The Living Art of Greek Tragedy (review)

This lively introduction to Greek tragedy has the pluck to treat the ancient and revered "goat songs" as if they were performance material, and it has even been written with the specific interests of the theatre practitioner in mind. With a careful marshalling of production-oriented information, The Living Art of Greek Tragedy effectively construes its subject as a performance rather than as a literary tradition. After first characterizing each of the extant plays individually and positioning them a bit in the context of fifth-century BCE Athens, it proceeds to discuss selected performances and rewritings of the plays throughout the ages, up to and especially including those in our own time. And as she guides the reader through these countless textual variations and productions, McDonald routinely takes time to consider their real or imagined reception by an audience.

The selected works represent a wide range of languages, cultures, and political climates, including several each from, among other countries, Japan, South Africa, the United States, Ireland, France, and Germany, creating a kaleidoscopic and detailed impression of the tragedies' presence on the modern stage. To cite three examples: Kabuki design elements in Yukio Ninagawa's production of Euripides' Medea (1978, 1984, 1993) produce startling effects, such as when "The actor playing Medea has crystal drops that adorn her eyes like dangling necklaces of tears" (148); multicultural complexity infuses Ariane Mnouchkine's production in France of Les Atrides (1990-92), in which "she incorporated elements from Kathakali, Brazilian, Kabuki, and Noh traditions" (33); Nigerian writer Ola Rotimi adapts Sophocles' Oedipus the King into the play, The Gods are Not to Blame (1968), and extends that play's conflicts into the horrifying world of the Biafran War. Surveying these diverse appropriations frees the plays from their familiar trappings as Golden Age classics and recasts them as powerful vehicles for a postcolonial era in world theatre.

An idea is also gained of the tragedies' history on the stage with the noting of landmark productions, such as that of the Oedipus Tyrannus in 1585 at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, "the first translation of Greek tragedy to be performed in the West" (64), and August W. Schlegel's adaptation of Euripides' Ion, produced at Weimar in 1803. The scores of summaries become simply fascinating, incidentally, as an annotated roll call of the outstanding artists who have worked with Greek tragedy: Gide, O'Neill, Eliot, Sartre, Brecht, Anouilh, Fugard, Müller, Wilson, Taymor, Gurney, Wertenbaker, and Mee are only some of them; earlier figures include such literary bellwethers as Seneca, Racine, Goethe, and Hölderlin.

The book is made up almost entirely of the descriptions of the tragedies and of their later reincarnations as translations, adaptations, and stage and screen productions, but McDonald also develops in her commentary on them an increasingly sophisticated and comparative way of viewing the various versions of the plays. The book thus wavers between being a segmented reference work and a graded introduction to the field. The accounts appear in chronological lists that separately track each play's unique legacy and are grouped by author into three large chapters, one each for the works of Aeschylus (seven plays), Sophocles (seven), and Euripides (nineteen, including the satyr play Cyclops). As a result, reading quickly and in large doses isn't easy; the same characters and events recur with and without changes in so many different versions of each play that it helps enormously now and then to take a break. With some plays, such as Hippolytus and Antigone, the legacy is so intricate that it reads like the variations of the Sicilian Defense in a chess book. Of course, after the initial reading or browsing, this book will continue to serve, thanks to its index, as a valuable reference work, and not only for theatre artists, but for classicists and theatre academicians, as well.

When covering the less Byzantine, i.e., the majority, of the theatrical legacies, the writing becomes a pleasurable stream of lucid, reliable descriptions of the...