglou (2009: 341); and Zapheires (2000: 132, 133). Makisoglou rightly implies that, after 1968, the popularity of existentialist drama waned. Young Greek actors then turned to plays of social criticism such as those of Adamov and especially of Brecht (Asimakoulas 2005a: 102–103). Petrakou (2004: 217–254) and Puchner (1999: 152–155) discuss the influence that the existentialism of Sartre and Camus exerted on Greek theater, which was never as profound as that of the “much more theatrical” Theater of the Absurd (Puchner 1999: 155). 59 The second part of Makisoglou’s testimony is again quoted by Karaoglou (2009: 295 n. 1115). The speaker reminisces about the social aspects of selecting and staging political plays with trusted friends. Kornetis, too, stresses the importance of the bonding culture of the parea that frequently gathered in its taverna of choice (2006: 250–256). See further Daloukas (2006: 311) and Kotanidis (2011: 48, 84, 124), who interspersed his memoir with numerous references to taverna visits, drinking bouts, and romantic flings.

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Greek Theater (Synchrono Helleniko Theatro), founded in October 1970 by Stephanos Lenaios and Elly Photiou, was as much an Athenian gathering place as a playhouse, especially once it had found its permanent home in the Alpha Theater (from the 1971/2 season on).60 In its first season, the Contemporary Greek Theater was housed at the Orvo Theater (Lenaios and Photiou 1990: 9). Its second stage, the Patari, then offered the intimacy of a smaller stage that communicated more directly with its public. Spectators watching from up close felt even more that they belonged to a group linked by common literary and political interests. During the Polytechnic uprising, the Alpha Theater became a “crisis center”; interaction there broke down political boundaries among participants and rendered their social backgrounds insignificant. The authorities, however, curtailed the theater’s parallel activities such as the post-performance discussions on Friday evenings and the debates about drama, freedom of expression, and cultural values in general (Lenaios and Photiou 1990: 16). Because the operations of the Contemporary Greek Theater continued to depend on box office profits, the company soon opted for more plays imported from the modern Western repertoire, which delivered easier recognition as well. As independent theaters, the new and progressive companies did not receive state support of any kind and, in case of an enforced ban or closure, suffered serious losses. Their relatively greater risk-taking led to constant financial stress. One initiative, however, was very long-lived and deserves special praise for its singular mission: the Stoa Theater of Thanases Papageorgiou and Leda Protopsalte continues to do valuable work to this day. Both actor/managers have devoted four decades to promoting the uvre of modern Greek playwrights. Their theater was founded in December 1971 and is located in the Athenian suburb of Zographou.61 It harbored a dissident attitude toward the Colonels but, nonetheless, adapted exceptionally well to the post-junta era. With a whiff of nostalgia, Papageorgiou describes the creative years of the early 1970s, during 60 Testimony by Lenaios, June 16, 2001; Lenaios and Photiou (1990: 5, 16, 17); and Mackridge (unpublished MS, 8–9). 61 See Papageorgiou (1990 and 1992) and several interviews with Papageorgiou, all in Greek (1972, 1973, 1984, 2001a, 2001b, and 2002). See further Anon., “The New Theatrical Teams” (1972) and Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:236). The papers of Georgakake and Lazarides, edited by Blesios (2011) among the proceedings of a 2007 conference devoted to the Stoa Theater, discuss its stagings under the junta.

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which he discovered a new Greek theater through close collaboration with young dramatists such as Pontikas (1942– ): This era was the golden decade of the modern Greek theater play. None of us knew it then, but our course was being determined by our success, by the encouragement we received from certain theater people, and also by the public’s distinct craving for a bit of truth. The modern Greek play would become “our creed.”62 Pontikas was the first playwright to convince us that embracing the modern Greek play and taking it very seriously would be worth our effort. The problems posed changed, the language became simple, informal, and the playwrights . . . felt their heroes’ pain. (Papageorgiou 1997: 239–240)

In the playbill that accompanied the inaugural production of Kambanelles’s Courtyard of Miracles by the 1969–1970 Thiasos Vemata, director Papageorgiou had called the exponents of the urban commercial theater “traders in falsehood and trash.” He wanted the new movement to topple the commercial stages’ near-monopoly, battling it with “genuine theatrical sentiment, in its selection and production of plays and in its relationship with the public, without the need for stars, patronage, political rhetoric, pseudo-problematization, or socalled experimentation.”63 With Pontikas’s play, Something Fishy, the Stoa Theater broke new ground during the 1972/3 winter season.64 The production was directed by Helene Karpeta, Papageorgiou’s then collaborator, and has been called a “psychography of fear and of the individual’s perennial compromise” (Georgakake 2011: 34). Together, Karpeta, Papageorgiou, and Pontikas discovered that the turn to the New Greek Theater opened up pathways to artistic autonomy and

62

Papageorgiou makes an ironic reference to the multi-volume collection of Papadopoulos’s speeches, interviews, and declarations that the state was publishing under the title of Our Creed (1968–1972). See also Veloudes, “The ‘Credo’ of April 21: Ideology, Politics, and Economy,” Eleutherotypia, April 21, 2005. 63 Papageorgiou is quoted by Polykarpou (2011: 24), who elaborates on the founder’s first initiative, the November 1969 opening of the Thiasos Vemata (“Steps”) in the historically leftist Athenian neighborhood of Kokkinia (Nikaia). The thiasos opened with a programmatic production of Kambanelles’s Courtyard of Miracles but closed by late April 1970 (Polykarpou 2011: 22, 23–27, 28). See also Georgakake (2009: 115) and Karter (1978: 43–44). Charalambides (1973c), too, decried the lack of quality plays in the commercial Greek theater circuit. 64 See Georgakake (2009: 171–172); Michaelides (1975: 116–119); and the play’s brief presentation and reviews in the volume edited by Papageorgiou (1992: 35–40), who attests to his extensive collaboration with Pontikas in the early 1970s (1997: 238–242). Chapter 2, pp. 145–151, presents the case study of Pontikas’s Trombone.

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integrity (including the honesty of a natural diction), and that these goals could not be fully achieved by staging the classics or the Western repertoire. “Truthful” modern Greek plays, which used the new critical language and renounced artifice (whether in acting, music, costume and set design, stage lighting, and so on), delivered their own unique commentary on current events in Greece.65 This tenet, however, did not preclude the Stoa Theater’s “foreign” success with the spring and fall 1973 production of Peter Weiss’s Song of the Lusitanian Bogey (1967, originally in German), a timely attack on the evils of Portuguese colonialism and a poignant depiction of the African colonies’ nascent liberation movement.66 The play’s relevance to Greece raised red flags with the junta censors.67 The new spaces that housed the early 1970s Greek stage marked another noteworthy phenomenon: theater’s decentralization, which undercut the centralized totalitarian state (Frangi 1996; Hager 2008: 156). Traditionally, Greek theater life had played itself out in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki but had seldom reached the silent groups and classes that now showed interest in participating. Some new stage managers moved their plays outdoors, to public spaces and open park sites or other, improvised facilities (such as garages and warehouses). Other directors sought out culturally neglected areas. As early as 1966, Giorgos Michaelides had founded his Theater of Nea Ionia, the first stage to operate outside of the urban center of Athens (Markares 1966; Michaelides 1998). He hoped to stimulate a local demand for drama in a refugee suburb that had never before housed a resident stage company. Bringing theater to the people was a way for the director/manager to declare his independence from the highbrow cultural establishment but it posed daunting logistical challenges. The Colonels closed down the Theater of Nea Ionia shortly after the coup (Gkiones 1999: 74), but this setback launched Michaelides into his next venture: the spring 1972 foundation of the politically oriented Open Theater (Anoichto Theatro), which lasted through 2006. Michaelides soon found himself directing a stage company, 65 Pephanes (2011: 16). See also Georgakake (2011) and Skourtes, “G. Skourtes: ‘Let’s Talk in the Language of the People and Tell the Truth,’ ” interview by Kontogiannes, To Vema, April 3, 1970. 66 Robert Cohen (1993) introduces Peter Weiss and expands on the Song of the Lusitanian Bogey (1993: 100–106). 67 See Georgakake (2011: 34–35); Papageorgiou (1973: 14); and the play’s presentation and reviews in Papageorgiou’s edited volume (1992: 45–50).

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running a drama school, and publishing the monthly journal Open Theater, audaciously called “a review of political theater” (testimony of June 5, 2001; also Hager 2008: 108–109, 157). These demanding activities attest to the tight interlocking of stage theory and practice, in a joint effort to shape and empower audiences in nearly every sector of society and reach a public beyond the politico-intellectual set. The Free Theater or Eleuthero Theatro (founded in May 1970) followed the trajectory of intense inquiry and creative exploration. The free public sphere constructed by this thiasos was the most popular one, and it survived for several more years after the regime’s collapse. The Free Theater became synonymous with a nerve center of progressive action in Athens but toured to Thessaloniki as well. Its members experimented with alternative models of leadership and group dynamics and transferred those to the domains of political morality and resistance. The Free Theater may have come closest to the American Living Theatre shattering the complacency of its public. While it did not create a 1960s-type commune, its members devoted long hours of unremunerated (and at times unacknowledged) labor to the collective cause. The thiasos found its voice in dissent on stage and managed to weld a committed constituency among its spectators. The degree of its public’s involvement was not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different. Moreover, the Free Theater had faced and successfully overcome the immediate danger of the censors’ reprisals. Like several other young companies, however, it was plagued by internal discord and fatigue; it saw many actors coming and going, and it eventually dissolved in 1979. Because the Free Theater’s contribution was so significant, however, Chapter 4 will revisit the troupe’s work and progression through the 1970s. The danger of splintering was mitigated when fewer personalities were involved. Thus the Experimental Theater (Peiramatiko Theatro, founded in 1964) was, from 1968 on, housed in a small and bare venue on Athens’ Akademias Street and was run by Marietta Rialde, stage director, lead actress, playwright, and translator. The Theater of Inquiry (Theatro Ereunas) was founded by Demetres Potamites in spring 1972 and remained active for decades in the Athenian neighborhood of Ilisia. Guided by its name and mission, this company devoted itself to the search for new topics and dramatic expressions, and it embraced symbolism and minimalism (testimony by Potamites, March 6, 2002; Potamites 1993). However, most of the stages of the New Greek Theater with its identity of dissent ran out of steam

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as soon as democratic freedom was restored to Greece. Nearly all vanished after only a few years of activity.68 Some dropped artistic innovation in favor of polished traditional theater. Even companies that had galvanized a committed cast and public of students, intellectuals, and liberal urbanites disbanded after summer 1974. The agitational groups that remained and, in particular, some epitheorese or commercial revue stages began to sound like rebels without a cause.69 It took untainted spaces and new initiatives to allow young people to move toward the symbolic center of the Greek cultural scene. The new alternative locations were small and unconventional and they incurred only moderate operating costs. Also, they typically featured sets that were minimalist in their application. The new troupes settled for simpler, non-technological methods of staging and other forms of “poor” theater (perhaps less by choice than by necessity, but nonetheless proudly invoking Grotowski). They then compensated with generous doses of the actors’ human presence: many performers were in close and consistent contact with their public. Thus the younger generations spearheaded the renewal of Greek dramaturgy and developed their own cultural politics of the theater, which were not always well understood by the establishment. They inspired a sudden excitement about contemporary-style performances that spurred Greek society to look at itself and that extended the reach of political resistance against dictatorial rule. As the New Theater gained ground, Kretikos (pseudonym of the critic and theater historian Thodoros 68 Among the lesser known stage initiatives was the Workers’ Theater of Lazaros Papadopoulos (Papadopoulos 1974a and 1974b). The anonymous author of “The New Theatrical Teams” (1972) mentions also the Living Theater (Zontano Theatro), Studio 47, and the student troupe of Athens College. Kotanidis was very impressed by the work of the thiasos named Nea Poreia, “New Course,” and its 1971 production of The 300 of Penelope (ˇi 300 Å —Å º Å), a modern satire written and directed by the group’s founder, Giorgos Charalambides (Kotanidis 2011: 261; also Georgakake 2009: 152–153). Noteworthy, too, was Charalambides’s 1972 production of Tale without Title (—ÆæÆŁØ åøæ 
Æ), by Kambanelles (Georgakake 2009: 169–170; New Course 1972). In 1973 Vasiles Diamantopoulos founded the Theater of Satire (Theatro Satiras) in Thessaloniki (Hager 2008: 67, 109, 270). 69 A similar crisis affected the realm of revival comedy after the junta’s fall (Van Steen 2000: 210–212, 220–223). Makisoglou describes how the loss of a common political goal eroded the sense of cohesion within the Theatrical Workshop (testimony quoted by Karaoglou 2009: 297). In this respect, too, the Workshop followed a course comparable to that of the Free Theater, which had been its point of reference (Karaoglou 2009: 297–298).

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Chatzepantazes) remained skeptical about the authenticity and the ideological purity of this Greek avant-garde. He lamented: “Alas! The figleaf of social problematizing has been covering up so many of our theater’s old and known faults—and that just in the past year! The unbridled star system, the blatant lack of preparation, the shameless opportunism, and the raw profit-seeking, all have been disguised by the lion’s skin of political mobilization” (1972: 182).70 Kretikos saw not a political theater, but a theater of sloganeering and provocation, which blunted the public’s ideological as well as aesthetic sensibilities. This theater, he alleged, was no more than escapist theater on the sly, leaving its audience with a false sense of empowerment (1972: 183). The only useful political theater was, for Kretikos, the “theater of problematization” (Ł Ææ
æ
ºÅÆØ
), which committed to substantive inquiry into and critical analysis of sociopolitical issues and did not expound on its objectives too loudly (183).71 He accused the artistic “pioneers” (æø

æØÆŒ
) of seeking only a temporary shelter in the vanguard of idealist coteries until better professional opportunities—and better financial rewards—in theater or television work presented themselves. In his view, the exponents of the Greek avant-garde contested the system for as long as they themselves had not yet secured a place within that system. Avant-gardism was only a means to an altogether different end and made for a catchy advertisement slogan along the way. Giorgos Charalambides, too, expressed disappointment in the new troupes that sold out to the established theater. Their purportedly progressive ideology, he contended, was opaque and inconsistent and was mired in the name-dropping of Western avant-garde playwrights. He added with verve: The widespread confusion has engendered the following theater types: the gloomy and “profound” playwright, the “bold” stage director, the impudent missionary-actor, and the viewer-victim. Twilight has become this theater’s natural environment, writhing has become its modern acting style, sorcery its message, and hysteria and anxiety its aesthetic finds. (Charalambides 1973b)

70 Also Kretikos (1973a: 196–197). Kalphopoulos (1973) added his criticisms to those of Kretikos. 71 Kontogiannes (1970) explains the original notion of “books of problematization” or political books functioning as intellectual stimuli. See also Kretikos (1971: 206), and Chapter 4 n. 39.

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These harsh criticisms notwithstanding, the new troupes faced, in addition to numerous financial and logistical obstacles, the challenge of needing to replace what they rejected with something of lasting substance. New directors, playwrights, actors, and artists moved Greek spectators out of their comfort zones and made them enter the world of absurdist, Brechtian, or other experimental drama in new physical locales. The Greek public was far more willing to follow along than the established critics. The prolific critic Helene Ourane, a rare elderly woman journalist who wrote under the male pen name of Alkes Thrylos, questioned the aesthetic relevance of what she saw as theater’s abrupt dislocation.72 Ourane was not ready, either, to accept the risks of nonconventional, interactive performance, and she preferred much more sedate shows that left audiences sitting in the dark. Unyielding toward the avant-garde, whose experimentation she denounced as amateurism, she described her experience of attending, in December 1969, a performance of Unprofitable Line 0 (Aª
Å ªæÆ), a one-act psychological drama written by Dinos Siderides and staged at the Apologia Coffeehouse Theater. Her critique, which is more concerned with the venue than with the play, is telling of new beginnings and old reserves: More and more new theatrical venues are being housed in apartment buildings and now also in coffeehouses. . . . Look what the Coffeehouse Theater is all about: one goes down a few rough, steep, and therefore somewhat dangerous steps to then find oneself in an underground kapheneio. . . . There, a podium separates the small room in two parts, in which the supposed spectators sit on benches and stools. . . . The actors on the podium, two women and one man, either move with the convulsive movements of puppets or they each deliver a different text altogether. . . . With difficulty I made out a few words: “louse,” “hunger,” “Biafra,” “operation,” “hemorrhage.” I vaguely suspected that the play was yet another variant of the poems of those upstart poetasters who, in their eagerness to treat the notorious and overstated anxiety of our age, do not pursue any means of therapy; they don’t even use their own words to interpret this anxiety. . . . they express the confusion of the times with an equally confused verbalism dominated 72

Van Steen ponders the all-too-powerful role of Ourane and other established critics (2000: 191–192). Ourane was a member of the National Theater’s Artistic Directing Committee and her reviews reflect the institutional and moral codes that conditioned her thinking.

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by certain characteristic, dull, and stereotypical buzzwords—slogans. The pandemonium on and around the podium lasted for about one hour: one hour of insufferable boredom. . . . I could not but laugh at those [playwrights] who think they have been wronged when the regular theaters reject their masterpieces! (Thrylos [Ourane] 1970a: 202)

Ourane depicted her descent into (what the French call) a boîte as an unbearable katabasis, fraught with danger and disenchantment. Descending a treacherous downward path was the literal and metaphorical equivalent of “stooping down” to the level of experimental theater. The alternative, unknown stage threatened all that she considered to be safe, secure, and intelligible; it threw into doubt inherited beliefs and the accepted practices of Greek logos-based drama. Also, the indignant tone of Ourane’s verbal assault proves that it took the established critics some time to develop an appropriate critical vocabulary in which to discuss the New Greek Theater and its unconventional stages and stage techniques. Interestingly, an anonymous critic who celebrated novelty along with Greek youth discussed the same “heretic” production: “Dinos Siderides staged a new play . . . following the prototypes of the French théâtre de poche, with a lot of improvisation and with the participation of its public.73 His new effort is a modern psychological drama entitled Unprofitable Line; it is a work with character and personality” (Anon. in Chroniko 1970: 44; also Georgakake 2009: 116). The New Greek Theater created opportunities for the embodied experience of alternative lifestyles and acts of protest. Playbills, interviews, and articles repeatedly noted the additional benefits that the stage, availing itself of new forms and contents, offered when compared to the more private arts. Key, however, was whether this theater would be given full freedom of expression. Hager affirms that the younger generation’s main demand was the “break with 73 Hager speaks of “pocket theatres” (2008: 108), the small indoor art theaters that housed the first innovative productions of 1970, before experimental stagings moved to outdoor locales and started to draw much larger audiences (by 1973). Bradby and Sparks refer to Cohn’s 1987 study of “pocket theater” in postwar Paris (1997: 11). Cohn uses markers such as “small,” “intimate,” “adventurous,” and “experimental” to describe the “pocket theaters” of the decade 1944–1953 that played for “discriminating audience[s]” (1987: pp. xiii, xiv, 6). Kotanidis mentions the related culture of the boîtes of Plaka, which, since the early 1960s, had offered the intimate venues for Greek youth’s preferred music and songs (2011: 73; also Dematates 1998).

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the past, which for the conservative establishment, especially in the ultra-nationalist context of the colonels, was evidence of crisis” (2008: 75). By late 1973, critics were less preoccupied with a show’s venue and form and looked, rather, for political truth and ideological integrity (Hager 2008: 237). Actors who spoke the truth under the general conditions of censorship, propaganda, and mendacity earned the trust of the Greek public, which sought out their venues and plays— which led, in turn, to more radical works and further inquiry into the role and efficacy of dramaturgy. The avant-garde director Spyros Vrachorites emphasized how, under the distress of the dictatorship, a new Greek theater and, more importantly, a new Greek audience was being forged (testimony of July 2 and 4, 2000). Without cultivating “snob successes,” the New Greek Theater refashioned spectators and enriched their political education. Papageorgiou concurred: “The new theater teams multiplied and we achieved what I call Greek theater, a Greek awareness. For me, the decade of the 1970s was the one that created Greek spectators for the following decades. Spectators with a Greek awareness” (2001b: 259). Audiences—and, in particular, student audiences—showed a loyalty to select theaters that had seldom been seen before. Many students saw their favorite performances repeatedly, urged their friends to go and see them, bought the playbills, and provided the best word-of-mouth advertising.74 Hager agrees: “audiences choose to be part of this discourse, and choose to interpret the theatrical sign-system in political terms” (2008: 40). A theater text truly comes to life at the moment of its staging, but these texts lived on long after the performances as well: spectators recounted particularly effective scenes or skits, popularized snappy lines and songs, and relished in the jokes, incidents, or moments of spontaneity. Such parameters conditioned both production and reception and need to be part of any discussion of the plays. Personal anecdotes related to theater-going abounded in interviews with informants, and often these anecdotes were better remembered than the details of the plays themselves. The politics of the personal became part of the public’s outlook and attitude toward a theater that was growing into one of the era’s most vital social and political forces.

74 Kotanidis describes the rapidly growing response to the spring 1972 production of The Story of Ali Retzo in Thessaloniki (2011: 246–247, 252).

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Theater-Historical Context & Innovation STAGE TROUPES AND THE TROOPS OF THE STAGE: PERFORMING DEMOCRACY IN A STATE OF TYRANNY The junta made us left-wing. (Alivizatos, quoted by Kornetis 2006: 148)

Under the harsh conditions of the military dictatorship, the Greek stage was still able to re-create a genuine public sphere, a platform for discourse and dissent. By the early 1970s, certain theaters had gained enough credibility with the Greek public to become favorite gathering sites and places of opposition: the stage started to operate as a forum for the student and youth movement to redefine itself as a resistance movement. Popular plays functioned as communal sites for the vicarious experience of rebellion, and alternative performance itself was a new mode of liberation, however temporary. Many of the shows that provided food for thought in the 1950s through 1960s were mounted by Koun’s Art Theater. By the early 1970s, new independent companies had taken over the baton and stirred up excitement and controversy around modern Greek plays and leftist foreign works. These new troupes worked hard to democratize an elite “high” culture and to break the tight grip in which the classics had been holding the Greek stage. As radicalized thiasoi, they pursued an “engaged theater” or “mobilized theater” and explored new paths to innovate, in closer collaboration with their committed audiences. Conditions under the military regime accelerated those developments, and they made it impossible for any new troupe to become popular without responding to current needs. Greek theater-goers, too, grew convinced that plays that stuck to conventional forms, contents, and settings were incapable of fostering doubt or contestation. The New Greek Theater claimed legitimacy for the bolder modes of revolutionary thinking and action, and it cast those modes in codes and styles that had swept across Western countries since the late 1960s. The younger Greek generations joined the dynamic new groups in celebrating the modern and the countercultural, while exponents of the dictatorship kept clinging to tradition and to the classical heritage. Radicalized productions belied the junta’s most cherished claims, that Greece enjoyed stability, tranquility, and state-protected artistic freedom. Modern Greek drama of the 1960s and 1970s was not the mere product of the impact of the Theater of the Absurd and Brechtian

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dramaturgy. The new means of representation that the troupes of young actors adopted was often precisely that: a means to a radical aesthetic end, which, however, prioritized the radical (in an ideological sense) over the aesthetic.75 Also, the use of Western terms within Greece should not be overemphasized, given that this context does not always lend itself to Western European definitions. Much more was going on in Greek cultural life of the mid-1960s through early 1970s to help spark the fervor from which the New Greek Theater was born. Popular, (neo)folkloric, and historical drama were rediscovered; satirical spectacle flourished and fed on local comic traditions. A few examples are cases in point: the Free Theater’s ironizing (and seemingly apolitical) adaptation of Golpho, a popular bucolic melodrama of the late nineteenth century by Spyridon Peresiades but now renamed Golpho for Life (ØÆ Çø ˆŒ ºçø, 1974); the political revues and satirical skits of Kostas Mourselas; and the stinging reworking of the myth of the house of Atreus by the young Vangeles Katsanes, entitled When the Atreids . . . (ΌÆ
Ø `æ   . . . , published in the May–June 1964 issue of Nitsos’s Theatro).76 Performances of these works helped build Greek identity and solidarity and they were often highly animated. Therefore, these examples are far removed from the “fossilized” forms of theatrical writing and dramatic expression dating back to earlier decades, which Thodoros Grammatas recognizes (2002: 1:203). Rather, many modern Greek plays of the junta era conveyed the urgent need for political and social change and offered up their every potential as progressive collective undertakings. Greek theater created a variety of conceptual as well as physical spaces for renewal, resistance, and ultimately reform. While the cultural standing of the stage in Greek national life was hardly new, the early 1970s theater still managed to drastically rearrange the field for years to come. The next chapters, then, aim to address the following questions: how could this theater, acting under censorship restrictions, proffer such fertile ground for a

75 Hager concurs that the “Greek version of the Absurd” was “highly political” in its manifestations: “aesthetic radicalism was the product of political radicalism” (2008: 116). 76 On Golpho for Life, see Chapter 4, pp. 284–285. References to Mourselas’s satires open Chapter 2. On Katsanes’s play, see Van Steen (2002) and Chapter 2, pp. 94–95. The latter work has been translated into English as The Successors by George Valamvanos and Kenneth MacKinnon (Katsanes 1979).

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repressed society to voice its opinions? How did Greek audiences respond to the new theatrical landscape? How did the modern Greek stage contribute to the construction of a new understanding of Greek history? How did some of the new plays operate and what were their main topics, strengths, and weaknesses?

2 “These bonds of freedom hurt” The Logos and Silence of Censorship and Self-Censorship

Are you free or not You have stopped asking (Mourselas, Oh Dad, What a World!, 1974: 98)1

HELLAS HELLENON LOGOKRIMENON: GREECE OF THE CENSORED GREEKS When they did address me it was not because they had any inclination whatsoever to explain themselves [about filling the victim’s mouth with plaster]. Until then they had treated me like an object, but perhaps on some deeper level they needed their work to be approved by me as well. The one . . . spoke: “It was for your own good,” he said. (Thanasis Valtinos, “The Plaster Cast,” 1997: 25. Trans. Jane Assimakopoulos and Stavros Deligiorgis)

The institution of censorship may function as a measure of a state’s democratic integrity. After the 1967 coup, censorship in Greece was far from a historical curiosity but was, rather, alive and well. Papadopoulos, Pattakos, and Makarezos waged an intense struggle for the 1 The oxymoron that delivers this chapter’s title is a line borrowed from the theme song of Mourselas’s satirical play, Oh Dad, What a World!. The epigraph is from the closing song of the same play.

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control of culture and the media, which they deemed critical to the consolidation of their power. State censorship was aided by the fact that the Greek word logokrisia (ºªŒæØÆ) does not have the same negative components as the Latin-derived English word: logokrisia literally means that speech will be judged or evaluated. The dictators’ insistence on their “historic” role explains why all plays produced after April 1967 were subjected to censorship. The regime’s battle to impose its own culture entailed a process of purging or cleansing through which the “nation in peril” could be cured and made whole again. In the rhetorical tradition of Metaxas, the strongmen styled themselves as messianic saviors, healers of the “diseased,” and guarantors of social and moral order. A stricter morality became one of the pillars of the Colonels’ totalitarianism. As per Papadopoulos’s infamous metaphor (on which he elaborated in one of his first public appearances; see Papadopoulos 1968: 11), Greece was a patient who had been placed in a plaster cast and needed close supervision for the healing process to complete itself.2 The Colonels thought of themselves as latter-day founders and vigilant fathers to the family of the nation, with the authority to educate, censor, and punish the “immature” and “irresponsible” Greeks. The rulers’ axiomatic verbiage built the walls of new prisons: their moral and religious terms camouflaged political demands, and the much-heralded family hierarchy buttressed state and military hierarchies. Revamped family metaphors unleashed a torrent of official reprimands about Greek youth’s dearth of “patriotic” sentiment and civic spirit, about its individualist 2 On the Colonels’ self-styled role as saviors, see Chapter 3, pp. 160, 162, 165, 221. As “healers,” “doctors,” or “surgeons,” the dictators imposed restrictive measures on the Greek population to “cure” it from its “selfish individualism.” Emmanuela Mikedakis (2007) analyzes the speech patterns of Papadopoulos (based on Papadopoulos 1968–1972). Her detailed third chapter treats the strongman’s references to the doctor, the patient, the diagnosis of the illness, and the prescribed therapy, which is never presented as a punishment or torture but, rather, as a “cure” or correction (Mikedakis 2007: 243–316). Authors and cartoonists fleshed out the dictators’ spurious claims that they were not only protecting but actively producing the “health” of the Greek nation, and they doted on the overused metaphor of the plaster cast. My epigraph quotes from Valtinos’s story “The Plaster Cast,” which literalizes the metaphor (Papailias 2005: 262 n. 21; testimony by Valtinos, June 19, 2001; Van Dyck 1998: 38, 47–49). Foucault remarks on the “medical gaze,” or the use of the medical discourse as a strategy of surveillance (1980: 107; 1995: 10, 227). Kornetis stresses Papadopoulos’s almost paranoid manner of talking and general comportment (2006: 143; 2013: 102). See also Clogg (1972: 46, 53, 54); Meletopoulos (1996: 152, 160–183); Phillips (1969); and Scott (1990: 103–104 n. 67).

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(mis)conduct or petulant childishness. Government and religious paternalism cast any patriotic obligation to the regime as a duty to family and faith. Political sin entailed family betrayal and was tantamount to moral depravity. Theater in the heavily policed Greece of 1967 had to comply with the government’s official “mission,” that is, it had to help build political consensus about ill-defined national purpose. Playwrights and actors exposed contradictions in the array of political and moral constructions that underpinned the “regime of truth.” In the game of hide and seek, they were always on the lookout for parallels and analogies that could disclose meanings lurking between the lines. This introduction briefly refers to some preliminary and typical scenarios, which are explained at greater length in the relevant sections of this chapter and Chapter 3. Once family dynamics had started to function as metaphors for the workings of power, staging the family became an effective theatrical tactic that often fooled the censors. The family-related absurdities that Greek theaters put on stage were readily understood as stand-ins for dysfunctional sociopolitical structures.3 The junta’s police body, which saw itself as a military force, could be compared to an occupying army ruling with 3 Mourselas’s play Oh Dad, What a World! is imbued with satirical criticism of paternalistic moralizing and bourgeois complacency (Kambanelles et al. 1974: 204). Significantly, the parents of Mourselas’s play push their children toward conformism and compromise. They represent a hypocritical establishment that has sunk into an absurd urban madness. The play’s episodic script incorporates scenes from a very popular television series of 1972–1973, titled This One and . . . That One (¯Œ ŒÆØ . . . ¯Œ), a series of satirical one-acts also written by Mourselas (and translated into English by Horton: Mourselas 1975). These skits were performed as cross-talk acts by two quintessential Greek underdogs, whose names did not even appear in the series title. The confounded Solon and Loukas presented themselves as a pair of commentators on current affairs but, like Beckett’s tramps in Waiting for Godot, they voiced a more philosophical to absurdist-pessimistic viewpoint, to which Greek society responded well. The aloof but disapproving attitude of these professional skeptics or “doubters” (amphisvetíes) was a ruse that fooled no one (Valoukos 1998: 19). Mauromoustakos speaks of “wise wanderers” (2006: 257). The television series was curtailed by the stricter censorship regulations of late 1973. In summer 1973, Diamantopoulos’s Theater of Satire first performed Oh Dad, What a World! in Thessaloniki, and then took the production to Athens for the winter season (Georgakake 2009: 181–182; Michaelides 1975: 105). The censors cut a scene called “The Apology” but did not state any specific reasons. The show’s tour on Crete was cut short by the local police (Anon., calendar entry of July 29, 1974 in Chroniko 1974: 178). For reviews of Mourselas’s play in the mid-October 1973 production, see Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:106–110) and Makres (1973d). Hager offers a full discussion of the play and its reviews (2008: ch. 6, 199, 220–239).

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iron hand. Some plays featured uncanny historical parallels to the Nazi Occupation and Civil War or to current repressive regimes, and they were banned or aborted in rehearsal. The dictators were sensitive to any parallels drawn between them and known tyrants; they did not tolerate comparisons between their present opponents and mythical or historical rebels, either. They particularly resented analogies between their own practices and those of the Nazis and curtailed mentions of torture, secret police, paid informers, curfews, random arrests, or house searches, all of which both regimes practiced or maintained. The government was clear about its injunctions, which made the choice of an avowed leftist author or playwright an obvious choice for the opposition. Brecht became a red flag but also a powerful tool in the hands of dissidents. Brecht had fought fascism and could be revived to wage war against neofascism. As Dimitris Asimakoulas has shown, the Brechtian works selected for translation into modern Greek in 1970–1971 reflected the author’s 1930s struggle against rising Nazism and his search for answers to the question of how the intellectual should resist (2005a: 13–15). Katsanes cleverly deployed ancient myth in When the Atreids . . . , which cloaked his work in a canonized and therefore acceptable form. His play is the perfect case of a pre-junta ban that helps the reader understand the volatility and complexity of state censorship. The young author’s work interrogated classical drama in new ways and delivered some of the first tremors of the theater revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. More than any other work of the decade, Katsanes’s play captured the revolutionary potential of working within the tradition. In early August 1964, during a short-lived political dawn under the liberal government of Georgios Papandreou, the production of Katsanes’s work was banned for making antiroyalist statements and for featuring a popular rebellion against the royals. When Koun’s 1959 production of Aristophanes’ Birds had notoriously been forbidden, it had been under the right-wing government of Konstantinos Karamanles. The character of a mock-priest parodying Orthodox liturgy had been the proverbial red cloth for the reactionary establishment to close down Koun’s production immediately upon its premiere (Van Steen 2000: ch. 4). Thus the ban on Katsanes’s play marked a throwback and also prefigured what was to come less than three years later: official expectations of conformity, which rested more heavily on reworkings of the classics; the state repression of young playwrights’ imagination, easily resulting in self-censorship;

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and the crude suspicions that continued to stunt ideological pluralism. Both of these pre-junta productions, however, were a reminder that theater’s power to shock Greece had not been lost, and that official bans could have the effect of forcing an apparently theatrical controversy into the political arena. Even by the time of the coup, officials often missed the subtexts of oppression and despondency that characterized contemporary Greek plays and that motivated or demoralized their protagonists. Anagnostaki’s early work is pervaded by such sentiments, but most of her plays passed the censors’ scrutiny. In February 1967, the playwright’s first full-length work, Keeping Company, opened at the National Theater (under the directorship of Leonidas Trivizas) but, under the impending threat of a military overthrow, it was hurriedly taken off the program: set in a militarist and depressive urban milieu, it had characters collide rather than communicate and it prefigured junta repression (Sakellaridou 1996: 108; Sykka, He Kathemerine, April 20, 1997). Some of the offensive lines read: “Before the army came, we had our homes and we lived like human beings. Then the army came, we left, and we are no longer human beings” (quoted by Anagnostaki, testimony of July 18, 1998). Papadopoulos made stage censorship one of his first orders of business, because he saw particular danger in theater’s relevance and directness. The very act of attending a play gathers the spectators into a group in a way that other forms of literature do not; this group has the capability of doing more than a single individual can accomplish. The participatory nature of the stage, too, makes the experience of attending a play quantitatively different from the private experience of reading or watching a screen. Theater fosters communal involvement and political vitality; it hones the public’s ability to interpret in the light of its own immediate concerns. Because theater per definition places people and things on stage, that is, brings them out into the open, it attracts visibility and elicits audience reaction. Thus the stage can unexpectedly transform into a mass site of political criticism and social unruliness, whereas the individual reader of a text or viewer of a screen may remain isolated and can therefore be checked more easily (Van Steen 2001: 139, 185 n. 8, 10). This is particularly important in times when political gatherings are either suspect or altogether forbidden: then, gatherings of spectators can morph into political demonstrations and theater becomes a political player. Because theater audiences tend to outnumber the total cast, and because their reactions remain the greatest variable of stage

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dynamics, a production’s external effect can only partially be caused, directed, or checked by the actual representation or performance. Hiding behind the mask of dramatic illusion, producers and actors under the junta could contend to stand entirely free of blame for the spectators’ “spontaneous” reactions that, there and then in the theater, troubled the censors. If the censors tentatively accepted the cover of the play-act, or the performers’ claim to innocence, they too learned that part of the audience response can still be orchestrated (through allusion, suggestion, inflection, or intonation) as soon as the makers and consumers of drama start sharing a conspirational mindset and the hidden language of dissidence and resistance. Conditions of censorship offer one persistent advantage: the public is on the alert and grasps more easily the veiled political comments that the actors make on stage. Any discussion of the Colonels’ censorship must begin by clearing some ground about their contentious interventions in culture and, in particular, about the subject of preventive censorship. Preventive censorship affected the Greek press, theater, film, and television in their most obvious expressions. However, the regime’s control and surveillance of its citizens and especially of its independent thinkers went far beyond the initial rules and restrictions. The first sections of Chapter 2 show how the dictators tried to enforce a nationwide change of mentality and conduct by instating a combination of direct, preventive censorship and other binding ethical and society-control laws (targeting the mixed messages of 1960s morals and fashions) and also by delivering exhortative speeches.4 In the name of unity, they stifled any dissent, issued threats, and imposed heavy penalties on violators. Chapter 2 next acknowledges the Greeks’ enculturation into ancient myth and demonstrates how state censorship impacted productions of classical drama. This section highlights public protest statements, such as the famous one that the modernist poet George Seferis issued in March 1969, when he last spoke as a national poetic voice. To gauge censorship’s true nature and volume, the chapter’s final sections present several examples from modern Greek dramaturgy and the case study of Pontikas’s Trombone. Because, however, the muzzling or banning of modern Greek plays affected relatively 4 The distinction between preventive and hortatory censorship is a key theme also in Michael Holquist’s incisive study, “Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship” (1994), which is not country-specific.

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small circles, far removed from the conventional playhouses, they are more difficult to document. Evidence of these cases at times becomes anecdotal. The record that would allow a full examination of who and what was impacted by the regime’s censorship has not been preserved. Chapter 3 notes the personal and structural effects of the coercion under which the junta placed the makers of Our Grand Circus. The vantage point of censored or banned plays is a useful heuristic tool with which to draw the restricted orbit of cultural production and the “disappeared” terrain of political production. The resulting insights deepen our understanding of theater’s potential under totalitarian regimes but also stimulate theater to better define its role in fragile or threatened democracies.

SILENCE AGAINST CENSORSHIP: THE BOOK INDEX AND SELF-IMPOSED SILENCE Art Can Crack the Colonels’ Plaster (Anon., title of article in Greek Report 5 (June 1969), 22)

The censors and security officers of 1967 issued a list of more than one thousand banned books, mostly of Marxist and Russian literature or books related to World War II. The Book Index blacklisted also certain works of Aristotle and studies by classical philologists and historians, such as those of the British philhellene historian George Finlay and of George Thomson.5 The latter had written books on ancient history and literature from a Marxist perspective and had published a scholarly edition of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1932 and 1940). Among the blacklisted modern writers were Giannes Ritsos, Vasiles Vasilikos, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Maxim Gorky, and Fidel Castro. Thus the list included names ranging from foreign communist writers

5 Finlay was an active participant in the Greek War of Independence and espoused a liberal point of view. His seven-volume History of Greece from Its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864 (1877), attests to his interest in the Greek past from the Roman period onward, at a time when most historians and travelers to Greece were still preoccupied with the classical period. See further Potter (2004).

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to the works, political or not, of Greek authors branded as communists.6 Modern Greek translations of classical drama were not overlooked: forbidden were translations of ancient tragedies and comedies by Kostas Varnales, Vasiles Rotas, and Photos Giophylles. Their leftist views were considered dangerous and their translations were believed to have tainted the original classical texts.7 Some banned books were “risky” but older and were thus known entities; more 6 On the regime’s targeting of leftist literature via blacklists, see, among many others, Iordanides (1973); N. Papandreou (1975); and Phrankoudake (1975). Two of the Colonels’ blacklists of authors, one of October 25, 1971 and one of January 1974, were published in an appendix by Axelos, in his work on Greek publishing activity (1984: 145–151, 152–156). The second and expanded edition of Axelos’s work prints the same lists but provides more historical context from the perspective of an additional quarter century (2008: 41–81, 158, 167–179, 182). To the dictators’ dismay, a copy of the first list fell into the hands of NYT reporters, who made fun of the tags, mistakes, and inconsistencies attached to the names of a total of 124 Greek and international authors. To the outside world, the regime had been boasting that Greece was a liberal nation of freethinkers that had no need for censorship. See Anon., NYT, February 5, 1972; Kamm, NYT, January 27, 1972; and Tonge, The Guardian, February 10, 1972. The second blacklist comprised 172 works. The very first index of banned books, however, had appeared as early as May 1967 (Kornetis 2013: 218 n. 20). It gained international notoriety when its items appeared in a listing featured at the end of the 1969 movie Z by Costa Gavras (based on the book by Vasiles Vasilikos). The list at the end of Z, however, which includes the names of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, should not be taken to mean that all of ancient tragedy and comedy was banned, only that the revival productions of some plays staged by “suspect” directors and actors came under intense scrutiny and that some were forbidden. See further Roufos (1972: 149, 150, 155) and Van Steen (2001: 135, 140). Chatzevasileiou (2004) studies two poetry collections written by Ritsos during the dictatorship years: Messengers (Æ Æ ç æ) and The Devastation of Melos (ˇ ÆçÆØ  Å  º). Beaton presents Ritsos’s Stones, Repetitions, Railings (— æ, ¯Æƺ łØ, ˚تŒºøÆ, manuscript of 1968) (Beaton 1999: 273–274). 7 See Zeras (1999: 30). Varnales had found in Aristophanes and Socrates symbols of true democratic liberty and identified with them. In 1931 he had published The True Apology of Socrates, a sociopolitical satire of interwar conservative Greece under the cover of ancient Athens and Socratic philosophy. Socrates defended himself in Marxist, not 4th-century bce Platonic, terms and unmasked Athens as a sham democracy, discriminating against the poor and suppressing critical thinking and freedom of speech. Varnales’s Apology captured renewed public interest after the 1967 putsch. Also, Varnales had been awarded the 1959 Lenin Peace Prize. Puchner observes that Greek reactionaries, including the military dictators, exploited some of Rotas’s plays (such as his well-known Hail to Mesolongi) while persecuting him: the elderly Rotas was arrested during the night of the coup and deported to the island of Gyaros (Puchner 2000: 156, 215, 217–220). Metaxas used Gyaros (southwest of Andros and close to Syros) as a prison island for Marxists and communists and instituted its dark legacy that lasted through the Civil War and its aftermath and that was taken up again by the Colonels. After the 1967 coup, the dictators sent approximately 7,000 political prisoners to Gyaros, who stayed there until they were

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damaging were the restrictions on recent political and sociological literature. Blacklisted, too, were books on “shameful” aspects of Greek history and society, such as studies breaching the topic of ancient Greek homosexuality,8 or a 1968 ethnographic work by Elias Petropoulos, named Rebetic Songs (in Greek), on the Anatolian import of the rebetika music (with a rich anthology of songs, which depict poverty and life in the margins of the urban Greek underworld).9 Intolerant of “negative” subjects, the censors took action also against works that reopened dark chapters of the country’s history (such as the Civil War). They tried to smother anything that undermined political orthodoxy and social “harmony.” In the first days and months of the coup, the Colonels dissolved progressive organizations, among them the Union of Greek Actors (Benake 1999: 162, 164). Actors of state theaters had to submit to the old reactionary practice of signing loyalty checks (G. A. V. 1969: 13). Many intellectuals, particularly those with a known left-wing background, fled Greece to avoid arrest, or at least the humiliation of having to submit their work for approval to self-righteous junta bureaucrats. The many talented artists and writers who went into voluntary exile created émigré communities in cities such as Paris, London, Rome, and New York (Kornetis 2013: 60–71). They were often seen as “outsiders” by those who stayed behind and faced daily risks, even though scores of outsiders, mainly students, raised

transferred to the Dodecanese island of Leros (to the camps of Partheni and Lakki). The prisons of Gyaros were reopened after the Polytechnic uprising, for the period of November 1973 through July 1974. For testimonies by former prisoners, see Deane (1976: 128–129) and the actor Tzavalas Karousos (1974). See also Servos (2003: 157–158 on Gyaros, 161–162 on Lakki); Van Steen (2011: 4–5); and Voglis (2002: 108–111, 224). 8 See “Athenian” (1972: 121–122); Daloukas (2006: 257, 259); Doulis (2011: 172); Kornetis (2013: 208–209, 213); Lambrias (2001: 48); and the anonymous NYT articles of July 23, 1968 and October 31, 1968. Metaxas and his reactionary supporters extolled the family as an institution interlinked with the Greek nation’s very existence and shared a public hatred of homosexuality with the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy. See further Ebner (2004: ch. 6; 2011: 193–197). 9 Petropoulos ignored the censors and published his book by himself. He was subsequently harassed and sentenced to time in prison. He claims his book was the only one to appear without the regime’s seal of approval during the junta years. His letter in Eleutherotypia of April 23, 1996 describes his experience of the regime’s censorship and is discussed, too, in the paper’s April 19, 2001 special issue on the dictatorship. See further Doulis (2011: 104–105); Gauntlett (2012: 152–155); and Papanikolaou (2007: 132–133).

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awareness and helped shape the worldwide public opinion on the dictatorship.10 Many of those who remained in Greece (or could not hope that the authorities would issue them a passport and permission to travel) preferred the alternative of dignified silence and refused to write, publish, or produce altogether. Many benefited from intensified contacts with friends or relatives abroad, who helped to dispel the misinformation spread by the regime. The Colonels’ lies affected the least educated and the poor, because they had no recourse to 10 See the diaries of London-based Maria Karavia (2007), who helped publish Greek Report, and of Orestis Vidalis (2009), a Greek officer who left for the United States, where he joined the anti-junta campaign. Lambrias (2001: 48–49) and Palaiologopoulos (2005) treat the antidictatorial press and literature issued by Greeks abroad. Some expatriate Greek directors and actors used ancient drama, the country’s time-hallowed cultural export, as an agitprop platform for raising international awareness. With the exception of Melina Mercouri’s work, however, most of their productions were reperformances of classical theater, which offered real advantages over the contemporary Greek drama that could not be moved easily. Van Steen points to Cacoyannis’s 1971 movie, The Trojan Women, and to Stavros Doufexis’s more unusual ventures into Attic comedy (Van Steen 2001: 167, 181–182). The latter’s production of Aristophanes’ Knights with strong anti-junta punch (Nuremberg, October 1967) warned against demagoguery and featured the knights as the longhaired intellectuals of the hippie and beat culture detested by the Colonels. The director’s 1969 adaptation of the Birds was less successful. Several Greek interviewees alluded to tensions between those on the inside and those on the outside of unfree Greece. Many Greeks who stayed for lack of financial resources or contacts abroad felt deserted by those who went into self-exile. Many of those who emigrated struggled with a sense of guilt and anxiety about the fate of those left behind. Many outsiders still pretended to be insiders; intermediaries were few. Awkward comparisons about the relative degree of hardship suffered in either situation popped up in conversations with informants. So did telltale remarks such as the nickname of “Kolonaki” for the more high-class Greek exile community of Paris. The majority of my interlocutors started the interview sessions by spontaneously telling me where they were at the time of the coup and during the remainder of the dictatorship period. Even though a range of factors might have driven personal, professional, or family decisions to emigrate, the self-exiles routinely engaged in some form of self-justification or self-exoneration concerning their departure from Greece. The long tradition of relating to Greece’s territory as the defining topos was back in full force to shape self-perception as well as individual and collective memory. Artemis Leontis has treated this rich topic in her seminal book, Topographies of Hellenism (1995). Seferis captured the essence of a Greece coded in isolation in his famous poem that opens with the line, “Our country is closed in . . . ,” «ˇ  Æ ÆØ ŒºØ  . . . ». The dialectic between insiders and outsiders is one of the core themes of the 1974 movie, The Rehearsal (˙ ŒØ ), which Jules Dassin conceived as a dramatization of the Polytechnic uprising and thus as a metaphorical rehearsal of the decisive revolution. The film was made in New York and starred Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s wife. The movie never officially premiered, however, because the junta fell before the scheduled opening date, which preempted its relevance. Testimony by Dassin, July 27, 2000. See further Kotzamani (2000) and Weiler, NYT, April 28, 1974.

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information accessible only in foreign languages or via new technologies (such as home telephones and television) (Sotiris 1971: 13). Against this backdrop, the intelligentsia saw publishing as giving one’s vote of confidence to an oppressive government that hid behind a façade of liberalism. Self-imposed silence was a preferred way, too, to show solidarity with persecuted colleagues and to forgo advancing one’s individual career under unfair conditions. The silence of authors and publishers, or the “Authors’ Silence” or “silence boycott” as it became known, was a tacit protest against the Colonels’ antiintellectualism as well.11 The liberty of silence, the refusal to perform an act of self-negation, was tantamount to insisting on freedom of speech. But refusing to publish also meant passing up opportunities to criticize the lack of freedom and to find new modes of personal expression. After some two years, this defiant state of silence proved incapable of making any claims in the affirmative. By spring 1969, Greek artists and literati worried that the silence that had descended over Greek cultural life would hamper artistic growth and could be perceived as symptomatic of a deep identity crisis.12 Moreover, the state’s own publishing initiatives had started to undermine the silence boycott’s power to reappropriate agency. A case in point was the 1969 official publication of Laïke Mousa, Folk Muse, a collection of poems, thank-you notes, and “spontaneous” letters in support of the new government (Roufos 1972: 153). The preface of Laïke Mousa anticipates that a sequel to the first volume may be published in the near future, because the stream of “sincere” praise for Greece’s “saviors” is “unstoppable,” “like a volcano eruption that hurls high into the sky all that has long been suppressed in people’s hearts” (1969: 3).13 Authorities 11 Papanikolaou (2007: 130; 2010b: 177–178) and Roufos (1972: 156, 158–159). Some writers bypassed both the Greek censors and the Authors’ Silence by publishing their work in Cyprus. Among them was the poet Elytis, who was not a leftist and who later won a Nobel Prize. Beaton discusses Elytis’s creative output of the early 1970s (1999: 271–273). 12 According to Asimakoulas, the mentality of art for art’s sake, which the boycott cultivated, proffered an alibi to those writers who sought safety rather than involvement in critical thinking about freedom of speech and the intelligentsia’s role (2005a: 110). 13 The dedication in this note represents a specimen of this type of “inspired” eulogies. The poem, with its slur against communists, should perhaps have remained untranslated given that even a modest attempt risks improving it: `¯` ˇ —`ˆ˝` ˙ 21 `—¸ˇ 1967  ˇ ˆØHæª —ÆÆ ıº ŒØ’ › ˝EŒ ÆŒÆæ Ç

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at the national, regional, and local levels co-opted writers and artists into their political structures and rewarded them generously in the hope of incorporating many others, to create a culture that would endorse and promote their reactionary values. A more controversial state initiative was the republication of the Anthology of Modern Greek Literature, an interwar anthology compiled by Herakles Apostolides and reissued through the mediation of his son, Renos Apostolides. The Colonels forced newspapers to publish stories from this anthology without asking the contributors for their consent.14 Eighteen authors protested against the conditions under which the regime reissued the Anthology by signing a public statement in which they demanded to be taken out of the forced ŒØ’ ›  ıºØÆe › —Æ ÆŒe ªºı Æ e ª . ı ƪÆ æåÆØ ŒÆd ƒ æE, ÆØØa B  EÆæåÆ KªÆ ƒ læø K ı  I æÆ. ˆØa çÆ ÆŁB  çºØ ı d XŁº a ªfiÅ ¼ ›  æÆ e b !"ªÆØ  d NŒØØa ’ #æºÅ.  ˙  EŁØŒc ˚ı" æÅØ ººa Ł ºØ a ŒÅ ªØ’ ÆP e ŒØ’ › ¸Æe ÇÅ A  b c IŒÅ, ŒØ’ !ºŁı ºØ a ŒıºØa a  ºıÆ Æ ŒÆd b Iç ı    e  Æ Œ Ø Æ. a › ¸Æe ŒÆ ºÆ" ŒÆd Ł ºØ $ıåÆ Ł ºØ ıºØ, ˇNŒª ØÆ,  ˇ ØÆ, ¨æÅŒÆ. (`˝˝˙ ˆ. ¸¯—¯˝ˇ, B Ø Æ) DEDICATION TO THE PROTAGONISTS OF APRIL 21, 1967 Giorgos Papadopoulos and Nikos Makarezos and Stylianos Pattakos saved the nation. Colonels, all three of them, sons of the Countryside, they have become the heroes of glorious History. Just imagine, my friends, what would have happened if the Army had not come out on April 21. The National Government wants to accomplish many things and, therefore, the People ask it to never weary lest the dogs come out again, the very rabid ones, and leave nothing in our country standing. But the People have understood and want quiet, they want work, Family, Harmony, Religion. (IOANNES G. LEPENOS, Vonitsa) 14 On the state’s botched attempt to create and disseminate its own literature, see the following anonymous articles: “The Colonels’ Answer to Seferis,” Greek Report 3 (April 1969), 18; “Mad Order Completed by a Proud Announcement” and “Oppressed Intellectuals Declare Their Contempt,” Greek Report 3 (April 1969), 19; “Freedom Is Indivisible,” Greek Report 5 (June 1969), 23; and “Literature by Order,” The Times, April 8, 1969. See also Beaton (2003: 400); Bekatoros (1993: 48–54); and Doulis (2011: 111–116, 125).

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publication, which made a travesty of intellectual freedom. This “Statement of the Eighteen” (April 23, 1969) was the first public and collective protest act of Greek intellectuals against the dictatorship.15 Some of the signatories went on to publish a political-literary book of poetry as well as prose by the title of Eighteen Texts (˜ŒÆå  ŒÆ, July 1970, issued by the leftist publishing house Kedros of Athena/Nana Kallianese). The hugely popular Eighteen Texts became the first book to signal the end of the Authors’ Silence and presented “indignant demands for the liberation of the word in contemporary Greece” (Spanos 1973: 370).16 The collection vaunted an unimpeachably neutral title, ironizing Papadopoulos’s ludicrous stipulation that all books bear titles corresponding exactly to their contents. The names of the eighteen co-authors, whose majority belonged to the traditionally conservative ranks, figured on the book’s cover in alphabetical order (Beaton 1999: 264; 2003: 400–401; Bekatoros 1993: 54–55). The success of this first collective protest volume led to follow-up initiatives which, with their more leftist contributors and messages, tested the regime’s tolerance further and helped to reverse the effect of three years of stultification: the publication of New Texts and New Texts 2 (1971, also issued by Kedros), as well as of progressive journals such as the influential monthly, He Synecheia, “The Continuation,” which stressed genuine cultural continuity (and which Kedros published from March through October 1973), and finally the volumes entitled Deposition ’73 and Deposition ’74 (˚Æ ŁÅ ’73 and ˚Æ ŁÅ ’74), published by Boukoumanes (Seferis, Ritsos, Anagnostakes, et al. 1973; and Alexiou, Augeres, Vagenas, et al. 1974).17 The latter took on an outspoken leftist character (Doulis 2011: 139–148; Papanikolaou 15 See Argyriou (2007: 85–87); Beaton (2003: 400); Doulis (2011: 116–120, 124, 125–127); and Phrankopoulos (1974: 174–177, 182–183, 188–192). 16 See Argyriou (2007: 87–88); Asimakoulas (2005a: 112–113); Beaton (1999: 263–264); Bien (1973); Doulis (2011: 116, 124, 126, 127–139); Kornetis (2013: 160–161); Papanikolaou (2002 and 2007: 130); Phrankopoulos (1974: 192–193); Sichani (2012); and Van Dyck (1998: 20, 27, 37–50). See also Anon., NYT, July 12, 1970; and Raymont, NYT, April 23, 1972. Barnstone (1972) provides English translations of the eighteen texts (by Kay Cicellis, Edmund Keeley, Rodis Roufos, and others) in a collective volume published by Harvard University Press. 17 On the publication of New Texts, see Anon., NYT, February 22, 1971; and Anon., The Times, February 22, 1971. On New Texts 2, see Anon., NYT, November 16, 1971; and Modiano, The Times, November 16, 1971. For a post-junta publication, see Vrettakos et al., Resistance Poetry, 1967–1974 (1975, in Greek).

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2002: 447). Apart from Kedros and Kallianese, its remarkable female director, other progressive publishers, too, met the need for politically charged reading material and attempted to reclaim the autonomy of the Greek publishing world: Kalvos (founder Giorgos Chatzopoulos), Keimena (founder Philippos Vlachos), Planetes (founder Kostas Palaiologos), and Stochastes (founder Loukas Axelos).18 A few publishing houses (most notably Kalvos) started issuing translations and editions of ancient Greek drama and other works of classical literature (Asimakoulas 2005a: 149, 150–151; Axelos 2008: 63). In 1970, Kallianese inaugurated a special series “Contemporary Greek Theater,” in which, by late 1972, plays of Anagnostaki, Kechaïdes, Matesis, Mourselas, and Skourtes had appeared (Mourselas 2004: 69, 71). Fighting kitsch with works of substance, printing quality texts and articles that were not openly antidictatorial yet scrutinized the political predicament, became recognized ways to express intellectual defiance (Van Dyck 1998: 25–26). Notably, expressing defiance emerged as a group effort, not unlike the collective response of the New Greek Theater. In the arena of government-sponsored theater, the Colonels and their appointees fired and reshuffled actors and directors at the National Theater and at the State Theater of Northern Greece (Vaphopoulos 1988: 105–107). In February 1970, they installed the Organization of State Theaters of Greece as a supervisory board that defined official policy for the National Theater, the State Theater of Northern Greece, and the Greek National Opera (Ethnike Lyrike Skene). The dictators appointed Vasileios Paxinos, a supporter without much experience in theater or the arts, as the new organization’s director (Karaoglou 2009: 24–28). The National Theater became a state-controlled institution, which explains why some actors left.19 18

See Asimakoulas (2005a: 117–133); Axelos (2008: 56–58); Bekatoros (1993: 65); and Chatze-ioannou, To Vema, April 26, 1987. Karamanolakes focuses on the radical nature of Kalvos’s publishing activity (2012). In her collective volume, Makrynikola discusses the impact of junta censorship on the workings of Kedros (2004: 22–26) and includes various testimonies to the same effect (2004: 53–78; also Axelos 2008: 76). The Hestia publishing house (founded 1885) adhered to its known center-right position and avoided risk throughout the dictatorship years (Karakatsoule 2011: 261–266). Cf. Philippotes, Eleutherotypia, May 29, 1997. 19 The early resignations of Alexes Minotes and Katina Paxinou from the National Theater, following their disagreements with the newly installed junta sympathizers, became international news. See Anon., Le Monde, January 16, 1968; and Kotanidis (2011: 110, 314–315).

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Under the conservative Giorgos Kitsopoulos, who was appointed general director of the State Theater of Northern Greece, the latter company, too, adopted the dictators’ cultural policies and did so perhaps too zealously.20 The main and arguably only positive contribution of the Organization of State Theaters of Greece was the founding of the New Stage of the National Theater and of its equivalent at the State Theater of Northern Greece (see Chapter 1, pp. 75–77). These new stages fostered more contemporary modes of dramatic expression and advanced the long-awaited decentralization in the Greek theater world (Karaoglou 2009: 26). The regime, however, tightened its control over the annual Athens and Epidaurus festivals and also over the festivals held in Northern Greece (Philippi and Thasos), to ensure that they projected “the best” of classical Greek culture (which meant: outdoor revivals of ancient tragedy in conventional forms) (Karaoglou 2009: 40–43). Before the coup, the Athens Festival had been a glamorous event. By the late 1960s, however, the government-sponsored festivals appeared anemic, because many international companies withdrew their participation in protest. After a first embarrassing round of foreign cancellations had ruined the 1967 Athens Festival, an unofficial cultural “embargo” continued to plague the summer festivals. To defend the atrophied program of the 1968 Athens Festival, the authorities contended that the festival administration had sought to present an all-Greek program that year (G. A. V. 1969: 14). The cancellations led to severe financial as well as artistic consequences and made the Greek government lose face internationally. The festivals were, after all, largely intended to keep up the pretense of a free and active cultural life in 20

See Karpeta (1997: 18); Sougioultzes (1999: 25–28), on Kitsopoulos; and Karaoglou (2009: 33–35, 300–301), on the internal politics at the State Theater of Northern Greece after the coup. Overall, Karaoglou takes a more forgiving view of Kitsopoulos’s role. She stresses the need for the state theater administration to give the regime its “vote of confidence” (2009: 37) and to find the right “balance” between “obedience” and “political statement” (2009: 280). This lack of autonomy, however, compelled the State Theater of Northern Greece to mount patriotic or nationalist plays on national holidays and to celebrate the regime’s anniversary on April 21. One such patriotic play was The Sacred Battalion (ˇ æ  ¸ å, 1970), a heroic drama written by Kitsopoulos himself that featured military exploits from the eve of the Greek Revolution. See Georgakake (2009: 141–142); Karaoglou (2009: 27 n. 69, 38, 327); and Puchner (2000: 233). Despite tapping into the Greek revolutionary narrative, Kitsopoulos’s drama, however, could never compete with those older patriotic plays that offered a platform presenting the contemporary Greek situation with obliqueness (Chapter 3, pp. 166–167).

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Greece, especially for public opinion abroad (Gkiones 1999: 74–75; Meester 1969: 49). In 1971, the regime founded the Greek Ministry of Culture, which was to serve a similar nationalist role. The government’s awarding of state prizes for literature and theater was another attempt to mold Greek culture in its own definition. Scriptwriting competitions and prizes underscored the Colonels’ public appeals to the literary and artistic community that it create a “patriotic” art, while threats of censorship and retaliation rendered such “hortatory” statements normative (Meletopoulos 1996: 184–200, on Colonel Ladas’s pronouncements). Contest prizes were the tangible expressions of a well-developed patronage system: instead of encouraging and shaping the next generation of playwrights, they enticed more authors to toe the official line and undermined the advocacy for political truth.21

PREVENTIVE CENSORSHIP LEGISLATION I called together all the journalists, editors, reporters, publishers, everyone, in my capacity as minister of the interior, and I said, Gentlemen, the entire matter is up to you. You alone 21 Hager, too, mentions the annual prizes for drama doled out by the Greek state (2008: 92). Author “Y.,” merely identified as “a writer who recently left Greece,” averred: “In competitions, exhibitions, and public commissions the reward goes every time to mediocrity. Mediocrity alone is recognized because it alone is harmless, poses no problems, lacks impetus, looks backward . . .” (The New York Review of Books, May 21, 1970, 28). Author “Y.” can be identified as Alexander Xydis [Alexandros Xydes], whose identical statement is quoted by Vlachos (1971: 155). In 1967, Karras (1934–1992) received the state prize for theater for his first play, The Nightwatchmen. His third play, The Attendant, took the 1969 state prize. See Karaoglou (2009: 66, 152) and Sivetidou (1995: 399 n. 2). The second award provoked the critical denunciation of a playwright who might have been “co-opted” by the regime. Receiving grants from the Ford Foundation, too, was enough to raise suspicions of dubious loyalty to the opposition’s cause. See further Axelos (1984: 53–55; 2008: 64–67); Kotanidis (2011: 194–198, 203, 204–207, 209); Phrankopoulos (1974: 202–214); Rialde (1973: 14); and Zapheires (2011: 110–113). Koun declined state subsidies but was still accused of collaborating with the US-supported regime for accepting a 1968 Ford Foundation grant (Koun, interview by Pelichos, Ta Nea, October 4, 1973). See also Constantinidis (1986: 8); Eleutheriou (1972); and Michaelides (1972). For a detailed analysis of the Colonels’ treatment of Koun, see Van Steen (2000: 138–140, 143–144, 172–173, 205–206, 253–254 n. 71; 2001: 173–175). Koun (counter)claimed that the junta censors rejected about half of the plays of the Greek and international repertoire proposed by his company (Chatzaras 1978: 54, 56–57).

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shall decide whether we shall have censorship or not. Now I offer you the choice. Either we have no censorship at all and anyone who steps out of line goes straight to the detention camp on the island of Yiaros [Gyaros], or we have censorship and the censor decides what gets published and everyone stays out of trouble. Mr. Nixon, they voted for censorship, I assure you. (Colonel Pattakos addressing future US president Richard Nixon, who visited Athens in mid-June 1967; Pattakos is quoted by Robert Keeley 2010: 129)

The military government placed Greek theater under especially harsh restrictions. Papadopoulos sent a circular order dated May 30, 1967 with specific censorship regulations for direct control of dramatic performances to all Greek playhouses and to the police. His directives were cast in the rhetoric of “protection” and “prevention,” which typifies the use of preventive censorship, or censorship as a control mechanism before publication or production takes place. The opposition journal Greek Report, an uncensored monthly magazine issued in Britain (by Panagiotes/Takes Lambrias) that kept the junta oppression in the international eye, published an English translation of Papadopoulos’s circular in its April 1969 issue: All theatrical pieces or musicals and public shows of any kind are forbidden which: 1) Can disturb public order; 2) Propagate subversive theories; 3) Defame nationally or touristically our country;22 4) Undermine the healthy social tradition of the Greek people and their ancestral habits and customs; 5) Touch on Christian religion; 6) Attack the person of the King, the members of the royal family and the Government; 7) Exercise a harmful influence on youth; 8) Exercise a distorting influence on the aesthetic evolution of the people. (Anon., “Art and Censorship,” Greek Report 3 (April 1969), 17)

The reader may glean more insight, however, from Nitsos’s publication of 1967 government documents pertaining to stage censorship 22 Hager’s translation of this stipulation is to be preferred: “Discredit the national or touristic image of our country” (2008: 95). The Greek original awkwardly reads: «˜ıçÅÇ Æ KŁØŒH j ıæØ ØŒH c åæÆ Æ» (Nitsos, ed., 1974: 108).

