Greek
Drama at the end of the Twentieth century: Cultural Renaissance
or Performative outrage?
Professor
Lorna Hardwick
This article is
based on a lecture given to the annual meeting of the Society
for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies in London in June 2000.
It is offered here as a position paper to highlight aspects of
current debate on performance and reception issues. I am grateful
to the Council of the Society for their invitation and to members
of the audience for comments and discussion, both on the day and
subsequently.
‘Classics are
simply residues, maps left over from earlier cultures; they invite
you to make some sort of imaginative movement’: Jonathan
Miller (1968), commenting on his work directing Robert Lowell’s
Prometheus. [1]
My purpose in this
lecture is to identify some of the imaginative movements which
are taking place and to consider how they are being received and
what kinds of cultural shift may be involved.
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Introduction
The virtual explosion
of performances of Greek plays, translations of Greek plays and
adaptations of Greek plays shows no sign of diminishing. Within
the last eighteen months or so in the UK alone we have had (the
numbers in brackets refer to the documentation of the productions
on the Data Base which is part of this research project) :
-
The London Festival
of Greek Drama, an annual event, which this year had Birds
in Greek (DB no. 2519), Oedipus the King in English translation
and Peace in English translation (DB no. 877).
-
The triennial production
in Greek at Bradfield College, this time a superb Hippolytus,
notable both for its choreography for the Chorus based on modern
music and dance rhythms and for its formal qualities (DB no.
2520).
-
The Actors of Dionysus
tour with theAgamemnon (DB no. 1119) and Grave Gifts
(DB no. 1113), the latter a bold decision to present the Choephori
on its own.
-
The Oxford University
Dramatic Society's Birds in translation (DB no. 967)
and Iphigenia in Aulis in Greek (DB no. 966), as well
as a production of Seamus Heaney’s A Cure at Troy (DB no. 1109), subtitled ‘after Sophocles’ and taking
the Philoctetes as its source text.
-
Another student
production of Birds - the Scottish Academy of Music and
Drama’s version at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, entitled God Love Thatcher (fade to Greek)(DB no. 1108).
-
The Fringe also
had a somewhat neglected Women of Troy by Courttia Newland,
in which the opening words to the prologue were ‘ this
is Nathan Poseidon reporting from the South Atlantic for the
Times’ (DB no. 1114). (The Trojans were Christians and
Cassandra a Jesus-freak).
-
Also at Edinburgh
was the latest in the Tomee Theatre company’s series of
Antigones, characterised by dance and the use of the body as
the main instrument of communication (DB no. 1117)
-
Antigone also got prime time in Oxford and London in Declan Donellan’s
version of Will Allan’s translation (DB no. 1091). This
I found striking in its use of the movement of the Chorus to
frame the changing focus of the action and in its ability to
present Creon as a flawed tyrant from the beginning and yet
to suggest in the second half of the play that the play is as
much his tragedy as Antigone's.
-
In late 1998 we
had the tour of the Craiova Theatre Company of Romania with
their Oresteia (DB no. 940) directed by Silviu Purcarete.
Four hours of Aeschylus in Romanian with English sur-titles
looking like Tube-train indicator boards was not as dire as
it sounds. The effect of silhouette and mime and the synchronised
Chorus of grey suited politburo geriatrics was stunning and
transcended language barriers, even for those in the audience
who did not previously know the play.
-
The Oresteia,
and especially the Eumenides, ought, one feels, to be
the play for the turn of a century in such need of conflict
resolution and the late Ted Hughes’version of the Oresteia,
presented by the Royal National Theatre and directed by Katie
Mitchell, took over the Cottesloe on the South Bank in London
before touring the States (DB nos 1111 and 1112). Mitchell defended
the Balkanisation and other contemporary allusions in the staging
as responses to current uncertainties –‘a lot of us
feel morally thrown…and don’t know how to find our
bearings morally and politically. To some extent the production
was working that through’ (New York Times, May 7,
2000).
-
In such a context,
Electra also seems a play of choice and was presented
in Greek in Newcastle and London by the pupils of Newcastle
High School (DB no. 2547).
-
The Compass Theatre
Company’s production of Electra (DB no 989), featuring
Jane Montgomery in the title role, alternately outraged and
transfixed audiences nationally. (It also prompted the only
audience row I have witnessed, when after the play the foyer
at the Ustinov Studio in Bath was blocked by debaters angry
about whether the recognition scene should have been played
in such a brutal manner or with tenderness).
-
Theatre Cryptic’s Electra (Glasgow and on the Edinburgh fringe) exploited
multi-media, to achieve both shock and, in the recognition scene,
tenderness and subtlety (DB no. 1115).
