A Sense of Theatre: The Theatre Historian’s Perspective

Now that we have entered an age when respect for the plays of classical Greece has been reduced to treating them as an excuse for showing how much cleverer are “versions” by contemporary adaptors / dramatists than those of their long-dead forebears, and I have entered an age when respect for those architects and pioneers of their new genre of theatre two and a half thousand years ago has itself an aura of the antiquated, I would like here to revisit, for the last time, reasons why a theatrical understanding of the 46 plays that have survived is not always the same as a dramatic one, but should take priority over any theoretical or literary approach. In the more than thousand English translations of the plays published from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, translators have tended to recreate the Greeks in the forms and fashions of the drama of their own time, or to have invented formats which reflect contemporary notions, often deluded, of cultural sensibilities in the classical world. After all, it is not until the twentieth century that these multiple translations begin to reveal any awareness of the plays as performance pieces, either originally or since. By then the plays had been largely appropriated by a multitude of extraneous vested interests which came to dominate scholarship. The worst disservice has been done to the Greeks by the arrogation of a performance discipline by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and various generations of cultural jugglers, often claiming a pedigree that goes back to Aristotle, and even Plato. Enthusiasm for the theatre from Socrates and Plato went no further than to exclude it from the ideal state as too dangerous, while Aristotle’s defense of the drama in the Poetics, some insights notwithstanding, was written seventy years after the death of Sophocles and Euripides and never reads like the work of a theatre-goer.