Greek tragedy has never been performed so frequently and on such a worldwide scale as during the last fifteen years. Helmut Flashar has noted the marked increase in productions of Greek drama, both translations and adaptations, that began in the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1970s on the number of productions grew at an even faster pace. Directors no longer restricted themselves to the canon of well-known plays, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Electra, or Euripides’ Medea, but began to explore the whole corpus of ancient drama (Flashar 1991, 199-302). Recent figures from the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford show a further acceleration of productions during the 1990s and the first years of our century. In December 2003, the Archive’s database registered 4,246 productions of Greek drama worldwide, performed between 1951 and December 2003, ofwhich almost 1,200 were mounted during the 1990s. As I write, there is no sign that the popularity of ancient drama among modern theater artists is waning, given the 454 productions between 2001 and December 2003 worldwide.
This spectacular increase in absolute numbers raises the question ‘‘why?’’ Why do a growing number of modern directors all over the world gravitate so strongly to this genre that they are willing to confront all the strange elements that, while organic to Greek tragedy, reveal an enormous gap between their own culture and the remote fifth-century Athenian society? These are elements that even scholars sometimes have difficulty apprehending: mythical figures whose hybrid social structure encompasses both the old aristocratic codes and the democratic innovations of fifth-century Athens; gods from an unfamiliar pantheon, who appear on stage and communicate directly with human beings; formal elements - lengthy monologues, high poetry, a paucity of onstage action, and the continuous presence of the chorus - that run counter to every dictate of modern entertainment. Why do some theater artists go to the trouble of toning down or even eliminating such distinctive elements in order to retain little more than the basic story? Why do others feel the need to rework these basic stories and to create adaptations that sometimes seem to have forfeited almost all connection with the original plays? And why do spectators feel impelled to watch such productions?
In order to answer the question ‘‘why?’’ we need a representative collection of data. Not only do we need to know what ancient tragedies were performed where, when, and by whom, we also need descriptions of how they were staged, for what audience, and under what historical and cultural conditions. The sheer volume of productions and their global and temporal spread make it difficult to gain full access to all relevant data. Happily, data collections registering the reception of ancient drama are growing rapidly. In the United Kingdom the Open University maintains an online database to register productions of ancient drama. Individual countries, such as the Czech Republic and Greece, have developed similar national databases. The Oxford Archive, which is the most comprehensive because of its international scope, has already proved an invaluable tool for many scholars. Its potential will increase still further if it can be linked to databases with other specializations (such as the reception of Shakespearean drama or the theater history of individual countries).
At the present state ofresearch, the available international data provide information about the who, what, where, and when, but a more thorough analysis of the performances themselves, and how they affected their audiences, is still lacking. A small canon of international productions has received much critical attention. However, a general picture of the global reception of ancient drama requires that we focus more systematically on local differences. If research into the global performance history of ancient drama is to pass from the descriptive to the analytical phase, both supranational and interdisciplinary collaboration will be indispensable. A full assessment of past and present manifestations of ancient drama requires not only specialists in the discipline of classics, but also in theater history and theoretical and empirical theater research. The European Network of Research and Documentation of Ancient Greek Drama, situated in Athens, represents a first step in this direction.
Since a comprehensive answer to the question ‘‘why?’’ cannot be furnished at the present state of academic research, in this chapter I will present some partial answers that have been offered by scholars and theater artists and that command a certain degree of universality. I will discuss the attractions Greek tragedy exerts and the obstacles modern directors and actors have to overcome in staging Greek tragedy. I will focus mainly on Greek tragedy in translation, because a key feature of the revivals of the last century, in my view, is the unprecedented attraction exerted by the original texts in translation, as opposed to adaptations. This development had its start in nineteenth-century Germany, Britain, and France, and spread rapidly over Europe and the United States from the 1880s on. In the last decade of the twentieth century more directors than ever turned to Greek tragedy in translation and faced the challenge of appropriating and reinterpreting its unfamiliar formal elements. This is not to say that performances of translations outnumber the adaptations. On the contrary, research I recently conducted on the reception of ancient Greek themes in the Dutch professional theater between 1951 and 2003 shows that out of 250 productions related to ancient Greek mythological themes, only 65 concerned Greek tragedy in translation (against 113 adaptations and 72 new versions based on themes not treated in extant Greek tragedy). The figures ofthe Oxford database show a comparable proportion. Those of the Czech Republic, however - and this illustrates the limited value of generalizations - show a clear preference for translations. I will return to the Czech case later.