-
No-one who saw
Messing with Medea (by the now sadly defunct Orchard
Theatre Company, DB no. 1000), which both toured and showcased
at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, will readily forget
the versatility of the two member cast and especially the gripping,
silently enacted physical and emotional transformation of the
Nurse of the Prologue into the figure of Medea, silhouetted
against a plain white sail sheet. The audience of fidgeting
school-students were stilled and hardly drew breath for the
rest of the performance.
-
In the summer of
2000 Fiona Shaw, directed by Deborah Warner is playing Medea
at the Abbey, Dublin (DB no. 2573), and is, according to one
critic (Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, 10/6/00) ‘more
sad than bad, infected with the bitter humour of the terminally
despairing’.
-
Drawing out the
irony and playing Medea with black humour was a characteristic
of Liz Lochhead’s translation, which featured in what for
me has been the outstanding theatrical experience of the last
few months, Greeks performed by theatre babel in the
Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow in March. This consisted of three
separate versions of Greek plays, each running for about one
and a quarter hours and specially commissioned from modern Scottish
writers: - Oedipus by David Grieg (DB no. 2524); Electra
by Tom McGrath (DB no. 2521) and Medea by Lochhead (DB
no. 2510). The Old Fruitmarket is what the name implies - a
traditional and unconverted ex covered- market venue with stark
red brick walls, high and resonant roof, cobbles and flagstones
underfoot. The atmosphere was electric on the Saturday night
when all three plays were presented in sequence to a capacity
audience.
-
Scotland’s
ability to energise new forms of classical theatre was underlined
in the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Theatre’s production of Edwin
Morgan’s translation into modern Scots of Racine’s Phèdre. In this Phaedra (DB no. 2525) Euripides,
Seneca, and Racine were interleaved on a playing space formed
from a huge shell shape (designed by Isla Shaw). This took over
the stalls and was raised to the level of the grand circle (with
safety net in place) while some of the audience sat on what
would traditionally have been the stage, giving the effect of
performance in the round.
-
To the list of
such 'close relatives' of Greek drama one might add the Gate
Theatre’s touring production of Peter Oswald’s Odyssey,
(DB no. 1090), directed by Martin Wylde and Tony Harrison’s
verse-film Prometheus (DB no. 946), still discoverable
at some Arts cinemas.
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Now this may sound
like a bewildering array of Greek plays (including some which
were not very Greek either in conception or performance). And
in a sense it is, but from it some significant patterns emerge:-
Firstly, productions
range across the whole spectrum of theatre: student drama, touring
productions directed mainly at the school and college syllabus
but attracting broader audiences; fringe and experimental productions;
commercial theatre; international tours by prestigious companies;
involvement of leading actors, writers and directors as an integral
part of their oeuvre. Greek plays and Greek referents are a significant
part of artistic creative activity. In this respect, they can
be seen both as part of the transmission of ancient culture and
as a springboard for artistic and intellectual intervention in
staging and interpretation, with all that that entails for various
forms of theatre and for critique of modern artistic forms and
their social and political context. Greek drama is a catalyst.
Secondly, there is
a corresponding variety in audiences and in audience knowledge
about the source plays and source culture. Clearly Greek plays,
both in the original and in translation are an important part
of student experience of theatre (as audiences and as players).
For many, Greek plays are the only or primary source of awareness
of ancient culture. They may be the only experience of Greek drama
‘away from the page’ and changes and adaptations will
shape or reshape the audience’s views about the ancient world.
Impact on the audience’s cultural sensitivity, to both ancient
and modern and to perceptions of links and differences between
the two, can be considerable.
Thirdly, there is
the question of which plays are selected for performance (and
I leave aside for the moment the influence of the syllabus!).
It is often said that the 1980s and 1990s have prioritised Greek
plays that are also war plays – well, that covers most of
them! Karelisa Hartigan has argued that this is the case for the
20th century as a whole, at least in the USA, where
she considers that Greek drama in the commercial theatre was most
prominent when the country was involved in war. [2]
Certainly its true that the prominence of certain plays seems
to be cyclic and perhaps relates to some extent to the possibilities
for the production style to resonate with modern contexts. Yet
this is not always straightforward. For example, while the Eumenides
is significant as a play which explores ways of breaking the cycle
of revenge and killing, it is actually quite difficult to situate
away from the ancient context, especially in terms of the importance
of Athena’s support for the primacy of male over female as
part of the resolution of the conflict. Modern staging increasingly
includes an additional stress on the perspective of Clytemnestra,
either by recasting the story from her viewpoint (as in the recent
production in the USA of Kelly Stuart’s Furious Blood,
DB no. 2581) or by including Euripides’ Iphigenia
in Aulis as a prelude or by miming the sacrifice of Iphigenia
at the crucial point in the chorus of the Agamemnon. (This
is not always a very effective counter-attack against the demonisation
of Clytemnestra, at least in the recent RNT production I referred
to just now).