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(“Documents: The Junta’s Shackles on Greek Theater: We Open the Dossier of Seven Years of Censorship,” featured in the March–June 1974 issue of Theatro but brought out shortly after the regime’s end: Nitsos, ed., 1974). The original Greek text of the circular order, signed by Papadopoulos, is far more extensive than the English translation of Greek Report. Addressed to “all theater directors and managers of stage companies,” it first invokes the authority of the Committee for the Control of Theatrical Works. This committee subjected any theater play or any form of public spectacle to preventive censorship; in practice, it required that theater directors or managers submit the play’s full script for inspection, “typed and in two copies” and accompanied by the application fee (Nitsos, ed., 1974: 107). Article 8 best sums up the pragmatic terms of theatrical freedom under Papadopoulos’s rule: “The Committee has the right to cut or strike out any part of the text. The applicant [i.e. the theater director] has the right to accept those cuts or not. In case the applicant disagrees, the work cannot, of course, be performed” (Nitsos, ed., 1974: 108). Articles 9 and 10 reveal the committee’s awareness that, in actual performance, actors’ modifications or additions can affect the script and its tone. Therefore, the committee threatens to hold directors and managers as well as actors responsible for such “violations,” thus instituting the ugly dynamics of colleagues keeping each other in check. If a theater has been closed down temporarily for breaking the law, the manager must still continue to pay its actors and personnel (Article 11) (1974: 108). Papadopoulos resurrected fascist-style legislation that was first passed and enacted in the late 1930s through mid-1940s but that had subsequently fallen in disuse. From July 1941 through the following year, the Nazi occupiers had resorted to Metaxas’s censorship laws complemented with ad hoc police regulations, to control all forms of art that appealed to the people: theater, cinema, books, and records.23 In 1942, the Greek collaborationist government had 23 Censorship under the Metaxas regime ranged from anathematization to book burning (Carabott 2003: 32). Van Steen refers to infamous prewar cases of censorship (2011: 41–46). See further Hering (1996: 306–312, 315–316) and Panourgia, on the position of art under Metaxas’s rule (2009: 232–234). Petrakis discusses the extent and power of Metaxas’s propaganda mill and devotes special attention to theater propaganda (2006: ch. 4). See also the recent studies of Angeles on theater and Metaxas’s EON, the Ethnike Organosis Neolaias or National Youth Organization (Angeles 2006: 94–101); Hamilakis (2007: ch. 5); Kallis (2007: 236, 238–240, 241); Panourgia (2009:

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issued a new decree that addressed stage censorship more comprehensively and approved of only a short list of plays.24 Only works from countries under Axis control could be performed. Anglo-Saxon and Russian playwrights were forbidden, with the exception of Irish drama. With pre-1950s fascism, the Colonels shared a fierce hatred of leftist artists and actors, whose (real or supposed) transgressions they punished according to the old penalty system: stage companies were

34–37); and especially Troules (2009). Glytzoures (2002) dwells on Metaxas’s promotion of mobile state theater units, called Carts of Thespis and modeled after Fascist Italian and Nazi German prototypes. Since Metaxas, too, the chauvinist presumption had grown that revivals of classical tragedy had to uphold its treasured legacy as Greece’s national, “monumental” poetry. Machairas (1999: 107–113, 122–123) addresses censorship under the Nazi Occupation, when Greek national poetry carried mass protest demonstrations. A modest degree of state censorship continued to exist in postwar and Cold War Greece, even under democratically elected governments, flaring up with the occasional crisis and entrenching of official positions (as with the government bans against Koun’s Birds of 1959 and Katsanes’s antiroyalist play of 1964, see pp. 94–95). Throughout the dictatorship years, Koun’s Birds production was excluded from all prestigious venues, while its translator, Vasiles Rotas, remained blacklisted (Van Steen 2000: 138–140). For more details on junta censorship, see Sakketos (1980); Van Dyck (1998: 12–56, or her chapter “Power, Language, and the Discourses of the Dictatorship”); and Van Steen (2001, focusing on censorship of ancient drama including revival productions of Aristophanes, 171–180). Katsapes briefly discusses the rather ineffective church-initiated censorship of theater of the junta era (2013: 519–521, 527–528). Two 1978 Greek articles, both anonymously published in Kallitechnike Epitheorese, treat the censorship of the metapoliteuse period (“Down with Censorship” and “Censorship”). See further Green and Karolides (2005: 210–214); Legg and Roberts (1997: 115, 165); and Veremis (1997: 159–174). Low-level censorship was still in existence even after the mid-1970s transition to democracy, and some rules have remained on the statute books. Public pressure, however, has usually been sufficient to prevent old rules from being enforced. Delveroude remarks on political censorship of Greek theater in the late 19th and early 20th century (1988: 299–300 and n. 27). Seiragakes addresses censorship of interwar political satire (2009: 1:124–135, 313–326). Theater and theater’s challenge had been embedded in Greece’s national and cultural rebirth since the prerevolutionary era (Van Steen 2010a: ch. 3). Moral and religious censorship often functioned as a mere cover for political interference. 24 Some examples of the enemy-inspired rules may show to what extremes these went: it was forbidden to mention onstage the terrible winter famines. Dressing characters in ethnic Greek costumes such as the phoustanella was not allowed. After the May 1941 Battle of Crete, Cretan mantinades (improvised distichs or serenades) were banned from Greek theater. Sets could not depict mountains or hills: the censors feared that showing the landscapes in which the resistance was fought would naturally excite the audience. See Van Steen (2001: 140–141, 185–186 n. 12). On the partisan Theater of the Mountains, see Myrsiades and Myrsiades, who also study Greek censorship during WWII (1999: 59–69). See further Dizelos (1962); Sevastikoglou (1992); and Van Steen (2011: 27, 41–42, 310).

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reprimanded, fined, and dissolved, or their playhouses were shut down for any length of time. Producers, actors, and playwrights (or translators) were held legally accountable for the acts of other company members as well as for their own initiatives: an impromptu attack against the authorities from any one of them could lead to fines, arrests, and even executions (Myrsiades and Myrsiades 1999: 61). The terror that the pre-1950s reprisals had inspired lay within Greece’s living memory; so did, however, the means, tactics, and antics to subvert the censorship rules. The Colonels’ Censorship Service resided under the authority of the Ministry to the Premiership (and later the Ministry of the Presidency) and of the General Secretariat of Press and Information.25 The dictators and the Committee for the Control of Theatrical Works, or the special control board of political arbiters of the stage, created a system of preventive censorship that functioned via first-degree and second-degree control mechanisms and that was in effect from May 1967 through the end of 1969. The scripts of proposed plays, Greek or foreign, complete with the names of the cast and of the scheduled locale, had to be granted a formal license by smaller committees, on which the authorities asked bureaucrats, lawyers, priests, police agents, and security or army officers to serve. The Government Gazette of the Kingdom of Greece published a decree of April 30, 1968 by which the state formalized the role of eight “first-degree” committees, each consisting of five members who scrutinized films and plays and whose majority vote constituted a legal decision.26 This decree allowed for an appeal process for films but not for theater plays. Very few of the committee members, except for the occasional conservative author or scholar, had received an education or special training appropriate for evaluating art and literature.27 Like oldfashioned schoolmasters, the censors struck out what they did not like but did not always explain. Works offensive to the regime,

25 See Gregoriades (1975: 1:114); Karaoglou (2009: 20); and Zaharopoulos and Paraschos (1993: 29). Meletopoulos discusses the role of Konstantinos Vryones as the appointed director of censorship for the first two years of the dictatorship (1996: 234–243). 26 Decree No. 394, ¯˚ `’ 95/04.05.1968, published in the Ephemeris tes Kyverneseos tou Vasileiou tes Hellados (the reference to the Kingdom of Greece was retained even after the Colonels deposed the king following his abortive countercoup). 27 Testimonies by Kambanelles and Mourselas, February–March 1994. See also “Athenian” (1972: 96) and Maltezou, He Vradyne, August 6, 1974.

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traditional morality, or religion were subjected to a process of expurgation or to an outright ban. The same held true for works that dwelled on revolutions or popular uprisings, no matter in which period or location those were set. The committees applied simple plot censorship to most submissions, and they followed bans against using the names of declared left-wing writers, artists, and actors. It sufficed for one member of a stage company to be considered a communist to cast instant suspicions on the plays that the group submitted to the censors, who tried to preempt the shows’ presumed effect rather than their actual impact. Name bans also ensured that the names of dissidents were excised from newspapers, public announcements, playbills, and other written sources, turning victims into “nonpersons” and scheduled projects into “nonevents” (in the words of Alvin Shuster, “Nonpersons List Is Long in Greece—Censored Press Also Must Deal with Nonevents,” NYT, August 15, 1969). The use of name bans is, however, a self-defeating practice, attracting negative attention while the victims gain the public’s sympathy. That did not stop the Colonels, however, from applying crude name bans to the world of theater, film, and music.28 Some plays were forbidden because of established precedent, whereby the fate of new submissions was determined by previous decisions made regarding certain artists and genres. Still other productions that seemed likely candidates to provoke a ban actually slipped through the net. Many Greek playwrights, producers, and actors managed to undermine the censorship of the tight pre-performance licensing procedures. Nonetheless, the self-appointed guardians of aesthetics and morality returned plenty of scripts riddled with deletions in red pen. Given the “Authors’ Silence,” the number of new plays submitted to the censors in the 1967–1969 period was very small. The example of a translation of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae is a case in point. Besides, it shows that the censors did not see the wood for the trees. Euangelatos was preparing the production with the Experimental Stage of the State Theater of Northern Greece and had to submit his translation of the play to the Thessaloniki censors’ bureau prior to 28 G. A. V. (1969: 13). The Colonels forbade the films and withdrew the citizenship of the popular Melina Mercouri, who promptly responded with her protest memoir called I Was Born Greek (1971). Her husband, Jules Dassin, also figured on the regime’s blacklist, as did the well-known tragic actress, Irene Pappas, and Michael Cacoyannis. All of them left Greece and staged vociferous opposition abroad. See also “Athenian” (1972: 97) and Van Steen (2001: 144, 181–182).

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the July 1969 opening date. The front page of the original typescript bears the censor’s stamp accompanied by an illegible signature and by the date of June 20, 1969. The censor added the moralizing general comment: Prosoche stis metavoles (—æå  Ø  Æ"º ), “[Be] careful with the changes [to the text].” His (unlikely: her) red pen slashed “vulgar” words and expressions, as in the formal speech of Praxagora, who claims that women always enjoy having sex: for the slang verb pediountai (ÅØ& ÆØ), the censor substituted philiountai (çغØ& ÆØ), meaning that “women always enjoy being kissed” (Euangelatos 1969: 9). The censor expurgated many other “vulgarities” as well, such as the word pornes ( æ) for “whores,” which he changed to (e)laphries (ºÆçæØ ), “women of loose morals” (1969: 30). Obviously, he concentrated on fine points of Euangelatos’s diction in a script that, at first sight, followed the classical comedy’s plot. He even added his own “improvements” to the text. Lacking understanding, however, the censor did not touch on the director’s Brechtian and neorealist interpretation of the Ecclesiazusae as a blueprint for a utopian communist state ruled by women. The warped logic of this type of censorship seemed to believe that cutting single sentences or words would prevent the production from transmitting its “dangerous” content to the public (Karaoglou 2009: 65–66). Euangelatos’s Ecclesiazusae passed the censors’ check.29 Beyond stringent rules, licensing procedures, and prepublication or preproduction censorship, the Colonels instated a mechanism of second-degree control of plays, requiring the stamp of final approval following a complete dress rehearsal. After this second screening, an official permit was issued for the show to open. Even in the postpremiere stage, however, suspect plays, which often became popular overnight, could still be closed down or withdrawn under the threat of prosecution (under martial law). Occasionally, the authorities invoked a stage company’s minor violation of certain codes or deadlines as justification for withdrawing a production that was gaining ever-increasing visibility. Their specious reasons ranged from prohibitions against the small underground theaters that housed such popular productions (with the authorities checking presumably for compliance with fire code regulations) to charges that companies had failed to procure the right stamps and seals to be allowed to put up 29 See further Van Steen (2000: 215–216). I am grateful to Euangelatos for sharing with me his copy of the vetted translation of the classical comedy.

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their advertisement posters. Lenaios had a total of six productions fall victim to the “tyranny of rules” (testimony of June 16, 2001). Retroactive censorship or other forms of punitive interdictions came with terrible financial consequences for the casts, which were deprived of their livelihood, and for company directors, in cases in which they were obliged to keep their actors and staff on payroll. Any component of a production, or any part of the cover of illusion assumed by the play, could be slapped by the regime’s censorship. Theater-goers came to expect as much when the text or translation of an original work was concerned, and they knew of the name bans against lead actors, artists, and directors. The musical scores, sets, and costumes, too, had to adhere to traditional theater’s conventions, or otherwise drew criticism or even a ban. When the junta forbade the songs and compositions of Mikis Theodorakis, who had been the towering Cold War champion of the suppressed Left, its interdiction boomeranged and rendered all of the composer’s works political and more beloved by the public.30 Theodorakis’s case is an example of the hyper-politicization of culture that state censorship induced 30 The junta’s notorious ban on any of Theodorakis’s musical compositions is well known: General Odysseus Angeles explained that Theodorakis’s music was capable of “reviving political passions and causing discord among citizens” (quoted by MacDonald 1983: 175 n. 9). See further Giannaris (1972) and Holst (1980) and, most recently but in a journalistic vein, Katinakis (2011). The official interdiction affected songs by Theodorakis whose lyrics were based on Ritsos’s poems (such as the Epitaphios and the Eighteen Short Songs of the Bitter Fatherland, ˜ŒÆå  ºØÆ æªıÆ Å ØŒæ  Æ æÆ, the latter recorded during the brief “thaw” of 1973). As an unintended result of the name ban, Theodorakis’s score for the famous Axion Esti of Elytis became a powerful piece of national music and an expression of popular resistance. The setting of contemporary Greek poetry to popular music, a practice that dated back to the earlier part of the decade, gave rise to a new musical form, the “ ‘popular art song’ ” (Beaton 1999: 269). Theodorakis’s political significance as a symbol for the fight for freedom was huge: after the assassination of the popular left-wing deputy Gregores Lambrakes in 1963, he had assumed the leadership of the leftist Lambrakes Youth. After the initial shock and cover-up, it became clear that the murder had been committed by ultra-right-wing elements in Greek society, in collusion with the police and, it was rumored, also with the palace (Gkotzaridis 2012). Kornetis expands on the role of the Lambrakes Youth prior to the dictatorship years (2013: 10–36, or his ch. 1). For further reflections on music’s power under the junta, see Papanikolaou (2007: esp. 93–95 on Theodorakis’s political stance), who also discusses the agitprop ballad songs of the wry Dionyses Savvopoulos, who became a newer voice of student protest. See also Beaton (1999: 270–271); Daloukas (2006: 248–252); Katsapes (2013: passim); Kotanidis (2011: 49, 109–110, 125, 143–144, 390–391); and Zapheires (2011: 128–132). Many Greeks played forbidden records at home: this meant they refused to endorse the official discourse and did not allow the national paranoia to penetrate their own private space.

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(Kornetis 2008: 257; 2013: 191). The ban extended to productions of ancient drama for which Theodorakis had composed the musical scores: the 1967 summer festival performances of the National Theater’s productions of Euripides’ Phoenician Women and Suppliants and of Sophocles’ Ajax. Aeschylus’ Prometheus and three comedies of Aristophanes were canceled as well (see pp. 120–122, on the former). These cases drew much international attention and publicly embarrassed the junta leaders.31 News about censorship impacting on the classics was the kind of news that was prominently noted in the foreign press. Western newspapers and cartoons focused on the suspension of democracy in the country of its birth and kept the classical legacy in the forefront. Only sporadically did they refer to a contemporary Greek play being banned. The dictatorship’s preventive censorship affected not only theater but also the fields of journalism and art criticism, on which the former relies for further exposure.32 However, written documentation on specific cases and interventions was never systematically organized or preserved. The state directives that restricted the freedom of the press were not very different from those regulating the theater, except that newspapers were also obliged to publish state-issued press releases, official announcements, proclamations, speeches, and the like. In addition, newspaper editors had to check with the censors on the layout of their pages, the placement of photographs, and the size and positioning of headlines on the front page. The performativity at work in publishing heavily censored newspapers deserves further study, to cover, for instance, the papers’ use of cartoons and big lettering, the strategic displays on kiosk stands, the boycott initiated by the prestigious conservative paper, He Kathemerine, as well as

31 The 1966 Lysistrata production by Minos Volanakes with music of Theodorakis did not see repeat performances, either, and Volanakes himself went into self-exile. See the anonymous newspaper articles: NYT, June 25, 1967; The Times, June 28, 1967; Le Monde, June 29, 1967; NYT, June 30, 1967; NYT, July 5, 1967; NYT, July 10, 1967; The Times, July 10, 1967; Le Monde, July 12, 1967. See also Anon., “The Voice of the Actress,” Greek Report 4 (May 1969), 23; “Athenian” (1972: 97); and Van Steen (2001: 142–143). 32 The recent two-volume study by Varvara Georgopoulou, Theater Criticism in Athens of the Interwar Period (2008–2009, in Greek) supplies ample proof that theater criticism had been interwoven in the fabric of Greek intellectual life since the interwar period. Ntelles [Ntellis] (2011) researches film criticism under the junta.

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the official closure of many left-wing papers.33 Journalists chafed at the government’s interference in their lives as well as in their work. The regime lodged charges against “errant” reporters and expelled many foreign correspondents. Operating under such heavy pressures from the censorship bureaus, newspapers of the junta years did not publish substantial theater reviews, let alone full data on rejected playscripts. Other regular channels for theater criticism (such as the literary periodical Nea Hestia) were very few and were dominated by conformism. Progressive cultural periodicals such as the Epitheorese Technes, the journal of the postwar left-wing intelligentsia, had been closed down.34 Reviews of actual performances were notoriously vague and reluctant to draw interpretive conclusions. Most theater critics engaged in self-censorship both to protect themselves and the stage companies whose work they observed. Otherwise, their judgments could be used by the censors and the police to retaliate against non-complying theaters. Oral testimonies are often biased and tend to magnify the interviewee’s “heroic” stance of opposition against the repressive establishment and the resulting state of his/her victimhood. On the other hand, laurels received during the junta period often met with later suspicions. Apart from problems of sources, incongruities in the government’s implementation of the preventive censorship procedures further complicate the researcher’s work. The Colonels aimed to install a clear-cut system of unambiguous rules and regulations; instead, their lack of consistency created a lot of duplicity and gray area. The basic censorship criteria soon proved inept, capricious, and contradictory. At times, the dictators could be swayed by international criticism or condemnation (Shuster, NYT, April 19,

33 MacDonald (1983) and Stratos (1995) have studied the regime’s curtailing of the freedom of the press. Gregoriades mentions Helene Vlachou’s decision to close down her newspaper group (of He Kathemerine, Mesemvrine, and the weekly Eikones) (Gregoriades 1975: 1:113–114 and 2:321). Zaharopoulos and Paraschos (1993: 28–30). 34 See Argyriou (2007: 94–101); Doulis (2011: 21, 76, 81); Palaiologopoulos (2005: 47); and especially Rautopoulos (2006), who traces the history of the Epitheorese Technes. On the fate of other periodicals and papers, see Doulis (2011: 23–24); Kornetis (2013: 167); the chapters and documents collected by Kotsiphos (2010); Palaiologopoulos (2005: 47); and Pappa (2003). The outspoken periodical Anti was promptly banned (Kotanidis 2011: 283–284). Zapheires discusses the leading periodicals of Thessaloniki, Diagonios, Kritike, and Nea Poreia, and also the well-respected monthly journal on contemporary cinema, Synchronos Kinematographos (Zapheires 2000: 145–146, 198). Ntelles [Ntellis] (2010 and 2011) expands on the latter periodical and its influential editor, Vasiles Raphaelides. See also Karalis (2012: 159–161).

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1970). Some stage managers succeeded in building a cause célèbre on a publicized interdiction or closure, because censorship raised a banned work’s profile. Therefore, the authorities ignored some “offending” productions that were the talk of the town so as not to draw additional attention to them. This explains the paradoxical occurrence of some liberal (and much-advertised) allowances or practices during years of general oppression.

HORTATORY CENSORSHIP, SELF-CENSORSHIP, AND CENSORSHIP UNLEASHED I think we’ll be free—free to support the government (Newspaper editor quoted by Shuster, NYT, August 15, 1969)  ˙ åØæ æÅ ºªŒæØÆ r ÆØ a   !åfiÅ ºç ! The worst kind of censorship is not to have any money! (Giannes Patiles, “Doïna,” in But Now, Watch Out!, 1973: 31)

Censorship wants and needs to include and construct as much as to prohibit. Papadopoulos stated what he wanted to see as much as what he did not want to see. What he asked from the Greek stage were “well-made” plays in praise of the nation, God, and the family (G. A. V. 1969: 13). Such plays supported the junta’s ideology by blunting critical thinking and faking an image of social tranquility. In the domain of cinema, Papadopoulos added insult to injury when he urged filmmakers to keep to innocent, sentimental stories, preferably chaste romances ending in a church marriage. He famously sought “clarity and honesty” (Papanikolaou 2007: 130). Like the productions of the New Greek Cinema, however, shows of the New Greek Theater reiterated the big questions and complex problems that, without facile solutions or happy endings, presented serious social content. Under hortatory censorship or positively phrased guidelines (and financial inducements), plays and films reflecting the official ideology were welcomed. Movies that projected nationalist themes or that promoted Greek tourism or similar special interests received priority in the state subsidy system. Many serious film projects, however, were shelved or

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were stopped in the production process. Other films and plays depended on the reception they found abroad to facilitate their distribution at home. In general, however, hortatory censorship has far more insidious and long-ranging consequences, in that it blurs the distinction between censorship by the state and by oneself. Self-censorship (Æı ºªŒæØÆ) is the type of censorship that is present already in the earliest stages of planning a project. It is in effect when writers and artists internalize the constraints under which they are required to operate and limit the complexities of their work in order to forestall criticism.35 A licensing system exacerbates the pernicious effects of self-censorship, demarcating the boundaries to the censors’ tolerance and discouraging playwrights from committing to projects that push or exceed those boundaries. Unfortunately, however, hardly any texts deliver insights on the author’s inner censor. Because Greek authorities could intervene at any moment and because the constant pressure acted even before the “offenses” had been committed, the modes of self-censorship had a nefarious and widespread impact. The uncertainty about the consequences of one’s acts proved, if anything, more limiting than the earlier certainty about the regime’s rules. Some theater genres paid the price of a growing conformity of themes through 1969, that is, for as long as the state’s preventive censorship paired with its incentive and reward system ensured that writers edited out any unwanted elements. Along with propagandistic or historical-nationalist works, the Colonels promoted cultural products too trivial to be harmful (Parlas, To Vema, July 1, 1972). Over time, however, the damage done by banality is greater than that caused by the public absence of a singular quality work. During the seven-year dictatorship, repetitive boulevard comedies, chauvinistic “historical” films, and harmless foreign imports formed the bulk of what could be seen on stage, on the big screen and, after 1967, also on state-regulated television. Television and radio

35 Graham-Jones defines self-censorship as “censorship’s internalized counterpart” (2000: 20). In addition to censorship and self-censorship, she posits a third category of countercensorship and invokes some examples of its common strategies, which were deployed in plays staged in Chile and Argentina under their respective dictatorships: parody; the orphaned quote (i.e. inserting a “canonized” text that carries the otherwise risky message); the double entendre; rhetorical figures such as metaphor, allegory, and analogy; and transference (i.e. breaking up the taboo message so that different characters voice a piece of it and not one character is solely responsible) (2000: 21).

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networks functioned under direct government control and lost whatever credibility they had. They became prime tools of political propaganda and cultural stagnation, feeding as they did to the lowerand middle-class living-room public their “dream factory” films, imported serials, and endless soccer matches.36 The latter sealed Greek television’s success and boosted nationalist fervor. Sport and spectacle became vectors through which the compliant television service relayed overt nationalist propaganda to all corners of the country. For being the latest and most fascinating technology, television drew in scores of inexperienced viewers, whom it synchronized into an ever-larger public. The politicized media channels were always hard at work to depoliticize the content they provided and to forge the nation into a single audience. Self-censorship in Greece grew more prominent throughout fall 1969. Effective January 1, 1970, the Colonels replaced preventive control by the New Press Law that left journalists, literati, and artists responsible for censoring their own work in accordance with the by then well-known official principles.37 Theater plays and movie scripts, however, were still subjected to the preproduction licensing procedures, which were only occasionally relaxed.38 The New Press Law proved to be a mere token liberalization of the earlier censorship legislation, and the freedom enjoyed after 1969 was but a relative one. The continuing restrictions on the press became so notorious that they permeated other forms of cultural production as well. The dictators kept up the language of ideological policing and did not restore the necessary constitutional guarantees for the new “freedom” that they boastfully proclaimed. Instead, they held on to the rules of martial law that, at times, stipulated detrimental 10:00 p.m. curfews 36 See further Afentouli (2003: 173–174, 179); Karter (2004); Katsoudas (1987: 189, 193, 195, 196, 205, 206–207, 208); and MacDonald (1983: 174–175). Davarinou discusses the national radio station’s propensity to broadcast staged readings and theatrical works that furthered the regime’s propaganda (2013: 269–272). 37 The date of the abolition of the junta’s preventive censorship differs depending on the source. Zaharopoulos and Paraschos record perhaps the earliest date, October 3, 1969 (1993: 29; also Beaton 2003: 400). Discussion about the New Press Law was underway but the official decree was only issued on November 15, 1969 and came into effect on January 1, 1970. See Decree No. 346, ¯˚ `’ 232/15.11.1969, published in the Ephemeris tes Kyverneseos. 38 Testimony by Kotanidis, June 8, 2012; Phrankopoulos (1974: 184–185); and Roufos (1972: 158). In an open letter of January 1972, the Panhellenic Union of Free Theater called for the final abolition of censorship of plays (Ta Nea, January 24, 1972).

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for theaters (anonymous articles in NYT, July 28, 1969, and The Times, November 23, 1973). Also, they continued to impose penalties and jail sentences on dissidents who, in their view, impaired public order or state security through such “crimes” as defamation, obscenity, and insult to morality. They retaliated with stiff fines and prison terms against stage companies that mounted any work capable of being construed as a threat to the political order. The regime’s informers were generally assumed to be present among the theatergoers frequenting a playhouse or work under suspicion.39 The dictators “staged” their censorship and cast their agents in public roles in actual theater settings. The end of The Keys (Æ ŒºØØ, summer 1970), a one-act play by Marios Chakkas, poignantly satirized the “new freedoms” of a “newly liberated” society, with a “chief of staff ” announcing measures that had to spawn mind-numbing uniformity: “We recognize people’s absolute freedom to play backgammon, during the fixed hours, of course; the right to spoil their children, to watch soccer, but again when and how the law ordains” (1971b: 93).40 During this “liberalization” period, which started with the regime’s lifting of preventive censorship and ended with the November 1973 Polytechnic uprising, New Greek Theater grew in significance and influence, as a form of collective consolation and public dissent. The junta had already weakened and was no longer powerful enough to break the back of growing domestic resistance or to curtail everything it deemed troubling. Against this backdrop, staging serious modern Greek plays was an act of opposition: it was a safer bet for directors and actors to produce propagandistic plays or to revive older, tried works, “sure draws,” romantic comedies, and melodramas. New plays were acts of courage for not taking refuge, either, behind the Greek myths or the well-worn historical and patriotic dramas. New plays 39

Absolutely all of my informants took for granted that the regime placed secret agents in the theater auditorium, to listen for infractions and to report back on offenders. See also Gregoriades (1975: 1:114). Only Kotanidis, however, claims to have recognized some of the notorious torturers in the audience on the occasion of the April 21, 1972 performance of The Story of Ali Retzo (2011: 280–283). 40 One-act plays, even those with hard-hitting dialogues, were normally seen as more “innocuous” and were therefore more acceptable to the censors. The volume edited by Michaelides (1971) was the result of a 1970 competition for one-act plays organized by the publishing house Kalvos (on which see Karamanolakes 2012: 113). The bulk of the submissions resorted to techniques borrowed from the Theater of the Absurd. Chakkas also wrote short stories such as “The Bidet” (1986 [1st edn 1970]), which strikes an absurdist tone. See further Chakkas (1979) and Thomadake (1996: 205–222).

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turned into multidimensional and thought-provoking productions enabled actors and audiences to exert their intellectual autonomy and, if not to voice openly, at least to identify their political concerns. For the otherwise silenced Greek people, participating in modern play production became a form of, first, symbolic resistance and, then, active protest (when many joined the students at the Polytechnic University). With the Polytechnic crisis, a third phase of censorship ensued. During the days of the riots, theaters either closed in solidarity with the students or the regime suspended their shows, thereby implicitly crediting the stage with the protest value it had been cultivating among its public. Afterward, the press refrained from printing political news and state censorship of plays was tightened.

PROMETHEUS BOUND AGAIN Who calls from a remoter past than the bound Prometheus, and yet who still manifests himself when history moves in directions where defiance and unfreedom cry for help? (Tony Harrison, “Fire and Poetry,” 1998: p. viii)

Renewed conditions of censorship and anticommunist discrimination elicited new interest in the myth of Prometheus, Aeschylus’ battered but defiant culture bringer.41 Shortly after the coup, the junta censor of the National Tourist Organization (EOT) banned a production of Aeschylus’ Prometheus directed by the celebrated tragic actress Anna Synodinou. Her company, the Hellenic Stage (Hellenike Skene), wanted to present the tragedy with some of the

41

The Greeks of the dictatorship era would have called it a futile academic exercise to worry about the Aeschylean authorship of the Prometheus Bound, as classicists now do. Contesting the play’s authenticity would have damaged its prestige, that of Aeschylus, and the personal and collective stakes vested in the tragic hero. For the purposes of this analysis, I honor the Greek theater world’s firmly held belief that nobody other than Aeschylus wrote the Prometheus. Contestation originated in the Anglo-American scholarly domain: some interpreters have posited dating problems based on observations on content and dramatic form, which seem to fit a postAeschylean author better. Mark Griffith reasons that Aeschylus might have written the tragedy late in his career. He points out that most scholars, however, have dated the play to the 440s or 430s bce (1977 and 1983: 31–35). See also Taplin (1977: 240, 460–469, and passim).

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leftist connotations it had acquired throughout its modern Greek reception history. Synodinou did not belong to the Greek Left but she had surrounded herself by many leftist artists and collaborators.42 She herself was known to be part of the traditional Right, from which the ultra-right-wing regime expected tacit acceptance, if not support. In her autobiography of more than thirty years later, Synodinou recalls a disheartening confrontation with a stubborn official and his military language and mindset: I asked him to change the [negative] decision [i.e. to lift the ban on the Prometheus production] and the wretched man answered me: [The censor:] “Here, the insolent Prometheus states that he will not respect God while keeping himself at the ready [Ææ  Æ].”43 [Synodinou:] “What do you mean when you say ‘at the ready’?” [The censor:] “I mean ‘ready to act,’ as when we keep our weapons ‘right by our side’ . . . At the end of the page, look, right down here . . . Prometheus says to Hermes: ‘I will not obey you, the lackey of God . . .’ How can we possibly produce plays like that up there at the Lycabettus Theater?!” I felt nausea and a deep sadness about this sorry state. I left. Greece was being held hostage. All the people, we were the hostages of a junta of illiterate men. (Synodinou 1998: 330; capitalization of “God” as in the original Greek text)

Synodinou’s reconstruction of the interrogation by the censor was a plea for sanity. She was not merely protesting the official ban and the alleged verbal “offenses,” which provoked her disgust; rather, she was contesting the humiliating treatment doled out to her and her entire country. In her contempt for the man’s narrow-minded injunction, however, Synodinou did not disclose what was really behind the stumbling block of «Ææ  Æ.» This censor was well aware that seemingly insignificant lexical choices could prompt a strong reaction from the audience. He acted under general orders to erase all verbal 42 The musical score of the 1967 Prometheus production was by Ioannes Xenakes. The translation was by Alexes Solomos. Nikos Chatzekyriakos-Gkikas designed the costumes, which promised to be spectacular (pictures in Synodinou 1998: 330–331). See also Synodinou (1999: 214). 43 The Greek expression pará poda (Ææ  Æ) is used in reference to guns (rifles) kept “right by the leg,” “by one’s side,” or “within reach.” The discussion between the censor and Synodinou likely pertains to Prometheus’ defiant response to Hermes in lines 953–963 of the original play.

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traces of the Greek Left’s contribution to the wartime resistance, because such references could elicit public approval and thus denounce the regime’s ongoing persecution of the Left. The phrase «Ææ  Æ,» however, was a common Greek way to assert the Left’s continued willingness to combat the Right through the Civil War and its aftermath. Its formal origins can be found in directives issued by the Greek communist leadership in October 1949, when the Civil War had effectively ended in the Left’s defeat but when its leaders were still urging the rank and file to keep on the alert. Diehard partisans promised to remain in a state of mobilization, with their rifles positioned “right by their legs.”44 Therefore, if the Prometheus of Synodinou’s production were to be heard using this loaded phrase of keeping himself on a war footing, sympathetic audiences might interpret his words as an expression of moral and political vindication on behalf of the defeated of the Civil War (many of whom had again been sent to prisons and island detention camps). Synodinou further reflects on her experiences of the junta and its natural enemy, the Aeschylean Prometheus: The cancellation of the Prometheus Bound production was for me the first blow, the first tragic indication that either I had to agree with Kratos and Bia that the likes of Prometheus do damage to the human race, or I was to be punished. Aeschylus is every actor’s great master. He made us the heirs of a spiritual legacy with his trilogies of Prometheus and the Oresteia. These dramas leave the actor with the mission to make a concerted, relentless effort of heroic resistance against every infernal, dark force that tries to subvert or thwart this effort. Every day, the actor delivers words to his spectators. His personal suffering is akin to that of Prometheus. The actor’s suffering affirms that spiritual continuity is of the highest importance (1998: 347).

The 1967 interdiction against the Prometheus led the talented Synodinou to place her two-decades-long career on hold, and she withdrew into premature retirement. She was forced to give up the newly constructed outdoor Lycabettus Theater, which had been contracted out to her (as a short-term concession, in legal terms) and which 44 The phrase supplies the title of a recent volume edited by Voutyra, Dalkavoukes, Marantzides, and Bontila, “The Weapon at the Ready”: The Political Refugees of the Greek Civil War in Eastern Europe (« º Ææ  Æ») (Voutyra et al. 2005). The flap of the book’s front cover explains the red-flag phrase, which triggered aggressive responses from the Right through the 1960s.

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her Hellenic Stage had inaugurated with a June 1965 Antigone production.45 As an offstage Antigone, Synodinou spoke out against the dictatorship in May 1969. Her protest statement was published in Britain by the activist journal Greek Report: Our country, Greece, is subjected to a cruel and unworthy destiny. A heavy silence has spread over the land, where at the dawn of civilisation resounded the clarions of freedom, justice, democracy, poetry and art. It is the silence that accompanies the abolition of freedom. . . . The democratic values which belong now to our common heritage were first established in Ancient Athens. And we Greeks draw our knowledge of justice and our faith in it from the texts of philosophers, historians and tragic poets. Listen to the message of Sophocles’ “Antigone”. . . 46

Synodinou had purposefully released her statement to the foreign press, which appreciated her identification with Antigone as a global emblem of protest (with a quotation from Sophocles’ famous “Ode to Mankind”). Classical tragedy, especially, was perceived to belong to the core of intellectual culture worldwide. Also, Synodinou appealed to the international concern with freedom and democracy as well as to the Greek tradition espousing these values, while emphasizing the current, anomalous state of enforced silence. She deployed the tragic character of Antigone as a metonymic mask that stood for (curtailed) dramatic stagings but also for the (diminished) radiance of ancient Greek civilization. This Antigone of 1969 proclaimed disobedience to the self-serving laws of tyranny and, like her classical prototype, invoked the language of justice. Her voice exerted its metaphorical power in realms beyond the theater, in journalism and in activist writings. References to ancient drama proved to be a powerful currency in an international exchange functioning on symbolic capital. Greek intellectuals used antiquity and especially classical tragedy to marshal vital Western resources in their struggle against anti-intellectual usurpers who also lacked moral authority: ancient drama had to build a rich reserve of foreign goodwill for the Greek 45 Nitsos (1965) sharply criticized the conservative language choice that Synodinou made when she gave preference to the translation of Sophocles’ Antigone by Tasos Lignades. 46 Synodinou is quoted in “The Voice of the Actress,” Greek Report 4 (May 1969), 23; bold lettering as in the original. The statement has been included (and contextualized) also in Synodinou (1998: 342–343). See further Andrikopoulou (1999: 328) and Van Steen (2001: 165–167). Upon the publication of Synodinou’s statement, the Colonels promptly confiscated her theater on the Lycabettus.

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forces of dissidence.47 Synodinou’s statement was not the first protest and was not the only one to reappropriate the long view of tragedy: Nobel Laureate George Seferis had issued an earlier declaration, on March 28, 1969, which drew far more international attention (see pp. 133–135). Synodinou’s withdrawal from the stage, however, was conspicuous for letting silence rule in the absence of freedom of speech. Ever since she had created the role of Antigone in a 1956 production directed by Alexes Minotes, she had been identified with the iconic heroine. The covers of Greek textbooks on ancient drama featured an image of her as Antigone.48 In 1972, Synodinou made a spectacular comeback as Electra in Sophocles’ eponymous tragedy, staged by her revived Hellenic Stage at the Herodes Atticus Theater. She portrayed an Electra who, like Sophocles’ heroine, rebelled against the easy complacency which she saw many Greeks adopt. Her production’s finale celebrated tyrannicide (Anon., Akropolis, July 21, 1972; Lambrou 1987: 323). Sophocles concluded his Electra: “O race of Atreus, after so many sufferings, you have deserved at last to see freedom, perfected by this day’s deed [Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus]!” Synodinou’s chorus members turned these lines into a rallying cry chanting: “After so many sufferings, you have deserved at last to see freedom.” For “freedom,” they chose the expressly Demotic form, “leuteriá” (ºı æØ), which augmented the line’s emotional impact.49 This modern chorus amplified Sophocles’ final moral beyond the careful hint of present trouble and, as intended, elicited vocal audience approval. The chorus’s relief at the killing of the usurper Aegisthus turned into a call to overthrow the latest usurpers. 47 Yalouri mentions the recurring reminder of the debt that the civilized West owes to Greece (2001: 82, 103–105). 48 See Synodinou’s article, “The Antigone of Synodinou,” in the special issue of He Kathemerine, June 19, 2005. Theodorakis predicted that the junta would fall as soon as Synodinou would appear again in Epidaurus (quoted by Synodinou 1985: 50). In summer 1974, Synodinou returned to the role of Antigone in Solomos’s production staged at Epidaurus and thus confirmed the end of the dictatorship (review by Makres 1974c). Antigone’s emblematic value was heightened also because the tragedy had been “cleansed” by Metaxas, who subjected theater to state censorship and rigid control of thought, and also by some of the postwar right-wing administrations. See further Georgopoulou (2010: 142–144); Melas (1960: 404–405); Troules (2009: 81–85); and Van Steen (2011: 41–46). 49 Translator Ioannes N. Grypares was not a leftist but, because he died of deprivation under the Nazi Occupation, his name and work gained connotations of suffering under an unjust regime. This information was kindly provided by Mackridge (email communication of May 30–31, 2012).

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The tyrannicide enacted and applauded on stage became the hopedfor demise of the dictators.50

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, CLOSING ACT  åغØ ºı ŒÆæçı  —æÅŁ Æ  ı  Æıæ& Å ˆıæı with thousands of nails they hammer Prometheus to the crosses of Gyaros (Giorgos Karter, “Internal Affair”: Poems, 1967–1974, 1974: 21)

During the dictatorship years, the reception of Aeschylus’ Prometheus proved to be a matter more of political theory, practice, and counterpractice than of aesthetic disposition. The same held true for other interpretations of ancient drama and myth. Greece saw the “activism” of the leftist Prometheus revived and expanded, along with that of Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra. These heroes invited ready identification or close association especially under a new state of persecution, exile, and torture. The theater metaphor present in the Colonels’ “Operation Prometheus” may shed light on Greek tragedy’s final encounter with the dictatorship. NATO strategists had called a Cold War plan against possible communist aggression by the name of Prometheus. This plan ironically validated the connections between Prometheus and Greek communism: the upstart army-state of April 1967 took the mythical hero as its figurehead to act swiftly to “save” the country from an (imagined) communist threat (see Introduction, pp. 2–5). By 1967, Prometheus, the resilient tragic intellectual, solidly 50 Stathes Speliotopoulos, the author of a negative critique in the conservative journal Nea Hestia, attacked Synodinou’s company for what he called “abuse” of the classical text. He resorted to typical calls for “respect” and for “aesthetic and moral standards” (1972). Such calls naturally played into the Colonels’ hands. Van Steen expands on Orestes as a legitimate tyrannicide and on mythic family feud in the context of Greek national conflict (2001: 160–165; 2002: 223–230). Dissident Greek youth found a hero in “tyrant-slayer” Alexandros Panagoules, who, on August 13, 1968, tried to assassinate Papadopoulos but failed and was arrested, tortured, put on trial, and condemned to death. Panagoules’s death sentence was never carried out but he was killed in a mysterious car accident in 1976. For recent and diverse accounts of his life and death, see the conference contributions published by The Pnyx—21st Century (2008, in Greek) under the telling title of Alexandros Panagoules: Protagonist and Bard of the Resistance. See also the very personal account of Oriana Fallaci (1981).

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belonged to the Greek Left. The Greek exemplum of the leftist Prometheus was established in the 1920s and was affirmed by successive generations of radicals, who made many returns to this male archetype from their “own” legacy. This coveted Prometheus delivered a dignified expression of his sense of duty, forgoing vengeance. The poet and translator Kostas Varnales created the most important early Marxist and Russian-imported Prometheus to appear in Greek literature when, in Alexandria in 1922, he published the first version of The Burning Light ( ç ı ŒÆØ). The “burning light” of his title is the revolutionary firebrand of Reason; its hero, Prometheus the fire bringer, is in the vanguard of an unstoppable Marxist drive. By 1933, the Prometheus of Varnales projected a “new and totally anthropocentric vision, both iconoclastic and belligerent,” in the words of Yorgis Yatromanolakis (1996: 157).51 The image of the strong leader-ideologue that Varnales broadcast through Prometheus influenced many Greek writers, including Vasiles Rotas and Kazantzakis, whose trilogy Prometheus dates to 1944 (Bosnakis 1991). Thus, for the staunch Marxists and communists among the Greek Left, Aeschylus’ hero was the oldest dissident, social ideologue, artistic creator, and martyr-intellectual—the Promethean artist and intellectual who must inevitably become a rebel. These dynamics of resistance were revived by the political prisoners of the Civil War and its aftermath, who reclaimed Prometheus as one of their iconic champions. The more recent leftist interpretation had the tortured Prometheus believe in his spiritual strength and in his own just cause, which entailed the quest for knowledge and the sharing of skills with mortals against the will of the upstart tyrant Zeus. Prometheus proved

51 Yatromanolakis’s evaluation pertains to the second and thoroughly revised version of The Burning Light (Athens, 1933), to which we now generally refer. Yatromanolakis also notes the similarities and differences between the two versions (1996: 156–159). Dallas (2003) offers a comprehensive philological study of Varnales’s work. Nietzsche, who identified with the Aeschylean Prometheus, influenced Varnales and Kazantzakis. In the ninth chapter of his Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche compared the myths of Prometheus and Adam. He concluded that the human race might achieve its loftiest goal only by committing sacrilege and then bearing all the consequences, including the misery inflicted by offended deities. See Lecznar (2013) and Ziolkowski (2000b: 116–117). Nietzsche famously called Aeschylus’ tragedy a “hymn to impiety” and its hero’s “offense” the “virtue” of “active sin,” which, for him, commanded pride and dignity (Nietzsche 1999 and 2000: ch. 9). Van Steen further describes the Nietzschean and Marxist Prometheus of the Old Greek Left (of the interwar and postwar periods) (2011: 117, 125–127).

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tyranny wrong. The exile stage represented an older but insular phase of Greek theater functioning as a critic of its society and as a resource for contestation. By dire necessity, too, this stage had been noncommercial and had espoused more democratically organized working relations which, in turn, enhanced audience participation. Thus the detained and exiled actors had decommercialized and democratized tragedy well before the Athens and Epidaurus Festivals institutionalized classical drama as an outdoor mass spectacle culture. These principles were practiced on the periphery but not in mainstream Greek theater of the decades 1950–1970, until the new troupes of the early 1970s changed the cultural landscape. The Greek intelligentsia of the dictatorship years built on the precedent of staging the Prometheus that the political detainees of the prison islands had developed. The avowed leftist actor Manos Katrakes (1908–1984) belonged to the very same group of people that had suffered persecution at the hands of the postwar reactionaries and that was again hurt professionally by the junta authorities.52 His 52 A lead actor at the National Theater, Katrakes had been pushed out by the conservative Demetres Ronteres, when the latter became the theater’s appointed director general in 1946 (through 1950). See Kalaïtze (2001: 239) and Krontiris (2007a: 199, 204, 206; 2007b: 190–191). Katrakes was sent into “internal exile” by successive postwar right-wing governments and spent many years on the prison islands (Makronesos and Hagios Eustratios [Aï Stratis]). Van Steen notes the prisoners’ long experience of Prometheus gained in the island camps, quintessential places of punishment in desolation, and offers a vignette of Katrakes as the impromptu Prometheus of Makronesos (Van Steen 2011: ch. 3 and 127–128). During his years in exile, Katrakes strove to give his fellow detainees a sense of a cultural life through communal play production (Van Steen 2011: ch. 4). Also, many dissident actors and artists of the prison islands wanted to protect the Greek legacy from misinterpretation and propagandistic distortion, which affected even Aeschylus’ Prometheus (Van Steen 2011: 127). In 1952 Katrakes won first prize for playing Prometheus in a production with the Thymelikos Thiasos of Linos Karzes at the ancient theater of Delphi (Spathes 2003b: 249). From then on, he was identified with this leading role. In summer 1955, Katrakes founded his Greek Popular Theater (Helleniko Laïko Theatro), located outdoors at the Pedion tou Areos, which became his permanent open-air stage until the Colonels demanded that the company be disbanded. The authorities banned the play that the thiasos had opened just a few weeks before the coup: Gerasimos Staurou’s Goodnight Margarita (˚ƺÅ&å Æ ÆæªÆæ Æ, with an April 3–21 run at the Veakes Theater). Katrakes himself continued to appear in big roles (such as Oedipus) of classics staged by other theaters. See Exarchos (1995–2000: 2/1:194); Georgakake (2009: 82); Martsakes, Karageorgou, and Demesticha (2004: 119, 122); N. Papandreou (2002: 178–179); and Spathes (2003b: 250). On Goodnight Margarita, see Panagiotounes (1993: 99) and here, p. 137. Katrakes went on to explore other forms of repression under authoritarian rule, as in his 1960 production of The Antigone of the Occupation (H ` ت Å Å ˚Æ å ), a work by Notes Pergiales (reviews by Maniates 1960 and Thrylos 1960).

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work and that of others who had passed through the prison islands in the aftermath of the Civil War represented a period of intense infusion of ideology into drama, bringing personal testimony to historical injustice. When after 1967 the consolation of ancient drama was needed again, these actors could fall back on the old choices of radical classics and on the intense grassroots experience of those classics that stemmed from the prison islands (Van Steen 2011: 313–314). The military regime’s unraveling was marked by a memorable closing act in Prometheus’ leftist Greek reception: a Prometheus of 1974 symbolized renewed leftist dissidence.53 By 1974, the censors knew how to comb readings of Aeschylus’ play for leftist messages. They had learned to be on the alert for the effect of the classics but they made gestures of false freedom—and desultory mistakes. They gave the National Theater permission to stage Aeschylus’ Prometheus at the summer festival of Epidaurus. Takes Mouzenides, the production’s moderate director, and Tasos Roussos, a translator known for the clarity and faithfulness of his translations, might have seemed like relatively safe bets to the regime.54 Also, the This play drew parallels among ancient myth, the Nazi Occupation of Greece, and ongoing retaliation against young idealists, who fought unrelenting battles against the establishment and who risked ending at violent odds with the collective. Like many other actors, Katrakes preferred parts that spoke for the ideological camp in which he situated himself, and he let his real-life experiences blend with the fictive situations of the dramatic prototypes. 53 Internationally, Prometheus had become an icon of the leftist committed culture and, in particular, of the Eastern European Marxist literature of the 1950s and 1960s and of the Antikewelle, the intense engagement with ancient (Greek) themes that the German Democratic Republic (1949–1989) experienced. See Calder (1996); Hall (2004a: 174–175); Ruffell (2012: 124–130); and Ziolkowski (2000a: 562; 2000b: 122). Among the best known exponents of the East German Antikewelle were Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf. Müller delivered critiques of contemporary East German society by way of ancient drama and myth; his poststructuralist drama utilizes myth as material in process. Wolf ’s name stands for feminist revisions of female classical figures (Cassandra and Medea). On Wolf ’s Cassandra, see further Komar (2003: 107–118) and Van Dyck (1998: 118–120, 138–139). Brecht’s influential Antigone of 1948 predates the founding of the GDR. 54 On the qualities of the translations by Roussos, see Chasape-Christodoulou (2002: 761–765) and Symvoulidou (1998: 58–59). Mouzenides had had an earlier run-in with the junta-appointed higher echelons of the National Theater. The costumes of his 1969 Electra of Euripides caused a stir: when the director presented his preview performance at Epidaurus, junta sympathizers in the executive ranks felt scandalized by the “un-Greek” costumes of Orestes and Pylades. They promptly forbade all further performances if the same costumes were to be used. Paulos Mantoudes had designed the controversial costumes, which consisted of a peasant-

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traditional theater establishments generally complied by continuing to produce the stream of reworkings of ancient drama that Greeks and tourists alike had come to expect at the annual summer festivals. Mouzenides’s Prometheus production opened on July 6, 1974, however, when the first signs of the junta’s rapid decline were showing and protest voices were growing louder and bolder. The censors, who watched directors, translators, and even composers closely, underestimated the key variable of the leading actor. The National Theater’s production caused a stir with protagonist Katrakes, who, by summer 1974, had polished the role of Prometheus to perfection. Katrakes thrived in this production condemning the tyranny at the time of its ignominious collapse. He spoke to a full Epidaurus Theater that gave him an enraptured applause. Many had come to see the 1974 Prometheus production precisely because it starred Katrakes in the lead role, and they were not disappointed. Enter Bia and Kratos, the brutal and unscrupulous minions of Zeus, who carry out his order to restrain the shackled but defiant Prometheus. The public starts roaring as soon as it hears their names: Bia (via), “violence,” teams up with Kratos, “the State,” in this word’s first meaning in modern Greek. The semantic association of the state style dark jacket to be worn over a white shirt and trousers. The outfits resembled, however, the rugged ones proudly worn by the Greek leftists and communists who resisted the 1940s Axis enemy in the mountains and countryside. The authorities branded these costumes as “Bulgarian” and “unpatriotic”; their allegations expressed the reactionaries’ damning view of the leftist-communist resistance. Besides, Mantoudes’s costumes invested the play’s male cast with both the mythic power and popular endorsement to eliminate usurpers of the paternal domain: Aegisthus and Clytemnestra in the myth, the Nazi Germans in recent Greek history, and the Colonels under the current circumstances. The National Theater’s dispute about Mantoudes’s costumes soon became a public issue, which the foreign press took up, and Mouzenides’s unyielding stance led to some cancellations. Of course, the aesthetics of a theatrical performance shape its artistic and ideological sensibilities, and costuming and stage design can play important parts in either accentuating or diluting such sensibilities. Most classical drama productions staged during the dictatorship years used far more conventional, almost repetitive “ancient-style” costumes, typically designed by Kleovoulos Klones. Dio Kangelare speaks of the “aesthetics of the chlamys,” which held many National Theater productions back (testimony of June 12, 2008). The furore about Mantoudes’s costumes reveals, once more, to what extent revivals of ancient tragedy were expected to be heroic costume dramas and not plays of ideas. On Mouzenides’s 1971 production of Aeschylus’ Persians, staged by the National Theater at Epidaurus, see Higgins, The Times, July 15, 1971. His Oresteia of 1972 was more subdued. See further Kotanidis (2011: 112–113); Papasoteriou, Eleutherotypia, May 26, 1996; and Van Steen (2001: 151–153, 158–160, 162; 2002: 198–202, 203–207).

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with violence was inevitable: violence was a military and nationalist violence, enacted by the tyrannical state upon a fettered Greece. The production’s visual images and electrifying exchanges dispelled the difference between ancient and modern heroes, and Prometheus acted as a mask for shackled Greece in the person of Katrakes. The audience at Epidaurus had eagerly been awaiting the passages in which the protagonist would express liberal or defiant ideas, as when he denounced the arbitrariness of “new tyrants” (as in Aesch., Prom. 439, 939, 942, 960). Katrakes called for the public’s judgment on the remorseless dictators, adding the shared understanding of his own painful trajectory. He also sported the knowledge of the hero’s ominous predictions that the ruler would have to capitulate and that he himself would be liberated (Aesch., Prom. 168–177, 186–192, 947–950, 956–959). Prometheus chose not only to disobey Zeus but also to refuse his offer of compromise; his suffering was therefore an emphatic act of free will. Katrakes was refigured as Prometheus: his stage incarnation recalled his personal fate but, as intended, the sympathetic audience applied the lines to the common Greek experience under the junta. Greece’s call for freedom found vindication in the play’s cataclysmic end, when the protagonist enjoyed the support of the chorus and of a public of thousands, both in the process of empowering themselves. Applause was particularly impassioned when the chorus leader stepped forward and stated: “I have learned to hate traitors” (l. 1068). Similar riotous applause greeted Prometheus’ final and famous cry of frustration: “You see how wrongly I suffer” (1. 1093). The critic Alkes Margarites called the performance Katrakes’s “personal triumph.”55 An experienced actor working in the voice of Prometheus, Katrakes easily felt and fed the mood of the crowd. He spoke as a dissident both through the voice of his stage character and as a known personality in the history of the Greek Left. His act projected current problems through the magnifying prism of classical theater and metatheater while giving a “human” face to Prometheus. 55 Margarites, Ta Nea, July 13, 1974. Kanakes (1999: 559–561) and Makres (1974b) deliver negative comments. For more reviews, see Chatzedakes et al. (n.d. [ca. 1976]: 306–307, 317–320). Georgousopoulos complained that Synodinou played her role of Io as if it were a solo performance, that the male lead was bent on making “facile declarations,” and that the production in general lacked cohesion (1982–1984: 1:57–58). Some voices (such as Lemos 1989: 535) criticized Katrakes for rejoining the National Theater.

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If previously, however, the actor stood for the tragic hero, he had now made himself and the tragic hero stand in for the entire country. Katrakes had few qualms about acting as the conscience of the leftist Greek theater world—or even of the nation incarnate. He presented a cosmic struggle between individual history and the fate of the community, between tragic necessity and the aesthetic and moral production of that necessity. His time served on the prison islands had fostered his audacious interpretation on behalf of an engaged audience. Two sources, one Greek, one English-speaking, further illustrate how Katrakes’s Prometheus was received. Theater scholar Platon Mauromoustakos recalls that, when the chorus leader proclaimed “I have learned to hate traitors,” police agents and soldiers walked in to secure a subdued finale and to prepare for the crowd’s orderly departure. In the dark of the night, somebody shouted, with irony and contempt: “Kalos tous prodotes!,” “Welcome to the traitors!” The audience went into another furore (testimony by Mauromoustakos, July 2, 2000). In response to Katrakes’s final cry, “You see how wrongly I suffer,” the outbursts of applause lasted for many long minutes, which made the officials present feel threatened. Because they occupied the honorary front seats, the powerholders found themselves in a precarious position, caught as they were between the actors on stage and the sea of spectators behind them, uproarious and shrouded in darkness (testimony by Mauromoustakos, July 2, 2000). Classics Professor Richard Thomas, too, remembered the high-voltage atmosphere and rightly gauged the junta’s fragility: I remember . . . being somewhat surprised that such a play [the Prometheus Bound] was being permitted by the junta, whose representatives were present for the performance (I think it was opening night), unaware as we were that their régime had entered the final days of its tyranny. ... [T]he last lines of the play approached. . . . Hermes, messenger of Zeus, demands on behalf of the latter that the enchained Prometheus reveal the secret of the marriage that can destroy his reign. Prometheus, of course, defiantly refuses, preferring bondage to acquiescence, and as he did so in the performance at Epidauros, stage-center, Christ-like, arms spread out on the rock, directly in front of the colonels seated in the front row, we all rose up in spontaneous applause. The Greek next to me, somewhat unnecessarily, interpreted: “He said, ‘When you have a nation in chains, you no longer have power over it.’ ” As we, the defiant inheritors of the demos, rose up and cheered with an enthusiasm which

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effortlessly connected the oppression of the régime to its ancient and mythic paradigms, soldiers moved onto the orchestra, their guns trained over the heads of the colonels. It seemed clear at that point that the junta would fall (1997: 9–10).56

The conditions created by the military takeover encouraged Synodinou to cooperate more closely with the radical and leftist ranks of the Greek theater world. In the 1974 Prometheus production, Synodinou as Io embodied tyranny’s female and right-wing victim, and she therefore functioned as an ideological complement to Katrakes/Prometheus. Although the two of them were set in mythical times, their recent personal experiences of the regime’s retaliation rang through to the modern spectators. Differences in time, space, and affiliation collapsed and ideological divisions between Right and Left began to be eroded. This was what the dictators should have feared more than the effect of a play’s lines: that, against all expectations, the Greek Right and Left could and would join together against them.57 They should have been concerned about the collaborative and mobilizing stimuli of a theater leading to rightist dissidence in conjunction with the Left. The Prometheus revival proved that, by the end of the sevenyear military rule, the hero’s portrayal had disentangled itself from the determinist trappings and class divisions of a dogmatic, olderstyle Marxism and had sought and found new ideological and professional associations. Prometheus was no longer the charged symbol of the exclusion or apartheid visited by the Greek Right onto the Left. Instead, the hero reinvented himself through forward-looking strategies and alliances and now symbolized the long-awaited stage of liberation. This perspective was interlaced with the optimistic vision of a new people through the hero’s quest for knowledge and his sharing of skills and benefits, which would set the human race free

56 I thank Richard Thomas for confirming this written testimony for me and for allowing me to quote from it at length (email communication of April 7, 2012). Given that Papadopoulos had been overthrown in the wake of the Polytechnic riots, the “colonels” present might have been the new hardliners, Brigadier Demetrios Ioannides and his appointee for president, General Phaidon Gizikes. In a telephone interview of November 5, 2012, Anna Synodinou corroborated that many officials from the various Greek ministries were present and, in particular, the top levels of the Ministry of Culture. 57 See further Close (2002: 119, 123); Phrankopoulos (1974: 174); Roufos (1972: 160–161); and joint statements such as “An Important Declaration of Political Unity” by Kanellopoulos, Mavros, and Zighdis (1971).

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from bondage of any kind, against the will of the power-wielding enemy. Traditional revival tragedy of the state theater establishments and of the Epidaurus Festivals could begin to untie itself from conformist strictures, be they self-imposed or not. Some revival productions relapsed into stifling determinism and made a mere exhibit of their remains. In the post-1974 decades in general, however, ancient drama became a free laboratory, where orthodoxies and heterodoxies were allowed to clash, and where different approaches, interpretations, and experiments were put forward. Then, too, modern Greek theater could finally fathom the unrestricted appearance of indigenous plays, some of which shared themes with classical drama.

SEFERIS’S FIRST AND LAST INTERVENTION It is painful for me to speak . . . , painful to be silent. (Prometheus in Aesch., Prom. 197–198)

A turning point in the reign of the Authors’ Silence was a declaration issued by the reticent George Seferis on March 28, 1969.58 This declaration drew international attention, not in the least because it was first broadcast by the BBC Greek Service. The 1963 Nobel Laureate used his position of influence to extend the limits of the allowable and his statement defined and validated the years of silence after the fact (Papanikolaou 2002: 445). Seferis defied martial law to cast his sense of tragedy in the words of Aeschylus, the ancient “national” poet and visionary. His declaration reads: [I]n the case of dictatorial regimes the beginning may seem easy, but tragedy awaits, inevitably, in the end. The drama of this ending torments us, consciously and unconsciously—as in the immemorial choruses of Aeschylus. The longer the anomaly remains, the more the evil grows. . . . “I see before me the abyss towards which we are being led by the oppression which has spread over the land.” (Seferis is quoted by Anon., “Nobel Prize for Truth,” Greek Report 2 (March 1969), 1; also Edmund Keeley 1999: 205)

58 See Beaton (2003: 397–401); Doulis (2011: 57–65, 70, 105–111, 120–125); Hager (2008: 68); Koukounas (2004); and Papanikolaou (2002: 444–445; 2010b: 178–180).

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In the latter part of the quotation, Seferis freely paraphrased Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 958–960, or Clytemnestra’s terrifying lines, to convey his vision of an implacable tragedy, that of the human cost of conflict and war and of Greek intellectual life being threatened with extinction. He had summarized these lines earlier, in his poem Mythistorema 20, to read: “The sea, the sea, who will be able to drain it dry?” (trans. Keeley-Sherrard). Seferis explained: “I feel that Aeschylus sees clearly in front of him this unending continuity between murder and murder, this inexhaustible purple” (Dokimes A’, 290). Here Seferis revived the formerly trite metaphors of “drama” and “tragedy” to predict impending disaster if the dictatorship were to remain in place. He was promptly called a modern Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess of doom, for he, too, risked not being heeded.59 The Colonels retaliated by launching a smear campaign against Seferis. Others faulted him for guarding his discretion overly carefully, even though the performative role of the “national bard” had long been available to him. In other words, his subdued statement did too little too late.60 Also, the statement still operated on the level of the high culture of a consummate diplomat convinced that personal opinion, politics, and art did not mix. Nonetheless, Seferis inaugurated a new phase in the public condemnation of the regime, even if he did not commit to acts of resistance with more widely visible results. Beaton links the poet’s motivation for speaking out to the nefarious effects of the Authors’ Silence. In a conversation with Robert Keeley, Seferis explained:

59 The chorus lines of Agam. 990–994 preface Seferis’s famous dissident poem, “The Cats of St Nicholas” (February 1969), which opens the protest volume Eighteen Texts (see here, p. 103). Imminent tragedy can also be sensed in Seferis’s late poem (March 1971) about the cruel but deserved death of an ancient tyrant: “On Aspalathoi . . . ,” « Ed IƺŁø . . . » (Plato, Republic 616). This prefiguration of the Colonels’ downfall was included in New Texts 2, the third collective protest volume issued by Kedros (see here, p. 103). See further the anonymous articles, NYT, March 29, 1969; “Nobel Prize for Truth,” Greek Report 2 (March 1969), 1; and “Art Can Crack the Colonels’ Plaster—George Seferis,” Greek Report 5 (June 1969), 22–23. See also Beaton (2003: 396–397, 403); Padel (1985: 94); Schwab and Frangos (1970: 91); and Van Dyck (1998: 21, 24–28, 115, 118–119). 60 See further Calotychos (2003: 228). It must be noted, however, that Seferis’s statement preceded that of Synodinou and also the “Statement of the Eighteen” (see here, pp. 123–124 and 102–103 respectively).

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These young people are losing so much, they are not learning and they are being filled with awful propaganda. We cannot afford to lose a whole generation. That is why I have spoken out, and now I feel at ease. (Quoted by Beaton 2003: 399)

More to the critics’ liking were some of Seferis’s shorter protests against the junta, such as the two-line poem entitled “Out of Stupidity,” «#e "ºÆŒÆ», which denounced the dictators’ utter depletion of the meaning of words, even as their performative language was meant to achieve domination. Dated Christmas 1968, the poem deconstructed the notorious mantra of the “Greece of Christian Greeks” (Beaton 2003: 395–396):  Eºº· Fæ!  Eºº ø· Fæ! 'æØ ØÆH· Fæ! æE º Ø Œæ . ˆØÆ  d Œ Æ ; (1976: 103) Greece: Fire! of Christian: Fire! Greeks: Fire! Three words dead. Why did you kill them?

Untamed national poetry served the Greek struggle for freedom again on September 22, 1971, when crowds gathered for Seferis’s funeral and sang en masse one of his poems called “Denial,” «ΆæÅÅ», which begins: “On the secret seashore,” «  æتØºØ  Œæıç ». The poem had been set to music by Theodorakis, whose work had been banned, but the defiant masses did sing the song in his musical setting.61 Scores of people came out to show their respect for the public stance of opposition that Seferis had taken two years earlier, when he issued his statement. Seferis had at first shown reluctance to become the spokesman of dissidents “but the tradition of Solomos, Palamas, and Sikelianos was too strong for him in a land where, at least in time of crisis, poetry still mattered enough to raise up heroes even against their will” (Edmund Keeley 1999: 205).62 61

See further Andrews (1980: 41–58); Beaton (2003: 404–405); Bistes (2010: 129–130, 141–144); Doulis (2011: 237–240); Kotanidis (2011: 226–229); and Regos (1999: 238). The procession at the earlier funeral of George Papandreou (November 3, 1968) had also grown into a public act of mourning and dissidence, given the iconic status of the deceased. Robert Keeley offers an extensive report (2010: 185–190, quoting eyewitness Louise Keeley). These collective protests were framed within the culturally accepted context of the Greek funeral (Kornetis 2006: 154–155; 2013: 111–114). According to Wren, young demonstrators accused of displaying antijunta sentiments at Papandreou’s funeral were arrested and imprisoned (1969: 21; also Kretikos 1996: 239–241). 62 Greek poetry’s consciousness-raising force has been illustrated most eloquently by Edmund Keeley (1999), who tells of Katsimbales’s defiance of the Nazi German

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Textual and Ideological Cleansing You spot the pressure points of a failing state by looking at what it censors. (Nick Cohen, The Observer, November 3, 2012)

The Colonels’ censorship of the stage must be examined in relation to contemporary debates about the role of the Greek author, actor, or artist and given the plays’ social, historical, and political backdrops— a point on which Nitsos kept hammering in editorials and other comments in his journal Theatro. Examples of plays and their contexts may show how censorship affected the New Greek Theater of the early 1970s and how some dramatists and producers managed to deflect the censors’ attention. The boards that searched scripts for what they regarded as salacious or inflammatory content banned only a relatively small number of plays outright. One such case was Gangrene (ˆªªæÆØÆ), a short social drama in which author Giorgos Dialegmenos presented an acerbic reading of contemporary Greek society: the play was scheduled for production at the Stoa Theater in January 1972 but was banned from the outset. The Bus ( ºøçæ), a utopian play by Nikos Zakopoulos, was only temporarily banned in 1971.63 Recurring bans inflicted on less visible plays defined the censors’ sanctions more clearly. Thus the repeated ban on soldiers at the 1943 funeral of national poet Kostes Palamas. Katsimbales sang the banned Greek national anthem—the verses of another national poet, Dionysios Solomos—and marked the occasion for a collective release of patriotic sentiment. Angelos Sikelianos, too, contributed by reciting his commemorative poem on freedom to Palamas. This poem soon became one of the standard texts for Greek schoolchildren to memorize (Keeley 1999: 203–204). Palamas’s Triseugene was revived in Thessaloniki in 1943, marking a display of defiant national theater (Myrsiades and Myrsiades 1999: 61). On the Colonels’ contrived use of Palamas, see Sichani (2015: passim). 63 Georgakake (2009: 139–140). On the instant bans, see Horton (1984f: 202); Karaoglou (2009: 22 n. 53); Lenaios and Photiou (1990: 17); and Parlas, To Vema, June 30, 1972. The information about Dialegmenos’s play is confirmed by careful, handwritten notes made on the playbill of We Lost Auntie—Stop ('Æ Å ŁÆ,  , 1975), by the same playwright. The playbill, kept in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library, is part of a much larger collection of Greek theater programs that was donated to the library by Princeton professor and theater-lover Richard Burgi.

