Episode 105: The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama with Professor Fiona Macintosh

Introduction

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Leaguer. Ancient Greek and Roman drama has influenced theatre for millennia, and playwrights and other artists from around the world continue to draw inspiration from these works.

0:31But how have these plays been performed and interpreted over the centuries? There's been surprisingly little work done on that question, in contrast to the many decades' worth of research about how Shakespearean performance has evolved.

Archive of Performances

0:44The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford is trying to change that state of affairs. And today, we're fortunate to be joined by Professor Fiona McIntosh, who's the Archive's Director, and Professor of Classical Reception at Oxford. Fiona is a fellow at St. Hilda's College, and, most recently, the author of Performing Epic or Telling Tales. Fiona, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure, and thank you very much for inviting me. I understand that this project started nearly 30 years ago, and that it's grown considerably

1:17over time. But what did it start out to do, and what is your focus now?

Project Beginnings

1:22Well, it began life very much as a research project. And as you indicated in your introduction, there was a very real perception on the part of a very small group of classicists that, yes, people had maybe anecdotal knowledge about performances of ancient plays in the modern world. They knew that, for example, in the early modern period, definitely universities and certain

1:54schools were performing ancient plays, and not just, of course, in Britain, for example, but very definitely in the Jesuit schools across Europe. That was very much the case.

Early Performances

2:08And there was a kind of vague knowledge that some people somewhere had made some kind of records. But when it came to the more recent years, there was really only anecdotal knowledge. But what was happening from probably the 1980s onwards was there was suddenly a real increase in performances of especially Greek tragedy, and especially on the professional stage. And there was one very distinguished scholar who's very much part of the archive, the APGRD's team in Oxford,

2:45and that's Oliver Taplin, who was regularly in the 1980s invited into the rehearsal room for what now we can see as kind of landmark productions of Greek tragedy, the perhaps most important first of which was a production of Aeschylus's Oresteia at the National Theatre in London, directed by Peter Hall, and using a script of the great kind of poet, playwright, Tony Harrison.

3:18And Taplin was very much part of that.

Influential Productions

3:20So in some ways, a number of us were very much aware of that and also aware that this was happening around Europe, particularly around Europe at the time, and of course, you know, by the 90s, very much in North America as well, and that no one was systematically collecting the material, let alone thinking about how those productions were beginning to shape the way classicists in particular, but more generally, how people thought about Greek tragedy.

3:52So it began in really, because there was an absence, and because there was a sense that we knew that especially performances of Shakespeare were taken seriously, performance histories, and that people were beginning not only to document them, but also really to talk about the history of the plays through performance. So as very often happens in my discipline in classics, you know, 30 years, or in this case, perhaps 50 years later,

4:23we were playing catch-up, and we began what was a research project. And I think that's very important to emphasise, because we called it, you know, an archive, and we collected, because we had to, material. I said already, individuals very generously donated their own material. But this was not, until considerably later, an archive which was, in a way, putting its collection first.

4:55It, you know, our collection really were footnotes, references, at the end of our chapter, or at the bottom of our page. It was only later, when we had our first archivist, round about 2010, called Naomi Setchel, who said, hey, you've got an important collection. So we have to confess that we were rather Philistine kind of scholars, and amateurs, in hopefully, you know, the better sense of the word, rather than the negative.

Performance History Value

5:23We're going to get into some of these materials that you've mentioned that are in the archive in just a moment. But kind of a big-picture question, what's the value of understanding these plays' performance history? We've already mentioned, perhaps inevitably a few times, Shakespeare, and how understanding the history of how those plays were performed helps inform our understanding of the plays themselves. What about when it comes to classics? That's a very good point. And I think, in some ways, going back to Aeschylus' Oresteia and those early productions,

5:57actually, a particular, really important production in France, at the beginning of the 1990s in particular, it was the production from the extraordinary theatre company based at La Cartoucherie in Paris, Théâtre du Soleil, led by the inspirational Ariane Nouchkine, the sort of now legendary theatre director. And that company put on a version of the Oresteia called Les Atrides that included, as the first play,

