Greece: Safe & Censored

In the ten weeks since it seized power, the new military government of Greece has, at one time or another, turned thumbs down on miniskirts, radio transmitters, football games, beards, Beatle haircuts, indigent tourists and fireworks. Now the junta is considering theater. Banned are all performances that might "disturb public order, promote subversive theories, discredit the Greek nation or tourism, offend the Christian faith, the King or the government, undermine the people's social traditions, or harm the esthetic advance of the people—particularly youth."

Theatrical companies took one look at that majestic edict and began revamping their repertories. The Epidaurus Festival of Ancient Tragedy discovered that it had no room on the schedule for Euripides' The Suppliants, a story of a free city-state triumphing over tyranny.

Sophocles' Ajax was also taken off the boards, as was Euripides' Phoenician Women. Aristophanes' bawdy political satires, The Birds, The Clouds and The Frogs, got the hook at the Athens Festival.

The gaps in the festival program are getting progressively harder to fill. In protest against the artistic restrictions laid down by Greece's governing colonels, the Kiev Ballet, the Budapest Symphony and the Moscow Symphony have all canceled scheduled performances. An English chamber-music ensemble has sent its regrets; the Los Angeles Symphony and the Philadelphia Woodwind Ensemble have joined the boycott. Athenians are faced with a summer of safe plays and sedate music by Italian chamber-music groups who are already in town and seem content to stay for a while.