The focus of this chapter is on the relationship between reception and staging, which includes opera, dance, and physical theatre. It takes its main focus from the concept of the ‘performative turn’ outlined in Chapter 1 above, but also resonates closely with the ‘turns’ characterized as ‘translation’ and ‘cultural’. Chapter 6 will include comment on the relationship between performance and more recently theorized ‘turns’ (decolonizing, global, and existential). Although in this chapter the main emphasis will be on staged performance and its analysis, the wider implications of ‘performative’ (namely the actions, perspectives, and responses created by and through performance) also underly the discussion and follow on from the emphasis in Chapter 3 on the ways in which stereotypical associations can be challenged and changed. Performance, sometimes on a monumental scale and including processions and re-enactments, has played an important part in public propaganda in the modern period. Important recent scholarship in that field includes Erika Fischer-Lichte's 2017 monograph Tragedy's Endurance. Performance of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800, which included exploration of the deployment of Greek material to subvert, and its use to influence the public through exploitation of the psychology of the crowd; and Gonda Van Steen's 2014 study States of Emergency. Theatre and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967–1974, which examined the use of ancient Greek material to authenticate a modern Greek political regime, and the concomitant attempt to influence the public psyche through large-scale performance events.
The theory and practice of staging raise crucial issues for reception studies. Staging involves a live performance and a live audience. Each live performance is different, and it is impossible to recapture in ways that allow the kind of analysis and debate about an established ‘text’ that is possible when discussing a poem or a painting. In fact, the task of the theatre historian in trying to reconstruct past performances has been compared with that of an art historian trying to study paintings solely on the basis of descriptions:
One only needs to imagine what a history of painting would look like where the author had at his disposal neither originals nor copies of pictures but only any number of good descriptions! The historian of the theatre finds himself provisionally in just such a situation as soon as he leaves the realm of his own perception.Footnote 1
In the 1920s, when this distinction was drawn, it was a radical one since it added to a historiographical approach, which was already shared with cognate areas of study, a new approach based on personal observation. This provided a counterweight to the transitory character of theatrical performance.
The effects of this shift of approach are seen in current reception studies in the methods used in the analysis of modern performances of ancient drama, whether in the original (with or without surtitles), in translation, or in adaptation.Footnote 2 The growth in the use of contemporary productions as research data for the study of reception is partly due to the widening of conceptions of what constitutes theatre ‘history’ and partly due to the sheer empirical pressure of the numbers of productions of ancient drama worldwide. These productions occur across the whole spectrum of theatre: student drama, touring companies, fringe and experimental productions, and commercial theatre (including international tours by prestigious theatre companies and the attraction of elite companies for tourists).Footnote 3
This means that leading actors, writers, directors, and designers become involved with ancient drama, and especially Greek drama, at various stages in their professional development. In many cases it has become an integral and distinctive part of their career. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the directors Peter Stein, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, and Deborah Warner have done major work on ancient theatre with actors such as Greg Hicks, Fiona Shaw, and Diana Rigg (the last two became ‘stars’ around whom productions with major female roles centred) and designers such as Jocelyn Herbert, Dionysis Fotopoulos, and Vicki Mortimer. These developments show that staging of ancient drama is not only a strand in the transmission of ancient culture but also a strand in current theatrical practice. In addition, participation in live theatre, whether as spectator or as performer (for example, in amateur or student productions), brings ancient drama into the lived experience and the imagination of the wider public. Fischer-Lichte has emphasized in much of her published research that performance is both a unique event and also transformative. She has investigated how performance involves ‘bodily co-presence’ of performers/doers (including technical staff) and of spectators who perceive and react to the ‘doers’. These processes are interactive and sometimes unpredictable. The creation of meaning is shaped by the intensity and ephemerality of the event that is the performance, and by the way in which the texts (the ancient and its modern translation or adaptation) shape and are shaped by the performance dynamics.Footnote 4
Sources for the analysis of live performance
Ancient drama is both a springboard for artistic and intellectual invention in staging and interpretation and also a site for the critique of modern theatrical forms and their social and political context. In another sense, it is itself both a ‘receiver’ and an agent, in that its theatrical vitality makes it a site for engagement with the other theatrical activities and traditions which contribute to the history of performance of ancient drama. Combined with the transitory nature of all theatre, this richness brings with it some problems for research in reception of ancient drama. The range of primary sources which need to be used is large and is often included in the category of ‘paramaterial’ or ‘perimaterial’. To the obvious sources of the ancient text and the performance text (whether an edited version in the original language or in a translation or adaptation), it is necessary to add materials relating to the set design, lighting design, costume, movement, and acting styles. Some aspects of the set and costumes may be archived by large companies but most are ‘preserved’ only through still photographs (sometimes posed for pre-performance publicity) and videos (frequently of poor quality and/or directing the viewer's gaze from a crow's nest or an acute angle).Footnote 5 Posters and programmes often include useful visual and printed evidence about design, production values, and the approach taken by the director and translator. A somewhat neglected area in reception research has been the extent of commercial sponsorship, Arts Council, and other grants and private subscriptions in enabling a production to be staged and perhaps toured.