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the play Goodnight Margarita (˚ƺÅ&å Æ ÆæªÆæ Æ), by Gerasimos Staurou, literalized the interdiction against commemorating the Greek Left’s suffering in the 1940s. Staurou’s 1967 play was based on a short story entitled Margarita Perdikare (ÆæªÆæ Æ —æØŒæÅ) and written by Demetres Chatzes. The play deals with the life and unjust death of a young female member of the resistance under the Nazi Occupation. Because its subject matter inspired analogies between the past and the current repressive regime, the play fell under intense scrutiny. The story also reveals, however, that Margarita was betrayed by members of her own degraded bourgeois family trying to save their own skin. Immediately after the coup, Katrakes had been forced to shut down his theater company in the midst of a production run of Goodnight Margarita. The instant ban on Katrakes’s show issued a stark warning to any stage director tempted to create a production that could be construed as undermining the usurpers’ agenda. Nonetheless, Goodnight Margarita entered into a second production cycle when, in 1971, the Contemporary Greek Theater of Lenaios and Photiou took up the play and toured it extensively—until it was banned again.64 The Brechtian form that rendered Greek youth theater militant allowed some experimental productions more leeway. A show such as the 1971 Free Theater production of The Story of Ali Retzo (1965) by Markares expressed its political views on the present in words and scenes relating to the Turkish past (see Chapter 4). Unbelievably, the censors only asked the Free Theater to strike the word Œøº ÆØÆ (“little bastards”) (testimony by Kotanidis, June 8, 2012; also Georgiopoulou 1999: 145). A Man’s a Man (Man Equals Man; original title: Mann ist Mann), Brecht’s play of 1926 that foregrounds the sterility of the human personality in a violent and ridiculously militaristic society, was staged in Thessaloniki by the Theatrical Workshop of “Techne.”65 Its troupe mounted the play as a collaborative, well-researched production in February 1972 and used a

64 See further Hager (2008: 103); Karter (1978: 141–142); Lenaios (1995: 94–96); Lenaios and Photiou (1990: 15, 17, 20–21); and Parlas, To Vema, June 30, 1972. See also Georgakake (2009: 82–83) and here, n. 52. 65 Wright covers A Man’s a Man (1989: 33–36). Georgousopoulos gave the production a very positive review (1999–2000: 2:277–281, 309–310). See further Anon., “The New Theatrical Teams” (1972: 176); Karaoglou (2009: 63, 67–68, 266–270, 342); and Kornetis (2006: 235–236).

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script adapted from the translation by Anny Koltsidopoulou. The censors left intact the play’s démontage of personhood and excised only one line stating: “Soldiers are the worst people in the world” (Karaoglou 2009: 68). These deletions reveal the committees’ literalminded equating of offending content with offensive lines of the form and size that they thought they could easily expunge. The opposition used Brechtian plays as ammunition in the fight against state conservatism and armed capitalism. The repeated successes of the Free Theater and of the Workshop offered eloquent corroboration of its actors’ conviction that they could best challenge the reactionary establishment via Brechtian methods. When questioned, the actors could explain, too, that the objectionable lines existed already in the (pre-coup) original and that the lines under suspicion dealt merely with past and foreign, not with modern and internal politics. The audiences of the Free Theater and of the Workshop willingly shared in the mask or pretense that carried play production under the junta: the pretense that the play-act was just that, a play-act, when it was essentially an act of rehearsing real-life protest. Brechtian and absurdist methods, visceral theatricality, symbolism, polysemy, and ambiguity enriched the public’s psychological and intellectual experience of the new Greek plays, while sustaining the distance necessary to confound the censors. Metaphor and allegory proved for the censors particularly difficult fields in which to exercise discursive hegemony. Some of the new plays delivered their social and political commentary in highly poetic and lyrical overtones, but more often they presented a nihilist or existentialist reading of the junta’s priorities, which drew the censors’ attention, ire, or ban. A play such as The Noose (˙ ŁÅºØ) by Skourtes combined various nonrealistic elements to expose the country’s deadened cultural and intellectual life as well as the demise of its human subjects. The work thrived on political indictment through its extensive allegory of the noose for the suffocating state system. In 1971, the censors rejected Skourtes’s script on the rationale that it contained “subversive and antinational ideas.”66 However, the Markezines government of “controlled liberalization” 66 See Kambanelles et al. (1974: 205) and Parlas, To Vema, June 30, 1972. The Musicians, however, the third play of Skourtes’s “trilogy of stains” (the other two being The Nannies and The Noose), was allowed a two-month run in a 1972 production by Koun’s Art Theater. See Georgakake (2009: 163); Karter (1978: 160–161); Michaelides (1975: 128–129); and Pankoureles (1974: 108; 1983: 24).

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(September–October 1973) allowed the play to be performed at the Art Theater on the condition that certain cuts be made, but then closed it down on the third day of its run (testimony by Skourtes, July 6, 2001; also Andrikopoulou 1999: 330).

Who’s Afraid of Marietta Rialde? The absurdist plays, especially, presented a truth of a nihilist and countercultural reality, whose revolutionary impulses haunted the censors. Absurdist plays were often deployed not so much to shake known values but to reinstall them independent from the rulers’ moral and political agenda. A pioneer in this domain was Marietta Rialde, one of the few women in the predominantly male Greek theater world of the 1960s and 1970s. Rialde ran her own Experimental Theater, acted herself, and translated and wrote plays in which she featured issues of oppression and gender. She tried to deconstruct the hierarchies of the male establishment and of the conformist spectacle culture. Rialde’s refusal to be contained in a system of categorizations sharpened her confrontational revisionism.67 She accumulated perhaps the most notable record of run-ins with the censors—a testimony to her perseverance and her dedication to noncommercial theater. In December 1970, the censors judged Rialde’s own play, Mao Mao, to be “unsuitable for spectators under the age of 16,” but it was still allowed to open at the Experimental Theater by mid-January 1971.68 With her 1972 adaptation of Peter Handke’s recital play, Offending the Audience (1966), Rialde problematized conventional spectator identification and sympathy with the actors. Instead, she caused the viewers to be taken aback by what

67

No adequate study exists to document Rialde’s extensive work. Phrankopoulos’s review (1978: 223–225) is very brief, as is Exarchos’s blurb (2009: 570–571 [vol. 4/2]). Sakellaridou mentions Rialde but does not enter into further discussion (2006: 320). Given that Rialde’s position was unique in modern Greek dramaturgy of the late 1960s and 1970s, we do not have enough material to even begin to answer the question of whether women’s activism through theater differed from that of men. On rare occasions, Rialde teamed up with more established playwrights to bring, for instance, a very effective 1970 production of Angelos Terzakes’s The Ancestor (ˇ æ ª). See also Georgakake (2009: 122); Hager (2008: 118); Karter (1978: 57–58); Rialde (1973); and testimony by Rialde, July 28, 2000. 68 Sykka, He Kathemerine, April 20, 1997. See also Georgakake (2009: 138); Karter (1978: 94–95); and Thrylos’s review (1971b).

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happened on stage: acts of swearing, accusation and self-indictment, confession, testimony, and other forms of dramatic provocation. Her event-theater was concerned with performance and its mutations but was not always “audience-friendly” (testimony by Rialde, July 28, 2000). Rialde militated against Greek society but specifically targeted the petit-bourgeois spectators, their hypocritical morals, and their desires for comfort and social ascent. Her theater’s defying stance, however, ultimately aimed at empowering actors and viewers alike. In late 1972, after two more of its productions had been banned, the Experimental Theater was forced to close its doors temporarily: the production of Handke was rejected as “nihilistic” and a production of Rialde’s own nightmarish charade play, Oust or The Mean Little Song (ˇ& ,  æ  ıå æƪıŒØ), was banned for being “anarchist and subversive.”69 For the censors, the nature of such “offenses” was self-evident and no further explanation was needed. The latter play assails the paranoia of suspicion that descends over powerless people who, under a (real or imagined) threat of danger from the outside, become each other’s worst enemies. Moreover, the people are willing to commit anew to this destructive process with each new, selfproclaimed revolutionary government and with each new call for collaborators and scapegoats.70 Thus, as a social actor in real life, Rialde used her own and others’ plays to shape and validate radical ideologies. She made everyone complicit but especially the public. Hers was a revolution of revulsion.

Making Terror and Torment Visible: The Greek Performative Turn The prohibitions affecting the visual components of plays such as action (nudges, gestures, glances, and so on), costuming, or even advertising were as revealing as the traces of the cleansing process

69 See Andrikopoulou (1999: 330); Hager (2008: 94); Karaoglou (2009: 22 n. 53); Parlas, To Vema, June 30, 1972; and Sykka, He Kathemerine, April 20, 1997. Georgakake (2009: 171) and Rialde (1973) furnish data on the October 1972 production of Oust. 70 Karampetsos concludes: “the audience is led to the unavoidable consciousness of its own fears and insecurities in a world where heroes and traitors are manufactured from among its members in order to sustain the organized irrationality of the colonels” (1979: 213).

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that removed certain words, lines, or themes.71 Absurdist theater techniques extending into the realm of the visual and purely illusionary let actors elude or subvert the “truthful” stage expression on which the Colonels insisted. These techniques liberated performers from having to depict acts realistically or in a historically accurate manner: instead, actors could project events and thoughts beyond the logical sequence of cause and effect or the rigid linearity of time and space. Like Rialde, director Giorgos Michaelides chose to present tough absurdist tales that did not allow his audiences to escape into a fantasy world but, rather, made them ponder consequences through analogy with current conditions (Kotanidis 2011: 273). In December 1970, the censors forbade Michaelides’s absurdist work Autopsy after a mere six performances.72 Its production at the Patari, or manager Lenaios’s second stage at the Orvo Theater, visualized the terror of arbitrary violence and had been playing to packed houses (Karter 1978: 91–92; Lenaios and Photiou 1990: 9, 13, 16). The spectacle onstage conducted not an anatomical autopsy but the autopsy of a moribund state. Also, the play operated on a minimal amount of text, which its author had submitted as an “artsy” script. As expected, the censors deemed the literal script innocuous and did not look for a subtext. Lenaios described how, in actual performance, an “irrelevant” character, seemingly unaware of anyone’s presence, read out this “inessential” script while seven other actors slowly took off the bandages in which they were wrapped, and then climbed onto a huge cage and shouted at the top of their lungs (testimony of June 16, 2001). The bandages and the cage visualized the play’s themes of oppression and entrapment, whereas the scream voiced the victims’ frustration with an absurd, inconsequential world. When the production was permitted to reopen in January 1971, it was on the condition that this frenetic finale be cut (Karaoglou 2009: 22 n. 53)—which 71 Nitsos recalls a clumsy case of censorship that targeted the iconic status of Brecht’s image. The regime withdrew Theatro’s January–February 1966 special issue on Brecht (5, no. 25) but subsequently relented on the condition that he, as the journal’s publisher and distributor, would let the censors slap their official stamp of approval on Brecht’s full-face photograph that featured on the issue’s cover. The censors liked to stamp Brecht’s forehead. Nitsos delivered a caustic preface to the 1976 reproduction of the cover of the 1966 issue (1976: 13; also his testimony of July 3, 2000; Asimakoulas 2005a: 99, 193). 72 Testimony by Michaelides, June 5, 2001. See also Constantinidis (1986: 8); Georgakake (2009: 136); Kotanidis (2011: 154–155); Lenaios and Photiou (1990: 17); and Parlas, To Vema, June 30, 1972.

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turned the muzzled play into a more poignant experience for those in the know. Like several other early 1970s plays, Autopsy minimized traditional scenography and let the cage speak for itself. Powerful, too, was the reperformance cycle into which the Autopsy production entered along with its engaged actors and audiences: the actors played audaciously for as many performances as possible before, they trusted, the officials would amputate the script or close down the show. Loyal theater-goers attended the show on multiple occasions, looked for changes from one performance to the next, and spread the word among friends and relatives: for wanting to relive the experience, they extended the meaning of reperformance on the part of the viewers. A few months later, Michaelides and the Patari delivered a second proof of the censors’ inability to credit visual action with the same power as the stage text. In March 1971, they mounted a production of That Evening We Played Shakespeare’s Work, Romeo and Juliet (¯Œ  "æı ÆÇÆ  æª ı Æ Åæ øÆ ŒÆØ ıºØ Æ), a play written by Michaelides that used Shakespeare’s classic to release the anguish of the current younger generation (Georgakake 2009: 140–141; Karter 1978: 109–111). The committee had granted the production a license, failing to correctly assess the power of gestural abstractions and the versatility of stage sets, even when resemblances with Autopsy were obvious. At various points in the otherwise harmless-looking play, the young actors threw themselves against the prison bars at the very front of the stage, which symbolized the condition to which ordinary Greeks and their theater had been reduced. These bars, which remained on stage throughout the performance, made the audience feel imprisoned as well (testimony by Vassilis Lambropoulos, June 29, 2011). Lambropoulos, who was among the spectators one night, recalls: There was also a . . . sense . . . of total futility. Several lines were just delivered, not acted, to convey a sense of—here we are tonight, actors and audience, spending an evening together doing what? Shakespeare (as opposed to protesting, fighting . . . )! How pointless! The whole thing was uncanny! (email communication of January 21, 2012)

The censors caught on and shut the production down after only a few performances. Michaelides’s work in 1970–1971 was not based on

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any of the traditional categories such as character development, suspenseful conflict, or dramatic progression. Onstage his work revealed far more than was visible in a plain reading. It reduced even Shakespearean content to a paratactical “sideshow,” carrying its own negation within itself. Michaelides’s productions made pointed metatheatrical comments about the possible gaps between text and performance, or between (uninvolved) art and “real-life” despondency. Art and (abuse of) power suited the absurdist framework, which introduced enough semantic confusion to let both scripts slip by the censors. Without delay, however, the makers of these “happenings” caught the tone of the despair and the images of the terror that had pervaded Greek society.73 The austere use of the bandages, the cage, and the prison bars evoked a sense of torment even before the performers managed to express their anguish. Codes of nonverbal behavior or silent parts of speech were powerful tools in the actors’ attempts to deliver a two-faced performance that made the play’s textual form and stage action diverge and then collide. These seemingly isolated incidents, however, may not tell the full story of what Greek theater practitioners were discovering in their unconventional dramatic performances of the early 1970s. Since the late 1960s, the Western and the Central European stage had been experimenting with what would later be characterized as the Performative Turn in theater, or the move away from the narrative text and its faithful representation (Hall 2004b: 27; see also Chapter 1 n. 38). The Greek version of this Performative Turn let the language of the body take precedence over theater’s logos, with the added advantage of disorienting the censors. Michaelides’s role as an early explorer of this paralógos and Performative Turn (albeit not in these exact terms) has long been neglected. Not coincidentally, a prior adaptation of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which Michaelides created in collaboration with the Free Theater’s first members,

73 Mackridge notes that musical “happenings” of protest, staged at the Hellenic American Union in Athens and featuring mimed acting based on a minimal script, got off lightly. These happenings, which were serious in nature, were performed against the backdrop of modern classical music; only the occasional event was intended to be comic. Significantly, these shows were performed on Americansponsored premises. Mackridge, email communication of May 30–31, 2012, and unpublished MS, 2. See also Kouroupos (2002: 45, 46).

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attacked social inequality and transformed the play into a visceral cry of angst amid the threat of terror. The Beggar’s Opera premiered on September 3, 1970 and enjoyed a successful, uninterrupted run; it anticipated Michaelides’s own two plays described earlier, which moved further away from scripted theater and staged acts of group affirmation. With each one of the three productions that followed in quick succession, Michaelides took bolder and bolder steps to replace the tyranny of the text with visual, kinetic drama and to move toward (a Greek version of ) the Artaudian “Theatre of Cruelty,” replete with the Artaudian actor’s physicality and emotional force.74 His imagistic staging of dissent opened up new performative and linguistic forms that required particularly dynamic acting on the part of the cast. The audience in turn had to commit to a different kind of seeing, a creative seeing, capable of dealing with intensity, doubt, and pain, with scripts that short-circuited dialogue and did not explain but articulated suffering. In the span of a mere few years, Michaelides produced new aesthetic paradigms that stressed the self-conscious theatricality of performances without falling back on the reassuring structures of conventional plot and lead figures; rather, his productions found a new protagonist in the terror that ruled over traumatized but rebellious characters. The director posited: We reduced the script to a mere incentive, a simple tool or stimulus, and focused on learning through improvisation. The actors had to work quickly on their feet. I urged them to convey emotion, to make eye contact with the spectators, and to remember that that scream is what the spectators have in them, too. (testimony of June 5, 2001)

74 Michaelides came perhaps as close to “postdramatic theatre” as was possible in early 1970s Greece. In 1999 Hans-Thies Lehmann defined “postdramatic theatre” as a theater that displaces the story’s logical progression from the center and that lets the public experience no longer “an organizing quality but . . . an artificially imposed ‘manufacture’” (Lehmann 2006: 26; the notion has not yet percolated in many encyclopedias of theater and performance such as the otherwise very helpful one of Kennedy 2003). Michaelides’s own play, That Evening We Played Shakespeare’s Work, Romeo and Juliet, especially, reduced the story’s internal logic to a “mere sham . . . that only serves clichés” (in Lehmann’s words, 2006: 26). See further McGlynn (1990). These topics receive hardly any attention in the special issue of Themata Logotechnias 50–51 (2013) devoted to Michaelides.

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A MODERN GREEK CASE STUDY: THE TROMBONE OF MARIOS PONTIKAS

Production Data and Censorship Restrictions Greek dramatists who depicted torture rather than mere terror entered a minefield. In April 1970, Papageorgiou’s production of the one-act play Guilt (¯å , 1968) by Marios Chakkas was taken down after three weeks for portraying one of the regime’s most brutal torturers in a scene of only a few minutes long.75 Notably, Chakkas’s torturer was a jealous wife who began the interrogation scene with the familiar threat: “If you don’t tell all, you won’t get out of here alive” (1971a: 11). By comparison, Pontikas’s Trombone (1973), which placed the torture acts on stage but without identifying them as Greek conditions, fared better. A brief case study of Pontikas’s neorealist play may provide further insight into stage censorship and into the minds of the committee members. The Trombone had been premiered at the Amalia Theater in Thessaloniki on October 9, 1973, by the Theatrical Workshop of “Techne,” and its first run lasted through December 16 of the same year.76 The collective directorial responsibility for this “team production” rested with its actors and artists, among them Stelios Goutes, Roula Paterake, and Manos Loïzos (music). More than 8,000 spectators saw the play over the course of some sixty performances. Thus the production’s first successful cycle started at the height of the “controlled liberalization” (under the Markezines government) and ended after the tumult of the Polytechnic uprising had calmed down (Karaoglou 2009: 276, 277). However, the play’s run was interrupted for approximately ten days coinciding with the protests. According to the rules pertaining to new stagings and/or venues, the script was then resubmitted to the censors in anticipation of a 1974 production by the New Stage of the National Theater, which was eventually postponed until December 1974.77 The

75 Chakkas (1971a: 11–18). Polykarpou confirms that the production was mounted by the Thiasos Vemata, precursor to the Stoa Theater (Polykarpou 2011: 27–28). See Andrews, The Times, March 18, 1975; Georgakake (2009: 123); and Karter (1978: 61–62). Torture and oppression that take place behind closed doors recur as a theme in Chapter 4. 76 See Georgakake (2009: 184); Michaelides (1975: 119–122); and Nitsos (1974). 77 Testimony by Pontikas, June 10, 2012. For reviews of The Trombone’s second production, staged by Kostas Bakas and the New Stage, see Dromazos (1986: 227–228;

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manuscript shows how the censorship board vetted the three-act script line by line before granting it a license (albeit with restrictions) on March 26, 1974. The handwritten notes on the cover sheet, however, are barely legible:78 ˇƒ [= `ƒ] º KªæÆç ŁÅÆ (e F Œ. æ ŒÆ  ºı B 8Å æØ. [ æغF]  ¯ Ø æB.  ˙ ˆæÆÆ & #ªÆºØ ı [?] [seal illegible] ¯ˆ˚˝¯` `˚``¸¸˙¸ˇ˝ Ø’ IźŒı Œ ø H 16 K H  a ZØŁ B º ÅØı Æ ØƪæÆç. [initial(s)] A. [?] 26.3.74 The pages have been signed with the initials of Mr. Boromboka, member of the 8th three-member Committee. The Secretary Agaliotou [?] [seal illegible] JUDGED UNSUITABLE for minors under 16 years of age, with the deletions marked on the reverse of the page. [initial(s)] A. [?] 26.3.74

This prohibition against audiences of minors was not an uncommon one (Karaoglou 2009: 64). It was another expression of the Colonels’ ostensible concern with the education and well-being of youth, which it had good reason to regard as its most critical opponent.

Art as Alibi: One Man’s Music Is Another Man’s Misery [O]ne of theatre’s major responsibilities in an oppressive society [is] to break the conspiracy of silence that always attends an unjust social system. (Athol Fugard, “Antigone in Africa,” 2002: 143)

originally published in He Kathemerine, December 27, 1974); Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:145–147); Makres (1975); and the collection of critiques in Pontikas (1981: 68–78). 78 Mackridge kindly assisted with deciphering these notes (email communication of July 1, 2011).

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Pontikas’s Trombone presents the themes of personal responsibility under a repressive regime and of the individual’s obligation to break the silence about ongoing abuse. The play shows how a Greek couple’s tawdry domesticity is tested against the demands of civic life. The husband, Pelopidas (Stelios Goutes), is a conservative, middleaged civil servant and also a passionate trombonist, who hopes to be hired one day to play in the marching band of the capital. His wife, Eutychia (Roula Paterake), is pleasantly supportive and encourages her husband’s musical ambitions, but mainly because she dreams of a more comfortable, bourgeois lifestyle in a “proper” city apartment. She embodies the mentality that social respectability hinges on affluence and on keeping up appearances of propriety. The physical realism of Eutychia’s living room expresses her aspirations to climb the social ladder. The future looks promising: Pelopidas has become friendly with the mayor; he will soon be the preferred trombone player of the worthies of his small town. Husband and wife are elated: the big city will be next! Living up to her name “Happiness,” Eutychia affirms that her husband means everything to her and that he has made her perfectly happy. But Pelopidas worries about the bizarre behavior of his fellow band members. Why did they stop playing the other day and let him carry on all by himself? “Do you or do you not know?” one of them pressed him after the incident. Little by little, Pelopidas starts putting the pieces of an ugly puzzle together: the mayor and the notables thank him for his unplanned solo performances, not because they appreciate the quality of his music, but because the trombone sounds cover up the screams of pain of the innocent victims who are being tortured in the town hall.79 Pelopidas is devastated. His music has only been an alibi! His playing has become sheer display and even a form of aggression. He also realizes that violence is not a side effect or byproduct of the system, it is the system, and it has been destroying many more invisible victims. Living up to his heroic name now, Pelopidas decides that he no longer wants to have a part in the mayor’s sinister performance act.80 He wants his art, which sensitized him to the torture victims’ fate, to remain pure. Eutychia then turns against her husband and 79

To this day, multiple reports circulate about junta interrogators who let engines run loudly during torture sessions to muffle the victims’ screams. 80 Pelopidas was a 4th-century bce Theban general, known for his bravery, who played an important role in battles against the Spartans and the Macedonians.

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blames him for sixteen years of misery and poverty.81 “There is no man in this house,” she sneers (Pontikas 1974: 71). She not only shrugs off the onus of responsibility but also physically attacks her husband, who refuses to play along with the establishment to save her bourgeois dream of “happiness.” “All is well if we are well,” is Eutychia’s mantra (1974: 70). In the play’s closing scene, one of the torturers has now come for Pelopidas, who has acted as a responsible witness to injustice. Will his wife gain the strength to do the same?82 Pontikas saw a parallel between the musical performances of his trombone player, which disguise torture, and the theater spectacles of the regime’s actors, who helped to mask injustice (testimony of June 10, 2012). Like the trombonist, the singers, performers, and audiences participating in the junta festivals had the option to resist rather than to facilitate the cover-up of state violence (see Chapter 3). Pontikas contrasted the attitude of heroic self-abandonment with that of selfpreservation. He affirmed, too, that social responsibility is not an abstract case of conscience but involves each individual member of the group. By inscribing Pelopidas’ lonely resistance, Pontikas reappropriated the cultural codes and values of musical and other performances and reclaimed their integrity. Music helped to hide another universe accessible only through empathy; yet it sensitized the musician, who showed his best side when not playing. Pontikas creatively reworked the much-discussed theme of the silence boycott. His Pelopidas, who is all talk and all trombone throughout the first act, comes to realize what gruesome purpose the sound of his music has served, and how blind he has been for not seeing the signs. His personal growth to full awareness leads to a momentous decision: he will no longer play to help conceal the officials’ sordid torture practices. Self-imposed silence will be his cry of protest and show of solidarity with the latest anonymous torture victim. An active protest regimen of silence will restore Pelopidas’ own and the tormented man’s dignity. Pontikas’s hero, whose trombone playing has gained

81 Makres took issue with the unexpected emotional reversals in the couple’s psychology and interaction (1975). 82 Karaoglou discusses The Trombone at greater length (2009: 68–69, 70 n. 234, 274–277, 343). N. Papandreou counts the play among the Workshop’s most remarkable accomplishments (1997b: 124–125, 128). See also Nitsos, “A Truly Greek Play” (1974); and the special issue on Pontikas of the periodical Dromena (1996), with important articles by Bakas, Charitou, and Lankadinos.

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him long-desired access to the corridors of power, turns away from the establishment and its fascist violence and declares in disgust: The voice [of the victim] opened not only my ears; it opened also my eyes. You’ll say “Bravo . . . And then what? What is there that you can do?” (small pause). Nothing. Let it be said: there is nothing I can do. The only thing I can do is to stop [playing]. That’s something, at least (1974: 71).

From November 1973 through March 1974, the extra-theatrical premises of Pontikas’s play were more current than ever, and the show seemed like a good candidate for a ban. Again, however, the censors missed the big picture and fussed over single words and phrases. They demanded that the words “fascist,” “general,” and “field marshal” be excised from the script, because they might elicit audience reaction.83 Among the “offending” sentences were, apart from some sexually charged lines: “Eat your hearts out, Generals!,” “I want you to become a marshal who governs,” and “What does that mean, ‘fascist’?” (in the context of Pelopidas rejecting the label with which the other musicians have been branding him).84 These red-flag phrases crossed the dividing line of the stage and the current Greek predicament and were perceived to be indictments of the military regime. Once the other band members have told Pelopidas about the screams of pain of the torture victim, he refers back to the conversation as follows: “You hear him shout, the stupid donkey, the wretched Greek, you hear him shout.” In this sentence, the censors struck out the word “Greek” (1974: 109, 110). “A Greek can only be a positive character,” Hager explains, and any offense against the Greeks had to be eliminated (2008: 96; also Karaoglou 2009: 68–69). The censors’ fanatic nationalism was indeed laughable when it expressed itself in

83 The censors similarly curtailed an Art Theater production of Victor, or Power to the Children (1927), a surrealist farce written by Roger Vitrac, a close collaborator of Artaud: they forbade references to the play’s self-important but weak character of a military general and also the use of his Greek title (strategos), but they overlooked the central theme of a tyrannical child destroying its family and social environment. Koun and his actors cleverly resorted to the original French appellation of “Mon Général” (Gregoriades 1975: 1:114). The play opened in December 1973, in a biting Greek translation by Paulos Matesis. 84 The Greek text is included in Nitsos’s publication of key government documents pertaining to stage censorship (Nitsos, ed., 1974: quotations on pp. 109 and 110, resp.). The same two pages have been reproduced in the playbill (pp. 10–11) that accompanied the December 1974 production of The Trombone, staged by the National Theater’s New Stage.

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their silly objection against “the Greek” being mentioned in apposition with “the stupid donkey.”85 Meanwhile, The Trombone presented scenes so obviously critical of the government’s torture practices that the playwright, director, and actors were always left doubting whether they would be allowed to continue to perform. As mentioned at the opening of this section, the torture acts of The Trombone happen on stage but, significantly, the play does not identify the punitive administration or its victims (testimonies by Goutes and Pontikas, June 10, 2012). The clever play is a thoroughly decontextualized confrontation between an individual and a faceless regime. Pontikas placed torture on stage in a paratextual manner as well. The show’s playbill included one of his short stories entitled “The Archaeologists,” which pointed its readers toward an anti-junta interpretation. The story describes in cruel and meticulous detail how a team of archaeologists go about torturing a marble kouros statue, availing themselves of all the sinister “expertise” of their profession. Once the statue is “broken,” it moans: “I will . . . I will . . . tell . . . all . . . I am . . . Kouros . . . K . . . K . . .” (Pontikas 1973a: 15).86 The junta police brutally interrogated Goutes shortly before the February 1974 opening production of Woyzeck (1837), an older play to which the Theatrical Workshop turned after staging The Trombone. Woyzeck is the best known work of the German playwright Georg Büchner and delivers a radical social critique that presages naturalism. It depicts the dehumanizing effect of the military on a poor young man’s life. Because Goutes was badly beaten, the opening performance of Woyzeck had to be postponed for about a week. According to Goutes, however, the brutish treatment he underwent attested to the significant impact of The Trombone and to the Workshop’s success in general and had less to do with the troupe’s next

85 In a similar nationalist vein, the censors justified their ban on Kambanelles’s Daddy War (ˇ Æ   º) by stating: “The play promulgates antinational, antisocial, and anarchic ideas. More importantly, however, it calls the soldiers of Demetrius Poliorcetes ‘Macedonians’ and not ‘Greeks’” (Kambanelles et al. 1974: 199; also Hager 2008: 95–96). 86 “Breaking” people is the modern Greek expression for torturing victims until they succumb. The 1973 version of the story, included in a small volume of short stories by Pontikas, left blanks where the censors had cut words, half-lines, or entire sentences. This was a trenchant way for authors and publishers to show the traces of the physical excision of words and lines.

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selection.87 On the other hand, Goutes did undertake the tasks of translating and directing Woyzeck and therefore had to submit his name along with the script to the censors. He was battered when it became clear that the Workshop’s latest production would stir a new wave of psychological and political commotion, in which a growing Greek public participated.

RESTRAINING THE REVUE: MADE TO THE MEASURE OF THE MOMENT …Ø ŒÆº Æ Œı"æ ŁÆ ÆØ ŒÆØ ØŒ  Æ—ª&ł, Œı &, 溺& ŒÆØ Œ,  Ł ºØ  ºÆ  Æ. He will be one of us who rules us well—plaster, idiots, fools, and tanks, our people send to hell! (Actor Stauros Paravas citing the provocative lines from the satirical revue They Are Coming, They Are Not Coming that, by late 1973, led to his arrest and deportation to Gyaros; quoted by Maltezou, He Vradyne, August 6, 1974) At one point in the course of a bawdy, satiric review playing twice nightly to packed houses in a central Athens park, the actors lean across the footlights to tell the audience in confidential tones: “We did not write this stuff. We are just saying the lines.” (Alfred Friendly, Jr., NYT, August 30, 1970)

The role of the Athenian revue or epitheorese under the dictatorship merits further study. The complexities of the relationship between the political process and the satirical stage have not yet been adequately assessed. Lila Maraka (2005) convincingly argues that the epitheorese in its 1970s commercial phase assumed an apolitical stance with only a veneer of militancy: political satire remained superficial when more serious issues were at stake. Under the junta, however, the satirical revue and musical comedy in general enjoyed a freer status than that 87 Testimony of June 10, 2012; Karaoglou (2009: 68, 343). In this same, third phase of censorship, the Workshop submitted The Evening Visit (˙ "ªª æÆ), a late 19thcentury satirical work written by Elias Kapetanakes, in the hope of producing the play in May 1974. The censors cut entire scenes featuring politically charged speech that could easily be made to reflect on the current Greek predicament. Consequently, the actors dropped the plans for staging the play (Karaoglou 2009: 69–70).

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afforded to noncommercial theater, because they harked back to a long urban tradition of irreverence in which it had seemed more permissible to challenge politics and morality. Also, the genre’s function of theatrical license had often been one of controlled dysfunction. The government knowingly allowed some freedom to criticize; it applied some strategic tolerance so as to provide an outlet to feelings of public discontent which, if not voiced on stage, might have manifested themselves in more destructive ways. It reduced or displaced aggression by adopting a theatrical substitute. Therefore, some revues were allowed to operate as safety valves that the authorities could still regulate as they saw fit. Besides, any exceptions made by the officials in a show of self-promoting tolerance enabled them to persuade their friends and less committed enemies that free expression was still permitted. Typically, the stars of revue shows played for paradigmatic messages and, with sprightly repartees and folksy gestures, cued audiences drawn from the mass urban classes. These professional performers got in digs that elicited cheers and rounds of applause, while also keeping the censors at bay. Occasionally, however, they crossed the line, and the regime retaliated. The popular revue They Are Coming, They Are Not Coming (‚æå ÆØ—˜ æå ÆØ) was closed down in early November 1970, after it had been allowed a successful run through the summer. Written by Kostas Nikolaïdes and Elias Lymberopoulos, this epitheorese starred the feisty Rena Vlachopoulou and Stauros Paravas and was called the commercial hit of the year.88 Following the ban and a few other altercations, Paravas was deported to the prison island of Gyaros.89 The revue’s 88

See Andrikopoulou (1999: 330); Constantinidis (1986: 8); Exarchos (1995–2000: 3/2:521); Georgakake (2008: 43); and Kotanidis (2011: 264). See also Anon., NYT, November 7, 1970, and Sykka, He Kathemerine, April 20, 1997. 89 Conditions on the junta’s prison islands were appalling and did not lend themselves to educational or cultural activities. Nonetheless, Paravas’s exuberant humor was a source of consolation for many detainees (Psaroudakes 1975: 76–77). Giorgos Pharsakides, an exile of many years, mentions a production of some scenes from Aeschylus’ Persians that the prisoners of Lakki (on Leros island) prepared (Pharsakides 1994: 54, 74; 2006: 200). He himself designed the sets, inspired by the famous Ishtar Gate of Babylon and monumental Assyrian relief sculptures (for images, see 1994: 75; 2006: 200). When asked, Pharsakides could not remember the exact date of the production but confirmed that it took place between mid-1967 and mid-1970 (testimony of June 5, 2012). Also, among the participants were some of the former exiles of Aï Stratis, who had staged a 1951 prisoner production of the Persians (Van Steen 2011: ch. 4).

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title referred to the (dramatically promised) “free” Greek parliamentary elections, which might or might not be coming. By late 1970, elections had still not taken place, which exposed the absence of any real plan for democratization. The show also made fun of Colonel Pattakos, depicting him as doing little other than cutting ribbons at official ceremonies (Friendly, NYT, August 30, 1970). The dictators canceled also the premiere of a mid-December 1970 follow-up revue at the Akropol Theater that ridiculed recent modifications to their censorship legislation and that was called They Can Be Said, They Can’t Be Said (¸ ª ÆØ—˜ º ª ÆØ) (Georgakake 2008: 45–46; testimony by Spyros Tzoras, June 6, 2001). This and the previous epitheorese took on journalistic pretensions and incorporated recent news. Questioning the true nature of the regime’s more “liberal” approach, the title of the sequel show called attention to its anticipated censored status. The script’s repeated references to censorship were self-referential, prefiguring a show that might not be played to the full because certain truths could still not be said. The anonymous correspondent of The Times explained: “The censors objected particularly to a scene showing two gypsies sharpening scissors with which they cut short the dialogue of the actors when it became objectionable politically” (December 18, 1970). Because theater-goers never learned what the “they” were that could not be said, they started filling out the blanks and created their own meanings—a process that might or might not have reached beyond what the playwrights intended. Plays in the comic vein were at their best when they visualized the official interventions, verbalized the blanks (by inserting censors’ statements, pregnant pauses, or “bleeps”), and thus multiplied the possibilities of signification.90 90 The Theatrical Workshop’s December 1972 production of Phausta (1964), a caustic social satire by the popular humorist Bost (Mentes Bostantzoglou), mixed verbal and extraverbal discourses pertaining to censorship in innovative ways. The censors objected when character Giannes showed the front page of a newspaper sounding the alarm about current economic inflation (“25% Increase of Meat Prices,” at the opening of scene 5). The actors did not cut the scene but, rather, inverted the interdiction: to the paper, they now applied the black strike-out marks with which the censors typically blotted out female flesh depicted in printed materials from abroad. In his inimitable way, Bost further attacked the bombast of the Colonels and parodied many of their favorite expressions. Karaoglou incorporates testimony by Helene Makisoglou, who played the title role of Phausta (Karaoglou 2009: 69, 270–274, 295, 342). Bost’s “tragicomedy” was published in the 1965 issue of Theatro (ed. Kritas). See also Georgakake (2009: 173–174).

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A spirited revue named The Kid . . . Spoke ( ÆØ . . . ºÅ), performed by the Kalouta-Dor-Leivadites Company at the Peroke Theater, was one of the most daring productions to speak out during the winter season of 1972/3.91 The show presented the popular actors Anna Kalouta, Rena Dor, and Alekos Leivadites dressed as children and assailed the Colonels’ habit of infantilizing the Greek people. It satirically denounced the strongmen’s egocentrism and urged its audiences to speak up for freedom of speech. It made bittersweet fun of the conditions of enforced silence, exposing how the regime silenced its rebellious subjects/children and stunted their growth. Taking state paternalism to its tragicomic extremes, this epitheorese showed how the act of speaking out could break the spell of the children’s arrested development. But excessive patronizing marked the mid-1970s evolution of the revue stage as well. After July 1974, many companies churned out revues that cashed in on the euphoria of liberation, straining to rebuild a waning entertainment industry: they hastily appropriated the dissenting voice and packaged it as the latest commodity. The “populism” and the “noise” of the immediate post-junta shows drowned out the message of the few remaining quality productions, according to Kotanidis (2011: 509).92 Anti-junta slogans and provocative revue titles were publicized with great relish. Cheap resistance after the fact was the new fare. These developments, too, presumed the Greek subjects’ “immaturity” and enforced a new, nationwide state of infantilism.

CONCLUSION: MONOPOLIZING NATIONAL CULTURE: CONSTRUCTING BARRIERS AND TABOOS ¯Æ  ŒÆº Æ  å ıØ  Ç º Æ Æ å æØÆ ı æÅ Æ Æ  &º Æ Æ &æÆ ı ت ت Æ   ŒÆº&Å ŒÆØ  æª Æ  å ı ˆØÆ  ŒÆº ı, ªØÆ  ŒÆº ı

91

See Georgakake (2008: 52–53); Kotanidis (1973b; 2011: 311–312); Kretikos (1973a: 201); and Lakidou (unpublished MS, 37). 92 See also Kretikos (1974: 187–188); Mohr, NYT, August 7, 1974; and Rialde (1974: 39).

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I saw the teacher beating me with zeal I saw my hands swell from the beatings I saw my nerves slowly reach the breaking point As they beat me with kindness and love For my own good, for my own good (Popular song by Giannes Meliokas)

Plays do not come as finished products: scripts gain physical shape on stage. This leaves plays both elusive and vulnerable to control by the censors, who might miss cues in the scripts but who might also retaliate harshly against successful productions, once directors and actors have invested weeks or months of dedicated work. This chapter has examined why the Colonels feared innovative modern Greek theater and how they tried to silence its voice through rigid censorship legislation. It also explored censorship from the vantage point of the ideological weight that ancient tragedy could still be made to bear and studied the cultural dynamics of state censorship and its victims. Three acts of Prometheus framed the dictatorship period, while further references to Aeschylus and to Sophocles’ Antigone stressed the role and responsibility of nonconforming intellectuals such as Seferis and Synodinou. The Colonels’ censorship legislation became notorious for its preemptive strikes (with hit-or-miss tactics) and its reprisals against popular modern plays. These strategies constituted, however, only two sides of the regime’s broader agenda of cultural repression and terror that aimed to prevent civil disorder. Threats of direct censorship or retaliation were not empty rhetoric, which leaves us to wonder just how much artistic creativity, for all its attendant risks, was suppressed in the invisible process of self-censorship. Of course, the covert rules, causes, and effects of self-censorship cannot easily be elucidated, and neither can the processes that foreclose ideological, philosophical, linguistic, and other pluralism. The fear was real that, with culture, a guarantor of other freedoms had fallen. However, the regime’s censorship did not leave Greece an artistic wasteland and did not bury Greek art, which reemerged with a vengeance after some two and a half years of shock, disorientation, and deliberate silence. The modernist trajectory of ancient drama had run its course and revivals of the classics now featured the dissident tragic hero, embodied in such figureheads as Prometheus and Antigone. A new appropriation of ancient tragedy, however, took root beyond the

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contours of the conventional revival stage: its genesis lay with influential figures from the Greek cultural scene, who were not left-wing but confronted the dictatorship with fundamental questions about its legitimacy and methods. Seferis and Synodinou proved that dissent could draw from the patriarchal subtext of revival tragedy, not to confirm but to scrutinize that subtext and to explore new paths of individual agency. With Koun, a new-wave theater had started to explore the landscape of postmodernism both in productions of the classics and in its experimentations with modern plays, but this realm was still uneven and unfamiliar terrain and was not shielded from censorship, either. Beyond being high modernist or avant-gardist, Koun’s productions foreboded a broader postmodernist crisis that deconstructed a rigidly drawn Greek national identity and undermined many grand narratives (the Greek continuity narrative, its absolute values, and its coded reenactments are the subject of Chapter 3).93 In this hazy landscape of emerging Greek postmodernism, some revivals of ancient drama could still operate effectively but, in general, renewal was badly and urgently needed. Revival drama eventually had to accede to the orbit in which different stages, media, and techniques came together in new ways. Meanwhile, the New Greek Theater showed that it was not content to mirror reality, that it was capable of working in subversive codes, and that it could engage audiences with more pliant, polyvalent attitudes toward novel topics. The New Greek Theater both fed and followed public debates and pushed the limits of performance and performativity. What resulted was a new sense of how the plays that were assailed by the censors inspired modes of fashioning the more intellectually agile self. Thus the later dictatorship years (1970–1973) were abuzz with creative commotion among young playwrights and theater groups, who joined together to try to break the restrictive molds. The new troupes and their following found ways to distance themselves from the

93 Patsalides (2013) and Tsatsoules (2007: ch. 1) offer incisive introductions to postmodernism centered on Greek productions from the late 1980s on. Papanikolaou’s compelling argument for postmodernity’s timid first appearance in Greece is based on the early 1970s emergence of the journal Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature (Papanikolaou 2005; 2010b: 196). Significantly, Eighteen Texts served as a prototype for this American-based journal’s special issue on contemporary Greek writing, edited by Nikos C. Germanacos and William V. Spanos (1, no. 2, winter 1973) (Papanikolaou 2005: 136). See also Anderson (1998: 15–17); Katsan (2013: 10, 22–30); and Tziovas (2003).

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obligatory ideology of both obsolete moralism and anti-leftist bias and explored attitudes of civic disobedience. To their advantage, modern Greek playwriting and play producing could put, not just a human face, but a fresh human face on urgent political and societal problems. The growing popularity of absurdist and Brechtian plays demonstrates that the Colonels’ censorship legislation had some outcomes that they never fully anticipated and would have tried to avoid in the first place. The censors’ drastic rules and measures showed that the dictators believed in a mode of reading art and literature on a simple and obvious level, leaving no room for duplicity. They trusted in the overlap of face-value script with performance, or of a standard text with the “faithful” theatrical illusion built on it. The regime made concerted efforts to enforce this mode of singularity and stability, while its anxiety about alternative readings betrayed a fear of experimental and radically new interpretations. But its insistence on censorship merely accelerated processes of rereading the text and its representation beyond the conventional modes. The New Greek Theater avoided easy-to-read realism in its verbal, paraverbal, and visual language (the latter two categories being particularly resistant to preventive censorship). This avoidance was more deliberate on the part of directors and actors who understood that formalist or ritualistic conventions, theatricality, and ambiguity enriched the public’s psychological or intellectual experience of the plays. Dissident theater practitioners and audiences worked together to undercut the junta’s prescribed codes of realism and clarity, which underpinned its ideological objectives: the facile reproduction of reality and status quo had to perpetuate imitative and ultimately repressive models, which, precisely for being realist, made unwarranted claims to credibility and authority. Without condoning censorship, it did become a catalyst in pushing producers, playwrights, translators, and actors to communicate with their public in more inventive ways. Each production stood as an unlimited invitation for the complicit spectators to look for invisible levels of signification and to detect topical commentary in the script and its visual rendition. Audiences that knew that plays had to pass censorship procedures could not be naïve, if only because the act of interdiction rendered the text and its performance symbolic, turning them into ideal pointers (Holquist 1994: 14).

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This chapter’s second half turned to the work of innovative Greek playwrights and their encounters with the censors to illustrate the repercussions of the Colonels’ cultural policies. Several plays tested the dialectics of personal agency and social construction. Pontikas’s Trombone pitted processes of individual responsibility against the constraints of officialdom. Like other plays, it struck home that, even if ordinary Greeks were not immediately capable of changing current politics, at least they had the option of seizing their own destinies. Nonetheless, it also attested to the rebelling character’s loneliness against increasing hostility. The trombone-playing gig of the protagonist may have seemed innocuous but it mystified a tyrannical, all-demanding force. The New Greek Theater did not hide its preoccupation with military power, either decoding or reaffirming the terminology of war and struggle. While this theater was predicated on interrogating culture, the government, on the other hand, sought to regiment any and all cultural manifestations, including the representation of Greek history which, as Chapter 3 will show, took the form of controlled parades of historical reenactments. Many more questions related to the staging of the new Greek plays deserve an answer: how have borrowings from Western European culture influenced the modern Greek stage? How did loans from other dramaturgical traditions, such as the Brechtian theater, affect Greek texts and performances? The answers lie ahead in the subsequent chapters; for the purposes of economy, however, this chapter has highlighted stage censorship and the responses of the younger generations of theater people.

3 Monopolizing National History Performing Tyranny and Constructing Myths

All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. . . . where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1995: 12. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith)

DISPLAYS OF ORDER: CONSTRUCTING TYRANNICAL MEANING The crowds / are screaming in the stadium’s rows / tambourines, drums, clappers / are heard somewhere in the background. / Processions are mounting / and then the great goat / the protagonist enters with a saw. / He is wearing a tin crown / and a pair of blinkers / he sprinkles with blood / the stone steps / thus making the site grow. (Savvopoulos’s satire, 2004: 99, is quoted and translated by Papanikolaou 2007: 150)1

The first half of this chapter presents a detailed study of the dictatorship’s political spectacle and spectacular politics, or of its deployment 1

Papanikolaou (2007: 149–150) provides the Greek text and his own English translation of the central part of Ballos, Savvopoulos’s magnum opus of 1971 (Savvopoulos 2004: 98–100). Ballos doubles as the name of the entire album and of the main song, which ridicules the vacuous speech-making of the Colonels.

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of theatrical underpinnings in its coarse approach to Greek history. It argues that theatricality and performativity were intrinsic parts of the junta rhetoric. The Colonels crafted a nationalist representational apparatus by way of public spectacles, to underscore their military superiority and to celebrate their “saving” of the Greek nation, religion, and the family. They looked for respectability and legitimacy by making their spectacles bridge the perceived gap between the regime and culture. These spectacles redefined the Greek past and laid out the future of the Greek people; they functioned as dramatic rituals that bordered on political rallies. They placed glories of ancient through modern Greece in the service of hyper-nationalism, to then display and “authenticate” the 1967 “intervention” of the Armed Forces as the much-desired culmination of the Greek tradition of victory. The army, which identified with the “fatherland,” posited its supremacy over its communist enemies as well as over its historical foes through mass reenactments of Greek military triumphs through the ages. Spectacle and Greek history fed one another during the seven-year-long military rule but had their roots in the pre-World War II dictatorship of Metaxas, a bounteous admirer of fascist-style civic discipline and “displays of order.”2 In the spirit of the times, Metaxas had strengthened his grip on power by exhibiting massive youth groups engaged in military training or sporting exercises. The stadium that housed those events became the arena where a battle was fought over Greek history and culture, which were co-opted into the secular rituals and autocratic practices of the prewar regime. Therefore, the Colonels could reappropriate what was already available before taking the militarization of the Greek past to new “heights.” The first half of this chapter provides a historical analysis of their exploitative use of theater and demonstrates that the spectacles that the state mounted in honor of itself and that aggressively reaffirmed its power proved counterproductive in the end: the younger generations, especially, rejected the bombast of officialdom and resented the force-feeding of “patriotism.” I was privileged to have access to a rare source with which to illustrate this analysis: the summary documentary of a day of public festivals in 1967. The documentary was

2 I owe this apt term to Michael Herzfeld, who offers the following definition: “Displays of order both reflect and, in the sense of their performative capacity, serve to shape social transformations” (2001: 257).

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produced for Greek public television, which served as a vehicle for delivering news and culture by command.

DISPLAYS OF DISORDER: DECONSTRUCTING MEANING — ŁÆ ŒØ ÆæØ; When will the skies clear? (Old Cretan freedom song, re-created by singer Nikos Xyloures)

The second half of this chapter discusses the early 1970s play that the Greeks remember best: Our Grand Circus, the satirical-historical musical of the late Iakovos Kambanelles (1922–2011) produced by the popular actor-pair Jenny Kareze and Kostas Kazakos of the Kareze-Kazakos Theater Company. This unusual 1973 production was enthusiastically received as a homegrown reaction to the dictatorship and won over mass audiences for its innovative way of displaying Greek history: it placed various episodes of the people’s history squarely on stage and delivered an answer-in-kind to the proliferating victory festivals and military parades sponsored by the regime. The show and its eventful trajectory fostered self-knowledge about collective conditions and used popular history as a conduit for voicing anxiety about the present and the future. Historical scenes constitute the content, structure, and form of the plot but, unlike the official reenactments, they highlight the varied, often conflicting significations of the past. Our Grand Circus tapped the power of alternative storytelling and history-telling and resisted the reductive force of the junta’s nationalist history of heroes and battlefields of triumph (from Troy to Salamis to Grammos and Vitsi). This single but “spectacular” culture of nationalism and the radio and television broadcasts that promulgated it stressed an essentialist Greekness, which, by 1973, the actor-producers of Our Grand Circus knew how to subvert. Kareze and Kazakos redefined this essentialism as a Greek exceptionalism, not of triumph, but of suffering. They proclaimed the present Greeks as members not of a privileged but of a disadvantaged historical race, whose strength did not reside in its military force but in its ordinary people. Also, the dogmatism that typified the junta

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spectacles delivered cardboard heroes, too flat to make for meaningful dramatic interaction. These heroes appeared as exempla virtutis against the backdrop of the Greek past seen as a morality play. The protagonists of Our Grand Circus, on the contrary, reinfused political theater with dramatic intensity and restored detailed relief and personality to selected historical figures, whom they acknowledged as intrepid fighters for the cause of patriotism in its leftist definition. The new and developing canvas of Greek history of Our Grand Circus offered a scenario for vicarious rebellion as well. By inviting the public into its own microcosm of revolution, the production tore at the Colonels’ spurious claim to a “revolution that saved the nation.” With its message of rebellion, the play committed to sociopolitical involvement, but it lacked a more nuanced interpretation of a viable culture of resistance. Kambanelles 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, starting from below and featuring social particulars. After the incidents of November 1973, the playscript was truncated but still proved vital. Then the past of the production itself often erupted in the commotion of the latest performances, in a trenchant response to the regime which had, until then, seen very little critical reaction to the displays of its nationalhistorical mission. These developments marked a new, intense era in Greek politics when truth, authority, Greek history, destiny, and collective identity were the subjects of a public agon that was enacted in the designated theater spaces, but also in other, metatheatrical contexts and in many situations that Foucault would have characterized as those of spectacle and surveillance.

SPECTACLE IS POWER The theater, and the public spectacle in particular, constitutes today not simply a spectacle, or entertainment, but the greatest didactic and educational tool for people of every class, age, and gender, as well as of any social background. (Papadopoulos is quoted by Nitsos, ed., 1974: 108)

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One day at the Greek Television Archive in Athens I discovered and watched a seventeen-minute-long summary documentary of the “Festivals of the Military Virtue of the Greeks,” which were held in late summer of 1967.3 I watched the tape many times, first in disbelief, then in order to describe it in writing. But how does one even begin to record the “hyper-spectacles” of the Colonels?4 And were these grandiose but clumsy displays really meant to instill patriotic pride in the Greek tradition? The archive granted me permission to view and draw comparisons with similar digests for television of the festivals of 1966 and 1972. The synopsis of 1967, however, struck me as the most programmatic and the most interesting one to discuss: its subject was the festival that took place a mere four and a half months after the military takeover; its nominal audience was a gathering of masses at the Panathenaic Stadium but its notional audience was all of Greece. Because the Colonels had to allay domestic and international frustration, they pulled out all the stops for their first festival. As a result, the documentary of the 1967 festival provides deeper insight into how the dictators exploited theater and historical pageantry. By comparison, too, the spectacles that predated the coup placed less emphasis on the Greek army’s “patriotic” record or on its role in the nation’s “regeneration.” After the putsch, however, the Greek army was made to appear as the regime’s army, and the junta festivals paraded ultra-nationalism as (armed) patriotism. The official spectacles, however, were just some of numerous occasions on which the Colonels invoked patriotism to legitimate their usurpation of power. Barrack-style propaganda under the guise of edificatory goals loomed large. Even though these highly theatrical festivals left deep impressions on many of my interviewees, who retained vivid memories (and negative emotions) about them, scholarship has granted them hardly anything other than a few derogatory remarks.5 3 The concept of — ºØŒ `æ is not well served by the overly literal translation of “Polemic Virtue,” the adjective derived from polemos, “war.” The English “polemic” or “warlike” may sound appropriately aggressive but must here be substituted with “martial” or “military virtue” or “virtue in war” (the latter, as per Papadopoulos 1968– 1972: 5:207, in a speech delivered on August 30, 1969). 4 The characterization of “hyper-spectacle” or “hyper-theama” is drawn from Rautopoulos (1984: 69). Gregoriades resorts to the expression “bread and circuses” (¼æ  ŒÆd ŁÆÆ) (1975: 2:227). 5 Rautopoulos places these pseudo-cultural festivals in a concise historical context (1984: 70–71, 88–95). Van Steen (2010b) centers on the festivals’ displays of sports and bodily culture.

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The Colonels rendered history and politics theatrical in ways that historians of 1960s and 1970s Greece have yet to explore, whereas the bibliography on similar phenomena in other countries is substantial.6 Broader studies of how the Greek dictatorship thrived on appearances, propaganda, and slogans remain lacking. The Greek strongmen saw themselves as players acting out a destined historical mission by staging hyperbolic victory scenarios and manipulating public emotions through mass spectacles. They framed their reenactments of military triumphs by displays of troops to reinforce the script of the army’s perennial supremacy. The following sections deconstruct these spectacles to better comprehend the dictators’ conception of Greek history, theater, and nationalist politics. The Colonels’ “Festivals of the Military Virtue of the Greeks” or, in their conservative Kathareuousa idiom, Eortai tes Polemikes Aretes ton Hellenon ( E æÆd B — ºØŒB æB H Eºº ø), took place annually in late August or early September. However, national holidays (October 28, or Ochi Day, and March 25, Independence Day) and the regime’s anniversary date of April 21 occasioned additional public celebrations and self-congratulatory speeches.7 The Colonels indeed institutionalized the date of their intervention as a “Panhellenic National Holiday.”8 Festivals were typically held on Sundays, ensuring that many more people were free to attend. They were also held in designated spaces, where they followed a set trajectory. The dictators preferred the Panathenaic Stadium (that is, the “old” Olympic Stadium or Kallimarmaro Stadium) in downtown Athens and the Kautantzogleio Stadium in Thessaloniki (Karaoglou 2009: 38 n. 115) (see Figure 3.1). The restored Athens stadium

6 One of the most insightful treatments can be found in Fischer-Lichte (2005). Strobl (2007) has recently assessed the Nazi German stage. Ironically, the Colonels’ displays of military exploits resembled the mass victory celebrations of the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union (with the Spartakaiads and similar forms of collective pageantry and invented hierarchy). See further Golomstock (1990); Handelman (1990: 41–48); Lasansky (2004); Senelick (1998: 277–278); Spotts (2002); and Wyke (1999). Roche (2000) offers a longer historical perspective on “mega-events.” Herzfeld speaks of “the imagined community made manifest” (2001: 271). The insights of Benjamin (1968), Kracauer (1995), and Mosse (1975) remain relevant, too. 7 See the big spread on the festivals and the accompanying speeches of April 20–21, 1969, on the front page of To Vema of the following day (April 22, 1969). See also Kotanidis (2011: 83, 108). 8 In accordance with Decree No. 284, ¯˚ `’ 80/17.04.1968, published in the Ephemeris tes Kyverneseos.

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Figure 3.1. A parade float drives down the Panathenaic Stadium during the “Festival of the Military Virtue of the Greeks,” Athens, 1967. Credit: Athens-Macedonian News Agency for Katsigeras (2000–2001: 2:286).

(1896–1906) occupied the site of its ancient predecessor and had provided the stage for many mass events before. However, the Colonels and the Athenian public made the more obvious connection with the first modern Olympics, which were held in 1896 in the very same venue. Thus young women dressed as Olympic flame-bearers were enlisted to enhance the junta festivals. The imposing stadium with its aura of antiquity stood as a monument to Greek rebirth, national pride, and international interest. Turned into a crucible of Greece once again, it had to showcase the nation’s renewed “prime.” Papadopoulos unabashedly positioned the historical reenactments of the festivals against the spectacular backdrop of his “regenerative Revolution,” which he also called the Ethnosoterios Epanastasis, the “NationSaving Revolution” of the “National Revolutionary Government.”9 9

See Clogg (1972: 36, 40, 45, 48); Kourvetaris (1999: 137); and Woodhouse (1985: 31–32). See also Papadopoulos’s own statements (1968–1972: 3:56–57, on September 1, 1968; 5:206–208, on August 30, 1969; 6:163–165, on August 29, 1970; and 7:113–115, on August 27, 1971).

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Figure 3.2. A parade float celebrating the first anniversary of the “Revolution of April 21, 1967,” Athens, Panathenaic Stadium, April 1968. Credit: Athens-Macedonian News Agency for Katsigeras (2000–2001: 2:298).

He presented his regime as aligned with tradition and, at the same time, as the clean, “revolutionary” start of a new historical era (see Figure 3.2). Clearly, the ideological battle was on with stakes vested in the symbolic capital of the Greek Revolution of 1821 and its legacy. This battle played out on the theater stage, in the cinema, and in reenactments of the historical Revolution; it also affected, however, references to historical

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episodes that claimed to revive the original Revolution as well as the anniversaries that celebrated it. Significantly, the Greek Left had had considerable success in its efforts to appropriate the Revolution and its heroes prior to the military coup.10 The junta’s tyranny of presentation was also the tyranny’s self-deception, and spectacle played a key role in its self-delusion. The dictators exploited the setting of the massive outdoor stadium to showcase their ideal model of “popular support” and the sought-after “public consensus.” They spared no expense to equip the stadium to exhibit their “popularity” and to propagate their new, “revolutionary” political culture. The stadium’s main track area, therefore, had to be visible by television cameras and by the rows of thousands on either side of the track. The strongmen stressed their populist(ic) side and added folksy and popular notes to the “fantasy parade[s] of totalitarianism,” bringing in celebrated singers such as Marinella (Papanikolaou 2007: 150).11 They also mobilized large numbers of soldiers, reservists, and boy scouts (Alkimoi) as actors and extras, who had little choice but to deliver up the performance required of them. Many of these recruits, however, stopped short of acting with attention, let alone enthusiasm: some acted out the skits that they had rehearsed with visible discomfort or half-deliberate clumsiness.12 The turnout for the Colonels’ festivals tended to be huge. “Are all these people theirs?,” M. G. Merakles wondered with a sense of frustration (1987: 377, diary entry dated August 31 [1970]). Newspapers, radio, and television publicized the events well beforehand

10 Vasiles Rotas took many initiatives to reenact Greek theater’s historical role, raising patriotic awareness and disseminating knowledge about revolutionary episodes (Van Steen 2011: 37–41; Vasileiou 2012: 293–312, or her ch. 10). A secret student society and vanguard organization chose the name of Regas Pheraios to fight the junta. Regas (1757–1798) was a precursor-champion (and martyr) of the revolutionary struggle. See Kornetis (2006: 121–127, 259; 2013: 77–83) and Woodhouse (1995: 160). See further Kornetis (2013: 275–277). 11 See further Papanikolaou (2007: 94, 130–131; 2010a) and the DVD production directed by Anastases Agathos, entitled The Comedy of the Junta: The Hilarious Side of a Dark Era (in Greek), which accompanied the Ta Nea issue of April 17–18, 2010. The recent 13-part Greek TV series, It’s a Junta: Will It Pass? (2011–2012, directed by Photos Lambrinos), is based on the Epikaira, the official weekly news bulletins of the dictatorship years. Both new sources one-sidedly parody the mega-events staged by the Colonels. 12 Any possible lapses in the performances of these inexperienced actors aroused close interest. Metaxas had been the first to regularly call on army recruits to fill the ranks of the many extras needed in public spectacles. See Close (1995: 46–47) and Kofas (1983: 104).

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and announced that admission was free. They also devoted a big spread to the festivals after they had occurred. The massive attendance, however, was far from “spontaneous”—one of the favorite words of the coercive strongmen, who settled for the appearance of spontaneity. Nonetheless, the regime harnessed kindred beliefs in some sectors of Greek society and had its outposts in the public (as the roaring applause also proves). More commonly, however, the leadership insisted that an audience show up en masse and had its acolytes apply varying degrees of pressure from the top down. Many of the attendees were military cadres and units, officials, civil servants, “time-servers,” factory workers, schoolteachers, and schoolchildren. The junta placed not only Greece’s youth organizations but also its throngs of school pupils under the watch of the army as the selfappointed guardian of patriotic values. Most of the attendees knew or were reminded that they had some obligations to fulfill to the government, especially if they were subject to clientelistic ties as state employees. For the “invited” members of the official circles and their families, attendance at the festivals was, for all practical purposes, mandatory. The threat of the regime’s recording, file-keeping, and exacting sanctions affected the decision of many civil servants to simply show up.13 For those who would not be convinced by the show of popular support in the stadium, there were the shows of military strength. The junta’s staging of Greece’s military conquests was part of a comprehensive program of theatricalized acts and events that exhibited the muscle of the army’s manpower and (USfunded) equipment. Prompt retaliation, however, jeopardized the public standing of the Colonels, who tried hard to avoid bad publicity.14 As the fate of some of the regime’s enemies became better known, however, this theater started to show a more menacing side: it delivered a stern warning to those who chose to be on the “wrong”

13 For an example of Papadopoulos’s speeches of admonition to civil servants, see the article, “The State System Requires the Best Staff,” on the front page of To Vema, March 19, 1968. See further Close (2002: 115). 14 The Colonels maintained the make-believe that their festivals fanned the flame of genuine popular devotion to their rule, while large parts of the populace played along. The pretense of acting and “believing” on both sides reflected the dynamics of the “public transcript” and of the dramaturgy of power that James Scott has articulated in his seminal work, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990). On some of the specific strategies in exercising power and pretense, see Scott (1990: 89 n. 44).

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side of Greek history. Therefore, most of those present were performing, too, and they knew exactly which role to play. For the dictators and their real-life supporters, well-attended events, even if attended by a puppet crowd, generated tremendous propagandistic potential and patriotic brag value. Papadopoulos attempted to shape the perceptions of foreign correspondents, diplomats, and governments but also hoped to bring investors and tourists—and thus vital financial resources—to Greece. The Greek quasi-fascist histrionics had much in common with the performative modes cultivated by Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. These two powers turned mass spectacle and sport into essential components of their ultra-nationalist and racist interwar politics. The Italian Fascists of the early 1930s had transformed the outdoor athletic stadium into the ideal stage for political rallies and mass choreographies.15 Hitler had exploited the connections between mass spectacles and stadium settings of Olympic proportions: he had showcased German masculine prowess and racial superiority at the 1936 Olympics, which were held in a giant stadium in Berlin.16 Thus events of the late 1920s through the late 1930s underpinned the theatrical and nationalist uses of the mass stage of bodily spectacles. The large sports contests of the interwar period cloaked exercises in disciplinary and military training and bolstered the power of totalitarian regimes, parties, or up-and-coming politicians. Ritualized outdoor performance and nationalistic sport were intertwined also in Greek sporting events and other mass festivals of the late 1930s. Metaxas was the most important mediator in this process of influence: once he had adopted and Hellenized some of the fascist practices, successive reactionary Greek governments through the early 1960s resorted to metatheatrical rituals to define themselves and assert 15

Gori (1999) studies the Italian Fascist culture of the body and its ideological underpinnings. The special issue “Ideology and the Classics” of the Classical Bulletin (2000) highlights the close alliance that Italian Fascism built with ancient Rome. 16 The 1936 Olympics were captured on screen in the epic-propagandistic film Olympia (1937), made by the controversial Leni Riefenstahl. By 1936, Riefenstahl had completed Hitler’s previous commission, the filming of a massive 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg. The result, Triumph of the Will, contains many scenes of public speeches, youth gatherings, athletic marches, and military parades, which render Germany’s drive to war palpable. It also shows samples of the kind of monumental architecture (designed by Albert Speer) that later acquired a bad name because of its fascist origins. In her critique of Riefenstahl’s work, Susan Sontag speaks of “fascist visuals” and notes fascist art’s spurious claim to “idealism” (1991: 87, 91).

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their power. The national anniversaries of the Metaxas era, especially, presented co-optive sports and orchestrated masses as supportive of a totalitarianism of the body, which was—paradoxically—serving a totalitarianism of the mind.17 Greece, however, was in no position to follow Mussolini’s path of military expansion through his new Fascist empire and its “strengthened Italian race” (Burgwyn 2012). The Greece of Metaxas did not share, either, in the Italian Fascist project of a New Order for the Mediterranean and the Balkans, with World War II as an instrument of manipulation and subjugation. Instead, the country soon fell victim to Axis aggression. Metaxas exploited the available historical continuity models of the Greek nation, but his own nationalist synthesis still included the component of cultural continuity.18 Apart from fascist models, he drew on initiatives taken by the Lyceum of Greek Women (Lykeion Hellenidon), a female voluntary association that, in conjunction with other institutions, organized parades, “ancient” and modern folk dances, and spectacles at the Panathenaic Stadium from 1914 through the 1930s. The Lyceum’s festivals created the “blueprint of spectacular representation of Greek historical continuity” (Papakonstantinou 2010: 2009; 2011: 5): they highlighted 17

Neni Panourgia explains: His [Metaxas’s] was an imperialism of the mind and the psyche, an imperialism as aggressive as it was brutal, aimed at totally annihilating the citizen by demanding his mind. A citizen could not placate this project through mere compliance. It required not only total submission but total agreement. It could not tolerate or absorb dissent and disagreement but demanded complete agreement and subscription (2009: 34). The Metaxas state and its organs prioritized physical training and compliance with the national consensus over advanced school education. Public initiatives focused on the physical prowess of the collective, not of the individual athlete, and on the “aesthetics” of presenting dynamic bodies moving through dramatic spaces. Marketos discusses the aestheticization of sports and politics under Metaxas (Marketos 2006: 59–60). Also, Metaxas consolidated his “Regime of the Fourth of August 1936” in the days coinciding with the opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics, which ran from August 1 through 16. See Mandell (1987: 284) and Petrakis (2006: 235 n. 73). Metaxas further engaged masses of young people in athletic events through EON, his National Youth Organization. See Angeles (2006); Hamilakis (2007: 179–181); Petrakis (2006: 4, 88–91, and passim); and Petrides (2000), for a collection of EON’s primary texts. Metaxas also craftily used loudspeaker and radio broadcasts to promote the image of a unified totality of Greek citizens. See Carabott (2003: 32); Katsoudas (1987: 189); Pennanen (2003: passim); and Petrakis (2006: 90, 223 n. 143). 18 On the seminal notion of Greek historical continuity, see further Gourgouris (1996: 252–261) and Liakos (2002: 32–33, 34).