6:32so they made a trilogy into what's generally referred to as a tetralogy, a four-part play. The first play was not by Aeschylus at all. They took a play by Euripides at that time, still not very well-known play, called The Aphigenia Adalis, which is the backstory, if you like, to the events of the Oresteia, and that is what started the Trojan War and therefore, in many ways,

7:04led to the aftermath of the Trojan War, the return from Troy, which is where the Oresteia begins with the return of Agamemnon and the Greek fleet back to Greece. So that production was not only aesthetically and theatrically truly kind of groundbreaking, because, you know, even if today some people will feel that it's sort of intercultural kind of experimentation,

7:36might have in some way felt slightly uncomfortable, although I think the company would say it's always ensemble-led and their company members come from all over the globe. This is not the West appropriating and, in some cases, of course, misappropriating other non-Western theatrical traditions. So aesthetically, it was quite extraordinary. You can see clips, very few clips, on YouTube, I think even today, and we in the archive have a copy.

Influential Production Examples

8:12Why that production was so influential in terms of scholarship, I think, is really significant. If you put Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis before the Oresteia, you have a very different reading of what happens, especially in the first play, because just very briefly, in the first play, Agamemnon returns home from Troy and he ends up getting murdered by Clytemnestra, his wife, in the bath in the last part of that first play.

8:46Now, at the end of that play, Clytemnestra stands up over the corpse of her husband in the bath, together with the corpse of the concubine, Cassandra, who he has brought back from Troy. And she provides, finally, an explanation for her murder of her husband. She doesn't explain why she's killed Cassandra. She says that the avenging fury of the house was in me.

9:17And this is a house, a family with a particularly dysfunctional backstory and where scores are being settled within generations and across generations. So that's explanation number one. And then almost like a kind of throwaway, she says, I did it because he killed our daughter. He sacrificed Iphigenia at Aulis in order to, in literal terms, to make the winds appear

9:51and in order for the Greek fleet to be able to go to fight at Troy. Now, in some ways, you know, people often say, hey, the real reason is she's got a lover in the background, the Jesus. This is why she's killing her husband. This is just like an afterthought. However, if you preface the Agamemnon with the Iphigenia in Aulis, it's a very different story. Not only do we witness the hugely cynical backstory, I mean, shocking realpolitik when a father is

10:27prepared for political reasons to sacrifice his own daughter. And he does so at the behest of the priesthood, if you like, who dictated and say this is what the goddess Artemis demands because of a previous transgression on Agamemnon's part. But instead of sort of refusing to do it, he goes ahead because he's also terrified of the soldiers who are, if you like, baying for having been taken from their homes.

11:01They want to fight. They want to go to war. But we also watch the domestic side of this extraordinary and terrifying crime committed by the father. And we watch Clytemnestra realizing that she has been duped. They've been brought to Aulis on the pretext that Iphigenia is to be married. And Clytemnestra has an extraordinary speech when she says to Agamemnon, you in effect, or other explicitly, you have it in you to do this.

11:34This is not the first time that you have killed one of my children. And she tells this incredible story of when they first met. And that is when he found her, he holding her baby and he dashed her baby to the ground, killed her first child and then took her as his wife, just as, you know, we know that's happened with Cassandra in years ahead. So it now looks like we have in Agamemnon a kind of serial child killer.

12:08And it's very interesting because people started really rereading the Agamemnon in a way that they'd never done before and through the lens of that Iphigenia and Aulis play. And so now some people went so far as to see, you know, Agamemnon as a child abuser and so on. And other purists were absolutely horrified. This is absolutely not the Aeschylus' play and so on. But what it showed is how difficult, and that's one thing, of course, reception study shows

12:41altogether, that once you have rethought something because of something you've read, it's very difficult to unread it to clean your perceptual filters, as some people, some theorists have suggested. And that was a really, really interesting example. And then many productions after the Nushkin one went on to show how much Iphigenia is in the Agamemnon. And there was a very well-known production at the National Theatre directed by Katie Mitchell

13:16using the Ted Hughes translation of the play, beginning of the millennium, just at the end and into 2000, which had the ghost of Iphigenia on stage throughout the first part and had in the famous tapestry scenes when Agamemnon is persuaded by Clytemnestra to get down from the chariot and walk on the tapestries up into the palace where he's going to have his ritual kind of bath, which, of course, turns out to be a ritual slaughter.

