Orestes the Gunslinger and the Flying Bacchae. Ancient Theatre Festival - Syracuse 2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v7i2.353Abstract
For the 56th season of the Ancient Theatre Festival at Syracuse (3July-21 August 2021) three Greek tragedies were staged. In the first place, The Libation Bearers and Eumenides by Aeschylus (the second and third parts of the Oresteia) were played as a single performance of the translation by Walter Lapini, directed by Davide Livermore. The mythical history of the house of Atreus is projected into a twentieth-century context, with a sometimes disproportionate use of special effects which, although they have an undoubted emotional impact on the spectators, are often unnecessary and adopted simply for their own sake, with little reference to the sense of Aeschylus’ plays. The stagecraft of the Bacchae, on the other hand, is very different and much more successful. This production of the translation by Guido Paduano, directed by the Catalan Carlos Padrissa with his company Fura Dels Baus, however ‘extreme’ its scenographic choices may seem (flying Bacchae supported by a crane, Dionysus played by a woman) they always appear to be well integrated into the dramaturgical structure and responding to an intelligent interpretation of Euripides’ text.
Keywords: Aeschylus; Euripides; Syracuse; Greek tragedy; Davide Livermore; Carlus Padrissa.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
- The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
- The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
- The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.
