People and Days (1946)

Athens, 1949. A young man returns from the Nazi concentration camp deep in Germany where he had been held for years. In anticipation of liberation and homecoming, he has burdened himself with countless dreams. He finds the woman he loves married to another man, and post-December Greece torn apart by civil strife. “Free” life no longer seems as simple as he had imagined… People and Days is chronologically the first completed theatrical work by the patriarch of postwar Greek dramaturgy, Iakovos Kambanellis.

The Forest of Evil (1947)

An allegorical theatrical fairy tale in which the dark forces of evil wage war against the goodness of an innocent man until they crush his soul. Yet the purity of the spirit and innocence ultimately prevail over evil, and love and joy spread throughout the land.

Mr Nobody and the Cyclopes (or The Recognition) (1994)

A one-act play subtitled “A Brief and Naïve Nocturnal Comedy.” Here, the myth of Odysseus is employed allegorically. Nobody is a celebrated artist, prolific and successful. The two hundred and fifty characters he has created—the Cyclopes—demand their rightful share of the royalties. When the author refuses, they set out to undermine him and strip him of his stature.

A Wonderful Fellow

(Unknown date of composition)

A Comedy in Three Acts Tassos runs a furniture showroom on the ground floor of his building, while his family home is located upstairs. Stefanos, a guileless and kind-hearted man, is hired to work in Tassos’s store. He soon becomes aware of both the disintegration of Tassos’s family and the unscrupulous profiteering that drives the business. Determined to help, he succeeds in setting things right. Yet although everyone benefits from Stefanos’s good deeds, they find his generosity impossible to endure. In the end, Tassos dismisses him, calling him “a wonderful fellow” and “a misguided saint.”

Christ and the Cephalonian

(Unknown date of composition)

A theatrical fairy tale. Kambanellis weaves a tribute to the people of Cephalonia while simultaneously satirizing their cunning and inventive minds—their mischievous ingenuity with which they outwit and mock both the Devil and the representatives of Divine Law.

Office of Censorship

(Unknown date of composition)

An one-act satire. With sharp wit and intelligent humor, the play exposes the mindless manner in which censorship operated during the seven-year dictatorship of 1967.

The Suicide

(Unknown date of composition)

Comedy. Mimikos, an honest office cashier, is unjustly accused of embezzlement because of a trivial shortfall in the accounts. The incident deeply distresses him and, unable to bear the injustice, he decides to take his own life. Before carrying out this desperate act, however, he goes to an outrageously expensive restaurant, where he treats everyone present despite having no money to pay the bill. There he encounters a group of industrialists who decide to exploit his impending suicide for their own benefit—an action that starkly underscores the cynicism and callous indifference of the ruling class toward the suffering of a vulnerable individual.

Note: The absence of a date for certain works is due to the uncertainty surrounding their exact time of composition.