Ancient Greek Tragedies: Search/Destroy

why is there no Culture - Theatre category?

but there is! it's called CultureT > Theatre. maybe someone created it in response to your question. blimey.

i have only ever seen The Trojan Women, which was all right rather than brilliant. does stephen berkoff's Greek count? that RoXoRed.

Aeschylus is great but is also the hardest one to read. With enough historical background, the tremendously dull Seven Against Thebes becomes one of the most terrifying plays ever, but minus the background it's practically unreadable. The Oresteia is awesome obv., esp. the first two (the third one I can live without though classicists go nuts about its gender issues). The Ajax of Sophocles is magnificent and woefully underrated & looks toward the violence of Roman tragedy i.e. Seneca, whose plays are badly underread by English-speaking types although he's always been big with French writers. Euripides really is every bit as subversive and fascinating as everybody says he is, but his status as the darling of classical-lit slumming kinda puts me off.

I liked Agamemnon when I read it in high school. Antigone rocks too!

my Greek teacher at school used to claim that the Seven Against Thebes were the ancient greek version of the Magnificent Seven.

sign on a Greek clothing shop:

Euripides, Eubaiades.

IMO, anything that has survived and is performed with any regularity is amazing so I can't really destroy anything. Isn't it unbelievable how such a small population could produce so many works of genius?

Anyway, my picks are Medea and the old standby Oedipus Rex. They just stand up to so many different interpretations. For comedy (not that you asked!), Lysistrata and The Clouds.

It's mindblowing to think that we have only the tiniest fraction of the works that even the Big 4 produced. There were thousands of these shows.

yup.

although it is speculated that the best stuff survived, because that was what was most likely to be copied.

I'd love to see a full on performance of "The Bacchae". It's interesting to think how this would have gone down in ancient Athens, given that it is a play about how scary Dionysus is, when the theatre had its origin in his ritual worship.

Oedipus Rex is my favourite, but I've not read more than about a dozen Greek plays.

I saw the Bacchae performed in L.A. a few years back - the Pentheus character was so beautifully fleshed out, no pun intended, and the play's bearings on all kinds of modern questions were clear as crystal. But I still think Euripides is the one we'd like to think speaks most directly to our times while Sophocles is the one who's actually got us by the short hairs.

It's more that Euripides is self consciously "modern", presenting plays that deal with The Way We Live Today, while Sophocles goes after primal truths blah blah blah which will always have resonance.

I've long been partial toward Philoctetes by Sophocles.

Every mention of The Bacchae seconded: it's beautifully written and the plot is just fantastic. I'm a bit wary of seeing any classical greek play done by a modern company, though. This might be because I'm still scarred from the awful production of Antigone I saw a few years ago, with a really trite translation and a director who couldn't work out what to do with the chorus. Or, indeed, how to get any sort of credible performance out of the actors.

I would like Philoctetes, but I had to study it and am now convinced it only has one character. On the other hand, it has an actual deus ex machina, which is pretty impressive. Sophocles-wise, Oedipus At Colonus is really good.

"best stuff survived"
This is not an airtight theory. Some geniuses are not recognized
in their era, besides, many plays were destroyed in the fire
of Alexandria.

I think the problem with modern productions of Greek tragedies is that if you attempt to do them naturalistically you will come very unstuck. They're meant to be stylised and ritualised, and if you roll with that you're sorted.

Arguably the modern art form Greek drama is most like is opera, so there is a lot to be said for having the chorus and all the speeches sung. but that would be a weirdness too far.

I saw the same production of Trojan Women as Rener... it was alright rather than either great or awful. Partly this might be because all that happens in it is that the women sit around being depressed because their husbands are dead and now they are going to be divvied out among the Greeks and raped. And then their children are all killed. You could say that miserableness is the stock in trade of Grek Tragedy, but in this case the lack of any plot development hampers things.

what's Oedipus in Colonnos actually about?

I think there could be a successful naturalistic production of a Greek tragedy, but it would need a translator who's prepared to act as part playwright and be a little less respectful of the text. Extremely stylised productions may be true to the original form, but they need a lot of work to make themselves accessible to an audience. Generally, there's some kind of attempt made toward integrating naturalistic techniques with the ritualistic stuff, but it's hard to do well.

I think Pasolini's film of Medea got the balance right, though.

Oedipus at Colonus is about the death of Oedipus - it's a variant form on the legend in which he ends up just outside Athens (at the shrine of the Eumenides?), meets up with Theseus, fights with his male relatives and dotes on his daughters, and prophesises the glory of the Athenian state. It serves as a sort of bridge between Oedipus Rex and Antigone, and is really interesting on the idea of Oedipus as *blameless*.

I remember loving Euripides, Medea at the top of the heap. Hated Sophocles and Aeschylus though. That was 4-5 years ago though.

Comedies, Aristophanes obv, of which The Frogs was my favorite.

My iBook is named Medea.

Sadly that is all I have to contribute, really, although I'm enjoying this thread a lot.

Or, to explain a bit more: I'm generally not happy reading things -- well, things of presumably literary value -- in translation. And I don't enjoy reading plays (I enjoy watching them). So these plays are very distant and exciting to me, but until I make enough time to learn Ancient Greek...

interestingly, the one greek dramatist that i like the most is aeschylus. for lack of better terms, the oreistaia is both more primal and more abstract than, say, euripedes or aristophanes. the oreistaia covers both raw human emotion (e.g., grief, outrage, vengeance) and some rather abstract political theory (e.g., the balance between disorganized, passionate vengeance and organized, formal justice as being the necessary touchstone for society). and he undergird all this by the balance he achieved in his own writing -- spare, direct, economical, and elegant. it's easy for me to understand why aeschylus is so well-admired.

(sorry to sound like some fusty oxford don!)

I've never read any tragedies in the original language and so don't feel qualified to comment.

As comedies go,
Search: Aristophanes' Wasps and Clouds
Destroy: all of Menander