Trembling Specters: Barrie Kosky's Women of Troy as Post-Tragedy

Barrie Kosky has been labeled Australian theatre's enfant terrible. His adaptations of classical tragedies in the 1990s and 2000s in Australia drew radical performance modes and Aristotelian traditions into dynamic relation. This article proposes that Kosky's 2008 production, Women of Troy, is an example of what can be called "post-tragedy." Through the prism of Kosky's work, post-tragedy is posited as a particular approach to adapting the classics that, paradoxically, engages both postdramatic and Aristotelian performance modes. It is precisely through this paradoxical intersection that Kosky's Women of Troy—as an example of post-tragedy—operates as a theatrical response to, and affective critique of, the production of neoliberal subjectivity.