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4th Annual Postgraduate Symposium,
2004:
Adaptations of Ancient Greek Drama
The 4th Annual Postgraduate Symposium, on the theme of 'Adaptations of
Ancient Greek Drama', took place at Royal Holloway University of London
on Thursday 17 June and the University of Oxford on 18 June 2004. The
organisers were Eleftheria Ioannidou (Oxford), Elina Dagonaki (Oxford),
and Conor Hanratty (RHUL).
The programme is available as a PDF document by clicking this
link. Abstracts are available in plain text below on this page. (You
will need to install Adobe
Acrobat Reader on your machine to read PDF files. If you prefer to
read a paper version, please contact
us).
Tragedy in non-western contexts
Conor Hanratty, '"The Two-way Traffic of Our Stage?":
Questions of Interculturalism and Hybridity in Modern Adaptations of
Greek tragedy'
It would appear that in contemporary Dublin the production
of ancient Greek tragedy is dominated by women. The most popular plays
in performance are those which feature female protagonists – Antigone,
Medea, Clytemnestra, Electra. The most exciting adaptations of Greek
tragedy in recent years have been by female playwrights like Marina
Carr and Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy and female directors like Katie
Mitchell and Deborah Warner. This paper seeks to examine the variety
of women’s voices that are the driving forces in the contemporary
production of Greek tragedy in at the Abbey. Particular productions
for discussion include Deborah Warner’s production of Medea
starring Fiona Shaw, Katie Mitchell’s Iphigenia at Aulis,
originally performed at the Abbey Theatre in 2002, Marina Carr’s
By the Bog of Cats and Ariel, versions of Medea
and the Oresteia, and the new production of Antigone,
entitled the The Burial at Thebes.
Royal Holloway, University of London
Email conorhanratty@hotmail.com
Eleftheria Ioannidou, 'Greek Tragedy as the Other: Antigone
in The Island by Athol Fugard'
Abstract not available.
DPhil at University of Oxford, Archive of Performances of Greek
and Roman Drama
Email eleftheria.ioannidou@classics.ox.ac.uk
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Revisiting Ancient Conventions
Lefki Papachrysostomou, 'Adapting Aristophanic Comedy onto
Today’s Stage'
Abstract not available.
Université de Bretagne Occidentale
Email lefkothea1@yahoo.com
Chris Vervain, 'Discovering the Lock - Adapting Mask Techniques
for Performing Tragedy' [followed by demonstration]
Electra finds a lock of hair. How can we perform this in mask?
Lacking ancient stage directions and acting manuals the modern director
and actors of masked tragedy can only adapt the performance techniques
available today. Useful insights are provided by both the training of
conventional drama schools and the alternative approaches of Physical
Theatre and the modern western "traditions" of mask theatre
associated with it. Non-Western traditions of mask theatre that have
survived into the current era are also instructive, in particular, the
Japanese Noh. One complication arises from the fact that whilst mask
theatre has its own special requirements (compared with the currently
predominant unmasked naturalistic genres) masks come in various forms
and their lack of homogeneity calls for many different approaches and
performance styles. Performing the plays in English translation introduces
further complications. For example, whilst Aeschylus’ Choephori
is written for a theatre of mask various manifestations of "The
Libation-Bearers" seem to have been made with unmasked or
no performance in mind. The exact moment of Electra's discovery of the
lock is significant here. The needs of mask theatre- a highly visual
form, as we understand it - suggest a certain timing for the event.
This, in turn, has implications for the metaphysical significance of
this pivotal action. I illustrate this point with a practical demonstration.
BA in Fine Art (University of Hertfordshire), MA in Text and Performance
(King's College London / RADA)
PhD (current) in the Department of Theatre and Drama, Royal
Holloway, University of London (supervisor: David Wiles)
Email chrisvervain@btinternet.com
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Tragedy and Different Media
Elina Dagonaki, 'The Oresteia Myth in T. Aggelopoulos,
The Travelling Players'
Abstract not available.