Partial answers to the question ‘‘why?’’ (and ‘‘how?’’) have been formulated from different angles and with varying degrees of sophistication. Answers from the perspective of cultural philosophy take a broad view and concentrate on the fundamental existential struggle of Western man in periods of severe crisis throughout Western history (Decreus 2002 and 2003). More circumscribed answers originate in the context of contemporary and global sociopolitical criticism (Rehm 2003). Others are determined by historical and local sociopolitical conditions, or emerge in the context of performance aesthetics (Taplin 1999a, Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley 2004). Specialized publications on the performance history of specific works, such as the Oresteia (Bierl 1997), Medea (Hall, Macintosh, and Taplin 2000), Agamemnon (Macintosh et al. forthcoming), or in individual countries, provide many partial answers that have a potentially broader significance. Finally, numerous responses from theater artists all over the world have been offered in interviews and printed in performance programs (although practically speaking, these are the most difficult to get hold of). The status of all these answers varies: some reflect private truths, others claim universal validity; some are descriptive, others normative.
Cultural philosophers have tried to define the social and cultural conditions and the mental climate in which tragedy, both ancient and modern, and more specifically the tragic feeling, the consciousness of humanity’s finiteness, can prosper. According to Freddy Decreus, the tragic feeling
Mainly depends on a Western and originally Greek vision of the world and presents a fundamental idea of life and death which is not Christian and neither chthonic nor matriarchal. . . . The tragic feeling discusses the finiteness of the human being, the constant threat of losing a presumed security.... Therefore, the tragic condition and the endeavour it inspires to undertake actions, to make choices and thus to assume responsibility (and to become guilty), leads necessarily to ‘‘acting’’ in a fundamental way, away from nature. (Decreus 2003, 62)
This tragic feeling emerges with special force in periods of severe crisis, whether political, cultural, or both, and it is reflected in performances of tragedy. ‘‘The literary history of the West is characterized by a long chain of literary and aesthetic products called tragedies, which commented on man’s existential, political, philosophical and economic situation during important moments of (r)evolution’’ (Decreus 2002, 325). These plays either promise the possibility of a solution, or display man acting heroically in the face of his tragic condition, or expose the tragic awareness that in this bleak world there is no exit, no meaningful action, no communication, and no shared emotion. These visions of the tragic Decreus terms respectively the proto-tragic, the absolute-tragic, and the post-tragic (Decreus 2003, 73-74). The first category is exemplified by Aeschylus’ Oresteia, with its promise of a better future; the second by Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Euripides’ Bacchae, or Shakespeare’s King Lear; the third by modern rewritings such as Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (based on Euripides’ Hippolytus), or performances such as Romeo Castelucci’s Oresteia, with its ‘‘shocking images of desolated human bodies’’ (Decreus 2003, 73-76). The last example illustrates an important extension of the categorization, for it shows that modern performances of a proto-tragic work like the Oresteia do not necessarily subscribe to the proto-tragic vision. In fact, the performance history of the Oresteia shows that many modern directors question rather than endorse its promise of a better future (Bierl 1997). This clash of interpretations incidentally reflects a comparable debate among classical scholars (Glau 1998).
Decreus’ broad cultural-philosophical analysis of the tragic and of tragedy performances in the theater of the past and present provides a model for anyone who tries to understand the vast diversity of modern productions in what may be called the theater of innumerable faces. However, it is a model based on and particularly relevant to the work of the most prominent theater directors and authors. Although their engagement with ancient drama has gained much critical attention, the revival of Greek tragedy is not limited to a few high-profile productions. This revival manifests itself no less strongly in thousands of other more modest productions that attract an even larger number of theater-goers. These productions neither lay claim to nor are credited with epoch-making new world-visions - which is not to say that they lack vision or skirt the question ‘‘why.’’ On the contrary, they are representative of the more localized, more circumscribed answers to this question. These answers involve three characteristics that uniquely define Greek tragedy, and that will concern me in the next part of this chapter: the myths that provided the stories, the universal themes and ideas adumbrated by these stories, and the specific form of Greek tragedy.
‘‘Myth is the attempt to understand the world through art,’’ the German dramaturge Helmut Schafer has remarked (Schafer 1998, 439). To that end, Greek myth offers a rich source of powerful stories that belong to the public domain, are not linked with any major religion, and can thus be freely appropriated (Foley 1999, 6). In an era that has lost its grand narratives, the longing for explanation through storytelling motivates numerous modern directors to turn to Greek tragedy. Even if the modern audience is secularized and the cultic-mythical horizon alien to them, the basic stories that provide the material for many Greek tragedies are still widely known. Yet the broader mythical context from which the plots are taken, and to which they often allude, has become less familiar as modern education has marginalized the classics. The desire to ‘‘tell the whole story,’’ to disclose the long chain of cause and effect that extends beyond the plot of a single play, underlies the various productions that involve double bills (for example, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King followed by Oedipus at Colonus), adaptations that extend the plot of a single tragedy and incorporate previous events (for example, Mamma Medea by the Flemish author Tom Lanoye, based on Apollonius’ Argonautica and Euripides’ Medea), and vast mythical narratives such as John Barton’s Tantalus. For many theater artists it suffices to retell these horrifying stories and treat their audiences to an evening of intense aesthetic pleasure. For others, it is essential that the disturbing elements reflect upon and be relevant to contemporary social issues.