In contrast, it is
interesting that Birds is making a comeback. It seems to
me to be a play which defies seriously reductionist staging –
ie staging which concentrates on crude equivalences between ancient
and modern or which beats an ideological drum. I do not know whether
there are plans to stage Paul Muldoon’s recent version. [3]
If so it will be worth seeing for the very reason that Muldoon’s
script self-reflexively plays with and subverts attempts to anchor
it tightly in any one modern socio-political context. Although
there are puns and allusions, they remain just that.
This question of the
selection of plays for performance is not just a matter of the
external environment but also of the internal world of the theatre.
It also relates, I think, to the impact of canonical productions
and performances, against which practitioners measure themselves
or against which they react. This sometimes makes for interesting
paradoxes. For example, some may come to be considered ‘canonical
productions’ theatrically because of their authority and
influence, for instance Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides or
the Shaw/Warner Electra and they may nevertheless have
provoked fierce debate about staging, interpretation, acting style
and so on. This seems to me to be thoroughly healthy.
As an optimist, the
features I have identified suggest to me that we are about to
see a new and more sophisticated phase in the staging of Greek
drama, with greater emphasis on creativity within classical repertoire.
In hoping this I am probably in a minority. I am struck by the
extent to which some critics (and academics) are overdosing on
apoplexy. Here are some recent examples:
1) The cultural argument
In Arion 1996
was published an iconoclastic article by Herbert Holder ‘Geek
Tragedy? – or why I’d rather go to the movies’.[4]
Golder voiced a deep disenchantment with almost all contemporary
staging, partly because he thought the productions were flawed
but mainly because they were contemporary in a way which, he felt,
privileged modern resonances and acting styles over the Greek.
His main assertion was that ‘the ephemeral must never be
allowed to occlude the essential’. Of course, this encodes
a particular view of the Classical Tradition, which is seen as
a vehicle for transmission of an iconic conception of the plays,
rather than as a strand in dialogic processes of reception and
refiguration. Golder’s view entails a rejection of insights
from other traditions such as Noh drama (which he categorised
as ‘Nipponising’ at the hands of Mnouchkine).
2) The argument about
authenticity versus commercialism
Of course Golder has
been castigated by Oliver Taplin and others but aspects of his
unease permeate a good deal of academic responses to contemporary
staging. Robert Garland, who is preparing a book in this area,
suggested in a recent electronic seminar organised by the Reception
of Classical Texts Research Project that the ideal would be to
commission joint translations by a philologist and a professional
writer, as is done for productions in the ancient theatre of Syracuse.
The translation is tested in the actors’ school and modified
according to the demands of fluency and actability. This would
be interesting as an action research project but Garland thinks
that such a synthesis of talent and expertise is not generally
viable . He said – ‘although classicists are often deeply
disturbed by the latitude that translations take, particularly
those that are staged, they are of course in no position to teach
the contemporary theatre director his or her profession, especially
when big bucks are concerned, which is where the heart of the
problem lies’.
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3) The too-close-for-comfort
argument
This takes a number
of forms but usually involves accusations of creating a new mythology
or conflating ancient and modern experience and sufferings –
for example in the critical review by Keith Miller in the Times
Literary Supplement of Tony Harrison’s Prometheus
- ‘There is an arrogant tendency to conflate all of the big
themes of the past 100 years into one enormous supermyth’.
[5]
These reactions ,
I suggest, encode a number of features. Firstly, they reveal a
sense of cultural ownership which privileges some appropriating
cultures over others and gives academics a special role in safeguarding
the authenticity of transmission. In other words, it is claimed
that theatre in relation to Greek plays must be of a certain kind.
Some aspects of this seem to be related to a sense of a crisis
in Classics (especially Greek) and one senses that ‘Who killed
Homer?’ may shortly be succeeded by ‘Who killed Greek
drama?’ Then there is what I call the Phrynichos syndrome.
Herodotus tells us (Book 6.21.2) that the subject matter of The
destruction of Miletos was too close to home. Phrynichos
crossed the safety gap between theatre and ‘real life’
and between mythology and civic life. He narrowed the distance
between tragedy and the audience’s overpowering troubles
and was attacked for doing this. Perhaps that was why the Harrison
film of Prometheus offended? Yet if the gap is too great,
the force of tragedy is lost. The balance between the two extremes
will be one of the concerns of the rest of this paper.
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A Renaissance of
Greek Drama?
The criticisms and
anxieties which I have just summarised represent a move away from
the sense of relief, almost gratitude which one used to sense
amongst audiences and critics when discussing the revival of Greek
plays. There was almost a feeling that we had to enjoy,
appreciate and praise, if only to ensure that plays continued
to be presented and that Greek drama (and by implication a toe-hold
on Greek language) did not fade from view. So in one way it might
be said that fierce aesthetic and cultural debate is a sign of
confidence, that Greek drama is established with some security
in the repertoire, that its importance is recognised and that
the nature and quality of performances is important not only for
transmission of Greek culture but also for the vitality and diversity
of modern theatrical experience. Yet in another sense, as I’ve
suggested, the debates betray fear: a fear of cultural exchange,
of loss of control over the processes of cultural transmission
and interpretation.
