Iakovos Kambanellis

Kambanellis was born on 2 December 1922 in Chora, the main town of Naxos, into a family of modest means that moved to Athens in the mid-1930s. He left school early, worked and studied technical drawing at night classes, and had no formal literary education. In 1942, during the German Occupation, he tried to escape abroad to join the Allies, was arrested on the Austrian border in 1943 and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he remained until American troops liberated it on 5 May 1945.

Back in Athens, he discovered the theatre as a spectator, and taught himself to write for it. His first plays were staged around 1950, and the National Theatre produced Η έβδομη μέρα της δημιουργίας (The Seventh Day of Creation) in 1956. The breakthrough came the next year with Karolos Koun's Theatro Technis and Η αυλή των θαυμάτων. From then on he was the central figure of Greek playwriting for half a century, while also writing film scripts, directing one film himself, and supplying lyrics to Mikis Theodorakis, Stavros Xarchakos and others.

During the dictatorship of 1967–74 his Μεγάλο μας τσίρκο became a nightly act of resistance. He was elected to the Academy of Athens in 1999, continued to write plays into his eighties, and died in Athens on 29 March 2011. His daughter Katerina Kambanelli is a well-known singer.

Η αυλή των θαυμάτων (The Courtyard of Miracles, 1957) takes place in the shared courtyard of an old Athenian house where several poor families live. The house is to be pulled down for an apartment block, one young couple leaves for Australia, and the play ends with the courtyard emptying. Written in everyday speech, with humour and no heroes, it became the model of Greek realist theatre. Παραμύθι χωρίς όνομα (A Tale Without a Name, 1959), from Penelope Delta's novel, and Οδυσσέα, γύρισε σπίτι (Odysseus, Come Home, 1966) show his other side, playful and political.

Μαουτχάουζεν (Mauthausen, 1963) is his prose account of the camp and, above all, of the strange months after liberation, when survivors stayed on and he fell in love with a Lithuanian Jewish girl. Mikis Theodorakis set four poems from it as Η Μπαλάντα του Μαουτχάουζεν (The Ballad of Mauthausen, 1966), sung by Maria Farantouri; its opening song, Άσμα ασμάτων (Song of Songs), in which a prisoner asks the girls of the camp whether they have seen his love, is among the best-known songs in Greek.

Το μεγάλο μας τσίρκο (Our Grand Circus, 1973), staged by Jenny Karezi and Kostas Kazakos with music by Stavros Xarchakos and the voice of the Cretan singer Nikos Xylouris, retells Greek history from 1821 to the present as a series of circus acts; audiences under the junta understood every allusion and the performances turned into demonstrations. For the cinema he wrote Στέλλα (Stella, 1955) for Michael Cacoyannis and Melina Mercouri, from his own play, and Ο Δράκος (The Ogre, 1956) for Nikos Koundouros.

Kambanellis is staged every season in Greece: a revival of Η αυλή των θαυμάτων or Το μεγάλο μας τσίρκο is a regular event, and his plays are set texts in Greek theatre schools and appear in the literature readers of the lyceum. The simplest way to meet him is to listen to Άσμα ασμάτων in Farantouri's recording, then read the short, clear Greek of Μαουτχάουζεν, which is also a moving introduction to the Occupation years. Theodorakis conducted the Ballad at the Mauthausen memorial itself in 1988 and again in 1995, with Kambanellis present, and the song is sung at Holocaust memorial days in Greece. On Naxos his birthplace honours him, and the film Στέλλα, with Mercouri singing «Αγάπη που 'γινες δίκοπο μαχαίρι», is a classic shown on Greek television.

• He never finished secondary school and learned the theatre entirely by watching plays after his return from Mauthausen.
• The lovers of Άσμα ασμάτων are real: the song grew out of his own love for a Lithuanian Jewish survivor in the months after the camp was liberated.
• Το μεγάλο μας τσίρκο (1973) was performed under the colonels' censorship, and the audience's singing along with Nikos Xylouris turned every night into a protest.
• He was elected to the Academy of Athens in 1999, a rare honour for a dramatist.