Footnotes

Engonopoulos, Greece's prime exponent of Surrealism, was among the artists who eagerly participated in the innovative idea of Fotis Politis, director of the Greek National Theatre during the 1930s, who commissioned contemporary artists such as Spyros Papaloukas, Fotis Kontoglou and Spyros Vassiliou to design sets and costumes in a pioneering effort to rejuvenate the Greek stage. Engonopoulos' involvement with theatre design began in 1938 and continued until 1965. He designed sets and costumes for many works of ancient drama, as well as plays by Molière, Kazantzakis, Shaw and Brecht.

In 1962, he designed the costumes for Brecht's "Three Penny Opera", a work he particularly admired for being a "most caustic satire and at the same time, charitable and philosophical, cynical and containing the warmest faith, with obscenities and the most vexing prose next to the purest poetry, spirit and matter..." (in his book Peza Keimena (Prose), Athens, 1987, p. 93).