In this pa­per we will dis­cuss the the­atri­cal text of Galatea Kazantza­kis: While the Ship Sails. The play was writ­ten in 1932 and staged dur­ing the 1932-1933 sea­son at the Na­tional The­atre un­der the di­rec­tion of Fo­tis Poli­tis. Move­ment means a change of lo­ca­tion. In this study, it is as­sumed that in this play the con­cept of move­ment sug­gests mul­ti­ple al­ter­na­tions of po­si­tion.

First of all, the plot of the play has to do with a jour­ney by ship. Sec­ondly, it means that the choice of sub­ject and of the par­tic­u­lar dra­matur­gi­cal frame­work with the cor­re­spond­ing vari­a­tions is a re­sult of the “move­ment” of both the sub­ject and the dra­matur­gi­cal en­vi­ron­ment we en­counter in The Hairy Ape of Eu­gene O’Neill. Thirdly, it means move­ment as an al­le­gory of the per­son’s abil­ity to be iden­ti­fied, and fi­nally it has to do with the re­newal of play­writ­ing, its dis­tanc­ing from the lim­its of re­al­ism that was dom­i­nant in the Greek dra­maturgy of the time.

In our con­tri­bu­tion, we at­tempt to show how the au­thor uses the ex­pe­ri­ence of a jour­ney in or­der to high­light the ide­o­log­i­cal and so­cial con­flicts preva­lent in so­ci­ety at the time by ex­ert­ing her crit­i­cism. We will also pre­sent the sim­i­lar­i­ties of Kazantza­kis’s work with The Hairy Ape of Eu­gene O’Neil, ba­si­cally high­light­ing their in­ter­tex­tual re­la­tion­ship. Fur­ther­more, we ex­am­ine the philo­soph­i­cal re­flec­tion through­out the play and how this text in­cor­po­rates el­e­ments of ex­pres­sion­ism and other aes­thetic fronts. In or­der to achieve these goals, the re­cep­tion of the play in the­atre crit­i­cism was stud­ied in ad­di­tion to the lit­er­a­ture.