I have always tended
to resist the application of the term Renaissance to the phenomenon
of the recovery of Greek drama in all the various sectors of theatre
and performance that I described earlier. I have doubts about
the metaphor because, despite the best efforts of cultural historians,
the term is so often used in the narrow and unproblematic sense
of reviving the past or even, at worst, as part of the ‘Grand
Narrative’ of the rise of Western civilisation, a view summarised
recently as ‘a triumphalist account of Western achievement
from the Greeks onwards in which the Renaissance is a link in
the chain which includes the Reformation, the scientific revolution,
the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and so on’.
[6]
The author of that
verdict on the Grand Narrative, Peter Burke, has published a revisionist
assessment of the nature and scope of the Renaissance. The features
which his account attributes to the Renaissance are a source for
several aspects of the model which I wish to develop in order
to describe and test the cultural impact of Greek drama today.
Some aspects of Burke’s approach are surely uncontroversial
: he defines a Renaissance as a movement rather than as an event
or a period. He asserts that this movement involved innovation
as well as renovation and that it was characterised
by enthusiasm for antiquity and the revival, reception and transformation
of the classical tradition. Burke also identifies a paradox which
is important for my concerns. Although his Renaissance emphasised
the way in which innovation and the recovery of antiquity went
together (p 2), he notes a discontinuity in attitude between that
time and contemporary culture, which prizes novelty and finds
it difficult to respond to the sometimes difficult relationship
between innovation and tradition. Most important of all for my
purposes is Burke’s presentation of the Renaissance as ‘de-centred’,
rather than as holding the centre-stage position which has traditionally
been ascribed to it. He views the culture of Western Europe at
that time as one culture among others, ‘co-existing and interacting
with its neighbours, notably (in his case) Byzantium and Islam,
both of which had their own ‘Renaissances’ of Greek
and Roman antiquity’ (p 3).
This draws attention
to the way in which antiquity can function as an agent and catalyst
in the processes of cultural change and cultural exchange, being
definitively ‘owned’ by none of its activators or receivers.
Burke also emphasises the status of his Renaissance as a ‘half-alien’
culture – ‘the very idea of a movement to revive the
culture of the distant past has become alien to us, since it contradicts
ideas of progress or modernity still widely taken for granted
despite many recent critiques. At the very least – since
there are degrees of otherness- we should view the culture of
the Renaissance as a half-alien culture, one which is not only
distant but receding, becoming more alien every year’ (p
4). The term ‘half-alien’ seems to me to encapsulate
the corresponding ambivalence in modern relationships with antiquity.
Yet on the other side of the coin, ‘half-alien’ also
implies half -domesticated (sc related to ‘our’
history, ‘our’ culture, even ‘our’ values).
Anything that threatens that half domestication risks turning
Greek culture into something totally alien, and thus threatening
security in the definition of domesticated culture and values.
Other aspects of Burke’s
model are valuable too. He emphasises that the concept of reception
is more ambiguous than it sounds (p 6). In the nineteenth century,
for instance, it often used to be assumed that reception was ‘
the complementary opposite of tradition’, that tradition
was a process of handing over, reception was a process of receiving
and it was assumed that what was received was what was handed
over. Alternatively (and Burke locates this in his Renaissance
as well as in the theory of the late twentieth century), the emphasis
could be on the changes that occur in the process of transmission.
Reception is seen as a form of production or as leading to production.
New work may be created even by acts of rejection as well as by
appropriation, assimilation, adaptation and other forms of reaction
and response.
There is now, increasingly,
sensitivity to the role of the processes of translation, whether
verbal or, as I shall argue in the case of Greek drama, also performative
in a way which draws also on non-verbal translational practices.
And translation theory now recognises that translation is not
necessarily a pale imitation but may be a work of art in its own
right, in which both source and target languages are transformed.
Burke points to the metaphor of ‘bricolage’, the making
of something new out of fragments of an earlier construction.
This is a metaphor adapted by Derek Walcott in his Nobel Lecture
in which he refers to the creation of a new work from the shards
of shattered epic from the past. [7]
Burke relates this metaphor to that of ‘context’, a
metaphor taken from weaving (p 9). Context is applied not just
to the parts of the text preceding and following a given quotation
but also to the cultural, social and political surroundings of
a text, image or idea. So ‘receiving’ involves a creative
adaptation for the new context. According to Burke, this involves
a double movement (p 9) - the first is that of de-contextualisation,
dislocation and appropriation; the second, that of re-contextualisation,
relocation, refamiliarisation. Of course, in the metaphorical
framework of the ‘half-alien’ this may involve various
kinds of hybridisation. It also leaves open the question of the
extent to which the source contexts and the forms embedded in
them are transplanted into the new.
