Cavafy and Deadpan Drama

By Gonda Van Steen, Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, Dept. of Classics, King’s College London

Renowned academics share with us their perspective on the impact of C. P. Cavafy's work.

Manuscript of the poem "In the Theatre" - The digital collection of the Cavafy Archive

The internal theatricality of Cavafy's poems, as well as his use of monologues or theatre-related references, offer up an alternative path towards evaluating the impact of his art.

Cavafy has had a tremendous impact on our thinking about poetry and drama, poetry that stages or re-enacts history, and history that blends the archive, or even the mere footnote of history, with powerful theatrical expression. Cavafy displays an unequaled ability to deliver deadpan drama in an age when Romanticist and often hyperbolic dramaturgy was still flourishing and dramatists pressed psychological and social issues as well. Cavafy directs a visual stage without the trappings of personality- or effect-driven theatre. The drama of his poems “Alexandrian Kings” and “Kaisarion,” with their silent but doomed protagonist, could not be further removed from a contemporary theatre that pursued stardom or publicity. Silences in Cavafy’s poems speak louder than any act. In the same way, the once-stunted publication history of Cavafy’s poems, their path to proper dissemination and archiving, has been one of silent, gradual, but effective steps.

A reading of Cavafy’s poems from the perspective of theatre, performance, stage directing, and role-playing may fruitfully expand our understanding of the poet’s impact. George P. Savvides already expressed an interest in Cavafy’s theatrical perspective and spoke of the poet’s “semi-dramatic technique.” Other scholars and translators have noted the theatricality and the mise-en-scène potential of many poems of Cavafy, who himself was an avid theatre-goer. The poet sought contact with stage practitioners, and he eagerly read and conversed with masters in the realm of dramaturgy. Cavafy infused his poems with a profound sense of the stage, rendering him writer, actor, director, set designer, and prompter all at once. His feeling for action and gesture, his calibrating of plot twists and reversals, and his elliptic, laconic treatment of some subjects are, once again, truly theatrical. So, too, are the poet’s imaginative use of direct speech and collective monologues, his penchant for subversive irony, and his tendency to tell, retell, dramatize, and re-perform parts of the actions or contents of his poems. Recently, the performative dimension of Cavafy’s cross-cultural communication has been the topic of newspaper articles, blogs, conference papers, and so on. Cavafy’s poetry is profoundly performative, and we recognize that realm of impact as well: his poetry places a Hellenic world on stage and speaks to an audience of spectators as well as of readers.

Cavafy was an avid theatre-goer and sought out contact with stage practitioners

Cavafy’s poetry-writing is deeply embedded in the hermeneutics of dramatization, of strategizing onstage and also offstage. He sees the very pagan-Hellenic pleasure of theatre as a habit or mode of thought, a “way of life” or «διαβίωσι» (his words in “Julian and the Antiochians”). Also, many of his poems unmask, with perspicacity and daring, the true nature of public and political life and equate it with a life of play-acting, with keeping up pretenses, and with living up to artificial norms of expected decorum. With full-fledged modernist sensibilities, Cavafy deflates social, political, and sexual conventions and attacks moral hypocrisies. By using stage tactics and theatre-related references, he hones his own dramatizing techniques and applies them to the plotline and form of short to medium-length poems. Often, too, Cavafy adds a self-reflexive or meta-textual reflection to his poems, which the theatre texture only accentuates. The theatricality of his self-(re)presentation thus becomes especially poignant, and often leans more toward the tragic than toward the comic. The inventive theatre of Cavafy’s work brings into view the poems’ production processes (in multiple meanings of the words) and the poet’s relentless pursuit of the right content, form, morality, and technique.

True to form, Cavafy’s poems necessarily had to reduce the magnitude of complex plotting and the scale of suspense-building. But Cavafy did not diminish the poems’ intensity. Neither did he sacrifice the emotions evoked by his poems to the mechanics or even contrivances of composition. Or rather, Cavafy mastered the delicate balance between emotional tension and form exceptionally well. He sought to reach the poem’s maximum effect on the stage, even if only on the imagined stage. Therefore, the art of dramatizing, or the realm of versatile stagecraft, offers up another path toward comprehending Cavafy’s vast and ever-expanding impact.