This highly acclaimed 1975 feature has been long awaited in the Bay Area by followers of the Greek cinema and political scene. On its original presentation at the London Film Festival, The Times (London) film critic David Robinson wrote this trenchant review:
“The outstanding entry in the London Festival, finally, was The Traveling Players (O Thiassos) which confirms Theo Angelopoulos (director of Reconstruction and Days of '36) as a major talent. It is a panorama of Greek history from 1936 and the Metaxas dictatorship to 1952 and the American domination of Greek politics, as reflected in the odyssey of a little troupe of actors who tour with a sentimental nineteenth-century melodrama, a village ‘Romeo and Juliet,' called ‘Golfo the Shepherdess.' They never get to finish the play, and the tranquil sheep painted on their backcloth gaze down upon generations of anguish and bloodshed. At another level, these sad, shabby, often hungry folk act out the Atrides myth.
“Epic in scale, the film is also epic in the Brechtian sense in its treatment. The action is seen as a series of individual, often inexplicable events or tableaux, commentated by monologues, by slogans written on the walls, or by songs. The passage of history reverberates in individual incidents or is summarized in symbols; a straying hen provides a metaphor for the disastrous famine of the early 1940s.
“Angelopoulos's style of a roaming, exploratory camera and lengthy shots (there are only 80 individual shots in the whole film) inevitably recalls Jancsó; though he is now a totally individual stylist in his own right. The Traveling Players is a film which unfolds its secrets and its meanings gradually, together with its suspense, so that at the end of its four hours you are left eager to be told more. There few enough films of half the length, in London or Paris, of which this much could be said.”