Theatre in Ancient Greece

Greek drama traces its roots to the Dionysia, the annual festival held in celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine, revelry, and fertility. The Dionysia was in fact two separate festivals: the older, smaller Rural Dionysia, held in towns throughout Attica in the winter, and the City Dionysia or Great Dionysia, held in Athens in the spring. The ceremonies included dance and music, and as early as the seventh century BCE, a choral song called a dithyramb was added. At some point, these elements assumed a more structured form. According to Aristotle’s account in his Poetics, tragedy developed from the dithyramb and comedy from the phallic songs that were also part of Dionysian ceremonies.

From the beginning of Greek drama, plays were performed in an outdoor theater. The earliest performances may have taken place in the agora, or marketplace, located on the Athenian Acropolis; at some point they moved to the south side of the Acropolis, near the temple of Dionysus, where the Theatre of Dionysus was subsequently constructed sometime in the fifth century BCE. The theater was built around an orchestra, a circle of earth sixty feet across with an altar in the middle, and the first seats were probably wooden benches set into the hillside. Tiered stone seating was added in the mid-fourth century BCE.

Background

Aristotle credits Thespis, who lived during the sixth century BCE, with moving drama from a performance by a chorus to one with an actor. Thus, Thespis is remembered both as the inventor of drama and as the first actor, lending his name to the term "thespian." Little is known of Thespis aside from the references in Aristotle’s Poetics, but according to surviving records he was the first to present a tragedy at the City Dionysia, in 534 BCE, and the first to win the award for the best performance.

The drama competition became an important part of the festival. Over a three-day period, playwrights would stage three tragedies and one satyr play, and judges would select a winner. The competition was expanded in 487 or 486 BCE to include a day of comedic plays as well.

The Tragedies

Of all the tragedies known to have been written and performed in ancient Greece, only thirty-two complete texts have survived, all written by three great tragedians: Aeschylus (525/24–456/55 BCE), Sophocles (ca. 496–406 BCE), and Euripides (ca. 480–ca. 406 BCE).

Aeschylus first won the City Dionysia in 484 BCE, a feat he repeated at least twelve more times. Although Aeschylus wrote around ninety plays, only seven survived; of those seven, the first to win the competition was The Persians, in 472 BCE. Like Thespis, Aeschylus changed the structure of drama, adding a second actor and increasing the amount of dialogue. There is widespread agreement that theOresteia—consisting of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides—is his masterpiece. It is also the only extant tragic trilogy from the period. After Aeschylus’s death in 456 or 455 BCE, the Athenian people recognized his achievements by allowing his plays to be produced posthumously at the City Dionysia.

The first time Sophocles competed in the City Dionysia, in 468 BCE, he defeated Aeschylus to capture first place, the first of twenty-four victories at the festival. Scholars believe he competed thirty times, never receiving less than second place. He is credited with adding a third actor and with adding painted background scenery. Only seven of the 123 plays Sophocles is known to have written still survive. Electra and Antigone are celebrated for their portrayals of tragic women, and Oedipus Rex was considered the model play by Aristotle. Oedipus at Colonus, which portrays an aged, blind Oedipus in exile, is often cited as a supreme example of how the Greek dramatists used familiar material in original ways.

Euripides never achieved the fame that Aeschylus and Sophocles enjoyed among their contemporaries. Out of twenty-two entries in the City Dionysia, he won only five times. Nineteen of his ninety-two plays survive, sufficient to support his reputation as an iconoclast for his irreverent treatment of religion and other traditional subjects. The gods in Euripides’s plays are often irrational and indifferent to human troubles. To a greater degree than Aeschylus and Sophocles, he created characters whose flaws contribute significantly to their tragic fates. He is sometimes faulted for his use of prologues and endings that employ deus ex machina (literally, a god from a machine; in practice, a god introduced by means of a crane to resolve final conflict). His best known plays include Medea, The Trojan Women, The Bacchae, and Iphigenia in Aulis.