13:50That those tapestries in Katie Mitchell's production have little girls' dresses stitched all over it. So we watched him literally treading on his past, wading through the horrors and repeating, reenacting the shocking and fatal events at Aulis. So in that sense, it demonstrated to classicists absolutely how powerful productions were.

14:23But I could sort of wind back a little bit earlier by May just to say that that was, I think, the moment when classicists run in the 1990s suddenly realised that, hey, maybe we should seriously know what's going on in the theatre in order to understand how people's views are shifting. But I think in Greece, people began to understand a little earlier. And perhaps I suggest in North America, because people really didn't know this play, Aphigenia and Alice, at all well. I mean, it was ignored throughout the 19th century because there are questions always about

14:56how was it really Euripides or whatever. But in the late 60s in New York, as I'm sure many of your listeners will know, the great Greek theatre director, Michael Kakoyanis, he staged, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, a production of Aphigenia and Aulis. And that was not the first time, sorry, that wasn't the last time that Kakoyanis worked on that play, because it was then made in the 70s into the extraordinary film, which I'm sure

15:30many people have seen. And if not, they really should. When the very end, and Clytemnestra there is played by the incredible Irene Papas, the great tragic actor of the late 20th century, second part of the 20th century. And the last part of the film, the last few shots are really, really interesting. The camera begins by dwelling absolutely on Clytemnestra, staring furiously into the lens.

16:02And in the very, very last moment, we share her viewpoint. In other words, we are, I think, asked at that moment, all to be like Clytemnestra, people who speak truth to power. And this is very much how Kakoyanis reads that play, that it is absolutely about the venality of Agamemnon and the men who will do anything to sacrifice civilization to their own ends.

16:37So I think, and I've said it's important to emphasize this, you know, classicists, again, might belatedly have caught up with both the importance of the aphigenia in Aulis' play, but also how performances shape understandings of them. But it could have been a little earlier elsewhere. But I think Kakoyanis is the first. But it, I'm sure, you know, I'm talking to an audience who are theater enthusiasts, performance is always powerful. Performance matters.

17:07And of course, they shape the way we think about plays. But scholars who worked on Greek tragedy, really until the 70s, you know, thought it was just a very important kind of poetic text. And suddenly it became theater, but really quite late. Yeah, we're already talking about the relationship between the scholarship and then theater productions.

Archival Materials

17:30But we mentioned the fact that you've got all this archival material. I mean, you've got the name archive, the word archive right there in your name. What are the specific materials that you have? And what might someone who's interested in this subject, the reception of classical drama, what might they find in there? Yes, we do have a real collection. And as I mentioned, even if we slightly hid it before 2010, we definitely, from the beginning,

18:01realized that, you know, the real objects were important, at least to us. So, you know, in a rather amateur way, we did make sure they were, you know, not simply left in boxes, in piles. So we've got real things. And because I was working with Edith Hall, who was one of the founders, founding directors with Oliver Taplin of the APGRD, Edith and I were working on a kind of bigger parallel project

18:31to Oliver's interest. We were, in a way, approaching a bit more like theater historians. We were very interested in tracing what was really a lost history of the Greek plays on the British stage, ranging from 1660 up 1660. So the Restoration period right up to the beginning of the First World War, 1914. So we, above all, in the small team that we began life as, were collecting things and we were going to, you know, sales.

19:02You know, I still love going to those theatrical memorabilia sales, which occasionally pop up in London in particular. And, you know, just going through all this stuff that, of course, no one was remotely interested in kind of playbills. I mean, mostly, of course, 19th century. But we got a lot of plates. I know I'm ashamed to say we know they all have been ripped out of books and dealers are selling them individually. But in a way, we've given them another life because, you know, we are sort of reintegrating them in some ways into books.