Greg Hicks as Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, translated by Ranjit Bolt, directed by Peter Hall, National Theatre, 1996. Hicks's roles in Greek plays also include Orestes (The Oresteia, 1981), Agamemnon and Priam (Tantalus, 2000–1), and Dionysus (The Bacchai, 2002).
Increasingly, these primary sources are augmented by use of the theatrical review and the interview. The theatrical review is a difficult type of source to use critically. This is partly because it is produced as part of the policy of the publishing newspaper or periodical, and therefore reflects that publication's priorities and assumptions about (for example) the extent of the target readership's knowledge or prejudices about the ancient world and about theatre.Footnote 6 In addition, the theatrical review is a source of evidence about how the production was staged and the reactions of the audience. This performance ‘narrative’ is subject both to the vagaries and selectivity of the visual and aural memory of the reviewer and to their subjective judgements (which often colour an apparently factual description).
The theatrical interview is also becoming a significant oral and documentary source, particularly in recording the intentions and approach of the translator, director, and actors. However, like the review, it is by no means a neutral document. The focus and structure vary according to the type of publication (e.g. weekend broadsheet supplement, arts magazine, radio or TV news or arts programme, academic study, or archive). Also important is the point in time at which the interview is conducted – whether, during the rehearsal process, in pre or post-performance, immediately after the run, or later, when recollections may be influenced by the theatre practitioner's new work.Footnote 7
Text and performance
The second aspect of staging which is crucial for reception studies is the relationship between text and performance, a relationship which has become the dominant factor in the approach to drama in its ancient context.Footnote 8 These investigations began by analysis of evidence within the texts of the plays – for instance on exits and entrances, movements, and costume. Scholars then integrated this analysis with the extant visual evidence from ancient theatre sites, painted pottery, wall paintings, and mosaics. Action research has also been developed, to reconstruct and explore the implications of the use of masks, music, and the choreography of the chorus in creating the ancient theatrical experience.Footnote 9 This aspect of ancient theatre research has a vital role in reception studies both because it provides a framework for comparison between ancient and subsequent performances and also because it is stimulated by reception research which may generate new questions to be asked about ancient staging.
In research into both ancient and modern staging, the question of the audiences and their reactions presents particular difficulties. In neither case is it possible to reconstruct other than indirectly the variety of perspectives that members of the audiences brought to, or took away from, the performance. The ancient audiences and those of the intervening centuries are no longer there to be asked, and modern audience research has not been systematically undertaken. Some judgements may be made about audience numbers in antiquity and their likely social and cultural horizons, and in post-antiquity there are some personal anecdotes.Footnote 10 It is generally agreed by researchers that modern audiences are more culturally diverse than those in antiquity and have very different knowledge bases. They are less likely to be aware of the ancient myths and therefore less likely to be sensitive to the ways in which either these myths or the theatrical conventions of ancient performance are being adapted for the stage. In addition, their ‘horizons of expectation’ may differ quite substantially from each other, as well as from audiences in antiquity. The consequences for performance of Greek comedy are particularly acute, in that the specific references to contemporary political figures in Old Comedy are difficult to communicate on the modern stage. In New Comedy and Roman comedy, the stock figures and situations are more easily transferable across time and place. Where the nuances of the ancient text are not well known, modern performance has both to orientate the audience and to provide other theatrical means of explaining the significance of what is happening. This puts a particular premium on the relationship between verbal and non-verbal languages of performance.Footnote 11
Verbal and non-verbal languages of performance
The study of the reception of ancient drama has drawn on broader aspects of analysis of the semiotics (or sign-systems) of theatre. Theatrical semiotics generally distinguishes between:
(i) Language-based signs: that is, words, the sequences and patterns in which they are used, and the ideas which they express.