The Comedies

The precursors to Greek comedy were the satyr plays performed alongside the tragedies in competition. These plays were short and coarsely humorous, taking their name from the characters featured in the plays: lustful, drunken woodland spirits with goatlike (and sometimes horselike) features called satyrs, who were known as companions of Dionysus. By the latter half of the fifth century BCE, the first period of Greek comedy, known as Old Comedy, was flourishing, with Aristophanes (ca. 450–ca. 388 BCE) its most celebrated representative. The eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes are the only full examples of Old Comedy available to modern scholars. Aristophanes did not invent Greek comedy, but the genre reached its richest development in his plays, thus earning him the sobriquet "Father of Comedy."

The licentious qualities of the satyr plays can be seen in Old Comedy, which is characterized primarily by its satirical nature and its embrace of sexual innuendo. Some of Aristophanes’s work may be labeled obscene, and his humor at times is coarse and vulgar. However, it also includes pointed political satire, sophisticated parody, and, in his songs, an appealing lyricism. His best known plays include The Wasps, an attack on a pro-war politician, and Lysistrata, an antiwar comedy in which the women of Greece refuse to have sex with their husbands in order to force them to negotiate an end to the Peloponnesian War.

No complete texts remain from the period that scholars have designated Middle Comedy, which began around 400 BCE. However, enough fragments have survived to characterize it as less pointed and more general in its satire, with an absence of public figures portrayed onstage and a diminished focus on the role of the chorus.

Beginning after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, New Comedy, with stock characters based on ordinary people and formulaic plots, frequently love stories, became popular. Menander (ca. 342–ca. 292) was the best known of the New Comedy playwrights, but although his popularity persisted throughout late antiquity, sometime in the early medieval period most of his work was lost. Menander’s plays survived only in quotations until the early twentieth century, when excavations in Egypt uncovered a papyrus book from the fifth century CE, dubbed the Cairo Codex, that contained lengthy fragments of five of his plays. The Bodmer Papyri, dating from the third century CE and unearthed in 1952, contained yet more fragments, including almost the entire text of Menander’s play Dyskolos (The Grouch) and additional parts of his play Samia (translated as The Woman from Samos or The Girl from Samos), fragments of which had previously been recovered from the Cairo Codex. Based on this evidence, critics have suggested that Menander’s plays had a more serious purpose and his characters had greater individualism that earlier scholars had concluded. Menander was a strong influence on the Roman dramatists Terence and Plautus, who adapted many of his plays.

The Performances

Tragedy or comedy, Greek plays were performed in large, open-air structures. The Theatre of Dionysus, the site where all extant Greek plays were performed, is regarded as the prototype of the Greek theater. By the time of the three classic tragedians, plays were daytime performances that featured two or three actors, all male. The actors wore distinctive masks, often made of linen or cork. The exaggerated expressions of the masks served multiple purposes, including the practical ones of allowing a single actor to play more than one role and helping project the actor’s voice so that audience members seated at some distance could hear the speeches better. Although comic masks were often grotesque, tragic masks were typically lifelike.

Masks, costumes, and props all served to establish character. Athenian characters wore costumes that were more elaborate versions of ordinary clothing, generally a chiton or peplos (tunic) under a himation (outer garment worn over the left shoulder and under the right), but non-Athenian characters could be costumed in more extraordinary clothing. Tragic actors wore thick-soled boots called buskins, which indicated their superiority by increasing their height. When playing female roles, the male actors wore a prosterneda, a structure worn in front of the chest to simulate breasts, and a progastreda, a similar structure worn in front of the stomach to make the actor’s figure look more feminine. Props were simple and were used primarily to define characters, such as a crown to indicate a king or a cane to suggest old age. A crane-like device called a machina was used to raise actors into the air, often to simulate the dramatic entrance of a god.