The final aspect of
Burke’s model which I find particularly appropriate is that
of diaspora, although his model requires significant adaptations
in my context. Burke identifies four diasporas (p. 4) which had
a shaping role in his Renaissance. He uses the term mainly to
cover movement of people, although he also recognises the movement
of texts and images:
The first was of Greeks
who moved westwards from the beginning of the 15th
century.
The second was the
Italian diaspora of artists, humanists and merchants (to Lyons,
Antwerp and other cities).
The third was German,
especially printers but also artists (reached the area England
to Poland).
The fourth was of
Netherlanders, mainly painters and sculptors who were active in
the Baltic countries.
I think the metaphor
of diaspora is helpful not only as a feature of Renaissance but
also as a commentary on the situation that the texts and images
of antiquity are in today as part of the process of reception,
regeneration, refiguration and further reception. However, the
metaphor needs to be filled out and contextualised in a way which
differs sharply from the approach of Burke, although his broader
concept of diaspora as energising Renaissance still holds. In
the modern context I would identify three kinds of diaspora as
crucial in relation to Greek drama:
-
The displacement
of classical texts from the centre of education, culture and
institutions. This has been happening progressively since the
nineteenth century (as Chris Stray’s study has demonstrated
in detail. [8] This displacement
has been accelerated by various economic and social factors.
It also involves an element of intellectual and moral rejection
because of the association of an (admittedly selectively appropriated)
classicism with slave societies, imperialism, colonialism, fascism
and class ideology. Ironically, some of these socio-political
systems were enabling so far as the positive aspects of dispersal
were concerned, for example, through the export of colonial
systems of education (which nurtured the young Derek Walcott)
or through stimulating the use of classical texts and images
in a culture of encoded resistance (for instance in the GDR
or in apartheid South Africa).
-
In conjunction
with this there has been another kind of diaspora, a separation
of classical texts and images from their association with particular
dominant groups or with gender and class exclusions. As the
cultural politics of appropriation have become better understood,
there has developed an increased awareness among non-classicists
and classicists alike that it is simplistic to equate classical
values and cultural achievement with those groups who have appropriated
and used classical culture as a sanction for their own position.
This awareness means that the ancient texts and images are liberated
to be refigured and reappropriated by other groups and it is
here that all the elements associated with performance, both
verbal and non-verbal, have a crucial role. The current concern
with classical plays in post-devolution Scotland, for example,
promises to produce a significant commentary in this area.
-
Thirdly, there
has been a diaspora of individual artists, writers and directors.
This takes a different form. A figure like Derek Walcott is
multiply displaced – from African and European roots (because
of his ancestry), by empire, and from his home island by education,
poetry and politics. Classical texts and themes are interwoven
with all aspects of the history of this displacement and in
Walcott’s response to it. This is one reason he has engaged
so creatively with Homer, another displaced text. Seamus Heaney
is also in a sense displaced, from the North of Ireland to the
South, the product of an education part Irish- part Ascendancy-orientated
and it is his engagement with Sophocles’ Philoctetes in A Cure at Troy and with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in ‘Mycenae Lookout’ which is his means of mapping
a route through contested fields. In a slightly different way,
Tony Harrison has been displaced through education from his
working class origins and has used classical referents both
to map the process and to refigure the relationship between
classical culture and modern politics. Women writers, especially
in the theatre, have not been central to classical translation
and staging but even here Timberlake Wertenbaker, Deborah Warner
and Sarah Kane have spoken powerfully from the periphery and
moved it towards the centre. Among directors, Bertold Brecht,
Andrei Serban and Silviu Purcarete in different ways spring
from a theatrical and political diaspora and have refigured
plays from the classical canon as aesthetic experiment and ideological
critique.
Furthermore, all these
aspects of diaspora affect the nature of the audience and audience
response (whether one conceives of the audience as actual or ideal).
At any given moment, members of an audience have views which may
converge or diverge, individually and collectively, in respect
of their response to the particular play, their sense of the play’s
relationship to the Greek source or myth and the sense of the
play’s relationship to their own cultural framework, including
their sense of what is or is not ‘half-alien’. As Declan
Donnellan recently put it, ‘theatrical meaning, more than
in any other work of art is created by the observer as well as
by the artist’. [9] So I want
now to move on to consider some examples of the role of modern
performance in the recovery, transmission, refreshment and refiguration
of Greek drama and to ask questions about what is involved in
the construction of theatrical meaning and how this interconnects
with the cultural perspectives of the observer.
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The Power of Performance
In recent years, the
concept of performativity has become increasingly prominent in
Theatre Studies and related disciplines. However, there is by
no means an agreed theoretical base for the parameters of the
concept and its realisation in mis-en-scène across genres
and cultures. For my purposes I shall explore applications of
the concept which emphasise the role of performance as ‘doing’,
achieving, transforming and as having the power and authority
which goes with those acts. This of course includes verbal acts
– and here I invoke J.L.Austin’s distinction between
constative and performative utterances. The former report, describe
and propose: the latter do or enact by virtue of being uttered.
