March 2006

The experience of the rehearsal room in academia
Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Monash University, Australia

I should like to begin by thanking Lorna and Carol for the opportunity to present at this e-seminar. As Lorna said in her opening to this series, it is very easy to feel isolated as a post-graduate, particularly when dealing with an uncertain area of study. I am most grateful, therefore, for the opportunity to present some of my research conundrums in this seminar; and am particularly appreciative in advance of comments that seminar participant might make.

Many years ago, in my final year at university, I was writing my undergraduate dissertation on Sophoclean heroines. It was a heavily theoretical thesis: all Goldhill and Segal with liberal doses of Loraux and Zeitlin thrown in for good measure. It was neat and tight and very impersonal. When it came to my viva, I put up a spirited defence of the methodology until the eminent chair of the examining panel caught me short by asking, very sweetly, 'All very well argued, but do you really believe what you have written?' And I was flummoxed, because here was a question that cut me to the quick. What had been an exercise in academic hoop jumping suddenly became intensely personal, and I had to reply, 'Well, no, I don't, because it's not how I feel about the plays.' And I found myself explaining that this feminist-structuralist-deconstruction (it was the late 1980s and methodologies were very fluid) was like an intellectually satisfying crossword – all very clever in its own way - but didn't explain for an instant why I wanted to act Electra so much, why the play moved me so much, why Fiona Shaw's performance that I had seen just a few months before still haunted me so much.

This incident, too, went on to 'haunt' me in various ways; and indeed it is still a very powerful memory for me as I write the final draft of my doctoral thesis on Electra . The reason for its potency is that it speaks of the methodological tussle I have felt consistently in my career between my practical experiences as a theatre practitioner (who has, by accident more than design, been involved in several productions of Electra [1]) and my academic experiences as a lecturer who now (again, by accident more than design) teaches in a Classics department. Framing this tussle is a question of hermeneutics and methodology that is big enough to fill a library of seminar papers. I have no pretensions, therefore, to come up with any answers in this paper: my sole aim is to pose a question, and to see where that takes us in terms of the discussion.

My title, of course, contains more than a passing nod to Oliver Taplin's 2002 paper, 'The experiences of an academic in the rehearsal room.' [2] In that paper, Taplin gave a graphic account of the ambivalent relationship that theatre practitioners and academics can have, describing the uses (and occasionally abuses) of academic insight when employed in theatrical production. My aim in this paper is to do the obverse: to explore the issue not of the relevance of academic discourse to performance practice, but of performance practice to academic discourse. How can what goes on in the rehearsal room, on the stage, in the actor's imagination and body, in the audience's response, inform Classics? How can the performance practitioner's experiential insight complement the scholarly objectivity of the way in which we, as classicists, interpret Greek drama?

It might seem that I am posing questions that have already been answered. After all, in the last twenty or so years, there have developed entire new methodologies through which to investigate Greek drama: a wealth of new material in Classics that has simultaneously examined the cultural and theatrical currency of Greek drama and extended the disciplinary demarcations of what is valid for Classics. The very fact that we are participating in this seminar is indicative of how fruitful an area of study this has proved to be. There is still within me, however, the nagging feeling that in all of my readings of this material, my question remains not so much unanswered, as, rather, unasked .

Perhaps this is not surprising. It is representative of the great divide between practice and theory in terms of process . [3] The very question of 'experiential insight' raises a knotty problem about the relationship of the emotional and subjective in an academic discipline that prides itself on the rational and objective. Why should the performer's experience be of interest to a Classicist? There is, after all, a whole discipline of performance studies that analyses such things, and how, in any case, could a modern British actor's feelings in a rehearsal room in Sheffield elucidate an ancient Greek text from a theatre in Athens ? Why should the emotional responses and discoveries of a performer be relevant to a scholarly reading of the play? They might be interesting in their own right, but, as a renowned Classicist recently informed me, there is little cross-over between modern performance and Greek drama[4].

In some ways, this scholar has a point. The actor's way is surely very different from the academic's. The actor relies on imagination and 'intuitive philosophy' (Grosz 1995) in her art: the text, her voice and her body meet in the field of characterisation, at 'the phenomenological seam' (States 1992) of performance. The literary critic or theatre historian allows for the subjectivity of interpretation, but deflects the personal and experiential by objective philological/semiotic analysis or factual historical contextualisation. Ultimately, both performer and academic engage in a highly subjective form of interpretation, but whereas for the one, subjectivity is integral and celebrated, for the other, it is reframed in terms of appropriate academic discourse. Consequently, to ask for recognition of the intensely personal experience of the performer to be validated in the intensely impersonal operations of academia is to ask us to jettison our discipline's belief in the primacy of objective analysis over experiential emotion. In posing the question of whether the experiential insight of performers can inform Classics, I am actually asking a much tougher question: whether the unashamedly subjective, temporally specific and emotionally idiosyncratic can co-exist in a discipline that seeks 'the philogia perennis ' and the factual objectivity that can 'distinguish error from truth, and the opinion of the passing day from that true knowledge which lasts for ever' (Pfeiffer 1968).

