Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance

Abstract

This book explores how encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in modernist experiments in performance. It analyses the experiments of Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, H. D. and Bertolt Brecht in creating a modernist aesthetic in performing, dancing, translating and designing Greek tragedies, sometimes for the stage and sometimes for the page. The book proposes a modernist aesthetic of Greek tragedy based on Hellenism as theatricality that radically revises the philosophical discourses of tragedy. Theatricality is read within the broader modernist experiments that reconfigure the relationships between the play-text and the stage, the body of the performer and the written word, while also re-conceptualising the main authors/creators of the performance event. Most such modernist experiments exhibit a strong attachment to notions of Greek tragedy. Sometimes these notions are based on readings of actual play-texts or archeological findings, but more often than not they rely on creative versions and encounters with Greek tragedy that help to revise ideas about classicism, its authenticity and cultural currency, and contribute towards an understanding of Greek tragedy that allows for theatrical experimentation that at once looks backwards, unearthing a radical potential in Greek tragedy itself (after Nietzsche and the Cambridge Ritualists), and forward to reception theory and to the late 20th and 21st century performances of Greek tragedy.