(ii) Para-linguistic signs, which are connected both to linguistic signs and to the non-verbal signs which directly communicate meaning. Examples would be vocal sounds used to move the audience to sadness, anger, or excitement or to communicate the feelings or identity of the speaker – emphasis, tone, regional accent, and vernacular idiom all play a part here. These para-linguistic elements are important in staging ancient drama for their contribution in ‘translating the untranslatable’, such as sounds of lament or the juxtaposition of regional or ethnic differences. These aspects may generate a code or system within the play, or use codes outside the play, thus narrowing the gap between the alien aspects of ancient drama and the experiences of the (assumed) audience.
(iii) Kinesic signs: these include facial and body movements, and include sub-groups such as mimic signs, gestures, and proxemic signs (that is, those that interact with the space around them, showing distance or proximity for example, or that take the shape of movement). There is considerable debate about the extent to which universal validity can be attributed to the connection between facial expression and emotion. This problem has special implications for modern performances of Greek drama if masks are not used. Equally, there is debate about the universality of gesture signs, again important for ancient drama, where expressions of supplication or lament might be involved.Footnote 12
(iv) Actors’ appearance: mask, hairstyle, costume.
(v) Spatial signs: theatrical space and situation and stage space, which includes set, lighting, and properties.
(vi) Non-verbal acoustic signs, including non-verbal sounds and music.
All of these types of sign are involved in transforming the written text into the theatrical text of the performance. The conventional term ‘translation on to the stage’ includes all these elements and has to be distinguished both from ‘translation for the stage’ (which refers to the creation of a written text that can be performed) and from the growing broader connotations of the word ‘translation’, which is sometimes used to indicate movement from one cultural location to another.
Historical and process-based approaches
The discussion so far has drawn on two main models for studying reception on the stage. The first is the performance history, which studies the staging of a particular play through time (diachronic). This approach enables comparisons in staging of plays to be made that draw on the similarities and differences in how and why different periods select ancient plays for staging and how their meaning is interpreted, both in the staging and in critical responses to it.Footnote 13 Depending on the sources available, it is not always possible to compare details of performances, and the emphasis may sometimes be on the broader cultural and economic conditions governing the performance. The other main model used for studying staged receptions concentrates on the processes of creating a particular production at a particular time (synchronic). Different kinds of sources are needed in order to study the performance itself and to situate it in the broader contexts of the theatrical careers of the practitioners, the conditions which generate the production, and the reactions of audiences and critics. In the case of very recent performances, sufficient time may not have elapsed to make judgements about the significance of the production in the performance history of the play.
The coherent study of reception on the stage requires both diachronic and synchronic models to be considered, and they are increasingly being used in conjunction with one another. A good example of this tendency is the volume published by the Oxford Archive of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama, Medea in Performance 1500–2000.Footnote 14 This includes a table of performances, alongside the individual essays, which trace the history of production of the play through the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, and the Victorian stage, as well as in the twentieth century in a variety of political situations, several cultural traditions, and other genres such as opera and film.
The historical- and process-based approaches also converge in their use of categories and frameworks for describing and evaluating staging in comparison with other performances within antiquity and subsequently. The main features are:
(i) Language, including text and translation, as well as the variety and registers of language within the play (including vernaculars).
(ii) Use of ancient conventions: mask, chorus, formal elements such as agôn, rhêsis, stichomythia, messenger-narrative, pantomime.