The subjective response has, of course, started to find voice in Classics through the growing recognition of feminist theory and critical theories of situated readership (Rabinowitz and Richlin (eds) 1993; Hallet and Van Nortwick (eds) 1997; Van Nortwick (ed) 2001). It has to be said, though, that these attempts at validating the personal voice have taken little hold in 'mainstream' literary and cultural studies of Greek drama. They are part of a movement that is, depending on the perspective of the critic, either on the fringes of Classical Studies or at its cutting edge. Experiments in personal voice criticism/reflection are not generally accepted in a disciplinary discourse that still, by and large, retains a formalist view of the possibilities of textual authority and objective analysis. Also, the use of personal voice is a relatively new methodology, and the parameters of its use and application are far from determined. If I write about my own experiential findings of, for instance, Electra , what am I contributing to the communal knowledge about the play? Perhaps all I am doing is contributing to the communal knowledge about me - a grim thought. There is the other, much bigger, issue of whose 'experiential' is being cited: that of the performer who talks about her feelings; or that of the scholar who has similarly engaged in an 'experiential practice' in the selective process of interpreting her words.

Allowing the experiential into Classicist discourse is consequently a potentially risky business. It is an approach that makes the user vulnerable to accusations of being, as Van Nortwick puts it, 'self-indulgent, solipsistic, or – worst of all for the classicist – mistaken .' (Van Nortwick 1997). It needs to be owned, however, because the subjectivity of interpretation has close links to the subjectivity of the actor's embodiment, and recognition of the personal in interpretation can pave the way to an 'emancipatory hermeneutic' (pace Habermas) that can extend our entire approach to literary dramatic criticism.

So how can we incorporate the experiential voice of the performance practitioner into our literary studies? As Classicists, we are used to fielding questions from directors working on Greek tragedy. What if we reversed that usual dynamic, and if we asked questions of the performers? [5]What if we extended the range of questioning and spoke to not just the stars and directors but to the unknown actors: to Chrysothemis as well as Electra; to Pylades as well as Orestes; to the chorus; to the supernumeraries? What if we collected a record of their emotional and visceral responses – however inadequate it might seem to try to record the 'unspeakable when it works' (Melrose 1994) –that tried to prise open and look into that 'phenomenological seam'; that tried to find where text and actor meet in characterisational embodiment?

This is, I have found, possible, if tricky. Maybe unsurprisingly, actors like to talk about themselves, and whereas it can be common for the academic to be excluded from the vulnerable space of rehearsal, it is, in my experience, very uncommon to be refused interviews outside the rehearsal space. I have tried to do this over the last few years with various productions of Electra (both professional and amateur). Bit by bit, from a number of productions, I have built up little stores of information about actors' responses, about their feelings about specific moments of the play; about their connection to the genre. Without exception, every actor I have interviewed has felt an overpowering, totally surprising connection to the tragedy; and despite the pre-rehearsal prejudice many felt about Greek drama, most actors came to find an unexpected spirituality in the play. There is something important in these types of finding. We might spend a deal of our professional lives analysing ancient concepts of catharsis and mimesis: but we are living in the company of people who deal with these things practically night after night in front of an audience. Surely their experience has something to add to our understanding of these terms as living concepts, not just literary terms? The cultural context of performance and reception is massively different, but the phenomenological content might just be similar.

What, then, to do with this information? It can, certainly, find an archival home that can be of value in terms of theatre history and reception [6]. I believe, however, that there are further uses of experiential insight that can stretch the discipline specific parameters of Classics. I am suggesting that we use performance-practitioner insight as Classicists, not as performance theorists or theatre historian. Our interpretation of the actor's insight is necessarily and fortuitously moulded by our knowledge of the ancient context of the play, and our application of the experiential must be fully conscious of this. In this way, the experiential and scholarly can come together. The experiential of performance can provide a springboard to further literary investigation that might well throw no new light on 5 th Century practices, but might be hugely elucidating in terms of our contemporary reception. It might force us to open the parameters of our discipline to include and validate a wide range of interdisciplinary discourses. Performance is an intrinsically uncanny phenomenon: if we can find a voice for that uncanniness in our literary interpretations of the play, we open up the methodologically restrictive demarcations of a discipline discreet way of looking at the plays. In other words, we are forced to look at these oh-so familiar and oh-so moving plays from a new perspective; a phenomenological perspective: the fresh perspective of someone who re-creates it night after night. The actor makes the old new through repetition. In listening to her experiences, we as Classicists can do the same.Jane Montgomery Griffiths

Notes

[1] I was understudy in the 1991/2 revival of Deborah Warner 's Electra (Thelma Holt Ltd); Electra in Compass Theatre Company's 1999 UK tour; and directed it at St John's , York in 1997 and for the 2001 Cambridge Greek Play.

