TROY TOO, INSPIRED BY EURIPIDES

The following is not intended as a review per se of Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. Rather, it seeks to examine some of the issues arising out of one of the most-discussed aspects, the changes made from the 'canon' of Greek mythology. I expected, from advance information, to spend the entirety of the film in open-mouthed shock at what had been done. I didn't.

Theatre Journal, 1980

When this book was first published, its burden-that Greek tragedies make more sense when they are treated as plays for performance-was fairly novel, or at least it was preached more than it was practised. In the few years since then, it has become an orthodoxy, and stagecraft is now given due attention in nearly all new books. While happy about that, I am not happy that my name is cited as a 'ringleader' of those who maintain that we should concentrate on performance rather than words. I do not endorse that: the power of the Greek theatre rests on its extraordinary combination of word and embodiment. To neglect one is to impoverish the other. I trust that this book does not encourage anyone to set the performative dimension in competition with the verbal. I hope it does not seem fickle to say that there are things here which I would not write in the same way today. The revised bibliography gives some idea of how fast the water is flowing under the bridges of scholarship. I would also acknowledge more openly in chapter 1 the selectivity of any account of the 'author's meaning'. And in the last chapter I would stress more that it is the place of books like this to suggest and to prompt rather than to dictate to the professional theatre. The use made of my work by the National Theatre Oresteia in London in 1981-2 shows that such a relationship can work. This book is, in fact, about ancient Greek culture and about the theatre, and it is meant for the 'general reader' who is interested in either or both. I hope professional Hellenists will read it, but it was not written primarily for them. While I have had students in mind above all, students of drama or English literature or Classical civilization, any student who encounters Greek tragedy, anyone who is fascinated by the Greeks, who loves the theatre, anyone who is prepared to be enriched by the great literature of the past may find these pages worth while. But there is a condition. The core of the book (chapters 3-9) demands and assumes that the reader already knows all, or at least some, of the nine tragedies it concentrates on (they are listed on p. 22). Furthermore, it is probably best read with a translation (or text) open to hand, preferably a translation which has the line numbers in the margin (there are recommendations on pp. 197-8). This book is in no way a substitute for reading the plays themselves-and, if possible, seeing them. Indeed, I should like to think that the book has encouraged and will encourage theatres to stage these great dramas, and might help to find them audiences. I quote from the tragedies liberally. All quotations are translated and all the translations are my own. I am only too aware how stilted and imperfect they are; but I thought it essential to translate high poetry into something which suggests its lofty and arresting style. The language of Greek tragedy was not that of everyday speech, and I had rather turn it into bad verse than into pedestrian prose. In the earlier Preface I stressed how much this book owed to the inspiration and to the help of Colin Macleod. Since his death in December 1981, at the age of 38, everything that preserves his insight, however diluted, has become that much more concentrated. If this study succeeds at all in getting beneath the surface, that is owed to him. Magdalen College, Oxford March 1985 Oliver Taplin viii 1 The visual dimension of tragedy Behind the dialogue of Greek drama we are always conscious of a concrete visual actuality, and behind that of a specific emotional actuality. Behind the drama of words is the drama of action, the timbre of voice and voice, the uplifted hand or tense muscle, and the particular emotion. The spoken play, the words which we read, are symbols, a shorthand, and often, as in the best of Shakespeare, a very abbreviated shorthand indeed, for the actual and felt play, which is always the real thing. The phrase, beautiful as it may be, stands for a greater beauty still. This is merely a particular case of the amazing unity of Greek, the unity of concrete and abstract in philosophy, the unity of thought and feeling, action and speculation in life.