The mythical stories that underlie Greek tragedy deal with universal themes and issues central to human life. Greek tragedy considers the universals of warfare and its consequences, and the conflicting obligations of leadership. It has to do with conflicts between nations but also, as Ariane Mnouchkine has emphasized, with ‘‘internal wars, civil wars. They are wars in the family, but cruel wars’’ (Mnouchkine 1996, 181). Greek tragedy deals with universal emotions, universal fears, and the acts of capricious powers beyond human control. It brings on stage moderation and responsibility, and their counterparts excess and recklessness. It exhibits the sacrifice of children, cruel murders, suicides, horrible acts of revenge, and the fatal consequences of ignorance. And it does so in a straightforward manner that leaves little room for evasion or compromise.
It is a consensus of recent scholarship that Greek tragedy in its own time not only aimed at aesthetic pleasure, but that the performances were charged with political if not ideological significance. The definition of that ideological significance remains in dispute (see Croally, chapter 4 in this volume), but the topics of many of these plays suggest that Greek tragedy used the realm of myth to give voice to the other side of contemporary male-dominated Athenian society. Rehm has recently questioned some current assumptions about the ideological thrust of Greek tragedy. ‘‘As a product of the society from which it sprang, tragedy reflected Athenian imperialism, sexism, hypocrisy, intolerance, and a host of other ills. And yet time and again the plays confront and expose these failings, challenging the audience to think them through’’ (Rehm 2003, 34). The notion that tragedy reinforces patriarchy and male domination is called into question by the fact that the plays feature so many outstanding female characters as well as female choruses, female captives, and female slaves. The ideologies of warfare and militarism are challenged by plays like Hecuba and Trojan Women. The ideology of democracy is challenged by plays attacking ‘‘politicians and public speakers who manipulate crowds in their own interest’’ (Rehm 2003, 106 - this is an issue with no lack of analogies in the modern world).
Myth offered a secure framework for these sociopolitical concerns of Greek tragedy. The dramatic action, set in the mythical world, provided various models for examining historical events without becoming overtly topical or dangerously subversive. The mythical framework allowed the Greek tragedians to explore the human condition and the consequences of every kind of human behavior at its most extreme and horrifying. At the same time it created critical distance, because it constantly allowed the spectators to shift between mythical story and contemporary life. At any moment, each member of the audience could appropriate the weighty issues as relevant to his own experiences, or dismiss them as belonging to the mythical story and refuse to see the staged events as a matter of personal concern. This, in short, is what Kevin Lee has called a comfort zone (Lee 2001, 82-85).
This distancing quality of the mythical stories has also played an important role in the modern theater’s reception of ancient drama. It made Greek tragedy a powerful instrument for registering dissident opinions in many countries during periods of severe censorship when modern plays were blacklisted, but classical tragedies were still permitted - and welcomed by the audience as tokens of a lost humanism or shining examples of indomitability. Such was the case in Europe during World War II (for example, Sartre’s Les Mouches, performed in 1943 in Nazi-occupied Paris); it was also the case in Eastern European and other countries living under repressive regimes. In the former Czechoslovakia the freedom to perform Greek tragedy became a barometer for the political climate: during the severest periods total prohibition was the rule, whereas veiled topical interpretations were permitted in times of relaxation (Stehllkova 2000). I surmise that the issue of the comfort zone explains the Czech preference for translations over freer and more dangerous adaptations. The contradictory interpretations of Heiner Mriller’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (the play was published in 1965, premiered in 1968 in Munich, and had its first professional production in East Germany only in 1977) either as an anti-war play that criticized pre-socialist societies, or as a veiled criticism of the actual socialist ideology that governed the former German Democratic Republic (Lefevre 2000, 429-30), neatly exemplify the working of the comfort zone MUller had created. Even directors in the modern Western theater value the distancing quality of mythical stories. For Peter Sellars, who views the theater as centrally concerned with contemporary social issues, performing the classics, whether the ancients or Shakespeare, offers a welcome alternative to literal-mindedness. ‘‘The reason we apply poetry to these questions is because in the end it’s more interesting than journalism. Shakespeare can go further than Newsweek. Shakespeare’s equipment is better calibrated to deal with what we are actually facing as a society’’ (Sellars 1996, 226).