[2] In Barsby (ed) 2002, pp. 58-78.

[3] I hasten to add, not in terms of product, because so much recent scholarship has so ably documented modern performance and analysed its reception. As just an example of the range of study, in no particular order, see Hall and Macintosh 2005, 2004 (eds); Hall, Macintosh & Taplin (eds) 2000; Hardwick 2000, 2003, 2004; Wiles 2000; Rehm 2003; McDonald 1992, 2003; McDonald & Walton 2002; Dunn (ed) 1996; Garland 2004.

[4] Contra this, see Ewans 2002, who describes his difficulties in finding acceptance for 'the 'subjective' insights [he] had gained as a practitioner' (p58) in scholarly publication, and argues that his own practice ('which does conform in relevant respects with Athenian conventions' (p.59)) contributes 'reliable – perhaps even more 'objective'' insights into 5 th Century staging practice.

Gamel (2001, pp.153-171) takes an all together different approach and celebrates the subjectivity of her practice. Blending together the experiential and personal with a deep understanding of the social and literary context of t Ion , Gamel writes a convincing and highly moving account of the way practice can inform our understanding of the play. Her essay is an inspirational example of how personal voice scholarship can inform literary interpretation.

[5] In concentrating on the performer's experience, it is not my desire to devalue that of the rest of the theatrical production and creative team. My current project is to look at the phenomenological engagement of the actor and the text, however, so my research has so far been restricted to interviewing actors and directors.

[6] For an example of this use of interview, see the Reception project's 'Case Study' on the 2001 Cambridge Greek Play (http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/CaseStudies/cambridgeindex.htm).

RESPONSES

Marianne McDonald
University of California , San Diego

First I applaud the lower case used in the title. This is a paper about real experiences, as Jane calls it, 'the phenomenological seam', which I don't think is adequately conveyed by capital letters.

Next I applaud the article and the very important question that Jane raises. The rehearsal room is vital as a crucible for our classical texts, and I am amazed when anyone denies how much one can learn about the ancient play from observing the process of an actor mastering a classical role, or reminiscing about it later.

Jane says she would not be giving any answers, but remembering that 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds' (Emerson, 'Self-Reliance'), she gives a vital suggestion about documenting the rehearsal process and how valuable that can be for academia.

I have two anecdotes from my own work. First of all, last night we had a rehearsal of Trojan Women , with music composed by Myron Fink who commissioned me to do the libretto after seeing my version of the Trojan Women performed at our Old Globe theatre in 2000 to usher in the millennium with its always topical anti-war message. I wrote Sing Sorrow: Classics, History, and Heroines in Opera so that I could have a textbook for my course (which I'm teaching again this fall) on opera and the classics. So I applied what I learned to the necessary distillation that happens in any libretto that transforms an original classical text. At the same time as one is cutting, one needs to keep the emotional moments necessary for the build-up to the climax, and then a denouement. The singers when they first performed this opera were in tears during the Andromache monologue to her child, and also Hecuba's burial scene. They said afterwards how they had never worked with something so moving. At least, this shows how effective Greek tragedy is if performed well.

I also have been writing a book, Space Time and Silence, the Craft of Athol Fugard, in which I document the rehearsal process. I have sat in the rehearsal rooms from beginning to the end of Antigone (he directed my translation in Ireland in 1999).

At the start of the play the theatre is blacked out and the voices of the actors provide a curtain of sound made up of names chosen from the text: 'Acheron,' 'Salmydessus,' 'Dirce,' ' Thebes ,' 'Dionysus.' Four actors choose the names they like, and one begins. The next follows at a higher decibel level, and the others higher still. As the volume increases, the four voices that began fade out until both Antigone and Ismene are the only voices left calling each other. Antigone says 'Ismene' from one side of the stage, or theatre, beginning softly and then repeating the name with increasing urgency and force. On the fourth 'Ismene,' she answers 'Antigone,' and with that the lights go up, but dimly, and we see the two sisters embracing.

At the end of the play, the dead bodies are symbolically represented by articles of clothing. Haemon throws his cloak at his father. Eurydice lays her cape down at Creon's feet. Finally, Antigone puts her wreath next to the two 'bodies.' The four actors who began reciting the names at the beginning start again. They fade away, and Ismene calls out quietly, 'Antigone?' three times. Silence answers her. The lights go up.