19:34But so we've got to, I'm not sure what the oldest object, I probably should have asked, but if Claire Kenwood, our archivist, were around, she would probably say we have a couple of sort of 18th century objects. But I think most of the earlier collection inevitably is 19th century. And yeah, loads of playbills, you know, a lot of quite rich material. In the 20th century, we've got fantastic poster collection. We have masks as well. I mean, not a huge number, but we have masks.

20:05I think we don't have costumes, and thank goodness, because I'm not quite sure, you know, we would not have the expertise and definitely the space to collect that. But people have been and continue to be incredibly generous and not just with book collection. So we have a fantastic library. I mean, very strong on theatre history, but on classical reception, I think unparalleled. And when I arrived in January 2000 to join the project coming from the University of London,

20:43I sort of said, hey, where's our library? And people said, well, you know, you need to go to the Bodleian for that. You need to go to the English Faculty Library. You need to go to Taylorian for this. So I said, no, the idea is to try and make a collection so it's all in one room. And so we've done that. And of course, now visitors from all over the world come and because, you know, before they even look what's in our collection, they have got everything in one space, a most incredible

21:13kind of research resource at their fingertips, which is often in specialist libraries, in silos. So we did some, in that sense, sort of joining up in our collection, which has made it obviously unique and also very, very valuable. And I just say it's also, I think, really valuable, not only for scholars. And we're, of course, delighted when scholars visit from all over the world. But in a way, the really exciting moments are when theatre practitioners are saying, hey,

21:44can we come and look at this? Because, you know, we want to see, you know, what people have done before, designers we've worked with and so on. So we have real collection, but in recent years and in a way before the pandemic, but it's particularly post-pandemic, we've been really concerned to take our collection, like everyone else, to the researcher, to the interested party, rather than to expect people to be able to travel to us, definitely terribly expensive, even in the UK, to try and do that.

22:17And so we've thought of ways of, increasingly, how do we take our collection to other people? And we have a lot of digital resources, you know, like you, we have a podcast series, we have regular lecture series, we try and record our events. But the first thing we realise is we don't have enough money, sadly, to digitise everything. And as one of my advisory board, brilliant international advisory board said, why would you digitise everything?

22:48Yeah, and I mean, that was, in a way, the first time I have to say I actually, yeah, I mean, there is a serious theoretical question there. And rightly, one that we hadn't particularly thought about. I mean, for us, it was simply we didn't have the budget, but we could do other things. And what we've done is we've created, and we had funding to do it, two interactive multimedia e-books. The first one called Agamemnon, A Performance History, and the second, sorry, first one, Medea, A Performance History, apologies.

23:21And the second one, Agamemnon, A Performance History. And they're, you know, they're freely downloadable through iBooks and through our kind of website as well. We do have an EPUB version, I have to say, then not quite as good because they were built in iBooks. And we have, in a way, more 2020 ideas for further sort of smaller digital projects for, which will be equally interactive and, you know, kind of talking heads, talking about

23:52different objects in the pipeline. And so you'll be able to probably, we think now, view online, the e-books came out of a world that they're all in small sections, so you don't have to kill your memory now. But we realised that was a world when we were very conscious that lots of people had very unstable connections. And also, if you're in a rehearsal room, for example, you don't have an internet connection at all. So in being able to download something has its real value.

24:25And so, but we're kind of thinking for other projects, we'll probably have a kind of online presence. So we've got ideas about how to take the real objects outside of Oxford and beyond, and not always with the huge budget. I think that was important. You're mentioning these digital resources. And another one that I'd love to ask about is, actually two of them, the Ancient Performances

Databases and Resources

24:50Database and the Productions Database. What are those? And how can people use them? Oh, okay. They, in a way, the Modern Performances Database, sorry, I'm not really a statistics person, but I know it's vast, was where we began. And that's why we initially had funding back in 1996, and then again in 2000, and then 2005, and then thanks to the wonderful Mellon Foundation from 2010 to 2015.

