Vayos Liapis, Avra Sidiropoulou, eds. Adapting Greek Tragedy: Contemporary Contexts for Ancient Texts

Abstract

Since Hellmut Flashar’s pioneering book Inszenierung der Antike (1991), studies on modern stagings of ancient Greek drama have multiplied along with the proliferation, in a wide variety of cultural and geographical contexts, of performances/plays inspired, more or less directly, by Attic tragedies of the fifth century BC. Adapting Greek Tragedy, edited by Vayos Liapis and Avra Sidiropoulou, brings together contributions by specialists who take stock of the current situation, analyse several exemplary case studies, and reflect theoretically on the increasingly dynamic and problematic/problematising way in which adaptations of Greek tragedy today confront the dramatic genre that flourished in Greece some twenty-five centuries ago. At the heart of the volume is the question of what precisely an ‘adaptation’ is, what its possible modes of realisation are, and how modern adaptations of Greek tragedies can shed new light on the way we understand our relationship to the classical past by highlighting aspects of modern culture’s distance from the civilisation of ancient Greece.

Keywords: Greek tragedy; adaptation; translation; myth; drama; classical canon, Hellmut Flashar