Minos Volanakis was a Greek theatre director and translator.

He studied with Carolos Koun, for whom he translated American plays into Greek, and first made his name for his translations of the dramas of his friend Jean Genet

Jean Genet

Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...

, as well as for productions of Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

's Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...

and Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete...

' Lysistrata

Lysistrata

Lysistrata is one of eleven surviving plays written by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end The Peloponnesian War...

at the Athens Festival

Athens Festival

Athens - Epidaurus Festival is an annual arts festival that takes place in Athens and Epidaurus, from May to October. It is one of the most famous festivals in Greece. The festival includes musical, theatrical and other cultural events....

. In protest against the government, he left Greece in 1966 for England, where he became an associate director at the Oxford Playhouse. His productions there included Genet's The Maids

The Maids

The Maids is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. It was first performed at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris in a production that opened on 17 April 1947, which Louis Jouvet directed...

(1963-4) and The Balcony

The Balcony

The Balcony is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Since Peter Zadek directed its first production at the Arts Theatre Club in London in 1957, the play has attracted many of the greatest directors of the 20th century, including Peter Brook, Erwin Piscator, Roger Blin, Giorgio Strehler, and...

(1967), and Jean Giraudoux

Jean Giraudoux

Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy...

's Madwoman of Chaillot.

He provided the translation into English of Euripides

Euripides

Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...

' Iphigeneia at Aulis

Iphigeneia at Aulis

Iphigenia in Aulis is the last extant work of the playwright Euripides. Written between 408, after the Orestes, and 406 BC, the year of Euripides's death, the play was first produced the following year by his son or nephew, Euripides the Younger, and won the first place at the Athenian city...

for a production at the Circle in the Square Theatre

Circle in the Square Theatre

The Circle in the Square Theatre is a legitimate Broadway theatre in midtown Manhattan on 50th Street in the Paramount Plaza building.The original Circle in the Square was founded by Paul Libin, Theodore Mann and Jose Quintero in 1951 and was located at 5 Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village...

 in New York

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 in 1967, which Michael Cacoyannis directed. He directed a production of Euripides' The Bacchae

The Bacchae

The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy by the Athenian playwright Euripides, during his final years in Macedon, at the court of Archelaus I of Macedon. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis, and which...

at the Lyceum Theater in New York in 1968 and the US première of Genet's The Screens

The Screens

The Screens is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Its first few productions all used abridged versions, beginning with its world premiere under Hans Lietzau's direction in Berlin in May 1961...

in 1971. In 1973 he directed Euripides' Medea

Medea (play)

Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed...

at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York, which opened on January 17.

From 1975 to 1978 he was the general manager of the Northern State Theater in Greece. In 1984 he directed a production of Sophocles

Sophocles

Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides...

' Oedipus the King

Oedipus the King

Oedipus the King , also known by the Latin title Oedipus Rex, is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed c. 429 BCE. It was the second of Sophocles's three Theban plays to be produced, but it comes first in the internal chronology, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone...

for the National Theatre of Greece

National Theatre of Greece

The National Theatre of Greece is based in Athens, Greece.-History:The theatre was originally founded in 1880 with a grant from King George I and Efstratios Rallis to give theatre a permanent home in Athens...

, which subsequently transferred to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre

Vivian Beaumont Theatre

The Vivian Beaumont Theater is a theatre located in the Lincoln Center complex at 150 West 65th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The structure was designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen, and Jo Mielziner was responsible for the design of the stage and interior.The Vivian...

 on Broadway

Broadway theatre

Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 (opening on July 17 of that year).

Sources

• Anonymous. 1999. Obituary in The New York Times, November 20, 1999. Available online.
• Chapman, Don. 2008. Oxford Playhouse: High and Low Drama in a University City. Hatfield: U of Hertfordshire P. ISBN 1902806875.
• White, Edmund
  Edmund White
  Edmund Valentine White III is an American author and literary critic. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.- Life and work :...
  
  . 1993. Genet. Corrected edition. London: Picador, 1994. ISBN 0330306227.