Staging ancient Greek drama for contemporary audiences
BY ACTION, NOT BY RECITATION
By Nicos Shiafkalis
Ancient Greek drama has the potentiality to charge a production with such power, which may overwhelm a contemporary audience and if not purify them, will at least awake within them the eternal values and relieve them from the pains of the modern social decay and give them reason for their existence.
The question arises as to how this potentiality of charging a production of ancient Greek drama can be achieved and why hasn’t it done so for 2000 years.
My answer to this question is twofold. Firstly because most translators are missing the meat of the original texts in their effort to provide, in their opinion, a ‘poetic’ translation.
They ignore the fact that these texts were created to be acted and not to be read or recited.
Ancient Greek tragedians were poets in the sense that they were creating works of a performing art.
They were themselves directors, actors, musicians, choreographers and dramaturges. In other words they were experts in all aspects of theatre and they consequently knew how to write texts to be spoken by actors.
Guilty of murder are likewise actors and directors, who for centuries kept sucking the blood of the ancient drama texts, ( as well as that of Shakespearian plays ) leaving them blood dry.
Whatever reservations one may have about Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in his Poetics, one cannot completely ignore the remark “by action and not by recitation’, which is valid also for contemporary theatre.
Recitation in the sense of voicing the memorized text is a kind of narrative; a repetition of facts void of emotion.
But drama and especially Greek drama is mainly emotion. If we deprive the words of the passion behind them, then we have no drama.
So my argument is that the two main reasons that contemporary audiences refrain from attending performances of ancient Greek drama are: one, that most translators, through the centuries, for the sake of getting credits for their excellent ‘literary’ and ‘poetic’ translations, ignored the power of the original texts.
The other major reason is that most directors for the sake of showing off their inventiveness, they neglected through the centuries, the passion behind the words, focusing on clever and impressing stage and costume designs, on pompous and rhetoric speech.
Can we imagine Oedipus uttering his curses, or Antigone opposing Creon’s orders, or Hecuba lamenting over the corpse of her grand child Astyanax, or Electra accusing her mother for assassinating Agamemnon and so many other examples, to just being read by actors as if they were reciting telephone numbers from the telephone directory?
During the last three or four centuries some famous directors and actors in their efforts to experiment with the presentation of ancient Greek drama for contemporary audiences, came up with some remarkable performances, which nevertheless were not the rule, but the exception.
I hope that I have made my point and that my paper will contribute to the development of a fruitful discussion for the re-establishment of ancient Greek drama on its throne, as a popular theatre form, ( as it was at its time ) and enable it to function again as a social ministry.
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