Northern Ireland: Our Troy? Recent Versions of Greek Tragedies by Irish Writers

Abstract

It is, perhaps, only after one has written something that one begins to see not only one's own personal motivations for doing so, but also the broader social environment and forces that contributed to the making of the text. In 1994 I undertook a translation and, ultimately, an adaptation of Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. At the time I had a variety of personal reasons for choosing this particular text — not least my attraction to both Iphigenia's notorious change of mind, and the equally notorious suspicions concerning the authorship of certain passages in the text we know as Iphigenia in Aulis. The first gave me a great dramatic character, the second allowed me the freedom to play with the structure of the text. However, it was only after completing my version that I began to see those broader social forces that I and my text had been subject to, and through this I began to see the relationship of recent versions of Greek tragedies by Irish writers to recent developments and debates in Irish history.