MAY 1998

 

Overview

Lorna Hardwick

This month I'm circulating contributions from Toph Marshall, Michael Walton, Lowell Edmunds and David Wiles, together with an account from Katerina Zacharia of her important current project on the staging of Euripides' Hippolytus.

It seems that many of our original concerns are simply refusing to go away, including 'fidelity/creativity', space, design (all addressed by Toph and Katerina,with comment from Lowell on space); dance/song ( raised by Katerina and Michael); the relationship between specific contemporary reference and the expectations and assumptions about Greek drama held by audiences and practitioners (Michael in response to Lorna's point in the last seminar).There's also a newer issue about the principles and processes underlying aesthetic judgements and how this area could be included in reception theory.

There seems to be a good deal of interest in reconvening early next year (and see David's suggestion on procedures). I will contact everyone in the autumn to see if we can firm up a series of monthly agendas.If anyone would like to suggest a particular topic and/or offer to introduce it, by all means do so now (before you forget that brilliant insight...) and we will keep your suggestion on file.

We look forward to seeing many of you at the Open University Classical Studies conference on Theatre: ancient and modern on January 5th and 6th 1999 at Milton Keynes. There will be a varied menu of papers in the four main Panels (on Comedy, Performance, Theatrical Language and Reception in the 19th and 20th centuries), from established and new scholars from a number of countries. We also hope to have Plenary papers from Prof.J.R.Green (Australia), Dr.M.Mezzabotta (South Africa) and Prof. R. Rehm (USA).

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CONTRIBUTION

Michael Walton, University of Hull, UK

Two quick responses and a request, apart from a warm vote of thanks to the organisers for the idea and for getting it off the ground. Please let there be another one with more contributors.

1. The issue of specific contemporary reference is a broad one, not least, as Nurit Yaari and Shimon Levy have pointed out, in an Israeli context where 'a country by the sea' or even a man with a weapon cannot be neutral statements.

More significantly, I cannot agree with Shaun Richards' assertion that Greek tragedy is to do with inevitability. The Oresteia, Persians, OT (especially), Antigone, most if not all of Euripides, including Hippolytus, come down to human response and human reaction. I don't find these plays negative. Do other people?

2. To David Wiles' comments given at the end of February’s Seminar:

I am deeply uncomfortable at finding current theoretical underpinning of reception so unsatisfactory. I am sure there should be such a base but maybe we should be looking for it less in the formulae of linguistics and psychoanalysis and more in areas such as animal behaviour or cognitive perception - The work on eye research by Christopher Tyler in San Francisco, for example, whose analysis of painting and painters suggests that there are hidden principles at work which affect our aesthetic judgements. What I do know is that when Ninagawa's Medea stripped off, first her mask, then her whole costume (dictated by that production not by the text) the visceral/emotional response corresponded to moments that can be located in the texts of Aeschylus.

And the request. Richard Beacham and I are co-editors for a series part of whose aim is the reissuing of work that is out of print. Next on the list is Lillian B Lawler's The Dance of the Ancient Greek Theatre. Can anyone recommend someone, themselves, or another, to write a new Introduction?

Lowell Edmunds, Rutgers University, USA

I am in favor of an agenda, with monthly topics. I propose (1) the mask and (2) off-stage space. As for 2, I wonder - I am not a practitioner - to what extent off-stage space figures in the thinking of directors and actors. Contrary to David Wiles (see February responses), I believe that in Greek tragedy there is a always a fixed demarcation between stage space and off-stage space. The latter is indicated to the audience either by sound or by what the characters say (thus "diegetic" space). I have been trying to refine my analysis of stage space, beginning with abandonment of the word "mimetic," which I think I took from Isacharoff. Besides the physical stage space, there is (1) referential or descriptive or deictic language pointing to things really there on stage that both audience and characters can see; and there is (2) conjural (I had to coin the word) language referring to things that the characters can "see" and that the audience should also "see." In reading the Ajax this semester, the horrible possibility has arisen that the deictic hode, hede, tode can be conjural - horrible, because one would lose a valuable criterion for distinguishing between 1 and 2.

