The Greek Plays

by The Greek Plays- Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles

  Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus is rarely staged, but The Gospel at Colonus, a musical version by Bob Telson and Lee Breuer set in an African American church with a gospel choir as the Chorus, was performed in New York in 1993 and subsequently around the United States; it is available on video. The challenging lead role of the furious grieving daughter in Sophocles’ Electra has attracted famous actresses such as Margaret Anglin (Berkeley 1913, San Francisco 1915, New York 1918), Blanche Yurka (Boston 1931, New York 1932), and in London, Fiona Shaw 1989 and Zoë Wanamaker 1997.

  Because of its depiction of the sufferings caused by war, Euripides’ Trojan Women was one of the most frequently staged tragedies in the war-filled twentieth century. Michael Cacoyannis, who had directed Elektra (based on Euripides) in 1962, cast Katharine Hepburn as Hecuba in his 1971 film. Ellen McLaughlin’s 1996 version was deeply influenced by the Balkan conflict. Charles L. Mee’s bold adaptations always include non-Greek material; on his website he states that he creates plays that are “broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns.” His Trojan Women: A Love Story (1994) combines Euripides with Berlioz’s Les Troyens; the second half focuses on Dido and Aeneas. An Oresteia in Berlin in 1936 was explicitly propagandistic, suggesting that the trilogy’s movement from barbarism to enlightenment demonstrated the superiority of National Socialism. Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of Antigone, staged in Paris in 1944, was acclaimed for what audiences perceived as its support for the French Resistance. In 1993, the director Peter Sellars staged Robert Auletta’s version of the Persians in Los Angeles as an explicit critique of the 1991 American attack on Iraq. Xerxes was depicted as a still-defiant Saddam Hussein, while the Chorus called the enemy “terrorists” trying to grab Iran’s oil. Enraged audiences walked out in droves.

  Euripides’ Bacchae has been very popular from the 1960s on. The conflict between Dionysus and Pentheus evoked contemporary debates in the United States about drug use, gender roles, and sexual freedom. Richard Schechner’s version Dionysus in ’69 (1968) used nudity, sexual allusions and acts, ritual, music, and improvisation to involve the audience; it is available on video. The Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka’s Bacchae: A Communion Rite, staged in London (1973), focused on themes of slavery and anticolonialism.

  Many distinguished twentieth-century writers have been inspired by Greek tragedy. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), an important American imagist poet, studied Greek literature at Bryn Mawr and published free translations of Euripides including choruses from various plays, Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), and Helen in Egypt (1961). T. S. Eliot used a Greek-like chorus to comment on the assassination of Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and based The Cocktail Party (1949) on Alcestis. In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote The Flies, a play based on the Oresteia influenced by World War II and Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. A number of Irish authors turned to Greek tragedy during the country’s fierce political and social struggles. Derek Mahon produced the Bacchae (1996), Marina Carr created an Irish Medea in By the Bog of Cats (1998), and Tom Paulin, Brendan Kennelly, and Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize winner 1995) each created versions of Antigone; Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes (2004) contains beautiful poetry that is also speakable. Two Japanese artists have created significant stagings of Greek tragedy by combining Japanese and Western theater traditions. One is Tadashi Suzuki, who writes his own scripts; he staged the Trojan Women 1974, the Bacchae in 1978 (a bilingual production with Japanese and American actors, none of whom spoke the others’ language), and Clytemnestra (based on the Oresteia and Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra) in 1983. The other is Yukio Ninagawa, who staged Medea in 1978 and 2002 and Oedipus the King in 1986 and 2002. Each of these directors has toured his productions around the world.

  Fiction and Greek tragedy may seem radically different forms, yet some modern writers have combined them: Kate Cicellis in The Way to Colonos (1960); Nancy Bogen in Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home (1979); Christa Wolf in Medea (1998). An exciting new form of fiction is the graphic novel, combining art and text. Mike Carey and John Bolton’s The Furies (2002) and Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze (a series begun in 2001 and still ongoing) make fascinating use of Greek tragedy along with other classical sources.

  A number of festivals of Greek tragedy arose in the twentieth century, many on ancient sites. One of the first was the Delphic Festival founded by Greek poet/director Angelos Sikelianos and his American wife Eva Palmer. They staged an outdoor Prometheus Bound in 1927 complete with a chorus of fifty. The Syracuse Festival at the ancient theater in Sicily started in 1914 and has staged two Greek dramas every two years, attracting many spectators. The severely damaged Theater of Dionysus in Athens is currently being restored, but the Roman theater of Herodes Atticus, also on the slopes of the Acropolis, has housed the Festival of Athens since 1955. In 1938, Sophocles’ Electra was the first play staged at the theater of Epidaurus, and since 1954 there has been an annual festival there; the summer of 2015 will see presentations in modern Greek of the Prometheus Bound, Philoctetes, Helen, and Bacchae.

