The Reverse View: Greece and Greek Myths in Modern French Theater

Abstract

We have been using Greek drama as if Greece had never existed. That modern theater, from Racine to H61derlin, T.S. Eliot and Sartre, is replete with allusions, tacit or overt, to Greek drama, is beyond discussion. Even Brecht, who craved for only a political theater reflecting the concerns of the present, and whose notes on Sophocles' Antigone Beck and Malina applied to a Living Theater performance of Greek tragedy. sees Antigone as an international heroine defying Creon's formal edicts. Although geared towards maximum expressivity, twentieth-century theater, from Dada to Artaud, Grotowski and Paradise Now, cannot shake its debt to the myth of Greece. I am saying the myth of Greece and not Greek myths, because I am quite agreed with those who point to the survival of characters: Antigone, Electra, Orestes; to the use of plots basically unchanged since the fifth century; to a revival of the various agones between the heroes — and say that some of the forms of Greek tragedy survive in modern drama. And yet repeated use of basic plots, with only minor changes, cursory reference to the gods, even cries and silences, all that is not enough to warrant an actual reference to ancient Greece.,