What does this show? First of all, the importance of Antigone and her relationship with Ismene, something that Sophocles emphasized by his beginning the play with both of them, but often minimized in modern production. Fugard also used whispered words as music, drum beats, in a darkened room, which reminds us of the importance of music for the chorus, something so often neglected in modern performance. The heartrending cry at the end, shows the audience that the loss of Antigone is our loss as well.

I shall also be speaking this June at Oxford , and in South Africa on 'The Return of the Myth: Athol Fugard and the Classics.' I have translated for use in his plays, Ovid (Sorrows and Rejoicings) and Sophocles (Exits and Entrances), plays in which he shows the protagonist's relationship with in the first case Ovid, and the second with Oedipus. I also taught this last fall a course on' Classical Drama and the Works of Athol Fugard'. His professional work gave added insights to all the students who were studying the classical plays.

I also remember an instance when Werner Herzog attended a talk by James Diggle on Housman's emendations to classical texts, and Herzog, as a theatre/film professional, asked various questions about alternative textual choices and had the temerity to choose an emendation among those proposed on the basis of his theatrical experience. Diggle agreed with his choice. The practitioner helped a classicist here.

I find also that when classicists try to direct or put on the 'classics', their lack of theatrical know-how makes it dead in the water. I would also even apply that to Peter Hall and his ghastly productions with masks that make words unintelligible. My daughter and I saw his Oedipus plays in London , and she turned to me and said, 'That's why I gave up classics. That was totally lifeless.' She has her Ph.D. in French literature instead.

One last point about theory vs. practice. Frank Lentriccha said 'theory is dead.' Edward Said told me he writes for people to understand, not to show how cleverly he could use specialized jargon. But I have found that Classics departments and Theatre departments both (I'm a member of both at the University of California , San Diego), are slow to learn this. They are behind the literature departments who now often opt for writing comprehensible English. I have eight doctoral students writing their dissertations with me at the moment, and I encourage their speaking accessible English, rather than jumping through some witty hoops developed by people whom I think use it to cover up the paucity of both their scholarship and their imagination through their use of theoretical jargon. If one wants to communicate the value of the original classic, one needs a production that is in accessible English, actable, and moving. One can learn how to do this from theatre professionals, not only the directors who want to be 'faithful' to the classics in a literal way.

So both interpretation of lines, and actual emendations can be vitally informed by the practitioner, and the rehearsal room. As Jane suggests, there are many more fruitful results possible from this collaboration. Brava Jane!

Michael Ewans
University of Newcastle , Australia

Everything Jane says is both courageous and right . And I appreciate her isolation when she has to put up with a senior classicist who 'sees little crossover between modern performance and Greek drama'. (Where has he or she been these last few years?). It is only one step from that learned person's general position to the totally untenable specific stance taken by Jennifer March, who was privileged to view, at a conference in Chicago in 1993, a realization by Fiona Shaw of extracts from the part of Elektra, and pronounced that 'C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas Sophocle' – because it offended against an image of Elektra which March had formed when reading the text in her study.

I simply ask – what is the basis for such assertions by classicists? I have read many scholarly interpretations of Sophokles, and far too many of them (including March's own paper at that same conference) show no awareness whatsoever that Sophokles was a poiêtes , for whom the text was a component part of the performance which he presented for competition in the Festival of Dionysos; the text was devised not to be read, but to be spoken and sung .

There is a discipline in which these basic facts about Greek tragedy and comedy are acted upon; but (alas) that discipline is not Classics. Serious attention has indeed been given to the relationship between staging and meaning in Greek drama; but it has mostly been given by scholars who were originally trained in classics, but have (in my case, due to sheer frustration with purely literary and historical 'interpretations') left Classics in order to work in the discipline of Drama (or Theatre Studies). In England think of Michael Walton, David Wiles, Graham Ley (watch for his major book, The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing-space and Chorus , due from Chicago this northern autumn); in Australia Gregory McCart and I have been active in the field.

In our discipline of drama, the rehearsal room is an integral part of academic work, from first year to postdoctoral study. A replica of a stage shape from the past is a laboratory, in which experimental questions can be posed, tested, and answered – not in the study, where a variety of hypotheses can be maintained which often collapse under practical scrutiny, but by actually trying out different ways of staging a scene and a play. (The New Globe in London is not merely a tourist attraction, but a research workplace in which fascinating new discoveries about the stagecraft and dramatic technique of the Elizabethans are being made). Jane has to a certain extent been intimidated by the claim, made by some classicists, that their discipline is somehow more 'objective' than theatre practice; this claim is simply wrong. Subjective judgment is at much at work when a classical philologist uses his or her knowledge of classical Greek and his or her (subjective) feelings about appropriateness to decide what reading to print when making a scholarly edition of the Greek text, as it is when a drama scholar uses his or her knowledge of Greek stagecraft, together with his or her feelings about appropriateness, when deciding how a classical Greek text might have been realized in performance.

