The Ghost of Iphigenia and Oedipus on the Stairs: Ancient Theatre Festival - Syracuse 2022
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v8i2.396Abstract
The programme of the 57th edition of the Ancient Theatre Festival at Syracuse (17 May – 12 July 2022) consisted of three Greek tragedies. The staging of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (the first part of the Oresteia) was directed by Davide Livermore in Walter Lapini’s translation and was envisaged as taking place in the 1930s. The show was structured around a number of highly successful stage effects of great emotive impact, not least of which were the huge mirrors forming the backdrop in which the public could see themselves reflected throughout the course of the action. Besides this, the director introduces the ghost of Iphigenia into the action, a character who is absent in Aeschylus apart from the repeated re-evoking of her sacrifice before the war of the Greeks against the Trojans. The staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, directed by Robert Carsen in Francesco Morosi’s translation, is in a style which is completely different from Livermore’s Agamemnon, employing no special effects and instead totally focussing on the words and gestures of the actors. On the stage there towers an enormous staircase where the characters, and in particular King Oedipus, move up and down, their ascents and descents symbolically representing the rise and fall of the sovereign in a starkly ‘existential’ reading of Sophocles’ play which sees in the figure of Oedipus the paradigm of the condicio humana. Finally Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, directed by Jacopo Gassman in Giorgio Ieranò’s translation, locates the story in an abstract and atemporal space thus emphasizing the ‘traumatized’ personalities of the two protagonists (Iphigenia and Orestes), who only through a reciprocal recognition seem to be able to discover their own specific identity.
Keywords: Aeschylus; Sophocles; Euripides; Syracuse; Greek tragedy; Davide Livermore; Robert Carsen; Jacopo Gassmann
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 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.