When the comfort zone offered by Greek myth and the more traditional performances of Greek tragedy is undermined or removed altogether, the audience may experience the staged events as such an intrusion that they respond with fierce rejection, even if the performance’s subject matter is of great concern. This response became painfully clear when a radical adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia was presented at the Holland Festival in 2000. The Belgian company Het Toneelhuis mounted Aars! (Ass!), written by Peter Verhelst and directed by Luk Perceval (now one of the artistic directors of the Berlin Schaubuhne). The authors called their play ‘‘an anatomical study of the Oresteia’’ which tried to probe beneath the surface of so much male and female violence. Man’s major vital instinct, according to the authors, is sexual fulfillment, and in their version of the Oresteia, the relations between the four members of the family (Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, and Orestes) are fundamentally incestuous. In the course of the play, all except Electra are killed. Electra refuses further procreation by sewing shut her sexual organs. The performance represented a fundamentally post-tragic vision. Relations between male and female were described in terms of food and digestion, or in terms of war. Descriptions of war carried strong sexual overtones. This introverted world, where life is sex and sex is life, was staged as an inferno: a round basin filled with water, one rectangular table and four chairs, strong spotlights from all sides, stroboscopes dazzling the eyes, and the dominant music by DJ Eavesdropper (Yves De Mey) assaulting the ears (plate 30.1). The action unfurled with a strong dynamic thrust: slowness and softness, seemingly gentle, built up to a sometimes devastating and cruel tempo. Many spectators walked out during the performance and the press condemned the production. I must confess that I experienced negative reactions myself, but a subsequent published interview with the author and director made me revise my ideas and reevaluate this performance. The authors were deeply disappointed that no one in the audience dared to face the reality that their own society was so deeply rotten within: at this time Belgium was rocked by a traumatic scandal involving the sexual abuse of children.
Many people were also shocked by the fact that this production was explicitly linked to the Oresteia, although the original story had been dropped almost completely. Why did the authors not compose a new play about the scandal instead of distorting the Oresteia? But to write a new play directly exploiting such a delicate social issue would have invited spectators and critics to assess the work in terms of its historical accuracy, not in terms of essential truths of the human condition. By breaking the myth open the artists forced their audiences to revise their worldview. After all, the traditional story of Agamemnon is part of the spectators' cultural memory, and may even ground their fundamental thinking on such issues as justice or the blessings of democracy; so a radical break with that tradition makes their world
Plate 30.1 Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra in the production of Aars! by Het Toneelhuis (co-production with Holland Festival), directed by Luk Perceval, Amsterdam, 2000. Photograph © Phile Duprez. Used by permission.
Tremble on its foundations. This new version was not just about Belgium on the eve of the twenty-first century. It went beyond recent history and beyond Greek tragedy. It dealt with the foundations of humanity itself and presented an utterly bleak, monolithic worldview to which one might or might not subscribe, but which left no one in the audience unaffected. The performance was probably one of the strongest acts of sociopolitical and cultural resistance the Dutch stage had experienced for many years, but the absence of a comfort zone rendered it unbearable for many spectators.
The mythical stories dramatized by the Greek tragedians recognize time and again that individual human beings are responsible for the world they create, even if irrational forces may at any moment undermine their efforts. Many modern theater artists feel that this emphasis on personal responsibility in a world of imponderable forces is particularly relevant as an alternative model to a modern Western entertainment culture that shuns complexity and fosters indifference. It offers an alternative to the fable of total individual freedom and the suggestion that we can fully master our lives; an alternative to the promise of a world of free nations that believes in progress and that considers the past not a guide but a restraint that impedes the present and the future; an alternative to social and political utopias and to religious values that have proved deficient in the face of ongoing violations of humanity; and, finally, an alternative to the self-interest that governs national and global policies (Sellars 1996, Raddatz 2002, Rehm 2003, passim). For many modern directors, staging Greek tragedy is an act of sociopolitical and cultural resistance, less hazardous than under the repressive regimes mentioned above, but driven by the same impulses. Peter Sellars’ productions of Sophocles’ Ajax, Aeschylus’ Persians, and (most recently) Euripides’ Children of Heracles (plate 30.2) are telling examples. ‘‘For me the appeal of Greek drama is this insistence of those three playwrights to ask questions that our society rejects before you even ask. And yet they asked them anyway, and they asked them at length’’ (Sellars in McDonald 1992, 93). Greek tragedy is especially appealing because, as Helene Foley has observed, ‘‘Greek plots... provide a more complex notion of motivation than can be projected by reduced, modern characters in the present’’ (Foley 1999, 5).