(iii) Time, place, and culture: setting is crucial in decisions about whether the play is to be moved into the world of the audience or the audience moved into the world of the play, or whether the play aims to open up a situation related to both the world of the original and that of the audience.Footnote 15
(iv) Context of production: for example, the point on the spectrum between public festival and house-theatre, including court performance, music hall, and public spectacle (including as state propaganda).
(v) Context of performance: theatre space and its environment.
(vi) Critical reception: from victory in a publicly judged competition to premature cancellation of the run because of unfavourable reaction from audiences and critics.
Underlying these lines of enquiry there are also broader questions about the patterns of revival, such as the selection of the play at a particular time, or its prominence in a particular kind of social or cultural situation.
Original-language receptions
The history of ancient plays performed in the original language provides some important insights into reception histories. This is particularly the case in respect of Greek plays, in which, from the late nineteenth century, there has been significant interaction between amateur and professional contexts. The University of Edinburgh started a trend with the production of Greek plays in translation from 1873. In 1880 Aeschylus’ Agamemnon was staged in Greek at Oxford, where it involved collaboration between budding professional theatre practitioners such as Frank Benson, the Master of Balliol (Benjamin Jowett), and W. B. Richmond, who painted the scenery. Benson went on to perform in the inaugural Greek play at Bradfield College in 1891 (Euripides’ Alcestis). The Cambridge Greek play was inaugurated in 1882 (with a production of Sophocles’ Ajax) and the tradition still flourishes.
The initial approach in Cambridge was to base the productions closely on assumptions then current in classical archaeology concerning the construction of the sets. In addition, the music seems to have been a great attraction; and special trains were laid on from London.Footnote 16 The initiative found parallels in the United States, with Oedipus the King being staged in Greek (at Harvard in 1881 and at Notre Dame in 1888), and in Australia (University of Sydney, Agamemnon, 1886).Footnote 17 Although it was difficult to sustain the initial impetus (the transfer of the Oxford Agamemnon to London in 1880 was seen by Henry Irving and Ellen Terry as well as George Eliot), the Oxford, Cambridge, and Bradfield projects continued to have an impact on the reception of Greek drama on the stage in Britain. In the later part of the twentieth century, Bradfield attracted the attention of the director Peter Hall, and the traditions at Oxford and Cambridge probably contributed to the twentieth-century trend of inviting distinguished classicists to advise on the staging of classical drama on the commercial stage.
The ‘archaeological’ focus of the Cambridge Greek play did not, however, persist. The more recent productions have included imaginative sets and have emphasized resonances that cross time and place. The production of Sophocles’ Electra in 2001, directed by the classicist and theatre practitioner Jane Montgomery, did not have a Greek setting and made use of modern technology such as video screens, which were used to illustrate the childhood histories of Electra and Orestes. It also used English surtitles, as did the Oxford University Dramatic Society Medea in the same year. This production, directed by Nat Coleman, who was then an undergraduate in classics, did retain the Greek setting, emphasizing this by costume and body make-up designs derived from Greek vase-paintings. These examples of original-language productions, which have attracted large and varied audiences, differ in their approaches to the relationship between ancient text and modern performance. However, they share an appreciation that audiences for performances in the original language are not confined to those who either have a good knowledge of the language or are at least well informed about the plays and their theatrical contexts.
Translated receptions
This sense of the need to seek out wider audiences has been even more developed in productions which are staged in translation. The stress on performance as well as text, and the effect on the way in which productions are discussed and evaluated, provided a stimulus to the use of the concept of the ‘performative turn’. In terms of the translation approaches used, even relatively close translations have been shaped by the demands of performance and perceptions about the ‘target audience’.Footnote 18 Translations prepared specifically for the stage naturally have to have particular regard for speakability and performability. The actors must not only feel able to speak the lines with confidence but must also be able to move to them (in terms of rhythm and pacing). Modern productions in English have eschewed ‘distancing’ or ‘foreignizing’ approaches to translation and have aimed for the play to read and sound as if it were originally written in English. Just as important is the changed composition of audiences. Many spectators have only the most general idea of the plot and conventions of the plays, and are certainly in no position to be able draw conclusions about the impact of cuts, revisions, or adaptations made to the original.
