Abstract
The Epidaurus summer festival of 2003 was shaken by the highly controversial, postmodern production of Medea, directed by Stathis Livathinos.1 Its reverberations reached even the British press.2 Obviously, such scandals, occurring every two or three years, rescue popular festivals from the pitfalls of stultified performances by posing anew questions of ideological and aesthetic reorientation and testing the measure of the audience’s receptivity to yet further iconoclasm of theatrical conventions.
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Notes
Euripides, Medea and Other Plays, trans, and with an introduction by Philip Vellacott (London: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 24.
See, for instance, the subtle reasoning of R. Blondell et al., eds, Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 60–4.
N. S. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 13.
On this issue there is a vivid debate among feminist critics. See M. Williamson, ‘A Woman’s Place in Euripides’ Medea’, in Anton Powell, ed., Euripides, Women and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 16–31
E. A. McDermott, Euripides’ Medea: The Incarnation of Disorder (University Park, PA and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 1.
See N. Loraux’s comments in The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 40–1.
Teny Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. ix.
Howard Barker, Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 3.
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© 2007 Elizabeth Sakellaridou
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Sakellaridou, E. (2007). Stretching Medea to Postmodern Sensibilities. In: Aston, E., Case, SE. (eds) Staging International Feminisms. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287693_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287693_14
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