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cultural continuity, appealed to the national ideology of the Greek bourgeoisie at large, and expressed a sociopolitical consensus that was still far broader than that of the Greek Right.19 Later, Metaxas started to illustrate historical continuity with some examples of national triumphs and reused the Panathenaic Stadium as the preferred venue (Machaira 1987: 132–133). After Metaxas’s death in 1941, these Greek celebrations of continuity were kept up, albeit often in less elaborate ways. The decades-long repetitions are important, however, in that they retroactively “authenticated” the process of inventing traditions (in the formulation of Eric Hobsbawm 1992). The Colonels, however, sharpened the existing model to become a military paradigm, and they downgraded historical continuity as cultural continuity. The slots for Greek folk dances, for instance, which formed a prominent part of the interwar spectacles, were much reduced in the programs of the junta festivals (even though the Colonels themselves were often seen to participate in folk dancing on other, again populist, occasions). The programs of the junta festivals became programs of militaristic display, rigid stylization, and

19

Greek nationalists of various political affiliations had publicly argued for the historical continuity of the Greek nation since the second half of the 19th century. The historical continuity model had a long and complex bourgeois pedigree as well. This model underpinned the multi-volume History of the Hellenic Nation (1860–1874), the seminal nation-building work of Konstantinos Paparregopoulos. Paparregopoulos proposed five eras of Hellenism (the epochs of ancient, Macedonian, Christian, medieval, and modern Hellenism), but his work has been remembered in terms of three eras only: ancient, Byzantine, and modern Hellenism (Papailias 2005: 58, 244 n. 28). Hellenic ethnohistory’s incorporation of Christian Byzantium was finalized during the era of Greek Romanticism. The 1926 festivals organized by the Lyceum of Greek Women added the Minoan period to the canonical three eras of Paparregopoulos. Eleni Fournaraki has studied the formative role that the Lyceum played in designing state-sponsored mass events that stressed cultural continuity and that institutionalized the use of the Panathenaic Stadium (Fournaraki 2010 and 2011). She credits the Lyceum with inaugurating the “scheme of ‘the four ages of Greek civilization,’ ” with parades, processions, folk dances, and invented symbols and rituals (2010: 2075). Thus the Lyceum’s work provides examples of “authentic” renewals blending with “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm 1992). See also Markatou (2008). Advocating for Greece’s regeneration, Metaxas focused on the “illustrious” periods of antiquity, Byzantium, and his own rule (occasionally adding the 1821 struggle for independence). His sequence was a populist-fascist reincarnation of the continuity model, which let him proclaim himself founder of the “Third Hellenic Civilization,” modeled after Hitler’s Third German Reich. Through the late 1940s, the scheme of the “ ‘finest ages’ of ‘Hellenism’ ” encompassed the “Minoan/Creto-Mycenaean,” the “Archaic/Classical,” the Byzantine, and the “Neohellenic” age (Fournaraki 2010: 2075, 2077; 2011: 71, 73).

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preachy declamation, all of which fueled a repressive antiliberal bias and revamped the worn theme of the superior Greek nation’s continuity. Compared to the massive scale and sophistication of the Nazi rallies especially, the Colonels’ manipulation of mass spectacle (with a patina of Olympic ethos) for ultra-nationalist purposes may look like kids’ play. Moreover, the doctrine of either the paternalistic Metaxas or the military dictators on how to treat enemies was merely touched, not permeated, by the racist arguments for national superiority that had swayed National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy.20 The Colonels remained, however, implacably hostile to left-wingers and communists and delivered another onslaught of state anticommunism. They saw the communist enemy as a menace, not only to Greek territorial space, but also to Hellenic continuity. They always loudly proclaimed the army’s loyalty and fighting capacity but did not pursue imperialist goals. The dictators’ main objective, rather, was to establish legitimacy for themselves and for the Armed Forces, whose “savior” role they “documented” by way of a wholesale repossessing of the Greek past. Papadopoulos was particularly interested in Greek army victories from the venerable past and let those triumphs fan his own political ambitions.

What Happens in the Arena? Sporting Uniforms and Uniformity the pigs in uniform come together grunting for the Great Doxology (Theodosis Athas, Fragmenta (¨æłÆºÆ), “Sometime in the 70s.” Trans. Theony Condos 2007: 162)

The following more detailed description of the various spectacles that made up the 1967 festival is closely modeled on the summary version

20 The Greek ultra-right-wing discourse emphasized the historical continuity of the Greek “race” but did not seek “scientific legitimacy in physical anthropological or craniometric studies, as has happened in other European countries” (Hamilakis 2007: 171 n. 3). See also Panourgia (2009: 34) and especially Trubeta (2007 and 2013), who analyzes the discourse on eugenics in interwar Greece, its national concerns, and its ties to the emerging discipline of anthropology.

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for Greek television. The digest’s voiceover is spoken in Kathareuousa Greek by a male, whose language is inflated but still intelligible. His tone, however, is so stentorian as to be far removed from colloquial intonation. “Truth” speaks through the regime’s chosen medium of the authoritative male voice, the remnant of a narrative framework that controls how history is being told. Any room for individual interpretation has been eliminated. The tool of an enforced reading prevents alternative views of the events from being aired. The same holds true of the reenactments: a reenactment is, per definition, a set or fixed performance, which has lost the flexibility of any first-time or spontaneous enacting. Thus “truth” is constructed from above, by the “Regime of Truth,” whose monologic discourse then passes it down to or through passive recipients. The short 1967 documentary has all the pretentions, but not the aesthetic qualities, of a grand Hollywood epic of the 1960s: like a sword-and-sandals movie, it projects malephysical supremacy and unconditional moral right. Because the contents of the digests remained the same throughout the dictatorship years, subsequent producers focused on showing off technological advances. Beams of flashing light open the 1972 synopsis: they penetrate the dark sky and light up the block letters of junta slogans or mottos from the Greek tradition, letters that have been affixed to the hill slopes surrounding the Panathenaic Stadium. A maxim such as “always be the best” (ÆNb IæØØ) has long inspired the Greek agonistic spirit: it traces its origins as far back as Homer’s Iliad (e.g. Il. 6.208 and 11.784) and captures the epic’s heroic ideal. Firework displays accentuate the predictable finale of the festivals: a visual and verbal homage to the “Revolution of April 21, 1967.” What would become a very long day even for the most juntadevoted of spectators begins with a public ceremony held at the Monument of the Unknown Soldier in front of the Royal Palace (today’s Parliament building) on Syntagma Square. Once the patriotic tone has been set, the ceremonies continue with the celebration of a formal mass at the Metropolis Cathedral. The resulting images assist the Colonels in spreading the message that they honor the nation’s memory and faith and that they live by the exalted ideal of respect for the fatherland, religion, and family. Religion must help inscribe the new powerholders in the nation: it creates a mystified sense of unity between the certainty-seeking populace and its leaders. After the liturgy, limousines drive the dictators and other high-ranking representatives of the regime along a well-secured route to the stadium,

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where the show of military ritual and piety is about to commence. The general public has by then arrived. The cameras, however, zoom in on the VIP seats and dramatize hierarchical positions. Among those who enjoy honorary seating are the Colonels, their spouses, Greek royals, and leaders of the Church hierarchy. King Constantine II and his wife, Anne Marie, however, are signally absent.21 The camera lingers over their empty seats. The official reason, which the voice is eager to repeat, is that the royal couple is traveling on a state visit abroad. But viewers who have followed the post-coup events with a critical eye know that the king has made only an initial and reluctant show of support for the Colonels. By mid-December 1967, the king’s countercoup had failed, and he and his family were obliged to flee the country. The loud music of marching bands starts up. A show of uniformed men and army equipment, mainly tanks in camouflage colors, kicks off the military parade into the stadium. The gleaming hardware bolsters the image of the massed blocks of troops. The young combatants strike the disciplined poses of Greek military prestige. As synchronized marchers, the men perform geometric and close-order drills, and they exchange salutes in response to the directives that their commanders shout out. Then goose-stepping male recruits wearing sports outfits pass in review. Unarmed, they soldier in front of the VIP section and then engage in sporting displays showing off physical fitness and team coordination. Some of their exercises recall stunts performed by circus acrobats: young men leap through rings of flames, for example, on foot and on motorbikes. The group performances, in particular, mix acrobatics and drama: a dozen men pile upon and somehow drive one motorcycle while managing to hoist the national flag. These spectacles give concrete expression to a cult of strength and stamina and of youth and duty—of all youth’s duty. In the fascist tradition, these athletic exercises demand collective obedience and invoke class collaboration. Military training and physical skill are presented as coordinated displays of male bodies, suggesting the idealized relationship between the young soldiers and the body of Greek citizens. The connections between physical exertion, discipline training, and militarism serve to confirm the virile self-image of the crowd as well as of its leaders. The ideological interface of male 21 The royal family did attend the festivals of the year before the coup, as the digest of 1966 shows.

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gender and Hellenic superiority is glaring to modern eyes. The link between sporting masculinity and the creation of theatrical effect is explicit, too: active-duty soldiers in uniform perform as athletes, acrobats, and thespians and they embody the Greek army-state. Aided by the abstracting effect of their uniforms, soldiers demonstrate the strength of the junta’s military machine. Their displays mimic large-scale military maneuvers. Army commander Papadopoulos, also master-director of the festivals, controls the execution of the maneuvers of his muscle-flexing regime. Changes in music mark changes in content and purpose: from assertive march and parade music at the outset, to the music of suspense that accompanied the military exercises, to more festive, sprightly band tunes that celebrate Greek achievement. Now the reenactments of Greek martial victories begin. Here the text of the voiceover turns to full-blown purple prose. The tableaux start off with nothing less than the Greek victory in the mythical Trojan War! Recruits in ancient-style costumes portray the Greeks who have been waiting in their tent camp before the walls of Troy. They pretend to leave, upon which the Trojans venture out and fetch the huge wooden horse left behind by the enemy. At night, a handful of Greeks descend from the horse’s belly and open the gates of Troy for more Greeks to pour into the city. Together, they swiftly crush the weak Trojans. The latter are played, of course, by fellow Greek soldiers whose different, Orientalizing outfits must distinguish them from the good-guy Greeks. The Greeks sound the call of military triumph and pronounce the beginnings of Hellenic ascendancy and national preeminence. The Greek soldier is cast as the distinctive new hero, breaching new eras and boundaries, in whose footsteps the Colonels have followed. With uninhibited Orientalism, the reenactments provide the theatrical framework for the dictators’ staging of the patriotic principles of Greek military force. The next episode quintessentializes Greek patriotism: it hurls its public down from mythic antiquity to the first quarter of the fifth century bce and the Persian Wars. The glory days of classical Greece are shown complete with the Marathon runner announcing victory, only to collapse—awkwardly—on the stadium floor. The brisk juxtaposition of mythical and historical Greek triumphs lends the Trojan legend a “historical” and authoritative reality of its own. In turn, the Persian Wars bestow mythical heroism on the Marathon fighters, their peers, and the many generations of their “descendants” down to the junta era. Conversely, the

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deluded and defeated Trojan hordes are seen to start a long line of ostensibly weak and hubristic enemies. Together the Eastern opponents make up a formulaic composite of age-long barbarian inferiority. When the festival reenactments reach the Civil War years, the Colonels’ manipulation of enemy traits versus “ethnically pure” Greek character leads to a derogatory portrayal of the communists and leftists who lost the struggle. Subsequent episodes of the tendentious display of Greek military exploits follow principles similar to the makeover of the Trojan War. Spectators may admire next a triumphant Alexander the Great, who rides into the stadium on a nervous horse, which leaves some recruits flummoxed. No mention is made of the many decades and historical developments that separated the Persian Wars from Alexander’s conquest of Egypt and the East. Missing are, in particular, the Peloponnesian Wars and Athens’ subjugation to Sparta. Such references would have tainted, however, the desired image of Greek consensus and would have undermined the festivals’ Athenocentrism.22 Not all victories are created equal. Greek military supremacy, however, is still supposed to exist in each and any phase in between. It is as a Greek that Alexander here delivers the final blow to the Persian Empire by destroying its capital city of Persepolis (331 bce). His act is doubly “patriotic,” handing the dictators the opportunity to declare Macedonia unquestionably Greek. The dispute over Macedonia had plagued Balkan and Greek foreign politics from about half a century before the fierce armed conflicts of 1912–1913 (the Balkan Wars), to which the regime would direct attention in due course to restate the Greek nationalist cause. After Alexander’s parade, Constantine the

22 Metaxas upheld Sparta as a model of social austerity and as the embodiment of ancient military discipline, civic unity, and territorial integrity. Sparta stood opposed to the political model for more extensive popular participation, the classical Athenian democracy, which Metaxas associated with demagoguery and hypocrisy. Modern fascist-totalitarian regimes have, after Hitler, extolled the Spartan ideals, along with the prototype of a racially “superior” elite class ruling obedient subjects. On Metaxas’s selective use of ancient Greek history, his predilection for Sparta, and his contempt for Athenian democracy, see Carabott (2003: 30–31); Hamilakis (2007: 29, 176–178, 195, 202); Hering (1996: 290–291); Kallis (2007: 236–237); Machaira (1987: 144–145); and Petrakis (2006: 155). Cartledge (2004: 169–170) and Losemann (2012) discuss the widespread 1930s admiration for Sparta, building on the seminal work of Elizabeth Rawson (1969). The 1967 putsch revived the discourse of the Colonels as Spartans who sought a social and political asceticism. See Morris, Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1967.

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Great, founder of Constantinople in 324 ce, comes on. He is credited with establishing the Byzantine Empire that succeeded the (declining) Roman West. His victories are won in the name of Christianity: the sign of the cross appears bearing the letters of the divine promise of “In this sign, be victorious.” Constantine is acclaimed here as the father of the Eastern or Orthodox faith, whose doctrine was formulated in subsequent centuries. The next historical figure singled out for hero treatment is the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros Phokas, who reconquered Crete from the Arabs in 961 and thus stopped another inimical force from making inroads into Greek territory. No mention is made of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the most painful of Greek losses: the festivals must showcase triumph, not defeat. The digest goes on to present the 1821 War of Independence as a belated act of just retaliation for the Turks’ capture of Constantinople. The centuries of subjugation in between (the “dark ages” of the Tourkokratia) do not fit the official template and are summarily dismissed. The “epic” of 1821 encourages the Greeks to see their present as analogous to the classical past and, in particular, to the Persian War victories, and to assert an unbroken line of Greek excellence. Besides, the reenactments idealize the War of Independence as an epoch of unified revolution and public consensus among the Greeks—which it was not. The episode’s commemorative focus is on valiant male Greeks who expunge a military disgrace by inflicting injury and loss on the historical foe. The Colonels recycle the old revolutionary script that places unjust cruelty squarely in the Turkish domain and that affords the Greek masses the role of collective hero. These components make up the canonic text of the Revolution of 1821, which becomes a palimpsest of trials of Greek masculine bravery and moral strength. This text pivots on recognizable verbal and visual codes that the audience may grasp easily, and the shared emotions they engender fuel Greek patriotic sentiment. The Revolution of 1821 typifies the inexhaustible lessons for generations of Greeks to take to heart. Each reference to 1821 resonates anew with the weight of bygone eras, which pressures Greek youth to show itself true to the time-hallowed national tradition of valor. But the popular “epic” of 1821 was about the Greeks’ struggle for liberation and autonomy. The dictators’ effort to repossess this “epic” could not but press questions about the nature of freedom and independence under their tyrannical rule.

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After a few more episodes, the Albanian victory, which the Greeks won at the onset of World War II, is referred to as another “epic,” as it has been in common parlance. Soon after October 28, 1940, Greek troops and local civilians fended off an Italian invasion of Greece from the northwest and advanced into southern Albania. This triumph marked one of the earliest acts of organized and unified antifascist resistance in Europe. Metaxas himself gave the start signal of the battle against the Italian Fascists on the Albanian front. His— embellished—resolute “No!” in answer to Mussolini’s ultimatum is, by 1967, the famous watchword of a national holiday, Ochi Day (October 28). This historical tableau exceptionally includes female civilians, who appear, however, only in auxiliary roles: they act as humble physical helpers who haul boxes of ammunition and other military necessities, which they deliver to soldiers engaged in real action. In good patriarchal tradition, they merely assist and then resume their place of admiring spectators, who watch their men make Greek history. Young recruits then stage the Greek Right’s victory in the Civil War of the mid- through late 1940s. This meant that some of them were compelled to reenact the very defeat of their parents and families. A succession of postwar conservative governments (1946–1963 and 1967–1974) flaunted the triumph of the Right, which distressed a substantial but silenced part of the Greek populace. The Colonels rubbed salt in the still open wounds of leftists and communists by charging them anew with “acts against the nation.” They also scheduled their festivals on or around the anniversary date of the Right’s “victory” of August 30, 1949 (won on the mountains of Grammos and Vitsi). This date marked the unofficial end of the Civil War and was elevated to the status of a national holiday. The insensitive reenactment of the fratricidal strife struck home that the Right’s crushing of the Left was now perceived as a historical fait accompli and not as an actuality of ongoing persecution. The dictators presented the battles against interior and exterior communists of the past and present alike as interrelated parts of a single “holy war” in defense of the nation. Their official rhetoric, bolstered by the protracted state of martial law, was rife with calls for “patriotic” loyalty to the nation’s “protectors” and for vigilance and suspicion of fellow Greeks. It was the coarse display of the Greek Civil War that led Andreas Papandreou’s socialist government to issue a decree abolishing the Festivals of the Military Virtue of the Greeks in August 1982 (Anon., The Economist, August 21,

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1982, 39). During Papandreou’s post-junta rise to power, he had been publicly referring to the festivals as “celebrations of hatred” («ªØ æ  ı», as in his PASOK party’s manifesto Contract with the People, Papandreou and PASOK 1981: 43). Until 1982, however, a single official version established and re-established the history of 1940s Greece: it routinely emptied or “disappeared” the past of the Civil War and also leftist sympathies that lived on. The Greeks of the early 1980s had not reached a consensus about how to present recent Greek history, but many had come to realize that the true interest of the national past lay in how it constituted and conditioned the future. The Colonels’ festivals end with the climactic show of their own “triumph” over the communists on April 21, 1967. This self-promoting “victory” is the “coup” de théâtre, the play-within-the-play that caps the dictators’ self-representation: they need to continue to invoke a state of emergency to justify their armed intervention. A wagon float decorated with a giant version of the regime’s emblem of the phoenix rolls in: a Greek soldier stands guard outlined against the contours of the mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes. The symbolism of the phoenix, which boasts an age-long history, became ubiquitous during the dictatorship years of “resurrection.” The phoenix is seen to rise above the combined threats of communism and conflagration. A procession of floats follows carrying tableaux vivants of female figures dressed in antique-style costumes that represent the inalienable values and mottos vaunted by the Colonels: “Truth” (`¸˙¨¯`), “Glory” (˜ˇ˛`), “Salvation” (˙`), and “Freedom” (¯¸¯¨¯`) pass in review. The female characters who embody the Greek concepts that are all grammatically feminine, allegorize the qualities expected of the national body as well. Big white block letters on the hillside light up and form the slogan of “Long live April 21” (Z˙ ˙ 21 `—¸ˇ). Fireworks go off to dramatize the grand finale and draw repeated noisy salvos of applause. Militaristic triumphalism reaches new, exhilarating heights. So does totalitarian kitsch. The dictators’ streamlined national history is an authoritative exposé of Greek martial triumphs, in which patriotic leaders take center stage to command armies that stave off national crises. These iconic commanders embody a long chain of “indigenous” valiance but are not shown in any great detail. Their brave but anonymous troops prevail over emblematic “evil” enemies, who are themselves confined to the obscurity of groups of different creeds or ethnic

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origins. Military leadership, muscle power, and victory are valorized over any intellectual or artistic achievements. Thus the line-up of the “great men” of Greek history is reduced to a retrospective of static moments, stereotypical images, and oft-repeated slogans of a military leader cult. This is history as the personal myth of military men eager to boost their own profiles. The sense of the Colonels’ selfidentification with the “patriotic role models” is palpable. Their hero concept, too, is totalizing and masculinizing: their aim is to create the new, stalwart man—and man alone—in their image of the disciplined soldier. The onlooker stands by in a childlike or inferior position before military leaders who always win and whom the regime bumps up to positions of moral rectitude and authority. These leaders bring “salvation” to nameless Greek masses that suffer foreign “aggressors” and communist-inflicted “evils” and that are, like the foot soldiers doing the actual work, mere historical variables. The Colonels tainted history and perverted theater in their own militarized version of the continuous thread of Greek national history. They displayed performative military acts and axiomatic slogans in a hybrid stagecraft infused with myth and allegory and fortified by parade architecture and a scenographic arsenal. Their world of theatrical make-believe was equaled only by their verbal pyrotechnics. Political expediency and lack of real-life perspective, however, rendered the purported analogies between military triumph of the past and the nation’s current predicament strained at best. Theater was drawn into the orbit of conceit and self-righteousness, as the regime staged itself as the predestined new glory of a perennially victorious nation. The dictators turned the seductive continuity of building state power through supremacy into an aggressive “mytho-moteur” (to use Anthony Smith’s term, 1999: 215): the military continuity that they willed was to constitute and legitimize polity—theirs. The “proven” military longevity also affected morality, pedagogy, and education in its broadest sense, including the adult education purposes that the festivals served. The strongmen’s blind insistence on militaristic continuity, however, made them ignore the fallacies of armed chauvinism. Their myth, which proved too narrow to render their propaganda credible, could not resolve social or economic tensions, either, but merely deflected attention from the nation’s problems. In spectacles, publications, speeches, and monuments (extending to billboards, personal portraits, and renamed streets and squares), the insecure dictators competed for the Greeks’ recognition through

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source manipulation and by controlling public forums. The theme of military predominance through the ages, embodied by a canon of national heroes, was a popular topic in Greek radio and television programs from 1967 on. The Colonels also organized exhibitions on the theme of the military virtue of the Greeks and issued catalogues and other publications to reinforce the iconography and rhetoric of their festivals.23 In Thessaloniki, Giorgos Kitsopoulos, the general director of the State Theater of Northern Greece, was recruited to lecture on the topic of the Greeks’ military virtue on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary, on August 30, 1969, of the Greek Right’s defeat of the communists.24 The Athens War Museum was the architectural project that monumentalized the regime’s ethos of “blood and soil.”25 Thus the dictators co-opted the realms of culture, leisure, and the media for the purpose of dramatizing the backing that Greek history seemingly bestowed on them. A wide range of theatrical and performative modes served to represent the supremacy of the Greek army and its leaders. But who directed the junta festivals? The names sporadically mentioned are those of Giorgos Oikonomides, radio host and author of screenplays, and James Paris, a Greek-American entrepreneur who became the Colonels’ favorite producer of patriotic films.26 Paris’s morale-boosting war epics did their part to support the dictators’

23 Lambrinos notes the centrality of the festivals to the Epikaira (2011: 87). Soon after the coup, the regime announced that, in the following year, the historian Demetrios Vardanes would be publishing his History of the Revolution of April 21, 1967. To this day, I have not been able to find a copy of this history but, even if it was never published, the leadership’s will to write its own “revolutionary” history and its boasting about it remain facts. See also Georgalas (ca. 1971) and Papadakis et al. (n.d.). 24 The official lecture announcement uses the ideologically charged terms of “crushing of the communist bandits” ( Å ıæØ   ı Œ  ıØ ı æØØ ) (Karaoglou 2009: 292, 336). The National Resistance was only officially recognized in September 1982. See Decree No. 1285 published in the September 20, 1982 issue of the Ephemeris tes Kyverneseos tes Hellenikes Demokratias, the Government Gazette of the Greek Republic. 25 Dimitris Antoniou (2011) is currently studying one of the Colonels’ architectural projects that was the subject of much speculation but that was never built: the church of the Savior or the Nation’s Vow, a humongous church complex that would fulfill a postrevolutionary vow of the nation’s gratitude and would “grace” the Tourkovounia hills to the north and northeast of the city center of Athens. See also Decree No. 320, ¯˚ `’ 206/18.10.1969; Decree No. 736, ¯˚ `’ 229/13.11.1969; and Papadopoulos (1968–1972: 7:149–150, on October 28, 1971). 26 Kotanidis mentions Oikonomides’s collaboration (2011: 83; testimony of June 8, 2012). Koliodimos refers to the work of Paris (1999: 18, 20). See also Katsounake (2002: 34–35).

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“Revolution” and, like the festivals, they featured the typical purple passages of Greek history and also stories of personal sacrifice for the good of the collective.27 The genre generated movies such as No (1969), The Battle of Crete (1970), October 28, 1940—5:30 a.m. (1971), Papaphlessas, Hero of the Greek Revolution (1971, the genre’s best known film, directed by Errikos Andreou), and The Souliots (1972, directed by Demetres Papakostantes), as well as the occasional anticommunist film (such as Paris’s At the Borders of Treason, 1968).28 But Paris goes most often unmentioned: his work as an architect of the junta festivals has not recommended him to posterity. In the late 1960s, however, the experience that Paris had gained in the United States lent a—spurious—legitimacy to his work. Also, the monumental festivals obviously did not come about without the planning and cooperation of many more people. Many other artists, indeed, aligned themselves with the regime, including popular singers, musicians, and actors. The dictatorship could give the mediocre artist a more central role in Greek national life than prior eras ever could. Artists enlisted with varying degrees of reluctance: some enthusiastically placed their art in the service of the new government and adapted effortlessly; others were lured by state incentives or feared coercion. Refusing to collaborate came with consequences (Kotanidis 2011: 83–84). The role of those who did not assist in the resistance, however, has often been downplayed. But the sheer magnitude of the junta festivals offers perhaps the most convincing proof that the Colonels were not the only ones responsible for trivializing history and culture. Heaping reproach on the dictators was, after July 1974, the easiest way to exorcize collective guilt. Most individual

27 State-sponsored films such as Paris’s distinctive war movies and other carboncopy “heroic” epics were jeered by uproarious students attending the Thessaloniki Film Festival, from high up in the less-visible second balcony seating of the theater building of the Society for Macedonian Studies. See Kornetis (2006: 222, 228–229; 2013: 179–181) and Zapheires (2000: 203–205; 2011: 121–123). 28 See Karalis (2012: 110, 138–140); Koliodimos (1999: 242, 330, 348, 395, 495, 499); Kotanidis (2011: 232–233); and Soldatos (2006: 36–37, 38–40). The hero selection of these patriotic films partly overlapped with that of the historical dramas (and melodramas) of Giorgos Roussos, who, nonetheless, focused on “great women” as well as on “great men.” Chatzepantazes notes Roussos’s 1968 historical drama entitled Theodora the Great (Chatzepantazes 2006: 244). On the broader topic of warrelated movies and historical melodramas, see Tomae (2006) and, in particular, Dermentzopoulos (2006). Theodorides’s chapter (2006) focuses on anticommunist propaganda films and the threat of a “slavocommunist occupation.”

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cases, however, lack clarity and are further complicated by the later obfuscation by those concerned. When subsequent allegations were hurled about, the pervasive excuse was that even the most compromised actors and artists were just doing their job. The ensuing confusion about certain persons’ role within the system is therefore not entirely unwarranted. Only the full details can provide final answers and can unmask willful ignorance or distorted historical awareness. But such details do not add much and it is not our place to judge nearly half a century after the facts.

Teaching Patriotic Self-sacrifice for the “Revolution of April 21, 1967” He [the Marathon runner] senses that he has entered another country—lots of noise, people, bands with strange musical instruments, . . . people in different dress cheering him on: “Long live, long live . . .”—live who? They tell him to say “Nenikekamen (˝¯˝˚˙˚`!¯˝),” “We have won,” but he feels as if his voice has been cut off. He has forgotten, he does not remember a thing. “Comeon,speakup(ºÆ æ),”theytellhim, “say‘Nenikekamen.’” “Who, when?” he keeps thinking, “where have we won?” They stick a microphone in his face and the entire stadium can hear him gasping for breath . . . He does not utter a word. To hell with the ceremony! “I, I know nothing,” he keeps thinking, “Don’t get me mixed up in this. I have no business here,” and he drops dead. He didn’t say it. What a shame with so many people waiting for him. What a pity for the festivals . . . They took his body and dragged it out of the stadium, and the festival continued its normal routine, with the people again cheering the various skits, even those who, for a brief moment, had their doubts or had been upset . . . or who looked around in fear or made to leave, even those who stayed in the end to express amazement, to keep silent, and to bow . . . (Marios Pontikas, “An Insignificant Man circa 490 bce” (in Greek), 1973b: 19–20)

The Colonels expanded and militarized the festival template built by Metaxas and subsequent conservative governments. They propped up the spectacles further with “suitable” (read: censored) media

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coverage, whose rote praise was the illusionary equivalent of the rote applause in the stadium. They upped the ante of propaganda as well: they usurped Greek history on the rationale that, since they, as leaders of the Armed Forces, “owned” patriotism, they also “owned” any army victories of the past inspired by patriotic (self-)sacrifice. Thus they made Greek historical continuity subservient to their “ideology of the barracks” (as it has sometimes been called disparagingly). Ideologically expedient, too, was their logic that militarism vouched for patriotism and should, whenever necessary, stand in for politics. The dictators saw all of Greece as a mass that needed to be trained in this ethos, and they considered military-style disciplinary training to be the right approach. Therefore, the festivals at the Panathenaic Stadium had to construct a militarized communal identity: their purpose was to create an obedient youth and body politic at large. A devoted youth stood metonymically for the devoted masses of civilians and also for the presumed devoted army troops. Metaxas had realized the potential of public displays by youth groups as a means to “educate” Greek youth into the prewar, fascist type of performative patriotism. Through “patriotic” mass events, the Colonels, too, engaged in a “civic education program” for youths and adults who were past the age of formal school instruction. This project of epimorphose, or additional schooling beyond the walls of the conventional classroom, was the subject of much discussion after the 1967 coup, given that the government’s professed didactic aim was to prepare its citizens for “true democracy” or for the “New Democracy” (Meletopoulos 1996: 202). After extensive debate, the Colonels started to promulgate their preferred concept of “agoge tou politou” (ƪøª  ı  º ı), “citizen education,” “civics education,” or arguably “education in citizenship,” and its variants, “politeiake / politike agoge” ( ºØØÆŒ /  ºØØŒ ƪøª ) and “politeiake epimorphosis” ( ºØØÆŒ ØæçøØ).29 The regime’s hyperbolic displays of military prowess, too, were meant to (re)shape the people’s knowledge of Greek history and to inspire their pride for being “racial descendants” of the ancient Greeks. The junta festivals picked up

29

Gregoriades remarks on the extensive debate about these didactic claims and terms (1975: 1:114 and 2:310–311). The concept of “politike agoge” became codified as the title of Theophylaktos Papakonstantinou’s leading and state-sponsored civics manual (1970). See also Meletopoulos (1996: 200–211).

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where the practice of school history lessons had left off, teaching sacrifice-oriented “patriotism” and conformism in the name of Greek continuity. For decades, “patriotism” had been performed in Greek school teachings, in the teacher’s lecturing and in the student’s regurgitating of historical content that was to be idealized but never reinterpreted. The festivals joined traditional pedagogy in using youths and adults as prime material for nationalist subject formation.30 “Actors” mimicked skits and spectator-performers parroted slogans and, rather than learning anything new or challenging, they exerted themselves in corroborating established national myths. The dearth of a plurality of scripts in the traditional Greek classroom (which, besides, operated on the defunct language of Kathareuousa) and at the festivals mirrored the absence of pluralism in public life.31 In the spirit of the late 1960s counterculture, however, which turned 30 From the 19th and well into the 20th century, instruction in Greek history in primary and secondary schools, preferably highly structured, was marked and marred by its relentless emphasis on the “patriotic” national past. Ancient Greek language and literature, too, were often taught in tedious, ethnocentric ways, presenting the symbols of classical culture as sacred cows. On the problems posed by an educational culture of excessive classicizing and nationalizing, see Gazi (2000: 114–115) and Hamilakis (2003; 2007: 29, 179–181, 203). Koulouri (1991) examines Greek history textbooks. Legg and Roberts refer to the “nationalizing mission” of Greek education (1997: 98). Gkolia (2011) documents this mission through the first decade of the 21st century. She discusses the celebrations of the anniversary date of the April 21 regime (2011: 43–45, 144–162) but downplays the “Festivals of the Military Virtue of the Greeks” (2011: 303). To be sure, the nationalization of the masses through formal history lessons or through festivals that display the nation’s bodily performance or that invent (symbols of) national “traditions” is a widely shared process in the formation of modern nation-states. However, the Greek dictators’ manipulation of the past was an extreme case in the long course of the state’s appropriation of national history, whether through the official discourse that addressed the adult population or through the poor teaching of history in the public school and university systems. 31 Phrankoudake (1979) compiled and analyzed the pedagogical evidence from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. See also Anon. [Alexes Demaras] (1972); Asonites (2000); and Fournaraki (2010 and 2011). For recent reflections on 20th-century Greek education, from which social studies were long absent, see Avdela (2000); Katsikas and Therianos (2004); Kyprianos (2004); and Phrankoudake (2003). Efi Avdela characterizes the problematic situation as follows: In the national narrative reproduced in school, the Greek nation is understood as a natural, unified, eternal, and unchanging entity, not a product of history. The teaching of history neither moves beyond this ethnocentric concept of the nation nor familiarizes students with the production of historical knowledge. (2000: 239)

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much of Western European youth against any establishment, Greek students were among the first to expose the fissures in the artificial creation of a consensual nationalist history. Historicizing spectacle intersected with many other, long-lasting modes of the right-wing discourse on Greek patriotism. The Colonels kept revisiting the patriotic passages of lionhearted Greek leaders and of the self-sacrifice of subordinates, in the sequential designation of bodies to battles. They captured the highlights of the Persian Wars, the 1821 Revolution, and other military standoffs by invoking the battle cries that had purportedly initiated or driven them. Sporting battle cries and sloganeering turned into performative realms as well, as the poster depicted in Figure 3.3 may show. Based on the poster’s sequential registers, the slogans carrying Greece’s grand narrative exalted in certainty about the manly efficacy of the army “tradition,” which affirmed the nation’s “immortality.” The effort to lodge slogans of a limited “collective” morality in the Greek mind was another remnant from the Metaxas era. The prewar dictator proclaimed essay competitions for young people on topics that instituted and reiterated the nationalist exhortations. Among those guiding topics were: “I am the indestructible spirit of those who fought at Salamis” (Kostes Palamas), “The relationship with the Fatherland is a very close relationship, closer still than the child’s relationship with its parents,” and “One omen is best: to defend one’s fatherland!”32 The Colonels’ “patriotic” mottos, too, voiced the official demands that the Greeks renounce individual will and that they perform selfless acts similar to those of the Greek soldiers of the past.33 After 1967, the government urged schoolteachers to lift essay topics from Papadopoulos’s Our Creed ( —Øø Æ, 1968–1972), the multi-volume compilation of the ruler’s published speeches, declarations, interviews, and thoughts that was distributed gratis to schools and offices of civil servants (Mikedakis 2007: 84). The regime’s visual and verbal rhetoric, however, enacted or performed Greek patriotism, enmity, victory, and lineage in single-minded definitions. It homogenized 32 See Machaira (1987: 140–142). The latter motto traces its origins as far back as Homer’s Iliad 12.243, in which—ironically—the defiant Trojan hero Hector reprimands Polydamas, who discourages the Trojans from engaging in battle because of a bad avian omen. Gkolia discusses the regime’s slogans in greater detail (2011: 157–158). 33 Herzfeld observes that the ideal of self-sacrifice promising collective glory is a “key feature of nationalist discourses everywhere” (1997: 119).

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Figure 3.3. Poster: At the festivals of the dictatorial regime of 1967–1974, Greek actor-recruits and allegorical figures embody the known sets of historical slogans and victory cries. The regime relished schoolbook-style mottos that raised the Greeks’ defenses against national enemies. Credit: Publisher Anti for Rautopoulos (1984: 245).

multiplicity and excluded differences—in other words, dissent and non-compliance.

Reflecting Back on Greek History in Rapid Motion ! ›غE N e æøŁı ıæª ‹Æ " å#æÆ $æŒÆØ K ŒØ Ø . . . Do not talk to the Prime Minister when the country finds itself in motion . . . (Giannes Patiles, “Doïna,” in But Now, Watch Out!, 1973: 31)34

The regime of 1967 exhibited its canonic sequence of Greek military victories and mottos in order to authenticate its authority on behalf of the “deserving” Armed Forces. The Colonels exploited the nationin-danger theme to bolster the need for a perpetual state of armed 34 The line parodies the Greek equivalent of “Do not talk to the driver while the bus is in motion.”

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mobilization, for a prolonged state of exception. Their festivals framed the regimented mass formations by reenactments of national crises, which the Greek army was then seen to overcome with fortitude. More significantly, however, the displays and performances expressed the leadership’s demand for a civic society disciplined along the lines of the—overvalued—military model. Soldiers and “actors” had to give commanding performances before the ordered masses and had to embody exemplary patterns of military virtue and disciplined behavior. Even if citizen training did not have a direct military application, it procured many well-oiled cogs in the wheels of Greek society. Thus the mass events had to publicly demonstrate the dictators’ consolidation of power and Greek civic obedience. The Colonels had sought and found an “authentic” tradition of origins and a “valid” genealogy for their own military intervention. They posited the anniversary date of their takeover as a new national holiday. The self-serving cult of the past was also a cult of muchadvertised new beginnings, and the continuity model that linked the past to the present kept suggesting a paradoxical kind of parthenogenesis of Greek culture. The self-styled “regenerative Revolution” was, however, moving further away from the kind of revolutionary sociopolitical reform that Greece most badly needed. On the regime’s first anniversary, Papadopoulos concluded his address to the nation with statements that underscored his will to graft the army’s intervention onto the Greek tradition of victory: The Revolution of April 21 represents the greatest and most serious attempt to restore, reorganize, and cure Greece since it regained its National Independence. And the Revolution will succeed, because it bespeaks the necessity of the historical imperative. (“April 21 Has Proved to Be a Landmark in the History of Our Country,” To Vema, April 21, 1968)

Papadopoulos’s casting of the Revolution of 1821 as a grand analogue for his own military aggression smacked of propagandistic distortion. The 150th anniversary of the Revolution in 1971 was celebrated with a similar, hubristic degree of fanfare.35 The junta relentlessly promoted the values of the country’s rulers, ancestors, and roots by grounding them in a proud, “authentic” history, in an unchanging 35 For reactions, see Athanassopoulos et al., who issued the “Manifesto on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of Independence” (1971).

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geocultural territory, and in unshaken diachronic time. Not surprisingly, the official rhetoric of ethnic pride and of the strong national family appealed to the patriotic sentiment of those Greeks who sought stability after many years of military and political turmoil. For some, the regime’s stagings of historical continuity were gratifying precisely because they were long familiar. Plenty of others, however, realized that the junta was reducing Greek valor to purebred military character—and, even then, more to muscle power than to military genius. For the dictators, the theatrical communication through displays of military culture was one of tradition, supremacy, and proven authenticity. Critics, however, saw a farcical spectacle and a transparent concoction of propaganda.

OUR GRAND CIRCUS: GREEK HISTORY IN COMMOTION ˇØ å Ø % ÆÆæ ı ŒÆŁ#Æ Æ ª ıæÆ Ç  Ø  º Æ’ º Ø ŒÆŁøØŒ Æç. Verses do not overthrow regimes but they certainly live longer than all regime propaganda posters. (Titos Patrikios, “Verses 3” (1982). Quoted and translated by Vangelis Calotychos 2003: 213–214)

This preliminary conclusion was necessary in light of the content and structure of the second half of this chapter. The sections that follow respond to the earlier sequence of national myth-making with the episodes of demythification that constitute the revolutionary plot of the 1973 popular hit, Our Grand Circus. The production of Our Grand Circus experimented with new modes of a sobering and symbolic discourse, which it placed in a dialectical relationship with the truisms of the juntified history of flags and fanfares. Its “historical” undertaking was a fast-paced projection of the present situation through the lens of the past. Not coincidentally, Giorgos Maniotes called quality modern Greek theater the right antidote against the “cheap nationalistic-patriotic school festivals,” which packaged history for classroom consumption and continued to plague older

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generations as well (1992: 12). Rena Theologidou concurred that “the junta’s aesthetic was the aesthetic of the school play of March 25” (2002: 37). Our Grand Circus also offered a vivid reminder that historicizing theater had supported many expressions and episodes of Greek resistance (ever since the prerevolutionary decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century). Occasionally, the play even challenged the status of history as a knowable and teachable subject. Its performance of history, which mutated around a central core, exposed the fraught nature of representation under prolonged censorship, which affected not just contents but also forms and fixations. In late June 1973, the production of Our Grand Circus by Kazakos and Kareze became an instant success, breaking previous box-office records (Papasoteriou, Eleutherotypia, May 26, 1996; Sykka, He Kathemerine, April 20, 1997). The couple had invited Kambanelles to write a play that would address “their concerns about the sociopolitical situation” (Hager 2008: 204). According to the playwright, Kazakos and Kareze were inspired also by the famous French production of 1789 by Ariane Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil (testimony of June 15, 2001).36 This celebrated production re-created the French Revolution in a carnival atmosphere that resonated with ordinary citizens. Like Mnouchkine, Kambanelles opened up a new, 36 Mnouchkine’s production of 1789 premiered in Milan in fall 1970, then moved to a disused cartridge factory building in Vincennes, on the eastern side of Paris (hence the name of La Cartoucherie). See Bradby (1991: 195) and Kiernander (1993). The production of Our Grand Circus offers an analytical key to the reception of Mnouchkine in Greece, but this topic falls outside the scope of the current study. Even though Kazakos and Kareze worked closely with Kambanelles and singer Nikos Xyloures, they did not adopt the method of collaborative creation that the 1789 production helped to establish (see Introduction, n. 39, and Ch. 4, pp. 268–272). In summer 2012, the State Theater of Northern Greece, in collaboration with the Akropol Theater, revived Our Grand Circus to great critical acclaim. Director Soteres Chatzakes and his actors touched a raw nerve in the Greek psyche at the height of the country’s economic crisis and of resented, foreign-imposed austerity measures. On this production’s symbolic politics and power, see Pephanes, To Vema, October 7, 2012, and Sykka, He Kathemerine, July 22, 2012. The playbill explains the Greek origins of the various historical episodes and pays homage to the 1973 premiere but does not dwell on any links to Mnouchkine’s 1789. Vianne and Kontogianne open their contribution to the playbill with the leitmotif quotation from the charismatic revolutionary hero Makrygiannes emphasizing that, from time immemorial, “all the beasts struggle to devour us but they cannot” («ºÆ Æ ŁæÆ  º  Æ Æ ç ŒÆØ %  æ ») (2012: 21, quoting Makrygiannes ca. 1970: 206). Makrygiannes fought to have the first Greek constitution granted, a feat that invoked the court’s retaliation.

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culturally and socially more diverse site for a popular, everyday-life history that dared to disclose many of its oral details, personal experiences, and folkloric identities—and he called it a circus. The content of Our Grand Circus, however, was perceived as so overwhelmingly Greek that it silenced further references to the foreign model (which are absent from nearly all reviews and interviews). Also, the Greek playwright’s Courtyard of Miracles of 1957 had laid much of the groundwork for the sociopolitical debate to which Our Grand Circus committed itself fifteen years later: the early play had become a striking paradigm for the social fermentation of the postwar era and spoke a new, distinctively Greek language (literally and metaphorically), debunking stylized aesthetics and penetrating grim socioeconomic realities, instead. Both works, too, made private or small human interest stories emblematic of the history of the Greek people (Hager 2006: 244; Kambanelles 1990: 184, 193–194). The Courtyard of Miracles and other productions by Koun’s Art Theater, which earned much critical acclaim, were instrumental in breaking the hold that the classics and foreign works had on the modern Greek stage.37 In Our Grand Circus, Kambanelles, Kazakos, and Kareze mobilized folk memory and popular history as ideological forces with which to infuse segments from the Greek past. They tapped

37 See Ch. 1, n. 8. The Courtyard of Miracles saw many repeat performances, as did some of Kambanelles’s other problematizing plays, which further eroded the “high theater’s” bias against more popular social content: Tale without Title (—ÆæÆŁØ åøæ  Æ), Viva Aspasia (BÆ `ÆÆ), and Odysseus, Come Home (ˇ%ıÆ, ªæØ Ø) (Kambanelles 1990: 55–56, 57, 184, 185–186, 193–194). The playwright’s works on Odysseus and, in particular, The Last Act (˙ ºıÆÆ æÅ, 1998) debunked national myths of Greek self-righteousness with sharp wit and artistry. Pittas-Herschbach furnishes one of few articles in English (2001: 142–144). For studies on Kambanelles in Greek, see Chrysochoos and Reniere (2006); Pephanes (2000; 2005); and Puchner (2010a). Kambanelles’s cycle of plays on the myth of the Atreids conveyed countercultural readings through techniques of demythologization and existential questioning. His postmodern antihero Orestes helped to tie deconstructions of the main characters of Atreus’ house to promising developments in Greek theater and cinema of the mid-1960s through the 1970s. Van Steen (2002) studies Greek versions of the Orestes myth against the backdrop of 1960s politicized leftist theater and its characteristic doubt. Also, Kambanelles is perhaps the best known Greek proponent of a sympathetic Clytemnestra: he let Clytemnestra defend herself in two of the three one-act plays that were first produced on the National Theater’s New Stage during the 1992/3 winter season. These plays were published in 1994 under the collective title of The Supper (ˇ % ) in the sixth volume of Kambanelles’s collected theatrical works. The Supper consists of Letter to Orestes (ˆæÆ   ˇæÅ), The Supper, and Theban Parodos (—æ %  ¨Å#).

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into layers of vernacular memory on Greek heroes and villains and turned to the cult of the martyrs to Greek freedom and its prerevolutionary origins. They also exploited Greek folk legends and tales to invest the everyday and the everyman with heroic stature. The result was an unorthodox retelling of the Greek past that accelerated the process of rethinking history’s social and political functions and that implicitly criticized the regime’s writing of history “from above.” Our Grand Circus presented theater coeval with “living history,” which was shouldered by its committed performers and audiences. The production mustered the energies of a growing cultural and political resistance. The following sections explain how Our Grand Circus became history rewritten, how it played out its own plot and the (conspiracy) plot behind the Greek past. While the regime kept touting its “revolution” as a panacea, Kambanelles laid out the history of the open wounds of Greece and grasped at the causes of those wounds. For him, the first step to remedy the nation’s continued duress was to diagnose its past. Political corruption, hypocrisy, and betrayal became the play’s invisible protagonists. This thread about the diseased, venal realms of politics steered a conspiratorial and less attractive subplot, which was, however, still instructive. The critique of the playwright and the actors-producers was not solely directed against a faulty Greek history but targeted the tyrannical present fronting for this faulty past. Some questions, however, remain under discussion: does revisionist history make for a good play—or even good history? Is the author’s construction of ordinary people’s mental universe in itself not a top-down act? So, too, is perhaps the play’s drive toward a shared social polemic and the call on viewers to gather and reaffirm their revolutionary identity? Did Kazakos and Kareze try to create the utopian dream that is the theater of revolution, with all its attendant risks? Or did the revolutionary ideas come with the territory of a populist theater that granted multiple opportunities for direct contact with the committed performers? This was, after all, the time during which a commercial theater company could not survive unless it broadened the social basis of its audience. The production of Our Grand Circus made its public feel that it had something personal at stake, even in the haphazard, subjective, and irresolute quality of many of its skits. An in-depth analysis of the play and its production cycles may shed some light on intents and purposes. Kambanelles published Our Grand Circus in 1975, when democracy had been

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Figure 3.4. Cover of the playbill of Our Grand Circus, 1973, staged by the Kareze-Kazakos Theater Company. Credit: Kostas Kazakos (November 12, 2013).

restored. The published script is illustrated with pictures from the production and with sketches of the costumes designed by Phaidon Patrikalakes; it allows us to study in detail a play and its performance, both afflicted by cuts and sanctions (see Figure 3.4).38 38 The Akropol Theater management made an audiotape of a performance of Our Grand Circus that was staged during the production’s second run after November 1973. I thank Spyros Tzoras for providing me with a copy of the tape and for sharing

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“[M]oments from our past, mobilized to help us through a difficult moment of the present” ˚ÆØ  Ø ºÅæ#Ø ºØ Æ ÆÆ ŒÆØ # Æ ÆÆæåø ºØ Æ’ Å Ææå

ŒØ Æ æÆ  ıºåØ ªØÆ And who pays the price again, and how will I start again from the beginning? If at least I knew why . . . (Kambanelles, lines from the theme song entitled “Our Grand Circus,” 1975: 66)

By all accounts, Our Grand Circus developed a political identity and a history of its own and rose far beyond the level of a farce, tearjerker, or piece of personality cult.39 “The people came out and participated in the production, because they felt that this was their duty, as in a demonstration, as in a rally,” Giorgos Koumantos explained. “The performances became massive political demonstrations, the biggest ones of the seven-year dictatorship—even before the events at the Polytechnic” (1975: 5). Admittedly, Kareze had gained star status among audiences of the 1960s that loved romantic musical comedies.40 Her adoring fans had made her into an idol of the pre-junta “golden age” of popular film comedy. Kareze also played the lead role in a movie version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, which was released in November 1972, or just half a year prior to the opening of Our Grand Circus.41 his insights. In just the past five years, YouTube has seen many postings of photographs, scenes, and especially songs of the production. For recent testimonies to the songs’ appeal, see Leontis (2009: 182) and the 2011 CD issued by He Kathemerine featuring the show’s music and songs. 39 With the words of this section’s title, Giorgos Koumantos characterized Kambanelles’s play in a brief preface to the published version of 1975. References to the preface by Koumantos (1975: 5), the preface by Kambanelles (1975: 7), or to the latter’s script appear next in parenthesis. Kambanelles’s narration of Greek history “in the Present Tense,” which becomes a political protest act, is the focus of Hager’s recent article (2006) and dissertation chapter (2008: 199–220, 237–239). See also Puchner (2010a: 28–29, 451–487) and Van Steen (2007). 40 Therefore, the romanticized anticapitalism of Our Grand Circus was somewhat at odds with the nature and venue of the commercial theater, which had been the mainstay of Kareze’s career. See also Exarchos (1995–2000: 3/1:255–257). 41 This Lysistrata ranked third among the season’s financial hits and won the First Gold Award for Best Production at the 1972 Thessaloniki Film Festival. Greek movie theaters kept the production on their programs for 451 days. Many of its screenings overlapped with the first performances of Our Grand Circus. The movie’s driveling older males stood as caricatures of the junta leadership as they mimicked its kinetic

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Kambanelles took risks to have the script of Our Grand Circus approved by the junta censors. He tried to pass it off as a “historical play” and submitted twenty-three skits, hoping that at least ten of them would be accepted. He made the skits that were not essential to the show obviously offensive to detract attention from the remaining skits. As expected, the censors banned only the offensive, “lightningrod” skits but were content to let the other skits stand (Kambanelles 1975: 7). With the censors present at the show’s dress rehearsal, Kareze and Kazakos mounted a deliberately confusing selection of skits in a performance that was much shorter than the one planned (Papasoteriou, Eleutherotypia, May 26, 1996). The censors were fooled once more and granted their permission for the show to open at the Athenaion Theater, a large outdoor theater in central Athens. For the winter season of 1973/4, performances moved indoors at the Akropol Theater (on Ippokratous Street), which had begun to function as a meeting place for actors, students, and junta opponents.42 A second, more severe round of cuts followed, however, to which this discussion will return, but not without adding another example of the censors’ face-value treatment of words and meanings and their lapses of gullibility. When the censors called Kazakos in for interrogation, they showed him a copy of the script in which they had underlined all the controversial phrases. Kazakos managed to save some of the lines, however, by claiming those were the exact, “patriotic” words of Kolokotrones, the hero of the Greek War of Independence, not the words of Kambanelles, the playwright (Papasoteriou, Eleutherotypia, May 26, 1996). Actors could hide behind the screen of the widely acclaimed Revolution to pass dissident messages, in ways similar to the use of “sacrosanct” antiquity for cover. Stagings of acts from the Revolution allowed the opposition to play at rebellion under the guise of the forms and conventions—and the presumed degree of acceptance—of patriotic drama. Kambanelles, Kazakos, and Kareze referred to their stage as a “circus” (tsirko), which suggests a hybrid performance area and the informal to improvised style that draws in nontraditional audiences.

poses and spoke the patronizing language of its moral and political clichés. See Valverde García (2010) and Van Steen (2001: 176–180). 42 Testimonies by Kambanelles, June 15, 2001, and Tzoras, June 6, 2001. Georgakake lists the production data (2009: 182).

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The notion of “circus” also conjures up the presence of itinerant performers, fleeting moments of illusion and bravado, as well as childhood memories of laughter and escapism. The actors-producers presented Our Grand Circus with all the liberties that the direct performance style of the circus naturally grants or accommodates. The show became a blend of folk festival, clownery, variety spectacle, and revue. The choice of the title also signaled how the relationship of the performers to their public was to be understood. The casual atmosphere of the circus ring or arena was conducive to a jovial, physical performance repertoire with lots of surprises and outbursts of humor, even if the latter occasionally left a bittersweet aftertaste. Also, this circus play still showed the toolmarks of its construction, revealing a paratactical form that presented episode after episode without necessarily leading up to summary statements. However, the word “circus” in Greek also suggests chaos, irrationality, and low standards. The absurdity of early 1970s political life had reduced Greece to a “circus”: the country had been destabilized and lacked cohesion and logic. This topsy-turvy circus, Kareze reassures the spectators, does not feature any animals except for the two cut-out snakes that decorate the sidewalls, but “they eat only actors, not members of the audience” (Kambanelles 1975: 10). Kazakos and Kareze had commissioned Eugenios Spathares, the shadow theater puppeteer, to decorate the sidewalls and the entrance to the outdoor theater. His work expressed his fascination with folk narrative and entertainment such as the Karaghiozis shows, some of which feature snakes, as in Alexander the Great and the Cursed Snake (ˇ !ªÆºÆ%æ  ŒÆØ  ŒÆÆæÆ ç%Ø). Coiling serpents are among the well-known referents from the Greek folkloric and mythic tradition (Puchner 2010a: 461, 465–466). Here, however, the whimsical snakes functioned not only as props and sets but also as (mute) characters. Representing the dictators who curtailed the actors’ lines, they embodied a harrowing vicious cycle. The symbolic value of the voracious snakes could hardly have been used in a more frankly subversive way. Upon entering, the spectators took note of this first sign indicating that the show would not eschew relevant political commentary. Kareze’s reassurance and the public’s applause delivered a first rebuke to the Colonels (testimony by Margaret Kenna, June 24, 2005 and July 9, 2006). Other signs and markers, too, functioned as the concrete emblems of harangues that would otherwise have been conducted in terms too abstract for a circus

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performance. Thus the concept of the circus served Kambanelles’s intent to wed radical content to a popular, all-inclusive format. The characterization of “our circus” as “grand” pointed to Greece’s long history of tragicomic discrepancies and grievous situations.43 “[I]nstead of a grand historical narrative, [Kambanelles] provided a Grand Circus,” Hager observes (2008: 205). Leontis concurs: “the dictatorship was a misplaced circus that ought to be toppled” (2009: 182). Therefore, Our Grand Circus might be regarded as a performance ritual of demystification and collective self-deprecation: it was Kambanelles’s highly selective but very accessible reenactment of diachronic popular Greek history as a theater of the absurd. At showtime, the spectators in the Grand Circus enjoyed its greater than usual openness about the act of performing. They were seated in a nonconventional, open-stage arrangement, which also allowed the actors to deftly deploy their audience: two large sections of the public faced each other across a walkway that ended in a small circular stage.44 Because this catwalk protruded from the main stage into the very center of the seating space and thus exposed the performers to view from all around, it intensified the stage action and interaction with the spectators, who were often called upon to participate in the unfolding of the narrative of their own history. The audience members had a part to play, the part of Greek citizens, and their physical and psychological closeness to the actors prompted a sense

43 The modern Greek adjective megalo (neuter form) can denote size and scale— “big” or “large”—or quality—“grand” or “great.” All of these connotations came into play in reference to Greece as (a “circus” of) a country. A revue show of 1966 was called Circus Hellas (æŒ Å ¯ºº), after a common Greek saying. This meaning of “circus” was lost on Georgousopoulos, who took issue with Kambanelles’s title and the producers’ modalities of performance: in his view, the circus was not an artistic or entertainment form representative of the Greek tradition and, therefore, could not place a kaleidoscopic lens on Greek history or performance (To Vema, July 7, 1973). Of course, Georgousopoulos may have chosen not to elaborate on the less flattering, ironic associations. See Hager (2006: 245–246; 2008: 214–216). For more reviews of the Kareze-Kazakos production, see Paraschos (1973) and others in the appendix to Kambanelles’s edition of Our Grand Circus (1975); also Bacopoulou-Halls (1994: 404, 416) and Makres (1973b). Hager (2008: 214–220) and Pephanes (2005: 60, 84–89) further contextualize the reviews and come to a new appreciation of the play. 44 This arrangement mimicked the seating areas of the Panathenaic Stadium, where the bulk of the attendees could watch the spectacle that was the other half of the audience across the stadium floor. When I raised this point in conversation with Kambanelles, he expressed doubt as to whether the producers had deliberately pursued this ironic similarity (testimony of June 15, 2001).

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of complicity. The nontraditional arrangement, too, let the show be swept by shared emotions, lifting the need for historical accuracy. The majority of the spectators could observe other people’s reactions, which encouraged self-observation and self-reflection, especially when the actors fired difficult questions at them. Metatheatricality was thereby greatly increased, as was the exposure or vulnerability of the players and audience members. Besides, the cast told its public to do anything but remain “indifferent” (Kambanelles 1975: 92–93). When the stage moved from the end of the hall to its very center via a configuration of platforms or peninsulas, it helped to create an altogether new theater that doubled as a welcoming meeting place in the repressed civic life of Athens, where martial law had lifted the right of assembly and had forbidden extra-theatrical gatherings. The old partition between the proscenium stage and the seating area or auditorium had established social hierarchies that protected the bourgeois and upper classes. Also, it had maintained a more symbolic distinction between interior and extrovert forms of spectacle. Kazakos and Kareze often moved around at audience level and invited the public’s reflection on political performance beyond theater’s physical space. They accentuated the parallels between the drama of theater and the drama of life and alluded to the state’s hegemonic self-displays, which it performed and reperformed in prestigious locations. The new stage of Our Grand Circus was far from imposing, but its spatial overhaul contributed to the “happening” and helped to define the event-nature of theater-going. At opening time, Kareze delivers a humorous gibe commenting (metatheatrically) on the absence of a conventional stage: “[I]f I go in and tell them that there is no stage, they may look at me with suspicion and say that I am an anarchist!” (Kambanelles 1975: 9). Kareze does not specify who the hostile “they” are but she clearly points the finger at the censors. Next, her repeated and congenial “we,” the “we” of popular solidarity, invites the spectators in, promising an inside view of Greek history. This first-person plural may well be too inclusive a term and serve a populism that takes for granted that anyone who has come to watch is a Greek of the right hue. Nonetheless, these and other choices of words and themes are meant to instill in the public an emotional awareness of the rectitude of its ideals and actions. The initial divisions of “us” versus “them,” of “right” versus “wrong,” or of “heroes” versus “cowards and collaborators” set the tone for the rest of the play. The protagonists continue

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to mete out to any spectator the sensibility of the Greek underdog. Casting themselves as underdogs, they urge the audience to join them in speaking up for the masses of underprivileged or long-oppressed Greeks. This mass is the social category popularly known as that of the Romioi, or the average Greeks who, looking back at their OrthodoxChristian, Byzantine, and Ottoman legacies, missed out on the rapid Western-Hellenic “advances” of Greek sociopolitical life of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. For Kambanelles, however, the antithesis of these Romioi are not only the Hellenes, as in the seminal distinction theorized by anthropologist Michael Herzfeld (1982), but also those Greeks who are of a more “hybrid” nature (to use the key term with which Dimitris Tziovas (2001) and Vassilis Lambropoulos (2001) have challenged Herzfeld’s distinction).45 Those “hybrid” Greeks may well claim to belong to the group of the Romioi, but their petit-bourgeois aspirations drive them to spurn their roots and to adopt all the trappings of the smug ruling classes, be they Greek or Western-imported. This hybrid category receives plenty of Kambanelles’s attention, who sets apart the “real” Romioi from those who hypocritically “betray” the Greekness of Romiosyne. Kambanelles named the play’s main characters Romios and Romiaki (even though the latter diminutive is not common in Greek). Romios (Kazakos) directs the other performers and occasionally hurries them along. Romiaki (Kareze) is a follower, sidekick, or perhaps the Kolleteri (˚ ººÅ æØ, literally “Clinger”) of the Karaghiozis shows who, nonetheless, asks good questions that undermine a pattern of passive intake. Her witty repartee brings Romios down a peg. Together they guide the audience through the various skits. They act with gusto and deliver plenty of quick-fire exchange and slapstick comedy (Mackridge, unpublished MS, 10). Romios introduces the play as a “historical comedy” (Kambanelles 1975: 10). “This is a genre,” he explains, “that demands of its actors that they are most laughable . . . if they want to reflect the truth!” (1975: 10). He makes no bones about what is up with this “comedy”: it is a cross between 45 In his book Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor first formulated the “HellenoRomaic Dilemma,” the dichotomy between two distinct sets of attitudes and behaviors which he saw coexisting and at times conflicting within every Greek individual (1966: 96–125, 144–147). According to this dichotomy, claims Mackridge, “all Greeks are ‘hybrids’ ” (email communication of May 30–31, 2012). Mackridge generously shared his insightful comments on Fermor’s “Dilemma” and its subsequent reception in the anthropological literature.

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lunacy and sociopolitical critique that is uniquely its own. The protagonists’ running commentary is not just theatrical “shop talk,” and their jibes at current politics should not be dismissed as merely goodnatured fun: while they reassert the dynamic role that even a filtered comedy may play in Greek public life, they also mock the purported reality of history-making, of their own tragicomic history as well as of the history manufactured by the Colonels. With a stab at the junta censors, Romios cashes in on the pleasure that spectators feel when they find real elements from the outside world incorporated into the theater’s make-believe. With his next comment on the script and its history, the play reflects on its own status as a censored play: It’s a play that we could not possibly keep under control! It requires . . . liberties that our serious daily life does not have. . . . I said that our play is a comedy. But it is not a comedy simply because it was written as a comedy or because we call it so. It’s a comedy for another, much more serious and valid reason: we declared it to the censors as a comedy; we submitted it as a comedy; it was approved as a comedy under the legal decision with number 199. . . . This simply means that any resemblance between our comedy and a drama is completely coincidental (Kambanelles 1975: 12).

Self-referential acts bring the protagonists closer to their public. The play’s history and its struggle with censorship are embedded in the script. Romios has now blown the show’s cover that the realm of entertainment may be merely peripheral to politics. The extended reference to comedy places the production and its performances within an ironic framework. Kazakos creates a certain comic distance between himself and the script and claims for his comedy a zone that is temporarily free and autonomous. Thus he reflects on his status not only as co-creator and producer-manager but also as spectator and observer of current political vicissitudes. Striking a confessional tone next, Romios admits that he has spent time in a mental institution, because he was diagnosed with a common Greek affliction: he wanted to become prime minister. This is a direct blow at Papadopoulos for sweeping up multiple positions and portfolios, including the premiership. Papadopoulos rigged the July 1973 plebiscite held under martial law and had himself elected president of the new Greek “parliamentary republic.” But at least Romios’s political pathology, which he calls “patriotic” (Kambanelles 1975: 9), will not do any harm, because his performance act will “neutralize” it. Kazakos

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presents theater as an alternative or cathartic political stage, which has its own craziness but is more “therapeutic” and less damaging to others than the psychotic scene of real-life Greek politics. Romios acts as the “ringmaster-interlocutor” of a comic circus (Karampetsos 1979: 211). Others might see him as a town crier, a fairground showman, or a compère, emcee, or commentator of the Greek revue (Margarites, Ta Nea, July 7, 1973; Pephanes 2005: 59, 60, 81). With the urban genre of the revue or epitheorese, Our Grand Circus shares the loose string of satirical skits, song, dance, and offthe-cuff comments. Theater historian Thodoros Chatzepantazes has labeled Our Grand Circus a “historical epitheorese” (2006: 247).46 Kambanelles’s play pokes fun at some of the Greeks’ theatrical tastes, without necessarily questioning the genres of the revue or the romantic comedy that had been staples of modern Greek dramaturgy thus far. Nonetheless, Romios alludes to new directions that have recently opened up for these two genres—a straddling of genres, a more serious comedy that may take after a drama. Thus, with Our Grand Circus, popular stars like Kareze can make the transition to a bettercrafted, more meaningful type of comedy. One critic tellingly dubbed Our Grand Circus an “idiosyncratic type of epitheorese” (Doxas, Eleutheros Kosmos, July 11, 1973).

Remembering and Dismembering a Plot: Of Dreams and Deprivations, of Losers and . . . Losers [P]erhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution. (Augusto Boal 1985: 122)

After delivering some more pithy banter, Romios and Romiaki act in a series of loosely connected episodes that lead the spectators through Greek history since mythical times. Like the architects of the junta festivals, they skip centuries and then dwell on certain highlights— but these “highlights” are not those one would expect to see. Songs link the episodes together and add commentary (Hager 2006: 247; 46

Chatzepantazes and Maraka (1977) researched the role of the compère in the Greek epitheorese and the history of the genre itself. Seiragakes (2009) covers light musical theater of the interwar years and refers to the compère as well (2009: 1:115–121, 417–418).

