In Greek tragedy, it’s important to know who you’re talking to. But it isn’t always easy. In a theatre culture where all performers were male, and wore masks, and where a maximum of three actors shared all the major character roles, you couldn’t tell who you were looking at by sight. So, again and again, tragedy’s characters have to make wary inquiries.
In Aeschylus’ play Libation Bearers (458 BCE),1 long-separated siblings Electra and Orestes recognize each other by physical tokens: her foot neatly matches his footprint, their hair is the same texture and shade, and he carries a piece of fabric she wove as a child. Half a century later, Euripides’ dramatization of the same mythic story in Electra (c.410 BCE) pours scorn on this procedure; a woman’s foot would be smaller than a man’s—this Electra argues—while siblings don’t have the same hair, and a grown man doesn’t still wear a garment woven for a boy. Across a series of plays dealing with the troubled children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Greek tragedy powerfully, playfully highlights the importance—and the difficulty—of reliably knowing who you’re speaking to.
In Iphigenia in Tauris (Euripides, c.420–412 BCE), things are more complex still. Here, a captive Orestes point-blank refuses to utter his own name, meaning that Iphigenia (his older sister, long presumed dead) can’t recognize the brother she last saw as a baby. Unable to fathom the stubborn silence of this Greek stranger, Iphigenia asks, ‘Is it too big a name to tell?’ (trans. McLeish in Walton & McLeish 1997a, 138). Which is perhaps a good way to think about the ‘actor’ addressed in the title of this book. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor was initially conceived as a volume to support students training at UK conservatoires: international cohorts of young people studying the acting of Greek tragedy as part of an emerging professional skill set. On this basis, the book set out to combine historical surveys, discussions of contemporary theatre practice, and practical exercises which could be applied in the studio or rehearsal room, seeking to weave together the disparate strands of knowledge—intellectual, experiential, and embodied—which might add up to a professional competence in the re-performance of ancient plays. However, like the tragic siblings Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia, the volume’s authors have undertaken some major journeys since this beginning.
Today, we find ourselves working on different continents, in very dissimilar contexts. And our sense of who ‘the actor’ is has expanded accordingly. Some sections of this book emerge from work undertaken within university actor-training programmes in Australia, which—like their counterparts in the USA—have an active vocational emphasis; they aim to prepare students to seek employment in the theatre, film, and TV industries. To this end, such programmes often reinforce training traditions which centre upon commercially focused psychological acting approaches (although local cultures and practices may infuse and shape the range of cross-hatched training on offer). However, other portions of Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor draw on creative explorations undertaken with UK university students, whose approach to ancient tragedy may be very different. Such students may plan to pursue professional careers onstage, but they are learning within a culture where adaptation, devising, storytelling, and site-specific practice are understood to be key capabilities of the self-sustaining contemporary artist, and where the texts and stories of Greek tragedy are more likely to be positioned as provocations for independent performance-making than as fixed scripts to be acted.
Other elements of this volume develop from its authors’ own experiments in professional theatre-making (both in Australia and the UK), or their engagement with the work being generated by graduate companies. And so, issues overlapping with directorial perspectives have also started to infuse the project, giving rise to important new questions. How might particular tragic encounters be staged in relation to a range of spaces and places? How can the actor’s embodied, imaginative explorations of a text or role potentially inform such choices? And what is the balance of creative responsibility within a company or ensemble practically attempting to formulate responses to such questions? Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor is making its way into the world at a moment when the status and authority of ‘the actor’ is under intense scrutiny. However, the discussions presented here operate on the basis that the present-day (or emerging) actor is an intellectually engaged creative artist, who may well be a skilled and empathetic collaborator, but who does not automatically defer to the inherited power structures associated (particularly in western theatre) with the singular, authoritative figure of the director. According to this view, actors are self-determining agents, and therefore—at least to some degree—self-directing.2 As this volume will explore, today’s actors may assume authority and creative authorship in ways which radically exceed the expectations of previous generations, and Greek tragedy—rooted in a collective, choral dramaturgy—offers a richly provocative opportunity for exploring such potentials.
