! ! Didaskalia is an electronic journal dedicated to the study of all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman performance.! ! DIDASKALIA Volume 9 (2012) http://didaskalia.net ISSN 1321-485 1 ! ! DIDASKALIA 9 (2012 ) ! About Didaskalia Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient times to describe the work a playwright did to teach his chorus and actors the play. The official records of the dramatic festivals in Athens were the !"!#$%#&ί#". Didaskalia now furthers the scholarship of the ancient performance. Didaskalia is an English-language, online publication about the performance of Greek and Roman drama, dance, and music. We publish peer-reviewed scholarship on performance and reviews of the professional activity of artists and scholars who work on ancient drama. We welcome submissions on any aspect of the field. If you would like your work to be reviewed, please write to [email protected] at least three weeks in advance of the performance date. We also seek interviews with practitioners and opinion pieces. For submission guidelines, go to didaskalia.net. 2011 Staff Editor-in-Chief: Amy R. Cohen [email protected] +1 434 947-8117 Post: Didaskalia Randolph College 2500 Rivermont Avenue Lynchburg, VA 24503 USA Associate Editor: C.W. (Toph) Marshall Assistant Editor: Jay Kardan [email protected] Intern: Grace Gardiner [email protected] Advisory Board Caterina Barone Oliver Taplin John Davidson Peter Toohey Gary Decker J. Michael Walton Mark Griffith David Wiles Mary Hart Paul Woodruff Kenneth Reckford Editorial Board Kathryn Bosher Dan McCaffrey Dorota Dutsch Marianne McDonald Fred Franko Peter Meineck Allison Futrell Paul Menzer Mary-Kay Gamel Tim Moore John Given Nancy Rabinowitz Mike Lippman Brett Rogers Fiona Macintosh John Starks Willie Major Copyright Readers are permitted to save or print any files from Didaskalia as long as there are no alterations made in those files. Copyright remains with the authors, who are entitled to reprint their work elsewhere if due acknowledgement is made to the earlier publication in Didaskalia. Contributors are responsible for getting permission to reproduce any photographs or video they submit and for providing the necessary credits. Website design © Didaskalia. Didaskalia is published at Randolph College. i ! ! DIDASKALIA 9 (2012 ) ! DIDASKALIA VOLUME 9 (2012) TABLE OF CONTENTS 9.01 Risk-taking and Transgression: Aristophanes' Lysistrata Today 1 Michael Ewans and Robert Phiddian 9.02 Review: Lysistrata Jones 10 John Given 9.03 Review: Alexis, A Greek Tragedy 14 Aktina Stathaki 9.04 Review: The Complete Works of Sophocles (Rebridged): These Seven Sicknesses 17 George Kovacs 9.05 Review: The Women from Trachis at the University of Michigan 24 Amy Pistone 9.06 Review: Imagining and Imaging the Chorus: A Study of the Physicality, Movement, and 27 Composition of the Chorus in A.R.T.'s Ajax Viviane Sophie Klein 9.07 Review: The Oresteia at Carleton College 31 Eric Dugdale 9.08 Review: Euripides’ Bacchae at the Greek Theatre in Syracuse 38 Ralph Covino and John Serrati 9.09 Review: 48th Season of Classical Plays at the Greek Theatre in Syracuse: Aeschylus’s 44 Prometheus, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Aristophanes’ The Birds Caterina Barone 9.10 Up Close and Personal: Encountering Ancient Drama through Performance 48 Eric Dugdale 9.11 Review: Sophocles’ Elektra at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival 59 Ruth Scodel 9.12 Review: Sophocles’ Elektra at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival 61 Dana E. Aspinall 9.13 “First catch your satyrs” — A Practical Approach to The Satyr-Play(-Like?) 64 Anthony Stevens 9.14 Review: Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (Estonian: Iphigenia Aulises) in Tallinn, Estonia 84 Laura Viidebaum 9.15 Interview: Douglass Parker 91 Laura Drake Note Didaskalia is an online journal. This print representation of Volume 9 is an inadequate approximation of the web publication at didaskalia.net, which includes sound, video, and live hyperlinks. ii ! ! DIDASKALIA 9 (2012 ) 1 Risk-taking and Transgression: Aristophanes' Lysistrata Today Michael Ewans! The University of Newcastle Robert Phiddian! Flinders University Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BCE, is an Old Comedy about a fictional sex strike by the women of Greece designed to stop the Peloponnesian War. At a dark moment, when defeat appeared to be looming for Athens, the play provided a fantasy of peace. In recent decades it has been the most often revived and taught of Aristophanes’ plays, with 119 performances worldwide in the years 1990–2010, according to the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama.1 This piece, a collaboration between a translator and theatre researcher (Michael Ewans) and a Greekless literary scholar (Robert Phiddian), recounts a small part of that performance history, a part that sheds light on how this play translates (both literally and culturally) from fifth-century Athens to twenty-first-century Australia. The performances examined are a full-scale production designed