[10] However, my interest is as much in the non-verbal
languages of theatre as in the verbal. The performative impact
of a performance is created not only by the spoken text/translation/acting
script but also by the staging, set design, lighting, costume,
music and choreography. Furthermore, performative aspects of culture
are not confined to the theatre, dance studio or concert hall:
anthropological study of ritual and sociological analysis of everyday
life have revealed overlaps and interactions. In relation to the
ancient world, recent studies have investigated the relationship
between the Athenian democracy and performance culture and have
emphasised the relationship between public performance of various
kinds and broader issues relating to political agendas, the social
function of language, the construction of the political subject
and social stress and clashes of power. Critics have also emphasised
the often transitional state in performance of tragedy in the
fifth century, especially the redrawing of genre boundaries, the
refinement of dialogue and the role of stage effects.[11] The response of modern performance to these aspects
of ancient culture, both theatricially and, if I may use the term,
archaeologically, transplants and refigures these issues into
modern theatrical experience and with reference to modern cultural
contexts. An example would be a modern performance’s sensitivity
to nuances of performative mode when representing vendetta justice
and forensic justice.
In his introduction,
‘Programme Notes’, to the recent edited collection of
Essays on Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy,
Simon Goldhill has identified a framework for investigation of
the Athenian context of performance. [12]This
is bounded by four crucial Greek terms: 1) agon (contest);
2) epideixis (display). Taken together these two require
an audience. 3) schema – this is perhaps more problematic
and has an even wider semantic field. It includes gesture, dress
and equipment, the physical appearance which is subjected to the
gaze of the citizens (and which can involve concealment or semblance).
Schema involves positioning, of self or others. In Athens
the schema was open to scrutiny, evaluation and regulation.
Finally, Goldhill identifies 4) theoria, the term he uses
to discuss the changing politics of spectacle and the various
aspects of spectating, ranging from the act of attending and watching
to some kind of participation (in the religious and civic ritual,
or as a judge).
Considering the role
of the spectator or in modern terms the audience, reviewers, critics
and perhaps the Arts funders, raises significant questions about
who ‘counts’ and of the relationship between individual,
group and collective response and activity. It also raises issues
about the relationship between the ‘audience’ both inside
and outside the play (including the construction and performance
of the Chorus). If performance is, as Goldhill suggests (p.1)
‘a useful heuristic category’ which can be used to explore
the connections and overlaps between different areas of social,
artistic and political activity and if these connections and overlaps
are significant for understanding the culture of the Athenian
democracy, it follows that their mediation and enactment in modern
performance is equally (though differently) significant for understanding
the cultures which contribute to and shape the performances and
their critical reception. In this sense, the complaint of Colin
Meir that Seamus Heaney is ‘creating a new mythology’
and the critical unease of Shaun Richards about the (mis)translation
of Greek drama on the modern Irish stage look less like a plea
for authenticity than an expression of unease about the potency
of Greek drama in performance to expose faultlines and cracks
in modern cultural and political consciousness.
[13]
There is another reason,
too, why the modern performative impact of Greek drama is problematic.
This is because performance itself is ephemeral and its nature
and impact cannot be captured in the same way as is attempted
with written texts. Video may be useful but it is partial
and mono-visual and cannot in any case recreate the interactive
buzz of audience participation. Even the best efforts of current
research projects to document the elements of performance have
the limitations that the term implies. They may be able to map
the contribution of the languages of gesture and movement, dance,
music, stage effects, colour, costume and so on but they document
an historical event not a present moment in which verbal and non-verbal
combine to create the spectacle. What they can do, however, is
to record something about the balance held in each production
between the familiar and the ‘half-alien’, between the
domestic applications and the ‘safety-gap’; that is
they can suggest the nature and extent of the critical distance
which was created for a particular audience at a particular time.
I will mention just two recent examples where the interweaving
of the languages of theatre produced a performance which both
outraged some critics and transformed perceptions of the cultural
scope of Greek drama. These are taken from the performances of
Les Atrides by Le Théâtre du Soleil and a
South African Medea. In each case I will select only one
aspect for comment.
My first example illustrates
aspects of an oriental approach to theatre, developed by the French-based
company Le Théâtre du Soleil and their director Ariane
Mnouchkine. Their performance of the Oresteia was preceded
by Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and entitled Les
Atrides (DB no. 152). It toured internationally and was
performed in the UK at Bradford in 1992.The company had a background
in Eastern repertoire and the production drew on the music, movement,
acting styles and costume of Europe, Africa, China, India, the
Levant and Japan. The Japanese traditional theatres of Noh and
Kabuki, like the Greeks, used male actors, masks, poetic language
and heroic settings. My colleague Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones kindly
suggested suitable slides and gave me his recollections of the
performance. (Unfortunately for copyright reasons it is not possible
to reproduce the Les Atrides slides here).
