Comfort with Infidelity: Experiencing Greek Tragedy in Performance

My paper discussed some preliminary ideas regarding the performance of Greek tragedy on the modern stage. The performance of Greek tragedy is an experience often haunted by the spectre of the ‘original’. This experience of haunting comes in the form of the fidelity discourse, which positions the ancient text as the source of meaning and evaluates the modern performance in terms how ‘faithfully’ it replicates the ancient source. Through an interdisciplinary approach bringing together translation, adaptation, classical and theatre studies I aim to uncover the stakes of making a claim to fidelity regarding the performance of Greek tragedy. Especially illuminating at this stage of my research is the discomfort provoked by ‘unfaithful’ productions of Greek tragedy. This discomfort is in part provoked because questioning the fidelity discourse in this context unsettles entrenched hierarches between text and performance and between different forms of knowledge; particularly between experiential, embodied forms of knowledge and text-based knowledge. Also of interest to me is the way in which the intersection between classics and theatre studies acts as a site for much of this discomfort. I explored some of these discomforts using three (nearly) concurrent productions of the Oresteia in 2015 (at the Globe Theatre, The Almeida Theatre and HOME Manchester) as case studies.