  One of the most important manifestations of Greek tragedy’s intellectual influence is the work of significant philosophers. In his Aesthetics (1820–29), G.W.F. Hegel argues that tragedy reconciles opposing moral claims both of which have value. Antigone is a prime example, which results, Hegel argues, not in the vindication of either Antigone’s or Creon’s position, but a reconciliation of the two (too late, of course, for the protagonists). In The Birth of Tragedy (1872, 1886), Friedrich Nietzsche outlines a dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac, or idealistic art and disorderly revelry, and argues that Greek tragedy mixes these elements. Aeschylus and Sophocles, he thinks, understood and employed this mixture, but it was undermined by Euripides’ and Socrates’ excessive rationalism. More recent discussions by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1959), the feminist Judith Butler (2000), and the political philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2002–2005) indicate that Antigone continues to arouse philosophical questions.

  The first fifteen years of the twenty-first century have seen many strong productions of Greek tragedy around the world. Three representative versions: Yaël Farber adapted the Oresteia into Molora (“ash” in Sesotho) in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, where “reconciliation” took on new meaning. First staged in Johannesburg 2003, it featured harsh violence and traditional Xhosa music. Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey, set in California with Oedipus as an ex-convict, was first performed in San Francisco in 2010. Increasing awareness of the problems faced by soldiers returning from war has led to productions of Greek tragedy intended to provide therapy for them and others suffering from PTSD, addiction, imprisonment, and other crises (http://www.outsidethewire llc.com). The success of all these productions suggests that experimentation into the meanings ancient Greek plays can hold for modern audiences will continue unabated.

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  Screen. Greek tragedies provided subjects for the very earliest films. A number of silent films, most quite brief, based on Oedipus the King were produced in France (1908), Italy (1910), England (1912, 1913), and the Netherlands (1913), but no prints of these are available.

  Some films are based on drama performances, such as Tyrone Guthrie’s production of Oedipus Rex in W. B. Yeats’s translation, staged at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, in 1956, with actors in masks and stylized costumes. George Tzavellas directed Antigone, starring the wonderful Greek actress Irene Papas, in 1961. Don Taylor staged and filmed for the BBC modern-dress productions of his own translations of Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus (1986). The poet and translator Tony Harrison wrote and directed Prometheus (1998), commenting eloquently on the decline of the working class in England and the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe.

  Distinguished directors have included Greek tragedy in their oeuvre: Pier Paolo Pasolini directed Edipo Re (1967), using a provocative mixture of ancient and modern settings
, and Medea (1969) with the opera star Maria Callas in her only film role. Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962) modernized Hippolytus, with Theseus as a Greek shipping magnate; in his A Dream of Passion (1978) starring Melina Mercouri and Ellen Burstyn, an actress preparing to play Medea onstage forms a relationship with a woman who has killed her own children. Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó set Elektra, My Love (1974) on the broad Hungarian plain, using the Greek framework to comment on contemporary politics. Lars von Trier made a 1988 TV film of Medea making magnificent use of northern Danish scenery and creating an unforgettable depiction of the infanticide.

  There is at least one contemporary film that, though not explicitly based on Greek drama, uses one of its basic elements (discovery of a family secret) with tremendous force: the Canadian Incendies (2010), in which twins, following their mother’s last wishes, journey to the Middle East.

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  Music. Before 1600, Europe had known combinations of music and drama in Christian liturgy and court entertainments. But then a movement arose to reform music by emphasizing the words. Greek tragedy, which many believed had musical accompaniment throughout, provided a model for dramma per musica, involving libretti with a real dramatic structure. The earliest operas took their subjects from Greek myth; one of the most frequent is the story of Orpheus, a great musician who, after losing his bride, Eurydice, goes to the Underworld and by singing convinces the gods of the Lower World to give her back, only to lose her again. Monteverdi’s Favola d’Orfeo (1607), though not based on a particular tragedy, has a tragic structure and tone.

  Later come works more closely based on particular Greek tragedies. Some fifty composers wrote operas based on Medea; Cavalli’s Giasone (1649) was the first, and other composers include Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1693), Luigi Cherubini (1797), and Aribert Reimann (2010). In John Fisher’s metatheatrical Medea: The Musical (1994), a director has rewritten the play to comment on contemporary gay issues, but things go awry when the gay actor playing Jason falls in love with the actress playing Medea, a straight feminist. The musical dimension was provided by song parodies (popular songs with lyrics changed). Alcestis has been very popular, no doubt partly because of its apparently happy ending when Herakles brings the wife who sacrificed herself for her husband back to him. Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Alceste (1674) is a very free adaptation with various supernatural forces at work. Handel’s version Admeto (1727) adds many extra characters and complicated love plots. Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste (1767) is the second of his “reform” operas, in which he rejected the dominant model for music drama (the overly complicated plots, extra characters, repetition, improvisation, elaboration so clearly seen in Handel’s version), focusing instead on plot and character. A little-known example of the musical reception of Greek tragedy is Wagner’s Ring cycle of four operas, which premiered in 1876. Though the obvious source is German myth and literature, Wagner was deeply influenced by Greek literature, especially the Oresteia. While most late nineteenth-century Russian composers focus on Russian history and literature, Sergey Taneyev created an Oresteia trilogy (1895).

