Oxford University Press Postdramatic Tragedies (Classical Presences)

Ancient tragedy has played a well-documented role in contemporary theatre since the mid-twentieth century. In addition to the often-commented-upon watershed productions, however, is a significant but overlooked history involving classical tragedy in experimental and avant-garde theatre. Postdramatic Tragedies focuses upon such experimental reinventions and analyses receptions of Greek and Roman tragedy that come under the banner of 'postdramatic theatre', a style of performance in which the traditional components of drama, such as character and narrative, are subordinate to the immediate, affective power of more abstract elements, such as image and sound. The chapters are arranged into three parts, each of which explores classical reception within a specific strand of postdramatic theatre: text-based theatre, devised theatre, and theatre that transcends the usual boundaries of time and space, such as durational and immersive theatre. Each offers a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of a particular case study, covering both widely known and less studied productions from 1995 to 2015. Together they reveal that postdramatic theatre is related to the classics at its conceptual core, and that the study of postdramatic tragedies reveals a great deal about both the evolution of theatre in recent decades, and the status of ancient drama in modernity. Review ...the book deserves to be essential reading for those interested in the postdramatic, the tragic, and classical reception more broadly ― David Bullen, New Theatre Quarterly The volume has much to recommend it both for theatre historians and for those whose focus is on the contemporary reception of ancient drama. ― Emma Bridges and Henry Stead, Greece & Rome About the Author Emma Cole is a Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Classics at the University of Bristol. She received her doctorate from UCL in 2015 and since then has published widely on the reception of Greek and Roman literature (primarily tragedy and epic) in contemporary theatre, including the co-edited collection Adapting Translation for the Stage (with Geraldine Brodie; Routledge, 2017), and chapters and articles on the work of Katie Mitchell (2015), Martin Crimp (2016), and Sarah Kane (2017). From 2019-2021 she is completing an AHRC leadership fellowship, during which she will undertake a project investigating immersivity and the classics with a focus on British theatre company Punchdrunk.