29 research outputs found
Grounded, Heracles and the Gorgon's Gaze
Get PDFGrounded by George Brant is a drama which explores the psychological consequences, and moral implications, of our increasing dependence upon remote high-tech warfare. It takes the form of an extended monologue, in which The Pilot (we never learn her name) tells her own life story, from being a hot-shot F-16 flyer zooming over the skies of Iraq to the dislocation of piloting an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (commonly known as a “drone”) from Creech Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas. This essay discusses Grounded in the specific context of the Gate’s (London) production. It begins with a critical examination of my own “mis-seeing” of the play’s protagonist as a version of the tragic Heracles. The analysis which follows compares key aspects of The Pilot’s narrative with Euripides’ Heracles and Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and relates my “mis-seeing” to Brant’s referencing of symbols and characters from ancient Greek myth within the drama. It finally considers the Gate’s staging of the play’s closing moments in relation to the dramaturgy of Athenian tragedy, examining the ways in which the production denies its watchers the expected tragic spectacle of the fallen hero, instead foregrounding and interrogating the ethics of the audience’s own spectatorship
Greek Tragedy, Agonistic Space, and Contemporary Performance
Get PDFThis article combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy’s contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. It focuses on Athenian tragedy’s competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance-space, understood in relation to the cultural trope of the agon. Drawing on David Wiles’ structuralist analysis of Greek drama, which envisages tragedy’s spatial confrontations as a theatrical correlative of democratic politics, performed tragedy is here re-framed as a site of embodied contest and struggle; as agonistic spatial practice. This historical model is then applied to a current case-study; Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women as co-produced by Actors Touring Company and The Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2016-17. It is proposed that the frictious effects, encounters, and confrontations generated by this production (re-staged and re-articulated across multiple venues and contexts) exemplify some of the potentials of agonistic spatial practice in contemporary re-performance of Greek tragedy. Throughout, is contended that re-imagining tragic theatre, both ancient and modern, as (in Chantal Mouffe’s terms) ‘agonistic public space’ represents an important new approach to interpreting, and creatively re-imagining, interactions between Athenian tragedy and democratic politics
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Negotiating Translation for the Stage
No full textThis exciting collection constitutes the first analysis of the modern performance of ancient Greek drama from a theoretical perspective. ... This book provides the solution [to scant theoretical analysis] in the form of a lively interdisciplinary dialogue, inspired by a conference held at the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama (APGRD) in Oxford, between nineteen experts in Classics, Drama, Music, Cultural History and the world of professional theatre
‘Ercles Vein’: Heracles as Bottom in Ted Hughes’ Alcestis
Get PDFTed Hughes’ version of Euripides’ Alcestis (1999) is a play which diverges significantly from its ancient source-text, most notably in an interpolated sequence during which the drunken Heracles re-enacts his own labours, before experiencing traumatic visions. This article identifies this un-Euripidean interlude as a characteristic instance of inter-textual adaptation practice, in which Hughes constructs a self-reflexive, meta-theatrical play on the bombastic, tyrannical ‘Ercles’, as exuberantly performed by Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595). It locates this analysis within the context of developing scholarship on Hughes’ adaptations from the classics, and an increasing focus on the poet’s use of mediating texts, especially Shakespearean verse, in constructing complex, multi-layered and challenging re-writings of classical source-texts. It contends that the meta-theatrical comedy of Hughes’ Heracles-as-Bottom offers a familiar analogue for some key elements of the ‘prosatyric’ Alcestis, while also allowing the modern poet to expand upon the back-story of Heracles’ labours, as well as providing him with an opportunity to dramatize some of the darker aspects of the ancient hero’s violent career. It finally goes on to consider how this characterization might be related to the wider reception of Heracles, especially in his maddened, murderous aspects, in recent adaptations for the theatre
Herakles on Chesil Bank: The Archers, Disavowable Classicism, and The Small Back Room