25:21That was really primarily funding the databases as they became, because then we had the Ancient Database, a later incarnation. And that was really because people didn't know, as I said earlier on, at all about the history. They didn't know when plays had been performed, except, you know, maybe in memory or anecdotally. So that is a performance database. You can search in multiple ways, you know, by translator, for example, by director, by actor,

25:54and of course, by play, how usually, of course, by the canonical kind of, I suppose we can say source text, the play that inspired it. In recent years, we have moved beyond thinking simply about plays in the database. So you can also find out about performances that relate to the ancient Greek and Roman epics, so relate to, you know, the Iliad and Odyssey, and also to the Aeneid, Virgil's Aeneid, and also Ovid's Metamorphosis.

26:26And within that, I mean, the range is international. And I think the performance medium, it's really important to say, is as wide as you like. So, you know, puppetry, dance, rehearsed reading, we consider to be a performance. We've, in every way, you know, we've, not only are we not narrow in how we think about the relationship between this new work and the source text, because we realised, I mean, at the beginning, people were sort of splitting hairs. Is this an adaptation or is this, you know, I mean, A, I never was remotely interested in

27:00that myself, but also the point of you going to try and track how the afterlife of these plays, their power is precisely mutate at every turn. And if we decide that is not a play, it has to be so not any, I mean, I suppose if it just remotely talks about, you know, a son ending up having a relationship with his mother, even that I think we might debate and see whether it's a kind of Oedipus play.

27:31But, you know, so we're very capacious, I think deliberately so, and definitely in terms of performance genre. You were mentioning, speaking of being capacious, you're mentioning a moment ago, epic, which we might not normally think of as drama, kind of, that's a separate thing. But I know you have been working on how epic poems would have been performed. Could you tell us a little bit about that, how it fits into the archive's sort of larger mission? Well, I think the Performing Epic Project, which, again, was funded and began, I think,

28:11around about 2015, that came about because we realised that increasingly, in addition to people working with ancient dramatic scripts, they were also looking towards ancient epics as a starting point for making theatre in multiple ways. And, of course, that's been true across performance history. You know, I mean, that's where opera began looking at epic. And, you know, sorry, not in a way, absolutely.

28:41And I'm sure, again, audience people know that's where film began as well. And, in fact, so much silent film is looking not only as epic as a model, and it describes itself exactly as epic. And that's why we think that the modern locus of epic is on the screen. So it wasn't, it had never been there, it had always been there, but it suddenly became the end of the 20th century, the very beginning. Everyone was really interested in doing a new odyssey and both individuals and ensemble performances.

29:18And so we felt we needed to, you know, begin to both document it, you know, include it in our database, and also start asking questions, why? You say epic was not performed, but actually, that's, of course, a very kind of modern understanding, because we read the Iliad, if we have the stamina, and we're made to read it, you know, in a book, sometimes with much more pleasure, as it was for me, the odyssey in a book.

29:48So that's how we think of it. But, of course, we know that Homer was a bard, he was a performer, he was a singer, and that definitely the bards later, the rhapsodes, were at the end of a long tradition of oral poets performing to in front of audiences, and were not written down, of course, till considerably later. And it was the beginning of the 20th century, when two extraordinary American scholars, you

30:22know, went to former Yugoslavia to find living oral poets who also could compose in performance, in improvisatory ways, and realised that something as big as 24 books of the Iliad could indeed have been composed orally. And I always feel really significantly, maybe they were the first generation who could both understand what was happening as they watched these poets, because what was happening or what

30:54had been happening since earlier in the 20th century, jazz composers had been doing precisely the same thing. And suddenly, people, and increasingly artists during the course of the 20th century, realised that epic is improvisatory, just like jazz is improvisatory. And what does that mean? That means that it's part of a much bigger tradition, that an artist can contribute, participate in that tradition and make new work.

31:27And definitely, if you talk to young artists, people like the extraordinary Kay Tempest, who's Brand New Ancients, you know, was very much sort of, you know, the kind of emergent thing. I know they are now a huge international kind of star. But in the early days, when we invited Tempest to talk about their work with us, the excitement for them was precisely that they were participating in a kind of bigger tradition.

