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Versions or Perversions: Last Call for the Playwrights?

2015; Boston University; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2015.0020

2327-6436

J. Michael Walton,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Versions or Perversions: Last Call for the Playwrights? J. MICHAEL WALTON Not a year seems to pass but marks as many anniversaries as there are months, weeks or even days. Jan Kott, the eminent Polish poet, critic, theatre historian, former member of the Polish Underground Movement and, until 1957, fervent supporter of Stalin, was born in Warsaw on October 27, 1914, three months after the outbreak of the First World War, and two days before the Turkish alliance with Germany. A conference revisiting his work and legacy was held on February 19, 2015, at the Rose Theatre in Kingstonupon -Thames, marking fifty years since the English publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Methuen, 1965), the book for which he is best known in England and America. A “version” of Euripides’ Medea, directed by Carrie Cracknell and starring Helen McCrory in the title role, was premiered in London at the Royal National Theatre in July 2014. There is a connection between these two events beyond a contrived coincidence of dates. The English translation of Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Boleslaw Taborski included a forward from Peter Brook— as it happens celebrating his ninetieth birthday the day this article was begun. Brook described spending half the night at a police station in Warsaw trying to secure the release of one of Kott’s students. What surprised him most, it appeared, was Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy, translated by Boleslaw Taborski and Eduard J. Czerwinski. London: Eyre Methuen, 1974. xix + 334 pages. Euripides, Medea, A New Version by Ben Power. London: Faber and Faber, 2014. 128 pages. Directed by Carrie Cracknell at the National Theatre, London, July–September 2014. arion 23.1 spring/summer 2015 Kott’s identifying himself as a Professor of Drama. By 1964 there were only three independent University Drama Departments in the United Kingdom. Common as the discipline had been in America for almost fifty years, academic drama in European universities had long been an adjunct to English or Language Departments. As a result, any formal study of drama was rooted in literature, and as its poor relation. Why Kott’s example and reputation were so important lay in his critical approach to theatre history and its relationship to the politics and the practice of theatre in Europe. In this, he introduced many of his readers, Brook among them, to major European theatrical influences of which at the time we, in the UK, knew too little: Artaud, Dürrenmatt, Genet, Grotowski, Ionesco, Kafka, Meierhold, Mickiewicz, Strehler, and Wyspianski, never mind the—then—insufficiently appreciated Brecht and Beckett. Kott’s centenary deserved celebration. But—and this is a big “but”—Kott had followed Shakespeare Our Contemporary with The Eating of the Gods (Eyre Methuen, 1974) which he described in a subtitle as “An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy.” This gives the impression that the book is a monograph, but that is misleading. It is a series of articles (most published originally in Mosaic, Performance , The Modern Language Review, or Theatre Quarterly ), on hand-picked Greek plays, in order: Prometheus Bound, Ajax, Alcestis, The Women of Trachis, The Madness of Heracles, Philoctetes, and The Bacchae. Such a compilation is perfectly viable, of course, unless you treat Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as though Greek tragedy were the concentrated work of a single playwright, rather than of three dramatists whose surviving plays cover more than sixty years, and a whole range of different contexts, styles, and priorities. To do that is rather like assuming that there was a single thread linking the “Jacobethan” drama of Marlowe, Middleton and Massinger. It is a trap into which, I have to suggest, Kott stepped with both feet, but it is the manner in which he approached individual plays that is most open to challenge. versions or perversions 156 We do have to be careful here. Western Europe has tended, perhaps because of the Hellenist or Neoclassical fervor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany and England, to be possessive about ancient Greece, its literature , drama, art, and architecture. The fact that more volumes about the classical world are published in German or English than in every other language including Greek is...