Studii si Cercetari de Istoria Artei : Teatru, Muzică, Cinematografie (Dec 2015)
Oscar Wilde’s Social Comedies in Modern Greek Theatre (1908-1945)
Abstract
The reception of Oscar Wilde in Greece has occasionally been studied, although modern theoretical works around aestheticism devote a significant part to his influence on Greek artists at the beginning of twentieth century. Some of his plays - mostly Salomé and A Florentine Tragedy (1908) as well as an adaptation of The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1916)- appeared in translation and on theatre stage just after the release of his postmortem apologetic De Profundis. His comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, was introduced to the Greek audience simultaneously with his tragedies in 1908, and one more melodrama, An Ideal Husband was staged in 1917. After that year, only his tragedies were repeated whereas his melodramas disappeared in the interwar years, to reappear again in a sudden and noticeable frequency in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The aim of this paper is to identify the reasons of the constant absence of Oscar Wilde’s melodramas from the Greek stage but also to explain their sudden adoption in the late thirties through a new perspective: the interaction between theatre and the newly growing art of cinema. During the controversial 30s, a considerable number of film versions of Wilde's social melodramas were made in Europe, most of them in Germany; these movies were projected in Greece, restoring thereby the Irish writer and his work. The seventh art, which was anyway supplied by writers, actors and theatre directors, became the channel for the Greek public to get acquainted with Wilde’ s social comedies as a whole. Additionally, it affected the repertoire of Greek theatre groups, including the National Theatre of Greece. The paper will focus on cinema and theatre investigation of the 1930s and 1940s (mainly until WWII) in Greece, exploring the interchangeable relationship between those two arts, as far as Wilde’s social melodramas are concerned, in the broader historical, social and cultural spectrum of the era. The essay will also provide a short resume of Wilde’s reception in Greece.
