Staging Ajax's Suicide: A Historiography

Abstract

Staging Ajax's SuicideA Historiography Peter A. Campbell (bio) When I was commissioned to write an adaptation of Sophocles's Ajax for a theatre festival in lower Manhattan in 2004, I immersed myself in the various translations and editions of the play, which of course included editorial notes and commentaries. These notes often emphasized the great poetry of Ajax's monologues and the unevenness of the play's structure. But every single one of them discussed at length the staging of Ajax's suicide. There are numerous ideas of how this scene was originally staged and of its significance to the logistics and aesthetics of Greek staging practice, dramaturgy, and reception. The suicide is considered important because it is one of the few moments in Athenian tragedy in which an act of violence may have been staged in view of the spectators. As a playwright and director, I was compelled by the challenges of staging that moment and looked to the editorial notes and commentaries for information and suggestions. As a theatre historian, I was also interested in exploring how the moment of Ajax's suicide came to be understood as such a compelling piece of theatrical history. In reading the various versions of play, I was initially struck by the difficulty the writers had in describing the stage action at this key moment of the play. Sir Richard Jebb's translation, from 1893, has the most straightforward stage direction: "Ajax falls on his sword."1 Jebb suggests that the action is visible but does not fully address the logistical concerns of the original staging, which begs a central question for a director and a theatre historian: how does the actor portraying Ajax fall on his sword? Since we may assume he doesn't actually fall on an actual sword, which would likely kill him, Jebb requires us to imagine the staging [End Page 67] of this moment. In John Moore's popular and well-respected translation from 1957, Ajax "falls on his sword and collapses behind the bushes."2 If Ajax falls on his sword and then falls behind the bushes, the original question of how he falls on his sword remains, and more staging elements like "the bushes" are brought into play but not described. In Herbert Golder and Richard Pevear's Oxford University Press translation of 1999, "The platform is wheeled back, disappearing into the grove as Aias speaks his last words."3 Here it seems the act of suicide is not visible. But if there is a platform that moves backward, an ekkyklêma, does the action take place on the moving platform, before it leaves, or offstage, after the platform has left? The ekkyklêma also typically rolls in to reveal things, not out to hide them, leading to additional staging questions.4 In Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's translation, published in 2007, the stage direction, similar to Golder and Pevear's, reads: "The ekkyklêma withdraws through the skene door, and the door closes."5 In an extended footnote, the translators explain the reasoning behind their stage directions: "Many commentators and a scholiast's note on a later manuscript of the play suggest that the suicide was staged in full view of the audience. We think Ajax's language of withdrawal from the light and discovery of his body at line 891 point to the exiting of the ekkyklêma here and not to a depiction of the act of suicide onstage. The myth of Ajax's death was well known to the audience…and Sophocles would increase suspense by not depicting this most private of acts."6 Meineck and Woodruff make a set of choices based on their interpretations of the text as they read it and the historical staging and how they understand it. And they do not suggest that the suicide is visible. Their primary reasoning here is that the audience would already be familiar with the image and thus would not need to see it. These stage directions illuminate the complicated nature of playtext and its relationship to staging and to theatrical history. They also reflect the scholarly commentaries that attempt to reconstruct the original staging of the...