I wonder why this (to me, obvious) fact is so threatening to many classical scholars. There are of course several honourable exceptions; they are led in the UK by Oliver Taplin, by Lorna Hardwick, who goes to and learns from as many modern performances of Greek tragedy as she can, and by my one-time Cambridge supervisor Pat Easterling, who astonished and delighted me by citing two performance-based insights – one of my own, and one by Gregory McCart – when delivering her plenary address on Sophokles at the Greek Drama III conference in Sydney in 2002. By contrast the appearance of my edition of Aischylos, Oresteia in 1995 resulted in a very hostile Canadian response from Ian Storey and Toph Marshall. Fortunately for me, this review appeared in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and I was therefore able to reply, defending my research methods. To my delight, emails of support for my reply came in from all over North America – from classicists!

So Jane is far from alone. She is a formidable actor and director (I have been privileged to see videos both of her own performance as Elektra, and of her Cambridge production); her only problem is that she wants to bring the experience of the rehearsal room to bear not in Drama, where we are used to using this space as a teaching and research laboratory, but in Classics, where clearly some barriers need to be broken down. But hopefully this is only a matter of time! After all, Classics has adopted many different new methodologies in the last few decades – including sociology, modern anthropology, structuralism and feminism. It would be good to see performance studies firmly added to this mix.

References

Jennifer March in Dunn, F. (ed.), Sophocles' Elektra in Performance (Stuttgart 1966)

Ewans, M. (ed. and tr.), Aeschylus: The Oresteia (London 1995)

Ewans, M. (ed. and tr.) (with Graham Ley and Gregory McCart) Sophokles: Three Dramas of Old Age (London 2000).

BMCR 96.9.96, review of Ewans 1995 by Storey and Marshall; my reply was published in the same e-journal in 1997.

For information about practice as research through performance, a visit is recommended to the website of the PARIP group at Bristol university Drama Department, led by Professor Baz Kershaw; http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip

Lorna Hardwick,
The Open University, UK

Thank you Jane for a very thought-provoking contribution. I'd like to take up a point you make near the beginning of your paper when you refer to the 'methodological tussle' you have experienced. I think that such tussles are part of the game for all of us researching in this area, ie for both theatre practitioners and academics, although of course the features differ. In my own case, I'm very aware of a methodological issue that's important in researching and documenting the relationship between ancient and modern performance. I was originally trained as an ancient historian but to work on modern performance I also have to be sensitive to the impact of the directors/actors/designers/translators/adapters and to the way in which their practice is grounded in other kinds of experience and traditions. So I'm dealing with the kinds of sources that hardly exist for researching ancient performance. As a result of thinking about the modern primary sources I'm very aware of the big gap between (for example) using interviews as a source for a director's approach and actually understanding how practice is constituted and can itself be research. I don't see the academic/practice relationship as polarized between 'objective' and subjective' but more as provoking reflection on what one is doing and how and why and what difference it makes. It seems to me that experiential insights aren't just about how one feels but also about what one does (both as a response to feeling and in shaping it) and how that transforms not just the individual but also the audience and readers and their perspectives on the play. I see this as a constantly evolving process pf re-engagement with both performance and reading and academics need this as much as practitioners do.

So academics can perhaps learn from the experiential approach, not just as a aid to understanding what's going on in performance but also in relation to our own work. Perhaps the concept of the classicist as practitioner is worth looking at?

George Theodoridis
Australia www.users.bigpond.net.au/soloword

A co-denizen at last!

Thank you very much Jane, for an excellent read; one which nourished and delightfully challenged my every corpuscle!

I must admit, I did not get the chance to read Taplin's 2002 paper to which Jane referred. Judging by what she said about it, it seems Taplin would have covered much of what I'm about to say, though, this is only my guess.

Jane admits, she has no answers to the plethora of rhetorical questions she has posed to us and, moreover, I have yet to work my head around the sentence, 'There is still within me, however, the nagging feeling that in all of my readings of this material, my question remains not so much unanswered, as, rather, unasked.' I admit wholeheartedly, Jane, this sentence has me flummoxed!

It is true - of course it is!- that a classicist, or a mathematician, or a physicist could learn a great deal from an actor (and let's not forget here the influence of the kindly director who is but one only of many other serious influences which will play upon her feelings and understanding of a stage), whether she is an actor of the classics or of modern plays. So could a psychologist, a philosopher, an ethicist, a social worker, as well as a teacher of economics. The stage can indeed teach a great many and very valuable things and, indeed again, the actor can learn a great many and valuable things from these 'academics'. Dare I also suggest that whilst classicists learn from each other and from (mainly) their library, an actor can learn a great deal also from non-academics –like her next door friend, a toddler, an athlete, a baker, a candlestick maker?