In many cases, these factors combine to bring about an increased degree of interpretation and explanation within the production. This may take both verbal and non-verbal forms in order to create or restore some ‘referential validity’ to the classical framework as a ‘language’ for receiving and interpreting the play. Examples of the effect of this priority occur not only in ‘free’ translations but also in those which follow the ancient text quite closely. In his translation of Agamemnon (1999 version), David Stuttard, a trained classicist who worked closely from Fraenkel's edition, developed the images of blossoming and decay to emphasize to the spectators the role given them by Aeschylus. The Herald describes the Aegean sea on the morning after the storm destroys the fleet: ‘And when the sun broke through at dawn, the whole Aegean sea was blossoming with shipwrecks and the corpses of the dead’ (Aesch. Ag. 658–9).Footnote 19
Later, Agamemnon describes Cassandra as ‘my flower, my blossom’, and Stuttard thought that the audience would be prepared by the earlier image to pick up the sinister undertones here.Footnote 20 In his version Stuttard also made Clytemnestra use the image in her ‘welcome’ to Agamemnon: ‘and now you are here like warmth in winter, thawing out our house to make it blossom’.Footnote 21 Lattimore translates this as ‘you bring with you the symbol of our winter's warmth’, while Lloyd-Jones has ‘you signal warmth in the winter by your coming’.Footnote 22 Finally, Clytemnestra in her triumphant speech after the murders comments on her struggle for vengeance that ‘now in time and with eternal justice it has flowered to its fulfilment’.Footnote 23 This variation on the theme follows from Stuttard's view that Aeschylus’ major challenge to the translator is the need to preserve and communicate the tension between symbol and reality in the imagery. The multiplication of the image was intended to ensure that the audience, unfamiliar with Aeschylus’ imagery, did not miss the structural force of the metaphor.Footnote 24
Relationships with the language of reception
Other approaches to translating for the stage have shown various kinds of assimilation into the new language. Two that are particularly important are translations in which the receiving language and cultural framework dominate the interpretation, and those in which the receiving language is infused with an additional conceptual and emotional range. Examples of the first kind of assimilation are often signalled by anachronisms. A production of Trojan Women in the spring of 2002 demonstrated this (Figure 6). The chorus referred to the sufferings of ‘the Lebanon and Palestine, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Croatia, Kosovo – an old world butchered in a blaze of ashes’.Footnote 25 Hekabe then picked up the refrain, and the chorus referred to ‘The towers exploding in a holocaust of flame’ (23). In contrast, in her translation of Euripides’ lines 1320–1, Shirley Barlow has ‘The dust like smoke winging to the sky shall prevent me from seeing my home’ and ‘the sound of the towers falling’.Footnote 26 The 2002 acting script's allusions to recent events, including the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, received some criticism for restricting audience autonomy in their reception of the play. On reflection the translator expressed some doubts about the use of specific names but considered that the imagery of the collapse of the towers provided an equivalent to that in Euripides.Footnote 27
Mark Katz as the Greek Herald Talthybius, holding Astyanax (in a bag of dust). He returns the body to the child's grandmother, Hekabe (Maria Fierheller), and mother, Andromache (Tamsin Shasha), in Trojan Women, adapted and directed by David Stuttard, Actors of Dionysus, 2002.
