1 See See Kate, Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970)Google Scholar; Pomeroy, Sarah B., Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves; Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 97–110;Google ScholarZeitlin, Froma I., Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), pp. 87–119;Google ScholarHelene, Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 12–13;Google Scholar Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts’, Theatre Journal, 37, 3 (October 1985), pp. 317–27.

2 Case, ‘Classic Drag’, p. 324.

3 Ibid., p. 324.

4 Ibid., p. 327.

5 Deborah Warner directed Electra in 1988 and Medea in 2000, with Fiona Shaw playing the lead in both touring productions; Katie Mitchell directed the Oresteia at the National Theatre in London in 1999 and Iphigenia at Aulis at the same venue in 2004; and Rhodessa Jones directed the Medea Project with incarcerated women from 1992, mixing their own stories with the story of Medea. These revised versions include Hélène Cixous, La Ville Parjure; Per Lysander and Suzanne Osten, Medea's Children; Cherríe Moraga, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea; Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats and Ariel; Christa Wolf has written novels about Greek tragic figures: Cassandra and Medea.

6 Judith, Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2000);Google ScholarLuce, Irigaray, Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans. Montin, K. (London: Athlone, 1994Google Scholar); Peggy, Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar.

7 Edith, Hall, ‘Introduction: Why Greek Tragedy in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Edith, Hall, Fiona, Macintosh and , Amanda Wrigley, eds., Dionysus Since ‘69 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 1–46Google Scholar, here p. 37.

8 Helene Foley, ‘Modern Performance and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy’, Presidential Address 1998, Washington, DC, available at http://216.158.36.56/Publications/PresTalks/FOLEY98.html.

9 Edith, Hall, ‘The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy’, in Easterling, P. E., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 93–126Google Scholar, here p. 105.

10 Katie Mitchell in conversation with Jonathan Croall, Stagewrite, Autumn 1999, available at http://www3.sympatico.ca/sylvia.paul/hughes_katie_mitchell.htm, accessed 24 July 2006. A number of all-male productions have been staged since Peter Hall's Oresteia, such as Ninagawa's Medea etc. See Helene Foley, ‘Bad Women’, in Hall et al., Dionysus Since ‘69, pp. 90–8.

11 George, Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

12 In organizing an international conference on Antigone in 2006, I was sent proposals for papers about recent productions in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Nigeria, South Africa and so on. See also Hall, ‘Introduction: Why Greek Tragedy’, pp. 18–19.

13 Antigone is referred to by the chorus as autonomous – line 821. The importance of this description has been identified by Robin Lane Fox recently: ‘“Autonomy” is a word invented by the ancient Greeks, but for them it had a clear political context: it began as the word for a community's self-government, a protected degree of freedom in the face of an outside power which was strong enough to infringe it. Its first surviving application to an individual is to a woman, Antigone, in drama.’ Robin, Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 7Google Scholar.

14 Quoted in Helene Foley, ‘Bad Women’, p. 78.

15 John Waters, ‘Problems in Excusing Medea's Murders’, Irish Times, 19 June 2000.

16 Ibid.

17 Callie, Oppedisano, ‘Disability, Femininity, and Adaptations: Peeling and Trojan Women’, Texas Theatre Journal, 2, 1 (2006), pp. 91–9Google Scholar.

18 See Slavoj, Žižek and Mladen, Dolar, Opera's Second Death (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 184Google Scholar.

19 Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, p. 110.

20 Edith, Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Euripides, Bacchae and Other Plays (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. ix–xxxixGoogle Scholar, here p. xi. Lines 250–1 of Medea, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958 edition).

21 Helene Foley, ‘Bad Women’, p. 79.

22 Hall, ‘Introduction: Why Greek Tragedy’, p. 13.

23 Butler, Antigone's Claim, p. 22.

24 Judith Butler writes, of the recent extra-legal activities of the US government, ‘Sovereignty becomes that instrument of power by which law is either used tactically or suspended, populations are monitored, detained, regulated, inspected, interrogated, rendered uniform in their actions, fully ritualized and exposed to control and regulation in their daily lives. The prison presents the managerial tactics of governmentality in an extreme mode. And whereas we expect the prisons to be tied to law – to trial, to punishment, to the rights of prisoners – we see presently an effort to produce a secondary judicial system and a sphere of non-legal detention that effectively produces the prison itself as an extra-legal sphere.’ Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), p. 97

25 Butler, Antigone's Claim, p. 40.

26 For a discussion of the private firms subcontracted by the US government to interrogate detainees see Joan Didion, ‘Cheney: The Fatal Touch’, New York Review of Books, 53, 15 (5 October 2006), p. 56.

27 I am referring here to the unpublished 2005 text used by Ybarra (privately held), which differs from the original version published by West End/University of New Mexico Press in 2001.

28 Patricia Ybarra, Director's Notes, available at http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Theatre_Speech_Dance/HungryWomanProgram.pdf, accessed 28 December 2006.

29 Rena, Fraden, Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 55Google Scholar.

30 James, Diggle, ‘The Violence of Clytemnestra’, in Dillon, John and Wilmer, S. E., eds., Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today (London: Methuen, 2005), pp. 215–21Google Scholar.

31 Edith Hall, ‘Iphigenia and Her Mother at Aulis’, in Dillon and Wilmer, Rebel Women, pp. 3–41, here p. 18.

32 Ibid., p. 18–19.

33 Ibid., p. 19.

34 Medea, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958 edition).

35 Katie Mitchell in conversation with Jonathan Croall, Stagewrite, Autumn 1999, available at http://www3.sympatico.ca/sylvia.paul/hughes_katie_mitchell.htm, accessed 24 July 2006.

36 In Marianne McDonald's view, ‘The rest of the furies were about to attack the audience, feeling their leaders had sold them out’. Marianne McDonald response, available at http://www2.open.ac.uk/ ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/e_archive/1999/May.htm, accessed 23 July 2006, p. 6.

37 Mary Kay Gamel, ‘Staging Ancient Drama: the Difference Women Make’, available at http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/e_archive/1999/May.htm, accessed 23 July 2006, p. 3.

38 Gamel, ‘Staging Ancient Drama,’ p. 3. She also mentions that she found it possible to stage feminist versions of plays in ways that were consistent with the meaning of the original texts: ‘In my stagings of ancient drama at UCSC my feminist commitment led in some cases to stagings which seemed true to the ancient script's meaning in its original context, in others to stagings which challenged or subverted what we took to be the original meaning.’ Ibid., p. 1.

39 See Foley, ‘Bad Women’, pp. 86–7.

40 Ibid., pp. 98–103.

41 For a scholarly discussion of whether women attended the festival of Dionysus, see Sophocles, Antigone, ed. Mark Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 51, n 150.

42 Zeitlin, Playing the Other, p. 13.

43 See Žižek and Dolar, Opera's Second Death, p. 186.

44 See ibid., p. 186.