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Pephanes 2004–2005: 259, 274–291). So do the banners and signs that the performers of one skit carry as if in a ragtag street demonstration. Such aural and visual components tap into Brechtian theater techniques and accentuate historical and social meanings that differ from those sanctioned by the state (Hager 2006: 244–245). They unmask the political matrix on which official histories have thus far been drawn (Karampetsos 1979: 211; Pephanes 2005: 62, 79). They also invite the spectators to ponder the discrepancies between rhetorical promises and popular demands. With keen precision that often hides behind the seemingly naïve questions and comments of Romiaki, the production shows how turning points of Greek history have been experienced differently by politicians who manipulated them and by ordinary people, who suffered through them. The true Romioi are those Greeks who have been pawns in a game played by Greek and foreign usurpers, who have acted selfishly and disingenuously. As in a circus, those Romioi are the minor players who are relegated to the role of onlookers as soon as the big shots come on. The production provides bold and plentiful proof that, on many occasions, the general Greek population was cheated out of the benefits of what the establishment touted as “triumphs.” Its adds color and body to some overarching concerns: greed, corruption, power lust, internecine strife, or the fighting among siblings within the nation-as-family, tyranny as the perversion of just fatherhood, the manipulation of religion (that is, religion that manipulates and lets itself be manipulated), rebellion and resistance from the bottom up and hypocrisy and betrayal from the top down, historical victories that bestow long-term prerogatives on the powerful but reaffirm the defeat of the people and its champions. The production directs all sympathy toward those oppressed Greeks in what is, in essence, a play about Greece’s long-time winners and losers. Old tyrants tend to reappear in new guises. But old rebels and fighters, too, reappear as fresh combatants who are fired up by the wrongs done to successive generations. The virtue that the average Greek can bring even to a foredoomed struggle is, however, that of the proud, resilient, and indomitable Romios. Exceptional dignity characterizes the play’s folk heroes, who fight to preserve liberty and autonomy and inspire others. The first “historical” scene features the mythical father Kronos/ Cronus (Kambanelles 1975: 17–18), and many of the subsequent episodes add nuance to the theme of Greek time/history acting like a

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tyrannical father, even devouring its/his own children (1975: 7).47 The play’s pervasive theme of the destructive appetite of archetypal Kronos/ Time/history invites viewers to reconceptualize Greek foundational myths. Time as self-destructive Greek history has, through recent decades, devoured the country’s children: Greece is the sow that eats her own piglets. At stake is no longer the seamless progression of narrative time but time that runs its unchanging cycle and that repeats its pseudo-ritual act of annihilating its own. Ritual repetitions suspend linear time and re-create the cyclical time of a mythical given, even when the show pares down the mythical or the grand-historical taxonomy to the more ordinary and the quotidian. Nonlinear time also adds synchronic qualities to the play’s virtually diachronic Greek history. The production solves the problem of how natural or even illusory time is supposed to render historical time synchronic by exploiting the full potential of performance, which can draw all of history within a play’s symbolic reach. Unlike the strictly linear time of the modernist scenario of “progress,” Greece’s recurring history stresses analogies. The synchronic course of official Greek history had rendered one era’s triumph analogical to another’s, but smoothed over the particulars that affected the victims of subjugation. The recurrent patterns of victimization are, however, at the core of popular Greek history. But this history is not taught in schools and is therefore less well known. Kambanelles, however, trusts that, if a specific historical event remains incomprehensible, others of an inherently similar nature will make its meaning clear. If one crisis seems unsurpassable, others will prove that the Greek history of the people carries on. What could become a near-eschatological conception of Greek time, given these premises, turns into the playwright’s call for patience and resilience. “If you are Greeks and you pain for your country, don’t rush and you’ll understand it all,” urges the king, who opens the Kronos scene (Kambanelles 1975: 17). The Greek transitive phrase,      Æ, expresses more than the translation of “to pain for your country” or “to feel your country’s pain” can convey. It prepares the audience for what it will undergo in this performance. By the time the unconventional “comedy” draws to a close, Romios agrees that Greek history has been “our incurable national tragedy” (1975: 91). 47 Hager (2006: 246) and Pephanes (2005: 60, 61). Strictly speaking, Kambanelles blends the Titan Cronus, father of Zeus, with Chronos, Time, in a symbiosis that aptly serves the tenor of the play.

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The opening scenes employ powerful visual as well as verbal metaphors: devouring Time or cyclical Kronos himself is identified as one of the coiling snakes visible on the sidewalls. The king, the priest, and the official agent who introduce Kronos and together carry a large noose, which entraps the people, stand for the political, religious, and military powerholders, respectively. These character allegories are not lost on the audience, which picks up also on the double meaning of the Greek verb æ#ø (troo), “to eat” but also “to kill,” to “ruin,” or “destroy.” The club-bearing agent explains: “We have followed Kronos’ example: . . . whomever we cannot control, we eat” (Kambanelles 1975: 17). The three pillars of the Greek establishment, the king, the church, and the military, help to maintain Kronos’ reign, which has granted them special privileges and lets them abuse their power. They fear the young Zeus and the revolt that he is preparing against his tyrannical father. The priest does not hesitate to brand Zeus’ rebellion as an act of “disrespect” and “anarchy” (1975: 17). All three agree that they have to appease Kronos by feeding him more Greek blood, preferably the blood of poets, sages, democrats, martyrs, and other exemplary people. Kronos’ feeding frenzy will let them purge all subversive elements from Greek society (1975: 18). The powerhouses of Greece collude to destroy the country’s best and brightest. The next episode (Kambanelles 1975: 19–23) elaborates on Greek religion as a mechanism of power abuse, contrasting the show with the church-blessed spectacles of the dictators, whose various performances were never plainly secular. The new skit shows how agents of Philip of Macedon bribe the priests of the Delphic oracle to receive their desired outcome. Philip has also managed to install the high priest of his choice (1975: 19). This feat was another stab at the putschists, who replaced the archbishop of Athens with a new archbishop who was a known junta sympathizer and a militant anticommunist (Close 2002: 115; Gregoriades 1975: 1:115–118). Next, Philip schemes to replace the old Pythia with a new one whose oracle will favor his expansionist plans and will discredit Demosthenes, his archenemy, who is seeking to build a strong coalition of Greek forces to fight back.48 Romiaki plays the role of the new, drunk Pythia, who 48

Philip interfered in the affairs of the Amphictyony, or the council made up of representatives from several Greek city-states that controlled Delphi, its oracle, and its games. When the Third Sacred War came to a close in 346 bce, Philip was able to “take credit for the cessation of hostilities” (Dillon and Garland 2013: 517).

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gives Philip’s agents what they want. She makes a mockery of venerable traditions in this vignette depicting Greece’s religious system for sale and its classical age in shambles. Romios and Romiaki move back and forth between their actors’ parts and their roles as indignant observers of the quasi-historical scenes. They are always part of the dramatic illusion even when they set themselves apart from it. The political commentary they deliver as observers, however, sounds more “real” and “objective” and leaves the audience with the best possible impressions of the protagonists. Nearly all of their comments match the political convictions for which Kazakos and Kareze are known. For example, Romiaki at first refuses to play the role of the intoxicated Pythia, a role devoid of sympathy for the Greek opposition against Philip (Kambanelles 1975: 24). When she gives in, she lends the humor of incongruity to the scene because the public, aware of Kareze’s beliefs, expects her not to tolerate political maneuvering. Thus the persona that Kareze normally projects is perceived to be a genuine reflection of her political values. She plays the indignant young rebel with a verve that suggests that only a thin line separates her stage role from her offstage personality. Capitalizing on the certainty that her political persona is well known, Kareze can play a role contrary to her ideals, then revoke it on stage, and demand a part of integrity that is entirely hers. But all of this play-within-the-play and, specifically, these modes of commenting on the acts of others and one’s own still take place under varying conditions of dramatic make-believe. Nonetheless, such immediacies stir up audience members who may otherwise lack the incentive to break out of their conventional ways. After the events of November 1973, real life intruded upon the stage of Our Grand Circus and tested the projected sympathies of the actors and theater-goers for their validity. In the one and only scene that relates to the Byzantine millennium, a beggar exhibits the self-delusion of victims of the official propaganda mill (Kambanelles 1975: 24–27). He profusely praises the reign of Emperor Andronikos Komnenos, a late twelfth-century usurper of the throne of Alexios Komnenos who met his end in a violent popular uprising. The Greek public’s identification of the usurper with Papadopoulos is immediate (Pephanes 2005: 61; testimony by Tzoras, June 6, 2001). At the end of his monologue (Kambanelles 1975: 26–27), however, the beggar gives away his true motives for parroting the official line: only by extolling the emperor’s rule and character has he been able to beat the stiff competition of a multitude of other beggars,

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who also suffer but vent their bile. Because the naked truth “doesn’t move anybody,” our beggar hopes that his utopian tale will draw people’s attention (1975: 27). The truth of early 1970s Greece, too, is hidden behind a façade of fake happiness and prosperity, and it takes a beggar’s final act of self-refutation to demolish artificial constructs. The emperor-tyrant is neither heroic nor generous; in fact, the emperor doesn’t wear any clothes. Andronikos created an entire beggar class and started to sell off Constantinople to his “allies,” who rapidly intruded upon the city’s territory. Kambanelles prefigures the devastating Greek loss of Constantinople but remains interested, rather, in what goes on in the “down-times” of history, in the intervals between the big events or the watershed dates. His account of the hidden folds of history, of social history rooted in the seemingly insignificant mass of ordinary people, corresponds more closely to the experiences of his contemporaries. A trenchant record of human cost looms larger than the regime’s fixed record of victories, which systematically ignored personal events and especially personal losses. Kambanelles merely alludes to the four centuries of Turkish domination after 1453, just as he skipped the postclassical centuries of Greek submission to the Romans. His focus is less on the yoke that outside enemies have imposed on the Greeks and more on internal oppression. He highlights the various forms of humiliating submission into which Greeks have pushed fellow Greeks and also the conditions of foreign domination into which obsequious Greeks have let their lands slide. In Kambanelles’s view of recent history, the War of Independence of 1821 failed to liberate the average Greek, who had waged the revolutionary struggle at great personal cost. Here the play engages with modes of theater and methods of education that may reinforce or contradict one another. Romiaki firmly believes that she knows what 1821 stands for, because she has learned about it in school. Romios warns her that the Greek school version of history can be very far removed from the truth (Kambanelles 1975: 28). Romiaki retorts with a naïve comment that is clearly meant to state the exact opposite: “This is a theater, not a school! People have come to be entertained. Are we now going to give them a history lesson?” (1975: 28). Conservative critics questioned the producers’ vision of a past that would no longer be controlled by “patriotic” indoctrination via the Greek educational system. Solon Makres took issue with Kambanelles’s lack of endorsement for the traditional type of patriotism and lamented his “failure” to uphold a Greek race that “‘bestowed the light onto the

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known world,’ as our schoolteachers claim—and correctly so” (1973b: 1262). Significantly, Makres linked reactionary patriotism to established educational practices and conjured up the omnipresent didacticism of the regime. Kambanelles’s own approach to instruction reveals both progressive and conservative elements, which proves that his generation, too, has difficulty shaking off habit and tradition, even on a platform (re)presenting a new reading of the Greek past. Our Grand Circus is, on the one hand, a performative statement of doubt and contestation: the actors express and embody strong suspicions about the official discourse on Greek history, and they undermine the uncritical, pupil-like loyalties that the regime demands from its children/subordinates. On the other hand, the play’s dynamics of learning and teaching are not free from scholastic pedantry and moralizing didacticism, either. The short exchange cited earlier reveals how Romios, the older male interlocutor who acts with an air of self-importance, will teach his younger female sidekick and also the audience what “needs” to be taught and what needs to be omitted for being “dangerous,” “anti-Hellenic” knowledge. The production’s humor occasionally fools the viewer into forgetting that this, too, remains a didactic narrative and moral exposé (Georgousopoulos, To Vema, July 7, 1973; Kretikos, Akropolis, July 23, 1973). What was a unified struggle for liberation in 1821 (at least in Kambanelles’s brief depiction) is now open to manipulation: shifts in political power seem to allow for (even press for) shifts in moral categories. Even worse: the revolutionary spirit is vulnerable to discord and contamination spread by outside forces and their Greek collaborators (typically those who shy away from the actual fighting, Kambanelles 1975: 38–39) through the divisive strategies of favoritism and nepotism (1975: 35–36, 38). The production then skips ahead to the year 1833, when the Bavarian King Otto arrived in Greece only to be ousted about thirty years later (1975: 66). The king turns the hard-won benefits of all free Greeks into “special favors” (rousphetia) for select local leaders, while he imprisons or eliminates others (1975: 28–36, 38, 45). His courtiers and those of subsequent foreign-imported royal families are equally depraved: they haughtily turn ordinary Greeks into servants and—quite literally—porters of their effete bodies (1975: 37–44). Only a few Greeks refuse to yield to the hollow ambitions of the upstart ruling classes. Our Grand Circus notes various state efforts to disarm or “emasculate” deserving Greek heroes whose muscle and musket won

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the War of Independence but who have now become burdensome and “superfluous” (1975: 38), because they cannot or will not be absorbed into the new sociopolitical order dominated by the foreign dynasties. First, the long-skewed machinery of Greek justice prepares to decapitate those Greek leaders who refuse to accept the status quo. The sinister state system upholds “justice” against these “troublemakers” with the help of a “great gift” from its French allies: a guillotine on wheels, which, like Kronos, keeps demanding its fodder (1975: 45–47). But this guillotine may well be a curse worse than Kronos because it symbolizes foreign interference with the local justice system, itself a willing executioner. The production finds its perhaps most memorable performance in the guillotine’s silent parade across the stage.49 The iconic image of the conveniently mobile guillotine conjures up the gruesome reality of the dictatorship’s widespread terror and retaliation. Another, ironic “solution” to the pesky problem of the unwanted fighters of old is to retire them as statues. Kolokotrones, who was imprisoned by King Otto’s administration, complains onstage that he, too, has been reduced to a statue, a disingenuous memorial to an incarnation of patriotism that is no longer valued (1975: 60–64). Erecting statues in honor of heroes like Kolokotrones is a clever way to confine them to past history and to literally set them aside, lost in the hustle and bustle of Athens: his immobilized statue stands in front of the Old Parliament building off Stadiou Street. Kambanelles mocks the officials’ propensity to honor a monument or memory rather than pay tribute to a living person (Karampetsos 1979: 211; Pephanes 2005: 62). This time-hallowed modus operandi keeps heroes in check, renders the populace content, and leaves the ruling class in power. The indomitable Greek fighters and their Romioi, however, have been robbed of their Revolution. Greek liberty has become a specious name for a new kind of oppression. Our Grand Circus drives home, nonetheless, that the frustrated “epic” of 1821 has created a near-mythic tradition of 49 Kalkane, Apogeumatine, July 23, 1973. According to Foucault, the guillotine was first deployed in 1792 (1995: 13). Dorovines testifies to the guillotine’s use in Greece after 1833 and through the first decades of the 20th century (1981: 1461–1462, with reference to the penal law of December 18, 1833). He also stresses ordinary Greeks’ association of the guillotine with Otto’s reign and with non-Greek executioners. Benveniste (1994) treats the Greek penal system of the 19th century emphasizing juvenile delinquency. I thank Leonidas Cheliotis for his help tracking down the relevant sources (email communication of July 23, 2012).

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dogged resistance so powerful that it should cause concern to the Colonels, who keep branding leftist remembrances and reincarnations of the Revolution as subversive.50 The scene of the Third of September recovered an instance from the official line of hegemonic forgetting, not remembering (Kambanelles 1975: 49–58). The skit, which became one of the most popular in the play’s history, staged the decades-long enslavement of Greece to its foreign “allies” and “protectors,” England, France, Russia, and Austria. The coup of September 3, 1843, undertaken by Greek army officers and politicians with popular support, forced King Otto to finally grant the first constitution, which transformed Greece into a parliamentary democracy. But the king recoiled, tried to manipulate the new constitution, and forbade that the date of the uprising be celebrated as a national holiday. The production’s bold showing of the people’s clamoring for a constitution conveyed that the Greeks of 1973 were ready to rise up again and demand the full restoration of their constitutional rights (testimony by Kambanelles, June 15, 2001). Adding insult to injury, the junta regime had a highly authoritarian constitution ratified in a September 1968 plebiscite held under martial law, the results of which most Greeks considered to be fraudulent. Also, by stressing the absence of a national holiday celebrating the original constitution, the episode responded to the Colonels’ imposition of the new national holiday of April 21 honoring their “Revolution.” The actors of Our Grand Circus unfolded banners that cried out “Freedom,” “Constitution,” “September 3, 1843,” and “The Nation’s representatives in the palace,” as if they were taking part in an actual political rally (Mackridge, unpublished MS, 11). Some of those banners came with the connotations of popular Greek protests and leftist demands of the past decades: “The people win” (ˇ ºÆ ØŒ, associated with World War II liberation and resistance) and “Voice of the people, ire of God,” a common Greek expression denoting a justified popular outcry (ø ºÆ , æª ¨ ; also “The people’s voice equals God’s rage,” as per Kornetis 2013: 188). Other placards, such as “Foolish arrogance” (`˝ˇ˙˙ —¯ˇ'`), could not have been more current. Thus recognizable historical scenes endowed more recent and contemporary events with meaning and purpose. 50 The three-volume series entitled 1821 and the Truth (1971–1977, in Greek), written by Giannes Skarimbas, originated in this ideological standoff. See further Karamanolakes (2012: 113, 116–117).

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The following satirical dialogue, in which no Greek voice or viewpoint is heard, shows how the Great Powers decide on matters as weighty as the granting of the first constitution to the Greeks. The absurdist scene lambastes the hypocrisies of government depicting the constitution-granting process as a sardonic plot hatched by the superpowers’ ambassadors, who merely refer to the Greeks in the third-person plural and to the constitution with the bland “it”: English [Ambassador] Should they have a constitution or should they not have one? . . . French [Amb.] Since they never had it, why should they have it [now]? . . . English [Amb.] Those who have it will lure them along! French [Amb.] They don’t compare to those who have it! Russian [Amb.] I know of others who don’t have it either! Austrian [Amb.] What they have should suffice them! . . . French [Amb.] What will they do with it once they have it? . . . English [Amb.] They’re not mature enough to have it! French [Amb.] They’re too immature to have it! Russian [Amb.] For their own good, let them not have it! Austrian [Amb.] They are not allowed to have it. English [Amb.] We decide that they will not have it? The Others That they will not have it! ... English [Amb.] French [Amb.] Russian [Amb.] Austrian [Amb.] English [Amb.] French [Amb.] Russian [Amb.] Austrian [Amb.] English [Amb.] French [Amb.] Russian [Amb.] Austrian [Amb.]

And if they insist on having it? Because, from the looks of it, they will [eventually] have it! Where they’ve arrived now, they will have it! How will we accept that they have it? Do you see a way in which they would not have it? If they were to have it without having it? What do you mean, have it—not having it?! If they were to think that they have it, while in reality they do not have it? If they were to believe that they have it, then they could just as well not have it! They will be delighted to have it, but we will know that they do not have it. Thus they will have it without having it, and they won’t have it while having it. Do we decide that they may have it?

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If we prevent them from having it, then we risk that they [end up] having it. The only way for them not to have it, is that we allow them to have it. Just look at all that they do not have! That’s what we allowed them to have! Since we will allow them to have it, let’s see now who will have it. Can there be any question? We will!

(Kambanelles 1975: 55–56)

Devoid of ethical standards, the ambassadors conclude that their respective governments can have the best of both worlds if they bestow only a seemingly democratic constitution on Greece, one that will not jeopardize the domestic and international status quo. In Kambanelles’s view, Greece has seen one predatory set of politicians after another since the days of the Great Powers’ patronage, and the American-backed Papadopoulos regime has been the latest one to undermine the constitution. The “diplomatic” exchange of the foreign ambassadors resembles a protracted act of haggling by commercial brokers selling off Greece’s autonomy and integrity. The diplomats’ highly imitative language obfuscates the meaning of words and proves utterly noncommittal: when one of them introduces a “new” idea, which is merely a twist on an old idea, the others run with it. Diplomatic decision-making amounts to a cavalier process of testing the other parties’ superficial sympathies. The interests of the Great Powers themselves are at stake and should not be shaken to advance Greece. The true meaning of constitutional freedoms falls on deaf ears. Meanwhile, however, a group of Greek protesters on the front stage has been observing the connivers standing on the platform opposite. The audience is exposed to two simultaneous interpretations of the same historical event and can draw informed conclusions (Hager 2008: 213). The foreign ambassadors agree that the Greeks do not deserve a constitution because they are not “mature” enough to handle full democratic liberties. This excuse of the Greeks’ “immaturity” recalls Papadopoulos’s phony rationale for refusing to hold free elections and for failing to restore other important articles of the constitution. Our Grand Circus satirizes foreign stakeholders but also the Colonels who claim to “educate” the Greek people following a humiliating pedagogical line: the common Greeks have to first

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behave better before receiving their “rewards.” This carrot-and-stick principle strikes home that the average Greek has remained an unprotected subject in a poorly functioning parliamentary democracy. Some of the final scenes of Our Grand Circus take the public back into the iconic world of Greek popular culture, such as that of Karaghiozis, the quintessential underdog who embodies the hardy spirit of the much-afflicted Greek populace (Kambanelles 1975: 68–76). The actors here mock contemporary situations while they play the stock-in-trade characters of the shadow theater and speak in the typical drawn-out declamation style of the genre (Ang. [Angelomates], Hestia, June 30, 1973). With Karaghiozis, they turn themselves into the puppets of history for dramatic effect. Some of these figures, however, are so burlesqued that they become the less credible foils of an inauthentic popular tradition of nostalgia. Opposed to them stand the self-styled Greek aristocrats, whom Kambanelles calls “capital-dwellers” (proteuousianoi) and whose Kathareuousa language he parodies. Scores of simple Greeks, however, are bedazzled by this lazy aristocracy, which craves the luxuries of Western Europe and apes its fashions. Some fall for the hubris of these uppercrusty Greeks, who dangerously romanticize the 1897 war against the Turks. The “fake knights” or “pseudo-knights” (pseuto-hippotes, Kambanelles 1975: 77) rush into war as if it were an excursion, but thereby send legions of lower-class breadwinners to their deaths and ruin the country financially (1975: 77–84). The scene’s opening and closing song presents war as an aristocratic sport but also takes the edge off the class struggle: They polished their buttons, they made their stripes shine. And they went for a walk with their cannons (1975: 84).

An interlude called “Ta Venizelika” has the Cretan politician Eleutherios Venizelos silently walk out along the platform (1975: 85–86). For some, he gave all to the fight against the Greek oligarchy and monarchy of the early years of the twentieth century, only to be dislodged by the resentment of an ungrateful nation. Even though the production presents Venizelos as a pillar of Greek history and situates him in the popular tradition of 1821, his appearance is not one of imposing theatrics but rather of contemplation (Pephanes 2004–2005: 287). Peter Mackridge, who attended one of the 1973

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outdoor performances, testifies to the remarkable impression made by this “extraordinary ‘apotheosis’ of Venizelos, in which the actor . . . dressed and made up as Venizelos simply walked out silently, stood for a few moments, then exited, accompanied by extended and rapturous applause” (testimonies of October 9, 2002 and July 14, 2006). A song of hope addressed to Venizelos follows, in a show of (somewhat uncritical) hero worship (Mackridge, unpublished MS, 10).51 The scene called “The Uprooting,” however, confronts the spectators with the failure of Venizelos’s Great Idea: after the Smyrna Disaster of 1922, the ethnic Greek populations of Asia Minor had to leave for an uncertain future in Greece (Kambanelles 1975: 87–89). Here the dialogue and songs are interspersed with short but effective reports in the form of announcements by the Red Cross. These reports, which the Greek radio still regularly featured through the junta years (testimony by Mackridge, July 14, 2006), relate the messages of people who lost loved ones in the traumatic exodus from Asia Minor. They express how individuals keep clinging to the faint chance of finding missing relatives even half a century later. Like nonillusionistic Brechtian glosses, these broadcasts comment on events whose historicity is still palpable. The messages personalize the many victims’ ordeals and make history less of a leader-centered or androcentric enterprise. Hardly any traces of women’s trials have been inscribed in Kambanelles’s scenes up until this point. Here, however, women and children do exist paradoxically for being among the missing persons listed by the Red Cross. The concluding episode entitled “The Victory Songs” shows the startling scene of a Nazi execution of Greek patriots (Kambanelles 1975: 91–94). Masked Greek traitors or turncoats who informed against resistance fighters are seen dancing amid their lifeless bodies (1975: 92). In protest, Romios frees a prisoner and together they head for the mountains, the site of the Greek guerrilla operations that targeted the Nazi occupiers of 1941–1944 and subsequently the reactionary Right of the Civil War. Romiaki voices the hope that the Greeks will rise again to the sound of the old drum of the Revolution, in whose sacrifice the resistance shared. She places the 51

The renewed interest in Venizelos around 1970 did not go unnoticed. According to “Y.” [Alexandros Xydes], lay and academic discussions were ongoing, not only on the topic of foreign interference in Greek politics, but also about Venizelos’s courageous struggle against the royalist elite (New York Review of Books, May 21, 1970, 27).

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heroism that the combatants of the Greek resistance displayed on a par with that of the fighters and martyrs of 1821. Domestic as well as foreign reactionary forces, however, have discredited and executed members of both groups, whether by means of the guillotine or by the firing squad. The leftist resistance ideology provocatively posits its own historical genealogy under a dictatorship that perpetuates Nazistyle repression. Romiaki is convinced that the revolutionary embers can be rekindled and that the resistance against the current oppressors will grow (Hager 2006: 250, 252). The segment’s silence about the (still controversial) Civil War, however, is deafening. Romiaki here realizes her full potential as an independent individual. Kareze’s words and actions approximate the Left’s statements and beliefs so closely that it is difficult to separate the voice of her person from that of her persona. “Something is happening,” she shouts (Kambanelles 1975: 93), and her call turns into a battle cry spurring awareness and action. Our Grand Circus ends with the rehearsal of revolution: the consecutive scenes of the virtue of resistance infuse the Greeks with a renewed revolutionary identity and incite them to fight the dictatorship. The entire company (including the executed patriots who rise again) joins in a powerful closing song carrying the popular demonstration on stage—a blueprint for a possible protest beyond the theater once people shake off fear: ¸Æ Å ŒłÅ ºº  ŒçºØ,52 Å åØ ØÆ  ç æ ŒçºØ, Ø Æª#  åØ ŒØ % çº  ÆÆ  åı Æ % øçº. ¸Æ Å ŒłÅ ºº  ŒçºØ, ç , ÆæÅ  æÆ ªæçØ  ı ŒØ 

åÆæ ’   ı Å ºıæØ ŒæÆ. (1975: 94) People, don’t bend your head any longer, no longer spend the night in fear, the struggles you have waged do not avail you if they don’t pay off the blood that you have poured. People, don’t bend your head any longer, fear is a coward’s black fate, joy goes to him who holds on to freedom.

52 Popular songs and slogans prefer the word laos, the Left’s word for the “people,” over the choice of ethnos, which the regime adopted.

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This theater reaches its apogee in a direct call to resistance. It presents itself as a revolutionary history of the nation and co-opts its public in the search to comprehend the power of historical representation. The agitprop components serve a vital function and persistently question the official narrative, but without reducing the desired popular revolution to a mere spectacle. If there is one inappropriately titled “revolution,” it must be the one proclaimed by the dictators. Our Grand Circus metaphorically brings the current rulers to judgment before the people’s tribunal formed by the audience. Not surprisingly, the subsequent uprising at the Polytechnic University made the play’s call to arms (re)appear in the context of growing, militant public unrest. Also, the show fell victim to the regime’s retaliation, a process that the playwright, actors, and spectators underwent experientially as well as politically.

The Polytechnic, November 1973: Showdown and Regrouping «ˇ æÆŪ»,  ı ºØ Å ˆØƪØ, «ƺ  Å Å ¯ºº%Æ». ÆÇ ÆØ  æÆŪ Æ ıªıæÇØ Å ¯ºº%Æ ŒÆØ Æ ÇØ ˚æØ ı ŒÆØ ˚ıæ Æ ıææØÆ. “The General,” Grandmother says, “restored order in Greece.” I imagine the General tidying up Greece, putting Gentlemen and Ladies in drawers. (Margarita Karapanou, Kassandra and the Wolf, 1976a: 8. Trans. Nikos C. Germanacos: Karapanou 1976b: 5) The tyrant [Papadopoulos] has fallen. Time for tyranny to fall. (Nikos Psaroudakes 1975: 15)

When the uprising of November 1973 at the Polytechnic University threatened the Colonels’ rule, Kareze and Kazakos shared in the outpouring of popular sympathy for the students who declared a free Greece in the university buildings they kept occupied. Other actors, too, went to show their support and several theaters closed down in solidarity (Kotanidis 2011: 424, 428, 431, 495). The ideological affinities between the production of Our Grand Circus and the student and youth movement grew increasingly obvious: both pursued a radical break with the authoritarian past and voiced a revolutionary message of hope, expressed in the main slogan of November 1973, “Bread, Education, Freedom” ('!, —`˜¯`, ¯¸¯¨¯`).

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The students demonstrating in the university’s courtyard further used slogans and banners that had been designed for the production of Our Grand Circus at the Athenaion Theater, which was only a few blocks away from the protests.53 Thus they took the play’s (literal) language and ethos with them to the new theater of revolution—a revolution seen through a prism akin to that of the stage. Our Grand Circus was the “happening” or the event-theater that reflected most closely the political scene of those turbulent mid-November days (testimony by Maria Vouyouka-Sereti, July 27, 2011, among many other informants). As the Colonels crushed the student uprising, they tightened censorship regulations and closed down many theaters for at least one week. Their retaliation against the show and its cast followed without delay: Kareze was arrested and held for several days by the Special Interrogation Section of the Military Police, which also slapped the company with severe sanctions.54 Various administrative departments and offices joined together to cut the production of Our Grand Circus by half.55 In this drastic second round of cuts, they slashed those historical vignettes that most openly raised the demand for political liberty and autonomy, that is, most of the ancient through early nineteenth-century scenes. What riled the censors, in particular, was the play’s frank presentation of the historical continuity of unfreedom. The curtailed playscript retained the skits with the guillotine, the foreign diplomats debating the granting of the Greek constitution, some lines from the scenes with Karaghiozis and the pseudoaristocrats, the parade of Venizelos, the Red Cross announcements pertaining to the Smyrna Disaster, and the finale of World War II resistance, betrayal, and rehabilitation. Thus the purview of the 53 Hager (2008: 200, 214) and Kornetis (2006: 237–238). Kambanelles’s foresight also showed in a comment made by the statue of Kolokotrones (Dionyses Papagiannopoulos), pointing to the university buildings up the block from Stadiou Street: “This palace will one day destroy the other one” («Æı  ƺØ ØÆ æÆ ŁÆ çÅ  ºº », Kambanelles 1975: 60). The demonstrations at the University of Athens Law School had taken place four months before the show’s opening, and they prepared the ground for the Polytechnic uprising. “The contributors to the production picked up on the subversive pulse and reinforced it,” states Anna Mauroleon (2012). 54 See Kotanidis (2011: 421) and the anonymous NYT articles of November 24 and December 15, 1973. 55 The tape provided by the Akropol Theater management allowed me to estimate by how much Kambanelles’s playscript was reduced. The salvos of applause audible on the tape make plain how well the audience still responded to the butchered play.

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show’s popular Greek history shifted to postrevolutionary and twentieth-century events and to the more serious segments (Hager 2006: 249–250). To compensate for the loss in performance time, the producers amplified the songs and relied on allusions that spoke to the public’s sentiment and memory. Song and dance, too, had long been the more emotional markers of the struggle for liberation. Kareze and Kazakos had commissioned Nikos Xyloures, the leftwing Cretan lyra-player and beloved “bard” and palikari, to contribute his talents to the show, singing the lyrics of Kambanelles to the music of Stauros Xarchakos. Many of the play’s tunes are simple and have the ring of folk songs to them, and they became instant hits (Pephanes 2004–2005: 259, 274–291, 327). This body of songs of Our Grand Circus grew in importance as a running political commentary, which was easily channeled into ideological dissidence. Thus the show’s new run, which was staged under stricter censorship conditions but before theater-goers in the know, was, if anything, more successful (Hager 2006: 251–252; 2008: 213–214). The strength of the production’s suspense factor, which previously derived from the heterogeneous choices and treatments of episodes, now lay in the public’s curiosity about what content remained. Also, the play still expressed its makers’ drive to discredit official agendas and to demythify schoolbook Greek history. The slim script of a show that had been the talk of the town now functioned as a pars pro toto, a part that spoke for its totality, with theater-goers filling each other in. Thus the case of Our Grand Circus represents a failed kind of retroactive censorship and exposes the self-defeating nature of such action. The spectators interpreted all possible remarks about oppression as allusions to Greece’s predicament and also to the recent acts of retaliation. Kambanelles himself testified that his history of Greece continued to get its message across but now in a contagious atmosphere of conspiratorial euphoria (1975: 7). He also recalled that young theater-goers started asking not simply for tickets but for “tickets to freedom” (Kornetis 2013: 188). Because the play had never operated on a factual framework or on a conventional historical periodization, it could more freely stir memories and emotions, and the boundaries between them became more porous. The actors criticized loudly, confided whisperingly, and turned the performance into a cri de cœur. Our Grand Circus had begun to express concrete resistance when the actors and audience members of the stage had become actors and

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supporters in front of the Polytechnic’s gates and when political sanctions had become sanctions against the theater. Also, performance could oppose more efficaciously once it better understood the dangers as well as the possibilities. Our Grand Circus was effective metatheatrically because of the mobilizing strategies that the actors devised to communicate with growing audiences for whom they continued to produce meaningful drama in the face of overwhelming difficulties. Its actors and spectators had done some of the grassroots work in advance of the standoff at the Polytechnic but, with the same players acting onstage and offstage, the standoff led to the show’s renewal and radicalization in the weeks following the dramatic turn of events. By trampling the popular mobilization, the regime rendered the actors’ old roles more political as well. The viewers’ experience, too, became that of a more participatory performance. Viewing was political, and the play was no longer a mere performance but became a true revolutionary event. Georgios Anastasiades ascertains that the Greeks cast their “popular vote” every day by attending Our Grand Circus (2001: 40). To participate was the political act of the concerned citizen. Play watching was partaking in a communal, electrifying experience with actors who were visibly ensconced in the lives of their spectators and openly identified with the man and woman in the street. When theater let the offstage discourse burst onto the stage, spectators could reflect on how to overcome their powerlessness and become empowered agents, even if only for the duration of the performance. The show’s enticing ethos no longer resulted from make-believe but amounted to the sum of all participants’ experiences and contributions. Audiences flocked to see the curtailed play and to show sympathy for Kareze (Hager 2006: 252, 253). The agitated presence of many admirers made for performances riveting with emotional swings. The thrill of theater-goers discovering just how many people shared similar convictions made the political front of Our Grand Circus grow even more manifest (testimony by Tzoras, June 6, 2001). The mobilizing techniques of Kazakos and especially Kareze explain how the production could hold an extraordinary appeal for a subordinated people, even when it routinely passed up opportunities to deepen its analysis of history and revolution. But popular(ized) theater may indeed be the louder form of popular resistance. A number of questions, problems, and contradictions nag at accounts such as Our Grand Circus, which are weighed down by

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polarities and emotions. Strong partisanship inevitably reduced characters and nuances. Because no characters, except for the protagonists, were on stage long enough to register a detailed ideological position, the viewers were often left with a mere superficial understanding of contexts and motivations. Kambanelles, Kazakos, and Kareze stacked the cards very heavily against anyone other than the victims who were, by definition, the lowly and the downtrodden. Their show’s plot overlapped with history’s plotting against the well-meaning Greek people who have long been victimized by foreign powers and imposed regimes. The producers impaled the high and mighty and tried to score easy sympathy points—which must raise concerns about historical sloppiness. If the Colonels’ nationalist history resulted from the acts of “great” Greek men, then the people’s history of Our Grand Circus resulted—somewhat naïvely—from the repressive actions of evil men, Greeks and foreigners alike. The makers of the show replicated this one-dimensional patterning in the heroic narratives about their own “good guys” and, by inculpating “historically guilty” parties anew, underestimated the intelligence of many viewers. Here the production lost much of the subtle emotive quality that distinguishes art from propaganda. Despite its keen sense of unrequited injustice and unsettled scores, Our Grand Circus offered up only tales of victimization and never a specific tale of revenge. This encouraged the spectators to see the entire play as an act of vindication by those whose liberty had been trampled upon by obscurantist forces. Kambanelles chafed at the impossibility of Greek history’s “defeated” to present their own take on the past (testimony of June 15, 2001). In its sharp condemnation of official history, however, Our Grand Circus made the pendulum swing in the opposite direction. Its all-in-one plot recognized only one historical continuity: the constant given that ordinary people and even victorious fighters would be robbed of the gains of the struggle for freedom; only the rich and powerful have reaped those advantages to the full. The Greek War of Independence, which should have brought permanent liberation, deteriorated into a sequence of foreign and domestic subjugations for the underprivileged to suffer. Desolation, poverty, and social injustice became the invisible protagonists of a play that urged the masses of the have-nots to resist any further exploitation. This message survived even the second round of the censors’ cuts; it was validated by the regime’s sanctions and replicated itself under the blows of power abuses. As the makers of Our Grand

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Circus raised the veil on political machinations and social derelictions, they proposed a rather vague classless humanism but stopped short of calling for new societal structures that would address inequities and demolish the old class system. Their play is, from beginning to end, the staging of a people’s history that did not have to be— which is where the real but extreme tragedy lies.

CONCLUSION: HISTORY AS CREED, HISTORY AS ACTIVISM Among so many metastasizing Dictatorships the few bright and courageous spirits Are like desperate cells At the foothills of Cancer (Theodosis Athas, Fragmenta. Trans. Theony Condos 2007: 156)

This chapter has examined how the Greek dictatorship exploited history and theater and how theater’s counteroffensive presented its own “usable past” (in the apt phrase of Brown and Hamilakis 2003). The Colonels stage-managed the grand Greek historical narrative as theater and showcased a canon of historical reenactments in massive open-air spectacles. This theater of indoctrination shored up the regime’s nationalist and “messianic” mission by providing templates of competition, combat, leadership, and ultimate victory. The dictators militarized and politicized performance at large and called for military-style discipline, in particular, in order to halt (rumored) communist threats and to reverse perceived signs of decay in Greek society. Their investment in self-aggrandizing festivals raised questions about the phenomenon of power enamored with history, mass spectacle, military uniforms, and other symbols, all of which were meant to inspire obedient submission and monolithic interpretation. School education was another arena of choice: it, too, had to generate the fixed patterns of thinking that reinforced the government line and that left no room for considering causality in history. If spectacle was the regime’s preferred platform for disseminating nationalist history, education was the vehicle for standardizing it. The junta’s normative parading of military feats and of subjects’ duties found its equivalent

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in the tight state control of education. Ubiquitous uniforms gave expression to the regime’s desired uniformity of thought and action—in the ideal image of an orderly (or soldierly) body politic. The Colonels’ “Truth” was codified through the festivals, the media, and education, which had to muster up approval and cohesion. But the dramatic pretense of a rule representative of a heroic and immortal Greece failed to provide sufficient philosophical content or form. To establish itself on firmer moral grounds, the regime also tapped other available symbolic and popular paradigms. It tried to fill its ideological void with the slogans of jingoistic patriotism, for instance. The myth of timeless Greek continuity, which affirmed that history’s “fundamental constants [we]re struggle, sacrifice, victory” (in Connerton’s words, 1989: 42–43), was persuasive to some. Generally speaking, however, the clichéd historical reenactments failed to rekindle an exhausted master narrative, or masters’ narrative, despite the resources that were lavished on them. The frequency, too, with which the junta festivals were repeated on contrived anniversaries degraded history and brought it down to the stage of serial reproduction, to a group ritual of docile masses applauding the state’s guiding fictions, accompanied by the effects of visual and verbal pyrotechnics. The historical reenactments represented just one facet of the proliferation of hegemonic performances in Greece’s political life under the dictatorship; yet they were among the most carefully fabricated public rites. Stagecraft, however, could not substitute for statecraft. The Colonels promulgated the ethno-historical nation and its mission and represented the Greek body politic to itself, that is, to crowds produced by any means. In their paternalistic thinking, however, they mistook a performance in a stadium with mass attendance for an event for the masses or of the masses. The regime’s program for grandiose theatrics of history to illuminate national myths before a civic body was deeply flawed. Also, the ceremoniousness with which the dictators conducted their festivals belied any genuine attempt to rouse the crowds to actively participate in shaping Greek history. The soldier/actors who appeared before mass audiences were no longer individual figures but stood for generations of obedient Greeks. Their dramatic function was to prepare the stage for the true “heroes,” the “nation-saving” leaders, who pursued a populist and elongated historical perspective. The thrill of Greece’s history of victories had to stir the properly “spontaneous” enthrallment with the regime’s recent

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“triumph.” The historical army leaders stood proxy for the Colonels in their victory. This theater of cartoonish reenactments, however, was a desperate expression of what the dictators were really seeking: a place on the podium of Greek winners. But they lost the ideological contest before they lost the real test. Dialectically opposed to the dictatorship’s crude militarism stood the production of Our Grand Circus and its promotion of popular history as an ideological and militant force. The 1973 show demonstrated how knowledge of the people’s past was crucial to comprehend the Greek social fabric and how it could serve to regain political freedom. The play dramatized the close relationship that the average Greeks enjoy with “their” history, the clashes between vernacular memory and official discourse, individual and group identities, and oral and written records. Harnessing public outcry about the regime’s gaudy appropriation of the Greek past, Our Grand Circus marked the ways in which early 1970s stage practitioners had started to rethink Greek theater’s mission, methods, and innovations. The last category entailed the mobilizing functions of the stage as well as the liberal incorporation of performance techniques from the revue, the Brechtian theater, the Theater of the Absurd, and from other recent modern Greek plays. By late 1973, too, the Greek public was keen to see tragicomic, philosophical, and existentialist reflections performed with all the directness that the popular stage could offer—reflections on the people’s historical vicissitudes, on prolonged sociopolitical conflict, and also on the official negation of such conflict. Kambanelles, Kareze, and Kazakos created a leftist ideological genealogy out of historical vignettes of continuing hardship and persistent lack of freedom, which became palpable on stage in agitprop-like skits alternating with more contemplative pieces. Their show became a long-awaited stage celebration of Romiosyne or, given the locale of the absurd circus in which Romios and Romiaki barely survive, a catharsis of the pain of Romiosyne. Like a Karaghiozis show, the production reveled in its love for Romaic detail, which ranged from the picturesque and ethnographic to the partisan and populist. Occasionally, however, Our Grand Circus slipped into self-indulgent melodrama and turned oppression into a spectacle of its own (Georgousopoulos, To Vema, July 7, 1973; Kretikos, Akropolis, July 23, 1973). Therefore, the production’s communal and political experience was far more important and memorable than its aesthetic value.

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The carnivalesque of Our Grand Circus translated aesthetics into politics and filled the metaphor of the play’s title with meaning and content. Also, the play’s arena of Greek social history offered up an ironic mirror to the Colonels’ “bread and circuses.” Kambanelles reclaimed the power of history-writing and re-presented heroes and events that the regime had already written, performed, and fixed in its own definitions. The nationalist “saviors” of the junta spectacles had been the great Greek men of mythical through modern battles. Our Grand Circus looked for the simple survivors of Greek history and myth—for Kronos’ victims, not for Achilles’ victories. The play restored ordinary Greek people to the collective memory as history’s forgotten heroes (with no questions asked about the veracity of some segments). It told stories of self-sacrifice and resilience that would never have entered the master narrative. Emperor Andronikos Komnenos was not the one to eulogize Byzantine history but a plain beggar was—and he promptly turned his praise inside out. The show presented Venizelos as a silent character, but let Kolokotrones’s statue and the antiheroic Karaghiozis make public statements. It recalled the deeds and words of those who defied subjugation. To the hegemonic parades, Our Grand Circus responded with a parading of the guillotine (a perversion of a public monument for the dead), which deflated official rhetoric and exposed historical absurdities. Even matters as crucial to domestic politics as the granting of a first constitution or the choice of a new king were colonized by the Great Powers, who continued to exploit the Greeks’ frustrated aspirations to freedom. While targeting oppressors, the show also repeatedly struck home that social issues had not yet exhausted their momentum. The seemingly topical but never innocent skits had spectators grapple with unsettling problems that continued to defy closure. The play’s popular history strongly suggested that the neglect of social issues had been at the root of Greece’s political problems all along. Also, the call for a combined front against the regime might still be muted by lingering social divides. To dispel that danger, the production conjured up an image of civic unity that was perhaps idealized. It assumed broad common ground among Greek citizens; but firming up this common ground among the presumed like-minded was precisely the show’s task. Early segments of Our Grand Circus noted obsessive cycles from which the Greeks were unable to break free. The play’s finale, however, no longer presented a people’s tragedy as inexorable: it resisted the rationale that the events

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depicted occurred naturally and predictably, as in the regime’s master narrative of glorious and predestined continuity. The producers’ hope was to develop a relevant and revelatory history of a new Greek future. Our Grand Circus rewrote Greek history, untold Greek history, in skeptical and anti-authoritarian terms that thwarted the Colonels’ dogmatic discourse and their essentialist version of Greek continuity. The play confidently positioned itself at the center of a newly defined patriotic theater. It extolled the value of heroic patriotism as an ideal to which the Romioi Greeks had contributed most. Patriotism had been the prerogative of the dictators and their supporters, as per their rhetorical claims. Kambanelles’s notion of the patriotic hero was shaped more by the hero’s moral and societal relevance than by his political or military standing. The playwright gave the revolutionary movements of the honorable but defeated a new heroic-patriotic identity and incorporated them into cyclical, subjective, and relativizing time. His work helped to establish the pedigree of the Left’s ideology and defined anew, in philosophical rather than pragmatic terms, the concepts of victory and defeat. For Kambanelles, the continuous structure of this radical history transcended the ostensibly disparate facts. Virtually discontinuous fragments of history and patterns of victimization made up a new continuity, not of the fetish of glory but of loss. The unending non-epic of the nation is a continuity to which no nationalist myth-making ever turns. Official history is exposed as a perfunctory illusionism that must be exorcized by a more germane act of illusion: theatrical performance. Theatrical performance, however, cannot be trusted entirely when it claims to set the historical record straight. Besides, reducing nationalized history to falsehood might imply that there is a single, “correct” version of the past. The danger still looms large that history may no longer represent what actually happened, only what may be revealed and what may presently be embraced. However, in confronting the dictators, Our Grand Circus did speak the truth: the regime was merely the last installment of a long and now unraveling continuity of oppression. For sharpening the thematics of militancy, the play gained the significance of a revolutionary manifesto.

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POSTSCRIPT You need a sense of humor to live in a state like this. (Anonymous)

The last and lighter word of this chapter must go to Paul Nord, journalist, satirist, and revue-playwright (pseudonym for Nikos Nikolaïdes, 1899–1981). After the coup, Nord went into self-exile in the United States, where he had lived for many years before as well. He contributed strong anti-junta writings to the Greek-American press and wrote the satirical poem Aphrodyssey, A Sexual Odyssey, in late 1969 through early 1970: ˚Æd #æÆ, łº, t, ! FÆ  ı, Æ ŒÆØ æØÆ ( O%ØÆ ŒÆd H «I%Øæ ø I%æH» a ŁÅ ’ Içæ %ØÆ56 ...   ı ( ¯ f  f Kı ˇ æ ı ŒÆd —Ø%æ ı ŒÆd  ØÅb ØŒææ ı, º ı ı ŒØ’ Iæ ı –   ı H a ŒÆçæÆ ºª Ø IææøÅ Ø MºŁØ Ø IØøÆØŒ d ŒÆd ƒ ºØªø Ø ¸Æ%%,  f ªºøÆ ¼ æ Ø ŒÆd ıºı Ø, a º ı  ŒØ’ ¼æå  a ª ı Iºı Ø  F Œæ ı  f çı ÇøE I’ ‹Æ ºıŁæ#ŁÅŒ I’ e Çıªe e  æŒØŒ ŒØ’ Iø ÆæÆ%ŁÅŒ H «çغºº ø» æ ÆH a åØÆ a ªÆła ŒÆd «)Ø ŒØ’ )Ø» %ØÆØ E, X Ø «Œ -d, Œ -» ... ˚Ø’ KH ƒ ÆæØ% Œź Ø غ F ªØ’ IæåÆEÆ ŒºÅ Æ a  ŁÅ  ı " ŒÆæ%Øa ÆæÇÆØ ŒÆd ŒºÆØ. A, øØ , łød ŒØ’ KºØ, çA Œ¼Æ Œæ%Ø, çA ºØªŒØ ˙æ%  , ºØªŒØ ¨ ıŒı%%Å ... å æA b . . . «! ºg ºÆ» ŒÆd b a › æØÆ )Å ŒÆd  åÆź , çºıŒ FØ ŒÆd ƺØ. !Ł a å æÆ  åÆ b a ØÆ – ŒØ’ r  ƒ Iæb  F ‚ººÅ : ˛ºªøÆ ŒØ’ KªŒæØÆ!

56 The adjective aphrodisios is typically used in conjunction with nosema, to denote “venereal disease” (Æçæ %Ø ÅÆ). This connotation colors the poem’s title and the mock imitation of the Odyssey’s opening lines, defying translation in English.

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Monopolizing History, Constructing Myths (P. N., or “Hapless Homer,” Aphr-Odysseia)57 And now, o my Muse, sing a new Odyssey, Sing of the venereal afflictions of the “shameless men,” ... Tell me, You, who inspired Homers and Pindars, and minor poets, rich and penniless— tell me how they managed, those few sick and stupid officers and the lustful likes of Ladas, who grew up in deprivation and ran around barefoot, how they managed to don army boots and to become rulers absolute of the state, which barely gets by from the time it was freed from the Turkish yoke and instantly gave itself over to the claws of our “philhellene” protectors, and it survives “so-so,” that is to say, “comme ci, comme ça.” ... [Muse:] And while the slogan-mongers talk about ancient glories, my heart in my chest is torn apart and weeps. Eat, you simple Greeks, bread and olive, eat some onion, too. eat a little Herodotus, and some Thucydides, too ... Fill yourselves up on . . . “Come and get them!”58 and on the Homeric epics, and drink chamomile, mint tea, and salep. Learn to eat and fill up with your eyes only— for it’s a virtue for the Greek to feel faint from hunger and to show self-control!

57 Nord signed with his initials but also with the pun “Omeros Amoiros,” “Hapless Homer” (near-homonyms in Greek). His poem was reprinted in the Greek-American paper Campana (Kampana) of May 10, 1981, from which the quotation is taken. When compared to the historicizing eulogy from the collection Laïke Mousa (quoted in Ch. 2 n. 13), Nord’s parody wickedly undercuts the regime’s moral and rhetorical impulses and especially its invocations of the classical legacy and historical continuity. 58 The reference is to the famous rallying cry spoken by the Spartan general Leonidas at Thermopylae (480 bce), when the Persian enemy demanded that his 300 soldiers lay down their arms (quoted by Plutarch, Apophthegmata Laconica 51.11).

4 Individual Responsibility before Tyranny as the Capitalist Enemy Yesterday we saw The Nannies of Giorgos Skourtes . . . A beautiful, allusive . . . condemnation of the dictatorship. Will the people understand it? . . . Writers must start to write, must struggle with themselves, with their art; they must utter their cry, their “no,” through their symbols . . . We must speak rather than remain silent. Silence is death. (M. G. Merakles 1987: 377; diary entry dated February 19 [1970], calling for an end to the Authors’ Silence after seeing a performance of Skourtes’s Nannies) ˆØÆ Æ ÆØŁ ºŁæØ, ªØÆ Æ å Å ÆÅ, ªØÆ Æ   ºŁæØ!!! . . .  å Ææ ’ ƪæ Æ ÅºŒæØŒ łıª ,  Æ ÅºŒæØŒ ºıæØ,  Æ ÅºŒæØŒ ªøæØ . . . To feel free, to have the power, to be free!!! . . . all you have to do is buy an electric refrigerator, or an electric washing machine, or an electric dryer . . . (Spoken by the cunning salesman in Nikos Zakopoulos, The Traveling Salesman, ca. 1972: 34)1

The 1967 dictatorship resorted to crude modes of capitalism to boost Greece’s economic development. It condoned a self-indulgent

1 Horton provides brief details on Zakopoulos’s signature play, in which commodities define and confine life (1984f). The Traveling Salesman highlights mass culture and consumerism and transforms social tragedy into a mere sales pitch: a persuasive salesman manages to sell the latest material goods to the established members of a bourgeois Greek family. The father even agrees to buying the services of a guard after

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cosmopolitan consumerism and deployed antiquity as a cultural broker with massive potential for expanding tourism. A new way for the opposition to fight the Colonels was to expose the capitalist motivations that the official “messianic” rhetoric camouflaged. Students attacked the regime’s attempt at social control via consumerism and technocracy with the weapon of Herbert Marcuse’s thoughtprovoking work, One-Dimensional Man (1964).2 This chapter analyzes select examples of the theater’s struggle against state-driven capitalism, including one resorting to absurdist modes (The Nannies) and another drawing on Brecht’s epic theater techniques (The Story of Ali Retzo). Together, these examples highlight the most important ideological and formal underpinnings of the New Greek Theater. They reemphasize the role and responsibility of individuals, whose big and small choices determine to what extent capitalism may tighten its grip. These cases demonstrate, too, that, under the less restrictive censorship conditions of the early 1970s, some plays and theater venues developed into substitutes for the normal political and civic process. The more daring productions functioned as sites of cultural dissidence and as gathering places for exponents of a growing resistance against the dictators. The Nannies of the debutant playwright Giorgos Skourtes was staged by Koun’s Art Theater in February–March 1970. The play depicts two marginal characters who, with different degrees of commitment, struggle to disentangle themselves from capitalist entrapment, from money and its eternal tyranny. The Free Theater’s Story of Ali Retzo saw its first run in spring 1971 and it, too, portrayed gain-driven corruption and class oppression. Both early productions may be called tributes to the destabilizing effect that voices from youth in the margin exerted. By late 1973, Our Grand Circus and its more established producers capitalized on the earlier trends and accelerated the introduction of new stage methods. hearing the salesman’s pitch that “the neighbors already ordered one” (Zakopoulos, ca. 1972: 48). This guard then keeps the family imprisoned in its own house while artificially feeding its sense of external danger. The play’s metaphors are transparent but very well executed. This most interesting work, however, has not yet been translated into English. Georgakake furnishes data on its 1972 production, directed by Iordanes Marinos (Georgakake 2009: 160). 2 Kornetis (2013: 163–164). Marcuse’s influential book was translated into Greek in 1971 by Bambes Lykoudes. The Greek consumer culture of the 1960s and 1970s is best captured in the advertisement images published by Papapolyzos and Martzoukos (1997: 93–200).

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This chapter’s first half engages with plays that represented Greek theater’s first shattering of the master narrative of growing prosperity and economic modernization while performing an absurdist social commentary. It discusses Skourtes’s Nannies but refers back also to works that prepared the Greek Theater of the Absurd. Among the latter are Finding a Match for Antigone ( æØ Å `تÅ, 1958), by Vasiles Ziogas, and The Attendant (ˇ ı , 1969), by Strates Karras. Skourtes’s Nannies appeared last in this sequence of three plays that share many common themes and forms. When compared to his predecessors, whose satirical talent and keen sense of observation prevailed, Skourtes brought contrasting moralities into a more fruitful antithesis and better proved the relevance of the iconic dead woman to the shared concern with personal responsibility. All three playwrights made the problems of society’s moral degradation and of the lack of independent thinking palpable through the metaphor of the female body: they placed a deteriorating or dead body on stage, and this recurring ploy of stressing private decay strengthened their critique of the public rot. The female corpses also made a mockery of the dictators’ fetish for pure and masculinist heroism. They served as vehicles for foreign and absurdist influences but aptly marked Greek society’s embalmed state as well. Constantinidis has called the image of the decrepit female corpse a steady feature of the Greek existentialist protest plays, which present human flesh as old and repulsive (1985: 141; 2001: 150). All three plays are variants, too, of similar oppressive conditions depicted on stage: the setting is that of an enclosed, sealed-off space, a suffocating prison, in which violence crushes the demoralized victims, who barely survive but cannot escape. (Non)events in these spaces of ethical and physical decay happen in a total and unnecessary isolation that forbids communication with the outside world. Obscurantist forces keep the victims in a blind environment of terror, which causes them to lose perspective of what happens elsewhere, what their individual options are, or what few practical choices remain. Plays by Ionesco and Sartre (his Huis Clos, No Exit of 1944) functioned as models, but the Greeks’ current experience of a paranoid regime does most to add realistic detail and nuance to the sense of imprisonment in the home or in local surroundings.3 Thus this entrapment becomes a Greek dramatic 3 Sartre’s Huis Clos strikes home that the prison of mutual destruction is partly self-created: its characters are no longer able to extract themselves from this noxious

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re-creation of moral impasse and existentialist claustrophobia, elements that drove Anagnostaki’s earlier absurdist works as well (see Chapter 1, pp. 60–61). The depressing unalterability of the (anti) hero’s predicament becomes an existentialist metaphor for the ordinary Greek’s bleak world. Skourtes colored the theme of entrapment with the verve of his assault on the consumerism of a domineering mass culture, which turned the already marginalized Greek into an easy victim of the Colonels’ rush to capitalism. Apart from the commonalities with foreign and domestic absurdist models, then, what more do the three Greek plays share? The dream of easily acquired fortune or rapid enrichment acts as a precipitating force. Futile aspirations lead to brutal victimization in an absurd world, which opens up a wider perspective on the Greek and, more generally, the human condition. Ziogas (1937–2001) centered his one-act play, Finding a Match for Antigone, on a family’s matchmaking efforts on behalf of the dead bride Antigone. His important postwar play was staged in 1960 by the Twelfth Curtain theater company (˜ø ŒÆÅ `ıºÆ Æ, directed by Chrestos Vachliotes) and broke ground for Greek surrealism and absurdism with images that influenced theater’s new trajectory.4 The play delivered a satirical critique of the petit-bourgeois and unmasked abusive family dynamics that functioned as metaphors for oppressive power relations. Onstage action took the form of ceremonial repetition and ritualized play and, occasionally, of cruel game-playing enhanced by realistic and folkloric detail. Ziogas probed the forbidden and engaged in grotesque, at times manic or anarchist, hyperbole. His revisionist critique inspired his contemporaries and immediate successors. Skourtes and Karras took their audiences back to the dreadful living room of the bourgeois household in environment even when escape becomes an option (Daigle 2010: 141). Petrakou notes the play’s 1970 production by Rialde’s Experimental Theater (2006: 144, 152 n. 41). 4 See further Bakonikola-Georgopoulou (2000: 71–73, 140–151); Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:194–199); Kontogiorge (2000: 192); Mauromoustakos (2006: 228, 230); Michaelides (1975: 55–57); Nikopoulos (1984); Pephanes (2001: 318–324, 329–330, 342–343, 347–348); Petrakou (2004: 353–364); Prousale (2010a and 2010b, with emphasis on the death-related, subversive, and philosophical ideas in Ziogas’s work); Puchner (1995 and 2004; on Finding a Match for Antigone, in particular, 2004: 29, 95–104, 140, 151, 153, 164–165, 371); Spathes (2003b: 254); Thomadake (1996: 78–93); and Thrylos (1980: 199). N. Papandreou discusses the contribution of the Twelfth Curtain (founded 1958) to the nascent movement for alternative theater focusing on modern Greek plays (2002: 180, 182–185, 187).

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The Nannies and The Attendant respectively. In the 1960s, the Greek word synodos suggested a female attendant. The incongruity of a male character taking up the role of a female attendant added the semantic layer of the male protagonist’s inadequate self-image. This layer, which pertained to Skourtes’s male nannies as well, is lost in modern references to The Attendant. Karras’s play, which was awarded the 1969 state prize for theater, drew inspiration from Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party and Samuel Beckett’s Godot.5 In March 1971 (approximately one year after the production of Skourtes’s Nannies), Mary Vostantze put on The Attendant with the New Stage of the State Theater of Northern Greece (at the Aulaia Theater).6 Savvas, the young hero of Karras’s black satire, goes for a job interview that takes bizarre turns. His interviewers, two guards and a supervisor, all servants to an old lady, at first try to deter Savvas from applying for the job of attending to their authoritarian mistress. Then, they tie him to a chair and terrorize him in a pretended interrogation scene. Savvas loses awareness and becomes delirious but learns that he now qualifies for the position: he has become a wreck but does not complain! Savvas accepts and joins the ranks of the other disillusioned servants who have lived and worked in the house for many years and who prefigure the deteriorating fate of the hero, forever confined to the crumbling mansion. The sickness of people in aging rooms and houses again expresses the sickness of society. But the desperate Savvas is willing to

5 Karras’s Nightwatchmen (ˇØ ıåçºÆŒ, 1965–1966) received the 1967 state prize for theater. The play presents the timely topic of an anticipated threat that cannot be well enough understood. See also Georgakake (2009: 102–103); Karter (1978: 27–28); Michaelides (1975: 70–71); and Puchner (2000: 313–324). 6 See Georgakake (2009: 142–143); Karaoglou (2009: 152–155); and Michaelides (1975: 72–73). The Attendant was performed also by the Dallas Theater Center, in May 1971 (as was The Nightwatchmen during the previous season, both in English translation). Washburn reviewed The Strongmen’s English-language version performed during a run of Greek plays at the Westbeth Cabaret Theatre in New York (The Village Voice, July 20, 1972, 45). In December 1972, The Attendant was mounted by director Stelios Papadakes with the National Theater’s New Stage. Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:83–87, denouncing the repeat production) and Speliotopoulos (1973a) offered critiques. Karras classed himself as a playwright of the opposition but the national and international (American) recognition he gained raised some resentment in Greek circles. Several of my recent informants called Karras’s politics too harmless and accused the dramatist of playing to popular dissatisfaction to promote his own work. See further Karras (ca. 1973: book cover) and the anonymous interview with the playwright in Theatrika (Karras 1972: 16, 17, 18, 21).

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sing like a bird and to blindly carry out orders, all at the whim of the capricious mistress (Karras, ca. 1973: 106–111). He will likely even participate in the ritual of “breaking (in)” future applicants. Absurdity triumphs when it turns out that the old lady might actually be deceased (as suggested by the first Greek and some subsequent stagings). The plays of Skourtes and Karras laid out scenarios of resistance as they interrogated the role of the oppressed within various economic and other structures, which ranged from private to very public. Both dramatists showed deep sympathy for the hapless victims who tried to eke out a living in times when the benefits of Greece’s economic progress were unevenly divided. Karras liked to name his plays after (non-prestigious to marginal) “professions,” often with performative dimensions (Michaelides 1975: 67–68, 69; Sivetidou 1995: 404–405). This profound understanding of the perennial fortune-seeker or of the Greek who kept dreaming of a sudden role reversal anticipated the tone and atmosphere prevalent in Our Grand Circus, which preferred the carnivalesque to the absurdist. Skourtes’s Nannies denounced the cruelty of a late capitalist regime that had thrown Greece into obscurantism. The protagonists’ desires to make money and settle down were ostensibly private pursuits that were, nonetheless, fueled by the country’s socioeconomic conditions. The characters of Karras, too, lived and worked in the ugly margins of society; they competed with each other and perpetuated the cycle of violence of which they had been victims themselves. The use of violence onstage pointed to the very real violence taking place offstage. The plays did avoid, however, the pitfalls of the trite rhetoric of medical imagery, which was tainted by the regime’s overuse. The protest, then, of impaired (anti)heroes was all the more potent precisely because it was voiced, courageously and solitarily, by marginal protagonists who were confronted with more than the usual physical challenges.7 It begged the question of why a public of the able-bodied could not make informed and brave decisions and commit to a more outspoken stance of opposition. The failing bodies

7 Constantinidis sums up: “The protagonist is or feels socially, intellectually, morally, and physically ‘inferior.’ . . . The point of departure of existentialist protest theatre is when the psycho-physical decay of the characters has reached an advanced (and therefore hopeless) phase” (2001: 149, 150; also 1985: 141–142). Ineffectual male protagonists are often portrayed as impotent or lacking sexual vitality (2001: 150).

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betokened the sad state of vulnerable but sympathetic individuals ruled by fear, guilt, or a deadened consciousness. Also, these metaphors for crippled human relations, enforced infantilism, and unscrupulous game-playing rendered the works symbolic and helped to avoid censorial repercussions. “Theatre productions,” claims Hager, “exposed the corrupted structures of a dying world order, and urged their audiences to act, to resist this totalitarian order” (2008: 154).

THE NANNIES OF GIORGOS SKOURTES: MONEY, MATERIALISM, TRAMPS, AND THE CAPITALIST BOSS Æ  Æ æØ  غ, æ  Æ Æ ÇØ ÆÇ ı ªØÆ Æ  ; ˜  æ ÅºÆ  Æ ŒØ Æ æÆ ØÆ . . . ; ˚Ø Æ ŁıÆØ ŒÆº, Æ æ Æ ı åÆ Œº łØ Æ ÆØ Ø ı Æ ø æı Æ,  Ł ı æ Æ,  Å  ç Œæ! But, goddamit, did you have to pick on me to let off steam? I mean, couldn’t you have turned a blind eye . . . ? And, if I remember correctly, the small change the kids from the next street stole off me was, for sweet Jesus’ sake, mother, it was just a nickel or two! (Kostas Tachtses, «Æ æ Æ», “Small Change,” 1984: 16 [1st edn, 1972]. Trans. Nikos C. Germanacos: Tachtses 1973: 523) The dominance of consumerist deception . . . that covers every aspect of our lives. We become commodities ourselves. (Skourtes in an interview by Giorgos K. Pelichos, Ta Nea, February 7, 1970. Trans. Hager 2008: 125)

The Nannies built on Ziogas’s Antigone and on The Attendant of Karras to sharpen its critique of Greek society’s absurd descent into capitalism. The three-act play demonstrates how money and drama made convincing complements on the stage of the mid-dictatorship and focuses on the literal and symbolic violence that capitalism enacts. The work ties greed for money to the broader social dimensions of inequity and repression, but it also examines the levels of deception and self-deception that the typical “victims” of socioeconomic disparity inflict on themselves and others. Money is one of the most powerful forces in Skourtes’s early plays in general, which

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explore human impulses under the ravages of capitalist greed.8 It spawns interpersonal conflicts and social and cultural divides; it breeds political corruption and unleashes struggles for resources. The Nannies, then, leads its audience into the bolted house that stands for junta-occupied Greece of 1970. Giorgos Lazanes staged the play with actors of the Art Theater in February and March, or during the months in which Koun and his disciples were exploring the foreign Theater of the Absurd, with productions of Beckett (Endgame, premiered at the Art Theater on January 20, 1970, following a February 1969 production of Waiting for Godot) and Ionesco (The Chairs, The Lesson, and The Bald Soprano; all three premiered at the Art Theater on April 4, 1970). Koun’s production of Endgame, in particular, lent new expressive means, such as the motif of the wheelchair, to contemporary modern Greek plays intent on showing decay and demise. The cast of the Nannies consisted of Thymios Karakatsanes as Petros, Giannes Mortzos as Paulos, and Nikos Bousdoukos as Stauros. The set design was by Giorgos Vakalo.9 The very successful production of The Nannies catapulted the young and unknown Skourtes onto the Greek theater scene. Patricia Kokori saw a new debut for Greek dramaturgy at large: “The Nannies helped to impel the Greek theatre into the modernist age of critical self-consciousness and experimentation with new forms” (1995: 11). Critics heralded the play as a breakthrough in Greek drama also because it marked the Art Theater’s first major modern Greek production since the coup (Georgousopoulos 1982–1984: 2:401; Karter 1978: 55–56). Skourtes’s Nannies unravels the dynamics of money-driven servitude to an immoral power by way of a fairly straightforward plot. The mysterious Stauros hires the unemployed duo of friends/relatives, Petros and Paulos, who interact like brothers. Both have recently 8

Skourtes has continued to develop as a playwright and my choice of one of his earliest plays is not to imply otherwise. 9 For reviews of and comments on The Nannies, see Anon., Psychagogia, April 14, 1970, 36–37; Bacopoulou-Halls (1982: 137–141; 1994: 413); Celik (2002: 39–47); Hager (2008: 118–119, 122–131, 150–152); Karter (1978: 55–57); Klaras, He Vradyne, February 25, 1970; Kokori (1995: 11, 14); Lygizos (1987: 133–134); Michaelides (1975: 21, 123, 126–128); Pankoureles (1974: 108; 1983: 17, 23–24); Parlas (1970); Phthenake (1970); Thrylos (1970b); Trezou (1970); and Varikas (1972: 342–345). On a 1982 production of The Nannies directed by Skourtes himself, see Dromazos (1986: 251–254; originally published in He Kathemerine, April 2, 1982) and Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:401–403). The Nannies was taken up and produced by several other theater companies and amateur troupes as well.

