‘That Best of All Things, Greek’

Extract

‘Ancient tragedy, ancient tragedy’, insists Cavafy somewhere, ‘is as holy and wide as the universal heart’. Of late this holiness has demonstrated its universality beyond the printed page, beyond the stone amphitheatre or the wooden stage, to make its impact all over again from the cinema screen; an impact, moreover, which is surprisingly unweakened by its transference to so unfamiliar a medium.

The process has not long been at work: Medea and her children, it is true, made a fleeting appearance in Never on Sunday when, Melina Mercouri explained, in spite of all appearances to the contrary they were really on their way to the beach. And when the bodies Uttering the stage rose to acknowledge the applause it was not easy for Dassin, as the American professor, to prove her wrong. The first serious example, however, of the new wave of adaptations from the great Greek dramatists (though not the first to reach this country) was probably the Electra of Michael Cacoyannis, which won a prize at Cannes in 1962; then came another Electra, that directed by Ted Zarpas, which was shown in Venice in 1962 and in the London Film Festival later last year; these two, together with Antigone, directed by George Tzavellas, seen earlier this spring in London, are straight-forward presentations of the original tragedy. Phaedra directed by Jules Dassin, is a modern transposition of the play, with details of the plot significandy manipulated to suit the twentieth-century setting and the geographical expansion of the action.

I have not, unfortunately, yet been able to see the Zarpas Electra, which stars the famous Greek classical actress, Anna Synodinou, as Electra and is, it is widely agreed, a revelation. This film avoids any personal angle - it is simply a magnifi- cendy photographed version of an actual performance of the play by the Greek National Theatre in the great stone amphitheatre of Epidauros; the same stage, incidentally, where Melina Mercouri saw Medea and which she so assiduously haunted that the sign ‘Closed owing to Greek Tragedy’ was hung on her door for the duration of the festival.