So then, what do we make of this?

My biggest fear, as an ex-teacher and an ex-actor/director (aren't we all?) has always been the little word 'over.' Over-teaching, over-producing, over-directing, over-acting… you get my drift. As a teacher, I used to see the young teachers studying endlessly to find even more 'facts' to tell their poor students who already had written or gathered huge piles of them. 'Don't forget the role Fate plays in the Greek theatre… Don't forget the role love and hate play in the S/sperean theatre… and Time! See how Sophocles uses Time… veeeery important; don't forget this, don't forget that and don't forget to read the sixteen books I've lent you all…'

The better teacher, of course, would minimise the extra material and emphasise that which is necessary.

My heart then goes out to the poor actor, too, who must listen –often against her better judgement- to a young director, all eager to over-direct, only to have his (over-)exuberance added to by some classicist who knows even more 'stuff' (unrelated to the stage or the play as it will be performed by her) stuff which he is eager to over-teach and which (stuff) she, the actor, must intergrate into whatever her understanding is of, say, an Elektra who has been played a million times and still played identically everywhere, every time with only subtle variations of tone, pitch and emotion hidden/half hidden behind a mask.

And my heart goes out to the poor classicist, too, whose job is to gather as much info about the ancient history of an empire, its drama, its poetry, its customs, its coinage and who suddenly must fit into her already heavy curriculum the thoughts of an actor who can only tell her how she feels in the rehearsal room, or in her bedroom as she reads her lines to herself, or on the stage, before, during and after the show. 'Experiential insight' can far easier be shared in a pub between friends than in the gaps between the lines of a curriculum.

I had the enormous pleasure of participating in a short correspondence with John Taylor who teaches Classics at Bradfield College (Reading , UK). He is currently working with a group of 13-18 year olds on a production of Medea to be performed in the original Greek (June 22-27 www.bradfieldcollege.org.uk) in the college amphitheatre. Many of the students involved in the production have little or no experience of the ancient language but are keen to be actors. Should then that poor classicist for whom I had taken my hat off above, reject any of these actors? If not, what would each learn from t'other – classicist from actor, actor from classicist?

Similarly, some of the students of a school for the blind near my house are actors; the actors of a school for the deaf. They and many other, non-conventional actors also have their views about the plays they're engaged in. How many of them do we ask to enter the revered halls of academia? And, in this globalised globe which affords us the opportunity to cross-fertilise minds and inventions alike, which particular halls? Those of Jakarta , of Lesotho , Addis Ababa , Tashken? Lima ? Bogota ? Which actors?

Not only that, but Jane adds another question, 'what if we extended the range of questioning… to the unknown actors: to Chrysothemis as well as Elektra… to the supernumeraries?' And still another: 'What if we collected a record of their emotional and visceral responses?' What follows is, I believe, not an answer but a mute response, the like of which might prompt one to say that 'the question was not asked.'

So, no, I don't think that overcrowding anyone's curriculum is of any help. Nor do I suggest the contrary: that communication –free, impulsive, left-to-chance communication and not forced or contrived by the administration- between faculties, any faculties, between interested friends should be prohibited. Socrates had a few cautionary remarks to make about learning which he has expressed most adequately in Protagoras but that aside, learning is, by and large, a good thing: Over-learning (ladling more soup into an already full bowl) makes for a very sluggish, indolent soul.

Here I am reminded of Francis Coppola's efforts to get Brando to 'feel' and 'think' like Kurtz. All that 'method acting torture' all that hard slog called 'actors' exercises' when push came to shove amounted to nothing. Some actors, we must face this fact, are simply photographer's models: they want to be told where to stand, how to move from spot one to spot two, what modulations should their voices have. Often, these actors, bless their souls, produce a far better result than those who are bloated with Grotovsky and Stanislavsky, Elia Kazan and all the other dogma-lovers who followed them. And they, too are actors. Would they be able to contribute anything to the 'Classicist's brief?'

I'm afraid, too, that the words 'academic' and 'classicist' have been used so as to mean one and the same thing. They don't of course and whilst these two words might have distinct and easily discernible meanings, the word classicist, at least to my mind, is not altogether that clear. Many of the Universities I was lucky enough to visit have different subjects making up this faculty: anything from Middle Eastern Studies to Roman History with a bit of Greek History thrown in but with no Ancient Greek language whatsoever. Or some other permutations in variance with other Universities around the planet. I'm mentioning this because whoever these hypothetical actors/directors are, they may not always be able to help with Jane's ambitions of bringing the '…unashamedly subjective, temporarily specific and emotionally idiosyncratic' to 'co-exist in a discipline that seeks ' the philologia perennis' and the factual objectivity that can 'distinguish error from truth, and the opinion of the passing day from that true knowledge which lasts for ever'' (quoting Pfeiffer 1968)

Which actor then? And which Classicist? Let's not get the one confused with the other.