  Twentieth-century musical works that use Greek tragedy include two operas by Richard Strauss, each with a libretto by the distinguished poet Hugo von Hoffmansthal. Elektra (1909), based on Sophocles, is thrillingly dark, concentrating on Electra’s obsession with her father’s death and including an ending in which Electra’s joy at the murder of Agamemnon’s killers leads her to dance herself to death. Egyptian Helen (1928) is a very free adaptation of Euripides’ Helen with many added characters including an omniscient seashell. But the boldest musical version of the Helen story is unquestionably Jacques Offenbach’s La belle Hélène (1864), which is not a tragedy but a comic spoof that mocks Menelaus and ends with Paris and Helen sailing off to erotic happiness.

  Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1928) is an oratorio that can be presented either fully or partly staged. In the libretto by Jean Cocteau, a narrator speaking Latin, “a medium not dead but turned to stone,” mediates between audience and performance, providing a definite alienation effect. Julie Taymor’s 1992 production in Japan is available on video. Carl Orff, most famous for his Carmina Burana, used Hölderlin’s translation in creating his Antigonae (1949).

  Three modern operas are based on Euripides’ Bacchae. Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger (1926) focuses on a twelfth-century Christian king of Sicily who is deeply upset by meeting a shepherd with pagan beliefs. In the final act, the shepherd’s followers dance and the shepherd is transformed into Dionysus; instead of Euripides’ tragic ending, Roger is transformed and grateful. Egon Wellesz’s Die Bakchantinnen (1931) similarly uses biblical imagery to suggest that Dionysus is Christ, while Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids, with an English libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (1966), follows Euripides’ play. Most recently, John Eaton has composed three operas based on Greek tragedy, including The Cry of Clytemnestra (1980) and Antigone (1999); Judith Weir composed music for a production of Oedipus the King directed by Peter Hall (1996); and Andrew Simpson created an Oresteia consisting of three one-act operas (2003).

  All the evidence suggests that translators, adapters, directors, composers, and filmmakers will continue to create exciting productions, films, and music based on Greek tragedy.

  FURTHER READING

  Good overviews of the theatrical reception of tragedy are Helene P. Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012) and Robert Garland, Surviving Greek Tragedy (London: Duckworth, 2004), which focuses on British productions and also includes musical and film reception. Dionysus Since 1969: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, edited by Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Amanda Wrigley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) discusses various productions in the late twentieth century. Studies on individual plays include Agamemnon in Performance: 458 BC to AD 2004, edited by Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Erin B. Mee and Helene P. Foley, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Medea in Performance 1500–2000, edited by Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000).

  On tragedy in film, see Pantelis Michelakis, Greek Tragedy on Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) for an extensive (though not comprehensive) guide with excellent theoretical perspectives. In Opera from the Greek: Studies in the Poetics of Appreciation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), Michael Ewans discusses five operas based on Greek tragedy. Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage, edited by Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjenšek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), provides in-depth discussions of works from the late sixteenth century to the present day.

  An indispensable aid is the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford (www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk), which includes archival, digital, and bibliographic resources on productions of ancient texts from 1450 to the present. Most useful for Americans is the online searchable database of productions (www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/​research-collections/​performance-database/​productions), which is constantly seeing the addition of new material.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  JOSHUA BILLINGS is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University. His research focuses on tragedy and intellectual history, and he has published one monograph, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton, 2014).

  MARY-KAY GAMEL has worked as translator, adaptor, director, dramaturg, and/or producer on more than thirty fully staged productions of ancient drama, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and New Zealand. She has also written widely on issues involved in such “subsequent performances,” including what constitutes “authentic stagings.”

  GREGORY HAYS is Associate Professor of Cla
ssics at the University of Virginia. He has published articles and reviews in journals ranging from Classical Quarterly to The New York Review of Books. His translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is available from the Modern Library.

  RACHEL KITZINGER is professor emerita of the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College. In addition to a book on Sophoclean choruses and articles on Sophoclean tragedy, she has directed a number of productions of Greek tragedy, including Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, using the translation she collaborated on with the poet Eamon Grennan.

  MARY LEFKOWITZ is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, emerita, at Wellesley College. A recipient of several honorary degrees and a National Humanities Medal for her teaching and writing, her books include The Lives of the Greek Poets; Greek Gods, Human Lives; Euripides and the Gods; and the sourcebook Women’s Life in Greece and Rome.

  DANIEL MENDELSOHN, an author and critic, writes frequently for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. His books include the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a translation of the complete poems of Cavafy; and two collections of essays and criticism, most recently Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (2012). He teaches at Bard College.

  FRANK NISETICH is Professor of Classics, emeritus, the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He has translated Pindar (Pindar’s Victory Songs), Euripides (Orestes), Callimachus (The Poems of Callimachus), and Posidippus. In addition to Pindar and Homer (1989), he has published articles on Pindar, Euripides, Callimachus, and the influence of Pindar on modern poetry.