The reason why Greek tragedy proves such a timeless source of aesthetic pleasure and such a powerful instrument for various political and cultural aims lies not only in its powerful stories and the universality ofits themes and ideas, but also in the manner these are presented in the plays. Greek tragedy is compact and avoids the anecdotal. ‘‘The ancient texts. . . are almost free of history and allow one to face the essential issues directly’’ (Schafer 1998,430). The conflicts are presented in an extremely lucid way, and the arguments and underlying dilemmas often possess an internal logic that makes both positions understandable. Hence many of these plays accommodate shifts of sympathy over time, and are able to corroborate competing models. In productions of Euripides’ Bacchae from the 1960s Dionysus was welcomed as the liberating god, for example in Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 (Zeitlin 2004), whereas more recent performances emphasize his cruel, threatening aspect (for example the Dutch theater company ZT Hollandia’s Bacchanten, to which I will return). In 1936, in the context of the Olympics in Berlin, the German director Lothar Muthel mounted a version of the Oresteia that glorified the Nazi regime - the only instance of a Greek tragedy being used for this aim (Flashar 1991, 164-65). During World War II, the
Plate 30.2 lolaus, guard, immigrant children, and chorus in the production of Euripides’ Children of Heracles by the American Repertory Theater (co-production with Ruhr-Triennale), directed by Peter Sellars, Botrop, 2002. Translation by Peter Gladstone. Photograph © Richard Feldman. Used by permission.
Humanistic values of Greek tragedies became a source of moral support for dissidents living under repressive regimes, and after the war performances of ancient drama were mounted on the German stage to reestablish the humanistic perspective that had been befouled by the Nazis. Helmut Flashar points to the increase in productions of Oedipus the King after the war, the subject matter of the play being related to the issue of German war-guilt (Flashar 1991, 181-84).
The third feature that commends Greek tragedy to modern directors is its formal diversity. The combination of theater and music, soloists and chorus, speech and song, movement and dance, text and rhythm, lower and higher poetry, monologues, stichomythia, and formal debates - elements that characterize all Greek tragedies - is a rich source of inspiration, and in part explains the preference of many modern theater artists for staging Greek tragedy in translation. This return to the basic form of the Western theater is sometimes occasioned by situations of artistic and social crisis when, as Rush Rehm puts it, ‘‘We must grapple with unfamiliar cultural assumptions and the peculiarities of foreign dramatic conventions, in order to see our own society and its artifices from a new perspective’’ (Rehm 2003, 38). Max Reinhardt’s experiments with his Theater of Five Thousand, in which different social strata merged into one theatrical experience (he produced Oedipus the King in 1910 at the Circus Schumann in Berlin, and the Oresteia in 1911 in the Musikfesthalle in Munich, with other productions taking place in venues throughout Europe), are one of the early and famous twentieth-century examples; here Greek tragedy and its original performance characteristics were used to break with traditions in the current theater. Reinhardt experimented with massive choruses and an acting style unprecedented in productions of Greek tragedy; this style gave precedence to the actors’ bodies and movements and accentuated their sensuousness, vitality, and energy, instead of elevating the words of the play in the manner characteristic of the insipid contemporary theater (Fischer-Lichte 1999, 5-11).
The formal qualities of Greek tragedy, however, are equally attractive in periods when the theater is flourishing. It may be an exaggeration to say that Greek tragedy is one great challenge to experiment, but its performance history shows that it can accommodate a broad range of formal experiments. It invites artists - directors, actors, and set designers, young and old, novice and experienced - to plumb their creative faculties in order to master these plays, and to sort out the elements essential to their concept of what theater is or should be. Every time the decision is made to stage a Greek tragedy, the artists are forced to rediscover and reinterpret the raw form. Some consciously reject all formal characteristics as outdated impediments to a modern vision of the play. They prefer to tell the bare story, to try to locate the dramatic and theatrical energy in the psychology of the characters. This seems an easy way out, but it is not. Since the dramatic figures of Greek tragedy are not colored by much explicit psychology (Euripidean tragedy is the most explicitly psychological of the three), this approach is extremely demanding and the result often falls flat.