The impact of the classical referential framework and its linguistic registers on the receiving language is a feature of modern translations into Scots. In 1990 the first act of Klytemnestra's Bairns, a translation by Bill Dunlop of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, was staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The full text of the complete Oresteia was later performed on Calton Hill.Footnote 28 Dunlop added a prologue by Apollo to explain to the audience the situation of the inherited curse of the House of Atreus and to accustom them to the idiom he was using. In his ‘afterword’ he situated his version in a tradition ranging from John Stuart Blackie and Gilbert Murray to Robert Lowell and Tony Harrison, adding ‘This adaptation imagines a possible response to a request from a financially constrained Athens for an accessible cost-effective reworking of the text, making use of local varieties of language’ – a reference to the regional varieties of lowland Scots. Dunlop also published a study of the process of creating his translation, starting from the premise that ‘Any translation or adaptation into Scots is, perforce, a political act which asserts the validity of [the] language.’Footnote 29 He deliberately chose the area of ancient tragedy in order to produce a translation which would mediate between the literary and the everyday. He particularly wished to develop the range of modern Scots to ‘allow it to discuss intellectual concepts in a currently acceptable form’, building on the strength of Scots, which he saw as ‘its immediacy, its ability to hit emotional targets with remarkable precision and concision, and, despite its limitations in carrying complex intellectual cargoes, its flexibility of response to altered circumstances’.
In common with the creators of many modern versions, Dunlop worked from other translations, being most influenced by Lowell and Vellacott.Footnote 30 His approach indicates the broader cultural significance of the revival of the Scots language, which was part of the literary revival of the earlier twentieth century, as well as being a manifestation of the climate of cultural nationalism surrounding devolution at the end of the twentieth century. It was felt that, after the Treaty of Union in 1707, the varieties of the Scots language, celebrated and developed by Gavin Douglas’ translation of the Aeneid in 1513, had been devalued by the stress on English literary forms. At the end of the twentieth century, there was a renewed interest in translating classical texts (both ancient and French) into Scots.Footnote 31 This development was researched by Ian Brown, John Ramage, and Ceri Sherlock in a project which compared the Scots and Welsh languages as vehicles for the translation of Greek myth into another culture in a way which is analogous to the translation of a text from one language into another.Footnote 32 The project also analysed ways in which the Scots and Welsh languages are capable of dealing with the material of ancient tragedy, with special emphasis on Antigone.Footnote 33
Reception of comedy
One of the points made by Dunlop in his discussion of the theatrical strengths of the Scots language is its flexibility as a medium for irony, sarcasm, and forms of humour that rely on juxtaposition of words and a sense of the ridiculous; and Scots has been used by a number of translators of comedy.Footnote 34
Translation of comedy raises further questions about the relationship between language and performance and about the communication of equivalences. The problems relating to the differences in the cultural frame of reference between ancient and modern audiences are particularly acute in comedy because humour uses contemporary references as well as exploitation of the human situation for its effect. One approach to such issues for the translator of Aristophanes has been summarized by Peter Meineck, the classicist and theatre practitioner who translates specifically for performance:
that sound scholarship is essential to any translation of an ancient play goes without saying, but what about the lessons learned from performance? A play is only created for performance and its existence as a written text is subordinate to its primary form and function as a live, shared experience between actors and audience. But can a contemporary, English-language production of an Aristophanes play, any more than a script that gives directions for one, still be called an experience of Aristophanes?Footnote 35
Meineck's answer to this dilemma is that, in spite of differences between contemporary and ancient theatre, both draw on experiences that still have dramatic force: father-and-son conflict, stupidities of the legal system, corruption of politicians, satire of new ideas, and human problems and aspirations. However, he chose not to update the contemporary references in Aristophanes’ plays, on the grounds that ‘A joke about a politician's errant behaviour in the news today will seem as out of date to an audience or reader in five years as will a reference to Cleon or Alcibiades.’ His view was that a skilled actor and director can make references to ancient historical (or mythical) figures understood by the audience by facial expression, movement, and body language. This is not the same as explaining such references, which Meineck does in his printed text by a combination of footnotes and endnotes – an indication, perhaps, that performance is not quite all.
