A theatre company choosing to present a Greek play in the twenty-first century faces many choices, and decisions made must inevitably involve compromises of one kind or another. For 50 years, heralded particularly by O. Taplin’s The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: the Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (1977), the ‘performative turn’ in the study of Greek drama has provided analytical tools that allow scholars to understand what happened during performance on an ancient stage.Footnote ¹ It does not follow, however, that simply replicating ancient performance practice will be meaningful and emotionally impactful for a modern audience. Replication will create theatrical meaning differently for an audience less familiar with mythical narratives, less attuned to perceiving religious dimensions in theatrical entertainment and less habituated to publicly performed poetry. Most modern productions do not take place in single performances with an outdoor stage and an audience numbering in the thousands, and ancient performance conventions were conceived with these constraints, and many more, in mind. In different ways, the books under discussion stake out how specific choices have been made, and offer models from which a contemporary production can learn.

Cole’s Punchdrunk on the Classics: Experiencing Immersion in The Burnt City and Beyond offers invaluable insights into a truly challenging and exciting piece of theatre. The Burnt City is ‘the example par excellence of twenty-first-century immersive theatre’ (p. 3), building on the company’s radical revisioning of Macbeth, called Sleep No More (first presented in 2003). Cole worked with the company as ‘an embedded researcher and dramaturg’ (p. 16), and her rigorous scholarly insights pull back the curtain on this amazing production that drew on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Hecuba. Her involvement with the company had begun earlier with Kabeiroi, based on the fragmentary tragedy of Aeschylus (pp. 42–6). As a work of reception scholarship, Punchdrunk on the Classics is a model for performance ethnographical research.

Throughout The Burnt City the audience is integrated into the performance. Every spectator experiences a different show (arguably true of any work of theatre), as short five-minute scenes are repeated in a vast performance space. An audience of 600 moves from one scene to another, each member choosing to follow one piece of action and not another. Over the course of a typical three-hour performance, the eleven scenes in The Burnt City are repeated three times each (p. 10), and individual spectators can follow different characters with each repetition, ending with a large finale, bringing together all the audience members for the final scene. The ‘loop chart’ connecting these scenes ‘was the closest thing that The Burnt City had to a script’ (p. 59). Hints are given about the content of these scenes, but a table or list would help readers without direct experience of the company’s work navigate the discussion more easily. In addition, one-on-one scenes would sometimes pull an individual spectator into a private performance, an act of separation that adds intimacy as well as vulnerability, for both spectator and performer (pp. 84–8). As described in the brief history of the company (pp. 33–53), some trademark practices resonate particularly well with the tradition of citizen-performers of the tragic chorus. Audiences are masked (pp. 35–9) and assume one function of the ancient chorus, as the inevitable witness of the stage action (pp. 39–41).

The care and detail with which Cole beautifully describes the rehearsal process should be inspiring for anyone who loves theatre, as she takes readers from the earliest meetings for The Burnt City, through project development and the COVID-19 delays that impacted so many theatre practitioners, to the eventual opening in 2022. The two parallel discussions of the rehearsals dovetail well, with the first detailing ‘rehearsal as mythopoiesis’ (pp. 55–99) and the second the process of ‘abstracting ancient literature’ (pp. 100–42). Cole’s field notes are evocative, allowing readers to think about how meaning is shaped and how influences are added that deepen the performance experience, even when they are anachronistic – indeed, sometimes because they are anachronistic, and so are more likely to evoke a specific feeling in spectators. Classical texts are torn apart and reconfigured in The Burnt City, but it is always done through engagement with the source material, and not in ignorance or defiance of it.