DPhil at University of Oxford, Archive of Performances of Greek
and Roman Drama
Email eleftheria.dagonaki@classics.ox.ac.uk
Christos Prossylis, 'Directing Ancient Greek Drama Using High-tech
Modern Techniques: A New Metalanguage Expression' [followed by demonstration]
Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera Greek is a startling
production of Stephen Berkoff's reworking of the Oedipus myth. Following
an overtly religious 1980s musical setting of the Oedipus story, (Lee
Breuer's Gospel at Colonus), Greek is a political
demonstration against Thatcherite Britain in musical form, premiered
in Munich in 1988. In my paper I intend to investigate: firstly, the
role of opera and Greek tragedy as comparable expressions of an ideal
of Gesammtkunstwerk; secondly, the socio-political status of opera as
a means of expression in 20th century England; thirdly, the potential
of the Oedipus myth and its particularly Sophoclean formulation for
modern reworkings with a contemporary political message. Feeding on
the 20th Century's obsession with Freud, it has been set against Stravinsky's
Oedipus Rex as a demonstration of fantasy and real-life meeting
to clash and destroy those in their path. The piece was considered so
disturbing that the British premiere of this opera at the London Coliseum
required an age limit to be imposed on the audience. Renowned for being
one of his wordiest but most powerful plays, where words kill and one
reviewer describes it as an eruption of internal emotional invective,
Greek, the classical modern classic, provides an exciting door
into the world of Sophoclean reception amongst those not formally trained
in 'Classics', a way of investigating the impact of Classical theatre
on our general cultural heritage.
Middlesex University of London
Email christos@prossylis.com
Expressive Modes
Yana Zarifi, 'Agave's Lament in the Bacchae:
An Example of Continuity and Change in the Performance of Grief for
the Dead' [followed by demonstration]
Abstract not available.
BSc in Sociology (London School of Economics), MA in Classics
(University College London)
PhD (current) on 'Performance as Research on the Ancient Greek Chorus'
at Royal Holloway, University of London (supervisor: David Wiles)
Email YanaSistovari@aol.com
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Rewriting Greek Drama
Callie Ann Sadler, 'Peeling and Trojan Women'
I propose to discuss a production of Peeling,
written by Katie O’Reilly and performed at the Project Arts Center
in Dublin by the Graeae Theatre Company in conjunction with the British
Council of Ireland 22-25 October 2003. An innovative and alluring adaptation,
Peeling is set during a contemporary production of Euripides'
Trojan Women. The three women in the play, Alpha, Beaty, and
Coral, are members of the Chorus of the Greek Drama. This situation
provides humor as the women fill their time 'out of the spotlight' with
comic conversations (which include such topics as recipes, acting, sex,
etc.) – but it also has a serious side as the situation of Euripides'
Trojan Woman and the contemporary situation of many women today is paralleled
in a thought-provoking performance. The play is contemporary in its
visualization, but the tragedy and beauty of Euripides initial vision
is retained (although much of the text is absent). The strength of this
adaptation lies in its boldness to address the subject of disability
and femininity in contemporary society, allowing it to reach a new theatre
audience and to ask an old theatre audience to look at the play in a
new way.
Trinity College Dublin
Email calliesadler@hotmail.com
Lynn Kozak, 'Smack that bitch up: Psychoanalysis,
Sadomasochism and Charles Mee's Bacchae 2.1'
Euripides' Bacchae has always managed to strike
a psychic chord within the audience through the ages; its theme of the
human struggle to balance primitive impulse with civilising order, and
the gap between ritual and violence, remains, more than ever, an enduring
conflict. In this paper I intend to examine how Mee has extended scholarly
psychoanalytic inquiry into the Bacchae through his own creative
interpretation of the play, focusing on how Mee uses elements of psychoanalysis
and sadomasochism to define his drama for a modern audience. Ultimately
I believe that Mee dramatically realises scholarly psychoanalytic readings
of the play and then pushes beyond the linguistic limits of the original
text in order to create a new, equally compelling drama about the violence
of living with ourselves.
King’s College London
Email lynn.kozak@kcl.ac.uk
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Melinda Powers, 'The Jagged Edge: Mee's Fatagagaian Orestes'
This paper will examine the role of catharsis in American
playwright Charles Mee's Orestes, a piece developed in collaboration
with Mark Woodruff at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, in the early
1990's. Mee has described his compositional process as influenced by
the way surrealist artist Max Ernst made his Fatagaga collages and has
written Orestes by cutting and pasting together texts from Euripides
to William Burroughs to the National Enquirer. His collage-style approach
to adaptation produces a jagged edge that reflects the turbulent world
of the play itself. In this way, Mee reproduces the disparity of Euripides'
text through his juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated material, a form
that ultimately deflects the cathartic moment. If catharsis functions
as a shared emotional experience among spectators, its absence here
serves as a dramatic technique that suggests the breakdown of community
and thereby democracy. Form and content work together in Mee’s
non-realistic, non-linear portrayal to comment on the shortcomings of
contemporary American democracy, and by breaking with the conventions
of traditional linear narrative, Mee is able to 'remake' and translate
the experience of Orestes for a modern audience. It is through this
'remaking' that Mee amplifies and interrogates the problematics of catharsis
already inherent in Euripides' Orestes. How can this one concept
apply to the divergent trajectories of Aeschylean and Eurpidean drama?
