Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 by Eleftheria Ioannidou (review)

Eleftheria Ioannidou's first monograph is a welcome addition to classical reception studies from a scholar equally embedded in the disciplines of classics and theatre and performance studies, whose level of expertise and fluency in both academic fields and several European languages is remarkable. The volume examines the relationship between the notion of tragedy and postmodern theory and aesthetics through an analysis of a series of plays which rewrite ancient dramatic material. In the past few decades, the debate about contemporary theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedy in western drama has been dominated by classical scholars based at, or associated with, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) research centre at the University of Oxford, founded by Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin in 1996; Ioannidou is currently an Early-Career Associate member, despite being based in the Netherlands as a Lecturer in Theatre. Publications from the international pool of eminent, mid- and early-career APGRD scholars have flooded the market since the year 2000, notably with volumes such as Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley's edited collection Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (2004). The present study emerged as a doctoral thesis supervised at Oxford by the now Director of APGRD, Fiona Macintosh, and operates within the same territory of Dionysus Since 69; it dissects western playwrights' re-imaginings of Athenian tragedy from the 1970s to the early years of the 21st century, but Ioannidou's point of departure is narrower in focus. In line with her colleagues at APGRD, however, she privileges textual analysis over a theorization of performance, despite the word "performance" being in the title of the research centre. Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames takes its cue from Terry Eagleton's position, articulated in Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003), that postmodernism and its inherent conservatism is incompatible with tragedy as a genre, aesthetic category and structure of feeling because "if human beings are fragments, they are not even coherent enough to be the bearers of tragic meaning" (Eagleton quoted in Ioannidou, 2). Relying on and extending Raymond Williams' historical materialism in Modern Tragedy (1966), Ioannidou's project is therefore to show how tragedy is "not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences, conventions and institutions" (Williams quoted in Ioannidou, 25) that can be adapted to suit different historical periods and literary movements, including postmodernism.

The overarching argument proposed by Ioannidou is that the prevalent postmodern gesture is to "undo" Greek texts in order to question the "system of exclusions or oppression that have been inscribed in them within a long history of reception" (4). She continues: "Greek tragedy itself is subjected to critique both as a category used to legitimize acts of retribution as well as a dramatic form that epitomizes the historical paradigm of the Western world, not least in its failings and discontents" (4). After a discussion of the modern critical debate on tragedy—from Nietzsche to Steiner, Brecht, Benjamin, Williams, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Eagleton, Maffessoli—Ioannidou proceeds to examine three plays that "propose a new ethics of appropriation of the canon" and "introduce a politics of viewing that transposes the ethical question into the process of reception" (71); namely Steven Berkoff's Greek (1994), Hélène Cixous's La ville parjure (1994) and Martin Crimp's Cruel and Tender (2004). According to Ioannidou, these plays "break with tragedy as a category that reaffirms aesthetic hierarchies and cultural hegemonies and invite audiences to reflect on the ways in which suffering is mediated, contained, and evaluated" (71).

Ioannidou then turns to investigate how postmodern tragedies engage with metatheatre, with reference to Pavlos Matesis' Roar (1998), Andreas Staïkos' Clytemnestra? (1975), Brian Friel's Living Quarters: After Hippolytus (1977), Athol Fugard's The Island (1973), and Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Medea (1977). Here, Ioannidou contends that rewritings by Matesis...