«Greek people have grown up caressing dead stones. I've tried to bring mythology down from the heights and directly to the people.»

Theo Angeolopoulos

«THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS is about dramas that can never unfold without interference, about governments that fall, revolutions that are aborted and entire streams of history that are diverted... It is about the world that lies just outside the viewpoint of the drama, ever thwarting or changing it. And it is about the transcendence of time... The form gives TRVELLING PLAYERS its distinction; history and contemporaneity give it intensity; the execution gives it its beauty.»

Michael Wilmington

THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS
(Greece, 1974-75. 230 minutes. Colour)

Directed by : Theo Angelopoulos
Screenplay by : Theo Angelopoulos
Cinematography by : Giorgos Arvanitis
Production design by : Mikes Karapiperis
Make-up by : Giorgos Patsas
Sound by : Thanassis Arvanitis
Music by : Loukianos Kilaidonis
Choice of texts and songs by : Fotos Lambrinos
Songs performed by : Nena Mendi, Dimitris Kaberidis, Ionna Kiourtsoglou and Costas Messaris
Edited by : Takis Davlopoulos and Giorgos Triantafillou
Produced by : Giorgos Papalios
With : Eva Kotamanidou (Electra), Aliki Georgouli (Mother), Stratos Pachis (Father), Maria Vassiliou (Chrysohemis), Vangelis Kazan (Aegisthus), Petros Zarkadis (Orestes), Kyriakos Kativanos (Pylades), Yannis Firios (accordionist), Nina Papazaphiropoulou (old woman), Alekos Boubis (old man), Kostas Stiliaris (militia leader), Grigoris Evangelatos (Poet).

THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS is a film of epic proportions. The action takes place during the years 1939-52 and is seen as a series of individual, often inexplicable events or tableaux, commentated by monologues, by slogans written on the walls, or by songs. It reveals the period's turbulent history while focusing on a travelling company of actors who spend those fourteen years wandering through provinces, cities and villages, performing, in increasingly threadbare circumstances, a 19th century pastoral melodrama, Persiadis' Golfo the Shepherdess. They never get to finish the play and the tranquil sheep painted on their back cloth gaze down upon generations of anguish and bloodshed. The passage of history reverberates in individual incidents or is summarized in symbols. These sad, shabby, often hungry folk, whose relationship is based on the family of the House of Atreus, are of varying political hues - from active collaborators with the Nazis (Aegisthus), to opportunists (Chrysothemis), to centrist Greek patriots (Agamemnon), to the apolitical (Clytemnestra), to left-wing idealists (Electra), to communist guerillas (Orestes). And they fill these roles as much as they do the mythic ones of wandering general, faithless wife, betrayer or vengeful son. As they travel amid the constant wartime convulsions, they begin, unconsciously, to enact parallels to Aeschylus' tragic cycle.