The development of the production included the removal of much of the language, replacing words with movements ‘which involved transforming text into a visual and experiential dramaturgy’ (p. 102). This process of translation is explored in detail in four scenes concerned with the abstraction of the ancient text. The sacrifice of Polyxena is explicitly juxtaposed with that of Iphigenia at the start of the war, and Cole ties the decisions made by the company to scholarship on the ancient plays. The descriptions of rehearsals in this chapter focus on the tightening of the presentation ‘to clarify the emotional journeys of the characters within the scene’ (p. 118), and Cole recognises the discomfort felt by the performers with the gender dynamics of the story. Also problematic is Hecuba’s killing of Polymestor’s children, who are consequently removed from the play. Even when Euripides’ lines were not being spoken, they informed the staging choices that were being made by the actors. Cole also documents moments when the translation of Agamemnon by Ted Hughes, a reference point for the development of the show, itself adapts or changes the shape of Aeschylus’ text (e.g. p. 134 n. 30).

Cole proceeds to explore the ways in which an immersive theatre experience is created for spectators, focusing on place and space (pp. 143–82). The Burnt City was performed in a vast site thick with military associations, spread across two warehouses at the Royal Arsenal in London, not a traditional performance venue.Footnote ² Different buildings map onto a geographical separation (Greece and Troy) and help reinforce the polarisations embedded in the Greek language. These associations were emergent and reflected a kind of dream topography that was communicated to spectators through a range of techniques. Theatre creates spaces for potential violence, and the imagined topography resonates with spectators in different ways.Footnote ³ Cole is careful to distinguish her own experience of the show with that of a first-time viewer. An Underworld was also part of the production, even though some viewers might remain completely ignorant of it, depending on the paths they experience. Further, not every spectator is given access to the one-on-one scenes, and this could lead to substantial disparities between experiences, which repeat attendance, possible only for some spectators for whom tickets are not an economic barrier, could only partially rectify (pp. 164–7). Audience management, ensuring the smooth movement of every spectator from one scene to the next, is a central part of creating individual immersion across hundreds of people while still maintaining a collective identity for the spectator-chorus. Though the discussion focused on a truly exceptional performance, these are practical concerns that should be considered in any modern production.

The final chapter focuses on this question of immersion and grounds the discussion not in modern theatre scholarship, but firmly within classical studies and the ways in which ancient theatre worked to provide some measure of the same experiential depth. Earlier, Cole had cautioned that the book was ‘not a how-to guide to developing an immersive experience’ (p. 57). The discussion instead ties explicitly to discussions of ancient aesthetics, framed around mimēsis and energeia. Cole attributes at least part of the success of Punchdrunk’s work to the company’s engagement across many productions with ancient literature. From the documentation of her eyewitness experience of rehearsals to the grounding of theatrical immersion in Athenian soil, Cole has produced a study that raises questions that can provide a thoughtful and academically rigorous foundation for any modern production. Even when not creating immersive theatre in this way, Punchdrunk on the Classics identifies questions that productions seek to answer, reflecting concerns of modern performers and maintaining a deep indebtedness to ancient Greece.

Ewans’s Staging Ancient Greek Plays: a Practical Guide is a short, accessible handbook meant to offer grounded, practical advice to any individual wanting to experiment with ancient stagecraft in a more traditional format. The author is a director and translator, with many years of experience bringing ancient plays the stage. Ewans believes that successful modern productions offer an interpretation of an ancient script, rather than an adaptation, ‘where the resources of the modern stage are harnessed to presenting so far as possible the essence of what can be recovered of the original dramas’ (p. 2), yielding ‘historically respectful productions’ (p. 3). The first two chapters provide an overview of ‘The Original Conditions of Performance’, discussing masks, chorus, performance space and acting style (which Ewans insists was realistic and not stylized), and ‘Values, Myth and the Individual, the Gods and Moira’, which presents a survey of various beliefs that may have been prevalent in Athens, particularly focusing on the different conceptions of the individual in ancient and modern thought (pp. 35–45), and the role of fate and the gods (pp. 46–59). Formal elements of Greek drama and practical considerations dominate the third chapter, ‘Performing Greek Plays on the Modern Stage’. Understanding these factors, Ewans believes, ‘should liberate you to explore the true depths of these remarkable plays’ (p. 147).