2013

"Taking as its starting point Nancy’s and Barthes’ concepts of myth, this book investigates discourses around community, democracy, ‘origin’ and ‘Western identity’ in stage adaptations of ‘classical’ Greek tragedy on contemporary European stages. It addresses the ways in which the theatre produces and perpetuates the myth of ‘classical’ Greece as the ‘origin’ of Europe and how this narrative raises issues concerning the possibility of a transnational European community. Each chapter explores a pivotal problem around community in modern appropriations of Greek tragedy: Chapter 1 analyses the notion of collective identity as produced by approaches to the Greek chorus. It investigates shifting paradigms from Schiller to twentieth-century avant-garde experiments and focuses on case studies by Olivier Py, Katie Mitchell, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Michel Vinaver and Mark Ravenhill. Chapter 2 explores the significance of and the discourses produced by the popular but false etymology of the word 'obscene', allegedly meaning 'offstage'. It discusses representations of violence and sex, assessing the ‘obscene’ as a historically-constructed notion, comprising those segments of reality that are deemed unsuitable for public consumption in a given cultural context, establishing a given visibility regime, linked to what Rancière would call a 'distribution of the sensible'. Through a comparative analysis of five adaptations of the myth of Phaedra – Euripides, Seneca, Racine, Edmund Smith and Sarah Kane – the chapter assesses changing attitudes towards ‘obscenity’, touching upon legal, aesthetic and moral issues. It concludes with a discussion of the limits of representation in relation to works by Romeo Castellucci and Krzysztof Warlikowski. Chapter 3 explores the myth of the simultaneous birth of theatre and democracy in ‘classical’ Athens and investigates the ideological assumptions implied by imagining the audience as the 'demos' of democracy. It argues that adaptations of Greek tragedy have been used in the ‘democratic’ West to achieve self-definition in the context of global capitalism and European ‘transnationalisation’. This idea is explored through adaptations of Aeschylus’s The Persians, which defined ‘democratic’ Athens in opposition to the ‘barbarians’. Works by Peter Sellars, Calixto Bieito, Dimiter Gotscheff and Rimini Protokoll are discussed in this context. The book concludes with an analysis of Rimini Protokoll’s Prometheus in Athens and an appendix entitled ‘How Not to Stage Greek Tragedy Today’. The main question that this book asks is: 'why do revivals and adaptations of Greek tragedy still abound in twenty-first-century European national theatres, fringe stages and international festivals?' Attempts to answer this question in recent scholarship have too often emphasised the ‘universality’ of Athenian drama and its ‘ability’ to survive and be 'relevant' through the ages, with particular attention to its ‘democratic’ credentials. While the influence and legacy of ‘classical’ theatre over the West’s cultural history clearly bears witness to its value (and this study does not want to argue otherwise), I believe a more appropriate answer lies elsewhere. The reasons, I suggest, why Greek tragedies are still widely staged in Western theatres, attracting large numbers of spectators, are to be fond in the pervasiveness of the mythologies that have been disseminated around ‘classical’ Athens and Greece as a whole, and in our continuous reproduction of them through discursive practices in the public domain. As Page duBois puts it, “I believe that reading ancient Greek art and culture can illuminate and enrich our present circumstances, but also that the Greeks were far stranger, more complicated, and more ambiguous than they might appear in much that circulates about them in the current climate”. The present study sets out to investigate these mythologies from a Performance Studies perspective and assess what they might mean for theatre-makers and audiences alike."

Does a modern audience expect a Greek play always to end in tragedy? This paper examines the reception of ancient drama in the Greek film industry of the 1960s. Two cinematic receptions of Sophocles and Euripides were produced within a period of less than three years: George Tzavellas' 'Antigone' (1961) and Michael Cacoyannis' 'Electra' (1962). The two directors took pains to emphasize the tragic aspects of their source texts even going so far as to make changes to them in order to meet this expectation. In my discussion I contextualize this phenomenon and investigate the high cultural value that the Greek state assigned to ancient drama.

2018

At the end of the Fall 2013 academic term, I assigned the students in my postgraduate seminar on dramatic criticism the performance reviews in Theatre Journal. In keeping with the journal's mission, the productions reviewed are international, often off the beaten path, and, presumably, significant in some aesthetic or ideological way. The students' collective response could roughly be paraphrased as "Why don't we know more about theatre like this? Why don't we do more work like this at our university? These shows take on racism and history and gender inequity with guts. Who supports these artists?" One might well have the same response to the productions Helene P. Foley discusses in her synoptic Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, the project of which is to "try to define and isolate central developments in the history of America's ambivalent relation to Greek tragedy on the professional stage from the nineteenth century to the present" (3). Foley is in a unique position for this huge undertaking. She is among the best-known and most influential of American classics scholars of the last two decades (prior to Reimagining Greek Tragedy her most recent book was Female Acts in Greek Tragedy); she is, also, the New York Times' "go to" person for comments on reworkings of the classic Greek plays on the New York stage. In Reimagining, Foley deploys both areas of expertise, albeit with a light touch. She foregrounds major socio-cultural themes and illustrates them with dozens of rich production examples. Her own critical voice regarding any individual show is generally muted. (My only minor disappointment in the book is that the author does not speak out more often, but for purposes of what she wants to accomplish she doesn't really need to, as her exhaustive sleuthing and lucid reporting do the job.) The book's overarching thesis is that "American theater has tended to respond to Greek tragedy and its central figures in an idiosyncratic fashion that reflects its own changing history and ideology and modifies our understanding of the possibilities for and implications of the tragic genre itself in the modern world" (11). Rather than opting for either a strictly chronological or a strictly thematic arrangement, Foley does both, gracefully intertwining chronologically arrayed case studies under topical rubrics. Two of these rubrics are characterological-a chapter on Medeas and one on Oedipuses. Two are political-a chapter looking at uses of Greek tragedy during the revamping of progressive aesthetics largely under Modernism's aegis and a chapter on the use of Greek tragedy to lobby for the pursuit of a better American democracy, especially during times of war.

