As the poet H.D. slashes a knife across the screen, staccato, in Borderline (1930), she enacts the very ‘clatter montage’ with which the film's director, Kenneth Macpherson, confronts the audience. An experimental silent film starring Paul and Eslanda Robeson alongside H.D., Borderline's place in the critical canon of modernist cinema is secure. With its deployment of montage techniques developed particularly by Sergei Eisenstein and its exploration of psychological fracture, it exemplifies two core preoccupations of modernist art. But, as T. convincingly argues throughout this volume, there is another aspect that lies close to the heart of modernist performance: that of ancient Greek drama and classical theories of acting. Borderline, with its motif of the scapegoat, its reflection of a troubled society via the microcosm of a group of individuals, and its evocation of a chorus, can be aptly seen through the lens of Greek tragedy.
Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance brings the ‘performance turn’ that has been a rich vein of Modernist Studies in recent years to the reception of Greek tragedy. The book highlights the fraught and sometimes contradictory relationships that modernist artists had with Greek antiquity, identifying that very tension as an aspect of the movement's constant negotiation between tradition and novelty. At the same time, T. sketches a portrait of the interwoven networks that existed between modernists experimenting with Greek tragedy through translation and performance, drawing out not only the wide range of approaches to antiquity that were being developed at the time, but also the ways in which many of these artists were in dialogue with each other.
The book's second chapter, focused on the dancer Isadora Duncan and theatre practitioner and theorist Edward Gordon Craig, is a case in point. Although the direct connections between these two are well known, T.'s examination of the ways in which their opposing ideas about the performing body sought roots in the ancient Greek tradition is illuminating. While Duncan's work prioritised a presence that could be achieved through embodiment by the performer, Craig sought to replace the human actor altogether, inserting the marionette in their place; while Duncan drew from ancient vases and archaeological sites to develop a space for the female performer on the modern stage, it was the absence of female performers that formed part of the appeal of Greek tragedy for Craig. Exploring the works of Duncan and Craig side by side, T. highlights the fertility of the Hellenic world for these artists who, in looking simultaneously backwards to antiquity and forwards to the future, enact a ‘quintessentially modernist’ (p. 34) manoeuvre to reach ends that were, at least in terms of their gender politics, diametrically opposed.
The Janus-faced gaze of modernism, encapsulated in Ezra Pound's famous ‘Make it New’ maxim, underlies the movement's exploration of the relationship between tradition and innovation that is key to modernist engagements with Greek antiquity. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and taking adaptations of Greek tragedy by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats as case studies, the book's third chapter reveals how questions of performability and translatability became entwined. Here, T. argues, we may see an early form of reception theory being developed by Benjamin, who argued for translation's ability to give an ‘afterlife’ to a work, not least in the productive ways that translation can make both source and target text strange. Benjamin's conception of translation sheds new light on the difficulties posed by many of the works examined in this chapter, rendering those difficulties a strength rather than a weakness. Indeed, modernism's infatuation with aesthetic difficulty, which has led to criticisms of it as an ostentatiously elitist form, is such a significant feature of works like Pound's Elektra (1949) and Women of Trachis (1954) that the question of their performability always arises. However, as T. makes clear, we should see this difficulty as akin to the demands that modernist writing puts on its reader, rather than as a failing. Difficulty is part of their aesthetic experimentation and may even be regarded as ‘a type of [Brechtian] gestus’ (p. 91) in its combination of the political, historical and linguistic to create the poetic drama's very particular pose.
H.D.'s translations, as well as her film work, are the subject of the fourth chapter. Reflecting on the connections between translation and performance in her poetry and acting, T. deftly underscores the ways in which H.D.'s engagement with Hellenism differs from that of the poets examined in the previous chapter. The poet and performer seemed untroubled and unburdened by the ‘cultural capital’ afforded to ancient Greek tragedy; instead, in a dialogue with Euripides’ plays that spanned several decades, she persistently set her own work and Euripides’ on a par with each other in a relationship that T. describes as ‘reversible and reciprocal, rendering both versions equally classical and modernist’ (p. 117).
Fittingly, the presence of Bertolt Brecht looms large throughout the monograph. The German playwright and theatre practitioner's ideas of epic theatre offered the modernists a model for how to combine artistic experimentation with political engagement, ensuring that his work be understood as a pivotal intervention in the relationship between Greek tragedy and modernism. The densely packed penultimate chapter offers an exploration of epic, tragic and dramatic theatre, centred around Brecht but also taking in the translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Hans-Thies Lehmann's work on the ‘postdramatic’, and the performances of Helene Weigel, analysing the impact of Brecht's work not only on other modernists but also on subsequent theories of performance.
Having argued throughout that modernist engagements with Greek tragedy echo ‘the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy’ of Plato's Republic, T. makes the case for seeing Plato as a Brechtian performance theorist in this chapter. Like Brecht, Plato regards theatre as inciting its audience to thought and action; unlike Brecht, Plato is horrified by the very reaction that Brechtian epic theatre sought to foster, but for both, the ethico-political facets of performance are crucial. Such a perception adds a further dimension to recent recognitions that it may be Plato, rather than Aristotle, that should be regarded as the first ancient Greek performance theorist.
This is a rich and engaging book that goes beyond exploring the reception of Greek tragedy in the modernist period to offer an even more far-reaching analysis. The volume reveals how modernist performance was impacted by the sometimes-allusive encounter of theatre-makers with Hellenism, with consequences that spread beyond the work of those who drew directly from antiquity, while sketching a genealogy of performance and performance theories that stretches back to ancient Greece. This is also a less Eurocentric Hellenism than might sometimes be assumed: for H.D. the heart of Hellas is located in Alexandria rather than Athens, while the engagement with Noh theatre in the work of Pound and Yeats, and Brecht's work with South-East Asian theatre traditions, point to a more syncretic ideal, albeit one not fully achieved in their work.
Generous in her citation of other scholars and drawing on her expertise in performance studies, theatre history and modernism, T.'s book makes a valuable contribution not only to those fields and to work on classical reception in the modernist period, but also to the theorisation of classical reception more widely too. The book's ‘Afterword’ ends by considering what we might learn now, during the current coronavirus pandemic, from the modernists’ encounters with Greek tragedy, reminding us that an engagement with Hellenism will always be most productive when it grants licence and acknowledges both the successes and the failures of Greek antiquity and the uses to which it has been put.