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SLIDE 1
Kassandra, Trojan
princess and prophetess of Apollo, dressed like a Noh priestess
in a thickly padded kimono.
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SLIDE 2
The three Furies,
who in the Eumenides were dressed like oriental peasants
in layered short dirty kimonos. This led some reviewers to compare
them to modern bag ladies (Note the battered footware).
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SLIDE 3
The performance’s
approach to the audience covered the whole sequence of audience
experiences. The audience was inducted into the cross-cultural
aspects of its experience as soon as it entered the building (a
large ware-house). One might compare Heiner Müller’s
Medea Material, which also explicitly gave the audience
a role as translators/interpreters. [14]
For Les Atrides, the props in the Reception Hall included
a huge map of the Mediterranean world showing the voyages of Agamemnon;
displays relating to Greek life, including food and an entrance
area in which the audience walked above a sequence of life size
terracotta figures, like the Chinese terracotta army.
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SLIDES 4 and 5
Then the audience
was encouraged to talk to the performers as they applied their
make-up and tied on their costumes. The lights dimmed and the
dancers of the Chorus in red, black and yellow costumes, rushed
on to the roar of the kettle drum.
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SLIDE 6
In the staging, Mnouchkine
adapted both Greek and Japanese conventions and used make-up masks
which retained the capacity for a language of facial movement
(rather than shifting the emphasis entirely to body movement).
The formalised make-up here expressed grief and ritual lamentation.
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SLIDES 7 and 8
In contrast, the male
characters, wearing Kathakali heroic make-up (originating in seventeenth
century epic story telling in India) weep ‘real’ tears.
Here is Agamemnon, lamenting the sacrifice of his daughter
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SLIDE 9
As Mnouchkine put
it – ‘push internal feeling and external for to the
limit’.
Referring back to
the revisionist Renaissance model I considered earlier, you can
see that Les Atrides involved a performative disruption
of any easy association between revival of Greek drama and the
concept of a Grand Narrative of Western culture and that in it
renovation and innovation worked side by side. There is certainly
a dynamic of diaspora, a displacement of some of the accretions
to the Classical tradition and especially of the association of
a canonical text with a particular dominant culture. The response
of critics may be conditioned by the fact that for those accustomed
to a western theatrical tradition, the performance then becomes
more that ‘half-alien’ - hence the desire of Golder
to reject it in favour of a gospel performance style that he considered
was more familiar, more domestic, to the culture of the USA, and
especially to its ritual and religious aspects.
My final example is
from the Mark Fleischman and Jennie Reznek directed production
of Medea performed in South Africa (Cape Town, Grahamstown
and Johannesburg) in three seasons between October 1994 and March
1996 (DB no. 827). It was an adaptation of the story of Medea
and Jason, drawing on Euripides, Seneca and Apollonius of Rhodes
(Argonautica). The production encouraged the audience to
make connections between Medea, the ‘marginalised barbarian’
and those population groups humiliated and disempowered by apartheid
and between Jason and those who had violated human rights in their
pursuit of power.
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(Click on slide title
to view)
SLIDE 10 Medea
SLIDE 11
Jason and the praise singer
The performance was
a collaborative creation by a multi-racial cast of actors and
dancers. The dancers who took the role of the Chorus were from
Jazzart Dance Theatre, the first South African multi-racial modern
dance company. Representation via the body has been a key performative
strategy for post-colonial theatres.[15]
There is a link to my previous example in that the Kathakali made-up
actors’ stylised face expressions in Les Atrides also
involve communication of carefully preserved systems of meaning
through the actors’ bodies, but the body movement in the
Jazzart approach, while drawing on traditional forms of expression
also involved creative improvisation in the rehearsal sequence.
Their principle is that the actor’s body is not just a vehicle
for conveying meaning but can actually communicate nuances of
the processes of struggle through movement, covering, revealing
and even contortion and ‘fracture’.
Incidentally, Jazzart
was the group which reworked Gumboot dancing to generate a dance
form to represent the ways in which repressed identities could
be encoded through movement and thus could act as a way of empowering
the otherwise repressed and silent (in that case the miners of
South Africa). In Medea, dance was a way of incorporating
oral tradition and consciousness into the play and thus also was
a means of transcending language barriers. In a country where
eleven languages have official status, verbal and somatic languages
joined together to tell the story. The Chorus had a double role.
In the Corinthian sequences they impersonated Greeks, using Western
contemporary jazz dance. In the Colchis scenes, they were transformed
into ethnic Colchians, wearing tribal dress with African dance
movements.
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SLIDE 12
Aeetes and the
Colchian Chorus
SLIDE 13
Aeetes and Medea
In a recent article
the late Margaret Mezzabotta (to whom I am indebted for these
slides) described the effect on the audiences-
'Each of the linguistic
visual and musical codes through which the performance communicated
was interpreted with varying degrees of ease by the individual
members of the audience depending on their cultural backgrounds.