C.W. (Toph) Marshall, Concordia University (Montreal), Canada

As I seek to understand ancient theatre and stagecraft better, I have found that experimentation, in the living laboratory of the theatre, an invaluable way to test, explore, and (sometimes) accept hypotheses about ancient stagecraft that would otherwise remain theoretical. A production should of course entertain, and I look enviously at the audiences some companies draw for ancient drama; I can at least boast that none of the eleven ancient plays I have directed has lost money -- one measure of success, I suppose. But as a classicist, success must also be determined by some measure of 'fidelity', however defined: for we are aware, as our audiences perhaps are not, how many distortions ('translations') are made when an ancient text becomes (re)concretized in modern performance.

I think in terms of three elements which concern me as producer/director: 'script' (what words are spoken, in whose translation); 'space' (where the play will be performed, before what audience); and, for want of a better term, 'design' (a vague term to embody all directorial decisions, personal agendas, etc.) Clearly, these three affect each other, both in antiquity and today. Broadly, space was fixed in antiquity, and plays were written and directed for that space. Today, only script is fixed (in part), and the original space can never be recovered. I know that Peter Meineck and Jim Svendsen regularly create works that must fit many venues, and space becomes a variable; similarly, I am sure we have all seen, perhaps with regrets, productions where both text and space were subordinated to the director's preconceived notions of what the play should be or mean.

For me, script is the least flexible of the three elements, within whatever range of liberties I allow the translation. Poor productions come from a failure to trust the text, as I regularly remind actors. So flexibility is to be found in space and design (which includes the decisions whether or not to use masks, to apply the rule of three actors, or to individuate a singing chorus, and any other attempt at authenticity that supplements my research). I want to know the venue before I know the play to be performed there. Rather than impose a script on a performance space, and 'make it fit' by altering elements of design, I find a venue (be it a black box, or a drained public fountain) and select a script that lets me test some element of design: I have used full masks in outdoor Plautus productions, only three actors in Euripides, and various means of representing the chorus in Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. It is the mutual reinforcement of these elements that is important. Fidelity comes from creating a balance, even if it is not precisely the balance struck in antiquity. My Helen production last summer explored notions of Euripidean comedy and the use of three actors, but also, through costume and set design, it helped me to emulate the political climate of 412, meaningfully for my audience. Because of the balance, the issue of video preservation proves so difficult. I have learned most about stagecraft from less known plays -- Children of Heracles, Women of Trachis, Asinaria -- and it is almost axiomatic that a successful stage presentation will not work as well on video. Nevertheless, classicists know what can be lost from a production, and we do not want to succumb willingly to the ephemerality of theatre.

'THIASOS' Katerina Zacharia, University College London, UK

[Editor’s Note: This contribution is of particular interest, since the Thiasos theatre company, under its artistic director Yana Zarifi, went on to develop a series of productions developing the ideas summarised here (see http://www.thiasos.co.uk/)]

The manifesto

Ancient Greek drama has proved its capacity to draw modern audiences. Part of its appeal lies in a sense of return to cultural roots, and the frisson of finding contemporary relevance in an archaic art form; and although the Greek and Roman classics no longer exercise their traditional ascendancy in our educational system, we are still haunted, and ultimately fascinated, by their prestige. In the late eighties and early nineties, a series of high-profile commercial productions across Europe stimulated a renewed interest in Greek tragedy, and what was heralded as a ‘boom’ has developed into a steady stream, as directors and audiences alike turn to the genre for refreshment, experimentation, and inspiration. In addition, the gradual re-emergence of the study of the classics in the form of ‘Classical Civilisation’ courses has created a wider audience, and a new demand for powerful and accessible performances of ancient drama which will bring to life what lies dead on the page.

