Translating Greek Tragedy to the Modern Stage

Translating Greek Tragedy to the Modern Stage

I'm approaching this issue from the starting point of someone whose main interests are in the reception of ancient Greek tragedy on the modern stage—that is, the ways in which the plays have been transmitted, translated, rewritten, and realized across time, place, and culture. Performed translations enable audiences to experience interaction between ancient and modern. They can also be indicators of changes in modern perceptions of the ancient play and in how practitioners use the transformative powers of theatre.

For most classicists working in this field, the upsurge during the past thirty years or so of performances of Greek plays and of new plays affiliated to them has caused not only delight but also deep-rooted challenges to the methods and theoretical frameworks used to research text and performance. Theatre translation is not just a relationship between the ancient text and the creator of the modern acting script; the activators of translation and meaning also include the director, the designer, the actors, and the spectators, as well as the material and cultural contexts of theatre and its spaces. In understanding this matrix, classical researchers have much to learn from theatre researchers and practitioners. Perhaps, too, we can offer some reciprocal benefits that might arise from our work on the continuing impact of the forms and conventions of the plays and, indirectly, of the ancient contexts in which they were first created and received.

Led by the work of Oliver Taplin dating from the 1970s,¹⁰ the performance aspects of the ancient text were placed at the center of classical research alongside the traditional emphasis on philological analysis, and both have fed into discussion of approaches to translation and to the reception of the plays beyond antiquity. Recent work on the histories of performance of the plays has considered a variety of contexts, including theatres of protest and watersheds in cultural and political change. Focus on translation issues has tended to regard the languages of translation as subaltern, but has also been influenced by the recognition from scholars of English literature that creative translations from Greek and Latin can attain artistic status in their own right (Pope, Dryden, Pound, Logue) and by the implications for theatre foregrounded by translation scholars such as Susan Bassnett.¹¹

Greek plays are now being staged in all types of theatre, from the high-prestige commercial companies to student and experimental productions on theatre fringes. However, all have in common that the theatre practitioners involved want to be regarded as "making it new," putting their stamp (or cutting their theatrical teeth) on plays that have long performance histories and on mythological themes that are lodged in the cultural memory. This means that comparisons can be made and metatheatrical elements abound. It also means that there is a tightrope to be negotiated between the concepts of revival and new work. Helen Edmundson, who wrote the script for the 2006 Shared Experience production of Euripides' Orestes, has recently described her approach as

not to be slavishly loyal to the source. . . . These days we all make very strong distinctions between adaptations and original work. But they're all plays and they all have to tell the audience a story. . . . Shakespeare plundered other people's stories shamelessly. And people didn't say "That's not a play, it's an adaptation."¹²

Edmundson also referred to commercial pressures to do adaptations because audiences will flock to a familiar title. The question in this case was whether spectators were getting the story of Orestes or Euripides' play. Edmundson said that she had "played fast and loose with Euripides' text" because she thought it "quite clunky . . . not really one thing or another." She reduced the Chorus's presence to some lines given to a slave (combined with a silent Chorus of nude, life-size terracotta figures at the side and rear of the stage). The production was well-received, but an effect of these changes (especially the cutting...