Scholarship on antiquity's reception in digital media (film, gaming etc.) has been on the upswing. With COVID-19 and its resultant lockdowns necessitating digital turns across disciplines, Greek tragedy has found itself in the digital realm, as demonstrated with the publication of Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis (2023) by volume contributor M. Telò.
Rodosthenous and Poulou here extend Rodosthenous's 2017 edited volume Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions (with several contributors returning: G. Sampatakakis, A. Sidiropoulou and M. McDonald) into this collection. Where the 2017 volume sourced its code predominantly from examinations of specific productions, directors and adaptive choices, this volume instead walks a line between theatrical close reading and theory of the digital, living up to the and of its title; this is not Greek tragedy in the digital, and indeed the digital world is placed on equal footing with the tragic. Digital theory and media are taken on their own terms, and it is inspiring to see the sort of thoughtful work that truly interdisciplinary scholarship can create.
The volume raises intriguing questions concerning not simply the meeting of Greek tragedy and digital media, but the performative and theoretical possibilities that arise when ‘[t]echnology acts as a performer’ (p. 64) or when tragedy (even unstaged) is informed by a digital understanding. Rodosthenous and Poulou's introduction lays out clear stakes, which are ably fulfilled by the rest of the volume, establishing a tripartite definition of ‘the digital’: an era and environment in which we create and communicate; a set of variable and convertible tools by which we do so; and the techniques developed to make use of those tools consciously. For theatrical ends, they argue, ‘digital media function[s] as a compositional, dramaturgical, and performative tool’ (p. 7).
D.M. Berry's prelude argues that the postdigital era's iteration of theatre is inherently tragic and suggests that tragedy can ‘speak vividly to a digital audience reflecting the feelings of a fragmentary and contradictory life within computational societies’ (p. 28); he also includes a discussion of digital innovation's larger ripples into humanities scholarship.
Part 1 opens with Sampatakakis's dive into technai from antiquity through the twentieth century to the present day, setting the stage for the first three chapters’ intertextual and intermedial emphases. Sampatakakis efficiently and clearly takes readers through centuries of production history and synthesised techniques, emphasising the consistent presence of technological innovation in theatrical spaces.
Poulou picks up the thread in Chapter 2 in her broad survey of the ‘rhizomatic mindset’ (p. 76) of both tragedy and intermedial digital approaches to theatre. She offers a compelling montage of digital mythmaking onstage, proposing a rhapsodic view of digital technology's immersive and multisensory capabilities.
In Chapter 3 Sidiropoulou surveys three twenty-first century multimedia tragic adaptations (Jay Scheib's The Medea, Wooster Group's To You, the Birdie! and Persona Theater Company's Phaedra I—) as they navigate the ‘cognitive turbulence’ (p. 82) of digitally negotiated tragedy, paying special attention to video design, blocking choices and the ability of digital intervention to fragment, augment and subsume an onstage body.
E. Baudou's Chapter 4 opens Part 2 (‘The Chorus and the Digital: Rediscovering the Politics’) by comparing two 1999 Oresteia adaptations (Katie Mitchell's National Theatre and Georges Lavaudant's Odéon productions) meditating on both productions’ use of pre-recorded and live video to ‘invent’ a chorus, choral memory and rituals, and a new intermedial communality.
Chapter 5, by C. Larmet and A. Wegner, also focuses on multiple productions of one tragedy, this time Bacchae. They extend Baudou's focus on ritual, moving away from the visual and into polyphonic ecstasy, analysing the aural digital quality of several Bacchae productions and the writers’ own vocal workshop experiences.
S. Kirsch argues in Chapter 6 that ‘considering digitalization, it is the non-protagonist figures of Greek theatre (i.e. the chorus, but also the messengers) that are of particular interest today’ (p. 130), offering the chorus as an ‘environment-making’ (p. 144) escape or mediation of digitally-enhanced subjection and control.
Part 3 narrows the volume's focus to specific implementations of digital techne for tragic ends, beginning with Chapter 7. G. Filacanapa and E. Magris detail their first-hand experiences with ‘digital masks’, both more traditional modifications and manipulations of the face and masking of the whole body through computer-generated avatars during the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation's ‘Ancient Drama & Digital Era’ workshop. They also discuss similar explorations of virtual doubles, motion-capture and multiplication of avatars from a single body.
Chapter 8 by J. Wilson-Bokowiec similarly centres on the products of personal performance practice, this time detailing the findings from performance piece PythiaDelphine21, ‘tak[ing] us on a journey through landscapes: real and conceptual, theatrical, ontological and technological’ (p. 163), posing multiple models of mediation both ancient and contemporary, digital and spiritual. Wilson-Bokowiec applies these ‘processing loops that transform the raw into information’ (p. 172) to oracular prophecy, the Aeschylean Cassandra and her chorus, and a cyborg-disrupted audience-performer-technology relationship.