2019

A Dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2017 CHAPTER FOUR Directing Choral Rituals: Mystagogy, Religion and Ecstasy 6 See for example Varakis (2008) 264-65. 7 Aeschylus' Oresteia directed by Karolos Koun, translation T. Valtinos, music. M. Christodoulides, sets and costumes D. Fotopoulos, masks Stavros Bonatsos, Theatro Technis, 1982. 8 On the use of Orthodox religious elements in Koun's Oresteia see for example Varakis (2008) 266-67. 9 Les Atrides by Théâtre du Soleil was created over the years 1990-1992 and is a tetralogy based on Aeschylus' Oresteia preceded by Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis. All four plays were directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, music was composed by Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, set design by Guy-Claude François with sculptures by Erhard Stiefel, and costumes by Nathalie Thomas et Marie-Hélène Bouvet. Iphigénie à Aulis was translated by Jean Bollack, Agamemnon and Les Choephores were translated by Ariane Mnouchkine and Les Eumenides was translated by Hélène Cixous. 10 See Decreus (2004). 11 See Chapter 2 of this thesis, pp.33, 35. 12 Οn the extraordinary performance history of the Oresteia in the last two decades of the 20 th century and the beginning of the 21 st see also Decreus (2004). 13 Rebellato (2015). See also Laera (2015). 14 See Chapter 6 of this thesis. 10 directed by Robert Icke. 15 Nevertheless this is an exciting time to be studying the 'problem': productions such as the 2016 Edinburgh production of Aeschylus' Suppliant Women, 16 a comment on the global refugee crisis with a 50-member citizen chorus, which was described as 'the soul of the show', 17 reveal the re-establishment of theatre's political engagement through a clear directorial focus on the collective-both on stage and off. Powered by the same sociopolitical context, Austrian author and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek wrote Die Schutzbefohlenen (The Suppliants) in 2013, a polyphonic play with references to the Aeschylean Suppliants, attacking Europe's asylum policy. In both examples the choral ensemble is the main medium to express storyline and characterization as well as the work's ideological foundation. This thesis will pose the question whether such instances as the Edinburgh Suppliant Women and Jelinek's The Suppliants are indicative of an ephemeral trend powered by a specific historical context, or whether the Greek chorus has a future on the contemporary stage. A note on the productions I was able to see live most of the productions discussed in this thesis. I was able to watch recordings of those I couldn't see live, either on-line or at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama. I also used as evidence reviews and interviews with the artistic teams. Since among some of the issues discussed here are construction of identity and self-definition, the non-academic, often subjective and heated tone of the reviews I found particularly useful: I am not using them as evidence to reconstruct the performances, but rather to see the productions' cultural impact and whether they clashed with established norms. 15 Oresteia, part of the Almeida Greeks Season, in a new version by Robert Icke, directed by Robert Icke, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, lighting by Natasha Chivers, sound by Tom Gibbons, video by Tim Reid, Almeida Theatre, London, 2015. 16 Aeschylus' Suppliant Women, in a new version by David Greig, directed by Ramyn Gray, composer and musical director John Browne, choreography by Sasha Milavic Davies, designed by Lizzie Clachan, lighting design by Charles Balfour, produced by the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Actors Touring Company. According to the theatre's website 'the Suppliant Women uses the techniques of ancient Greek theatre-recruiting and training the citizens of Edinburgh to create an extraordinary theatrical event.' (information on the performance available at: https://lyceum.org.uk/whatson/production/the-suppliant-women) 17 Fisher (2016).

Modern Greek Studies Australia & New Zealand 19, 2018

This study analyses the cinematic version of Euripides´ play The Trojan Women by the Greek director Michael Cacoyannis, a film-maker who payed special attention in adapting classical texts both for the theatre and the big screen. His recreation of Euripides’ tragedy, influenced by the Vietnam War and the dictatorships in Greece and Spain, brings to life and reinforces the message of the original text transforming the cinematic camera into an effective tool to denounce the abuses of power committed against their fellow humans.

Review published in BMCR: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2015/2015-01-04.html

Monograph: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society (OUP 2006)

In 415B CE uripides produced the Alexandros, Palamedes and TrojanW omen followedbythe satyr-play Sisyphus.¹ All three tragedies draw on theT rojanm yth,displayu nity of locale with Troy as the placeo fa ctiona nd shared ominantt hemes, concepts and dramatic characters.C onsequently, scholarlyc onsensus from Gilbert Murray tilln ow,i ncludingt he influential monographb yR uthS codel,r egards this Euripidean production as presentingt he features of a 'connectedt rilogy'.² My purpose is,firstly,tocontributetothe argumentation in favour of thethematic andideological connection of these plays,which, Is hall argue, is of ad ifferentn ature than that of Aeschylean trilogies (it is for this reason that Ishall be usingthe term 'Trojan trilogy' in inverted commas). Secondly, Ishallexplore thegeneric transformation of the epicmaterial into tragedyinthe lightoffifth-centuryintellectual and ideological contexts, whichc ouldy ield insighti ntot he cultural processesf ilteringt he Euripidean reworkingo ft he Homeric source text.³