School of something FACULTY OF OTHER School of Classics FACULTY OF ARTS Putting on the Greeks: Greek tragedy in Leeds Eleanor OKell Visiting Research Fellow.

School of somethingFACULTY OF OTHER

School of ClassicsFACULTY OF ARTS

Putting on the Greeks: Greek tragedy in Leeds

Eleanor OKell

Visiting Research [email protected] in Our Lunchtimes

www.classicstalks.wordpress.org/museum

Why is there so much Greek tragedy, especially premieres of New Greek tragedies, in Leeds?

What is the attraction of Greek tragedy?

For playwrights

For directors and theatre companies

For theatres

For audiences


The Bacchae, Kneehigh, West Yorkshire Playhouse (2004)

The truly great theatre companies stand out by their ability to be distinctively themselves and yet make a succession of shows that are distinctively different. After an astonishing few years of creative frenzy, Kneehigh joins those ranks with its latest piece, which takes Euripides' wild tragedy of reason and madness and reinvents it as a contemporary postmodern folk tale.

It sings so clearly to us not just because it addresses the hysteria of mob violence and cycles of revenge that are so much part of our times, but because it whispers directly to the heart and the dark desire to kick off our comfy slippers and join the wild, whirling dance of abandon and sod the consequences.

The Guardian


Photo © Keith Pattison

Ajax (2006)

stage@leeds


Orestes (University of Leeds, March 2011)

Hippolytus (University of Leeds, December 2008, Paphos Ancient Odeon – Cyprus, July 2010)

The Wife of Heracles (University of Leeds, May 2010)

Helen of Troy (University of Leeds, December 2007)

Ajax (University of Leeds, November 2006 / Tour of Cyprus, July 2007)

Alcestis (University of Leeds, November 2004)

Agamemnon (Raven Theatre – Leeds, February 2001)


Dr George Rodosthenous

http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/alex-clark/38/769/abb Alex Clark

Alcestis

(2004)


Helen of Troy (2007)


Hippolytus

(2008)


The Wife of

Heracles

(2010)


Orestes

(2011)


Opera: Cherubini's Medea; Grand Theatre, Leeds Nick Kimberley Thursday 18 April 1996

It's a story from your daily paper: marriage crumbles, husband abducts children, distraught wife resolves to get them back by any means necessary. For all its classical trappings, Cherubini's Medea is heart-stoppingly veristic.

…

Kandis Cook's costumes place the action in the court of some 18th-century nobleman, rendered a touch exotic by the vaguely Eastern headgear worn by Norman Bailey's Creon and Thomas Randle's Jason.


1980/81 Stravinsky Oedipus Rex

1986/87 Stravinsky Oedipus Rex / Pulcinella (Ballet Rambert) Berlioz Part 1 of The Trojans: The Capture of Troy

1987/88 Berlioz Part 2 of The Trojans: The Trojans at Carthage

1990/91 Tippett King Priam

1995/96 Cherubini Medea

1996/97 Gluck Iphigenia in Aulis Montiverdi The Return of Ulysses

2004/05 Gluck Orfeo ed Euridice(co-production with Emio Greco I PC Dance Company - opened at Edinburgh International Festival)

2006/07 Monteverdi Orfeo2007/08 Keiser The Fortunes of King Croesus (British Premiere)2008/09 Strauss Electra (concert perf. at Leeds Town Hall)



Ted Hughes’ Alcestis, 2000

“I wrote to Ted Hughes once to congratulate him on one of his works, and he wrote back saying his

tuning fork had always been in the Calder Valley. After that, we kept corresponding until his death.”

Barrie Rutter

“…especially poignant and courageous…Alcestis is a work that looks death in the eye without blinking. The production leaves no doubt that Alcestis is a major work.”Charles Spencer The Daily Telegraph


Born: 17 August 1930 at 1, Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire

The House of Aries (radio play), 1960

Seneca's Oedipus, 1968

Orpheus, 1973

Racine's Phedre, 1997

Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, 1999 (published posthumously)


Oedipus a new version by Blake Morrison

“The confrontations are like hammer blows, catastrophe is inevitable but the narrative is kept taut with tension…This is classic drama for everyone”The Stage (Kevin Berry)

“Refreshingly bold – I’ve seen many revivals of Greek plays that tried to shed the classical hauteur…but never one that so bluntly deglamorised an ancient tragedy and relocated it to our era. And somehow it works.”The Times (Benedict Nightingale)


“Morrison’s swift and unemphatically poetic version of Sophocles is a perfect example of levity in seriousness, exuberance in tragedy. The tale unfolds with a literally blinding clarity. Broadsides are touring- Catch them if you can.” Daily Mail (Michael Coveney)

“This flexible, creative treatment of a classic of the Western repertoire takes several risks but fully justifies them, because nothing is allowed to obscure the great strength of the original play it’s inexorable rhythm, its intellectual clout and its aural beauty.”Times Literary Supplement (Edith Hall)



Antigone (Northern Broadsides, 2003 )

Oedipus (Northern Broadsides, 2001)

The Cracked Pot (NorthernBroadsides, 1995)

Antigone A new version By Blake Morrison

A war has ended. Peace. Celebration – and problems.

