The Classical Theatre Tradition

It’s All Greek to Me is a Study Option on classical Greek theatre concentrating on staging, performance and theatre presentation. The course focuses on the form of Greek drama (tragedy, comedy and satyr) and the continuing influence of Greek theatre traditions on modern drama. Students on the course are encouraged to think creatively about how they would stage or present these plays on the contemporary stage.

Steve begins the course with a detailed survey of theatre presentation in the classical period and an examination of the role of theatre in Greek society. The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander are examined, concentrating on dramatic and theatrical technique, and later Aristotle’s Poetics and its affect on theatre history is studied. Theatre presentation in ancient Athens and the whole Attic region is a detective story that has involved the accumulation of considerable evidence and numerous theories but no conclusive proof. Staging and theatre presentation in Greek theatre remains a minefield of academic conjecture. Conflicting evidence is offered to students to allow them a glimpse of just how much hard digging goes on  — literally in the case of archaeology  — in trying to understand how Greek theatre operated. Also they are able to get a sense that academic opinion on this subject is in a constant state of flux. They are encouraged to weigh up the conflicting evidence and then make up their own mind. Once students have a picture in their own heads of a Greek theatre at work then they can decide how the plays could have been staged. Further more, they can then decide how the working of Classical times can be adapted/ignored/copied for modern day presentations.

There has been much discussion of the role of Greek theatre in Athenian society. The course looks at some of the major sociological issues raised by theatre historians in recent years such as the importance of the writer in the developing democracy (the special role of the sophos), the dramatic presentation of women and slaves on the Athenian stage (when they had little or no voice in the rest of Attic society) and the so-called peace plays of Aristophanes or the anti-war plays of Euripides at a time when Athens was more or less continually at a state of declared or undeclared war with her neighbours or Persia.

The actual plays and writers are not allocated a particular slot for week to week study as such. Instead the course takes students through the dramatic and theatrical techniques of the Athenian playwrights. For example, dramatic technique looks at the nature of conflict in Greek drama, its legendary setting, the use of irony, the repeated employment of certain story patterns and so on. Theatrical technique on the other hand looks at the use of silent or still characters on stage, the physical importance of certain properties (e.g. the bow in Philoctetes), the metatheatrical nature of Greek theatre, the role of the chorus and so on.

In examining Poetics the course emphasises Aristotle’s methodology of putting the student at the centre of the process of "tragic making" (a more literal and contextual translation of the term "poetics") rather than the "rule making" perspective that many traditional critics have when looking at the work. The course briefly traces the influence of Aristotle’s so-called rules and devices on theatre and also the Christian absorption (or distortion?) of the Aristotelian concept of harmatia or "error".

The course also looks at the general influence of the classical period on theatre since Greek times. For example, the option looks at how the conventions of the Greek Chorus have been absorbed into dramatic works and theatre presentations and how modern writers have written their own versions or "takes" on classical Greek plays and legends, ranging from T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion to Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love.The main purpose of the option is to see how Greek plays can be presented and made to work on the modern stage. This section of It’s all Greek to Me is the creative and imaginative focus of the course because once a general background has been established students are then encouraged to offer their own ideas for modern staging and interpretation. In short the course asks one ‘double-sided’ question: how does Greek theatre work both in an ancient and modern context? In this sense the course also hopefully teaches students how to read a play as a potentially living piece of theatre, a discipline they can then apply to all their theatre reading.