The theater itself consisted of the theatron, or "seeing place"; the orkhestra (orchestra), or "dancing place"; and the skene, or "tent." The theatron was the main audience section, with a seating area called a koilon that consisted of tiered seats, earthen in the beginning and more elaborate later on. These seats could hold more than fourteen thousand people, from average citizens to the very poor. Admission for the latter was paid by the state, and their seats were in the highest tiers. The elite occupied marble chairs that were engraved with their names and arranged in a semicircle around the orchestra, where the play was performed. The skene was a large rectangular structure located behind the orchestra that functioned as both a dressing room for the actors and a backdrop for the play. Actors made entrances and exits through the doors of the skene, and the roof provided a place for watchmen or for gods to loftily survey scenes. At first the skene was simply a tent, but later it became a permanent stone building. Theaters became more elaborate during the fourth and third centuries BCE, but the basic structure of the Greek theater remained remarkably similar to its beginnings.

Ancient Greek Theater Today

The legacy of Greek theater is incalculable, and its place in the canon of Western literature assures the plays a place in the academy. However, Greek drama survives in live performance and in adaptations as well. Since the nineteenth century, ancient Greek plays have been performed for modern audiences. Every three years since 1882 (give or take a year or two at the beginning), in a tradition known as the Cambridge Greek Play, students at the University of Cambridge have performed a Greek play, usually a tragedy, in the original language. In 1914 Aeschylus’s Agamemnon was performed at the Teatro Greco di Siracusa (Greek Theatre of Syracuse) in Sicily, inaugurating the first of an ongoing annual Greek drama festival organized by the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico (National Institute of Ancient Drama). The Delphic Festivals held at Delphi in 1927 and 1930 showcased productions of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and The Suppliants. Terence Gray’s Cambridge Festival Theatre opened in Cambridge, England, in 1926 with a performance of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and Gray produced a number of other Greek plays, both comedies and tragedies, before the theater closed in 1939. By the 1940s, more than thirty ancient theaters were being used for performances of Greek plays in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Libya.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the staging of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes have been a permanent cultural activity in modern Greece, designed to attract tourists and to preserve the nation’s cultural heritage. By the final decades of the twentieth century, productions of Greek plays had been staged in many locations around the world, including Japan, India, and Africa. The New York Times characterized the 1998–99 Broadway season as a flood of Greek tragedy, with productions including Medea, The Iphigenia Cycle (a double bill that combined Euripides’s two plays Iphigenia in Tauris and Iphigenia at Aulis), and a four-and-a-half-hour adaptation of Oedipus Rex.

In addition, contemporary writers have adapted Greek plays for various purposes, including critique and therapy. British poet and playwright Tony Harrison has produced a critically lauded translation of the Oresteia (1981) and a reimagined version of Medea, titled Medea: A Sex-War Opera (1985), both of which emphasized and critiqued gender roles and identity, as well as The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1988), which was based in part on the fragmentary satyr play Ichneutae by Sophocles. French director Ariane Mnouchkine’s feminist Les Atrides (1990), a tetralogy consisting of Iphigenia at Aulis and the Oresteia, debuted in New York in 1992 and earned Mnouchkine the 1993 Obie Award for Special Citations. In 1994 Rita Dove, then the US poet laureate, published The Darker Face of the Earth, an adaptation of Oedipus Rex set in the antebellum South. Since 2009, trained classicist and theater director Bryan Doerries and his company Outside the Wire have coupled dramatic readings of Greek tragedies such as Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, and Euripides’s The Bacchae with discussion groups to address topics such as the psychological effects of war, prison reform, and the treatment of addiction and substance abuse, among others.

Bibliography

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Csapo, Eric, et al, eds. Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC. Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. Print.

Doerries, Bryan. The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today. New York: Knopf, 2015. Print.

Ley, Graham. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Rev. ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print.

McLeish, Kenneth, and Trevor R. Griffiths. A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 2003. Print.

Ridgeway, William. The Origin of Tragedy: With Special Reference to the Greek Tragedians. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1910. Internet Archive. Web. 27 Sept. 2016.

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Wise, Jennifer. Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. Print.