Introduction

This introduction makes the case for postdramatic classical receptions to be included within reception studies scholarship. It contextualizes the overall study by providing an overview of the role of the classics within the development of postdramatic theatre and by charting the history of postdramatic classical receptions. The chapter offers an alternative to the standard teleological approach of documenting the history of postdramatic theatre, and instead suggests that the form arose from a diverse range of international theatrical experiments led by highly influential avant-garde practitioners, which gained enough notoriety and exposure to influence a range of other theatre makers. It examines Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Schechner, Tadashi Suzuki, and Heiner Müller, alongside a range of broader contextual environments, to argue that an interest in the classical underpinned the development of postdramatic theatre.

Conclusion

Postdramatic receptions of ancient tragedy represent a growing trend in contemporary theatre. This conclusion draws together the three core styles of postdramatic theatre considered in Postdramatic Tragedies, and considers future directions surrounding the combination of ancient tragedy and postdramatic theatre. The chapter reaffirms the significance of the political to postdramatic classical receptions. It claims that postdramatic tragedies have pushed both the tragic genre and the postdramatic style in new directions, and that an appreciation of them is key to understanding the history of theatre and of tragedy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (A 24-Hour Performance)

Jan Fabre’s 24-hour response to the œuvre of extant tragedy, Mount Olympus, is in many ways an archetype postdramatic tragic reception. Chapter 7 explores the production’s radical take upon both the form and content of ancient tragedy, and how its phenomenological impact encouraged the audience to interrogate the practice of receiving antiquity. It focuses upon how the production combined postdramatic techniques with tragic source texts to interrogated ideas of voyeurism, the institution of the City Dionysia, and the notion of catharsis. It utilizes Jacques Rancière’s work on politics and art, and his notion of the emancipated spectator, as a theoretical framework to consider how the production raised questions surrounding cognitive versus embodied agency and the limits of emancipation. It argues that Rancière’s emancipated spectator is best employed as a hermeneutic tool to unpack the politics of spectatorship rather than to create a totalizing thesis about the ideal conditions for a politically efficacious performance.

The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes

Chapter 5 explores Australian theatre company The Hayloft Project’s 2010 devised adaptation of Seneca’s Thyestes. It argues that the production’s combination of a focus upon the psychology of character with postdramatic techniques resulted in a confronting, visceral performance which demonstrated how Seneca’s material can interrogate modern values surrounding gender, sex, and violence. The discussion showcases the political potential of devised postdramatic performance, and simultaneously reveals how postdramatic reinventions can shed light back onto their source texts, in this instance via the contemporary commentary contained in the characterization of Atreus. The chapter posits that The Hayloft Project’s production can consequently not only tell us about the role of tragedy in the modern world, but that it also created continuity between the modern and the ancient and reveals that a contemporary commentary was part of this specific tragedy all along.

The Wooster Group’s To You, The Birdie!

New York-based theatre company The Wooster Group have a long history of using canonical texts as springboards for devised productions. Their 2002 To You, The Birdie! ostensibly used Racine’s neoclassical Phèdre as a source text; however, the artists also engaged with Euripides’ Hippolytus and included numerous elements from the Greek tragedy and its reception history in their production. Chapter 4 analyses To You, The Birdie! and reveals that within its highly ambiguous, disorienting performance aesthetic lay a complex engagement with the political. It argues that the production was infused with explicit political dimensions surrounding the company’s identity, the form of the production, and the socio-political context in which it was first read, alongside implicit political elements relating to the play’s exploration of gender, class, and its emphasis on the incomplete nature of the classics. Through comparative reference to Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, the chapter demonstrates how different reinventions of the same myth can substantiate alternate national traditions and, through their similarities and differences, shed further light on the role of tragedy in the modern world.

Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender

Australian dramatist Tom Holloway’s adaptations of ancient tragedy reflect both the way that dramatists can structure scripts with an ‘open dramaturgy’ that provides directors with the opportunity to realize text through postdramatic strategies, and the way that the classics can be used to investigate the Australian psyche. The 2010 première production of Love Me Tender, Holloway’s Iphigenia at Aulis reinvention, situated the tragedy in an Australian bushfire season, and reinvented it in the form of unattributed lines on a page. The absence of characters is a postdramatic strategy, and in performance numerous other postdramatic techniques were added to the script to create an affective, image-driven investigation into the theme of sacrifice. Chapter 3 argues that Love Me Tender embodies a politics of form, and that the play compounds an investigation into the idea of sacrifice with a focus upon societal tensions surrounding pre-teen sexuality and raunch culture. It suggests that Love Me Tender provides a key example not only of the way that this new dramaturgical style can be realized through postdramatic performance, but also of the political use of the classics in postdramatic theatre.

Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love

Chapter 1 explores the relationship between the classics, the postdramatic, and the so-called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre movement of Britain in the 1990s, taking the 1996 première production of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love as a paradigmatic example. Kane’s sparse, tightly woven script interrogated the Senecan themes of masculinity, sexuality, violence, and voyeurism; in performance, these themes were combined with a range of proto-postdramatic techniques to highlight their contemporary socio-political relevance. I suggest that the ‘in-yer-face’ movement can be viewed as a transitional period representing the gradual introduction of postdramatic techniques into British theatres. As a formative fusion of Greco-Roman tragedy and postdramatic theatre, Phaedra’s Love indicated the efficacious potential of this mode of performance to make powerful socio-political statements that have a visceral impact upon their audience.

ZU-UK’s Hotel Medea

ZU-UK’s overnight Hotel Medea positioned its audience as active participants throughout the three-act production, including, for example, as guests at Jason and Medea’s wedding in Act One, and as the couple’s children in Act Two. Chapter 6 utilizes Jacques Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator to consider this production and the degree to which the audience was, in fact, liberated. It suggests that the spectator’s emancipation was more intellectual, rather than physical, and that the use of ancient tragedy was key to this intellectual emancipation. It argues that through the constant shifting of perspective upon Medea the production encouraged the audience to have a discursive interaction with the traditions of receiving Euripides’ tragedy and to reconsider the ways, and reasons why, antiquity is reappropriated in modern society. The chapter reveals that in postdramatic classical receptions levels of formal innovation do not necessarily correlate to levels of textual innovation. Instead, the relationship between form and content, and its effect upon spectatorship, in postdramatic tragedies is seen to be fluid and, consequently, all the riper for analysis.

Martin Crimp’s Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino

Chapter 2 explores the relationship between text and postdramatic theatre via Katie Mitchell’s 2013 production of Martin Crimp’s adaptation of Euripides’ Phoenissae, titled Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino (The Rest Will be Familiar to You from Cinema). I argue that Mitchell’s experimental realization of the text can provide new insights into problematic issues in Euripides’ play, such as the function of the chorus, and that the production consequently indicates the value of analysing postdramatic receptions to the discipline of classics. Furthermore, the chapter showcases how the production engaged with a range of opaque political discourses that questioned the use antiquity to construct one’s own identity, and how tragedy can be used to consider contemporary power disputes and issues of nationalism. The discussion exemplifies why it is unhelpful to think of scripts as either dramatic or postdramatic texts, and instead suggests a focus on the potential that playtexts hold to be realized through postdramatic performance.