Ewans identifies a number of issues that any modern production must address, with observations about the ancient performance space (e.g. on p. 13, city officials sitting in front row of the ancient theatre had the worst sightlines) and about a few modern productions (e.g. on p. 98 n. 37, concerning director Katie Mitchell’s use of girls’ dresses for the tapestries in Agamemnon). Many of the recommendations Ewans provides recognise the gulf between modern theatrical culture in the anglophone world and that of classical Athens. He urges productions to treat gods seriously, using programme notes to provide historical or mythical context if needed (pp. 45 and 59–63); he stresses the importance of translation choice (pp. 65–73): ‘verse translation is essential’ (p. 69), and he castigates ‘WASP translators’ (p. 72) who identify non-Athenian characters in Aristophanes through dialect. He argues against ritual solemnity and in favour of modern dress (pp. 74–80). He discusses house lights, a framing technology unavailable in antiquity (142–3), and he recognises the challenges of choral placement on a proscenium arch stage, describing how he provided benches onstage for chorus members or has them with their backs to the audience (pp. 136, 142, 144). These proposed solutions position the chorus as a problem needing to be overcome, rather than the most distinctive opportunity ancient drama provides.

Of central importance is Ewans’s belief that the acting of Greek drama does not allow for any subtext in any ancient play: ‘Does [tragedy] have anything corresponding to the “subtext” that actors and directors explore in more modern plays? What are Deianira’s “true feelings”? … Such questions have no place in the interpretation of an ancient Greek play’ (pp. 42–3). As a result,

This approach will feel doctrinaire to many readers, even if a scholarly case can be made for such a view. As a result, this absolutism will put off at least some of those who stand to benefit most from ‘a practical guide’. The use of masks, the size of the performance venue, the role of music, the choices made concerning the chorus and many other factors might – indeed, should – change acting techniques. Such qualifications are not offered. Indeed, this position is not far from that suggested by American playwright David Mamet: ‘It is the job of the actor to show up, and use the lines and his or her will and common sense, to attempt to achieve a similar goal to that of the protagonist’; ‘Here, again, is your job: learn the lines, find a simple objective like that indicated by the author, speak the lines clearly in an attempt to achieve that objective.’Footnote ⁴ I believe Mamet can be helpful for understanding ancient acting, but it is far from clear that a modern actor must adopt such an approach to embody an ancient character successfully.

To demonstrate how he sees stage action working, Ewans guides readers through Agamemnon 851–974 and 1073–176 (pp. 82–7, 94–101, 126–32). Clytemnestra’s speech is broken into nine ‘beats’, including one in which she lies prostrate before her returning husband at line 901. This stage direction, inferred from the king’s words at 918–20, will be absent from most translations and cannot be said to be required. Is it important that readers agree with this specific proposed stage direction, with the concomitant implications such a gesture represents for her character? At best, it represents one possible choice, as is the tenor suggested for Agamemnon’s response to Clytemnestra, that ‘he is infuriated by the length of her speech’ (p. 98). A script provides ‘clues to action’: ‘these plays need and deserve careful thought about the characters’ aims in every word they utter, due attention to the form in which the playwright has composed each scene and sub-scene, and a response to any scene that involves props that yield conclusions about when, how and above all why they are deployed’ (p. 101).

