Necessity versus Progress: Classical Greek Theatre and Equal Rights

Abstract

Ancient Greek drama became the driving force in the Western theatrical revolution of the 1920s with Leopold Jessner's famous staging of King Oedipus in 1919. Once again theatre defined itself as the public tribune: the Athenian polis with its direct democracy giving way to the concept of a new social collective for the scientific age. The urgency of the impulse for social change coupled with the experience of World War I led to the investigation of images and action as forces of internal necessity arising from the existentielle Angst of a whole generation of artists who found themselves face to face with the spiritual bankruptcy of the bourgeois social order. The long-term effects of the new dramatists’ radical re-viewings of the Greek theatre's potential as a progressive social undertaking—revealing its use value—may be detected in current-day rehearsal practices. Some of these effects are the subject of this article, which presents the author's experience of directing Sophocles’ Antigone in 1986 at the ancient Greek theatre of Oeniades.