World Notes GREECE

The hottest ticket in Athens last week was a satire at the Athinaion Theater titled What the Japanese Saw. The two-hour burlesque heaps salty abuse on Greek President Christos Sartzetakis. "The country was in a mess," mourns one of the show's comedians, "then Sartzetakis came along too. Is it possible to look at this fathead and not laugh?" Added to those insults were plenty of barbs deploring the President's allegedly pompous ways. What made the show SRO, however, was the fact that its two main actors had just been arrested, briefly jailed, then tried and acquitted on the basis of their performance. The charge: defamation of the presidency.

The notoriously humorless Sartzetakis, 58, has denied any connection with the abortive action by the public prosecutor's office. Before taking up his post in 1985, Sartzetakis was a respected prosecutor and judge who was imprisoned and tortured under the dictatorial Greek junta of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Part of his career was dramatized in the 1968 movie Z. But the President has often been lampooned for his intolerance of press criticism and his regal life-style. After the bust, the government of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou issued a statement assuring citizens that it respected freedom of expression.