to test and perfect Ewans’s new translation of the play at the University of Newcastle (New South Wales) in 2005, and a series of dramatised readings of the play (in the context of a course on comedy and satire) performed at Flinders University in Adelaide between 1998 and 2009, initially with Alan Sommerstein’s translations published by Penguin and subsequently with Ewans’s translation. Lysistrata remains popular not just because it is good, but also because it remains topically significant for its antiwar message and the apparently feminist premise of women taking over public affairs.2 These causes of popularity are potentially a two-edged sword for understanding the play, as relevance can be bought at the price of anachronism and distortion of meaning. Our experience of differing translations in performances and dramatised readings suggests that an antiwar interpretation of the play’s ‘message’ is very sustainable in both text and performance, while a feminist reading is less so. We also found confirmation of James Robson’s comment in a recent overview of Aristophanes’ work: ‘It is often said that new translations of works are needed every generation, but in the case of Aristophanes the immediacy of some versions and adaptations (above all those written for the stage) can evaporate within a far shorter time than that’ (Robson 2009, 217). The challenge for a prospective new translator lies in attuning his or her new version closely to the time of performance and publication, without including elements which will date the translation too rapidly.3 Our observations will focus particularly on one scene, the raucous peace negotiation which Lysistrata orchestrates between the Athenian and Spartan ambassadors over the beautiful and naked body of Reconciliation. While the Sommerstein and Ewans translations have much in common, this piece will focus on their differences. Michael Ewans’s experience Stephen Halliwell comments on English translations of Aristophanes that: ‘Translators have found it [easy] to excise obscenity, and even give specious reasons for doing so. There are few who shirk at nothing in this area.’4 One of the main aims of my new translations of Aristophanes has been to rise to this challenge. My translation was first performed in 2005, in a modern-dress performance which took place in a replica of the orchēstra backed by a set representing a classical Greek temple, but with explicit sex scenes decorating the pediment, and with modern anti-war slogans (e.g. ‘NO MORE BUSH WARS’) sprayed as graffiti on the façade. Anne-Marie Adams as Lysistrata, wearing a smart business suit but with sexy red 1 DIDASKALIA 9 (2012 ) 1 high heels, did not play the role simply as the only serious-minded woman; she exploited the opportunities for humour which the part presents, e.g. lines 108–10 (discussed by Robert Phiddian below). Here I shall discuss the climactic scene of the play, where Lysistrata negotiates a formal settlement between the sexually desperate ambassadors from the two warring states, Athens and Sparta (all with erect penises), and the ambassadors inscribe their terms for peace on the naked body of a young woman who personifies the daimôn or spirit of Reconciliation (1115–1174). In Aristophanes’ original production she was probably portrayed by a man in a curvaceous body suit, including false breasts and painted-on pubic hair.5 This would simply not work today, so in my modern-dress production she was played by a sexually attractive and bronzed young actress in a minimal gold bikini, a gold tiara to signify her quasi- divine status, and gold sandals with straps criss-crossing up her calves. In the scene, Lysistrata calls upon Reconciliation to enter and bring the Spartans and Athenians to her. She then criticizes both sides for their bellicosity and their forgetfulness of all the help they had given each other in the past, before the war. The Athenians and Spartans acknowledge this, but while doing so are increasingly attracted to Reconciliation’s charms. LYSISTRATA . So we Athenians did that for you, and yet you’re ravaging this land that helped you out? 2nd ATHENIAN Yes, they are doing wrong. 1st SPARTAN We are—but that girl’s bum is beautiful. LYSISTRATA D’you think I’m going to let off you Athenians? Don’t you remember how the Spartans, when the tyrants 1150 had reduced us all to poverty, came fully armed? They killed a host of foreign occupying troops, and many of the tyrant’s friends and allies. They also helped you, by themselves, to throw him out and gave us freedom, so instead of slavish rags, we once more wore the cloak of freedom and democracy! 2nd SPARTAN I’ve never seen a girl with such great tits and buns. 1st ATHENIAN I’ve never seen a cunt6 more beautiful. LYSISTRATA You’ve done so many good things for each other; why are you still fighting? Why won’t you stop this wickedness? 1160 Why not be reconciled? What’s standing in the way? Then comes the reconciliation, during which the names of real Greek places are the negotiating points— 2 DIDASKALIA 9 (2012 ) 1 but are inscribed upon Reconciliation’s sexual organs.