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been released from prison, and they have no plan for the immediate future. Now they have landed the job of a lifetime, they think: they will live in Stauros’s luxurious mansion and “babysit” his wife. Paulos is jubilant because he has never had an opportunity like this before. The friends revel about money before they learn what the job is all about. Money’s allure soon draws them into a new kind of prison. Stauros’s mansion is hermetically sealed from the outside world, and its central space is dark and airless. A forbidden room houses the wife of Stauros, who soon admits that she has died but, he claims, now she is alive and well again. He expects nothing short of consent on this matter, with a persistence that reminds the viewer of the regime’s fixation on its “truth” that all is well in Greece. Stauros then demands that Petros and Paulos participate in the sinister wake and in the daily rites with which he himself keeps honoring his deceased wife. By the time the friends realize that their initial delirium about money has been entirely unfounded, they are no longer free. Stauros, the necrophiliac devotee, has locked them up in his house and keeps them in check with the promise of more money and material goods. He buys off their freedom and does not permit any communication with the “evil” outside world. His rationale is that the two friends need to go through a “salvation” or “rehabilitation” process and must remain shielded from the world’s falsehoods (Skourtes 1974: 53). Petros repeatedly complains about the lack of fresh air in the house and about the tightness of the new clothes that Stauros has ordered them to wear. He starts to rebel against the absurd situation and wants to halt the moral and spiritual demise into which Paulos is sliding. Revolt is, for him, the only possible response to this irrational oppression. But Paulos is either in denial or is swayed time and again by money. He does not bargain about the terms but blindly follows the money, leading to ever greater dependence on Stauros. Petros then attempts to break free from this gilded cage, but the acquiescing Paulos has become part of the corrupt system. On Stauros’s instigation, Paulos kills Petros by hitting him with the crowbar with which he tried to liberate himself. At the play’s finale, Paulos breaks down in tears: he realizes that he has condemned himself to a life of unfreedom for money. The Nannies functions as an elaborate allegory exposing the violence of junta-sponsored capitalism. This allegorical form, which takes money as its nontraditional protagonist, allowed Skourtes to

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pass the work by the censors.10 The playwright traces the friends’ individual choices and their consequences and dramatizes the final scene of decision-making, which is ruled by the gratuitous use of force. He draws his characters on the canvas of oppositions and alternatives, and he shows his public that the freedom to choose remains within everyone’s reach. But greed is also the marker of a tragic lack of self-knowledge, and precisely this self-knowledge holds the key to genuine freedom. The explicit moralism of The Nannies is strengthened by other factors as well. Petros and Paulos carry obvious biblical names—and burdens: they have a long and painful history together, which makes them interdependent, much like Peter and Paul, the two Christian saints whom the Greek religious calendar celebrates on the same day. Money, however, is the tool of alienation that severs the friends from society and that also drives a rift between them. Stauros’s offer of comfort does not let the two friends attain personal “salvation” but enters them into a “martyrdom” together, which is ominously foretold by Stauros’s name (with a shift of accent from the name Staúros to the noun staurós, Æıæ, or “cross”).11 Money is a martyrdom, in which Petros dies and which Paulos will continue to suffer. The temptation of money plays a catalyst role in Skourtes’s Nannies. The baiting Stauros represents all that money can buy. The portrayal of his sinister character reinforces the social divides that economic inequality perpetuates. At first, money is enough to bring out the burlesque in Petros and Paulos: when they arrive at Stauros’s rich mansion, they jump up and down in exultation, like Karaghiozis types, for having food, liquor, and luxury offered to them. Stauros offers plenty of whisky to placate their unease, which soon turns into anxiety. The friends, who have been waiting for the golden opportunity that will transform their lives of poverty, feel like winners in a 10 Sivetidou (1988: 22 n. 86). Petros alludes to the regime’s censorship, which exists both offstage and in the mansion in which the duo is locked away: —¯ˇ …ºÆ ı æåı    Æ Œ Æ  æºØ . . . ˇ ŒÆ Æ æØ ØŒ

 åØ.  Æ! ˛æƺÆ!  ƪºÆÆ ŒØ ƪƺÆŒØÆ. ˚ƺ, 

ØÆÇı æØ ØŒ Æı ; (Skourtes 1974: 32) Petros: There’s everything here but a clock. There’s not even a magazine. Nothing. Dead as a stone. Only statues and more statues. Don’t these people read magazines? (Trans. Kokori: Skourtes 1995: 37) 11 See also Hager (2008: 122, 124–125); Kalliantere (2003: 62); and Sivetidou (1988: 20–21).

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Karaghiozis performance and only gradually come to realize that they are the stereotypical victims of such a play. The stock-in-trade plots of the Karaghiozis shadow theater explore the use and abuse of power, and they foreground the uneven distribution of money and wealth as emblematic of skewed power relations. Thus the references that Petros and Paulos make to Karaghiozis shows add an ironic metatheatrical comment to the action that they portray. Money repeatedly manipulates them, although they believe they are in control, as it does with the eternally poor Karaghiozis. One of Skourtes’s subsequent plays, Karaghiozis Almost Vizier, reiterates this pattern of the struggle of the quintessential underdog who will, in the end, still rejoice at what little his master throws to him, while the structures of power and exploitation remain unchanged. Upon its premiere at the Art Theater on August 23, 1973, Karaghiozis Almost Vizier became another very popular play and delivered a second example of Skourtes’s skill in fusing older traditions with contemporary concerns.12 Drawing on shadow theater in varying degrees, both of Skourtes’s plays of the early 1970s constituted attempts to rediscover effective forms of political theater in indigenous and popular traditions, whose realism dovetailed remarkably well with the Art Theater’s simultaneous engagement with foreign absurdist theater.13 The enticement of money guarantees that the decrepit corpse of Stauros’s wife will receive care and devotion. It matters less if that devotion is genuine or not, as long as Petros and Paulos adhere to the required rituals. This is, of course, an allegorical reflection of 1970s Greek reality: the defunct system of the dictatorship, which still styles itself as a viable democracy, demands loyalty and dedication, but is willing to settle for the mere external signs of compliance.14 The 12 Lead actor Giorgos Lazanes created the title role, which expressed and defined his personal acting style. See further Constantinidis (1986: 14); Georgakake (2009: 183–184); Karampetsos (1979: 211–212); Michaelides (1975: 129–130); and Van Steen (2000: 172). Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:102–105) offers a positive critique whereas Makres’s review (1973a) is mixed. Kedros published the script in September 1973. 13 See Bacopoulou-Halls (1982: 139; 1994: 413); Hager (2010: 168–169); and Sivetidou (1988: passim). Ch. 1, pp. 70, 71, noted Greek artists’ concerted efforts to forge an ideology of popular culture into a militant political force, which was expected to assist in the struggle for freedom. 14 See Ch. 3, n. 14. For Sivetidou, the wife’s corpse symbolizes the dead “astike taxe” (ÆØŒ Å) or the decline of the old urban bourgeois class (1988: 15). The analogic link to the dictatorship, however, proves to be more compelling. The varied interpretations exemplify the problem of reception under censorship.

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female dead body symbolizes a decadent, corrupt, and corrupting state that has dissolved true democratic freedom and that tears away at resistance, solidarity, and human dignity. The democracy that the Colonels claim to have restored to life, and to which they expect the populace to pay lip service, is a ghastly shadow of her former self.15 Hager notes that Skourtes has represented the “absurdity of the system, which demands the individual’s full submission to a dead power” (2010: 169). Greeks living under the dictatorship have two choices, which are embodied by the antiheroes of the play: either to commit to resistance and set themselves free (spiritually), or to submit to deadening rituals of compliance sustaining a regime that is rotten to the core but that offers the “reward” of material comfort. Kokori comments on the forced rites in which Stauros makes the two friends participate: “Stavros is a parody of a salvation figure, in that he is suggestive of any establishment which attempts to conserve its dead values with force or pompous and religious ceremony” (1995: 14). Hager dubs Stauros the “celebrant of a deceased past” (2008: 123). Money confirms the duo’s status as hired people who, for pay, enact meaningless rituals of hollow adulation. Greed keeps Petros and Paulos in the service of death and impasse, of defunct ideas and ideals. Because the admirably rebellious hero dies in Petros, The Nannies remains a dark social and political commentary. Stauros is capitalism incarnate.16 In its unholy alliance with a sick state system, capitalism does not allow for any winners among the simple folk: everyone loses. By contrasting Paulos with Petros who rejects the downward trajectory of greed, Skourtes shows that the path of the man who sacrifices friends and ideals to money is avoidable. The playwright traces the origins of choice and responsible decision-making, to eradicate the misconception that one nefarious aspect of money inevitably leads to another. His work pivots on contrasts, but his characters could easily stand for the two sides of one person torn apart by the pull of money. Petros dies by violence but Paulos will die of asphyxiation in the 15 The identification with democracy is easy to make given that the Greek word demokratia ( ÅŒæÆ Æ) is feminine and that allegorical depictions portray Democracy as a woman. Skourtes’s presentation indulges in sexist and agist (or age-related) prejudice. His tramps are lured in by the prospect of being with a pretty young woman, alive and well; the disappointment there, too, can only be smoothed over with the promise of more money. 16 Michaelides has long identified Stauros with the Capital ( ˚çºÆØ), under whose rule social and ethical values collapse (1975: 126).

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mansion in which he will remain cooped up. The following dialogue from the end of the second act is telling: `ˇ — ŁÆ ; —¯ˇ ¯ø. `ˇ ˜ ı æåØ ø ªØÆ Æ. —¯ˇ ˚ÆØ   æØ , ; ˚ÆØ   غ  æ  Æ  æØ ! . . . ˚ŁÆæÆ! `ˇ ˛ æø! …ºÆ Æ  æø . . . ¯ ÆØ  ŒÆº Æ ªªº ı æŁ Æ Æ ºıŁæØ. —¯ˇ ! —Ø ØÆ. ¯ Æ ºæÆ ıºØ,  ŒÆºÆ; `ˇ  ł Æ  ı æåØ ºıŁæ Æ. —æ Ø Æ ªøæ  Å ƺŁØÆ. ˝’ Æ ÆæÅŁ  Æ łØŒÆ ŒÆØ Æ Ø Øæ Æ. ˝Æ ºıæøŁ . —¯ˇ ˜ Å Ł ºı Å ºıŁæ Æ ı, ŒÆºÆ; `ˇ ˜ ı æåØ ØÆ Œºª. (Skourtes 1974: 53) Stavros: Petros: Stavros: Petros: Stavros: Petros: Stavros: Petros: Stavros:

Where are you going? Outside. There’s no outside for you. And how do you know hey? How the hell do you know? You bastard. I know! I know everything. I am your guardian angel who has come to free you. Hah! It’s all over now. We’re free as birds, do you understand? There is no freedom in lies. You must discover truth. You must renounce your false and lowly dreams. Be freed! We don’t want your freedom, do you understand? You no longer have the choice.

(Trans. Kokori: Skourtes 1995: 55)

The Nannies bore the mark of the dictatorship period, and it continued to be recognized as a comment on oppression. Audiences were well aware that Skourtes was not merely reworking a tale of wealth and poverty. The playwright pushes the question of what becomes of the fragile individual under the pressures of the diseased system. The same question is directed at the spectator and also pertains to theater as an institution and to society itself. Capitalist enticements lead the play’s protagonists into shackles that they do not expect to find outside of the prison that they have just left behind. Their new ghostly confinement stands for the terrorized and demoralized Greek society

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straining under the military regime. “This was a sterilized and perfectly ‘safe’ society,” Hager argues, but one that was limited by “past values, principles, and ideologies” (2008: 128). Money functions as a lubricant to tyranny and ensures the capitalist system’s success in pushing the subject into isolation. The vulnerable Paulos loses his identity and comes to embody the servant-to-master relationship. Skourtes blames the tyrannical power, but he also points to such factors as greed, lack of personal responsibility, or willingness to compromise among any potential rebels. Paulos decries the despotic and infantilizing power but chooses not to resist it. He is unable to construct his own freedom, morality, or truth. Paulos helps to tighten Stauros’s grip while arguing that the boss is beyond his control. Profit and material gain buy not only his freedom but also his conscience and his perception of what is right and wrong. The hero’s quest for self-worth rapidly deteriorates when Paulos becomes the delegate apparatchik of tyranny. Paulos acts as a tyrant to Petros and perpetuates a cycle of Greeks oppressing Greeks—in a direct reflection of the Greek dictators’ minions oppressing ordinary Greeks. Once Paulos has killed Petros for greed and fear, he is doomed to live the life and lies of a dead man, in a prison-like indoors that keeps the primal scenes of death, terror, and murder in his full view. Even though Petros does not choose to die, his death is his ultimate refusal to become a cog in the machinery of capitalist oppression. He is, however, far from being a champion of dissidence and appears, rather, as its sacrificial victim. Weighed down by the solitude of revolt, he enters a state of confused isolation that is conversant with the absurdist aesthetic of Kafka or Beckett. Some critics have drawn parallels between Skourtes’s tramps and Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and they have compared the merciless Stauros with Beckett’s sinister authority figure of Pozzo. The Greek characters, however, maintain their directness and their instant rapport with the domestic and contemporary situation.17 It is under thoroughly Greek and also urgent conditions that Skourtes presses his questions of individual morality, the right to protest, the search for self-affirmation, and the need for sacrifice. The playwright posits that one can 17

On the connections between Skourtes’s work and Beckett’s Godot, see Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:49); Kokori (1995: 12); and Sivetidou (1988). Puchner discusses the influence of Waiting for Godot on Greek theater of the 1960s and 1970s in general (1999: 163).

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refuse to be part of the system of oppression. The mere acceptance of tyranny allows it to continue. The Nannies captures the fraught encounter between money and morality. Stauros expects the two friends to buckle under the insatiable impulse for money. Petros, however, has second thoughts and, for that very reason, he will be killed: he is unfit for the job. Paulos appears committed and at first knows no bounds or fear of remorse. Even he, however, is not a moral coward but is sympathetically portrayed; he is not a free character but has been caught up in the rat race for money. Money is the reason why Paulos suffers a breakdown that is entirely understandable. The imprisoned tramps believe that the public sphere outside is truly free but fail to realize that greed is the larger prison that would still keep them entrapped, even if they were to leave the quasi-morgue for the outdoors. Skourtes ironizes the escape plans of the rebellious Petros before Stauros, his friend, and the spectators. The actors and the audiences of the small, indoor theater in which his play was shown had to face the ugly Greek reality as soon as they walked out. Therefore, all of the participants in the production, including its public, are, in effect, playing a variant of the role of the entrapped. To them, the play provides a model of how the individual citizen can help build a more livable world. This model, however, is diverse, ambivalent, and time- and context-bound: the confines of the play, the stage, and the theater do not just let them exorcize the powers of greed and tyranny. Theater-goers better stop dreaming of the “great escape” and, instead, prove their self-worth and face external reality head-on (testimony by Skourtes, July 6, 2001). The modern Greek language can play off the metaphor of “eating money,” that is, spending money readily. It can also reverse the image and have money “eat,” “consume,” or “destroy” its victims. Skourtes strategically deploys this doubling of meanings to expose money’s grip on people, to unmask its brutalizing effect on Paulos, but also to reveal the disdain of Petros resenting greed. Petros makes the metaphors literal in a trenchant scene that begins with the words of tenderness he addresses to money as if to a (possibly unfaithful) lover: —¯ˇ ( Æ æØ ŒÆØ  ŒØÇØ  åÆæ, ƺº ŒÆØ  Œæıç  . ı غØ) `ªÆ Å  ı åغØæØŒ! . . . ¯ ÆØ ŒÆº,  Ø Ł ºø ŒÆØ ªØÆ  Æ. . . . ˆºıŒ ı åغØæØŒ, åæØÆ æÆ  ØæÆØ! . . . ı æØæ ÇØ  ıƺ, ŒÆƺÆÆ Ø ÆªÆ Å  ı åغØæØŒ; æÆ  ı ŒÆØ æıçæ ı åغØæØŒ,  åæÆ ø ÆØ ı ’ åØ ºØ Å ŒºÆÅ! ¨ ºø Æ  ŒØ ı åØÆ . . . Å çªØ  ,

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ÆªÆ Å  ı åغØæØŒ! . . . ¯ª ’ ÆªÆ ! . . . ` ’ ÆçØ ŁÆ ø  Ø, Æ   æØ, æº ı åغØæØŒ! . . . „  æ ŒÆØ Æ  Œø! ˝Æ  çø! ˝Æ  Æø . . . غØæØŒ ı! ( ’åØ ºØ  Æ ı ŒÆØ  ÆØ  ºÆ). —`¸ˇ — æ, ! —¯ˇ (— ªÆØ ŒÆØ  çØ) !ı ı, غ! !ı! (Skourtes 1974: 60–61) Petros: taking it [a $100 bill] stares at it gleefully but also with a look of disguised hatred. Then talks to it. My dear D-note. I’m well and I hope you are the same. . . . My sweet D-note I’ve been dreaming about you for years. You’ve been tormenting my mind, my dear D-note. My beautiful and gentle D-note the colour of your eyes has sent me to hell. I want you to stare into my eyes constantly. Never leave me, my dear D-note. I love you. . . . If you leave me, I’ll throw myself into the river, I tell you, my crazy D-note. Or I may kill you. Eat you, chew you up . . . my D-note! Putting it in his mouth and chews it voraciously. Pavlos: Petros, don’t! Petros: choking spits it out. Yuck! damn you, you wicked thing. (Trans. Kokori: Skourtes 1995: 61–62)

Petros wipes his nose with a $100 bill and spits in another bill. His growing contempt for money aggravates Paulos. Skourtes’s stage directions are telling: —¯ˇ (`æå ÇØ Æ « Æ ÇØ»  Å º Å «ºç». Å º Ø ’ ºı ı ı, ı åı ŒÆØ Ø ŒçæØ. ˜ÅºÆ  ŁÆ ŒØ Æ ºª  Å º Å «ºç». ıªåæø ŁÆ Æ çغØ, ŁÆ Æ ÆªŒØ, ŁÆ Æ å ÇØ, ŁÆ Æ Ø łÅº, ŁÆ º ÇØ  øØ, Æ Ø ºÆ, Æ ÆæÆ ÆØ, Æ ºıº ØÆ, ŁÆ Æ Ø åø, ø ı, ø  —ƺ, ÆÆ Æ ıå ’ ÆÅ). (Skourtes 1974: 75) PETROS starts “playing” with the word “money.” He utters it with every manner of intonation and facial expression. He’ll deliver a monologue using only the word money. At the same time, he’ll be kissing it, biting it, tearing it, throwing it up in the air, and covering the room, the furniture, the black clothes, the flowers, throwing it on the floor, on himself, and on PAVLOS with increasing tension. (Trans. Kokori: Skourtes 1995: 74)

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This scene strikes home the absurdity of accumulating money in a world in which money cannot even be used: money cannot possibly have any value in a prison cut off from the rest of society. For Petros, all the luxury is ultimately not worth the pain. His last words are a silenced reflection on the enormous cost of capitalist aspirations: —¯ˇ ¯ ÆØ Æª Æ . . . —Æ . . . (ˇ —ƺ åøæ  Æ  æØ  ŒØ, åı Ø  — æ  ŒçºØ. ˇ — æ çØ). (Skourtes 1974: 80) Petros: It’s a trap, Pav . . . PAVLOS losing control hits PETROS over the head. PETROS falls. (Trans. Kokori: Skourtes 1995: 77)

Money symbolizes and also feeds capitalism, which requires full and unconditional obedience; otherwise it retaliates. It enslaves the two marginal heroes who are forced to exist and survive in imprisonment, where money does not even “pay” but merely closes the vicious circle of entrapment. Capitalism desensitizes human beings, who stop questioning which direction their lives are taking, what they are contributing, and what is taken away from them. Money is the glue that makes our tramps think they have it together while they are falling apart. Dependency on money becomes a criterion by which to pass judgment on personal relations and power structures. Skourtes uses the parable of The Nannies to demonstrate capitalism’s deflating impact on resistance against exploitation. Yet the play also works from within the world of money to create that world anew. “[A] re-evaluation of attitudes and individual reactions to institutionalized power systems [is] possible,” concludes Kokori (1995: 14). Skourtes’s allegory enjoyed special currency with the Greek audience of 1970. Theater and public life overlapped and merged. Money or fancy only promised to bring on tragedy. Personal responsibility alone was worth gold.

STRATES KARRAS: THE TRADECRAFT OF CAPITALIST OPPRESSION   º åı çØ . . .   ŒÆØ Æıª Å ŒÅ . . . Æ æƪÆÆ, ŒÆØ ıƺ  ºÆ.

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Skourtes’s Nannies shows the detrimental effects of capitalism on contemporary Greek victims, who become prisoners of a system that spreads alienation far and wide and that leaves people starved for genuine values such as freedom. The work of Karras is a case in point, and some of his plays go further in exposing the insidious nature of the late capitalist system. Karras, too, studies various degrees of exploitation and delves into the past and present relationships of those who exercise it. The Troupers (1972), perhaps his darkest play, was staged by Michaelides’s Open Theater in 1974.18 The characters of The Troupers are two groups of marginal roadshow performers who, for gain, make a spectacle out of the bodily harm and the humiliating acts that they inflict on themselves. They constantly up the ante, trying to outdo their competitors in selfimmolation. They claim to be proper actors who entertain their audiences but have, in fact, been put out to play in an arena controlled by an unscrupulous ringleader. Each player for himself courts the favor of the invisible manager, who let it be known that the “best” performer will be hired. Like terrified children, the players fall under his spell and cannot shed the need to belong. Their competitive rush to self-destruct is twinned with mutual suspicion, under the eyes of the capitalist boss who is also a master of control and surveillance. The performers’ antisocial language and antagonistic attitude, along with the Lumpen costumes and the overall aesthetics of marginality, contribute to the absurdist-nihilist atmosphere that Karras tries to evoke. Godfrey Kearns defines the recurring mood as “[l]oneliness on the inside, chaos on the outside” (1986: 10). The various aspects of the characters’ work as players, the preparation and rehearsing of roles, the frequent interruptions, the props, costumes, and accessories—all are attempts to impress; all constitute the form, theme, and content of a performance. Karras portrays the dynamics of the master/slave

18 See further Georgakake (2009: 192); Karampetsos (1979: 213); Michaelides (1975: 68, 72); and Pezopoulou’s chapter on The Troupers (1996: 132–142). Georgousopoulos criticized the production (1982–1984: 2:120–124).

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relationship as a (mere) performance as well: he unmasks the tyrannical capitalist’s power as bluff and suggests that the subordinates can play their role without becoming reduced to it and without enslaving others. The predicament of the troupers, like that of the ordinary Greeks, is a nightmarish play, a pathetic drama with a sure end, which they can impose. At last, the exploited players reconcile: they move beyond the gloom of suspicion and conspiracy, and they start to cooperate to expel the manager and to return to a more dignified line of work (Michaelides 1975: 72; Puchner 2000: 321, 322). Thus, the performance of the troupe, a microcosm of Greek society, may embrace the spirit of teamwork in pursuit of common interests. The invisible but palpable menace of several of Karras’s plays has a name: he is the shadowy Bobby, and his American-sounding name is enough to identify the ruthless capitalist as possibly American. Like a mafia boss, he remains unseen and his impact blinds his victims. Bobby is responsible for the blinding of the supervisor in The Attendant (Karras, ca. 1973: 61–63, 65–66), whose top-down power structures pivot on blind compliance. The merciless Bobby had first appeared as a mysterious threat in Karras’s play of 1968, The Strongmen (published in 1971), which showed an Antigone character rebelling against the terror inflicted on a family of women, representative of the nation. The Minotes-Paxinou Theater Company staged The Strongmen in March 1970, adding the prestige of two established actors to Karras’s record.19 Minotes and Paxinou had resigned from the National Theater after disagreements with its newly installed junta sympathizers (see Chapter 2, n. 19) and, two years later, opted for a modern Greek politicized play (Hager 2008: 107, 167). They sought the symbolic capital of politicization again with a 1971/2 production of Brecht’s classic play, Mother Courage and Her Children (on which, see pp. 260–261). Karras’s strongmen are not very different from

19 Two reviews of Kretikos express plenty of reservations (Akropolis, 8 April, 1970; Chroniko 1972: 181). See further Anon., Ta Nea, March 17, 1970; Anon., Psychagogia, April 25, 1970, 34–35; Karter (1978: 59–61); Kotanidis (2011: 127, 148); and Thrylos (1970c). Phemy Kanellou conducted an interview with Minotes and Karras, which was published in Embros, May 9, 1970. See also Bakonikola-Georgopoulou (2000: 97–104); Georgakake (2009: 123); and Michaelides (1975: 71–72). Most of the introduction by Godfrey Kearns to Karras’s Theater I is devoted to The Strongmen (Kearns 1986). Also, Kearns notices similarities between The Strongmen’s threat of Bobby and Pinter’s Caretaker (1960) with its manipulative and deceitful character of Davies (Kearns 1986: 11).

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his troupers by profession. These freak performers, too, embody the language, mentality, and spectacle of the parade ground, but it is within the confines of the private sphere that they clamor for attention, respect, and power. They, too, are engaged in the performative rivalry of a testosterone theater, but their audience consists of scared women—and Greece’s scared public. One by one, four strongmen intrude into a house in which three women live. They decide to stay there, make themselves at home, and disregard the hostility of the young Antigone, the strongest and most outspoken woman, worthy of her ancient namesake (Pezopoulou 1996: 247–248). Antigone alone voices resistance, which the strongmen unnerve by refusing to take her seriously. Karras depicts a heroine challenged to realize herself and her rebellion, in a process that bestows dignity on the besieged individual. The older, unaware women do not gain the audience’s respect: they are unacceptably tolerant of this home invasion and keep deluding themselves with dreams of the men bringing a reversal of fortune or salvation. Thus they accommodate, first, the ill-mannered intruder Egnates and, then, his equally inconsiderate fellow usurpers. The private sphere of the modest, all-female household stands for the public sphere of Greece as a feminized nation. The demanding invaders embody the strongmen of the military dictatorship who occupy Greece and feel entitled to power, material privilege, and widespread acceptance. Egnates, the first and most menacing occupier, is also fragile, however. He lives in fear of Bobby, the treacherous manager/torturer, irritable tyrant, and abusive father. Bobby is the mastermind behind the ugly machinations that his cronies carry out in his ever-present absence, often at their own expense. The underlings struggle to perform, conform, and survive, and they exorcize their hopelessness by terrorizing those weaker than themselves. The ineffective defense mechanism of these antiheroes drains them of all interior strength and leaves them deprived of external support, in the impasse of victims who have become victimizers. The initial faint resistance to Bobby which they may have voiced proves to be a lost cause and a ground for more self-pity. The strongmen Kazanovas (an ironic counterpart to the historical Casanova, master of the art of seduction) and Egnates make this abundantly clear in the following passages, in which they, haunted by anguished memories, cry like small children:

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Kazanovas: Madam . . . Do you know Mr Bobby? . . . Mr Bobby sent me . . . The last time around, we had a harsh meeting . . . with Mr Bobby. He was with a doctor . . . he was with a doctor in a building. (intensely) “Why did you become a doctor?” I asked the doctor. “Why did you become a doctor and why not a butcher? Why didn’t you become a butcher? Why didn’t you become a murderer . . . a murderer for hire? You simply became a doctor and fouled up your work? A doctor and you’re doing this kind of work?” Then Bobby hit me. Mr Bobby. He hit me badly. “Don’t talk like that,” he told me, “you scum! How dare you talk like that to the doctor!?” I lost it and I told him off, too. “You are a pimp,” I told him, “a stool pigeon.” He laughed. Mr Bobby laughed . . . and, as he was laughing, he kicked me with his knee and hit me with his fist on the ear. . . . Bobby hit me without compassion. There was no reason why . . . (Karras 1986: 144–146)

Egnates continues with his own childhood recollections of the violent abuser, which render the faceless Bobby more visible: I was a child before the heavy-handed Mr Bobby. A pure and innocent child. There was nothing devious about me. . . . And he still beat me . . . I was thirsty, but Bobby wouldn’t give me any water; he would only beat me. . . . Bobby without brain, without eyes, without soul, without teeth . . . Bobby . . . is my father who beat me . . . He is chasing me . . . You’ve got to understand, Madam . . . Somebody has to understand . . . I need help . . . I need support, protection . . . (Karras 1986: 146–147)

Karras’s language in the first passage raises the specter of (ongoing) abuse of the medical profession for torture practices. The second passage associates the victim’s haunting nightmare with an oppressive father figure. The strongmen’s paralyzing fear marks their status as puppet-performers acting on behalf of stronger and more sinister forces, which use them merely as hard muscle. These men are in the business of putting on a show of force before the masses, but they have been intimidated themselves by capitalist and imperialist masterminds. A new wave of terror enters the house with each consecutive entry of up to four strongmen, who are all dressed in the same way and show a similar conduct: all tyrants look and behave alike, and they are vying to take over with only Felliniesque stunts to their record. The tragic prospect that there are many more dictators waiting in the wings looms large. With Antigone, all hopes of

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galvanizing resistance are vested in youth—but rebellion does not erupt onstage. Karras’s play ends with the entrance of the fourth strongman, who greets the actors and spectators with a perplexing “Good evening, patriots” (1986: 168).

THE AESTHETICS OF MISFITS AND FAILURES IN THE LATE CAPITALIST SYSTEM My voice seems strange to me. Am I human or am I a machine? Am I full or am I hungry? Acting on my own accord or following orders? My every step is a number. So am I the victimizer or the victim? ... Do tell me, do I have a face or not? (Mourselas, Dangerous Cargo, 1971: 58–59)

Ziogas, Karras, and Skourtes situate absurdist encounters in enclosed, moribund environments, in which physical decay signifies moral corruption. Bodily deformations stand metaphorically for the deforming reality that pervades even the family home. This domestic entrapment, which confines the characters mentally as well as physically, provides the locus for oblique allusions to Greece’s predicament under the dictatorship (Hager 2008: 45). Skourtes and Karras, in particular, color the many shades of the tradecraft of capitalist oppression, which leaves its victims gripped by terror. Their plays dramatize terror in allegorical and enigmatic ways, which bespeak the arbitrary world in which marginal characters struggle to survive. The performance of strength of Karras’s protagonists becomes a performance manqué. Also, the dramatist doubles and triples some figures (such as Egnates and Bobby), which renders the play-acting circular and inexorable; it underscores the absurdist theater’s propensity to deconstruct conventional characters and plotlines. The two playwrights depict the dangerous pathologies of uncaring capitalists, who subdue all their victims except for those whom the smell of putrefaction brings back to critical awareness. While the diffident antiheroes are incapable of any grand action, some of them, such as

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Skourtes’s Petros, nonetheless reclaim their autonomy in the most difficult of circumstances. Because these dramatists theatricalize the fields of indoors and outdoors, private and public, insiders and outsiders, they further portray how the suffocating Greek world relates to the wider Western culture. Their plays are not only direct products of the current events, they are also direct encounters with them. The new absurdist aesthetics of early 1970s Greek theater became political and stimulated further artistic innovations. Absurdist approaches that de-emphasized poetry but stressed self-deprecating humor appealed to the broader Greek audiences. Drawing on human observation, many of the new Greek plays explored real social problems in addition to the political stalemate. In their analyses of capitalist (self-)destruction, the dramatists reserved sympathy for the system’s outcasts and meted out huge burdens of guilt to the scheming perpetrators. In the early 1970s, however, the plays’ overstatement of the burdens of guilt and of human sympathies and exempla responded less to the public’s intellectual than to its emotional needs: the need to see the Greek people’s lack of freedom, which was unnecessary by any account, create positive energies that it could invest in dissidence and resistance against the oppressive regime. Skourtes, in particular, fostered the conviction that the individual could gain psychological strength from holding on, relentlessly, to personal dignity, spiritual independence, and high moral standards. His portrayal of Petros is a study in the dynamics of resistance against top-down coercion but also against the pressures and conformist ways of peers: Petros revolts whereas Paulos finds it impossible to extricate himself. Any verdicts about human debilities and cowardliness, however, had to instill a troubled recognition in the viewers. To pass such messages, playwrights, producers, and actors relied on the Greek public’s sensitivity to metatheatrical and larger sociopolitical contexts rather than on principles of conventional drama or narrowly defined politics. In the course of the plays’ performance runs, the position of the audience shifted from passive consumption to deliberate agency, from acceptance to a self-critique and to an active analysis of exploitative power structures. The absurdist approach and also Brecht’s epic theater style did most to help the New Greek Theater achieve these goals. It is, therefore, to the Brechtian analysis of capitalist oppression that the second half of this chapter turns, while briefly outlining the reception of Brecht in the Colonels’ Greece.

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THE STORY OF ALI RETZO: BRECHTIAN THEATER IN GREECE UNDER THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP Brecht also followed Marx in showing that political reality was often produced by flamboyantly theatrical means. . . . If theatrical means were used in gaining real political power, then the epic theater could reveal the working of this machinery of illusion. (Bryant-Bertail 2000: 3)

Brecht’s epic theater offers a valuable platform for examining the intense political drama that unfolded after the Colonels’ coup. Koun’s production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948) in 1957 marked Brecht’s first breakthrough in Greece. He followed up with a 1958 production of The Good Person of Szechwan (1943).20 In 1959 Kambanelles presented a Brechtian-style adaptation for the stage of Penelope Delta’s clever children’s book, Tale without Title. A November 1961 special issue (no. 83) of the periodical Epitheorese Technes was devoted to Brecht. These late dates lead Petros Markares (1937– ) to conclude that Greece became familiar with Brecht only after his death in 1956 (1982: 86). Markares, who translated Brecht, launched the second phase of his reception in Greece, realizing the potential of a more comprehensive approach to the German author by the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today, Markares is better known for his very successful mystery and detective novels and for his noir “Trilogy of the Crisis,” which reflects the impact of Greece’s financial woes (Expiring Loans, 2010; Termination, 2011; and Bread, Education, Freedom, 2012). Like Brecht, Markares aspired at being a playwright, stage producer, and theoretician, and he studied his model’s writings on acting and staging, which fill several volumes. He gained expertise in Brechtian dramaturgy at a time when opportunities for young Greek playwrights to earn recognition were very limited. In 1971, the Free Theater (Eleuthero Theatro) staged The Story of Ali Retzo (˙ Øæ Æ ı `º  Ç), a 1965 play that Markares had composed in the Brechtian vein with poetic overtones. The actors, who shared 20 Andreades shares general thoughts on Brecht in Greece (2009: 406–415). See also Iordanides (1973: 65); Kangelare (2010: 136, 139); Koltsidopoulou (2010); Markares (1982: 71–72); and Spathes (2003b: 251, 252). Mygdales (1977) and Ch. Papageorgiou (1989) furnish bibliographies on Brecht in Greece. An earlier version of this section appeared in Van Steen (2013).

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with many of their generation an ardent interest in Nitsos’s journal Theatro, had read the full text of Markares’s play in the March–April 1965 issue and committed to a study of the play in consultation with its author (Kotanidis 2011: 150–151). Their production became a collective effort to subject the military regime to the probing lens of dialectic theater. The Story of Ali Retzo captured a postmodernist ethos of ambivalence, which questioned oppressive power structures and social inequities. The story was set in a mid-twentieth-century Turkish village, and the Free Theater used this setting to critically investigate the problems posed by capitalism, mechanization, and exploitative means of production. The 1971 show became a tremendous success and warrants closer study. It expressed the frustrations of unreconciled audiences and of an “unruly” youth movement and, more importantly, it laid out a model for a new, radical understanding of theater as democratic process. The production invites us also to chart the ways in which ideas on Brecht, contemporary stage techniques, negotiated rewritings, and physical spaces operated in a broader process of acculturation and imitation-as-rewriting. Markares joined the act of rewriting to his experience as a theorist and translator by creatively imitating Brecht’s practice of theatrical storytelling. His collaboration with the actors of the Free Theater provides us with a prime example of how agents of translation and adaptation for the stage can assume multifaceted roles in the sociocultural field. The Story of Ali Retzo is remembered to this day as a definitive Brechtian moment in Greek theater under the dictatorship. It marked a cultural as well as a theatrical breakthrough, if not a (modest) revolution. But before delving into the details of the interaction with Brecht that Greece, Markares, and the Free Theater pursued, we need to explain this and other notions of Brechtian dramaturgy.

Theater as Process, Acculturating Brecht as Process We wanted to change the structures and the production method of the spectacle as well as its contents, but always geared toward the broad public. That was our goal and our strength. (Kotanidis 2011: 178)

Brecht and Piscator cofounded the “epic theater” as a politically committed theater whose praxis drew on the historical materialism

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of Marx.21 Its aim was to subject economic and sociopolitical forces to an objective and conscious analysis, which would expose how oppressive powers and ideologies had developed historically and continued to hold sway (even if this entailed that any representation of history would necessarily be reductive). Thus, Bryant-Bertail notes, epic theater presents history from the perspective of conflicting classes and, significantly, it suggests that world orders are subject to change (2000: 2–4). Brecht’s drama is indeed a social and ideological forum that envisions the possibility of change, and the same holds true of Markares’s play. The more rational side of epic theater, on the other hand, requires that actors do not embody but demonstrate their roles, and that the spectators remain aware that they are watching a performance. Brecht himself claimed that his epic theater does not make the spectator the victim of a “hypnotic experience”; instead, he or she inevitably has to “take a critical attitude while . . . in the theatre (as opposed to a subjective attitude of becoming completely ‘entangled’ in what is going on)” (1992: 78). The Brechtian player had to give a performance of being an actor rather than of the character that he or she impersonated. Up until the 1960s, many Greek performers found this concept hard to grasp: they belonged to a generation that had been trained in the acting theory and style of Stanislavski and had learned to embody, not reason, but emotion (following Aristotle’s idea of emotional empathy, which implicated the spectator by invoking pity and fear but whose excess Brecht rejected as a passive and self-indulgent form of drama). Markares drew from Brecht’s experience in handling historical themes for a global audience and, in conjunction with the Free Theater, exposed early 1970s Greece to a new genre and demonstrated its use value (Brecht’s Gebrauchswert) for his home country.22 Thus the production of The Story of Ali Retzo taught its public of 1971 and 1972 and subsequent readers much about what went on in Greece in the aesthetic, ethical, and political domains. The fragmented or refracted nature of the Brechtian play allows for greater freedom of interpretation. Performers and spectators are 21 Mumford offers a very readable introduction to Brecht and his dramaturgy (2009: esp. 78–81, on epic theater). Wright notes that Brecht later in life preferred the designation of “dialectical theater” to “epic theater” (1989: 24–25). 22 The studies by Haus (2005; 2007) elaborate on Brecht’s “use value.” Haus can look back on many years of close friendship and collaboration with Markares and his work is grounded in his theater practice in Cyprus and Greece. I thank him for sharing his insights in person as well.

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encouraged to approach the play with the Brechtian “third eye,” seeing and positioning things anew through the eyes of someone innocent of the conventions of drama. The modes of anti-illusory acting function as alienation or estrangement devices and stimulate critical commentary on the action (challenging, for instance, the perception of poverty and exploitation as “natural” conditions). They push the actors beyond an empathetic interpretation of their roles and discourage audience identification with the characters. Brecht’s principle of alienation or estrangement between actors, spectators, and performance is better known—though not necessarily better understood—as the Verfremdungseffekt (conventionally translated as “alienation effect”), the “effect” that “makes strange” or lends distance to the illusory world of the performance, which, broken down to its constitutive components, reveals contradictions, assumes a self-reflexive quality, and prompts a more profound social and political critique.23 Brecht was convinced that a geographical and especially a temporal distancing would foster a more rational and unprejudiced reception. The unmimetic nature of his objectivityseeking style has disappointed audiences addicted to romantic illusion or dramatic sensation. But Brecht’s dramaturgy and especially his novel conception of the relationship between performer and spectator could represent a new order. A theater of reasoned 23 Amy Green notes that Brecht’s Antigone, which reflects on destruction in the postwar era, created this Verfremdungseffekt by resorting to a formal minimalism: everything that went beyond the actors’ telling of the story was purged, and the stage was “sealed into a self-contained and self-sufficient universe” (Green 1994: 43–44). Brecht used the Antigone production to reassess the role of art and of the politically engaged artist. This process led him to adopt a trademark form of the Brechtian enterprise: the Model, hence the Antigonemodell. Brecht was deeply influenced by the classics and, throughout his life, worked creatively with ancient literature, myth, history, and art to make political statements against fascism and capitalism. His paradigmatic use of the classics was at the core of his unorthodox technique of alienation; his drama of socialist classicism confounded modernists as well as philologists still shackled to the ancient texts. Brecht subverted conventional ideas on how to unlock the content and form of original tragedy. He debunked the positivistic pseudo-symmetries and chorus geometrics that had, through the earlier decades, been defining traits of Western classical revivals. See further Bryant-Bertail (2000: 15, 18–19); Mee and Foley (2011: 43, 45–47); and Seidensticker (1992: 350–352, 363). Aris Alexandrou’s Antigone of 1951 is an example of a modern Greek reworking of Sophoclean material in the Brechtian mode. It reconnects with the existential questions and sensibilities that underlie tragic myth and that had also shaped Brecht’s social symbolism. Van Steen discusses Alexandrou’s play and publishes the Greek text and its English translation (2011: chs 5 and 6 resp.).

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reflection, which delivers a distanced treatment of history, politics, and human behavior, is better able also to instruct and to teach skills that are transferable to the realm of practical politics. Didacticism is never far removed from the Brechtian stage. Markares’s application of epic theater techniques to The Story of Ali Retzo merits closer examination. How did he deploy Brechtian elements and what did they mean to Greek urban audiences of the early 1970s? Markares did not simply borrow from Brecht but engaged in a process of transculturation with his dialectics, and the Free Theater then pushed this transculturation process even further. The concepts of rewriting and acculturation are central to translation theory and have permeated the study of Brecht’s reception as well.24 Markares’s treatment of Brecht, which extended far beyond the practice of translating, may illustrate the full range of the Greek reception through rewriting. Markares and the Free Theater “translated” the German playwright to a new cultural context, and used modes of citing, editing, reviewing, commenting, anthologizing, and imitating to achieve this goal. This process in turn challenged Markares and the actors to widen their theoretical reflections on Brecht and to commit to a translatio of epic theater’s technical terms. Markares translated the Verfremdungseffekt with the Greek term of paraxenisma ( ÆæÆ ØÆ), the technique of making reality seem unusual and unfamiliar instead of ordinary and of subjecting this reality to an (unconventional) passing of time.25 The actors of the Free Theater, then, adapted Brechtian themes and strategies to create meaning for their spectators of the early 1970s, many of whom were not familiar with the German playwright. They developed a theater that was constantly looking in on itself and that laid out processes or working schemes rather than outcomes: the performers committed to a self-conscious style of acting and subjected the content of The Story 24 A representative essay is André Lefevere’s chapter, “Acculturating Bertolt Brecht” (1998). Lefevere’s comprehensive work (1992) offers further insights into the theory of rewriting, which comprises forms of translating that reach beyond translation in the conventional sense but constitute no less mediated social acts (as they meet the perceived needs of shifting sociopolitical contexts that determine how rewritings are produced and consumed). Performances on stage or screen supplement the various modes of rewriting an actual text, which must bring the latter closer to the target culture (Lefevere 1992: 6–7). Asimakoulas (2009b) treats the notion of rewriting and its multiple aesthetic, sociopolitical, and institutional aspects. 25 Markares (1982: 81, 82; 2006: 153). See also Georgousopoulos (1999–2000: 2:280) and Hager (2008: 170 n. 33).

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of Ali Retzo, and a small part of history, to strategies of dialectical narration and distantiation. The resulting production rigorously observed the Brechtian alienation and commented on the stage action in various modes, which transformed and diversified the ways in which the public entered into the events depicted. Also, the Free Theater staged the play with performers who wore half-masks, which added another layer of distantiation to their acting.26 Brecht had been open to elements of Western folk culture, which granted Markares and the Free Theater creative license to do the same but to incorporate folk ingredients from the Eastern Mediterranean as well.27 Together, they presented an unpretentious village and folk environment that spoke to contemporary Greek conditions. This “imbrication” of the foreign into the local was partly responsible for the success of The Story of Ali Retzo, both as a script and as a play.28 For Markares, too, theater was a means of popular education and had to provide occasions for communication and judgment on issues of broad public concern. He turned his drama into a tool for epimorphose or “further education” (countering the government’s claim of providing education for all generations; Chapter 3, pp. 184–185). The Story of Ali Retzo presents different types of zealous confrontation in an attempt to deliver instruction about the causes of class friction, while other Brechtian strategies cool down the action flow. The danger, however, of the overt didacticism of the Brechtian apparatus is that it may flatten characters while the alienation effects might make the acting look mechanical and impersonal. Markares successfully averted these typical shortcomings and, drawing on folk detail, presented more sharply etched characters, such as the cameos of the landholder Ali Retzo, of the seasoned reporter/journalist, and of the idealist teacher/singer. The playwright drew on his theoretical study to infuse his work with germane Brechtian principles and steered the Free Theater’s actors in the same direction. He aimed to shift public opinion by the play’s end but the troupe’s production, despite its efforts to maintain a critical and historicizing perspective, still evoked an empathic response from many viewers. This response 26 Modern Greek theater of the 1970s rarely used masks, which was symbolic given its aims of immediacy and authenticity (Ch. 1, pp. 71, 73, 81). 27 Bradby recognizes that French theater practitioners, too, were attracted by the fusion of Brecht’s political art with folk culture (1991: 96). 28 I owe the term “imbrication” to Asimakoulas (email communication of February 3, 2011).

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proved, not the troupe’s failure, but the overwhelming emotional resonance of the themes of exploitation and repression. The Story of Ali Retzo left a paradigmatic demonstration of how the Brechtian apparatus could be made to inform Greek circumstances. This historicizing play encouraged oppressed Greek audiences to scrutinize complex material conditions and social contradictions and, therefore, their own predicament.29 Like Brecht, Markares rebelled against the theater that was an illusion of reality (that is, a reflection of the bourgeois status quo) and moved his spectators to see theater’s relevance to the contemporary world. Honoring his objectives, the actors of the Free Theater saw their rehearsal process of the play as a platform for investigation and analysis. They used their production space as a laboratory, to which they brought the results of extensive tryouts and improvisations. This conception of the Brechtian play engaged performers and audiences in a new kind of democratic action, while the stage depiction remained subject to constant evaluation and revision.30 Markares was well aware that many dramatists and actors reduced the principles of epic theater to a dogmatic style of mannerisms and telltale signs and that their productions were therefore intrinsically flawed. He repeatedly called attention to the danger of making “eclectic” choices from the range of the most familiar Brechtian devices for the purported goal of creating a politically engaged theater, because such cavalier choices were bound to

29 Markares wrote two more Brechtian plays that served similar purposes: The Epic of King Yby (  ı BÆغØ  , 1971; staged in December 1974 by the Stoa Theater) and The Guests (ˇØ çغØ, 1978). The former places itself in the tradition of the well-known presurrealist play, Ubu roi (Ubu the King, 1896), by Alfred Jarry, and features self-serving coups and countercoups. 30 Brecht’s definition of the “ ‘popular’ as intelligible to the broad masses” sharpened the focus of mainly younger and Western theater practitioners who sought to raise political awareness among disenfranchised populations (Taylor 2000: 173). Therefore, as Bryant-Bertail observes, Brecht’s work has often functioned as a model for feminist theater, even though his plays are not feminist plays. The principles of epic theater have influenced other theaters of social liberation as well, including the postcolonialist, the African-American, and the gay and lesbian stage. Contemporary feminists such as Jill Dolan and Elin Diamond (see Diamond 1988) have recognized this influence (Bryant-Bertail 2000: 65–66). In the United States and Europe of the 1960s, “the antiwar, civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights, and farm workers’ movements” rediscovered the stage practices of Piscator, Brecht, and the 1920s agitprop troupes, and they used them as models of an activist theater that could mobilize its public (Bryant-Bertail 2000: 211).

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remain superficial and undigested.31 Many Greek stage producers, however, joined the wave of commercialization that was cashing in on less thoughtful experiments with epic theater. Together, Markares and the Free Theater were fighting a “Brecht fever” that commodified historical and class conflict and turned it into mere spectacle.32

31

Testimony by Markares, July 26, 2001; Markares (1999a: 57). Kretikos concurred that, with the burgeoning Greek interest in Brecht, political mobilization had become “epidemic” and “too obvious” (1972: 181). The toolkit of Brechtian techniques includes the use of (living) placards and printed signs; the presentation of the stage as stage (often an open playing area); the use of interruptions, syncopations, and occasional flashforwards (as in film montage); scenes of play-acting and play-withinthe-play; the “historicization” of the dramatic events (which are thus seen from a fresh, skeptical perspective); the dissecting of abstract images and the assemblage of documentary material; and the structuring of the play by way of self-contained, episodic scenes often preceded by epic theater titles, headings, or captions (sometimes with mythical allusions) or by the introductory comments of a narrator or storyteller. Brecht’s policy was one of “each scene for itself,” which results in Brechtian tableaux that make for a cyclical and analytic narrative rather than building up to a linear and inevitable sequence. Important, too, is the Brechtian Gestus, “a gesture, a word, an action, a tableau by which, separately or in series, the social attitudes encoded in the playtext become visible to the spectator” (Diamond 1988: 89). Among the staging and acting codes advocated by Brecht were, furthermore, self-references and direct addresses to the audience; (reflective) songs out of character; still postures, pantomime, and nonhistrionic acting; the occasional casting of women in men’s roles and vice versa; the use of large choruses to place speeches in their sociopolitical context and to deliver a sense of theater as a community event. Pephanes has assessed how Markares applied these various techniques to The Story of Ali Retzo (2001: 112–114). 32 Brecht became a mascot of the domestic and international leftist opposition against dictatorships in Latin America. I owe the apt term “Brecht fever” to Taylor’s description of the popularity of Brechtian theater in Latin America of the 1950s and 1960s (2000: 172). She explains that this “fever” hit at the height of the Cold War for two important reasons. First, Brecht infused the epic form with Marxist ideology and thus offered “one more way of framing and making sense of Latin America’s revolutionary praxis and aspirations” (2000: 173). Secondly, Brecht combined the anticapitalist ideology with aesthetic principles, which inspired Latin American actors and directors to follow in the same path (2000: 173). Taylor has warned, however, that, although the theater of revolution “staged the uprising of the oppressed and tried to expose a bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist ideology, it also imposed its own myths” (2000: 174). See further De Toro (1984); Ford (2010: pp. xv–xvi, 3); and Puga (2008: 6–7). Patterson (1994) opens a long historical perspective on Brecht’s legacy. Bradby notes the enthusiastic reception of Brecht’s drama in France (1991: 54, 94–97, 100–102, 107). He credits Bernard Dort’s critical work with raising the profile of epic theater but claims that Dort also “exerted a tight control on all would-be directors” of Brechtian plays, which “soured relations between the supporters and detractors of political theatre for more than a decade” (1991: 101). Dort was translated into Greek by Anna Phrankoudake (Dort 1975). Residual aspects of control and animosity colored the Greek reception of Brecht as well.

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Brecht in Greece under the Junta Like many admirers of Brecht worldwide, left-leaning Greek intellectuals associated the Marxist dramatist’s work and life (including his persecution and later exile) with risk-taking and resistance during the crucial years of the rise of German fascism.33 The more radical fascination with Brecht coincided with new waves of anticapitalist, anticorporate, anti-imperialist, and anti-right-wing struggle. After the coup, young Greeks sharpened their sociopolitical awareness in terms conversant with international trends and related to Brecht, in particular, who had rapidly accrued symbolic capital in the student movements of Western Europe.34 The Greek student public recognized the many domestic experiments with Brecht (regardless of their quality) as deliberate attempts to preserve the revolutionary thrust of the May 1968 era (Kotanidis 2011: 234–235; testimony by Markares, July 26, 2001). Thus Brecht’s stature kept growing in the eyes of young Greek intellectuals searching for critical radicalism and literary modernity.35 In their estimation, Brecht was as much a Marxist cultural theorist as he was a poet-playwright, even though many knew of Martin Esslin’s attempt to rescue Brecht the poet from Brecht the Marxist. Phontas Kondyles provided the Greek translation of Esslin’s Brecht: The Man and His Work (1959), which appeared in 1971, a peak year of Brechtian activity in Greece.36 Brecht’s own theoretical and other works were translated into Greek, typically by exponents of the leftist youth and intelligentsia (Markares, Anny Koltsidopoulou, Anna Phrankoudake, Alexes Solomos, to name

33

Many European intellectuals and radicals of the 1930s through mid-1950s adopted Marxist thought and upheld the Russian Revolution as a possible model for remaking the bourgeois and capitalist world order. The WWII alliance between the West and the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazism solidified this interest. 34 According to Asimakoulas, during the growth of the global student movement, Brecht was the most widely read German author, who helped shape the “political and aesthetic consciousness of the New Left” (2005a: 103; italics his). 35 Others who offered theater theory designed to liberate actors, audiences, and societies were Artaud, Grotowski, and Boal. The latter’s Forum Theater bore the strong imprint of Brechtian methods. All of them were being discussed in Greece under the junta but none was as popular as Brecht. See, for instance, Puchner (1973). 36 See Esslin et al. (1966) for signs of the mid-1960s Greek interest in Esslin’s and others’ views on political theater. Kotanidis was captivated by Esslin’s 1961 book, The Theatre of the Absurd (Kotanidis 2011: 399–400). Magia Lymberopoulou published its Greek translation in 1970 (Ch. 1, n. 20).

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a few).37 Brecht’s poetry found an enthusiastic Greek audience as well: in 1970 the press Keimena (owned by Philippos Vlachos) published an edition and translation of select poems of Brecht (translated by Markares) in 2,000 copies, which sold out within ten days (Markares 2006: 157; Van Dyck 1998: 27). The first book of Brecht’s poems was followed by the publication a few months later of a second volume, Poems 2, again translated by Markares (Asimakoulas 2005a: 129, 216–220; 2007: 120–121). In 1971, Dionyses Divares translated and published Brecht’s Political Texts (under the pseudonym of Vasiles Vergotes and with the help of the progressive publishing house Stochastes). Asimakoulas rightly identifies the work as a “handbook of resistance,” which tells the oppressed to exercise critical thinking and to scrutinize what the oppressors present to them as “truth” (2005a: 162).38 These daring feats of translating and publishing were responses to Brecht’s call for action by intellectuals, who had to proceed from diagnosing sociopolitical problems to motivating themselves and others to resist. Brecht’s plays, too, were incorporated into the “books of problematization” (vivlia provlematismou), the wave of new radical literature that advanced social consciousness and challenged the political status quo while keeping up with global debates.39 This literature welcomed the “theater of ideas,” which included the socially responsible, psychological, and philosophical plays of Western and Central European and American dramaturgy. The Greeks saw the “guru” Brecht tie together the genres of the books 37 Both Markares and Koltsidopoulou maintained strong connections with Germany and the German language. Asimakoulas proposes that Brecht’s popularity in Greece might have been an echo of the “Brecht boom” that had started in West Germany in 1968 and that expressed the radicalization of youth’s political conscience (2009a: 239). In France, Brecht’s texts were used to indict the Franco-Algerian War (1954–1962). Asimakoulas (2005a: 19, 101–104, 157–158). 38 Asimakoulas studies the early 1970s Greek reception of Brecht’s Political Texts (2005a: 161–167). His 2005 dissertation is the most comprehensive account of Brecht’s position as the political author par excellence in Greece. Asimakoulas pays special attention to issues of translation, censorship, publishing activity (especially by the publishing houses of Kalvos and Stochastes), the social mission of art, and cultural resistance (also 2005b and 2007). Recently, he has examined the relationship between the Greek student movement and translations of Brecht (including the paratextual features of those translations and other framing functions of the “books of problematization”) (2009a and 2009c). 39 Kontogiannes (1970) clarifies the phrase “books of problematization.” Asimakoulas defines “problem books” as “serious books addressing important social issues and bringing readers closer to modern European thought” (2007: 121; also 2005a: 134–137; 2006: 83–86; 2009a: 238; and 2009c: 36).

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of problematization and of the theater of ideas (Markares 2006: 155). Brecht’s plays, therefore, provided the scripts for some of the first truly intercultural performances. They offered a conceptual drama of broad contemplation and direction rather than the narrow politics of sloganistic performance or raw agitprop street theater (another didactic idiom whose leftist message of the 1960s was far from univocal). By all formal and informal accounts, Brecht became the most popular foreign playwright in Greece during the junta years, and he made Lorca, Piscator, Artaud, Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett, Peter Weiss, Pirandello, and Dario Fo pale in comparison.40 The reception of Brecht in Greece was, however, often more preoccupied with articulating radical politics than with conducting artistic or dramaturgical inquiries (Markares 1999a: 56–57, 58). Also, once the political stimulus fell away, Brechtian aesthetics in Greek guise appeared to be adrift. Selfadvertised innovations and Brechtian structures, agitations, and revolts were not a panacea. They were too often seen as a ready formula that would solve all of contemporary society’s and theater’s problems—and then they disappointed. For reasons of space constraints, a few examples of Brechtian plays performed under the Colonels may suffice. The students of Athens College staged a production of Brecht’s Coriolanus in 1969, at the initiative of Kostas Arzoglou, one of the founding members of the Free Theater. Present-day politician Nikos Bistes recalls how they passed off the abridged play as Shakespeare’s and agreed with the censor to cut just the one line that they had rendered as: “The people will decide and not the dictator” (2010: 97–100). Markares provided the translation for the 1971/2 independent production of Brecht’s classic play, Mother Courage and Her Children (original title: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder; begun 1931, produced by the Berliner Ensemble in 1951). The play opened at the Pantheon Theater in Athens and became a big success. Director Alexes Minotes cast his terminally ill wife, the tragic actress Katina Paxinou, in her last major role.41 Brecht’s original play cuts the prominent themes of war, 40 Iordanidou (2005) and Proiou and Armati (1998) have researched Pirandello’s reception in Greece. 41 This Greek Mother Courage received a strong review from most critics, such as Karter (1978: 124–126) and Thrylos (1971d). Georgousopoulos called the production outstanding but it was, in his view, no longer Brechtian (1999–2000: 2:270). See also Andreades (2009: 409) and Pagiatakes, He Kathemerine, November 12, 1999. Minotes expounds on his thinking about Brecht (Minotes 1988a: 105–123; 1988b: 51–56,

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suffering, profiteering, and survivalism free from a conventional narrative. Under the Greek dictatorship, Minotes’s production conveyed the timely message that war and military action do not give but take from their participants, supporters, and apologists. War does not leave any winners; instead, it cynically exposes the degradation of a society that has not learned from recent experience. Brecht’s Mother Courage hurled a bitter and prophetic accusation at the German people in the lead-up to World War II. Through the fate of Mother Courage, the playwright anticipated the suffering of those ready and eager to wage war for the fascists. Minotes and Paxinou, however, downplayed the Brechtian contradictions between Mother Courage’s maternal side and her financial opportunism. Chatzepantazes objected to Paxinou’s emotionalizing of a play in which the laconic Brecht had studied the “moral and political dilemmas of the modern world” (Kretikos 1972: 182). A Man’s a Man (Man Equals Man), Brecht’s play of 1926 that treats the problem of human fragmentation and the dismantling of the subject in a militaristic society, was staged in Thessaloniki by the Theatrical Workshop. Its troupe of young people and students mounted the play as a collaborative project in February 1972 and used a script adapted from Koltsidopoulou’s translation.42 With its careful selection of pertinent texts, the production’s playbill was meant to educate its audience on the principles of Brechtian theater (Karaoglou 2009: 269–270). The same play, A Man’s a Man, was taken up by the group “D,” another young thiasos active in Athens (Kretikos 1972: 181). During the 1971/2 season, another two Brechtian productions saw the stage, and more companies wanted to prove how progressive they were by putting on “their” Brecht: The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), staged by the Proskenio of Alexes Solomos, and Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929–1931), by the Myrat-Zoumboulake Theater. In February 1973, Spyros Euangelatos staged Brecht’s Life of Galileo (1937) with the New Stage of the National Theater. For its first venture into Brechtian drama, the

108–116). Bradley (2006) presents various international versions of Mother Courage and their respective receptions. 42 See Anon., “The New Theatrical Teams” (1972: 176); Georgousopoulos (1999–2000: 2:277–281, 309–310, with very positive impressions); Karaoglou (2009: 63, 67–68, 266–270, 342); and Kornetis (2006: 235–236). Wright introduces A Man’s a Man and The Good Person of Szechwan (1989: 33–36 and 40–44, resp.).

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National Theater used the director’s translation. Stelios Vokovits played the title role.43 Brecht’s classical paradigms for modern personalities and circumstances, such as Antigone and Prometheus and, by extension, Galileo, inspired Greek producers working under the dictatorship, who wanted, for reasons of safety or for artistic reasons, to maintain some distance from disturbing psychological or historical events but still to voice relevant political protest. The example of Anna Synodinou, who played the lead role in a 1973 version of Brecht’s Antigone, may illustrate this practice. The German text was translated into modern Greek by Solomos, who also directed the production, and was published in a 1973 special issue of Theatrika.44 The work of Synodinou, in particular, let ancient and modern drama enter into in a dialectic analysis of methods and techniques. Brecht’s popularity in Greece led to numerous editions, translations, interpretations, newspaper articles, readings, and lectures on his work. In early October 1971, the Goethe Institute in Athens commemorated the fifteen-year anniversary of Brecht’s death with lectures and events that included book exhibits and a film screening of The Threepenny Opera (Anon., calendar entry of October 4, 1971 in Chroniko 1972: 162). Members of the Free Theater contributed staged readings of two of Brecht’s didactic one-act plays of 1929 (in Greek translation): Lindbergh’s Flight and The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent (Kotanidis 2011: 229–232; see Figure 4.1). The anniversary celebrations provided actors and artists with an alibi for giving Brecht more visibility, while he continued to figure on the censors’ blacklists. Many of Brecht’s books still circulated, often clandestinely. At times the censors made token concessions and allowed his works to be displayed in bookstores or permitted some of his plays to be performed—only to rescind concessions afterward.45 Significantly, the censors named Brecht as a forbidden playwright and, to a lesser extent, as the author of political-theoretical and communist treatises.

43 Hager (2008: 90) and Iordanides (1973: 67). Georgousopoulos offers a positive review (1999–2000: 2:287–293). McNeill (2005) elucidates Brecht’s Life of Galileo and its reception. 44 See Synodinou (1973) and also the review by Speliotopoulos (1973b). Kotanidis played Haemon in this production (Kotanidis 2011: 309–311). 45 Ch. 2, pp. 97–99, remarked on the regime’s blacklists targeting leftist authors. See also Georgousopoulos, Ta Nea, February 14, 2000; Kamm, NYT, January 27, 1972; Maraka, He Auge, October 11, 1998; Papagiannidou, To Vema, October 18, 1998; and Tonge, The Guardian, February 10, 1972.

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Figure 4.1. Scene from the Free Theater’s staged readings of two one-act plays of Brecht (October 1971, Goethe Institute, Athens). Courtesy of Yorgos Kotanidis.

The blacklists of October 25, 1971 and January 1974 motivate the ban on Brecht’s work with the plainest of explanations: “The author is a German communist” (Axelos 1984: 147; 2008: 169). Both lists also include Markares’s Story of Ali Retzo, which is labeled “A theatrical work with communist content” (Axelos 1984: 147; 2008: 169). Brecht remained all the rage, however, for speaking a covert political language when direct political commentary was forbidden. The 1971 craze for Brecht showed no signs of abating. Brecht’s picture, too, gained an iconic status in Greece (see Chapter 2, p. 141 n. 71). The burgeoning Brecht theater industry, however, flattened the

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messages of many of his plays (Kretikos 1972: 180; Sykka, He Kathemerine, April 20, 1997). To this day, conversations about the dramatist’s Greek reception inevitably lead to allegations that too many cooks dished up a Brecht that was tasteless or “untrue” to the “real Brecht.” Many of my informants complained that Brechtian theater, when presented with a propagandistic superficiality, did the cause of dissidence a quick but cheap service. Many theater practitioners used Brecht as a façade for staging merely a louder kind of political sloganism. Greek critics took issue with the younger generation’s facile adoption of Brechtian “gimmicks” such as the popular alienation effects and its unwillingness to reconceptualize dramatic performance (Skalioras in two articles in To Vema, April 5, 1973 and February 20, 1975). “All the young actors felt they had to do Brecht,” stated Nitsos, the publisher of Theatro, “but very few knew how to get it right.” Even when pressed, Nitsos did not explain what he meant by “right” (testimony of July 3, 2000; Nitsos 1973a). Georgousopoulos wrote in exasperation: “Whatever leads our young people and our older [generation] to mistreat Brecht, God only knows” (1982–1984: 2:63; also 1999–2000: 2:267, 272–273, 275, 278). Critics had a hard time accepting the vogue of “free-style” Brechtian productions, which strayed too far from the traditional to please the theater establishment that had long been shaping public opinion. They accused the new thiasoi of (narcissistically) riding the cultural and ideological trends and called Brecht’s revisionism overrated (see Kretikos 1972: 182). Telling is the reaction of Alkes Thrylos (male pen name for Helene Ourane), who reviewed the Free Theater’s production of The Story of Ali Retzo, to which this chapter turns next: Brecht’s epic theater has never swept me off my feet. Far from bedazzling me, its roughness repels me, as does its harshness, its coldness, and, above all, its presumed objectivity, which is a false objectivity. . . . What bothers me in Brecht is that subjectivity is being camouflaged. Brecht steers us in the direction of his own conclusions; he essentially makes his own propaganda statements, all the while pretending that he is not trying to influence us (1971c: 692).