31:58So that's how we tend to think about epic. I know lots of classes still don't think like that. I mean, there are lots of classes who do. But I have no problem thinking about it as being another ancient performance art and one that, you know, was not understood and was very much aligned with the kind of print culture. So much so that, yeah, in the 19th century, everyone decided you couldn't possibly ever write

32:30anything as long as an epic poem. And they had huge anxieties about epic in the 19th century. And of course, they said, well, we have our modern epic anyway, we have the novel. So, but yeah, we, I think, think differently today. And definitely one of the most exciting projects I think I worked on, you know, was this, what is epic doing today? And, you know, all the time I get people sort of writing to me saying, hey, you know, have you heard this incredible artist who's doing their own version of the Iliad or the Odyssey?

33:00And, you know, it, it's, it's amazing. And often, as you know, you know, around the world, people, you know, reading individual books and passing on, you know, a bit like a kind of famous sort of beacon speech from the Agamemnon. So now there's also a component, the translating ancient drama project. And I'm curious about that and maybe about the importance, maybe some of the potential pitfalls, what you see when it comes to translating these works into modern languages.

33:32Yeah, we, we, as you say, we, we, we've also realized that the translation is something rather more important than just naming a translator, which is what we did in, in the early years. I mean, and, and we were quite conscious because very often they might've been academics, although often those academics write a literal that gets overwritten by a kind of famous poet, because of course the theatre needs to sell tickets. So we were always sort of conscious that, you know, some of our team were those hidden

34:03translators. But in more recent years, and, and especially thanks to a young group of, well, across Europe, really, that had been through Oxford in various forms, were beginning to look at early modern translations in the vernacular, in the European vernaculars, and realizing that translation had been so narrowly understood. And to this day, I think is, and we needed to think, especially about early modern translation

34:34in very different ways. And so when people say, oh, no one translated a, let me think of a new Euripides play. Oh yeah, they only translated women plays or whatever. And then you suddenly find that no one in England was doing this. It was only Seneca. And then you suddenly find a huge chunk of maybe Euripides version of Medea in the middle of a play like Women Beware Women. And you sort of think, what's going on here? You know, how can you sort of lift a bit from one play by an ancient author and just shove it in the middle of your own modern play?

35:05And a young scholar who's now based in Paris called Cécile Duduilly has written brilliantly about kind of patchwork translation at this time. And if at the very beginning of, say, the 16th century, people were translating very much in competition with an ancient author in order to establish themselves both as kind of scholar and artist, she shows there's a shift. And of course, the shift comes with the rise of the vernacular language that you then maybe

35:39appropriate and repurpose in a kind of patchwork way. You stitch bits together, a bit like the Rhapsodes did with Epic. And you can therefore, and this is the point they were really trying to make when we were thinking about how we capture this, you can say, this is a translation, albeit one scene or one speech of an ancient play in a modern play. So we've tried, and of course, it's only the very beginning of what is the massive project.

36:10We tried to do that. And the idea in the database would be to not only say, hey, bits of Medea happen here. It would be, of course, to be able to then link you. And that already would do to the translation itself, so you can find it. But so that's where the translation project began. But a lot of people on, you know, as part of our research team are thinking all the time about, yeah, what does translation for the stage mean? And that is, you know, so from not so much page to stage, but page to body, if you like.

36:47So it's working with translators, sorry, yeah, with translation, but also with dramaturgy and with performance. And that, I suppose, is the bit of translation that we're most interested in thinking about now. And thanks to this team of younger scholars, many of whom are also practitioners as well. Yeah, throughout, whether it's translating or some of the other examples you've given, it seems like there's a lot of collaboration that you're doing with contemporary artists,

37:21creating new works or refining their sense of the classical works. What are some of the works that have come out of your collaboration with contemporary artists? And how do they fit into what you're doing? Yeah, that's very interesting. We had 10 years of funding from the Onassis Foundation some time ago. We'd love it to come again. When we had a producer and the idea was to co-produce new work and develop new work.