There are additionally a number of small details limiting the usefulness of the book. Vases are identified by their museum or the cover of a book they appear on, rather than the accession number (pp. 18 n. 28, 19 n. 32). Choruses are identified by their order of appearance (‘Lysistrata Choros 5’ on p. 24, or ‘Choros 4’ in Eumenides on p. 101), rather than by line number. Possible YouTube search terms are provided rather than a URL: for example, to find the 1957 film of Tyrone Guthrie’s direction of Oedipus, which had been part of the 1954 and 1955 seasons at the Stratford Festival in Canada, readers are sent to ‘British Recreation of Greek Theatre: Oedipus Rex 1953’ (p. 78 n. 21). The book concludes with brief evaluations of almost 50 productions or excerpts available on YouTube (pp. 159–95, again with no URLs), with student productions evaluated alongside professional ones. Perhaps representative is the treatment of two of the most influential tragic productions in from the past century: the National Theatre’s Oresteia directed by Peter Hall (1981, though the film is ©1983), which is discussed in a single paragraph (pp. 183–4); and Karolos Koun’s Oresteia (1980, film ©1982), which is wrongly attributed to the National Theatre of Greece and not Koun’s own company, Θεάτρο Τέχνης or Art Theatre (pp. 184–6). Ewans challenges individual staging choices (p. 184, ‘the Priestess does not crawl’) and insists that ‘there should be eleven human jurors who vote six to five in favour of the furies’ and not twelve (p. 185), as if this were a matter settled in the scholarship or represented a majority opinion (neither is the case).

Ewans discusses his own productions a great deal, with over a dozen passing references, and attests to the number of insights that directing an ancient play for a modern audience can generate. Staging Ancient Greek Plays is most successful when he takes time to describe specific productions at length (pp. 140–7), and occasional glimpses reveal the possibilities he envisions, as when Kreon in Antigone sits at a table smoking a cigarette and drinking raki (p. 121 n. 53). When his staging choices assume a quasi-evidentiary status, however, their value is diminished: for example, ‘my practical experimentation, workshopping scenes with and without a raised stage, has shown that it renders many important scenes unplayable, or at least playable only with considerable artifice’ (p. 15). Dictates such as this do not encourage creative engagement and seem to assume that an informed staging will always manifest in a particular way. This ends up detracting from the book’s value as ‘a practical guide’.

What a contrast, then, is Bullen and Plastow’s short collection, Greek Tragedy, Education, and Theatre Practices in the UK Classics Ecology . Despite the narrowly focused title, the introduction and eight chapters consider some of the most exciting engagements with the performance of Greek drama in the UK, centred on productions tied to academic environments. Individual authors regularly describe their own work as scholar-practitioners, and present honest reflection about the challenges ancient drama can bring to a modern producer. Without offering a how-to model, the authors consistently balance the passion a company might feel towards bringing an ancient play to the stage with a nuanced and humble candour about the issues faced in doing so. L. Parkyn, discussing a festival of classical plays in Sheffield, offers a true challenge: ‘While there is a passionate desire to impart knowledge … I ask whether this can, at times, be misguided’ (p. 100). The benefits of performance to academics differs from productions designed for school outreach, and these groups are not always equally served. That is to say nothing of a general theatregoing audience who might not be invested in classical drama per se, but want to pay to be entertained. Funding is crucial, and a perennial problem, and any modern production needs to contend with questions of breaking even: even when profit is not required, as in some academic contexts, there is a need to provide a meaningful experience. Too often, entertainment is sacrificed for perceived virtues of experiencing partially understood plays filtered through many scholarly sieves. Charging too much for tickets reduces participation, especially among students (p. 109); contrariwise, not having tickets at all risks signalling that a free experience is somehow valueless.

For Bullen ‘Greek tragedy as modern performance becomes a set of problems to be resolved’ (p. 32), and the solutions found will be distinct for every company, as it brings its abilities, interests and sets of knowledge to bear. There are ways in which knowledge of the past can inhibit creative engagement and new discoveries in a text, and striking a balance between knowledges possessed by different practitioners is necessary. Can one truly place ‘actors on an equal footing with the academic’ (p. 39)? The role of academic consultants in modern theatre production is examined in detail by Plastow. She traces three models of academic consultants that have developed since the 1970s, noting the uneasy relationship that can exist between a company and its academic consultant or resident dramaturg, who may sometimes feel their job is to provide information that will not always be used (p. 22). A question such as ‘is it in the original?’ can be asked, but it is not an answer every practitioner needs or wants, which can lead to tensions and frustration in the creative process. There is also a centralising of authority, particularly in the UK, where the voices of a few individuals, mostly from Oxford and Cambridge (pp. 10, 27, 34), have dominated. Plastow instead looks to a model of ‘co-creation’, modelled by a new generation of scholars more deeply embedded in a company, whose practice shows ways to offering more, if such input is desired. In this model academic authority becomes only one of multiple authorities contributing to a production, de-centralising the Classicist (p. 28).