The spectators’ uneven comprehension of the play’s different
signifying systems became a metaphor for the difficulty of understanding
what was happening in South Africa in the immediate post-election
period, during which old structures and certainties disappeared
almost overnight to make way for a new set of givens, likewise
subject to constant revision.' [16]
This comment seems
to me to encapsulate many of the problems that are reflected in
critical and academic reaction to the impact of performances and
adaptations of Greek drama. [17]
It is a commonplace to describe drama as a gateway to cultural
dialogue - as Gershon Shaked has put it , ‘only the art of
the theatre through its experience in translation on the stage
can bring the distant near and reduce the dread [which] are not
easily grasped and must be reinterpreted to bring them closer
to their audience’.[18] However,
it seems to me that while a good deal of attention has been paid
to authors (ancient and modern), to directors and even to the
role of academics (as advisors and cultural ‘gatekeepers’),
the role of the spectators/ audience in this complex transaction
has been under-examined. The audience, along with the modern translator/author
and the director possesses powers to shape, interpret and also
to mediate. Part of this power is cultural, part psychological,
part economic (if no audience this time, then no Chorus next time).
Of course, the audience is not undifferentiated. Nor is its hermeneutic
competence unambiguous, though it may be transformed by or indeed
itself transform the performance. What is ‘half-alien’
or maintains the ‘safety-gap’ for some is not so for
others. Because audiences are now so diverse, both in terms of
sub-cultures, as I indicated at the beginning, and so also in
terms of cultural referents, the tightrope between the half-alien
and the domestic, the safe critical distance and the uncomfortably
challenging becomes more problematic, more wobbly, less predictable.
Agon, epideixis, schema and theoria
are subject to a scrutiny which, unlike that of the Athenian democracy,
is both wider and narrower in its cultural awareness, less certain
in the definitions, boundaries and applications of its discrimination
between insiders and outsiders and sometimes less certain that
such discrimination is either coherently justifiable or desirable.
Over and above this,
audiences differ in their awareness and experience of the different
aspects of the classical diasporas which I have discussed. So,
too, do conceptions of what is or might be entailed in a Renaissance
of Greek drama and in the limits and opportunities associated
with performative innovation and transformation. Therefore, it
seems to me that this particular Renaissance needs the ‘outrages’
in order that distinctive voices and representations of the constituent
diasporas can be uttered, verbally and non-verbally. They help
us to refocus our attention on the source texts, the performances
and contexts of reception and on our own cultural assumptions
about the alien, the half-alien and the ‘safety-gaps’.
Lorna Hardwick
December 2000
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Endnotes
[1]
Jonathan Miller, quoted in Jonathan Price, ‘Jonathan Miller
directs Robert Lowell’s Prometheus’, Yale
Theatre 1, Spring, 1968, 40
[2]
Karelisa Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage:
Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theatre, 1882-1994, Westport
CT, Greenwood Press 1995)
[3]
Paul Muldoon, tr. with Richard Martin, The Birds, Oldcastle
Co Meanth, Gallery Books, 1999.
[4]
Arion, third Series 4.1 Spring 1996 pp 174-209.
[5]
Keith Miller, Times Literary Supplement, May 14 1999.
[6]
Peter Burke, The European Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1998, p. 3.
[7]
Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,
New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1993.
[8]
C Stray, Classics Transformed:schools,universities and
society In England 1830 – 1960, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1998.
[9]
Source: Declan Donnellan, contribution to BBC/Open University
video discussion of As You Like It.
[10]
See for example J.L.Austin, How to do things with words,
2nd ed. 1975.
[11]
See for example Helene Foley’s discussion in her Introduction
to Peter Meineck’s translation of the Oresteia, Indianapolis,
Hackett, 1998pxv.
[12]
In (ed) Simon Goldhill, Essays on Performance Culture
and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1999.
[13]
For further discussion see Lorna Hardwick, Translating Words,
Translating Cultures, London, Duckworth, 2000, ch 5.
[14]
See n.13 Hardwick, 2000, ch 4.
[15]
See eg H Gilbert and J Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, theory,
practice, politics, London and New York, Routledge, 1996,
chapter 5.
[16]
M Mezzabotta , ‘Ancient Greek Drama in the New South Africa’
in (edd) L Hardwick, P E Easterling, S Ireland, F Macintosh and
N Lowe, Selected Proceedings of the January Conference 1999:
Theatre Ancient and Modern, Milton Keynes, 2000, 253. Also
published electronically.
[17]
For discussion of the cultural positioning of theatrical reviews
see the critical essay by Lorna Hardwick, The Theatrical Review as a Primary Source
on this Website.
[18]
In (edd) H Scolnicov and P Holland, The Play out of Context:
Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1989,10.
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Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English