37:52And I think everyone would agree that the thing we were most proud of was at the time was to co-produce with the Oxford Playhouse, the first UK tour of Jarl Farber's extraordinary version of the artisti called Melora. So that, I think, would be one way in which it was kind of curiously driven, in the first instance, by scholars who were able to persuade Theatre Company, a very distinguished one, the

38:26Oxford Playhouse, that it was really worth bringing this over and that we would kind of support it hugely. And it was. In recent years, very much thanks to what in Oxford is called TORCH, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, which have funded quite a lot of work about knowledge exchange. And obviously that's taken multiple forms. But for us, it's been very much about persuading them. And I also know everyone talks about innovation in, you know, in scholarship, sorry, in universities

39:00and really in my university, that means vaccines. But we've managed in a small way to say, hey, working with practitioners might be innovation in a way. And I suppose the most recent exciting example was work we did with a brilliant young woman composer called, sorry, Cheryl Francis Hode, who is working with a librettist called Jean Penseur-Besson, who's a very, very talented librettist and opera director.

39:33And they were beginning to work on an opera about Penelope. And actually their main intertext is, because it's still ongoing, Atwood's, the Penelope ad. And they said, we're doing this project. And I got very excited. And I persuaded the university, hugely rich musical culture, but usually driven by men, that they really should support this project. And we were able, you know, to have the first workshop and it's ongoing.

40:05And it was a week, which, and obviously they had done quite a bit of work together before the week. But it began, you know, with a number of young people in the room, a few older people like me. So really thinking about not only how brilliant the Penelope ad, their source text was, but also how problematic it now seems some years later, and, you know, kind of brainstorming with them as we began.

40:35Of course, some of us had already heard some of the music, began to think about what they might be doing. And that project was very exciting because I went with the creative team into a local school. And what they loved was they suddenly realized that not only could they have a view about it, but that their view might matter because this was under, in development. And so we thought a lot about Penelope and what Penelope might be feeling at a particular moment.

41:05And then they turned up to what was an hour's sharing, I mean, of two or three arias and participated in it, in, you know, they were granted the script, you know, and it is step one. There is now a bigger network. It involves some people in North America as well. Hopefully we get some further funding for that. But, you know, this in the past, you know, might have been something if one was sort of privileged to, you know, be party to it.

41:37But now I think it's become, yeah, quite, you know, what the French call, Europeans call a lab. This means that scholarship doesn't have now to have the kind of disconnect that it did

Collaborations and Innovations

41:50in previous generations. Yeah. It seems as though you're getting some really kind of interdisciplinary stuff. You're just talking about, you know, librettos and music, but there's also, as I understand, dance, one of the projects recently. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It, you know, we, some years ago, we had a very brilliant singer on our team who sadly is no more, Peter Brown. He passed away some years ago. But he, Peter, was determined to take on opera as part of our, you know, kind of expanding

42:22our research area. And I boldly said, opera is brilliant, but it can't be done without dance, you know. And if we want to understand the chorus, we absolutely have to engage seriously with the history of dance. So I began leading on a project which increasingly was referred to as the ancient dancer in the modern world. The idea of the ancient dancer, because of course, no one is really, can really understand what an ancient dancer was by looking on a vase. Although lots of people have tried to think they did know how they could sort of animate

42:56that vase. And that led in turn to, yeah, lots of exciting collaborations with very distinguished choreographers and dancers. And also, I have to say, a number of classicists whose early life was in dance training, who are now moving into the area of dance scholarship. So what, and it, I mean, ancient dance scholarship was Lillian Lawler, name I'm sure, and on British side, an extraordinary woman, but pretty eccentric, a bit like Lawler, called Ruby Jinner.

43:30And then, and of course, at the beginning of the century, it was only women who worked on this and it wasn't serious. Now, there are lots of classicists who are beginning to work really seriously on ancient dance and thinking about, you know, what is Pina Boucher doing? I've got a brilliant research student at the moment called Marcus Bell, and he's working on choreographing tragedy. And it's in kind of very contemporary dance from Bausch onwards. But why, in a way, that kind of curious early interest in, you know, why do people think

44:02about the ancient dancer and how they shape modern dance history? That was coincident with, in my college, work of a wonderful English fellow called Susan Jones, who, again, her first life was as a principal dancer with the Scottish Ballet. And then her second career was as a brilliant kind of modernist in the English faculty. And together, in college, we persuaded everyone that Sue needed to begin something which we now