It is clear that ancient Greek drama has the potential to become a significant part of our cultural life. Progress, however, has been obstructed by one distressing detail: the productions themselves are often disappointing. There are, let it be said, notable exceptions; but far too many attempts to stage tragedy deaden and emasculate what should be thrilling and vigorous. This has little to do with resources, for the best-funded productions have often been the dullest; but it is the result of wrongheadedness, at the most fundamental level, about how this art form actually works: where its strengths lie, and how far opposed it is to modern Western theatrical norms.

Authenticity is not the issue. A good deal of information is available to us about how the Greeks staged their plays in the 5th century B.C., but the attempt to replicate these conditions exactly in a modern setting would be an impossible, and almost certainly unrewarding project. We cannot, after all, replicate a 5th century Greek audience - we cannot rely on the same expectations, the same shared cultural background, the same fluent comprehension of the ancient ‘language’ of stagecraft. But on the other hand, it makes little sense to abandon ancient conventions altogether, for that is to run the risk of erasing many of the very features that make these plays worth performing.

Central to our proposal is a vision of tragedy as a spectacular ritual performance, combining a highly wrought, and often densely poetic text, with vivid and emotive dance and song - a kind of ancient Gesamtkunstwerk. The formal organisation of the spoken text, the elaborately stylized costumes, and the consistent musical framing, together imply a highly ‘coded’ acting technique whereby the emotional content is communicated in a systematic language of gestures and symbols.

We have lost the ancient codes on which the Greek tragedies were predicated; and in our own time Western drama has been dominated by a ‘say it as if you really meant it’ ethic of realism. None the less, stylized musical dance-drama does survive in various forms in our own culture (ballet, opera, musicals), some flourishing, others increasingly fossilized; and in other countries (particularly outside Europe) we find a variety of lively musical theatre traditions which offer striking parallels with many of the features of ancient Greek drama. Any of these traditions might provide a model, a starting point in the quest; and by adapting and integrating them into our vision of Greek tragedy, we achieve a double aim: we insist on the distinctly non-Western quality of the genre, and at the same time we offer a modern, accessible, and powerful equivalent to ancient performance techniques.

Our target audience falls, roughly, into two groups: the general theatre-goers; and professionally interested parties (students, teachers, academics); consequently, our aims are both to ‘entertain’, and to provide materials for education and scholarly debate.

The theatrical production

The core of the project will be the production of an individual play, in a specially written English translation. The broad outlines of our approach, and the ways in which it differs from other attempts to put ancient tragedy onto the modern stage, have been outlined above in our ‘manifesto’: we will oppose ourself to techniques of realism, for which the ancient texts are unsuited - a fact that is well known, but almost always ignored; and will explore more formal, ‘artificial’ techniques which will allow the script to work on the stage without resorting (as is too often the case) to violent cuts and rewrites. Most importantly - and here, again, we offer something virtually unique - the chorus (which appears as a character in every tragedy) will dance and sing, as indeed the script requires them to. Since the original music and dance are lost to us, a new musical score will be composed, and dance movements will be choreographed in a style adapted from one of a number of possible world cultures.

Euripides’ Hippolytus

We have chosen the Hippolytus as our first play, with the intention of presenting it on stage in November 1998. We have, in fact, been commissioned by the Cambridge Triennial Committee to offer a foretaste, in the form of selected choral set pieces, at the triennial conference at Cambridge on 22 July 1998: this gives us a useful deadline, and hence an incentive to make sure work is well under way by that time.

The Hippolytus was chosen for a number of reasons, many practical. It is one of Euripides’ most popular plays, and rightly so; it is not excessively long, and contains a regular series for choral set pieces; and to the inexperienced audience it offers the life-raft of a clear formal plot, adapted from a myth which may not itself be well-known, but which has clear parallels with stories from other cultures, including our own (Phaedra falls in love with her celibate son-in-law Hippolytus; spurned, she kills herself, and in dying she engineers Hippolytus’ destruction). This factor makes the action of the play easy to anticipate, and is a step towards the kind of familiarity with the material which the ancient tragedian would have expected of his original audience.

Founder members:

Katerina Zacharia, General Manager, Academic Adviser

Yana Zarifi, Artistic Director

Jamie Masters, Executive Producer Music director and Composer