Greek Drama

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28938, 4 July 1959, Page 3

Greek Drama

An Introduction to the Greek Theatre. By Peter D. Arnott. Macmillan. 240 pp. Index.

The great merit of this book is that its author is quite at home in two specialties which too seldom occur together. He is a classical scholar, a Fellow of the University College of North Wales, and at the same time a practical man of the theatre. He has created a method of presenting classical plays with marionettes and performed to schools, universities and theatre groups during the last eight years, and in 1956 to the Annual Conference of the Classical Association. His interest is in finding ways to interpret Greek drama to modern audiences. In this book it is never forgotten that Greek drama consists of plays to be acted. As sometimes happens when a practical man or woman of the theatre writes on Shakespeare, many dramatic features which have escaped the more academic and literary critics are given proper emphasis. The dramatic effect of the purple carpet laid out for Agamemnon' in the play of Aeschylus is likely to be missed by the scholar reading Aeschylus In the study, though it is important in the theme of the play as it emphasises Agamemnon’s pride at the very hour of his fall.

More important, the presentation of the classics as living plays will commend them to the general reSder. There is no danger here of seeing theta as something remote wltfch may safely be left to a few scholars. All quotations are translations and the book is primarily designed for the general reader who knows Greek drama only in translation. The first four chapters give the necessary background for a discussion of selected plays. A first chapter clearly distinguishes two kinds of drama, the drama of convention and that of illusion. Modem plays attempt to create an illusion of reality; Scenery, costume, gesture and speech are as lifelike as possible. The cinema is an extreme case of this and pew techniques, such as 3-D, are attempts to make the illusion as complete as possible. There is another approach, that of the No plays of Japan, or of Greek drama. Here no real attempt is, made to pass the play off as real in the naturalistic sense, but conventions indicate the setting and' scenery A poetic description of trees and moonlight can establish the scene as night in a forest even though the sun is shining on an archtectural stage background. This is familiar to students of Shakespeare.

This main difference of approach established, the writer goes on to outline the origin and structure of the plays, the stage and its equipment and the audience of classical times. Though based on antiquarian research which in its detail was probably hardly exciting, the whole picture of a lively audience at an ancient drama festival makes fascinating reading.

Particular representative plays are discussed in detail; the “Agamemnon” of Aeschylus, the “Medea” of Euripides, the “Cyclops” of Euripides and the “Birds” of Aristophanes. This introduces us to early and later tragedy, the satyr play and comedy. A chapter on Plautus shows the continuation of later Greek comedy in Rome. The selection of a few plays for detailed discussion rather than a quick run through the whole extant corpus is a commendable method of writing a book of this sort, particularly helpful for readers without a detailed knowledge of Greek literature.

Another chapter deals with problems of translation. This is a frank discussion of what is necessarily lost in any translation from Greek, and a warning that the most successful translation as literature may not be the most successful on the stage. While the writer has to agree with the old saying that translations are like women—those that are beautiful are not faithful and those that are faithful are not beautiful—he gives a guide to some of the best known translations and an evaluation of them. Of his own translations in earlier chapters the extracts from the “Agamemnon” seem particularly successful. A translation of the “Cyclops” in an alliterative Piers-the-Plowman type of blank verse seems a little odd. It is perhaps directly influenced by Christopher Fry and may not tfe inappropriate on the stage. The influence of Greek drama

on later drama down to T. S. Eliot is discussed in a last chapter, and an appendix “Some Notes on Production” will be of great value to anyone producing a Greek play. From a purely literary point of view one might find better interpretations of Greek plays than this book offers. Scholars might suggest that “Alcestis” should not be discussed without taking into account Greek views, different from our own, on the status of women and the aged. They might not agree that Aristophanes’ “Birds” is “pure fantasy” without reference to current politics. But no book will give a reader such a practical insight into Greek plays as plays. And few books equal this one in presenting the Greeks as living people and Greek studies as something of lively interest to modern readers. .<?