Lena Divani. Theatrika: I orea thymomeni, i Pentanostimi, Ikogeniako Dikeo

World Literature Today, Nov-Dec, 2008 by Christina Dokou

Lena Divani. Theatrika: I orea thymomeni, i Pentanostimi, Ikogeniako Dikeo. Athens. Kastaniotis. 2007. 208 pages. 15.67 [euro]. ISBN 978-960-034604-6

Although the three plays in this volume were written (and some even successfully staged) a few years ago, they come out in print only now, at a time when the name of Lena Divani has been established in the minds of modern Greek readers as a popular and diverse writer with a fresh, playful, and gender-conscious approach to contemporary urban life. Divani is the kind of writer who, although working from within academia--she is associate professor of the history of Greek foreign policy at the University of Athens--uses culture to sharpen and spice up her per spective with a sustained, rebellious youthfulness instead of submitting it to the stiff starch of scholarly jargon. Accordingly, each of her plays mixes humor (from downright farce to mordant irony) with daring parodic forays into various speech genres--often, in the tradition of ecriture feminine, playfully intertwined--to offer a critical yet ultimately affirming perspective into the problems of mundane existence, the relations between men and women, family dynamics, or class struggles.

This thread uniting the three plays Divani has written so far probably owes its lyricism not only to her feminism but also to her longer experience with prose, as she is best known for her novels on modem life and relationships. Thus the first two plays (Slapping Beauty and Cinderyummy)--thematic and verbal puns on the sexist fairy tales of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella-appropriate the form of the fairy tale so as to deconstruct it through its transposition into modernity and the idea of gender performativity as noted by Judith Butler. We watch the characters step out of their roles, criticize, exchange, and undermine them, ultimately concluding "happily ever after" on the chances of an honest male-female relationship in a world where love is travestied by stereotyping social conventions.

As for the third play (Family law), despite its bitter tone and pitiless realistic exposure of a small-town family whose great expectations and even greater tensions lead its members to the "lives of quiet desperation" they deserve, Lena Divani reserves a final modicum of compassion for those fools in hell, pitting the twisted law of cannibalistic humanity they have faithfully followed against the higher law of almost-divine retribution that makes tragic figures of them all.

Christina Dokou

University of Athens