Gonda Van Steen has justly made a name for herself as one of the leading experts on the performance of ancient Greek drama in modern Greece. In her books Venom in Verse (2000) on Aristophanes in modern Greece and Theatre of the Condemned (2011) on the performances of ancient tragedy on Greek prison islands during the late 1940s and the 1950s, she showed herself to be keenly aware of the political ramifications of drama performances in the Greek state, while in Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire (2010) she demonstrated that these ramifications go back at least as far as performances of Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Euripides’ Hecuba in Odessa in 1817–18 and a staged reading of Aeschylus’ Persians in Constantinople in 1820.

Although both Theatre of the Condemned and Stage of Emergency are published in the OUP's ‘Classical Presences’ series, in her new book Van Steen focuses on performances of contemporary Greek plays rather than ancient drama, building on the excellent unpublished PhD thesis by Philip Hager.Footnote ¹ She devotes more pages to three contemporary plays performed during the extraordinary flowering of Greek theatre between 1970 and 1973, namely Yorgos Skourtis’ Οι νταντάδες (1970), Petros Markaris’ Brechtian Η ιστορία του Αλή Ρέτζο (published in 1965 but staged in 1971 and 1972) and Iakovos Kambanellis’ spectacle Το μεγάλο μας τσίρκο (1973) than to any other play, while performances of ancient drama make a comparatively rare appearance. Thus Van Steen's book, hard on the heels of Kostis Kornetis’ Children of the Dictatorship (2013), takes its place as another in-depth study in English of Greek culture under the farcical Colonels’ junta, doing authoritatively for drama what Karen Van Dyck's Kassandra and the Censors (1998) did for poetry.

The title of Van Steen's book makes a play on a phrase from the title of the royal decree of 21 April 1967 ‘Περί κηρύξεως της χώρας εις κατάστασιν πολιορκίας και αναστολής άρθρων του Συντάγματος’ which, among other things, prohibited the circulation of pedestrians and vehicles in the streets of Athens. Van Steen shows how, in a country where open-air gatherings of more than five people were forbidden, theatre brought people together to participate in a group activity that made them realize that there were other like-minded people in their midst, and for this reason theatrical performances could often become covert political demonstrations. She stresses the importance of the experimental, the live and the collective nature of theatre as an ongoing process (‘forever a rehearsal’), which made it a more effective tool of cultural resistance than other artistic media:

Van Steen rightly devotes a lot of space to the Colonels’ censorship policy and to the various ways that authors and directors found of getting round it. She stresses the importance of actors freeing themselves from the script and expressing themselves through non-lexical means such as gestures and tone of voice. She also shows how, time and again, the literal-minded censors failed to see the wood for the trees, censoring individual words and phrases while leaving the overall message intact. But she rightly stresses that censorship had plagued the Greek theatre before the Colonel's coup, referring especially to the banning of Karolos Koun's production of Aristophanes’ Birds in 1959 because it included a scene parodying an Orthodox priest, and the banning of Vangelis Katasanis’ Όταν οι Ατρείδες. . . in August 1964, under the liberal Papandreou government, for making anti-royalist statements.

Despite the book's subtitle, Van Steen says nothing about performances of avant-garde music. Musical performance during the dictatorship, which was more or less uncensorable as long as it did not involve verbal text, is a topic that should be studied while some of the composers, performers and audience members are still alive. I attended an unforgettable performance of Jani Christou's Αναπαράσταση ΙΙΙ: Ο πιανίστας at the Hellenic-American Union in 1969, during which the ‘pianist’ (the actor Grigoris Semitekolo) began throttling himself with one hand while striking the keys with the other, until his rogue hand forced him off his stool and on to the floor, where he groped around in a vain attempt to regain his seat in front of his instrument.Footnote ² To the audience this happening seemed to be an allegory of the way the Colonels were curtailing creative freedom and stifling Greek culture.

Also, despite the fact that the programme of the exhilarating revue . . . και συ χτενίζεσαι is reproduced on the front cover, Van Steen provides little detail of the show itself, which I attended in the Άλσος Παγκρατίου in the summer of 1973. While Van Steen points to the sexual innuendo implicit in the show's title (something of which I confess I had been previously unaware), she doesn't mention the number entitled ‘Το τελευταίο ταγκό στο Κουρδιστάν’ – a reference to the notorious scene in Bertolucci's 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, which many people in Greece had heard about even though it had been banned there. The sketch began with a fictional TV news item reporting that the price of butter had risen in Kurdistan. (Greece was experiencing galloping inflation at the time, whereas until recently the military government had managed artificially to keep inflation down.) This was the cue for a song in tango rhythm whose lyrics contained an outrageous sexual innuendo:

The fact that such innuendoes, which became the talk of the town, managed to avoid being banned from the stage is a testament to the blinkered outlook of the censorship authorities. Those who took part in this show – writers, performers and audience – were complicit in seeing such verses as ridiculing the prudishness and stupidity of the military regime.

I shall end with a few minor quibbles. First, Van Steen writes that the short stories that were compulsorily published in newspapers in 1969 were taken from ‘an interwar anthology compiled by Iraklis Apostolidis’ (p. 102). In fact, Apostolidis’ famous anthology, which first appeared in 1933, was confined to poetry, whereas he began publishing his less well-known anthology of stories in 1953. Secondly, she states that the title of the magazine Η συνέχεια ‘stressed genuine cultural continuity’ (p. 103), whereas in reality it implied that the magazine was continuing the struggle for the freedom of speech that had been initiated in the volumes Δεκαοχτώ κείμενα, Νέα κείμενα and Νέα κείμενα 2. Thirdly, she presents Romioi and Hellenes as two different kinds of Greek (p. 199), whereas Patrick Leigh Fermor and Michael Herzfeld (the second of whom she explicitly refers to) conceived of the Romios and the Hellene as two antithetical aspects of each individual.

I should stress that the above caveats in no way alter the fact that Van Steen's book is a masterly analysis of Greek theatre during the Επταετία.