44:34called Dance Ox, which is Dance Scholarship Oxford. And I have to say, because of her contacts, because of her knowledge, it is now a kind of leading research centre in the world where dance, and we collaborate a lot with them. And yeah, it's wonderful. Because unlike North America, where dance history, dance studies were always within academia, in the UK, that absolutely was not the case until, I think I'm right in saying it's as

45:06late as the sort of 70s, 80s. And then, of course, in the so-called new institutions. So they were always somehow kind of at one removed from, you know, what was considered to be serious sort of scholarship. But that's absolutely not the case now. And we're delighted. I mean, it was very late again in Oxford that that happened. But it happened in a way, because of, you know, a weird bunch of classicists and, you know, this highly distinguished dancer turned literary scholar.

45:37And we just clubbed together and said, hey, we're going to do it. And the patron of Dance Ox, by the way, is Dame Monica Mason, who ran the opera, well, ballet for years. So it's it is that well supported now. And it is, yeah, maybe something I think we're we're more proud of than other things. I'm hearing from what you're telling us all these really interesting connections between the materials in the archive, the scholarship that you're doing and and things that are going on now in the world of dance, in the world of theater, contemporary art.

46:11The classics, I think, today in the 21st century, I think it's fair to say they occupy this important, but sometimes kind of awkward position. They're seen as this foundational body of cultural work. But then there's all this maybe baggage that comes along with them. How do you think the archives work can help explore and understand, but but maybe also in some ways change this? Well, I'd like to think that we were part of a change. I think we've got a lot of work to do and the discipline is now seriously engaging with

46:45decolonizing its its collections and its curriculum and and so on. And about time, too, I think is most people's view. I think before one of the reasons why we were thinking about this first was because it became very apparent that Greek tragedy was not, you know, the exclusive preserve of some narrow European elite that actually from at least post Second World War, that it really

47:16was nobody's and everybody's. And it by the 60s was absolutely up for grabs. You could say things with tragedy, Greek tragedy or through Greek tragedy that you couldn't say before. Of course, it's always been useful because it's in times of censorship throughout history. You can use an ancient story and tell pretty subversive stories and elude the censor. But in the post-war world, it became more than apparent, you know, across the globe that

47:46tragedy had not only gods that no one believed in, but it still had gods. So it could say, explore big questions that often, you know, are kind of crude sort of late capitalist world, if you want to put it that way, often can't begin to kind of broach. But also in terms of its aesthetics, its performance modes, it often was non-Western theatrical cultures that showed classicists and other mainstream Western theatre practitioners how to stage, for

48:22example, a chorus. So I remember, you know, the kind of huge excitement in the middle of the 80s, when the incredible Japanese theatre director Nina Gawa came to Edinburgh Festival with his Madea. And it was, you know, rain fell typical Edinburgh fashion as we sat outside in front of the neoclassical facade of the university and watched this play. And it was watching a kind of kabuki inspired Greek chorus was the best thing.

48:55It was the hottest ticket in town. And you didn't need to be interested remotely in Greek tragedy or know anything about no theatre or kabuki or anything. You just had to see this incredible production. So I would say that that has been a huge, huge help that tragedy from an early stage was definitely not something that Europe owned, that Europe had all the answers for. I mean, on the contrary, they really needed to look beyond not only their books, but also

49:29beyond their continent. And of course, beyond North America as well, in order to understand what these plays might have meant and the extraordinary power that they could have in performance in antiquity. We'll post links that will let you explore the archive of performances of Greek and Roman drama and learn more about their work and the resources they provide. Fiona, thank you so much for introducing us to the archive. A pleasure. Thank you.

49:59If you'd like to continue today's conversation, please visit TheatreHistoryPodcast.net and follow at TheatreHistory on social media. Please note that, while we usually spell theatre T-H-E-A-T-R-E, it ends in E-R on our social media handle. Our theme music is The Black Crook Gallop, which comes to us courtesy of the New York Public Library Libretto Project, and Adam Roberts.

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