Other artists welcome the formal characteristics and consider them essential to the staging of ancient drama, and a potential enrichment of their theatrical know-how. They are eager to glean any information scholarship can offer about the ancient conditions of performance. This information was vital to the reconstructionist approaches that characterized most performances until the 1950s. For modern theater artists, however, it is more often the case ‘‘that the aspects that most interest [scholars] are not necessarily those that are going to interest or inspire the theatrical interpreters’’ (Taplin 2002, 21). For modern artists it is the gap rather than the connections between ancient and modern performance that releases the artistic energy they need to mold tragedy’s raw material into a compelling new form.
Experiments with the form of Greek tragedy confront modern directors and actors with serious paradoxes. When, for example, a director decides to use a translation that is faithful to the metrical shape of the original text, the actors face the curious situation that the expression of emotions is strictly bound to modes of delivery. At the moments of greatest emotion the protagonists in the ancient performance had recourse to song and to a more elevated poetic register. That is, unrestrained emotion is expressed in high poetry, under the supreme control of the singing voice, and through the controlled movements of the dancing body. This convention creates a paradoxical situation for modern actors and spectators, who are familiar with a naturalistic display of emotions. If the director and the actors decide to sing and dance, the challenge is to find a key that turns this alien convention into a credible emotional moment. Those who succeed often discover that stylization in Greek tragedy has an extremely powerful effect on the audience. Those who decide to ignore the convention have to face another paradox, that of reuniting an elevated poetic register with a naturalistic display of emotions. Both decisions demand a high level of craftsmanship from the actors.
Another paradox is presented by the iambic trimeter that characterizes the orderly, eloquent monologues, the messenger speeches that conjure up such powerful images of offstage action, and the contentious dialogues in which words are forged into weapons. On the one hand verse is a valuable tool for the actors, because the iambic trimeter regulates the tempo of delivery. Yet it is a hazardous tool as well, because the easy-going verses tend to slacken the concentration both of the actors and the audience. Only the greatest actors make the best of this paradox by exploring and exploiting the trimeter’s possibilities. They master these texts by constantly searching for the right tempo; they have the courage to slow down and take the time to gain full control over the emotional dynamic. They make the words do the work by breaking up the rhythm of the verses, thus emphasizing the significant. They succeed in feeling true to the text and true to themselves, and they are immediately rewarded for it. For them, these difficult texts open themselves up to be interpreted afresh each performance by means of shifting emphases. Skillful actors and actresses can make texts speak in ways that readers only seldom experience.
Not only do actors face the challenge of making themselves familiar with the formalities of the language and the fierce emotions of Greek tragedy; they may also be required to dance and sing, or to use masks, which require a different attitude to body language. With masks, the body must take over some of the expressive functions of the face - although we should never forget how expressive the mask can be on the face of the greatest performers (on the use of masks in modern productions, see Wiles 2004). Actors and actresses may be obliged to impersonate such alien figures as gods or seers, or perform unfamiliar formal actions involving, for example, prayer or sacrificial rituals. To retain one’s credibility in such unfamiliar situations is a continuous challenge. For actors the religious dimension is probably the most difficult to grasp. The Greek concept of divinity differs from the Christian one: the Greek gods are not omnipotent and omniscient, but exert power over limited domains. They sometimes display the worst human traits, but they still remain gods. A tragedy may incorporate rituals and prayers that were central to Greek culture, but for which our modern society has no counterparts. One cannot simply replace ancient Greek religious rituals in performance with modern ones, unless one acknowledges that these bring a totally different set of connotations into play. There is no modern religion and no set of religious rituals that are shared by a majority of modern spectators. Whether to devise and perform rituals that are neither exotic and alien, not tainted by Christian overtones yet cogent in performance, or to adopt current rituals is another dilemma that every production has to sort out anew.
In other respects as well Greek tragedy is a treasure-trove for theater artists. As Helene Foley and others have observed, the plays offer ‘‘dramatic opportunities for actors of all ages,’’ as well as an ‘‘extraordinary repertoire of powerful and subtle female roles’’ (Foley 1999, 4). She has recently shown how the gender politics of Greek tragedy inspired many contemporary female theater artists, especially in Japan, the United States, and Ireland (Foley 2004). A recent production of Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women (called De Trojaansen) by the Dutch theater company Onafhankelijk Toneel moved one step beyond the attractiveness of female roles, and mounted these plays with an all-female cast (plate 30.3). The director, Mirjam Koen, took this step because she and her cast were sincerely interested in how women would react to assuming the role of men at war, how it would feel to play the conquerors as well as the victims. She wanted to show that women can be brutes like men and that they are as guilty as men. The production grew out of a deep concern with the female victims of war. In several interviews Koen made explicit reference to the women of Srebrenica, whose husbands and sons were deported by the Bosnian Serbs during the summer of 1995 in front of a powerless Dutch UN battalion. Koen chose Euripides’ plays because the central themes, especially the mechanisms of power, are universal. Hecuba, one of the great female parts of Greek tragedy, was interpreted as a powerful mother, protective, comforting and also vengeful, determined not to be broken by the unending cruelties that assault her. Ria Eimers, the actress who played Hecuba, received the most prestigious annual theater prize for her role.
