The Greeks Aren’t Done with Us: Simon Critchley on Tragedy
We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts.
—Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Greek Historical Writing, and Apollo (1908)
Thirteen years ago, when I lived briefly in Glasgow, I made it a habit to regularly attend the theater. An unheralded cultural mecca in its own right, overshadowed by charming, medieval Edinburgh to the east, the post-industrial Scottish capitalI was never lacking in good drama. Also, they let you drink beer during performances. Chief among those plays was a production of Sophocles’s Antigone, the final part of his tragic Theban Cycle, and one of the most theorized and staged of dramas from that Athenian golden age four centuries before the Common Era, now presented in the repurposed 16th-century Tron Church. Director David Levin took the Attic Greek of Sophocles and translated it into the guttural brogue of Lowlands Scotts, and in a strategy now deployed almost universally for any production of a play older than a century, the chitons of the ancient world were replaced with business suits, and the decrees of Creon were presented on television screen, as the action was reimagined not in 441 BCE but in 2007.
Enough to remind me of that headline from which snarked: “Unconventional Director Sets Play in Time, Place that Shakespeare Intended.” The satirical newspaper implicitly mocks adaptations like ’s which imagined the titular character (devilishly performed by ) as a sort of -like fascist, and ’s masterful version of ’s , which makes a play about the Plantagenet line of succession into a parable about gay rights and the Act Up movement. By contrast, quips that its imagined “unconventional” staging of is one in which “Swords will replace guns, ducats will be used instead of the American dollar or Japanese yen, and costumes, such as…[the] customary pinstripe suit, general’s uniform, or nudity, will be replaced by garb of the kind worn” in the Renaissance. The dramaturgical perspective behind Levin’s was definitely what the article parodied; there was nary a contorted dramatic mask to be found, no Greek chorus chanting in dithyrambs, and, as I recall, lots of video projection. aside, British philosopher would see no problem with Levin’s artistic decisions, writing in his new book that “each generation has an obligation to reinvent the classics. The ancients need our blood to revise and live among us. By definition, such an act of donation constructs the ancients in
