An academic in the rehearsal room

Abstract

It has been a fundamental premise of my work on Greek drama that serious scholarship is not only compatible with its performability, but can actually have a strong interplay with performance. When I started on this kind of study back in the seventies, it was primarily concerned with what one might call the recovery of ‘the’ historical performance. The most that respectable scholarship attempted was to relate the original performance — or rather what one can recover of that performance from the various sources and above all from the texts themselves — to interpretation. But since then, and in tune with developing methodologies, I have come to have an ever-increasing interest in not just the ‘original performance’ (not such an easy entity as it might have seemed), but in what has happened to the performance of the work since then, in performed reception across the ages. This is partly a matter of realising that all the performances that have happened between the ‘original’ and the present have intrinsic interest, and have significant things to tell us: these many pasts, and not just the one originating past, are worth recording and thinking about. But I do also strongly believe in the value of looking at contemporary performance for teaching and research purposes. The way that the plays are performed now (or tomorrow) helps in our ‘uncovering’ or ‘discovering’ things about the interpretations of the texts.