The modernist encounter with classical tragedy challenges received notions about tragic form and tragic sensibility: that it is incompatible with modernity (George Steiner) and that it is primarily a European/Eurocentric legacy. In engaging with classical Greek tragedy, modernist writers and theatre-makers (from T. S Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H. D., Ezra Pound, Edward Gordon Craig, and Isadora Duncan, to George Abyad, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and the later postcolonial iterations of Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona) create a set of relationships that radically rewrite ideas of influence and tradition and gesture towards an understanding of tragedy as a form of theatricality rather than as a play-text. This theatricality, read in conjunction with primitivism and orientalism, is not a quest for authenticity or for the lost humanism of the classics but helps to construct an experimental laboratory in translation, in performance, and in adaptation. From the Cambridge Ritualists to the later postcolonial readings, modernism helps to revision tragedy as part of world theatre.