A further challenge to the translators and performers of ancient comedy is the mobility of language (words, tone, register) within the texts. This element has been discussed by Michael Silk in his major study of Aristophanes.Footnote 36 While acknowledging the importance of mobility of language in the Roman satirists (especially Petronius), Silk regards Aristophanes as the prime exponent. He contrasts this with classical tragedy and Menandrian comedy, which are characterized by decorum, homogeneity, and coherence, from which it is difficult to deviate. He concludes that Aristophanic comedy has its own coherence, which incorporates diversity and freedom from the necessity to conform.Footnote 37 This mobility and diversity of language was, in the ancient world, subversive and not the norm which might be expected by an English-speaking audience influenced by Shakespeare and subsequent dramatic traditions. Finding equivalences for the mobility of the Greek language is a fence too far for most translators and directors, and is particularly difficult to achieve when the translation has adopted an approach based on acculturation, or bringing the text to the audience. One early twenty-first-century attempt is of particular interest in that it attempted to transpose mobility of language into mobility of movement.
Physicality as reception: movement, dance, and the body
The production was that of Aristophanes’ Birds in London in 2002, in a verse adaptation by Sean O'Brien.Footnote 38 The production, which was directed by Kathryn Hunter, a leading exponent of physical theatre, was a collaboration between the Royal National Theatre (RNT) and Mamaloucos Circus as part of the RNT's ‘Transformation’ season. Initially intended to be followed by a national tour in ‘Big Top’ venues, it used the episodic structure of Aristophanes’ play as a basis for exploring in movement the diverse linguistic registers of the successive visitors to Cloudcuckooland. The ‘rapping’ Poet, for example, gave a virtuoso display of break-dancing (‘for those who think tradition's crap’), while the chorus of birds themselves were played by trapeze artists, allowing some virtuoso performances. However, the production had a mixed reception from critics.Footnote 39 One drew an analogy between O'Brien's verse – ‘muscularity, flipping from coarse colloquialism and nonchalant rhyming couplets to an exalted lyricism’ – and the evocation of the birds – ‘rippling torsos stand in for ornate plumage. Simple gestures – splayed hands, inclined heads and jerky limbs – conjure earthbound movements, while sundry feats of daring replicate the miracle of light’ – but concluded ‘there's only so much swinging on harnesses the eye can take’.Footnote 40 Others were more damning, referring to uneasy relationships between ‘aerial athleticism and Aristophanic satire’ and the shift of satirical object from the Utopian aspirations in Aristophanes to the militaristic tyranny of Peisthetaerus (Pez in this version).Footnote 41 Perhaps the problem with the circus-based approach was that movement was used partly as spectacle, partly as intermission. This held up the narrative energy of the play and prevented integration with its nuances of meaning, language, and humour (several critics described it as ‘remarkably humourless’).
In contrast, when used representationally, the body has been a key aspect of performance in several modern productions. These have restored to Greek drama the physicality which was an important aspect of ancient productions (especially since the use of masks required communication through gesture and body movement, rather than facial expression, and because the dancing space for the chorus allowed and required careful choreography). An important example is the Jazzart Dance Theatre dancers, who took the role of the chorus in the production of Medea directed by Mark Fleishman and Jennie Reznek in South Africa in three seasons in Cape Town, Grahamstown, and Johannesburg between 1994 and 1996. Jazzart was the first South African multi-racial modern dance company. In this production they not only drew on traditional forms of expression but also used creative improvisation as part of the rehearsal process.Footnote 42
The principle of the Jazzart Company 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, caressing, revealing, and even contortion and ‘fracture’. In this production of Medea, dance was a way of incorporating oral tradition and consciousness into the play, and also of transcending language barriers. In a country where eleven languages have official status, verbal and somatic languages joined together to tell the story. In the Corinthian sequences the chorus impersonated Greeks, using contemporary jazz dance familiar to many spectators, regardless of their cultural provenance. In the Colchis scenes, they were transformed into ethnic Colchians, wearing tribal dress, with African dance movements. Margaret Mezzabotta, the pioneer of performance analysis of Greek drama productions in South Africa, pointed out how this type of cultural interaction in performance provided a learning experience for the audience – ‘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’ – and suggested that this supplied a metaphor for the difficulty of mutual understanding in post-apartheid South Africa, a difficulty which had gradually to be overcome through shared experiences.Footnote 43