Across this range of settings and contexts, the variety of identities and aspirations which might characterize the ‘contemporary actor’ is vast; it’s almost (as Iphigenia suggests) ‘too big a name to tell’. And the range of motivations which might spur such artists to explore tragedy is concomitantly wide. But here are a few indicative possibilities. If you’re an actor-in-training, seeking a practical grasp of how to act in Greek tragedies as well as an intellectual understanding of the genre’s major challenges, this book aims to introduce an essential body of skills, exercises, and ideas that will help you become an informed interpreter of ancient plays. If you’re an emerging theatre-maker, keen to explore how the texts of tragedy can provoke imaginative revisions and re-appropriations, or how the skills of acting tragedy can help shape ensemble practices and identities, this book aims to offer inspiration, provocation, and practical support for your project. If you’re a teacher or director, looking for new ways to make ancient plays come alive, this book aims to equip you with a variety of practice-based approaches to classroom or studio explorations, which you can mix-and-match, or build upon, as your own situation and imagination suggest. If you’re a curious reader, wishing to find out more about Greek drama and dramaturgy, and contemporary approaches to these, this book aims to provide an engaging—if necessarily partial—account of the ways in which current artists interpret, adapt, and transform ancient theatre practices. However, it also aspires to tempt you onto your feet, at least once, to experience the performance potentials of ancient tragedy for yourself.
To all these readers, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor begins by issuing a challenge—to abandon two fundamental assumptions, which (in the experience of the volume’s authors) almost all of our students, colleagues, and collaborators bring to the task of acting tragedy. The first is that an ancient tragic drama may be treated just like a modern play-text, peopled by naturalistically motivated characters, with complex inner lives, whose journeys through the play follow logical, legible, and uninterrupted arcs. The second is that an ancient drama’s author will have adhered to classical principles of plotting, presenting a narrative focused upon a hero’s ‘tragic fall’, resulting in a play-text which obeys a series of structural rules, and therefore offers a predictably organized series of intense emotional effects. Taken in combination, these assumptions can be understood to imply that the familiar creative task of imaginatively inhabiting a character role through Stanislavski-derived psychological analysis, supported by a ‘correct’ intellectual understanding of a classical text (read as operating in accordance with Aristotelian rules), lies at the heart of acting ancient tragedy. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor deliberately sets out to challenge these assumptions, contending that the surviving texts of Greek tragedy, understood both in relation to their earliest performance culture and to contemporary acting and theatre-making practices, offer a much richer and more demanding set of provocations. It begins from the premise that when you hold a text derived from ancient Greek tragedy in your hands, that moment constitutes an encounter with a multi-modal performance score, which potentially requires the present-day actor to engage with breath, sound, music, song, storytelling, space, architecture, embodiment, transformation, and choral or ensemble practices—or any combination of these.
What tragedy demands is not simply intellectual and emotional identification with a particular character role—the modern classical tradition, which privileges psychological analysis, or its Americanized iteration in the form of ‘Method’ studio work. Rather, this book contends, the multiple challenges of ancient tragedy call for an actor who is eclectically, holistically, and playfully engaged in exploring (and perhaps pioneering) interactions between formally alien, and only partially documented, historical theatre practices and a wide variety of contemporary approaches to acting and theatre-making. In this way, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor aims to equip its readers with the knowledge and confidence to encounter Greek tragedy on its own, intensely demanding, terms. The model of tragedy presented here isn’t solely focused on the individual experience of a heroic or anguished protagonist, but adopts a wider perspective on tragedy as an ancient genre which incorporated poetry and song, provocatively intertextual myth-making, elaborate choreography and culturally loaded spatial vocabularies, and the embodied complexity and eloquence of the tragic chorus.
1.1 Reading About Tragedy
Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor aims to give today’s actors a new set of perspectives on the challenge of performing ancient tragic plays, but this project would not have been possible without the vital w...