The Travelling Players is a film of epic proportions, a masterpiece, one of the greatest films of all time. The action takes place during the years 1939-52 in Greece 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 popular melodrama, Persiadis' Golfo the Shepherdess. The relationships between them are based on the family of the House of Atreus and as they travel amid the constant wartime convulsions, they begin, unconsciously, to enact parallels to Aeschylus' tragic cycle. |