The Jazzart role in the South African Medea is one example of the way in which a combination of more than one art form can highlight a crucial and sometimes revolutionary change of direction in interpretation and artistic power in relation to a canonical or iconic work. Another example generated by ancient drama was the three-act ballet Clytemnestra, created by the dance-choreographer Martha Graham and first performed in 1958. This included a few spoken fragments at key junctures (for instance, when the sacrifice of Iphigenia is danced). Graham's version probed the psychology of Clytemnestra's story and heightened the emotional impact by the use of costume design drawn from Greek black-figure vase-paintings and the inclusion of eastern Mediterranean music to create an atmosphere of violence. It was suggested by one critic that this Clytemnestra ‘stands in the history of drama where Joyce's Ulysses stands in the history of the novel: it is as bold an experiment, as radical a departure’.Footnote 44
Operatic receptions
The creators of opera in the Renaissance aimed to revive from antiquity the fusion of music and drama in one art form.Footnote 45 On the modern stage the treatment of classical plays in opera has been significant in bringing together art forms to express radical change. The impact of the first performance of Strauss's opera Elektra in London in 1910 has been comprehensively explored by Simon Goldhill.Footnote 46 Goldhill analysed how Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto, taken from his own play which had scandalized and enthralled Germany a few years previously, worked with Strauss's modernist music and, in offering a version of the Electra story ‘full of blood and violence and sexual perversion’, challenged the investments of national cultures in ideals derived from the Greeks, and thus subverted the basis of Victorian Hellenism.Footnote 47 Plato claimed in the Republic that changes in music were associated with radical political change (Republic 424b–e) and studies of the performance history of classical receptions in opera have tended to bear this out.Footnote 48 At the Edinburgh International Festival in 2002, the staging of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, directed by François Girard, with the Canadian Opera Company and sung in Latin with English surtitles, was preceded by a performance of the Symphony of Psalms, accompanied by a video wall recording the names of AIDS victims and contextualizing for the audience the representation of the plague in the opera that followed.
Cultural exchange
It is also the case that music, song, movement, and acting styles have triggered debates about the validity or otherwise of cultural exchange in the staging of ancient drama. Arguments for ‘authenticity’ in language, setting, and staging are very often complicated by the commercial realities of location and finance, but deeper cultural issues are at stake. In 1996 Herbert Golder published an iconoclastic article in which he expressed a deep disenchantment with almost all contemporary staging because he considered that modern resonances and acting styles were privileged over the Greek.Footnote 49 His main conclusion was that ‘the ephemeral must never be allowed to occlude the essential’. This of course encodes a particular view of ‘the classical tradition’ as a vehicle for transmission of a closed theatrical tradition rather than as a strand in the processes of reception and refiguration. Golder specifically rejected insights from other traditions, such as Japanese Noh drama, in the context of his critique of ‘avant-garde’ productions such as Mnouchkine's Les Atrides, although interestingly he did state that he considered the gospel choir version of Oedipus at Colonus to be more faithful to ancient tradition. This was adapted as The Gospel at Colonus, an oratorio set in a Black Pentecostal church service and staged by Lee Breuer from 1983 to 1988, including a Broadway run. Golder's reaction suggests that national and cultural conceptions of classicism (that is, cultural horizons that are familiar) are at the root of much debate concerning artistic merit and the appropriateness of the correspondences made with modern perceptions of ancient productions. Arguing against Golder's position are a number of researchers and critics who point to the way in which interaction with non-Western cultural traditions can bring back to ancient drama some of the elements which have been marginalized by Western appropriations.Footnote 50
These vigorous debates underline ways in which reception studies have an important part to play in the reassessment and reconstruction of the interpretation, staging, and cultural and political contexts of ancient drama. There are signs that a new kind of philology, a philology of reception, is being developed. This research includes tracking the migration routes of ancient texts through other theatrical and literary traditions. It also includes study of the verbal and non-verbal languages used in bringing texts to the stage, and comparison of the contexts of creation and production, both ancient and modern.Footnote 51 When this new philology comes together more systematically it will provide a range of tools through which scholars can describe and analyse the relationship between ancient texts and their subsequent staging. This mapping of the commonalities and differences between ancient plays and their modern analogues is an essential prerequisite to evaluative judgements about the receptions and their cultural impact.