The formal density of Greek tragedy also allows for large cooperative projects - otherwise offered only by musical theater - involving live music, composers, and choreographers. Performances of Greek tragedy, to be distinguished from operatic versions, have always attracted famous composers and musicians, from Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in Ludwig Tieck’s Antigone (1841) to Harrison Birtwistle in Peter Hall’s Bacchae (National Theatre, 2002). In the Netherlands the world-famous Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra participated in performances of Sophocles’ Electra in the 1920s and 1930s, and today well-known Dutch composers are still eager to involve themselves with Greek tragedy.
The last formal element that will occupy me, one that is both a tremendous challenge and unequivocally the greatest stumbling-block in modern productions, is the chorus. Theater artists in general are convinced that the chorus is such an important constitutive element of Greek tragedy that a performance without a chorus cannot stand. Therefore, they are obliged to find an artistic answer to the function of the chorus in the play, whether in modern or in ancient performance - a subject that has occupied scholars ever since Aristotle. Scholars are fortunate because they can make tentative or qualified judgments. Theater artists, however, have to take
Plate 30.3 Cassandra, Hecuba, seated chorus member, and Talthybius in the production of De Trojaansen by Onafhankelijk Toneel, directed by Mirjam Koen, Rotterdam, 2001. Translation by Gerard Koolschijn (adaptation: Mirjam Koen). Photograph © Ben van Duin. Used by permission.
Decisions that allow the chorus to fit organically into the overall performance concept. Dealing with the chorus is not just a matter of interpreting its dramatic role. It is also a matter of the size and quality of the cast; budgetary considerations will determine whether a director can choose a large chorus of professional dancers and singers or must limit the choral presence to one or two individual actors. The theatrical possibilities of the chorus in performance also depend on the status of the choral texts. As long as a chorus reacts directly in its songs to the situations it is experiencing, it is relatively easy to give it a dramatic function in the performance. However, when the songs deal with gods and mythical figures that are only names for actors and audience alike, the choral songs, and in extreme cases the entire presence of the chorus, become a fundamental problem. There is no all-purpose formula for solving this problem, because the chorus of each tragedy is different and the conditions and artistic aims of each production are different. The best solutions, however, are found when the chorus (especially a chorus that is only marginally involved in the plot) is treated as the starting point rather than the tail-end of the production process. Many directors will probably want to drop the chorus from a production of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis because it seems so detached from the action. In Ariane Mnouch-kine’s Les Atrides, which incorporates the Iphigenia story as the first part, to be followed by the Oresteia, the choral presence was more organically involved in the action than in many performances of Greek tragedy that feature less problematic choruses. When artists do not succeed in giving the chorus a meaningful role within the overall concept, the performance will lose its edge. In such cases (indeed, the same holds for all formal elements that over the course of the rehearsal process turn out to be impracticable), it is often better to drop the chorus entirely, rather than to attempt forced solutions that can never lead to an organic whole. For such is the strange power of Greek tragedy that although the aesthetic experience will be less profound when its formal features are ignored, the absence of these features does not necessarily destroy the emotional impact of the basic story and the central themes. The reason lies in the dual character of the tragedies, which are ‘‘always written both in an aesthetic (literary) language and in an existential one’’ (Decreus 2002, 325).
The combination of powerful mythical stories, a wide range of universal themes deeply experienced on a human level, and a wealth of formal theatrical elements constitutes the unique character of Greek tragedy and explains the great attraction the genre exerts even across the boundaries of Western culture. Japanese directors like Tadashi Suzuki (Suzuki 1986) and Yukio Ninagawa (Smethurst 2000) turned to ancient Greek tragedy in the 1970s and afterwards, even though their own theater tradition offered them powerful stories of a comparable mythical grandeur and a mode of acting as formalized as (presumably) the ancient Greek theater’s. For the Japanese these tragedies counted as ‘‘the fountainhead of the Western humanist tradition, in their search for the values of freedom and democracy (tinged with Marx and Weber) that had eluded their own culture’’ (Macintosh 1997, 312).