Does Mee's use of a wildly non-mimetic strategy in fact enact a deep
mimesis of Euripides' reformulation of the Aeschylean precursor?
University of California, Los Angeles
Email mpowersA@ucla.edu
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Julie Waddington, 'Sarah Kane: A Contemporary
Writer with a Classical Sensibility?'
The aim of the paper is not just to offer a reading of Kane's
adaptation of the Euripidean and Senecan plays, but to consider the
tension which underpins Kane's turn to the classics. At the same time
that Kane draws on classical works she displays uneasiness with this
dependence on tradition, claiming not to be interested in the past but
in the future of theatre. She insists that theatre should be emotionally
and intellectually demanding and bemoans the state of current theatre
in which, she claims, drama has been reduced to a mere evening pastime.
Rather than appealing to a past theatrical tradition in order to challenge
this state she turns, instead, to the realm of football, arguing that
if people in the theatre were as emotionally and critically engaged
as spectators of a football match then theatre would become vital and
meaningful.
By focusing on Kane's Phaedra's Love, I hope to sketch out
some of the problems that arise when a classical sensibility is juxtaposed
with a contemporary viewpoint.
I will argue that on a textual level this play offers a significant
reconfiguration of the Senecan and Euripidean tragedies. I will also
suggest, however, that the effect of this reconfiguration was undermined
by the naturalistic conventions within which the play was first produced.
Paramount to this discussion will be the question of theatrical space.
Following David Wiles' insight that performance space has a marked influence
on the effect produced (Tragedy in Athens), I will argue that
a sensibility cannot simply be transferred from amphitheatre (or football
stadium) to small, intimate theatre space, as it is the space itself
which, to a certain degree, produces the sensibility.
Manchester Metropolitan University
Email juliewaddington@hotmail.com
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The Historical Perspective
Felicity Hitlon, 'Racine's Phèdre
and Sarah Kane's Phaedra’s Love in Their Sociopolitical
Contexts'
Abstract not available.
London
Email felicity.hilton@btinternet.com
Rebecca Nesvet, 'Allegory and Ambiguity in
Lady Jane Lumley’s Iphigeneia'
Abstract not available.
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Email ren@aber.ac.uk
Paul Monaghan, 'Prometheus Bound, Symbolists and the
Birth of Modern Theatre'
In this paper I will examine the way that a number of Symbolist
writers (in both theatre and other literary forms) and directors staged
and adapted Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, as a paradigmatic
example of the transmission and adaptation of Greek tragedy at the birth
of the modern theatre from roughly 1870 to 1930 in Europe, Scandinavia,
Russia and the USA. Vying for parentage at this birth were the very
different aims and techniques of the Realists/Naturalists, and the Symbolists.
At the centre of the Symbolist theatre lies a focus on poetry and the
evocation of a metaphysical realm at the expense of the material world
of social experience, while Realists sought to ground the new drama
in the material world of empirical science. An important aspect of the
development of modern theatre was an engagement with the past, and in
particular with the heritage of Greek tragedy. Wagner's notion of the
gesamtkunstwerk and the Symbolist's synthetism were conscious attempts
to recreate what they saw as the truly poly-phonic mode of Greek tragedy
which Nietzsche lauded in The Birth of Tragedy.
I will argue that Symbolist notion of the impersonal actor, in which
they sought to minimise or even eradicate the materiality of the actor
by the use of masks, puppets, or the spiritually athletic body, is particularly
appropriate for the staging of Aeschylean tragedy, and suggests a different
take on the use of masks by the Greeks.
PhD (current) on 'Performance Mode in Greek Tragedy' at the University
of Melbourne (supervisors: Denise Varney & K.O. Chong-Gossard).
Lecturer in Theatre Studies, University of Melbourne
Email pmonag@unimelb.edu.au
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Ancient Myths, Modern Repertoires
Clare Armand, 'Deborah Warner / Fiona Shaw's
Medea: A Performance of Euripides’ Playtext Elaborating
a Vision of the Present'
Abstract not available.
University of Reading
Email Clareinfo@aol.com
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