Antigone, hot-headed, wilful, stubborn daughter of Oedipus, must defy the new ruler, Creon, to bury her brother – traitorous leader of the failed rebellion. Caught in the act, she is condemned and brings death upon herself out of loyalty to her dead brother.

The individual versus the state, conscience versus the law, divine law versus human – Antigone is undoubtedly Sophocles’ masterpiece.


“Overwhelming…..It’s classical tragedy that speaks our language.”The Guardian

“From the moment the lights go up on the Chorus we know that we will be completely caught up in the drama. Immediately accessible…this is not one of those plays where you need to get clued up on the story before you go to the theatre.”BBC online


Northern Broadsides’ Medea by Paulin

The Telegraph commented:

Barrie Rutter has cast a striking, sure-footed young black actress, Nina Kristofferson, as the displaced enchantress whose loving devotions have curdled into vengeful hate. In an alluring greeny-blue silky dress, hair cascading down her back, Kristofferson convinces as a wounded tigress – caged by sexist circumstance in Corinth – who suddenly scents victory and the means to have horrific sport with those who have goaded her.


Medea, Alistair Elliot, West Yorkshire Playhouse 2003

Vulnerable outcaste, jilted lover and scheming sorceress. Without Medea's help, Jason would never have acquired the Golden Fleece, never have arrived safely back to claim his kingdom, never have had the success that followed, never have had his two beautiful sons. Such devotion surely deserves repayment.


Whatsonstage.com 25 November 2003

In a lifetime of theatregoing you will not often - indeed you may never - encounter an eccyclema. In the last two months Yorkshire has seen three. In the Northern Broadsides Antigone we had two, masquerading as superannuated hospital trolleys, and now, in Euripides's Medea at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, we get the third, as the wall of Medea's apartment is collapsed to reveal the dead bodies of her two small sons upon their bier. The eccyclema is a stage device in classical Greek tragedy for revealing the corpses to an audience which has been denied the actual spectacle of the dirty deed - it being axiomatic that Greek theatre displays not action but the before and after thereof. Mention of it here is not trivial, since Alistair Elliot translation of the play, originally made for Diana Rigg's performance at the Almeida in 1992, is here seen in a production which was fanfared in advance as marrying Greek theatre with the traditions of the Yoruba tribe of Western Nigeria.


Femi Elufowoju Jr (who also directs) contributes a bare-topped Jason who certainly looks more African than Greek but whose specious self-justification owes everything to Greek philosophical discourse. He is manifestly Medea's inferior both emotionally and intellectually, and Elufowoju's performance is generously restrained in acknowledgement of the fact.

Not quite the cross-fertilisation of theatrical traditions that we expected, then, but a workmanlike production with a performance of rare beauty at its core.

- Ian Watson


Simon Armitage was born 26 May 1963, in Marsden, West Yorkshire.

Mister Heracles - a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles, commissioned by West Yorkshire Playhouse (2001)

In an interview for Radio 4's Front Row, Simon Armitage said, "It is very much about heroism and I thought that was a strong contemporary theme."


Euripides’ play may be very old, but it doesn't feel old hat, even if the long speeches recounting off-stage atrocities don't sit with modern theatrical sensibilities.

Lyn Gardner

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 November 2010 23.00 GMT

A reviewer on Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender (an adaptation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis):

“The issues of today with 2,500 years worth of cultural punch.”


School of somethingFACULTY OF OTHER


Thursday 26th AprilRoger Brock

Renaissance Singers and the classics:

Dido’s lament and other Latin poetry

Classics in Our Lunchtimes www.classicstalks.wordpress.org/museum

School of something FACULTY OF OTHER School of Classics FACULTY OF ARTS Putting on the Greeks: Greek tragedy in Leeds Eleanor OKell Visiting Research Fellow.

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ajax university of leeds

alcestis university

hippolytus university

agamemnon raven theatre

leeds nick kimberley