This volume focuses on the development of theatre in Greece during the dictatorship of 1967-1974, shedding light not only on the messages and impact of the plays written and produced at this time, but also on the politics of culture and censorship affecting the Greek public during this period.
To sum up, Gonda Van Steen's book restages the history of New Greek Theatre by conducting a "cultural history of the dictatorship" (p. 304). Her work is valuable not only because it traces out a legacy of practices and thematic and aesthetic mechanisms that constitute the theatre of the last quarter of the twentieth century as she asserts in the last paragraph of her book. It is also valuable because, as I suggest above, the impact and legacy of this cultural production might be detected in other arts like cinema. Finally, it is also politically valuable since it provides proof for a moment in history when an art form had the dynamic and the momentum to shape social consciousness, to promote democratic solutions, to be a transformative power. In that sense, the book also stands as an excavation of our contemporary political imaginary.