Get PDFThe film The Small Back Room was written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and released in 1949. It is the wartime tale of an injured and embittered back-room scientist, who is recruited to help combat a new kind of explosive device. Based on Nigel Balchin’s 1943 novel, the film significantly alters the story’s climactic sequence so that the wounded Sammy Rice successfully disarms the mysterious device and, in so doing, restores his own self-esteem, while gaining the respect of the military personnel who witness his achievement. In this way, a downbeat source-text is transformed into a mutedly redemptive narrative of loyalty, friendship, and unconventional heroism. Hentzi (2008) identifies Powell and Pressburger’s adaptation of Balchin’s novel as ‘telling a version of the legend of Philoctetes’. This chapter builds upon Hentzi’s argument, together with Moor’s (2005) discussion of ‘magical spaces’ in Powell and Pressburger’s films, to analyse the strategies by which the pair infuse a recurring sense of quasi-mythic male friendship, and miraculous healing, into a film which is most often understood as one of their rare excursions into filmic realism. In the process, it formulates a new approach to reading The Archers’ classical reception during the later 1940s, focusing on their cultivation of deliberately ambiguous scenes and images whose classical influences could be swiftly disavowed by filmmakers under pressure to conform to the demands of realist cinematography
Staging a Transforming Great Britain: Tamlane, The Social Turn, and the 2014 Referendum
No full textThis chapter emerges from the energies and aspirations of the years leading up to the Scottish Independence Referendum of September 2014, and explores three dramas created during this period: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (David Greig, 2011), The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project (Northern Stage, 2013) and Rantin (Kieran Hurley, 2013). It borrows the mythic figure of the ballad-hero Tamlane (shape-shifting, multiform, and elusive) to reflect on the ways in which national identities have been asserted, subverted, challenged, and re-made (across several centuries) through the medium of Scotland and England’s traditional songs. The chapter specifically focuses on the ways in which these three modern theatre works sought to activate the convivial, participatory performance interactions associated with traditional song practices. In this way, it highlights the value of traditional ballads and songs for politically engaged performance-makers in both England and Scotland during a turbulent, uncertain, and ebullient historical moment
The Paper Cinema's Odyssey and The Factory, The Odyssey
No full textThis extended review highlights an increasingly important aspect of the contemporary performance reception of the Odyssey in the UK, with growing numbers of practitioners and companies moving away from the straightforward dramatisation (or revisionist dramatic contestation) of Homer’s epic tale, and towards a deepening engagement with epic storytelling as a distinctive category of performance practice. These projects have increasingly foregrounded the techniques and practices, and the active audiences, of epic storytelling, as well as the tales being told, opening up new landscapes for the exploration of ancient epic in live re-performance. Two productions currently playing in London are here taken as typifying this trend, demonstrating a developing focus on the flexible narrative structures and in-performance composition of Homeric epic, as well as the ripping yarn of the Odyssey’s plot
"It Happens in Ballads": Scotland, Utopia, and Traditional Song in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
No full textIn the National Theatre of Scotland’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), the eponymous heroine is a collector of ballads, who views her role as the loving preservation of traditional artworks. However, Prudencia’s perspective is challenged by her late-night encounter with the sinister Nick, whose own passion for collecting forces Prudencia to revise her sense of the ballad’s nature, and potential functions. In Greig’s drama, the ballad’s protean form proves to be both infectious, and transformative, and this process isn’t necessarily limited to the play’s characters. This chapter highlights the ways in which the ballad, in the course of the drama, becomes a catalyst for live, collective vocalisation. It contends that via processes of ‘musicking’ (as defined by Christopher Small) and ‘presencing’ (as described by James Porter, and recently elaborated by Mairi McFadyen), the show’s audience is also offered its own experience of ballad performance. Taking David Greig’s evocation of an imaginatively transformative ‘rough theatre’ as stimulus, the chapter also reflects upon the value of the traditional ballad for politically-engaged theatre more broadly, utilising Jill Dolan’s descriptions of a ‘utopian performative’ to consider how and why contemporary theatre artists might choose to borrow from of the sociable, participatory dynamics of the ceilidh. It concludes that Greig’s playful exploration of the ballad not only offers a stomping evening’s entertainment, but can also be located within a wider project of promoting a lively, popular and multi-vocal debate concerning Scottish identity and destiny