As a model for this new type of scholarly input, L. Swift describes the development workshops for her co-written 2023 play Fragments, which re-presents extant portions of Euripides’ lost Cresphontes. The constraints writers placed on themselves meant no new lines were written for (partially) surviving characters, and new characters were added (p. 115), as gaps were filled based on analogies from extant Euripidean plays (p. 118). This yields legitimate questions concerning what happened in the ancient play (p. 119: was Merope’s threat to Cresphontes part of the stage action?), even as the production itself innovates and finds new ways to tell its story – in this case, using puppetry. The true diversity of possibility in modern stagings is shown when Fragments is juxtaposed with the tradition of the Greek Play at King’s College London, described by P. Swallow. Begun in 1953, the annual, original-language production markets to schools; it survives as a pedagogical exercise for the participants and attests to the strong desire for access to ancient theatre among the audiences. Performing in ancient Greek presents additional, specific challenges and self-selects an audience that is not always interested in an immersive theatre experience, as shown when some spectators follow along with a Greek text open on their laps (p. 48).

Of particular value are the three chapters devoted to modern engagements with the chorus, which is the most challenging element of a Greek drama to bring to the stage. S. Harrop explores the political dimension of a modern Greek chorus, reflecting on her own ‘Lecoq-inspired pedagogies as prompts for agonistic choral experiment’ (p. 62). She stresses that it is a mistake to think of the Greek chorus ‘as an apparently natural, apolitical inheritance’ (p. 61), and warns against an uncritical acceptance of Aristotle’s Poetics in modern production decisions. This segues into S. Weston’s account of community choruses in three productions in the late 2010s. Drawing on first-person accounts, she challenges ‘idealist notions of democratic citizenship’ that might generate ‘an assumption that non-professional choral participation is inherently good’ (p. 84). Issues are exacerbated when professional performers are combined with a non-professional citizen chorus: some participate for work and remuneration; others are there for leisure. Only some community members will have the time and financial security to participate in such a project, even when, as can be the case, ‘their participation was professional in everything but name and financial remuneration’ (p. 91). These chapters challenge readers to engage thoughtfully with the ethics of bringing an ancient play to modern audiences, with an instructive thoughtfulness that I have not seen in other discussions within classical studies.Footnote ⁵

In different ways the three books under review engage with questions circling around the language of authenticity or fidelity, even if sometimes it is only ‘authenticity of a very narrow, philological sort’ (as Swallow writes, p. 48). To appeal naively to ‘fidelity’ or ‘authenticity’ is to fail to recognise that there are multiple authenticities possible, and any modern production must choose between them. It is never a simple question, to mask or not to mask? As Weston cautions, ‘the replication of an ancient convention does not automatically replicate the convention’s social function or value’ (p. 95). This is true, but it is equally true that the words of a play that survive only partially reflect the theatrical experience they represent and cannot be seen to stand on their own. Adhering to an ancient performance convention can be meaningful to a modern audience, but it can never speak for itself, and it too must be open to interpretation and framed in terms of dozens or indeed hundreds of other choices that every creative theatre team must decide. Slavish adherence will not, in my experience, produce good theatre, capable of enchanting audiences while still engaging meaningfully with an ancient script. It is only through diverse, informed engagements with ancient theatre, by both amateurs and theatre professionals who work to develop an understanding of ancient texts, that this dimension of the plays’ original power can emerge. As audiences and scholars, we can still be surprised by new things from familiar texts, and we can learn from the choices made by others through their engagement with the ancient world.