Finally, it cannot be overemphasised that the single most important thing for the stage, is the script. Everyone, actor, director, producer, audience must be comfortable with the script. If I had a dictum - and I don't because dicta are as restrictive and inhibitive to the imagination as are the dogmas, it would be that 'it's the script that makes the play and it's everyone else's job not to destroy it.' When we are discussing ancient plays, it would, of course, mean the translation. It is there, perhaps the director should ask careful questions. Not so that she will have an accurate rendition of the original but so that she knows where she is with it. Where the 'centre' of the original is and how far from that centre the translator roams; purposefully or otherwise. Fiona Shaw's performance would not exist without Sophocles having given her the gift of his script Electra .

In the end that's what all thespians are working from –that and, when it's available, the director's imagination which must not be hampered by some, classicist's 'Oh-so-erudite utterance;' and so far as a classicist's lecture theatre is concerned, it is her script, on her subject, her findings, her research on her area along with her imagination that must be heard by her audience (the students), not something collaged with the quazi-emotions or non-emotions of an actor.

I did have a bit of a chuckle with Jane's final sentence. Allow me to include an emphasis:

'In listening to her experiences, we as classicists can do the same'.

But then again I just might be reading too much into it.

Thank you again very much, Jane for an excellent read.

Final Response by Topic Leader Jane Montgomery Griffiths

Thank you to those who have responded to my paper last month. I appreciate your time and comments. I've found a deal of cross-over between the responses, but for the sake of order, I'll reply to each separately.

Thanks so much for your comments, Marianne, which I was very interested to read. When I read your work, I find your ability to combine scholarly analysis with passionate personal engagement to the 'living' possibilities of Greek tragedy very powerful (and occasionally challenging!): a fascinating antidote to the pseudo-objectivism I find so problematic. I enjoyed reading about your experiences with Trojan Women and Antigone . Perhaps they also show the strange combination of universality and minute specificity that performance insight can bring: the experiences of those performers and audience members were quite unique to the contexts of those productions and rehearsals, and yet analogous emotions can be felt by other performers, other audiences in other productions and other contexts (I'm thinking about a production of Trojan Women I directed when there were times when you'd have to scrape us all off the floor after a run-through, we found it all so harrowing). These experiences don't show us a universal 'answer' to staging a play (or opera), but show us a variant that can contribute to an understanding of the play (or libretto) as singular and multiple.

Which brings me to your fascinating point about James Diggle, Werner Herzog and textual emendation. When I was lucky enough to work with James a few years ago, he was wonderfully open and unfazed about my requests that he re-write Sophocles to do away with Pylades - perhaps indicative of his feeling that actorly emendations are just part of the performance tradition. His alteration of the text (a text already at so many unknown removes from the imagined archetype) and my use of those emendations (a use totally specific to that production) make me wonder if there isn't an interesting, if challenging, correlation between textual theory and performance practice; at least in terms of the theoretical implications of universal variation and simultaneous singularity and multiplicity. Certainly Worthern (1997) has picked that up in Shakespeare scholarship, and Gurd (2005) has recently argued for something like that (albeit without the performance aspect) in Euripides. Such a correlation might have enjoyable implications for befuddling essentialists and formalists who think there is only one way to 'do' or 'approach' a text. Since you mention Peter Hall, I should add that these dogmatists are just as likely to be found in the rehearsal room as in academia (as anyone who has worked with Hall is likely to tell you …).

Thank you, too, Michael, for such a detailed response. Your comments complement Lorna's very interestingly and demonstrate again the methodological potential for reflective practitioner theory and experiential learning. I have often thought that your practice and writing demonstrates strongly the idea of the rehearsal room as a practicum (much as Schön [1987] envisages), where experimentation through performance can lead to analytical theorising and vice versa . When I have read your work and seen your productions (unfortunately only on video), I have been aware of how you have used theory and practice to inform each other.

