Greeks Bearing Gifts

Just a week after Paris' reigning theatrical couple had scored on Broadway (TIME, Nov. 24), it was Athens' turn. Heading the National Theater of Greece, Katina Paxinou and Alexis Minotis arrived for a two-week run, enacting (in modern Greek) the title roles of Sophocles' Electro, and Oedipus.

The situation of Electra is almost that of Hamlet: a royal father's murder, by his wife and her paramour, must be avenged. But the protagonists of the two plays could hardly be more different. Electra, with her brother Orestes, is all clenched purpose and will. Indeed, despite the language barrier, last week's production particularly brought home what fierce, barbaric feeling is channeled by Sophocles' classic art. From the moment the curtains parted to reveal, on a bare, dim-lit stage, the bodingly severe entrance to the palace of Atreus, there was the sense of something ancient, awesome, implacable.

Actress Paxinou--already known to Broadway for several performances in English--made an impressive though hardly an inspired Electra. Impressive, too, was the Orestes of Thanos Cotsopoulos, the Clytemnestra of A. Raftopoulou. But what is usually the stumbling block of modern productions of Greek drama--the management of the chorus--was this time the special glory. There were "a few too-mannered touches; but its grave movement, its now murmurous, now resonant chanting, its sudden, swift, intensely dramatic confrontation of the audience, gave it a kind of orchestral grandeur and swell.

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