The Brecht mania continued through the year of the Colonels’ fall, after which a “Brecht fatigue” set in (in the words of Markares).46 46 Markares (1999a: 58); also testimony of July 26, 2001. See further Asimakoulas (2005a: 151–152) and Pankoureles (1975).

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The Free Theater: Theater as Collaborative Action The Brechtian activities of the Free Theater deserve further analysis. The Free Theater was founded in May 1970 by a group of dynamic students and recent graduates from the National Theater’s drama school.47 First, the thiasos put on an adaptation of the eighteenthcentury Beggar’s Opera by John Gay (in a translation by the poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke). The production opened on September 3, 1970 at the Vembo Theater in Athens and subsequently moved to the playhouse of the State Theater of Northern Greece in Thessaloniki.48 It struck a resonant chord with its public in both locations and gave rise to much critical inquiry.49 The actors had invited director Michaelides to lead them, and he transformed Gay’s work into a symbolic play of political threat with anachronistic references to the military regime. The production also sought socioeconomic relevance, attacked capitalism, and stressed a collective vision (testimony by Michaelides, June 5, 2001). The Free Theater was drawn to Gay’s play because it had served Brecht as a model for his Threepenny Opera (1928) and Brecht’s work itself was, in 1970, still likely to place the censors on the alert.50 With the second and more analytical choice of The Story of Ali Retzo, the Free Theater deepened its inquiry into Brecht’s epic theater 47 The core of the Free Theater consisted of about fifteen people, but some left early and newcomers joined. Among the contributors most often mentioned through the dictatorship years are, in alphabetical order: Kostas Arzoglou, Menas Chatzesavvas, Demetres Kamberides, Yorgos Kotanidis, Angelike Kyriazake, Giannes Lekkos, Yvonne Maltezou, Anneta Michalitsianou, Anna Panagiotopoulou, Giorgos Papadakes (music), Stamates Phasoules, Giorgos Sambanes, Christina Simopoulou, Nikos Skylodemos, Smaragda Smyrnaiou, and Giannes Totsikas. After the Free Theater disbanded in 1979, some members embarked on careers in television and cinema; others formed the Free Stage (Eleuthere Skene), which specialized in epitheorese or revue plays. Lila Maraka established herself in an academic position (Theater Studies). See further, Bacopoulou-Halls (1994: 414–415); Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:414–417); and Koltsidopoulou (1976b). Kotanidis sheds light on the Free Theater’s evolution and decline after its promising beginnings (2011: 112, 127–128, 129). 48 The September 3 date held symbolic meaning as the anniversary date of the granting of the first Greek constitution (in 1843), which the Colonels’ rule continued to undermine. See further Karter (1978: 69–71); Kotanidis (2011: 490); and Ch. 3, p. 209. 49 Kotanidis (2011: 13–22, 129–130, 134–142, 147) and Sykka, He Kathemerine, April 20, 1997. Thrylos (1970d) gave the Beggar’s Opera a mixed review. 50 Testimony by Demetres Kamberides, quoted by Varoucha (1999: 4). See further Wright (1989: 28–30).

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techniques and consolidated its collaborative working methods (Kotanidis 2011: 152). The actors were intrigued by dialectical theater, but exposure to it had been absent from their traditional training at the National Theater’s drama school.51 They therefore turned to Brecht’s Short Organum for the Theatre (Kleines Organon für das Theater, 1948) as a manual for self-study in the theory and practice of epic theater (Kotanidis 2011: 112, 147, 166, 384). The very first issue of Nitsos’s journal Theatro (December 1961) had published the Greek translation of Brecht’s Kleines Organon by Demetres Myrat. Other points of reference and models came from the world of contemporary Brechtian-style cinema, from the movies Marat/Sade (1967) by Peter Brook (based on a 1963 play by Peter Weiss) and Reconstruction (1970) by Theodore Angelopoulos (Kotanidis 2011: 167–168, 172). Kotanidis explains how the Brechtian techniques that the group started to apply to The Story of Ali Retzo affirmed its search for a collective identity and consolidated its working methods—and vice versa: A group of actors who are in a process of transformation, who seek to transform themselves into a team, transforms into a group of farmers who will reconstruct the events. . . . That second level, which comes from the attempt at reconstruction, is essentially the distance you take from the role, which allows you to see the role from another angle as well (2011: 167). First, the actor becomes a farmer and then the farmer reconstructs the events he has endured, and does so with full consciousness (2011: 186; see Figures 4.2 and 4.3).

After a demanding production process, the run of The Story of Ali Retzo extended for about five weeks in Athens in spring 1971, traveled to Thessaloniki in the fall, and was taken up again in Athens in spring 1972.52 The show signaled a breakthrough for the Free Theater and

51 Kotanidis (2011: 151, 172, 173). Sapounake-Drakake and Tzogia-Moatsou recently published a comprehensive study on the National Theater’s drama school, which discusses the dictatorship’s impact on the school as well (2011: 318, 330–331, 333–349). 52 See Georgakake (2009: 143) and Kotanidis (2011: 150–199, 245–252, 270–271, 272–283). For reviews of The Story of Ali Retzo, see Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:58–63, on the production’s April 1972 version, and 1982–1984: 2:143); Karter (1978: 116); Thrylos (1971c); and Varikas (1972: 397–401). Hager discusses the critiques in detail (2008: 178–181).

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Figures 4.2–4.3. Members of the Free Theater reflect on the identification with and distance from their roles as farmers in The Story of Ali Retzo and, as farmers, they recall and reconstruct their recent experiences. Courtesy of Yorgos Kotanidis, with permission of photographer Vangeles Eliopoulos.

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became its signature play. The actors worked closely with Markares and also invited the avant-gardist director Spyros Vrachorites to coordinate rehearsals and to guide their further research on Brechtian theater and collaborative staging methods (Kotanidis 2011: 150–151, 153). Under Vrachorites’s guidance, the group deepened its reflection on political conditions of repression and on prolonged socioeconomic exploitation. Vrachorites later explained that he had the play criticize the political camp of the Old Left as well as the ultra-Right, both of which, in his view, had allowed the disastrous coup of 1967 to happen. On the other hand, he insisted that he always saw himself more as a coordinator than as a stage director in the conventional sense (testimonies of July 2 and 4, 2000; also Georgiopoulou 1999: 146). The Free Theater used the Brechtian play as a venue for experimenting with new actor–producer relations. Its young players were convinced that Brechtian models could subvert the hierarchies and power structures of traditional (bourgeois and capitalist) theater (Kotanidis 2011: 112). The method of “collective directorship” (syllogike skenothesia or omadike skenothesia), they believed, could provide a blueprint for experimental stage companies and innovative organizations to implement horizontal instead of vertical conjunctions. Thus the Free Theater debunked the primacy of the director as the single mastermind who brought cohesion to the production by enforcing his personal will. This anti-authoritarian ideal, too, was influenced by Brecht, who had fought fascism: the dialectical freedom of Brechtian performance had to repudiate the “fascism” of theater. This vision also explains why the group called itself the Free Theater, emphasizing political as well as artistic freedom (Chatzedakes 1972: 14; Hager 2008: 164). The thiasos continued to conceive of the relationship of actors to a director as if it were that of workers to an exploitative boss. In his discussion of the actors’ collective directorship, Georgousopoulos registers their notion of the traditional director as an autocratic presence: “They have completely rejected the director, whom they consider to be a mummy from the past and an obstacle to the free creative process as they envisage it. They see him as a brake, as a tyrannical authority” (1982–1984: 2:60). Kotanidis reiterates: “We wanted to be conscious participants in the stage action and not mere vehicles for action. . . . We wanted to be in control ourselves of the path our work was taking” (2011: 145, 146; also 2011: 22, 144–147, 152–153, 515).

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The Free Theater saw itself as a vanguard “theater of ideas,” and it railed against conservative government, capitalist and corporate forces, and the military-industrial complex—in sum, against the establishment. Collective directorship reflected the group’s idealist creed that the aesthetic, moral, and political lessons contained in certain choice plays or in a given acting tradition, like that of Brecht, could best be learned by having the actors participate in the play’s making as well as in its presentation—making the old cliché of theater as a collaborative process literal all over again. This kind of teamwork found its theoretical model in Brecht’s references to himself as a Probenleiter, “rehearsal leader” (Bradby 1991: 191; Hager 2008: 162–163). Formative, too, was Brecht’s conception of how his Lehrstücke or “learning plays” had to be workshopped: these plays had to function as educational vehicles benefiting the performers who had to observe and critique as well as rehearse, and who thereby developed the apparatus and tools of “spectActing,” the method that turned performers into both actors and audiences of their own acting (Mumford 2009: 79). Kotanidis explains how the members of the Free Theater absorbed these principles and tried to put them into practice: We believed that our work would be more fruitful if we applied the collaborative method, and we wanted to break the rules, to become truly a Free Theater . . . We would put our ego aside and every one of us would listen to the other’s opinion, in every rehearsal. On the next day, we would contest the discoveries of the previous day, convinced that that was the way to go into depth. And nobody would try to impose his opinion on the others but only argue for it. And so we added a subtitle to the name of the thiasos: “The Free Theater: Teamwork” (2011: 152–153).

The Free Theater aimed to democratize the world of the stage. The new dynamics of collective directorship were meant to make young theater people practice the ethos of democracy that was missing from the real-life political scene: the actors established small-scale but symbolic decision-making structures that indirectly contested the absence of democracy. “What we were pursuing, teamwork (Æ ØŒÅÆ) as well as the actors’ liberation from the stage director, stood, to a certain extent, also in opposition to the junta,” Kotanidis avers (2011: 147). Collectivity (ıººªØŒÅÆ) on stage exposed the lack of collective responsibility-taking and collective resistance across

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the larger Greek society. Working as a collective, however, also diluted the individual’s responsibility in case the regime’s censors were to subject the troupe to interrogation.53 The actors’ working methods expressed the need for collective resolve, even when they found strength in numbers. They did not seek to divert responsibility but were highly motivated to work together democratically onstage and beyond. They volunteered their services in the name of genuine ideological commitment. They also tried to integrate multiple art forms, devoid of falsity and artifice, to gain access to broad social classes. Moreover, they denounced the label of “avant-garde” since they did not want to appeal to avant-garde audiences only (Hager 2008: 161). With Brecht, they envisioned creating and training a wide public that would think actively, develop arguments, and then act rationally. Thus the actors of the Free Theater saw themselves as workers and representatives of the masses, and they kept production costs low and ticket prices affordable. Also, they issued playbills that debunked the conventions of the bourgeois playbill, replete with paid advertisements for the latest consumer goods. Instead, their playbills listed all the contributors in alphabetical order and did not link performers to specific roles. “We wanted the entire production to bear the signature of the team,” Kotanidis explains (quoted by Georgiopoulou 1999: 146; also Kotanidis 2011: 191). Teamwork staging renounced rigid company management and the “star system” driven by the demands of divas, who shaped both the content and form of the plays in which they appeared and which, they expected, would promote them further. With its outspoken stance against the Greek star system, the Free Theater reclaimed from celebrities the right to develop its own performance style and space and the freedom to voice political opinions. At the premiere of The Story of Ali Retzo, the actors distributed a leaflet entitled “The Free Theater: A Text” (in Greek, published in Chroniko 1971, Free Theater 1971: 193–195). This leaflet stated that the thiasos had been concerned with the process and course as much as with the product of its activity, and it endorsed Markares, who saw his script as “malleable material, alive 53 On one occasion, Kotanidis recalls, the Security Police arrested the entire troupe (2011: 338; also quoted by Georgiopoulou 1999: 146). The Theatrical Workshop practiced the same diversion technique of “transference,” listing many and different names on various submissions to the censors (Karaoglou 2009: 68). For the concept of “transference,” see Graham-Jones (2000: 21) and Ch. 2, n. 35.

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and, most of all, unending” (1971: 194). The play was open-ended, and so was the rehearsal and production process (Kotanidis 2011: 273–274). The leaflet’s text constituted a preliminary version of the Free Theater’s 1972 manifesto, entitled “A Necessary Retrospective,” which accompanied the April 1972 production of The Story of Ali Retzo (Kotanidis 2011: 272–275). The language of the manifesto sharpens the group’s ideas on the social and aesthetic function of collaborative theater and calls for the public’s participation in this quest: “We have been searching for an audience that is alive, a keen observer . . .” (Kotanidis 2011: 273). The Free Theater theoretically agreed that its consultative processes were crucial, and that the group benefited from them in sociopolitical as well as in artistic terms. Realizing the ideals of true teamwork and solidarity, however, proved far more difficult than anticipated. Markares recalls the many aggravating hours he spent attending rehearsals of The Story of Ali Retzo, which he characterizes as a “pandemonium of conflict and enthusiasm, creativity and pettiness” (2006: 170). He explains: When the rehearsals began . . . we started to look for the working methods that we would follow. . . . For twelve actors to perform and direct all together was not the easiest thing in the world. In the end, the actors themselves decided to split into groups. Each group would come up with a proposal for every scene; the proposal would be discussed, analyzed, and tried out onstage; then the proposals of the other groups would follow according to the exact same procedure. Understandably, these working methods generated endless discussions, confrontations, and conflicts: each group fought tooth and nail to pass its own proposal, and the remaining groups, too, fought tooth and nail to reject it. . . . In any case, this was not at all productive. We had one week left before the opening performance, which was scheduled for Easter Sunday 1971, at the Kalouta Theater. There were Homeric fights, actors threatening to leave . . . But I must confess that, in spite of all the shouting . . . , the rehearsals for Ali Retzo had a magic to them (2006: 160–161, 170).54

54

A leader of the Theatrical Workshop, Goutes describes a similar situation and sums up: “There are many people in a team and all speak; the opinion of two holds more weight; the others listen to them; in the end, one does the actual stage directing” (quoted by Karaoglou 2009: 297).

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Markares remained skeptical about the Free Theater’s leadership style and about its collective creation projects, which were assembled from proposed improvisations. Ironically, the thiasos struggled to implement the new type of direct democracy that it was investigating. Some actors proved incapable of translating their idealism into a daily practice. Besides, conflicts over ideological affiliations accompanied the bickering about organizational and artistic forms. The acrimonious rifts that soon started to divide the group eroded its members’ belief that teamwork could produce theater of a more cohesive and consistent nature than any other way of play producing.

THE STORY OF THE S TORY The Story of Ali Retzo presents the partially true tale of a handful of Turkish farmers who have endured years of exploitation by their greedy landholder, Ali Retzo. The action is set in the mid-1950s through 1961, in a small village named Sturnari in southeastern Turkey (in the prefecture of Urfa) (Markares 2006: 164). Markares learned about the story from a Turkish newspaper report (testimony of July 26, 2001; also Hager 2008: 171). He gave his play the form and style of a dialectical montage consisting of seven scenes and multiple, ballad-like songs of varying length. Each scene bears a succinct title, often in the form of an indirect question introduced by “how,” which distills the essence of the various experiences portrayed in the scene: “How the tractor was bought,” “How the tractor became common property,” “How Dursun took Meriem,” and so on. The farmers of Sturnari applaud Ali Retzo’s latest promise to purchase a tractor: the powerful new machine will allow them to produce more with less labor (Markares 1999b: 23–24; subsequent page references to the script appear in parenthesis). But events take a nefarious turn once the tractor enters the village and labor relations change, village solidarity breaks down, and the small community starts to dissolve. The peasant culture of this microcosm becomes symbolic of a larger society dominated by Turkish overlords or by any repressive hegemony. The historical and geographical displacement of the struggling community worked to deter censorship but remained, in the Greek purview, only a thinly disguised foil for current capitalist exploitation. Markares insisted that his choice of location, his situating of

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oppression among the age-old Turkish enemy, helped the Free Theater to pass the work by the junta censors. Once the play had become a stage success and its political critique had become apparent, the authorities did not dare to withdraw it anymore for fear of causing a scandal (Markares 2006: 164–165; testimony by Nitsos, July 3, 2000). Markares construed the Turkish village according to the social and political needs of a Greece that, as early as 1965, had reason to fear an unconstitutional or even a military takeover. Other snippets from the “Oriental” context, too, such as the top-down administrative channels, explain why a play about the recent Turkish past could shed light on democracy’s failure in Greece. The daring 1971 production prompted audiences to exercise retrospective judgment and to assess the country’s predicament after a full four years of dictatorial rule. The Greek title’s “historia” signifies “history” as well as “story” (which explains why some translators render the title as The History of Ali Retzo): it indicates that the play opens windows onto the lives and times of characters while capturing the threads of larger historical dynamics. But the play is also Ali Retzo’s story, or his-story as seen from the vantage point of the dominant: capitalism always gives the last word to the capitalist, who controls the action (see also Hager 2008: 169). Markares diagnoses an older community culture that is gradually infected by the greed inherent in capitalism. The establishment tries hard to pass off corrupting profit as a measure of “productivity” and “progress.” The farmers’ deteriorating working conditions, however, make it painfully manifest that profit is what fuels passéist social forces. The peasants, who have long been prisoners of the capitalist system but now direct vituperative attacks against profit, begin to emerge from “ignorance.” They are not free of blame, however, for prolonging the conditions of their entrapment. Markares throws up some of the Brechtian barriers to the audience’s identification with the oppressed farmers. By filtering his own sympathy and frustration through the multiple perspectives afforded by the Brechtian stage, the playwright has made his own writing sound reasoned and premeditated, rather than self-indulgent or psychologically charged. The Story of Ali Retzo is informed by a critical class analysis and stresses the material conditions in which the peasants live and work as well as the class conflicts that these conditions produce. From the very first scene, Markares stresses that the farmers’ life is far from idyllic: life is controlled not by the farmers’ own intent, but by the

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hardships that Ali Retzo continues to inflict on them. Those peasants who do not resign themselves to abject servility and who oppose their overlord soon find themselves cowed and battered. This group’s bid for self-determination is being squelched on multiple occasions, not only by Ali Retzo and those who serve the interests of the dominant classes, but also by those who are too cowardly to raise their voice in protest. The village population is not unanimous in its resistance, provokes its own undoing, and thus plays into the tyrant’s hands. Markares mediates the antithesis between “good farmers” (poor but honest, and a variant of the “good workers”) versus “bad capitalist bosses” (rich and corrupt) by adding the perspective of those peasants who are themselves swayed by profit. He delivers a poignant reminder that, in the struggle for survival, the underdog consciousness does not necessarily offer a common meeting ground. Also, a black-and-white approach of political economy might have reduced cultural differences and nuanced socioeconomic realities to mere class differences. The arrival of the tractor lets Ali Retzo increase his gains and worsens the farmers’ fate (41). Ali Retzo cuts his workforce because modern machinery can adequately replace it (44–47). Also, he obliges those farmers who have kept their jobs to pay for the maintenance costs of the tractor (50–51). When the farmers go on strike to protest the new and unjust system of profit sharing, the callous Ali Retzo replaces the strikers with the peasants he fired earlier, thus dividing the community against itself (51–53). Markares depicts the turmoil caused by the abrupt mechanization of the agricultural sector by focusing on the iconic tractor, which Ali Retzo was able to obtain only because he bribed the corrupt bureaucrats (and he forced his farmers to contribute to the pool of money and gifts for bribes; 25–28). The playwright demonstrates the consequences of this mechanization on the communal relationships among the ordinary people: former small farmers with dignity and some degree of independence even in a feudal system become the exploited workers of and for invasive capitalist hierarchies. The play emphasizes the peasants’ new proletarian status. Markares adopts Brecht’s investment in social and economic forces and holds out the possibility of future change. The 1971 production employed cinematic means to make the human and the mechanical blend in a novel synthesis: Dionyses Martinenkos contributed a film clip that showed the slow metamorphosis of the resented tractor into the effigy of a hated tank (Kotanidis 2011: 187–188; Markares 2006: 167).

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This tank then forcibly removed the farmers from their modest family properties and reclaimed the land for Ali Retzo (113–114). The pointers to the Colonels’ takeover (with tanks) and military rule were unambiguous.55 The play’s reference to the Chorophylake, a military police force mobilized by Ali Retzo to block the villagers from returning to their demolished homes (112, 118), was a deliberate linguistic and ideological choice as well: this body lent muscle to the dictatorship through the common use of violence (Asimakoulas 2005a: 184 n. 13, 201; 2007: 131). The spectators also grasped the meaning of the barbed wire that placed the destroyed village in quarantine (Markares 2006: 166). They were appreciative, too, of the Free Theater’s find to have each male actor take his turn playing Ali Retzo—that is, of tyranny revealing its multiple faces.56 For the actors of 1971, Brecht’s epic theater constituted a politically committed theater. In the final scene of The Story of Ali Retzo, the journalist discloses that further reporting on the story is now forbidden: the farmers’ uprising has been appropriated by the self-seeking media and the complacent bourgeoisie, which rob them of the chance to spread their message. The reporter also falsely contends that state aid has been sent to the farmers (130). The teacher/singer then launches into a call for change. The audience, however, realizes that many of those who have been utterly defeated and are now deprived

55 Georgiopoulou (1999: 145, 146); Hager (2008: 178); Kotanidis (2011: 188, 193); and testimony by Vrachorites, July 4, 2000. 56 Markares is quick to take this “find” a peg down: To this day, I hear people talk to me with admiration about the ingenious idea to have the play’s key part, the role of Ali Retzo, performed not by one actor, but by all the male actors of the thiasos. This was not at all an ingenious plan but, rather, a necessary solution: all the male actors wanted to play Ali Retzo and they raised endless objections to the part being assigned to anyone else. Then at some point somebody came up with the idea—I believe it was Spyros Vrachorites—to have Ali Retzo’s part played by a different actor in each scene, so we could get out of the gridlock and the rehearsals could go on (2006: 167–168). Kotanidis contextualizes this episode (2011: 170–171) but still poses the question, “Was this solution in the end an active artistic choice or perhaps a masked compromise? . . . I believe it was the right choice for this specific group of people, who aspired at becoming a real team through the process of producing the play” (2011: 171). In practice and onstage, “before each event that the farmers aim to reconstruct, they come to an agreement among themselves as to who remembers best what happened, and thus they decide who will play which role,” he continues (2011: 172–173). By spring 1971, twelve actors played the thirty-two roles of the play (Kotanidis 2011: 178).

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of all possessions, might abandon the struggle to correct injustice. As eternal underdogs, the farmers will continue to suffer from capitalist exploitation and class-based prejudice. They remain subject to the power of the very tyranny that they have long resented. The Story of Ali Retzo repeatedly warns, however, against the temptation for the proletariat to internalize capitalist imperatives and thus to make illinformed decisions (as when the peasants burn the forest to free up more land for agricultural exploitation; 74–88). The farmers of Sturnari, whom Ali Retzo has reduced from sharecroppers to day laborers to homeless wanderers (106–108, 110–113), have canceled out the very class struggle that might have improved their conditions (Hager 2008: 168, 169). Hager concludes: “The proletariat is a passive consumer of its own commodification,” and the group’s “competition for survival” prevents it from realizing its full potential as a social class (2008: 172, 175). Markares does not posit an imminent reform of socioeconomic circumstances but projects at best a future state of emancipation, which former victims will have to struggle to achieve. The play’s conclusion serves as the repository of its disappointing and irreconcilable truths. The author’s pessimism, however, translates into the enlightenment of his reading public or theater audience. The closing song of the play urges the spectators to ponder what they have just seen: But for that [better] moment to come, help us, please, to first lift the heavy rock and to write for the story of Ali Retzo a just ending without delay (131).

The Free Theater’s audacious production demonstrated that capitalism brought on the downtrodden farmers’ social alienation. It marked this alienation with images of the villagers arguing among themselves set off against a minimalist backdrop (see Figure 4.4). The farmers with a liberated consciousness aspire to take possession of their own lives; they start pursuing ownership of the means of production and assert the right to protest, which is not a given. They are keen to clear those roadblocks that prevent them from achieving a decent standard of living. Among the impediments are various interlopers who betray their own class by serving the tyrant’s interests. The self-serving journalist is one of Ali Retzo’s errand boys.

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Figure 4.4. Scene from the Free Theater’s production of The Story of Ali Retzo. Courtesy of Yorgos Kotanidis.

With the unflinching brazenness of political propaganda, he keeps up the drumbeat for the wealthy landholder and helps him to manipulate language. He delivers “documentation” or “evidence” that conveys misleading information but that exposes to the audience how truth is routinely distorted. Ironically, this journalist reports for a newspaper called The People’s Voice (124, 130), a mouthpiece for the government that expresses itself in blasé reports written in the Kathareuousa language (the stilted idiom promoted by the military regime, which found its mouthpieces in newspapers such as Eleutheros Kosmos, Free People, or Free World; Zaharopoulos and Paraschos 1993: 28, 29). More than any other villain, the journalist propels the analytic disclosure of power and its insidious underpinnings. He supports the obscurantism practiced by the oppressive system, even though he has access to diverse sources. Ali Retzo himself makes frequent appearances (see Figure 4.5) and is forever concerned with increasing personal profit and quelling the next riot. Opposed to this camp stands the teacher, who is also the play’s narrator and singer but avoids any publicity forays. This intellectual and proletarian-by-choice champions

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Figure 4.5. Ali Retzo grants an interview to the news reporter. Courtesy of Yorgos Kotanidis.

the cause of the farmers and tries to instill a collective consciousness in them. He also guides their struggle against scrupulous mechanization and production increase for the sake of mere profit (11–16, 108). Only a truly militant, Marxist revolution appears to hold the promise of change. Spectators were encouraged to think about how the alterable society might indeed be changed. The dialectic, non-illusionistic mode of presentation, representation, and distancing had to make the public focus on this alterable nature of social and political conditions (testimony by Markares, July 26, 2001). The Story of Ali Retzo includes signs of the inhumanity of the oppressed man toward his fellow sufferers. When the young husband Dursun starts insulting his wife, Meriem, the spectator realizes that the simple farmer, too, can exacerbate social inequality (74). The teacher’s wish for Meriem’s “happiness” confirms this realization: “My God, give Meriem . . . much patience . . . and also endurance: when her husband beats her, let her be quiet, and when her motherin-law barks at her, let her show patience” (71). There are glaring discrepancies between the liberation that the entrapped seeks and the

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freedom that he cannot give. Again, however, The Story of Ali Retzo is not told in order to stress the psychological experiences of its protagonist(s) but to show social forces in action. It tries to derail authoritative language but does not succeed in counterbalancing or debunking masculinist language. The husband’s abuse of his wife is presented as a fact of life and is generally tolerated. So, too, is the motivation of Meriem’s father, who had hoped to marry her off to a rich man for money (56–63, 68). The peasants reproduce “capitalist relations within their own microcosms of the family,” Hager observes (2008: 167). They have not yet begun to rethink gender relations, even after growing aware of social disparities and of reactionary economic and political forces. One older woman, Akile, speaks her mind but others repeatedly urge her to keep quiet (22). These sexist aspects of the microcosm of the traditional village must dwindle before the purportedly much more vital class revolution. The Story of Ali Retzo presents either ungendered or male-defined values. Brecht, too, incurred odium for showing little interest in gender as a social phenomenon (see n. 30). This and similar contradictions of the sociopolitical struggle, however, may illustrate another important Brechtian principle: epic theater brings disparate pieces together in a montage and then asks its audience to reconstruct from those pieces the parallels with and inconsistencies of its own society. Capitalist-driven injustice takes on diverse forms in The Story of Ali Retzo, and the play observes these forms from varying and often dissonant perspectives, by means of sympathetic song, deceptive news-reporting, seemingly disengaged storytelling, parable-like allusion, and even partisan sloganeering. The play’s open-endedness comes as a surprise to readers and spectators and denies them a sense of closure. It reiterates, however, that the play’s purpose was to expound dramatically on sociopolitical realities but also to maintain an emotional detachment and to spur reflection. The counteractions of the farmers are enfolded into an activist understanding of a larger sociopolitical crisis, but viewers do not actually see the farmers take anything more than preliminary or protective measures. The Story of Ali Retzo does not feature political activism and opposition against capitalism as overt subjects of performance but presents, rather, a range of dissident possibilities that may emerge at any point in the play. If, on the contrary, the production had resolved the problems of the stage world on the fictional level, it would have left its public with the comforting sense that no further action was

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needed. The play’s open-endedness inspires comparisons between the onstage and the offstage performance of power. Brecht’s conception of political theater was similarly open-ended. The viewer or reader is moved beyond witnessing and identification to analysis, choice, and action. The production’s lack of closure, therefore, renders the theater-goers critically aware that they, too, have a role of responsibility to play: they must craft an ending to the story of Ali Retzo and must shape a proper history free from capitalist oppression. Seeking final liberation is the spectators’ duty.

“THE WORLD IS BURNING AND YOU ARE COMBING YOUR HAIR”: . . . KAI SY CHTENIZESAI …ºÆ øæÆ Æ ŒÆØ ŒÆº ŒØ   Æ ł æƺƺ  Άº Æ æ ÇÆØ,    Œ ŒÆ ªÆØ, ŒØ ı å ÇÆØ All is beautiful, all is fine and tonight we are in for fun to the Alsos you have come to cool off, here the world is burning, and you are combing your hair (Lakidou, unpublished MS, 10)

In late June 1973, the Free Theater opened a revue show named after a common Greek saying (with sexual innuendo), “The world is burning and you are combing your hair” (Ho kosmos kaigetai kai sy chtenizesai, O Œ ŒÆ ªÆØ ŒØ ı å ÇÆØ).57 The production expressed frustration that indifference reigned amid disaster and pointed the finger at the complacent Greek public as well as at the political forces (see Figure 4.6 for the cover of the show’s playbill, which, like Uncle 57 See Kotanidis (2011: 381, 406–408); Phasoules (2001: 576–577); and Sykka, He Kathemerine, April 20, 1997. Georgousopoulos gave the production a very positive review (1982–1984: 2:91–95). Kretikos, however, complained that the show lacked critical insight and did not pursue dialectical awakening (1973a: 201). Makres stressed that the revue’s satire missed opportunities to be edgy (1973c: 1395). Lakidou discusses the show’s critical reception in greater detail (unpublished MS, 36–38).

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Figure 4.6. Cover of the playbill of the Free Theater’s production of And you are combing your hair. The topic of personal responsibility is fronted by the accusing finger pointing directly at the viewer. Courtesy of Yorgos Kotanidis.

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Sam’s image, makes the finger-pointing literal). The thiasos staged this summer show in the park of the Alsos Pankratiou and invited once more reflection on capitalist pressures, on the state of play, and on theater’s responsibilities. The launching point for this revue, too, was the staging style of Brecht, who himself had undergone the influence of the German cabaret. The actors, however, softened the episodic framework and interrupted action flow associated with Brecht and transformed them into the rapid rhythm of the Athenian epitheorese (complete with the prologue, the skits, the song and dance numbers, and other typical ingredients of the genre). Because wider audiences related better to the “indigenous” epitheorese than to epic theater, the players sought and found in the genre’s revivification a way to be both Brechtian and politically relevant to the Greek public (Lakidou, unpublished MS, 6, 34). They cleansed the genre of the commercial trappings that tied it down during the 1950s and 1960s, debunked its reliance on professional singers and dancers, and reused its popular stage for citizen-created theater events. Nine of the revue’s fifteen skits were collectively written by the actors of the Free Theater, who then commissioned a few more skits and songs from well-known left-leaning satirists and playwrights, among them Bost (Mentes Bostantzoglou, known to rail against the bourgeois class and its conformist values), Kostas Mourselas, Dinos Siderides, and Giorgos Skourtes. Loukianos Kelaëdones wrote the revue’s musical score, which contained no fewer than forty-nine songs. The censors cut some skits, which was not surprising given that the entire play was meant to contest political and capitalist exploitation in Greece (Georgousopoulos 1982–1984: 2:95; Lakidou, unpublished MS, 7, 41 n. 6). Thus the group expanded collective directorship to include collective authorship as well. Its communal goal was to return to the very roots of the late nineteenth-century Athenian epitheorese by way of research and by restaging older revue practices. The actors studied a gamut of related materials and texts, and they gathered tapes of performances from the past, testimonies, pictures, musical scores, reviews, and other forms of criticism (Kotanidis 2011: 261–265, 270, 271). They reconceptualized the genre of the epitheorese and its language to make it speak to a modern public in ways that were self-critical as well as inventive. “For us, this is a schooling which no official education would have given us; only the actual practice could give it to us,” they stated (Free Theater 1973: 204). Through this process of research, the group became convinced,

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too, of the need to re-create the revue’s old-time emphasis on political satire and to devalue its more recent preoccupation with eye-catching spectacle. Thus the Free Theater’s production of And you are combing your hair was a study of the origins of the revue but also a commentary on the genre’s development.58 The result of the Free Theater’s satirically slanted epitheorese was a self-consciously theatrical form of entertainment that relied on a Brechtian-style mixing of genres to disorient the censors and that elicited a rapturous response from its public. Skits with visually irresistible metaphors, such as the scene with the washerwomen from Portugal who tried hard to cleanse the country’s “dirty laundry,” explain much of the show’s imprint on popular memory.59 Even though various skits jostled for attention, this scene enticed with its many allusions to the Greeks’ restricted lives: while talking in code, it harangued dictators and rallied supporters. Skits that found clever ways to predict the Colonels’ undoing were very popular as well. This Free Theater production, too, was a magnet for youth: about 65,000 people attended the performances in Athens (Kretikos 1973a: 201). Kornetis cites one of his informants on the subject of the play’s appeal: “[It] was a revolution within the ‘Revolution,’ a real revolution. We used to go to Alsos every night . . . We knew it by heart, the dialogues, everything” (Rena Theologidou quoted by Kornetis 2006: 237; also 2013: 187). The members of the Free Theater themselves became better and better known for being dynamic and critical: the thiasos never lacked in professional artistry but, more importantly, it brought spontaneity and revolutionary élan to its shows. Many informants praised the group’s kephi—a Greek word that defies translation but that conjures up a joyful and impulsive vivacity.60 While some other young troupes were preoccupied with defining 58

Chatzepantazes and Maraka (1977) situate examples of the Athenian epitheorese in their historical context. Georgakake (2008) centers on the junta-era revue. See also Koltsidopoulou (1976b: 54); Kotanidis (2011: 509); and Maraka (2005). 59 Lakidou (unpublished MS, 16–18, 26, 35). Referring to another nation’s dictatorship (such as Latin American states or, in this revue, Portugal and Kurdistan) was an effective trope to comment on the Greek military rule. Several contributors to Eighteen Texts referred to Boliguay, a fictitious Latin American junta-held state. See Papanikolaou (2002: 450); Roufos (1972: 159); Spanos (1973: 370–371); and Van Dyck (1998: 20, 27). Asimakoulas identifies this essentially Brechtian technique as “spatial displacement” (2005a: 165). 60 See Makres (1973c: 1395, 1396) and Varopoulou (2003: 227–228), with three decades separating their critical viewpoints.

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their ideological alignments, the Free Theater tried to keep up its freedom in spirit.61 The image of unity that the group projected was another important attraction pole for wider audiences. The Free Theater found empowerment in carefully selecting its venues in addition to its plays and interpretation styles. Its venues became meeting points for freedom-loving young people to experiment with new forms, contents, symbols, dress codes, and other markers of lifestyle choices. The group’s choice of the Alsos Pankratiou, a public park area in Pankrati, was an apt fit for the free-style genre and democratic nature of the reinvented epitheorese. Performances there presented a “people’s theater” that was affordable at a low price and that was set in a pleasant and alternative outdoor space, which featured none of the trappings of conventional playhouses and of the hierarchies they imposed (with their boxes, the “better” seats, the proscenium arch, the red plush, the overpriced bar, and other paraphernalia). Besides, it would have been a contradiction to perform Brechtian-style theater in buildings that were financed and promoted by the capitalist state. The Pankrati park was an antipode, too, to the “sacred” sites of the Epidaurus Theater and the Herodes Atticus Theater, which provided the ancient settings to the statesponsored summer festivals. Large outdoor stadiums, on the other hand, were associated with the regime’s military displays and nationalist reenactments of history. Thus the Free Theater moved performance away from “compromised” or elite spaces and turned it into an arena for an engaged youth’s struggle. In the alternative spaces to which its thiasos gave new meaning, the Free Theater was seen to explore modes of grassroots organizing and of direct action politics without, however, positing a full blueprint for an alternative society. The group’s members took theater to be their way of life and prioritized collective creation and action. In mid-June 1974, the Free Theater brought a modern adaptation of Golpho (1893) to its outdoor stage of the Alsos Pankratiou (Georgakake 2009: 195). Golpho is a popular late nineteenth-century bucolic melodrama that tells of unrequited love and that was written by Spyridon Peresiades. The thiasos called its audiovisual spectacle Golpho for Life (ØÆ Çø ˆŒºçø) and staged it as a critical parody of 61 Nonetheless, Kotanidis avers, many of the troupe’s members belonged to political organizations, as did he himself (2011: passim; also quoted by Georgiopoulou 1999: 146). See further Kornetis (2006: 236; 2013: 185).

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the history and theater practice of the modern Greek folk idyll (in the ethographic tradition).62 The adaptation relied on the apparatus of rural culture to nostalgically create and then debunk the illusion of traditionally pure ways of life. The Free Theater’s Golpho was a bored heroine, trapped in historical stagnation “for life,” and was surrounded by hippie characters who, incongruously, sharpened the conflict between old and new (aided by critical musical and cinematographic additions commenting on the stage action).63 Thus the group subverted the reactionary ideology that had long been built on the story’s innocent romance. In Kotanidis’s words, the show “deconstructed the ideology of Golpho as a national symbol” (2011: 484). The Colonels favored the folk idyll as a genre, with a populist nudge to the people of the countryside (Karaoglou 2009: 282–283). The parodic revision of the stereotypical folk plot undermined the junta’s patriotic claims. By conjuring up a fake-lorish nostalgia for the past, it urged for a more realistic assessment of the present. Class distinctions, too, stood out more clearly in the 1974 adaptation than in the original, which helped the show advance its social critique. Similarly, another typical tale of the past gained new sociopolitical relevance: when Giorgos Michaelides staged his March 1971 hybrid production of That Evening We Played Shakespeare’s Work, Romeo and Juliet, he exploited the cover of a play akin to Shakespeare’s romantic classic. But precisely this association allowed the director to present the known story with a novel twist, playing off the metatheater of the balustrades/prison bars that were part of the show’s sets. The actors repeatedly threw themselves against these prison bars, which gripped the viewers (see Chapter 2, pp. 142–143). Thus the force of these seemingly innocent plays was codetermined by their public. These parodies of the most traditional dramatic action presented new ways to breach the topics of ontological insecurity and existential despair: they utilized the presumed romantic naïveté of the love stories as another distancing device and a means to distract the censors. What more did

62 Chatzepantazes and Maraka (1981) offer a model introduction to the ethographic genre. See also Kretikos (1974: 187). The Traveling Players (1975) of Angelopoulos shows the Golpho play as an emblematic unrequited performance (Ch. 1 n. 13). 63 Kotanidis (2011: 445–447, 484–486). Georgousopoulos (1982–1984: 2:126–130) and Makres (1974a) wrote mixed to negative critiques. Kounenake observes that the production was a great hit with the Athenian public (1978: 15).

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the Brechtian theater and these ironic historical costume dramas have in common? All of them demystified dramaturgical processes and subverted conservative and bourgeois expectations of the stage. Their performance modes radicalized old and deeply resonant stories but they also held stage events at arm’s length: they engaged their audiences in the process of making sense of history, of the theatrics, tales, and legends of the past, and they urged them to scrutinize the clichéd narratives that the regime was force-feeding them. They historicized theatrical contexts, abstracted plot issues, and demanded critical change. Soon the first signs of an interest in more commercial forms of spectacle started to show among members of the Free Theater. Professional stage managers lured some actors away, and summer 1973 saw the group’s first split occur. Political alliances affected interactions and revealed dissenting conceptions of what constituted radical politics: some members expected the others to join them on their militant revolutionary path. Kotanidis stresses the latter turn of events (2011: 286–291, 299–300). A core group continued to stage revues until it disbanded in 1979. Among its most popular post-junta shows were the 1976 production of The Last Tram ( æÆ  ºıÆ ), which reflected back on the recent past in an anti-American vein, and the 1978 revue entitled It Happened to Katina (ı Å Å ˚Æ Æ) (a playful twist on the Greek for “it happened in Athens”).64 Thus, the earlier years of the Free Theater represented perhaps the healthiest period of soul-searching for modern Greek theater and also for the history of the Athenian epitheorese. Subsequent theater troupes at times looked backed nostalgically to the play production that resulted from these years of intense inquiry.

64 Koltsidopoulou (1976b; 1978) and Lakidou (unpublished MS, 40 n. 3, 41 n. 7) discuss the Free Theater’s post-junta revue shows and its late 1970s transformation. Phasoules sees a post-1979 continuation of the Free Theater’s work in that of the Free Stage, which, under his guidance, further developed the prose revue (2001: 574, 578). Kotanidis dwells on the long-delayed production of The Adventurer (ˇ ıå ØŒÅ, 1835), an anti-authoritarian satire written by the Constantinopolitan playwright and journalist Michael Chourmouzes, who also left a Demotic and socialist-inspired translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus (1861) (Van Steen 2000: 15, 50–63). The Adventurer finally opened at the Vretannia Theater in November 1974 (Kotanidis 2011: 199–203, 498–501, 507–510).

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CONCLUSION: CHAINS AND CHOICES Only the circus master and his animal tamers believed in the absolute magic of terror and the mesmerizing effects of false rewards. (Norman Manea 1992: p. xi. Trans. Cornelia Golna) ΆØ Å æÆ ŒÆØ  ººÅ ŒØ ººÅ ŒÆØ æ ŁÅŒ Å  Å ı ªºı  æŒı  Œºı  Æ ºØæØÆ. ¯ · ¨ ı  ªıæø  ; ¯ª ªÆØÆ Å ıƺ Æ. You opened the door and then another one and another one, and you found yourself in the midst of the grand circus, in the cage with the lions. You said: My God, what am I doing here? I was only headed for the toilet. (Giannes Kontos, “Magic Image,” 1972 [1979: 46])

Of all innovative theorists and dramatists, Brecht proved to be the most popular in proposing techniques for solving sociopolitical problems through theater. His critical rethinking of performance permeated the work of the Free Theater. Productions such as The Story of Ali Retzo resonated throughout Greece because, beyond the realm of the show and the appeal of the thiasos, many students, artists, and intellectuals were drawn into the orbit of Brecht’s theories. More than any other troupe, the Free Theater pushed the limits, deconstructed traditional cultural motifs and theatrical genres, and reconceptualized institutions, hierarchies, and performance spaces. Especially during the first four years of the group’s existence, its members dedicated themselves to a learning and “authentication” process, and its performances grew to be more and more about theater. This Brechtianstyle inquiry strengthened new approaches to modern Greek society beyond the stage. Engaging in Brechtian criticism meant engaging in political criticism, and aesthetic questions became ideological issues as well. Format became as political as content. Staging Brechtian theater was no longer just a renegade act but an act that reified a discourse of resistance. The Free Theater was politically effective because, following Brechtian maxims, it did not try to transport its

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spectators away from their own realities but prompted them to apply the relevance of the stage events to their lives. Filtered through the vision of Brecht, its production of The Story of Ali Retzo shattered the façade of theatrical illusion. The show’s deconstruction of capitalism, in particular, demonstrated to the public that it had the power to create a better world in which the good and the poor might find justice. Crucial, too, was the play’s Brechtian agenda of the tactical dissemination of truth. The work fragmented testimonies and multiplied reports to expose truth’s constructed nature and to unmask sham procedures. Epic theater techniques further helped to resolve the problem of how to stage a political work without resorting to slogans, accusations, or unmediated generalizations. The indirectness of such a drama let the Free Theater dodge the censors’ suspicions and thus opened new paths for its actors and audiences to exercise agency in otherwise restricted circumstances. Brechtian theater fostered the development of modes of political socialization and countered the demise inherent in social alienation. The production of The Story of Ali Retzo demonstrated how those modes of political socialization could come about: depicting the social and political values of ordinary people living under an armed, capitalist tyranny, it highlighted the younger generation’s attempts to overcome exploitation and to fight the struggle against political and spiritual paralysis. The Free Theater’s young actors discovered a grassroots approach to sociopolitical problems in the process of collective directing and (later) collective writing. Their play became a political fable that could apply to any totalitarian country. When compared to other historicizing works such as Our Grand Circus, The Story of Ali Retzo was less committed to representing the past but set out to create new histories, settings, and possibilities of its own. Like Our Grand Circus, the Free Theater staged the encounter of history with memory as a confrontation, but it was never an emotional confrontation. Our Grand Circus was too one-dimensional to be Brechtian and acted with a variety of techniques on the spectators’ sentiment. What The Story of Ali Retzo may have lacked in diversification of character and plot, it gained by respecting the impossibility of a realistic reconstruction of the past and by crystallizing a political analysis with (not for) its viewers. The production used its power to drive the actors and the spectators to the realization that they needed and wanted change. It strengthened their sense of community and grew their shared awareness of the power they had to bring about reform.

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Brecht’s reception in Greece was marred by the inability of many directors and actors to apprehend his multifaceted drama and by their efforts to exaggerate his politically engaged positions, which were nonetheless determining ideological parameters of his work. Markares held the unique position of being a knowledgeable translator and adapter, reviewer and occasional literary critic, promoter and theoretician, and also a committed imitator of Brecht’s work. An influential cultural producer, he played perhaps the most important role in assimilating Brecht and his work for the target culture of 1960s and 1970s Greece. The Free Theater’s alliance with Markares enabled the team to chart new territory in the process of rewriting and acculturation—in exploring truly intercultural performance. Together, they engaged with the question of where the use value of Brecht’s dialectic of contradiction lay for junta-held Greece. They offered up Brechtian theater not as a coherent whole but as a gamut of possibilities (symbolic, allegorical, and metatheatrical) with which audiences could interact, freely and selectively, and through which they could survey new avenues of public commentary and yet covert resistance. This unusual freedom was part of the attraction held by foreign models such as Brecht and the Theater of the Absurd, at a time when other liberties were under threat and when realistic expression was not feasible. It was also the kind of freedom that many theater professionals felt had gone missing from the revival stage of ancient drama. The new-wave theater was not about truth and universal messages but about doubt, contestation, dispute, or amphisvetese, the (very Brechtian) option “to go either way.” The Free Theater showed a postmodernist openness to challenges to drama’s traditional form and content, and it celebrated ambiguity in its Brechtian process of research and analysis. It opened up a new discourse about playwriting, text, performance, and audience. The group’s deconstructionist model of truth, which sought different expressions of time and space, contrasted sharply with the dictatorship’s title to the “Regime of Truth.” The thiasos offered not Truth nor truth but specific situations, detailed particulars, and individualizations, in which participants could perceive, dissect, and reconstruct a plurality of truths. This Brechtian process let actors and audiences regain another commodity that the military rule had made scarce: choice. The Story of Ali Retzo was an anti-junta work also for not binding its spectators to a single reading or perspective but, rather, fostering reflection about decision-making processes. The play

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involved the viewers, inviting them to interpret with a critical mindset and to contemplate moral choices. The Greek version of the absurdist theater, too, emphasized choice amid the chains of entrapment. Skourtes’s Nannies provided a compelling example of performance as a venue for transformative choice and change. Like The Nannies, Karras’s plays dramatized physical and metaphysical confinement and social marginality. They deployed allusions, metaphors, and analogies—literary and cultural figural speech—to depict the capitalist world’s invasion of the private sphere and its intent to keep civic liberty suspended. Brechtian and absurdist productions singled out the capitalist hierarchies and imperatives as common targets. The Greek absurdist playwrights, however, did not adopt the cerebral quality of the Brechtian analysis but stirred a sense of empathy among their audiences, who understood the marginal Greeks’ bedazzlement by money to be simply human: these Greeks were mere cogs in the chains of the regime’s greedy tyranny, which caused the individual, structural, and societal damage and “disappeared” community and solidarity. Skourtes’s Nannies stands as the most effective expression of the early 1970s aesthetics of marginality, but Karras voiced this aesthetics with the persistence of frequent repetition. This aesthetics of marginality, infused with the dramatists’ keen sense of their own and their country’s pariah status under the late capitalist junta, wedded an indigenous (neo)realism (in the style of Kambanelles denouncing oppression) to absurdist provocations that were foreign to the censors. Aided by the absurdist style’s cosmopolitanism, the new plays attacked the capitalist exploitation enacted by a sinister establishment that kept its citizens in a subaltern state. Critics and historians of modern Greek drama commonly isolate the Greek absurdist playwrights from their historical and geographical contexts and demonstrate how they have imitated foreign sources. The absurdist theater made in Greece, however, was not simply an offshoot of Western models but, rather, a creative, topicalized re-righting/rewriting (in a sense conversant with translation theory). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this Third Worldist theater’s choices rested with societal outcasts and with a poor art, embodied in the recurring characters of desperate performers-in-themargin. The transferable, iconic qualities of these figures, their existentialist anguish, and professed Greek authenticity urged spectators to check and challenge current reality. Constantinidis’s use of the clever term “resistentialist theater” acknowledged a modern Greek

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theater that probed existence and galvanized resistance onstage and beyond (testimony of June 11, 2001). Also, Greek absurdist theater perfected the skill of presenting human beings as skill-less, disabled, handicapped. It belabored individual impairments that sometimes turned into mental challenges. This persistent portrayal undercut any official rhetoric and obliquely represented the dysfunctionality of Greek society under the Colonels. The consistent depiction of physical deficiencies and individual weaknesses demanded the audience’s commitment to fight degeneration in the macrocosm of Greek life beyond the stage. Greek absurdist theater made both its untragic heroes and viewers face and reconcile their own acts of deficiency or complicity. Its most compelling productions held up mirrors in which the public’s inadequate role was reflected. This role included the state of responsibility of those who could never quite bring themselves to become activists and of those who profited from their dealings with the regime and were rewarded with wealth or prestige. Resentment against the latter ran high, especially when junta repression worsened. By staging the victimizer as another victim, however, the absurdist playwrights, and Karras in particular, allowed this resentment to surface and be dispersed in the safer context of performance.

Conclusion oæØ çıØ æÆ Hubris breeds the tyrant (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 873) Democracy privileges “individual participation in collective processes,” and that sense of a dynamic between the collective and the personal makes the formation of an audience an integral and contested aspect of its culture. (Simon Goldhill 1999: 9)

The army-state of the Colonels stalled the vibrancy of Greek modernism of the 1960s and took over where three decades of state anticommunism had left off. The “saviors” who intervened in a state of emergency posited a rigid moral order dictated by tradition and instituted strict censorship. The spectacularity of junta-held Greece infused New Greek Theater with the potency of dissidence. Excluded from the ballot box, the Greeks turned to performance for free(r) expression and for incipient or vicarious rebellion. Many inventive plays and “free” venues became metaphors for sociopolitical dynamics with which actors and audiences reflected on the world offstage. Greek drama, historically a forum of great public interest, now fought cultural stagnation and offered an alternative discourse of analysis, which was more democratic than any other of the few available discourses. This critical juncture engendered Greek theater’s performative turn, which resulted from global agitation as well as from dire local conditions. The novelty and cosmopolitanism of Mnouchkine-style, absurdist, and Brechtian drama brought creative liberation and “electrified” performances such as those of Our Grand Circus, The Nannies, and The Story of Ali Retzo (to name those discussed in detail). The dynamic actors of the Free Theater,

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especially, with their radically self-questioning approach, broadened viewers’ horizons, stressed, not individuality, but collectivity, and promulgated a sense of popular justice. Through Brechtian-style play production, they espoused a cognitive revolution in addition to a political one. They built close ties with their spectators, influenced their political beliefs and actions, and encouraged them to view themselves as part of an in-group (the in-group of the “imagined community” of global dissidents, to adapt Benedict Anderson’s notion). Thus they reified the performative methods of the 1960s student and youth movement while shaping a consciously political public conversant with the fight against capitalist oppression worldwide. The struggle of many young actors against the Colonels was also the struggle for a Greek youth identity in a rapidly changing, globalizing world. Theater of the dictatorship era was, therefore, a distinct act in the defining of youth as a new social and political force, and it drew on intercultural forms and “free” venues of sociability such as the new stages. New Greek Theater of the early 1970s was part of a broad social movement that intersected with the ideological and political networks of the student movement and of the New Left. It engendered a sense of urgency about theater’s potential to change lives, and it unabashedly raised the demands on its audiences. It inquired into political process as well as into dramaturgy and performance. For one, the Free Theater’s experiments with collective directorship tried to implement the process of direct democracy. Such difficult but far from innocent democratic structures challenged the lack of citizen input in real political life. Also, the actors discovered substitute voices in emancipatory characters that could carry on the public contestation forbidden by the regime. Audiences, then, turned more readily to where the new vitality reigned: they appreciated that young actors and adventurous producers were trespassing into unknown and unsafe territory to bring important issues to the stage. Another attraction of the experimental troupes was that they exposed areas in which Western influences and hyper-national identities clashed: these thiasoi went against the reactionary censors to confront individual and societal concerns with simple means but with the rich resources of critical energy and an uninhibited imagination. Young Greek actors “owned” their message of political pugnacity and spread the sense that conservative theater, patriotic drama, and also escapist commercial spectacle had become embarrassing moral liabilities. Young Greek audiences experienced release at what was

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said onstage in efforts to establish directness, sincerity, and authenticity or, in other words, truth in form, content, and commitment. Brechtian theater, especially, inspired a dialectical relationship between actors and audiences and between politics and culture and, significantly, it allowed for diverse or dissenting views. It also made the processes of history appear as changeable, which was a shocking notion in a Greece dominated by the dictators’ formulaic and antiquated conceptions of the past. Providing a legitimate physical space for dissident activity, theater became one of the few remaining interrogative acts, for performers and spectators to question plot, character, genre, and culture at large—story and history. Theater’s instruction, well served by the Brechtian didacticism, undercut the teachings of a regime that exploited school, family, and prison as (complementary) disciplinary institutions to enforce compliance, consent, or silence. Theater provoked discussion without providing facile answers and proved to be both liberated and liberational. The professed liberation of the stage was to regain the liberty to contest, to reach majority decisions, and then to act collectively, that is, to foster freedom of speech and democratic political action. The new, “liberated spaces” of certain theater venues and later university buildings lifted barriers and cemented unity among the various groups of dissidents (Kornetis 2006: 156; 2013: 114). The drama of theater did not limit itself to the stage but spilled out onto the sidewalks, into tavernas, in demonstrations, and in newspaper columns. Play production modeled patterns of mobilizing strategies, which it shared with the theater of the street. Thus it undermined the regime’s concerted effort to render opposition impotent or invisible. The drama of life, then, demanded that theater devise its own, original commentary on current events: reperformance of outworn plays was not a viable option compared to risk-taking new performance, replete with trial and error. The only acceptable form of reperformance was the repeated spectatorship that many students and young theatergoers bestowed onto the most thought-provoking productions. Besides, reperformance in the regime’s definition merely meant controlled reenactment, whose interpretation was fixed in advance. The modernist to early postmodernist Greek theater offered a platform for reconceptualizing and broadening the understanding of the political, not through (conventional) reperformance or revival drama, but through radically new performance. This theater played a key role in shaping the unofficial politics of the junta period and

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transformed the way in which the Greeks have understood politics as political culture, especially in times of crisis or emergency. Greek play production of the early 1970s was serious business. The process of creating a committed spectatorship was hard work, too, but it meant that theater ceded an important realm of authority to its public, which moved from passive absorption to active engagement. Thus the New Greek Theater brought a reassessment of theater and its power, which crystallized in a theater that forged new parameters of performance and that came to define an entire generation. The previous chapters, then, have foregrounded different aspects of the artistic and historical importance of the new Greek plays and of the intellectual controversies they generated, and offer up a cultural study through the spectrum of theater. The plays under scrutiny represent some of the best since the mid-1960s, but this study is far from exhaustive and provides merely a framework within which future work on theater of the junta era may be discussed. Also, more useful than seeking out the “best” productions proved to be the inquiry into the nature and status of the New Greek Theater (as outlined in Chapter 1). Chapter 2 showed how the stage exemplified the complexity of relationships between cultural policy and cultural practice, and this through the prism of state censorship, which donned some of the theatrical qualities typical of usurped authority. For all of the regime’s efforts at control and surveillance, however, it failed to deliver any formal definition of the New Theater’s role, to which it brought the same rigid approach as to existing genres. Stage practitioners readily exploited this realm of non-definition and ambiguity. Thus theater exposed the unstable relationship between the official center of politics and the decentralized and shifting seats of new cultural authority and cultural capital (which lay not only in play production but also in intellectual debate, in the dissident print culture, and so on). The New Greek Theater’s ideal of decentralization entailed not just a geographical relocation to the periphery but also challenged the director’s central role, favored plays and heroes that were non-mainstream, and displayed an aesthetic of marginality, which often descended into self-irony or self-sarcasm. It dislocated conventions of place, time, genre, and prestige and also the hierarchies enshrined in the literary and theatrical culture of the West. The various colorations of Greek marginality formed a substratum of Third Worldism that befitted 1970s left-wing political rhetoric and anti-Americanism. Part of Chapter 2 analyzed examples

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of the censors’ restrictions on productions of ancient drama, which were noteworthy given that the tradition-loving Colonels were least expected to interfere with revival tragedy or with historical or patriotic drama—the art forms of continuity and diachronic historical vision. However, the varied uses that Seferis, Synodinou, and Katrakes made of ancient drama still established crucial cultural moments of the present during which the tragedies’ enticing concepts served to unify Greek consciousness. The key to success lay, not in the effacement or even defacement of the classics, but in the re-facement of the tragic heroes, who were given the faces or traits of well-known actors/dissidents: Prometheus as Katrakes and Katrakes as Prometheus, Synodinou as Antigone, Kareze as Lysistrata. The modernist course of the classics had come to an end as revival drama withdrew more and more into the politico-societal role of tragic hero, embodied in the figureheads of Prometheus and Antigone, which were perceived to be most relevant. The second half of Chapter 2 assessed how the censors’ performance of state control affected the New Greek Theater. It showed how this political performance, too, conditioned material realities, and it took up the case study of Pontikas’s Trombone: the play’s hero lets his art, which, he realizes, has been functioning as a mere alibi, go silent by way of protest. The chapter refers to many more diverse instances of stage censorship, which have not traditionally been the subject of histories of the dictatorship. In general, plays that the public knew to have been censored reflected on contemporary reality with greater immediacy, rendering the state control and surveillance counterproductive. The section singled out playwrights and directors such as Pontikas and Michaelides, who started to explore the landscape of postmodernism, even though the terrain ahead proved to be unfamiliar and uneven. Michaelides’s work, especially, unmasked the censors’ lack of understanding of performance as a corporeal art that cannot be checked by textual regulation alone. More significant than the brute facts of this muffled theater, however, were the language, rhetoric, experience, perception, and memory of the rich visual culture and counterculture of the early 1970s. Protest action against the illogic of the censorship establishment manifested itself not only in the spoken word but also in the visual contents of plays that offered symbolic ways of rebelling. The New Greek Theater led directors and actors to reconceptualize the wide range of semiotic elements (gestures, blocking, costuming, set and lighting design) that make up the

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stage performance. The visual pathways allowed for forms of symbolic sedition especially in circumstances divested of hope. When junta censorship abated in 1970–1973, theater pushed the boundaries of the permissible. But Kotanidis’s personal story reminds us that retaliation against actors was rife, on the—correct—assumption that actors had become communal spokespersons and belonged to the “public’s domain.” In the name of historical continuity, the regime’s censorship aimed at “forging” an ideology of national unity and consensus; it reified conservative traditions and tried to control the canon. In her book Excitable Speech, Judith Butler might well have been referring to the Greek situation when she stated: “[C]ensorship is not primarily concerned with speech, and . . . the control or regulation of speech is incidental to the achievement of other kinds of social aims (strengthening particular views of legitimacy, consensus, cultural autonomy, national memory)” (1997: 133). New Greek Theater attempted to remake the canon or to create a new canon of modern dramaturgy where none existed. This theater was rethinking and reinventing itself through a novel concern with the plays’ specificity, and this quintessential presentism, which also validated forgotten memories, stood opposed to the historical determinism that burdened traditional Greek theater. When compared to revival tragedy or conventional historical drama, the New Greek Theater was tantamount to deliberate discontinuity, rupture, and confrontation. Like a fast-moving cultural tide, this stage became a catalyst to a wider revolutionary movement of disruption; it demanded liberation from the dictatorship and in tandem with social liberation. The New Greek Theater was, therefore, more than a temporarily fashionable obsession with collectivity and dissidence but, rather, laid the groundwork of the culture of the post-junta era. Symbolism and subtlety were absent from the Colonels’ nationalist theatrics, which concealed their intellectual and aesthetic poverty. The regime used its festivals as forums for teaching the old myths of blood and honor or for instruction in a militarist national faith. Papadopoulos tried to make up for poor statesmanship with better showmanship. He was the maker of a new spectacle culture with a view of performance as power. The triumphant historical reenactments (described in the first half of Chapter 3) may have failed to camouflage the dictatorship’s unstable ideological core but, as shows of confidence, they did have some success. The displays of military victories that saved the nation from emergencies had to cement

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continuity between ancient through modern army exploits and thus bolster the usurpers’ claims to “rightfully earned” primacy. The junta festivals also set up the physical and ideological framework of a “spontaneous” show of consent about disputed events that lived on in many of the spectators’ active memory. As consummate artificers, hieratic and aloof, the Colonels officiated at these compulsory rituals that had to bestow consensus and certainty on the recent past. With these public boasts and with numerous deliberate omissions, the dictators built a reactionary conception of history that showcased the “heroic,” masculinist past, but that “forged” the present as well: they mustered Greek history’s momentum to have it (re)cover, revise, and vindicate their own military takeover. Exploiting the fertile ground of theater and political metatheater, the strongmen staged the “sacrifice” of savior-leaders whom they saw as prefigurations of themselves. By reenacting the same, iconolatric triumphs every year, the regime inculcated hegemonic patterns of popular remembering, but it also induced collective amnesia, or the purposeful forgetting or “disappearing” of past losses, ambivalent events, or historical ambiguities. The ubiquitous master narrative of key leaders, dates, and battlefields was repeated ad nauseam in rhetorical slogans and speeches and in school textbooks. Meanwhile, the Greek people held captive by the state’s panopticism were repeatedly or forcibly reminded of which role to play and which script to follow: it was the script that directed them to be obedient, grateful, uncritical, and pious child-pupils of a regime that had taken over the educational system and also acted in loco parentis. It was a script, too, that they knew so well that they could play that they played their part. This script was, after all, more than thirty years old. The stultifying quality of the Colonels’ hist(o)rionics demonstrated that real theater still had a major role to play in (re)opening paths to innovative thought and experimentation. A production such as Our Grand Circus (discussed in the second half of Chapter 3) offered an antidote to the theater that dictatorial politics had become and thus to the general crisis of legitimacy. The production ventured into notso-glorious Greek history to demolish the prefabricated displays and eulogies of Greek triumph. It publicly reasserted the worth and dignity of ordinary people who refused to absorb the images and rhetoric of official propaganda. The play amplified the people’s voices to echo the voices of all Greeks who have historically cherished the ideal of freedom. The show’s heretic use of the past delivered a

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liberating reading of history: the work at last acknowledged a long chain of cause and effect; it retrieved previously banished memories and unveiled the larger structures of collective memory and of the politics of forgetting. Our Grand Circus was both archive and repertoire in its rewriting of historical “truths,” to restore social memories, stake out political claims, and manifest the public’s new sense of identity. The production made history not merely its subject matter but also, metaphorically speaking, its protagonist. It thrived on the strength of its performance language but, remarkably, also on that of its censored language after November 1973. Unlike other contemporary plays, however, Our Grand Circus did not dare to challenge the behavior of ordinary citizens and, rather, lambasted political leaders, who were presumably all cut from the same cloth. The show demonstrated how art and its popular authority deconstructed essentialist accounts of history but also how they advanced some dogmatisms of their own. The production’s didacticism, too, took away from its otherwise refreshing dialogic heterogeneity. With its multiple references to ancient history, the show further proved that modern Greek theater was still dialectically related to the classics and to historical continuity, even when functioning as a corrective or negative other. Our Grand Circus scrutinized and isolated those elements of an artificial public culture that sustained a Greece of dictatorial rule. By the early 1970s, television, too, had started to revolutionize international communication and observation, and it further exposed the self-deceiving script of the leaden Colonels. Actors and audiences quickly learned to subvert the very essence and credibility of representation, unmasking the crisis of official representation. Constantinidis speaks of a “crisis in the representation of the shared national culture” (2001: 151). Together actors and their public developed an elliptic or coded language whose ethos was not necessarily micropolitical but rather postnationalist. This language started to shift the poles of the traditional dichotomies: Greek versus foreign, patriot (ethnikophron) versus communist. The focus of early 1970s Greek theater on the people’s “small” history destabilized the regime’s investment in the venerable past and in a self-styled positivist history. The neorealism of Kambanelles, Greece’s pathbreaking reader of social history, deflated the contrived optimistic outlook. Theater life of the later junta years featured, not the official victors, but victims who were becoming more vocal and who took their rebellion to the gates of the Polytechnic University. Our Grand

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Circus delivered unmistakable signs that actors and audiences were taking the theater revolution literally, that the production’s revolutionary fervor was a reality that could no longer be ignored. Our Grand Circus called for a revision of the Greek master narrative by showing what historical reality should not be like. The production managed to transubstantiate in images, songs, and emotions its concerns about the ongoing repression. The new absurdist and Brechtian plays (discussed in Chapter 4) also countered the regime’s policies but did so dissecting the structures of capitalist hegemony. The playwrights engaged the analytical lenses of foreign models to deconstruct homegrown, army-backed capitalism, which had functioned as an important stabilizing factor in the junta’s ascendancy. Significantly, the frequently recurring discussions about the inspiration that Greek playwrights drew from their foreign counterparts led to further debate over more substantive issues, such as the legitimate place of modern Greek dramaturgy in the domestic cultural life of the 1960s and 1970s, issues whose long-term social and political implications transcended their initial aesthetic impulses. Reacting against the establishment’s conventionalism and purported rationality, the Greek version of the Theater of the Absurd dramatized irrationality, uncertainty, and a profound pessimism in a society that, already before the 1967 coup, seemed to have lost its logic and hope. The effects of the dictatorship’s very own absurdity showed daily in its paranoid anticommunism, sanctimonious rhetoric, didactic pretense, and outlandish theatrical quality, which only deepened agony, dejection, and inhumanity. By the early 1970s, the works of Greek dramatists such as Skourtes and Karras hastened the further breakdown of Greek modernism and ushered in the shy beginnings of postmodernist playwriting. The young harbingers of innovative experiments began to present their work with more confidence, albeit in smaller, more modest theatrical forms (such as the popular one-act plays). The trajectory of many of the new works led over interruptions, constraints, and taboos, which correlated with setbacks in the process of the protagonists’ social estrangement. Some of the plays’ characters are or become imprisoned (literally and metaphorically), and their imprisonment is all the more ironic because they believed that the new capitalist schemes would set them free. Karras delved deep into the existential domain of marginality to deliver a sharp sociopolitical critique but also to capture a neorealism that continued to appeal to Greek dramatists and audiences alike. It was this neorealism with its

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persistent local identity and reuse of tradition that ultimately positioned Greek absurdism at an oblique angle from that of other Western theaters. Mourselas, who balanced realist conventions and a sense of locality with absurdist components in many of his characterizations and dialogues, put it very simply: “I found the technique to touch on social problems by way of the absurd” (Mourselas, interview by Sella, He Kathemerine, May 8, 2005). Thus Mourselas rightly identified absurdist techniques as the means to a more localized end. Works such as Skourtes’s Nannies, then, created situations in which the antiheroes could implement their critical awareness and rehearse an active resistance. With overtones of self-criticism, such works presented the various roles that citizens might choose to play. Play production became the vehicle of a powerful cultural critique that redefined citizenship as engaged citizenship and called for a responsible civic society. The Nannies interrogated the causes and mechanisms of an authoritarian takeover and the cost of collaboration or resistance from an anticapitalist perspective. Epic-style theater took this interrogation process a step further, as in The Story of Ali Retzo, the most successful Greek instantiation of Brechtian dramaturgy, which made spectators question the incriminating actions depicted and wish to change them. Under capitalist pressure, what becomes of the play’s characters, of the audience, and of the institution of theater itself? The Greek version of the dialectical theater, too, disclosed the workings of the junta’s hyperbolic dramatizations and its scheming to solidify its political power. The Brechtian productions of the Free Theater helped the Greek public to discern the images and values with which its own reality had been constructed and to assess what real-life ramifications such constructions entailed. Brechtian de-dramatizations effectively demolished the regime’s “spectacular” nature and intentions and conveyed the desired analytical tools and critical distance. Taylor’s remarks on the subject of the 1959 Cuban Revolution may mutatis mutandis apply here: [T]he so-called revolutionary theatre . . . incorporated and furthered revolutionary ideology, identity, and images. The theatre of revolution, while functioning primarily on the symbolic order, also aimed at real, political change and saw itself as an important instrument in the social struggle (2000: 175).