I am most interested by what you say about the distinction between subjective and objective. To an extent, you are right about the 'intimidation' I have felt; although I would say that that is endemic in academia, not just in Classics. Partly, that is because of the culture shock of moving from professional theatre into the university sector; partly it is because of the institutional mores of the university system. Why is it, for example, that performance practice is, institutionally, given such a lowly research status? Why is it that in such an environment, my experience as an actor and director can openly be interpreted as dilettantism rather than interdisciplinarity? These are interesting questions that say something quite telling about academic culture: there is a pervasive need to hold on to the idea of 'objectivity', even if, at root, we all know it is something of a sham. I don't for an instant believe that the scholar in the nook merely monastic has any chance of finding an 'objective' reading of a text - the process of interpretation too thoroughly entwines the subjective and objective and the two can rarely be disentangled. But what I do believe is that there is a culture of pretending that the scholar can (your example of March on Shaw is a fine case in point: why not just say 'C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas Electre pour moi '?), because to do otherwise opens one up to the potential criticism of being uncertain, ignorant and wrong (to paraphrase Van Nortwick 1997).

I think that performance as research as some major methodological problems - but I also think that those very problems open up further immensely interesting issues about practice, reception and interpretation. From my own experience, I don't, for example, believe that performance as research offers answers to questions about ancient staging practice. For me, it primarily offers insight into the play and its reception in the contemporary context of a certain specific time, place and production. But I find it fascinating that you have such a different approach to the research implications of performance. The fact that we have such contrasting ideas about what performance insight can contribute demonstrates the possibilities, not the problems, of this line of enquiry. If it offers nothing else, reflection on the experience of the performance practitioner provides a forum for analysing interpretational multiplicity and interrogating the polyvalence of the text and the theatrical event. It prompts us to look at the nature of the interpretation underpinning our performance choices and our methodological frame. To my mind, it's no bad thing for us to be ' why? ' of ourselves - and that applies equally to the Classicist, the drama theorist and the performance practitioner.

Thank you, Lorna, for such an insightful response. I feel you hit the nail on the head for me, and point out very succinctly what I, too, believe (and wish I had stated with your clarity!): that is, that there is substantial cross-over between the practitioner roles of the academic and the performer/director. Both are involved in creative acts of interpretation, albeit with different parameters and in different media. I suppose we are dealing here with issues of hermeneutics, at base, and your comments suggest strongly the possibility that by reflecting on the different but complementary practices of academia and performance, we can reach that 'emancipatory hermeneutic' that can open up our understanding in mutually enriching interdisciplinarity. I'd like to think so. At core, I completely agree with your view of there not being a polarisation between the subjective and objective voice. My problem is that, in practical experience, I have found a lot of resistance to my attempts to combine the two voices: actors can be wary of 'intellectuals'; academics can be dismissive of 'theatricals' (I hasten to add, not all academics and actors, since I am wary here of Mr Theodoridis' implicit accusation that I have been generalist in my statements. Perhaps I've just been unlucky in some of my experiences …). That is where reflective practice and experiential learning can come in as a useful new methodological approach for the study of ancient texts and their modern incarnations. As you have previously helped me to see, it enables us not just to reflect on our experiences, but to look for educational and progressive uses (and applications) for that reflection: a means of developing our future practice by reassessment of our past. Perhaps as this methodology evolves, we will find a way of incorporating an understanding of 'what one does' with an appreciation of 'how one feels'. It is tricky to find the vocabulary and parameters for such research, but will be worth it if we can lessen the division between the subjective and the objective.

Finally to George (if I may): thank you for your response.

I'm not sure from your comments whether you are adding to my 'plethora of rhetorical questions' or trying to refute them by 'over'-loading them. I'm presuming the latter, so I'll defend my asking the 'unasked question'. Yes, there is vast variation in the sort of actors one finds (and no, not everyone is an ex-actor/director; if they were, my central premise wouldn't be an issue). Similarly there is vast variation in the sort of classicists one finds; the sort of translations one finds; and, to follow your lists, the sort of friends, toddlers, athletes and bakers one can find. Never for an instant would I argue that there is homogeneity between people, or even in a profession. I am not speaking from a generalist perspective, but from a specific, experiential and personal one. Those actors and classicists to whom I refer are not generic amalgams, but are specific people whom I have met, read, known, sometimes worked with. My interaction with them has shaped my ideas about Greek tragedy in performance, about the discipline of Classics and the craft of acting, and about the possible relationship between the two. In owning my personal engagement, I have come to believe in the necessity of acknowledging the subjectivity implicit, but often unrecognised, in interpretation. Having done that, I have also come to believe that reflection on the mechanisms behind interpretation (whether that be as a scholar or a performer) can throw useful, if occasionally troubling, light on the process and the product of hermeneutic engagement. That is where Habermas' 'emancipatory hermeneutic' comes in: reflection on one's own or another's interpretational processes should not swamp the hypothetical teacher, scholar or actor in dogma (or irrelevant material). Rather, it has the potential to liberate by preventing the one who is reflecting from falling into the sort of generalisation of which, if I read you right, you find me guilty. I don't think that considering how we interpret (or how others interpret) need bog down the over-burdened teacher or the over-stimulated actor: it could just help to free them up.