In return, several Western directors turned to Eastern theater traditions to find what the Western theater tradition could not give them: a way to experience the formal elements characteristic of the ancient Greek theater: the power of formalized acting and dancing, of masks and rituals, and the emancipation of the actor over the text (Foley 1999, 2-3). ‘‘I think we have the writers... .They invented the actors. They discovered the art of acting. And I think when you succeed in having both the
Western dimension and the Oriental, then you have the theatre I aspire to’’ (Mnouchkine 1996, 188-89). Cross-cultural application, however, whether Oriental or African, requires a journey to the heart of the other culture. Otherwise, crosscultural borrowing becomes cross-cultural shopping: superficial, lacking theatrical, artistic, and aesthetic truth, and finally meaningless.
One recent example illustrating the cross-cultural power of Greek tragedy is the large international festival production of Euripides’ Bacchae mounted by ZT Hollan-dia in 2002. The directors, Johan Simons and Paul Koek, invited the Syrian composer Nouri Iskandar to write music for the choruses on the basis of an Arabic translation. Iskandar is a well-known specialist in the tradition of Syrian-orthodox music, which he believes has close connections with ancient Greek music. A large group of professional Syrian musicians and singers came over to the Netherlands and worked for two months with Dutch actors and musicians well trained in the vocabulary of contemporary Western music. The performance became an encounter between cultures, fostered by opposite opinions about the role of the god Dionysus. For Iskandar, Dionysus represented the freedom of religion, which he emphatically expressed in his celebratory music for soloists and a large mixed chorus. For Simons and Koek, Dionysus personified the dangers of Western and Eastern religious fundamentalism.
The encounter took place on two artistic levels moving in opposite directions. On the level of the dramatic events, the production was staged as a terrible nightmare in which Pentheus’ resistance to the god was hopeless from the outset, and Dionysus lived up to his reputation of being gentle to those who fear him, and cruel to those who reject him. The final scene was staged as an outcome without winners: although Dionysus had proven his divine status, in so doing he destroyed his only human roots, the Theban royal family; and although Agave was broken by the loss of her son, she persevered even more strongly in her rejection of the god: here was an absolute-tragic ending that showed both visions of Dionysus as irreconcilable. Simultaneously, an opposite movement took place on the musical level. In the first part of the performance the acoustic Syrian instruments took the lead, but as Pentheus decides to dress himself up to spy on the Bacchants, Western electronics entered. What began as a fierce confrontation developed over the second half of the play into an entirely new musical idiom in which the two fundamentally different musical traditions harmonized. Where the confrontation of religious and political powers ended up in stubborn resentment, the confrontation of artists led to mutual understanding and harmonious cooperation, a proto-tragic vision. Here the cross-cultural power of Greek tragedy was at its strongest: the performance was a shared act of cultural resistance in a world of increasing polarization (plate 30.4)
Many are the attractions of ancient Greek tragedy, many the challenges and many the obstacles. Amy Green’s discussion of modern recreations of classical drama makes one thing very clear: there is no such thing as an ideal formula allowing modern directors to create a successful production of ancient drama. ‘‘The director must craft a rigorous and disciplined performance format to withstand the forces these plays exert on the stage, both as monumental works of art and as cultural monuments.... Successful concepts fly in the face of traditional styles, settings, and interpretations, but the new production aesthetic and its execution must have equally high aspirations or risk reductionism or, worse, parody’’ (A. S. Green 1994, 43). The styles we encounter on the modern stage are manifold, ranging from realist to modernist and
Plate 30.4 Syrian chorus and musicians in the production of Ba. ccha. nten by ZT Hollandia (co-production with Ruhr-Triennale, KunstenFESTI-VALdesArts, and others), directed by Johan Simons and Paul Koek, Brussels, 2002. Translation by Herman Altena. Photograph © Ben van Duin. Used by permission.
Postmodernist, from reconstructionist to experimental, and the possibilities for modern directors are virtually infinite. Whether a production will be good or not does not depend on the style chosen. A reconstructionist approach is not a surer guarantee for a successful production than a postmodernist one, nor is an adaptation in comparison with a translation. What gives a production of Greek tragedy the best chance of success is the artistic sureness that allows theater artists to choose and interpret a play in the context of their own sociopolitical and cultural context; to separate the relevant from the irrelevant; to have the artistic courage, even the artistic hunger, to face all the elements that are inherent in the genre and in each individual play and to make a selection by conscious choice, while remaining fully aware of the consequences of omissions. The artists must have the artistic sureness to devise a performance concept - in terms ofperformance location, cast, acting style, set design, use ofelectronics, and so forth - that organically absorbs all the elements selected, even if the performance celebrates postmodern fragmentation. Finally, they must know their audience; know how to involve the spectators both rationally and emotionally, and know how to shock in order to please them.
World History