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Because the new works expressed crucial communal values and existentialist concerns, often mixed with farce and brutality, their popularity was not limited to the thrill of the topical but lasted through the decades following the junta’s demise. Under the dictatorship, claims Aliki Bacopoulou-Halls, plays were created that appeared esoteric but that, for that very reason, “gain[ed] in interest, depth or universality” (1994: 405). Plays and performances became symbols of the cultural regeneration of the early 1970s. This was indeed the era that drew Greek playwrights out of the shadows of oblivion, that allowed them to pursue theater as their preferred or exclusive means of expression, and that taught them how to imagine, create, and manage an audience. The Free Theater, especially, availed itself of the strength of interfacing stage traditions and kept up links with ancient tragedy, foreign drama, older Greek genres, and also international cinema. Most new theater groups, too, employed a range of innovative strategies, from production styles that highlighted liberal ideas and potential protest lines through experimental interpretation. They deployed the analogies with the family or with the exploitation of women in a reciprocal process of self-definition that marked not only the actors and artists but also the spectators. This cross-fertilization afforded the opposition a “paralogical” stage of the most complex resonances, whose inventive performances could thrive in venues where everyday life, political beliefs, and artistic pursuits converged. The most creative plays lifted the barriers between politics, activist poetry and music, and journalism. Under censorship of the press, theater took the place of journalism and came to symbolize freedom of speech per se. It placed dissident ideas on a path of exponential growth (not unlike the launching of an idea or image that goes viral on the Internet in today’s climate of contestation). The makers of the New Greek Theater managed to weld a silent bond with their public, and together they engaged in an unwritten script of complicity as they read, reinterpreted, and criticized new plays. The public, in turn, could divest state culture of essential meaning while investing its own choices of plays, readings, and venues with dissident force. New Greek Theater was offering not only associative links and liberating choices, but also the very premises of a broader moral, ideological, and sociocultural diversity. This theater that rapidly diversified its vision contrasted sharply with the Colonels’ attempts to eliminate difference and to homogenize people and perspectives, especially on the topics of Greek history

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and the nation. The social agents of the new plays and the actors of the new troupes offered an antidote to the regime’s antidialogic conception of history and society and its production of political reality through flamboyantly theatrical means. This book has aimed to transform the past of the dictatorship into a history, a cultural history of the dictatorship. It has tried to restage, that is, to reimagine the junta period as a kind of cultural crucible that shaped the legacy of practices and ideals that constituted Greece’s theater culture through the last quarter of the twentieth century. Can Greek theater now be reinvented as the old powerhouse that promoted democratic solutions to a deep crisis, or will the crisis set its own state of exception— that’s the question.

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Index absurdism 16, 20, 20n28, 22–3, 29, 33, 47, 51–2, 51n8, 57–61, 57n20, 62n28, 76n54, 85, 93, 93n3, 119n40, 138–43, 157, 196–7, 210, 222–3, 228–49, 289–91, 293, 301–2; see also Theater of the Absurd Adamov, Arthur 46n1, 58, 77–8, 78n58 Aeschylus 30, 97, 98n6, 114, 120, 120n41, 122, 125–6, 127n52, 128, 128n54, 133–4, 152n89, 155; see also Oresteia, Prometheus Bound Agamben, Giorgio 14–20, 16n26, 23–4 theory of 18–25 Agathos, Anastases 167n11 Agnew, Spiro 10 Ajax (Sophocles) 114 Akropol Theater 153, 190n36, 193n38, 195, 216n55 Albania 178 Alexander the Great 176, 196 Alexander the Great and the Cursed Snake 196 Alexandrou, Aris 26n30, 253n23 “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) 253–5, 264 Alivizatos, Nikos 2n1, 3n3, 13n21, 63, 63n32, 88 All Together, Now! (2011) (Kotanidis) 69n40 Alpha Theater 79 Alsos Pankratiou (Pankrati) 284 Amalia Theater in Thessaloniki 145 amphisvetíes 55n16, 93n3 Anagnostaki, Loula 28n35, 37n43, 42–3, 51, 53, 54n14, 60–1, 60n25, 95, 104, 230 Anastasiades, Georgios 28n34, 218 ancient drama 28n35, 38, 48–50, 76n54, 100n10, 108n23, 114, 123–4, 125, 128–9, 128n53, 133, 155–6, 289, 296–7 And you are combing your hair (1973) (Free Theater) 280–1, 283 and kephi 283–4 Anderson, Benedict 294

Andreades, Giankos 250n20, 260n41 Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina 43, 265 Anthology of Modern Greek Literature 102–3 anti-Americanism 9n14, 24, 70n41, 286, 296 The Antidictatorial Student Movement, 1972–1973 (1999) (Daphermos) 27 Antigone (character) 57n19, 123–5, 155, 245–8, 262, 297; see also Finding a Match for Antigone Antigone (June 1965 production) 123 Antigone (Sophocles) 123, 123n45, 125, 155 Antigone (The Strongmen) (Karras) 245–8 “Antigone in Africa” (Fugard) 146 The Antigone of the Occupation (Pergiales) 127n52 The Antigone of Sophocles (Brecht) 46n1, 128n53, 253n23, 262 “The Antigone of Synodinou” 124, 124n48 Antoniou, Dimitris 181n25 antiquity 8, 12n18, 105, 123, 165, 171n19, 175, 185n30, 195, 227–8 Antonio or The Message (Anagnostaki) 60 aphrodisios 225n56 Aphrodyssey, A Sexual Odyssey (Nord) 225–6 Apologia Coffeehouse Theater 85 Apostolides, Herakles 102 Apostolides, Renos 102 Argentina 3n3, 8n13, 11, 21, 21n29, 23, 30, 117n35 Aristophanes 26, 50, 75, 94, 98n6, 7, 100n10, 108n24, 111, 114, 194, 286n64; see also Birds; Ecclesiazusae Aristotle 19, 97, 252 Armed Forces 14, 52, 73, 160, 172, 184, 187

362

Index

army (Greek) 4, 6, 14, 93, 95, 102, 110, 125, 160, 163–4, 167n12, 168, 172, 174–5, 181, 184, 186, 188, 209, 222, 226, 293, 299, 301 Art Theater (Theatro Technes) (Koun) 33, 37n43, 50, 51n8, 52n9, 58, 60n25, 61, 88, 138n66, 139, 149n83, 191, 228, 234, 237 Artaud, Antonin 46–7, 47n3, 144, 149n83, 258n35, 260 Arzoglou, Kostas 77, 260 Asimakoulas, Dimitris 35n40, 78n58, 94, 101n12, 104, 104n18, 141n71, 254n24, 255n28, 258n34, 259, 259n37, 38, 39, 275, 283n59 “astike taxe” 237n14 At the Borders of Treason (1968) (film) 182 Athenocentrism 176 Athens 2, 8n10, 12, 12n17, 27n32, 28n35, 33, 39, 50–1, 66–7, 76, 81–2, 83n68, 93n3, 98n7, 105–7, 114n32, 123, 127, 143n73, 151, 163–6, 176, 181, 181n25, 195, 198, 204, 208, 216n53, 260–6, 283, 286; see also Polytechnic University Athens Festival (1967) 105 Athens Theater Museum and Archive 39 Athens War Museum 181 The Attendant (Karras) 229–31, 231n6, 233, 245 and Savvas (character) 231–2 Aulaia Theater 75–6 Austin, John L. 64n34 auteur 56 “Authors’ Silence”/“silence boycott” 101, 101n11, 103, 111–12, 133–4, 227 Autopsy (Michaelides) 62, 141–2 avant-garde (Greek) 46, 50, 51n8, 59, 84–5, 87, 270 Axelos, Loukas 26n30, 98n6, 104, 104n18, 106n21, 263 Bacharian, Asantour 41 Bacopoulou-Halls, Aliki 36n41, 51n8, 57n19, 59n22, 60n25, 62n28, 197n43, 303 The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent (Brecht) 262 The Bald Soprano (Ionesco) 234 Balkan Wars (1912–1913) 176

Ballos (Savvopoulos) 159n1 “bare life” (Agamben) 16–17, 23 “bastinado” 10n15; see also torture BBC Greek Service 133 Beaton, Roderick 26 Beckett, Samuel 33, 46, 57–8, 58n21, 73n48, 77–8, 77n56, 93n3, 231, 234, 240, 240n17, 260; see also Endgame; Waiting for Godot Beggar’s Opera (Gay) 69, 74, 143–4, 265, 265n49 Bhabha, Homi 59n24 Biochemistry (Matesis) 58–9 Birds (Aristophanes) 94 The Birthday Party (Pinter) 231 Bistes, Nikos 260 blacklists 98n6, 262–3, 262n45 Book Index (censorship) 97–106 “books of problematization” 84n71 Bost (Mentes Bostantzoglou) 282 Botsiou, Konstantina E. 9n14, 39–40, 70n41 Bourdieu, Pierre 28n35, 47 bourgeois 54n15, 62n28, 73, 76n54, 93n3, 137, 140, 147–8, 170–1, 171n19, 198–9, 227n1, 230–1, 237, 256, 257n32, 258n33, 268, 270, 275, 282, 286 household 230–1 and The Attendant 230–1 and The Nannies 230–1, 237n14 Bradby, David 34n39, 47n3, 54n15, 56n18, 68n38, 73n48, 86n73, 190n36, 255n27, 257n32, 269 Brecht, Bertolt 1–2, 14n22, 16, 21, 23–4, 29, 33–5, 46–7, 46n1, 51n8, 53n13, 54n15, 55–6, 74–5, 76n54, 78n58, 85, 88–9, 94, 112, 128n53, 137–8, 141n71, 157–8, 202, 213, 222, 228, 245, 249–51, 258–66, 258n35, 268–70, 273–5, 279–80, 282–4, 286–90, 293–5, 301–2 and “alienation effect” 253–4 and didacticism 254, 295 and gender 279 in Greece under the junta 258–64 and politically committed theater 275 and process 251–72 as “rehearsal leader” 269 and techniques for solving sociopolitical problems 287

Index and theater under the dictatorship 250–7 “third eye” of 252–3; see also The Antigone of Sophocles; The BadenBaden Lesson on Consent; The Caucasian Chalk Circle; Coriolanus; The Good Person of Szechwan; Life of Galileo; Lindbergh’s Flight; A Man’s a Man (Man Equals Man); Mother Courage and Her Children; Short Organum for the Theatre; The Story of Ali Retzo; The Threepenny Opera Brecht: The Man and His Work (1959) (Esslin) 258 Bryant-Bertail, Sarah 250, 252, 253n23, 256n30 Büchner, Georg 150; see also Woyzeck The Burning Light (Varnales) 126 The Bus (Zakopoulos) 136 Butler, Judith 298 Byzantine Empire 177 Byzantium 8, 171n19 Camus, Albert 46, 57–8, 73n48, 78n58, 97 capitalism 9n14, 14–15, 15n24, 24, 32n38, 33–4, 61, 138, 194n40, 227–91, 294, 301–2 and consumerism 227–8 and exploitation 272 and individual responsibility 227–91 and Karras 243–8 and misfits and failures 248–72 and The Nannies 233–43 and The Story of Ali Retzo 272–80 and tourism 227–8 and And you are combing your hair 280–6 capitalist oppression 33, 240, 243–9, 280, 294 Carabott, Philip 8n10, 10n15, 31n37, 108n23, 170n17, 176n22 The Caretaker (1960) (Pinter) 245n19 Cassandra (mythology) 26, 134 Castro, Fidel 97 The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948) (Brecht) (Koun production) 250 censorship 1, 16, 19–27, 30–4, 38–9, 41, 46, 48, 52n11, 53, 54, 71–3, 78–9, 81–2, 87, 89–158, 162, 190, 195,

363

198, 200, 216–17, 219, 228, 236, 236n18, 237n14, 259n38, 262, 265, 270, 270n53, 272–3, 282–3, 285, 288, 290, 293–8, 303 and art as alibi 146–51 and the Book Index 97–106 and context to the Colonels’ censorship 91–7 and “dream factory” films 118 and George Seferis 133–5 and logokrisia 92 and national culture 154–8 and New Greek Theater 136–44 and Pontikas’s Trombone (1973) 145–51 and preventive censorship legislation 106–16 and Prometheus 120–33 and restraining the revue 151–4 and self-censorship 116–20 and “Statement of the Eighteen” 102–3 and visual components of plays 140–4 Center Union Party 3 The Ceremony (Matesis) 62n28 The Chairs (Ionesco) 234 Chakkas, Marios 119 Chatze-antoniou, Kostas 13n20 Chatzedakes, Giorgos 40n45, 68n38, 130n55, 268 Chatzepantazes, Thodoros 84, 182n28, 201, 201n46, 261, 283n58, 285n62; see also Kretikos Chatzes, Demetres 137 Chatzesavvas, Menas 77 Chatzopoulos, Giorgos 104 Cheliotis, Leonidas 208n49 China 65 Chourmouzes, Michael 286n64 The Chronicle of the Dictatorship (1967–1974) (Voulgares) 39 Chroniko 41 Chronos 203n47 CIA, see US Central Intelligence Agency Cicellis, Kay 42 Circus Hellas 197n43 “citizen education” 184 The City (Anagnostaki) 60, 60n25 claustrophobia 56, 61, 229–30, 235, 249 Cohn, Ruby 86n73

364

Index

Cold War 34, 113 “collective directorship” 34 “collectivistic nationalism” 8n10 Colonels 1–19, 2n1, 3n3, 23–9, 31n37, 32n38, 40–3, 45, 50, 52, 59, 63, 67–73, 71n45, 72n47, 79, 81, 86–7, 92, 92n2, 96–7, 98n6, 7, 99–102, 100n10, 102n14, 104, 106–12, 106n21, 110n26, 111n28, 115, 117–18, 123n46, 125, 125n50, 127n52, 128n54, 131–2, 132n56, 134, 134n59, 136, 140n70, 141, 146, 153–88, 153n90, 159n1, 167n11, 196, 220–2, 209, 211, 215, 219–24, 228, 230, 238, 249–50, 260, 264, 265n48, 275, 283, 285, 291, 293–4, 297–300, 303–4 and blacklists 98n6, 262–3, 262n45 and Censorship Service 110 and “controlled liberalization” 67–8 and dogma 27 as “laughed out of office” 41–2 and Our Grand Circus 196, 221 and “regenerative Revolution” 188 and rush into capitalism 230 as “saviors” 92, 92n2 and “spectacular politics” 23, 159–89 and “state of exception” 14–15; see also Demetrios Ioannides; Nikolaos Makarezos; Georgios Papadopoulos; Stylianos Pattakos Committee for the Control of Theatrical Works 110 communism/anticommunism 2–10, 2n1, 3n3, 5n5, 6n7, 7n8, 9, 8n10, 11, 13, 12n19, 14, 31n37, 41n46, 57n20, 74, 97–8, 98n7, 101n13, 111–12, 120, 122, 125–6, 128n54, 160, 172, 176, 178–82, 181n24, 182n28, 204, 220, 262–3, 293, 300–1 Constantine the Great 176–7 Constantine II 4–5, 174 Constantinidis, Stratos 36n41, 49n5, 53n13, 56–7, 57n19, 60n25, 229, 232n7, 237n12, 290–1, 300 and “resistentialist theater” 290 Constantinople 176–7 constitution 3–4, 6, 8n10, 9n14, 15–16, 118, 190n36, 209–11, 216, 223, 265n48, 273

Contemporary Greek Theater (Synchrono Helleniko Theatro) 43, 78–9, 137 Coriolanus (Brecht) 260 The Courtyard of Miracles (1957) (Kambanelles) 51n8, 80, 80n63, 191, 191n37 création collective 34n39 Cuban Revolution (1959) 302 Cultural Center “Hora” 41 Czechoslovakia 64–5 Daphermos, Olympios 27 Dassin, Jules 100n10, 111n28 Debord, Guy 32n38, 159 Delphic oracle 204 Delphi 127n52, 204, 204n48 democracy 4, 6, 8n13, 9n14, 11–12, 12n17, 13, 13n20, 14–15, 27n32, 29, 42, 46, 50–1, 63, 65, 82–3, 88–91, 97, 98n7, 108n23, 114, 123, 127, 128n53, 153, 176n22, 184, 192–3, 204, 209, 211–12, 237–8, 251, 256, 269–73, 284, 293–5, 304 Deposition ’73 104 Deposition ’74 104 “dialectical theater” 252n21 Dialegmenos, Giorgos 136 Diamond, Elin 64n34, 256n30, 257n31 dictatorship/junta/military coup (Greek) (1967–1974) 1–21, 23–34, 31n37, 32n38, 35n40, 37n43, 39–42, 45–6, 48, 49n5, 50, 54–5, 57, 57n20, 59, 61, 67, 71–2, 71n45, 74, 74n49, 77, 77n56, 87–8, 92–3, 92n2, 94, 96, 98n6, 7, 99n9, 99–100, 100n159, 103–5, 108n23, 110, 110n25, 113n30, 114–15, 117, 117n35 and capitalism 227–8, See capitalism event of 1–13 and government’s official “mission” 93 and history 2n1, 23–4, 304 and music 174–5 and “National Revolutionary Government” 165–7 and “national security crisis” 14 and “normality” 16 and public spectacle 39 and “spectacular politics” 23, 159–89

Index and “state of emergency” 14–18 and symbolism and subtlety 298 and torture, see torture and Western response to 9–12; see also censorship; Colonels; Prometheus Plan Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1997) (Taylor) 21, 23 dissidents 6, 12n19, 24, 42, 48, 94, 111, 119, 135, 294–5, 297 Disturbing the Peace (Havel) 65 Divares, Dionyses 259 Dolan, Jill 256n30 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) (Scott) 168n14 Dort, Bernard 257n32 dramaturgy 8n51, 28–30, 28n35, 33–7, 36n41, 37n43, 40, 47, 49, 51, 53–4, 57, 83, 87, 89, 96, 139n67, 168n14, 201, 234, 250–1, 252n21, 253, 259, 294, 298, 301–2 Dromoi tes Historias 27n32 Ecclesiazusae (Aristophanes) 75, 111–12 Eighteen Texts (1970) 42, 103, 103n16, 134n59, 156n93, 283n59 1821 and the Truth (Skarimbas) 209n50 EKIN, see Hellenic European Youth Movement Electra (character) 124–5 Electra (Euripides) 128n54 Electra (Sophocles) 124–5 Eleutherotypia 2n1, 28n34, 80n62, 99n9, 104n18, 128n54, 190, 195 Eliot, T. S. 97 Elytis, Odysseas 101n11, 113n30, Emanuel, Rahm 14 Endgame (1957) (Beckett) 57 Endgame (1970 production) (Koun) 234 EOT, see National Tourist Organization “epic” 177–8 “epic theater” 251–2, 252n21 Epidaurus Festivals 127 Epidaurus Theater 49–50, 105, 124n48, 127–30, 128n54, 133, 284 Epikaira 39 epimorphose 184 epitheorese (Athenian revue) 37n42, 83, 108n23, 151–4, 201, 201n46, 265n47, 282–6, 283n58

365

Epitheorese Technes 115, 250 ESA, see Military Police Esslin, Martin 57–8, 57n20, 258, 258n36 ethnikophron/ethnikophrosyne (“national conviction”) 7, 7n9, 300 ethnos 214n52 Ethnosoterios Epanastasis (“NationSaving Revolution”) 165–7 Euangelatos, Spyros 75 Euripides 45, 98n6, 114, 128n54 Excitable Speech (1997) (Butler) 298 existentialism 33, 51n8, 56–7, 57n19, 73n48, 78, 78n58, 138, 222, 229–30, 232n7, 290–1, 302–3 Experimental Stage of the State Theater of Northern Greece 28n35, 75, 111 Experimental Theater (Peiramatiko Theatro) 58, 82, 139 fascism 3n3, 10n15, 12n18, 27n32, 31, 31n37, 46n1, 61, 94, 99n8, 108–9, 108n23, 148–9, 160, 169–74, 171n19, 176n22, 178, 184, 253n23, 258, 261, 268 female corpse 229, 237–8, 237n14 feminism 26, 36n41, 43, 128n53, 256n30 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 25 “Festivals of the Military Virtue of the Greeks” (1967) 163–4, 178–9, 185n30 abolishment of in 1982 178–9 fiction (Greek) 23–6, 26n30, 41n46 Finding a Match for Antigone (1958) (Ziogas) 229–30, 230n4, 233 Finlay, George 97 Fo, Dario 46n1, 47n2, 260 Foley, Helene P. 46n1, 253n23 foreign 5n5, 9n14, 10–11, 17–18, 26, 30, 33–5, 35n40, 40, 45–8, 49n5, 56n17, 65–6, 68, 70, 75–6, 81, 88, 97–8, 100–1, 105, 110, 114–15, 117, 123, 128n54, 138, 169, 176, 180, 190n36, 191, 202, 206–16, 213n51, 219, 229–30, 234, 237, 255, 260, 289–90, 300–3 Foucault, Michel 20, 92n2, 162, 208n49 Fournaraki, Eleni 171n19

366

Index

Free Theater (Eleuthero Theatro) (1971) 33–5, 43, 48, 57n20, 64, 68–9, 73n48, 74, 77, 82, 83n69, 89, 118n38, 137–8, 143–4, 228, 250–7, 260, 262–77, 265n47, 280–9, 293–4, 302–3 and collaborative action 265–72 and “collective directorship” 268–70 and commercialism 286 and epitheorese 284 and 1972 manifesto “A Necessary Retrospective” 271 photos of 267, 277–8 as politically effective 286–7 as “theater of ideas” 269 and thiasos 268–9 and venues 284; see also And you are combing your hair; Golpho; It Happened to Katina; The Last Tram; The Story of Ali Retzo freedom of speech 6, 98n7, 101, 101n12, 124, 154, 295, 303 French Revolution 190 From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (1967) (Horowitz) 70 Galileo (character) 262 Gangrene (Dialegmenos) 136 Gay, John 69, 74, 143–4, 256n30, 265 Gazi, Effi 8n13, 185n30 Gebrauchswert (Brecht) 252 gender relations 11n15, 20–1, 43, 53n13, 71n45, 139, 162, 174–5, 279 gender-bending 71n45 General Secretariat of Press and Information 39, 110 Genet, Jean 58 Georgakake, Konstantza 28n35, 51n8, 60n25, 79n61, 80, 80n63, 86, 93n3, 105n20, 127n52, 136n63, 138n66, 139n67, 142, 153, 153n90, 227n1, 283n58, 284 Georgalas, Georgios K. 6n7, 181n23 Georgopoulou, Varvara 114n32, 124n48 Georgousopoulos, Kostas 56, 67n37, 79n61, 93n3, 130n55, 137n65, 197n43, 207, 222, 230n4, 231n6, 234, 234n9, 237n12, 240n17, 244n18, 254n25, 260n41, 262n43, 264, 254n47, 266n52, 268, 280n57, 282, 285n63

Giophylles, Photos 98 Gkolia, Paraskeue 8n12, 185n30, 186n32 Goethe Institute in Athens 262 Goldhill, Simon 293 Golpho (1893) (Peresiades) 89, 284 The Good Person of Szechwan (1943) (Brecht) 261 Goodnight Margarita (Staurou) 137 Gorky, Maxim 97 Gourgouris, Stathis 73n48 Goutes, Stelios 77, 145, 147, 150–1, 271n54 Government Gazette of the Kingdom of Greece 110 Graham-Jones, Jean 21n29, 60n26, 62n28, 117n35, 270n53 Grammatas, Thodoros 89 Grass, Günter 14n22 Greco-Turkish War (1897) 212 “Greece of Christian Greeks” 8, 135 Greece without Columns: The Making of the Modern Greeks (1972) (Holden) 12n17 Greek Central Service of Information (KYP) 9 Greek Civil War (1946–1949) 6n7, 7n9, 10–11, 10n15, 12n19, 13n21, 24, 26n30, 36n41, 45, 70, 70n42, 94, 98n7, 99, 122, 122n44, 126, 128, 176, 178–9, 213–14 Greek Ministry of Culture 106 Greek national character 12n17 Greek National Opera (Ethnike Lyrike Skene) 104 Greek National Theater, see National Theater of Greece Greek Report 100n10, 107–8, 123 Greek Revolution of 1821, See Revolution of 1821 Greek Right, see Right Greek Television Archive 163 Greek valor 177, 180, 189 Green, Amy 108n23, 253n23 Gregoriades, Solon 7n9, 110n25, 115n33, 119n39, 149n83, 163n4, 184n29, 204 Grotowski, Jerzy 46n1, 47n2, 57n20, 83, 258n35 Grypares, Ioannes N. 124n49 The Guardian 30, 98n6 Guevara, Che 63n32 guillotine 208, 208n49, 214, 216, 223 Guilt (Chakkas) (April 1970 production) 145

Index Hager, Philip 28–9, 28n35, 32n38, 39n44, 49n5, 52n11, 56, 56n18, 58, 59n22, 60n25, 64, 66n35, 67n37, 74n49, 81–2, 83n68, 86–7, 86n73, 87, 89n75, 93n3, 106n21, 107n22, 140n69, 149, 190–1, 194n39, 197, 197n43, 201–3, 211, 214, 216n53, 216–18, 233, 237n13, 238, 240, 245, 248, 266n52, 268–73, 276, 279 Hagmann, Stuart 68–9 Handke, Peter 139 Haus, Heinz-Uwe 252n22 Havel, Václav 65 Hellenic 8n10, 53n13, 54, 74, 120–4, 143n73, 164, 171n19, 172, 174–5, 199, 207 Hellenic American Union 143n73 Hellenic European Youth Movement (EKIN) (Helleno-europaïke Kinese Neon) 74 Hellenic Stage (Hellenike Skene) 120–4 Hellenikoteta 28n35 “heptaetia” 21 Hermes 131 Herodes Atticus Theater 124, 284 heroes 30, 42, 42n47, 50, 57n19, 80, 102, 105n20, 115, 120n41, 122, 124–6, 125n50, 126n51, 129–32, 135, 140n70, 147–8, 155, 161–2, 167, 173, 175, 177, 180–2, 182n27, 28, 186n32, 190n36, 191n37, 191–2, 195, 198, 202, 206–8, 213–14, 219–26, 229–32, 238, 240, 243, 246, 248, 285, 291, 296–9, 302 Herzfeld, Michael 160n2, 164n6, 186n33, 199 heterotopia 20, 23 history 2, 2n1, 4n4, 8n12, 13, 9, 11, 12n17, 14n23, 15–18, 22–4, 27n32, 28–37, 36n43, 38–42, 187–201 and Our Grand Circus 189–201 and history-writing 23–4 reflecting back on 187–201 History of the Hellenic Nation (Paparregopoulos) 171 Hitler, Adolf 169, 169n16, 171n19, 176n22 Hobsbawm, Eric 171 Holden, David 12n17 Holquist, Michael 96n4 The Homecoming (1965) (Pinter) 57 Homer 173, 186n32, 226, 226n57, 271

367

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) (Agamben) 16, 19 homosexuality 99, 99n8, 256n30 Horton, Andrew 37n43, 51n8, 53n13, 54n15, 62n29, 93n3, 227n1 How to Do Things with Words (1962) (Austin) 64n34 hubris 175–6, 188, 212, 293 humor 41, 41n46, 62, 62n28, 152n89, 153n90, 196, 198, 205, 207, 225, 249 hypokrisia 22 hypokritike 22 identity 22, 31, 51n8, 61, 70n42, 76n54, 77n55, 82–3, 89, 101, 156, 162, 184, 192, 194, 214, 224, 240, 266, 294, 300–2 Iliad (Homer) 173, 186n32 imprisonment/entrapment 58, 66, 74, 135n61, 142, 207–8, 227n1, 229–30, 241, 243, 301 individualism (Greek) 7–8, 8n10, 35, 40, 45, 48, 57n19, 58, 61, 66, 70–2, 76n54, 76–7, 80, 92–3, 92n2, 95, 100n10, 101, 131, 147–8, 150, 156, 158, 170n17, 186, 199n45, 213–14, 221–2, 227–91 infantilism 10n15, 71–3, 154, 233, 240 Ioannides, Demetrios 12, 12n19, 17, 132n56 Ionesco, Eugène 46, 58, 76n54, 77–8, 229, 234, 260; see also The Bald Soprano; The Chairs; The Lesson It Happened to Katina (1978 revue) 286 It’s a Junta: Will It Pass? (2011–2012) 39 Jameson, Fredric 15n24 “the junta” 2n1, 3, 3n3, 6n7, 8n11, 10, 10n15, 12n19, 13n20, 15–17, 21–34, 26n30, 28n34, 35, 31n37, 36n41, 37n42, 43, 38–43, 39n44 Kafka, Franz 28n35, 46, 240 Kaïses, Demetres 70 Kalkane, Eirene 208n49 Kallianese, Athena/Nana 42, 103, 104 Kalouta-Dor-Leivadites Company at the Peroke Theater 154 Kalvos (publishing house) 104, 104n18, 119n40, 259n38

368

Index

Kambanelles, Iakovos 28n35, 32, 37n43, 50–1, 51n8, 53, 58, 60, 80, 80n63, 83n68, 93n3, 138n66, 150n85, 161–2, 190–203, 203n47, 204–14, 216n53, 55, 217, 219, 222–4, 250, 290, 300 Kanellopoulos, Panagiotes 4 Kanellou, Phemy 245n19 Kapetanakes, Elias 151n87 Karaghiozis shadow theater 33, 36n41, 196, 199, 212, 216, 222–3, 236–7 Karaghiozis Almost Vizier (Skourtes) 62, 237 Karamanles, Konstantinos 13, 94 Karampetsos, E. D. 140n70, 201–2, 208, 237n12 Karaoglou, Antonia 28–9, 28n35, 39n44, 50, 76n54, 77n56, 78n58, 59, 83n69, 104–5, 105n20, 106n21, 110n25, 112, 136n63, 138, 141–2, 145–6, 148n82, 149, 151n87, 153n90, 164, 181n24, 231n6, 261, 270n53, 271n54, 285 Karapanou, Margarita 215 Kareze, Jenny 161, 190–6, 190n36, 194n40, 196, 197n43, 198–9, 201, 205, 214–19, 222, 297 Kareze-Kazakos Theater Company 161, 193, 197n43 Karpeta, Helene 80 Karras, Strates 37n43, 61, 62n28, 106n21, 229–33, 231n6, 243–8, 290–1, 301 and “the tradecraft of capitalist oppression” 243–8 Karter, Giorgos 125 Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry since 1967 (1998) (Van Dyck) 19–20, 26 Kathareuousa language 72n47, 164, 172–3, 185, 212, 277 He Kathemerine (Sykka) 95, 114–15 Katrakes, Manos 127–32, 127n52, 130n55, 137, 297 Katsanes, Vangeles 89 Katsapes, Kostas 27–8, 46n1, 63n31, 64n33, 69n39, 108n23, 109, 113n30 Kazakos, Kostas 161, 185, 215, 219 Kazantzakis, Nikos 36n41, 57n19, 126, 126n51 Kearns, Godfrey 244, 245n19 Kechaïdes, Demetres 51, 51n8, 61–2, 104

Kedros (publishing house) 103 Keeley, Edmund 133, 135, 135n62 Keeley, Robert 9n14, 12n17, 31n37, 107, 134, 135n61 Keeping Company (Anagnostaki) 60, 95 Keimena (publishing house) 104, 259 Kelaëdones, Loukianos 282 The Keys (Chakkas) 119 The Kid . . . Spoke (1972/3 production) 154 Kitsopoulos, Giorgos 105, 181 Klimke, Martin 63n31, 64n34 Kokori, Patricia 50–1, 51n8, 58n21, 60n25, 234, 238–9, 240n17, 242–3 Koltsidopoulou, Anny 42, 137–8, 258, 259n37, 261, 265n47, 283n58, 286n64 Komnenos, Andronikos 205 Kondyles, Phontas 258 Kontogiannes, Giorgos 84n71, 259n39 Kontos, Giannes 26 Kornetis, Kostis 3n3, 5n5, 6n7, 13n20, 15n25, 17–18, 24, 27–8, 42n47, 53, 53n12, 63n31, 64n33, 65, 67n36, 68n38, 70, 78n59, 88, 92n2, 98n6, 99, 99n8, 113n30, 113–14, 115n34, 135n61, 167n10, 182n27, 209, 216n53, 217, 228n2, 283, 284n61, 295 Kotanidis, Yorgos 9n14, 40n45, 42n47, 47–8, 53n12, 55n16, 57n20, 63n32, 64–5, 68–9, 69n40, 70, 73n48, 74, 77n55, 78n59, 83n68, 86n73, 87n74, 104n19, 106n21, 118n38, 119n39, 137, 141, 154, 181n26, 182, 182n28, 215, 251, 258, 258n36, 262, 265n47, 48, 265–6, 266n51, 268–71, 270n53, 274–5, 275n56, 277–82, 280n57, 283n58, 284n61, 285, 285n63, 286, 286n64, 297–8 Kotsopoulos, Thanos 50 Kott, Jan 57n20 Koumantos, Giorgos 194 Koun, Karolos 33, 37n43, 50–3, 51n8, 52n9, 58, 60n25, 88, 94, 106n21, 108n23, 138n66, 149n83, 156, 191, 228, 234, 250, 285n63; see also Art Theater Koundouros, Nikos 63 Kretikos 27n33, 52n9, 83–4, 135n61, 207, 222, 245n19, 257n31, 261, 263–4, 280n57, 283, 285n62; see also Chatzepantazes, Thodoros

Index Kunen, James S. 68–9 KYP, see Greek Central Service of Information Ladas, Ioannes 71n45, 106, 226 Laïke Mousa, Folk Muse 101–2 Lakidou, Ilia 280, 280n57, 282, 283n59, 286n64 Lambrakes, Demetrios 3n3 Lambrakes, Gregores 113n30 Lambrinos, Photos 39–40, 63n32, 167n11, 181n23 Lambropoulos, Vassilis 199 laos 214n52 “late capitalism” 15n24 Latin American drama 21; see also Argentina The Last Tram (1976 production) 286 law (Greek) 14n23, 15, 19, 23, 53n13, 66–7, 96, 108–10, 119, 123, 216n53 Lazanes, Giorgos 234, 237n12 Lefevere, André 254n24 Left (Greek left) 4–5, 5n5, 6n7, 7–10, 9n14, 11, 12n19, 15n25, 17, 26, 26n30, 34, 36, 40–3, 46, 48, 50, 51n8, 57n20, 63, 64n34, 66, 70–5, 70n42, 78, 80n63, 85, 88, 94–5, 98, 98n6, 99, 100n10, 101n11, 103–4, 106n21, 109, 111, 111n28, 113–15, 113n30, 118, 120–2, 124n49, 125–32, 128n53, 137–8, 150, 150n86, 156–7, 162–3, 167, 172, 175–9, 184–5, 191n37, 196, 208–9, 214, 217, 219–24, 239, 256, 257n32, 258, 258n34, 260, 265n47, 268, 271, 279–82, 286, 293–4, 296 and New Left 5n5, 15n25, 71, 294 and Old Left 26n30, 268 Lenaios, Stephanos 47n2, 79, 112–13, 136n63, 137, 141 Leontis, Artemis 100n10, 193n38, 197 The Lesson (Ionesco) 234 Liakos, Antonis 41 “liberated spaces” 295 Life of Galileo (Brecht) 261 Lindbergh’s Flight (Brecht) 262 literature/literary techniques 3n3, 3n4, 9n14, 16, 19–27, 28n35, 30, 33, 36n41, 41–3, 59n22, 63n31, 67n36, 70, 73n48, 77–9, 86, 92, 92n2, 95–106, 98n6, 100n10, 102n14, 110, 115, 118, 126, 128n53, 136–8, 141,

369

156n93, 157, 163n3, 185n30, 191, 199n45, 253n23, 258–9, 289–90, 296 Living Theatre 46n1, 82 “local specificity” 20n28 localism/locality 20n28, 301–2 logokrisia 92 logos 20 “Long Sixties” 28 Lorca, Federico García 46, 260 Lycabettus Theater 122–3 Lyceum of Greek Women (Lykeion Hellenidon) 170, 171n19 Lykoudes, Bambes 228n2 Lymberopoulou, Magia 42 Lyotard, Jean-François 20 Lysistrata (character) 26, 114n31, 297 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 194, 194n41 Macedonian Cultural Association 77 Mackridge, Peter 8n12, 26n30, 59n23, 72n47, 124n49, 143n73, 146n78, 199, 199n45, 209, 212–13 Makarezos, Nikolaos 3, 91–2, 102 Makisoglou, Helene 77–8, 78n57, 58, 59, 83n69, 153n90 Makres, Solon 206–7 Makrygiannes, Ioannes 190n36 A Man’s a Man (Man Equals Man) (Brecht) 137, 261, 261n42 “Manifesto on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of Independence” (1971) 188n35 Maniotes, Giorgos 189–90 Mann, Thomas 97 mantinades 109n24 Mao Mao (Rialde) 139 Maraka, Lila 151, 201n46, 262n45, 265n47, 283n58, 285n62 Marcuse, Herbert 228, 228n2 Margarita Perdikare (Chatzes) 137 Margarites, Alkes 130, 130n55 marginality 15–16, 34, 50, 228, 230, 232, 243–4, 248, 290, 296–7, 301 Marinella 167 Markares, Petros 28n35, 33–4, 40n45, 81, 137, 250–2, 250n20, 252n22, 254–6, 256n29, 257, 257n31, 258–60, 259n37, 263–4, 268–75, 275n56, 276, 278, 289 Markezines, Spyridon 68, 138–9

370

Index

martial law 6, 112, 118–19, 133, 178, 198, 200, 209 Martinenkos, Dionyses 274 Marx, Karl 3n3, 32n38, 63n32, 68, 73n48, 97, 98n7, 126, 126n51, 128n53, 132, 250–2, 257n32, 258, 258n33, 278 Marxism 3n3, 32n38, 63, 68, 73n48, 97, 98n7, 126, 126n51, 128, 132, 257n32, 258, 258n33, 278 masculinity 10n15, 42–3, 169, 175, 177, 180, 207–8, 229, 279, 299 and emasculation 207–8 and heroism 229 and the opposition 42–3, 299 masks 123, 130, 255, 255n26 Matesis, Paulos 28n35, 58–9, 62, 62n28, 74n49, 104, 149n83 Mauromoustakos, Platon 37n43, 93n3, 131 Mazower, Mark 3n3, 6n7, 9n14, 10n15 mechanization 251, 274, 278 Mee, Erin B. 253n23 megalo (neuter form) 197n43 Merakles, M. G. 167–8 Mercouri, Melina 27n32, 100n10, 111n28 metapoliteuse (“change of regime”) (redemocratization) 13 Metaxas, Ioannes 6n7, 8n10, 13, 12n19, 31n37, 53n13, 92, 98n7, 99n8, 108, 108n23, 124n48, 160, 167n12, 169–71, 170n17, 19, 172, 176n22, 178, 183–6 methodology 25–43, 39n44 and challenges 35–43 Michaelides, Giorgos 37n43, 51n8, 60n25, 62, 81–2, 93n3, 119n40, 138n66, 141–4, 144n74, 231n6, 232, 237n12, 238n16, 244–5, 245n19, 265, 285, 297 middle class 73, 118 military dictatorship, see dictatorship Military Police (ESA) 12 “mimicry” 59n24 Minotes, Alexes 104n19, 124, 245, 245n19, 260–1, 260n41 Minotes-Paxinou Theater Company 245 Mnouchkine, Ariane 34n39, 73n48, 190–1, 190n36, 293 mobilization 13n20, 21–3, 30, 31n37, 33, 56, 65–7, 73–5, 84, 122, 132, 167,

187–8, 191–2, 194–201, 218, 222, 256n30, 257n31, 275, 295 “mobilized theater” 88 Modern Greek Studies 19–20 modernization 16, 36n41, 46, 50, 55, 61, 66, 96, 155–6, 156n93, 203, 229, 234, 251, 253n23, 258, 289, 293–7, 301 Le Monde 30 Monument of the Unknown Soldier 173 moral degradation 56n17, 229 “moral panic” 3n3 morality 6n7, 7–9, 8n10, 15, 22, 33–4, 48, 55, 56n17, 63, 72, 82, 85n72, 92–3, 93n3, 95–6, 108n23, 110–12, 119, 122–4, 125n50, 131, 139–40, 152, 156–7, 162, 173, 177, 180–1, 186, 194n41, 207, 221, 224, 226n57, 229–30, 232n7, 235–41, 248–9, 261, 269, 290, 293–5, 303 Mother Courage and Her Children (Brecht) 245, 260–1, 260n41 Mourselas, Kostas 28n35, 62, 62n29, 89, 89n76, 91, 91n1, 93n3, 104, 248, 282, 302 Mouzenides, Takes 128–9, 128n54 Müller, Heiner 128n53 Mumford, Meg 252n21, 269 Mussolini, Benito 169, 178 The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) (Camus) 57–8 The Nannies (Skourtes) 28n35, 33, 36, 59n22, 62, 138n66, 227–44, 290, 293, 302 as allegory 235 and capitalism 244 cast of 234 and claustrophobia 235, 238–9 and dead female 234–5, 237–8 and modern Greek language 241 and money 235–7, 241–3 plot of 234–5 and Stauros 238 The Nannies (1970 production) (Lazanes) 234–5 national culture, monopolizing 154–9 national history 159–226 and activism 220–4 and the (symbolic) arena 172–83 and meanings 159–62 and Our Grand Circus 189–201

Index and patriotic self-sacrifice 183–9 and plot 201–15 and the Polytechnic University 215–30 and spectacle as power 162–72 National Socialist Germany 172 National Theater of Greece 3n2, 34, 37n43, 48–50, 75–6, 76n53, 85n72, 95, 104, 104n19, 105, 114, 127n52, 128–9, 128n54, 130n55, 145, 149n84, 191n37, 231n6, 245, 261–2, 265–6, 266n51 National Tourist Organization (EOT) 120 nationalism 6n7, 7–8, 15n25, 20–1, 31–2, 49–50, 55, 86–7, 105n20, 106, 116–18, 129–30, 149, 150n85, 154–64, 169–70, 171n19, 172, 176, 185–6, 186n33, 189, 219–20, 223–4, 284, 298, 300; see also “Festivals of the Martial Virtue of the Greeks” NATO, see North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nazi German Occupation (1941–1944) 10, 45, 94, 108, 137, 213–14, 258n33 Nazi Germany 10, 16, 45, 94, 108, 108n23, 124n49, 127n52, 128n54, 129, 135n62, 137, 164n6, 169, 169n16, 172, 213 Ta Nea 43 Nea Hestia 115 neorealism/neorealist 47, 51n8, 112, 145, 290, 300, 301–2 New Greek Theater 29–30, 33, 45–50, 53–6, 53n13, 75–87, 104, 116, 119, 136–9, 156–8, 228, 249, 293–4, 296–8, 303 and auteur 56 and classical dramas 46 and mythical-metaphorical plays 46 and radical critique 75–87 and textual and ideological cleansing 136–9 and theater’s paralógos 53–62; see also Karras; The Nannies; Our Grand Circus; The Story of Ali Retzo; The Trombone New Left 5n5, 15n25, 70n42, 71, 258n34, 294 New Press Law 118

371

New Stage of the National Theater 75–6, 76n53, 105, 145–6, 261–2 New Stage of the State Theater of Northern Greece 28n35, 75–6 New Texts 103 New Texts 2 103 “New Wave” 54, 54n15 The New York Times 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich 126n51 The Nightwatchmen (Karras) 61, 62n28, 106n21, 231n5, 6 1960s cultural revolution 2, 2n1, 3n3, 4, 10n15, 14, 17, 20, 24, 26n30, 28–9, 32n38, 33–7, 36n41, 37n43, 40, 43, 46, 46n1, 48–51, 52n11, 53n12, 54, 57n20, 60–5, 63n31, 64n34, 68n38, 69n40, 70n42, 71, 72n47, 82, 86n73, 88–9, 94, 96, 105, 122n44, 128n53, 139, 139n67, 143, 164, 169–70, 173, 182, 185–6, 191n37, 194, 228n2, 231, 240n17, 250, 252, 256n30, 257n32, 258n36, 260, 282, 289–90, 293–6, 301 Nitsos, Kostas 40, 40n45, 53, 89, 107–8, 123n45, 136, 141n71, 149n84, 162, 250–1, 264, 266, 273 Nixon, Richard 9–10, 107 The Noose (Skourtes) 59n22, 138, 138n66 Nord, Paul 225, 226n57 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 125 obscurantism 219, 232, 277 “Ode to Mankind” (Sophocles, Antigone) 123 Odessa 48n4 Odyssey 225–6, 225n56 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 293 Offending the Audience (1966) (Handke) 139 Oh Dad, What a World! (Mourselas) 28n35, 62, 91, 91n1, 93n3 Oikonomides, Giorgos 181, 181n26 Oikonomou, Maria 27 Olympics 165, 169, 169n16, 170n17 One-Dimensional Man (1964) (Marcuse) 228 Open Theater (Anoichto Theatro) 81–2, 244 Open Theater (journal) 82 “Operation Prometheus” 2–5, 31, 125–6

372

Index

Oresteia (Aeschylus) 122 Orestes (mythology) 54n13, 124, 125n50, 128n54, 191n37 Organization of State Theaters of Greece 104–5 Orientalism 175 Orthodox-Christian tradition 8, 199 Orvo Theater 62–3, 79, 141 Otto of Greece 207–9, 208n49 Ottoman Turks 177 Our Creed (Papadopoulos) 186 Our Grand Circus (1975) (Kambanelles) 28n35, 32–3, 55–6, 64, 97, 161–2, 189–209, 211–19, 222–4, 228, 232, 288, 293, 299–301 and activism 220–4 and carnival 232 and “circus” 195–6 and Eleutherios Venizelos 212 and the “Great Powers” 209–11 and Greek history 189–203, 216, 219, 220–4 and Greek religion 204 and hybrid shows 56 and Karaghiozis 216 and Kronos 202–3, 204, 208, 223 and losers 201–15 and mobilization 194–201, 218 and new stage methods 228–9 and Philip of Macedon 204 and Red Cross 216 and Romiaki (character) 199 and Romios (character) 199 and Smyrna Disaster 216 and Third of September 209 and “Ta Venizelika” 212 and Venizelos 216 and “The Victory Songs” 213 and Zeus (character) 204 Our Grand Circus (1973 production) (Kazakos and Kareze) 32, 161, 189–201, 205, 209, 215–22, 228, 293, 299–301 and “circus” 195–6 and cover of playbill 193 and heroes 162 and the Polytechnic University 215–20 Ourane, Helene 85–6, 85n72, 264; see also Thrylos, Alkes Oust or The Mean Little Song (Rialde) 140

paganism 8 Palaiologos, Kostas 104 Palamas, Kostes 36n41, 57n19, 135, 135n62, 186 “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” 32n37 Panagoules, Alexandros 125n50 Panathenaic Stadium 164–6, 170–1, 171n19, 173, 184, 197n44 “Panhellenic National Holiday” 164 Panourgia, Neni 170n17 Papadopoulos, Georgios (1919–1999) 2–7, 9, 9n14, 12, 72, 72n46, 75, 80n62, 83n68, 91–2, 92n2, 95, 102–3, 107–8, 116, 125n50, 132n56, 162, 163n3, 165, 168n13, 169, 172, 175, 181n25, 186, 188, 200, 205, 211, 215, 298 Papageorgiou, Thanases 42n47, 79–80, 79n61, 80, 80n62, 63, 64, 87, 145, 250n20 Papailias, Penelope 24–5, 92n2, 171n19 Papandreou, Andreas 27n32, 178–9 Papandreou, Georgios 3–4, 94, 135n61 Papandreou, Margaret 27n32 Papandreou, Nikephoros 37n43, 148n82, 230n4 Papanikolaou, Dimitris 26n30, 27, 28n34, 53n13, 59n24, 66n35, 99n9, 101n11, 113n30, 116, 133, 156n93, 159, 159n1, 167, 167n11, 283n59 Paparregopoulos, Konstantinos 171n19 The Parade (Anagnostaki) 60, 60n25 parakrátos 20 paralógos 20 “paralogy”/“paralogical” 20 paranoia 7, 113n30, 140, 228–9 paraxenisma 254 parea 40 Paris, James 181–2 PASOK 179 Patiles, Giannes 26, 116, 187 Patrikalakes, Phaidon 193 patriotism/patriot 7, 160, 183–9, 294, 300 Patsalides, Savvas 156n93 Pattakos, Stylianos 3, 91–2, 107, 153 Patterson, Michael 38 Paxinos, Vasileios 104 Paxinou, Katina 104n19, 260–1 Pelichos, Giorgos 43 Pelopidas 147–9, 147n80 Peloponnesian Wars 176

Index The Penal Colony (Kambanelles) 58 Pephanes, Giorgos 37n43, 62n28, 190n36, 191n37, 197n43, 201–2, 203n47, 205, 208, 212–13, 217, 230n4, 257n31 Peresiades, Spyridon 89, 284–5 Performative Turn 143 Persian Empire 176 Persian Wars 175, 177 Petropoulos, Elias 99 “phaulokratia” 4 Philip of Macedon 204, 204n48 Phoenician Women (Euripides) 114 Phokas, Nikephoros 177 Photiou, Elly 79, 137 phoustanella 109n24 Phrankoudake, Anna 8n13, 42, 98n6, 185n31, 257n32, 258 Pinter, Harold 46, 57, 60, 231, 245n19 Pirandello, Luigi 260 Piscator, Erwin 46n1, 251, 256n30, 260 Planetes (publishing house) 104 Plato 19, 98n7, 131, 134n59 playwrights 1, 29–30, 33–4, 34n39, 37n43, 38, 40, 40n45, 42, 46, 50–1, 51n8, 56, 58, 60n25, 61, 61n27, 65, 73n48, 75–86, 93–5, 106, 109–11, 117, 136n63, 139n67, 150, 153, 156–8, 190–2, 191n37, 195, 203, 215, 224–5, 228–9, 231, 231n6, 234n8, 235–6, 238–40, 248–50, 254–5, 258, 260–2, 273–4, 282, 286n64, 290–1, 297, 301, 303 Plutarch 226n58 “pocket theatres” 86n73 Polites, Linos 77 Political Texts (Brecht) 259, 259n38 “political theater” 38 political philosophy (Greek) 19 The Politics of Waste (Adamov) 78 Polykarpou, Polykarpos 80n63, 145n75 Polytechnic University of Athens 33, 67, 67n36, 68–9, 79, 98n7, 100n10, 119–20, 132n56, 145, 194, 215–20, 300 showdown 215–20 Pontíkas, Marios 31, 62, 79–80, 96, 145, 297; see also Something Fishy; The Trombone “popular art song” 113n30 post-9/11 climate 16–18

373

postmodernism 20n27, 36n41, 55, 156, 156n93, 191n37, 251, 289, 295, 297, 301 Potamites, Demetres 82 “Prague Spring” 63n32 prison islands 6n7, 12n19, 98n7, 127–8, 127n52, 131, 152, 152n89 Proceso 21n29; see also state-of-siege Prometheus (character) 57n19, 120–2, 121n43, 125–33, 126n51, 127n52, 128n53, 155, 262, 297 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) 30, 97, 114, 120–33, 155 Prometheus Plan (NATO) 2–5 propaganda 1, 6n7, 8n12, 11, 23, 38, 87, 108n23, 117–18, 118n36, 119, 127n52, 135, 163–4, 169, 169n16, 180, 182n28, 184, 188–9, 205, 219, 264, 277, 299 protests 4, 7n8, 12, 17, 26–30, 33, 42, 49n6, 56–7, 57n19, 63n31, 64–72, 64n34, 70n41, 86, 96, 101–5, 108n23, 111n28, 113n30, 120–4, 129, 134n59, 135, 135n61, 138, 142, 143n73, 145, 148, 194n39, 209, 211, 213–16, 228–9, 232, 232n7, 240, 262, 274–6, 293, 297–8, 303 Protopsalte, Leda 79 Rebetic Songs (1968) (Petropoulos) 99 reperformance 22, 100n10, 142, 198, 295 Republican administration 9–10 “resistentialist theater” 290–1 Revolution of 1821 (War of Independence) 48n4, 97n5, 177, 188–9, 206–8, 214, 219 “Revolution of April 21, 1967” 166, 183–9 Rialde, Marietta 42, 42n47, 58–9, 62, 82, 139–41, 139n67, 230 Riefenstahl, Leni 169n16 Right (Greek Right) 4–5, 4n4, 5n5, 6, 6n7, 7n8, 9n14, 12, 31n37, 34–5 Ritsos, Giannes 97 Romioi 199–202 Romiosyne 199, 222 Rotas, Vasiles 98, 98n7, 108n23, 126, 167n10 Roumeli (Fermor) 199n45 Roussos, Giorgos 182n28 Roussos, Tasos 128, 128n54

374

Index

Sakellaropoulos, Spyros 2n1 Sapounake-Drakake, Lydia 266n51 Sartre, Jean-Paul 46, 73n48, 78n58, 97, 229, 229n3, 260 Savvopoulos, Dionyses 71, 113n30, 159n1 Scharloth, Joachim 63n31, 64n34 Schmitt, Carl 16 Scott, James 168n14 Security Police 12n19, 270n53 Seferis, George 49n6, 96, 100n10, 102n14, 124, 133–5, 155–6, 297 Seiragakes, Manoles 108n23, 201n46 self-censorship 116–20 1789 (Mnouchkine) 190 Shakespeare, William 57n20, 76n54, 142–3, 144n74, 260, 285 Short Organum for the Theatre (1948) (Brecht) 266 Shuster, Alvin 111 Siderides, Dinos 85–6, 282 Sikelianos, Angelos 57n19, 135, 135n62 Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (2007) (Papanikolaou) 27 Sivetidou, Aphrodite 57, 62n28, 106n21, 232, 236n10, 237n13, 14, 240n17 Skalioras, Kostes 264 Skarimbas, Giannes 209n50 Skourtes, Giorgos 28n35, 33, 36, 51, 56n17, 58, 59n22, 62, 62n29, 104, 138–9, 138n66, 227–44, 248–9, 282, 290, 301–2; see also Karaghiozis Almost Vizier; The Nannies Smith, Anthony 180–1 snakes 196, 204 “society of the spectacle” 32 The Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 32n38, 159 Socrates 98n7 Solomos, Alexes 121n42, 124n48, 258–9, 261–2 Solomos, Dionysios 135, 135n62 Something Fishy (Pontikas) 62n29, 80 Song of the Lusitanian Bogey (1967) (Weiss) 81, 81n66 Sontag, Susan 169n16 Sophocles 98n6, 114, 123, 123n45, 124–5, 155, 293 Spantidakes, Gregorios 2 Sparks, Annie 34n39, 47n3, 68n38, 73n48, 86n73

Sparta 147n80, 164n6, 176, 176n22, 226n57 Spathares, Eugenios 196 “spectActing” 269 “spectacular politics” 23, 159–89 Speer, Albert 169n16 Speliotopoulos, Stathes 125n50, 231n6 Stanislavski, Konstantin 51–2, 252 “state of emergency” 3, 3n3, 14–18, 33, 179, 293 “state of exception” 14–20, 23, 187–8, 304 State of Exception (2005) (Agamben) 14–16, 19 “state of siege” 1, 3n3, 14–16, 14n23, 21n29 “state-of-siege” law 14n23 State Theater of Northern Greece in Thessaloniki 28n35, 29, 39, 50, 75–7, 76n54, 77, 77n56, 104–5, 105n20, 111–12, 181, 190n36, 231, 265 “Statement of the Eighteen” 102–3 Staurou, Gerasimos 137 Stefanidis, Ioannis D. 9n14 Stoa Theater 43, 79–81, 136, 145n75, 256n29 Stochastes (publishing house) 104, 259, 259n38 Stoddart, Helen 56n17 The Story of Ali Retzo, story of 137, 272–80 and critical class analysis 273–4 and gender relations 278–9 The Story of Ali Retzo (1965) (Markares) 33–4, 250–72, 293, 302 The Story of Ali Retzo (1971) (Free Theater) 250–1, 264, 274, 277–8, 287–8 photos of 267, 277–8 premiere of 270–1 The Story of Ali Retzo (April 1972 production) 271 Strawberries and Blood 69 The Strawberry Statement 68 The Strongmen (1968) (Karras) 61, 231n6, 245–7, 245n19 Suppliants (Euripides) 45, 114 surrealism 230 surveillance 6n7, 10, 32n38, 52, 59, 92n2, 96, 162, 244, 296–7 symbolism and subtlety 298

Index He Synecheia 103 Synodinou, Anna 49n6, 120–1, 121n42, 43, 122–5, 125n50, 130n55, 132, 132n56, 134n60, 155–6, 262, 297 tableaux vivants 179 Taylor, Diana 11n15, 21–2, 23–5, 30–1, 54n15, 74, 256n30, 257n32, 302 television (Greek) 30, 32n38, 38–9, 52, 52n10, 53n12, 59, 84, 93n3, 96, 100–1, 117–18, 160–3, 167, 172–3, 181, 265n47, 300 Thailand 65 That Evening We Played Shakespeare’s Work, Romeo and Juliet (Michaelides) (March 1971 production) 142–3, 144n74, 285–6 Theater of the Absurd 2, 37n43, 47, 47n3, 54n15, 56, 56n18, 58–9, 58n21, 59, 59n23, 78, 78n58, 88–9, 119n40, 222, 229, 234, 289, 301 Theater of Inquiry (Theatro Ereunas) 82 Theater of Nea Ionia (Athens) 81 theater-historical context 45–90, 304 and New Greek Theater 53–62 and performing democracy 88–90 and radical critique 75–87 and stage of emergency 63–75 The Theatre of the Absurd (Esslin) 57n20, 258n36 Théâtre du Soleil 34n39, 190 Theatrical Workshop (Theatriko Ergasteri) of “Techne” 28n35, 39n44, 43, 77, 77n55, 78n58, 83n69, 137–8, 145, 150–1, 153n90, 261, 270n53, 271n54 Theatrika 262 Theatro (ed. Kritas) 40n45, 153n90 Theatro (ed. Nitsos) 40–1, 40n45, 89, 108, 136, 141, 251, 264, 266 Theatro tou Paralogou 58 Theodorakis, Mikis 71, 113 Theologidou, Rena 52n10, 190, 283 Theotokas, Giorgos 3n2 Thessaloniki 27n33, 28n35, 53n12, 13, 67, 76–7, 81–2, 83n68, 87n74, 93n3, 111–12, 115n34, 135n62, 137, 145, 164, 181, 182n27, 194n41, 261, 265–6 Thessaloniki Film Festival 53n12, 13, 182n27, 194n41

375

They Are Coming, They Are Not Coming (Nikolaïdes and Lymberopoulos) 151, 152–3 They Can Be Said, They Can’t Be Said 153 thiasos 35, 41n46, 77–8, 80n63, 82, 83n68, 127n52, 261, 265, 268–72, 275n56, 282–4, 287, 289, 294 Thiasos Vemata 80, 80n63, 145n75 Third Worldism 15–16, 15n25, 24, 290, 296 Thomas, Richard 131, 132n56 Thomson, George 97 The Threepenny Opera (1928) (Brecht) 265 The Threepenny Opera (film screening) (1971) 262 Thrylos, Alkes 85–6, 127n52, 230n4, 245n19, 260n41, 264 The Times 30 torture 5n5, 6n7, 10–11, 10n15, 12n18, 19, 17, 32, 62–4, 72, 74, 74n49, 92n2, 94, 119n39, 125–6, 125n50, 145–50, 145n75, 147n79, 150n86, 246–7 tourism 1, 49, 107, 107n22, 116, 120, 129, 169, 228 “transference” 117n35, 270n53 The Traveling Players (1975) (Angelopoulos) 53n13, 285n62 The Traveling Salesman (Zakopoulos) 56n17, 227, 227n1 “Trilogy of the Crisis” (Markares) 250 Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl) 169n16 Trivizas, Leonidas 95 Trojan War 175–6 The Trombone (Pontikas) 31, 62, 96, 145–51, 297 The Troupers (Karras) 244, 244n18 The True Apology of Socrates (Varnales) 98n7 Tsatsoules, Demetres 60n25, 156n93 Tsoukalas, Konstantinos 31n36 Turkey 12–13 Twelfth Curtain theater company 230 tyranny 29, 33, 45, 75, 88–90, 113, 123–32, 125n50, 144, 149n83, 158, 159–61, 167, 177, 192, 202–4, 215, 228, 240–1, 244–5, 268, 275–6, 288, 290, 291 Tziovas, Dimitris 199 Tzogia-Moatsou, Maria Louiza 266n51 Tzoras, Spyros 153, 193n38, 205, 218

376

Index

US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 9–10 uniforms/uniformity 172–83 Union of Greek Actors 99 United States hegemony 9n14, 15 University of Athens 67 University of Athens Law School 66–7, 216n53 Unprofitable Line (Siderides) 85–6 Unseemly Partners (Walldén) 2n2 Vachliotes, Chrestos 230 Van Dyck, Karen 19–20, 20n28, 25–7, 43, 71n45, 92n2, 104, 108n23, 128n53, 134n59, 259, 283n59 Van Steen, Gonda A. H. 42–3, 50, 71, 94–5, 128 Varnales, Kostas 98, 98n7, 126, 126n51 Vasilikos, Vasiles 97 To Vema 3n2, 3, 11n16, 26n30, 28n34, 67n36, 72n46, 82n65, 104n18, 117, 136n63, 164n7, 168n13, 188, 190n36, 197n43, 207, 222, 264 Vembo Theater (Athens) 265 Venizelos, Eleutherios 212–13, 213n51, 216, 223 Verfremdungseffekt 253–4 Victor, or Power to the Children (1927) (Vitrac) 149n83 Vietnam/Vietnam War 9n14, 46n1, 63n32, 65, 70 violence 6n7, 10n15, 10–11, 45, 55, 58–60, 60n25, 62, 129–30, 141, 147–9, 229, 232–8, 275 Vitrac, Roger 149n83 Vlachos, Philippos 104 Voglis, Polymeris 5n5, 6n7, 7n8, 9, 10n15, 31n37 Vokovits, Stelios 262 Volanakes, Minos 114n31 Voulgares, Panteles 39 Vrachorites, Spyros 87, 268 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 57, 93n3, 231, 234, 240, 240n17 Waiting for Godot (Feb. 1960 production) 234 Walldén, Sotiris 2n2

Warsaw Pact 2 The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (1979) (Chomsky and Herman) 12n18 Weiss, Peter 46, 81, 81n66, 260, 266 Western culture 1–2, 12, 15n25, 17–21, 25, 29, 38, 40, 40n45, 46–51, 51n8, 57–8, 59n24, 63–7, 63n32, 71, 71n45, 74, 79, 81, 84, 88–9, 114, 123–4, 123n47, 143, 158, 177, 185–6, 199, 212, 231n6, 249, 253n23, 255, 256n30, 258, 258n33, 259, 259n37, 290, 294, 296, 301–2 and youth movements 17–18 and influences 294 and theaters 301 When the Atreids . . . (Katsanes) 40n45, 89, 94 Wolf, Christa 128n53 Workers’ Theater (Lazaros Papadopoulos) 83n68 World War II 74, 178, 216 Woyzeck (Büchner) (Feb. 1974 production) 150–1 Wright, Elizabeth 137n65, 252n21, 261n42, 265n50 Xarchakos, Stauros 217 Xyloures, Nikos 161, 190n36, 217 Yatromanolakis, Yorgis 126, 126n51 youth movement 4, 15n25, 17–22, 25, 27, 27n33, 29–30, 32n38, 33, 35, 40, 47, 51n8, 53, 57n20, 60n25, 63–75, 71n45, 76n54, 85–8, 92–3, 107, 108n23, 113n30, 125n50, 137, 146, 160, 168, 169n16, 170n17, 174, 177, 184–6, 215, 228, 247–8, 251, 258, 259n37, 283–4, 294 and the stage of emergency 63–75 Z (movie) 98n6 Zakopoulos, Nikos 136 Zeras, Alexes 98n7 Zeus 126, 129–31, 203n47, 204 Ziogas, Vasiles 62n28, 229–30, 230n4, 233, 248; see also Finding a Match for Antigone