In Chapter 9 Telò discusses Xen, a ‘video solo performance’ by Akram Khan, whirling between close readings of Aeschylus, lyrical theoretical engagements with ‘the archival circuit of lifedeath’ (p. 186) and a grounded, Rancière and Fanon-inspired look at the colonised subject's ‘self-expansion beyond time’ (p. 196).
Two pieces close the volume: first, P. Monaghan's ‘Postlude’ concretises a theme that weaves its way through many of the chapters: the effort ‘to minimize, depersonalize, and eventually to eradicate the live human actor in the performance of Greek tragedy’ (p. 199). Throughout the piece, Monaghan creates thought-provoking links between tragic subject matter and a possible digitally born posthuman landscape.
Second, McDonald memorialises Michael Cacoyannis, whose foundation, 2013 initiative and 2018 forum are thanked in the volume's acknowledgements. McDonald's homage is, with its searching exploration of cinematic technique in Cacoyannis’ Trojan Trilogy, poignant and written with personal warmth. I commend McDonald for naming and elevating members of Cacoyannis’ production team, including performers, composers and cameramen.
A possible shortcoming of the volume is not one endemic to it, but a symptom of a larger trend in academic discussions of theatre, classical or otherwise: in many (but not all chapters) the contributions of performers or inclusion of performer perspective is subsumed in favour of a more distanced theoretical engagement or hearing only from directors. I believe it is a valuable exercise to include performers’ thoughts on their own work, as actors (and indeed, technicians) are equal participants in the final theatrical product, equally intellectually capable as directors of reflecting on their process and on how their own bodies are informed by digital intervention. This gap does not exist across the board, however, and the chapters including performer perspectives sing out all the clearer for it. Chapters 5, 7 and 8, in particular, centre performer and creator perspectives. Chapter 3 discusses a performance written and directed by the author, but does not include performer or tech artist perspectives, relegating their names to an endnote.
My final note is less a critique and more a look towards possible futures for work beyond the volume. A tendency in the realm of digital theatre seems to be to lose sight of the actor, eliminate the performer and dance disembodied among the pixels and the code, exemplified by Monaghan's ‘Postlude’. In the process of ‘depersonaliz[ing] the actor or … remov[ing] the live actor from the tragic stage altogether’ (p. 207), I fear that some of the immediate tangible impact upon the lived experience of audience and artist may have been lost.
Going forward, what are the political ramifications of tragic digital presence? Beyond the theoretical, how do digital engagements with tragedy differ in their means of production and intended audience from more ‘traditional’ offerings? Even digital worlds, distanced as they may be from a fragmented and ‘masked’ body, are built upon human labour. The lush, open-world landscapes of video games are painstakingly rendered by underpaid and overworked developers; the VFX artists of blockbuster film franchises operate under impossible timelines; even AI-generated content still comes at a high human cost.
Another aspect of digital theatre I would be keen to see addressed in future work is asynchronous ‘online’ content. Telò's chapter comes closest to this with its examination of Xen's digital afterlife and the viewer's ability to rewind, play, pause, ‘turning on the machinic soldier’ (p. 186), whose body is fragmented and convulsed by upload to the cloud and his own movements. It was slightly disappointing to see less airtime for productions of the model necessitated during COVID-lockdowns: spatially separate actors and audience, rehearsals and production meetings conducted apart. The volume takes special care to dispel the misconception that ‘the digital has become synonymous with the online’, acknowledging that the terms are ‘often used interchangeably, but while something that is online is digital by definition, the reverse is not necessarily true’ (p. 3). Chapter 8 discusses the mechanics of Traces of Antigone, a Zoom-premiered work created during lockdown, and Berry's ‘Prelude’ references the remote-produced Reading Greek Tragedy Online, but I would have been interested to see further engagement with the ‘online’. Works such as By Jove Theatre's The Gentlest Work or the 2021 Oxford Greek Play (‘devised at a distance for its online platform’, as per the production's YouTube description) are seemingly ripe for analysis. The introduction makes mention of lockdown-conceived large-scale adaptations and productions (e.g. Bryan Doerries’ Theater of War), but the volume adheres mostly to the ‘offline’ digital world. Part 2's exploration of digital choruses also sparks a desire for further scholarship on extant tragedies through a digital lens. Euripides’ Helen comes to mind, consumed as it is with eidola, the immaterial, and moving beyond and beside the physical body.
The volume's overall structure is lucid and easily navigable. The tripartite division of the main chapters is sensible, and the organisation of endnotes is user-friendly; the volume also readily lends itself to selective reading, with the result that readers dipping into one particular chapter are unlikely to be disoriented. Some chapters have a tendency to reference ‘Western’ culture without unpacking what might be a loaded term, and one more copy-editing pass may have been useful.
This is a rich volume that I would recommend to scholars of the ancient Mediterranean and theatre studies, as well as artists outside the academy. It may not be the best choice to introduce students of antiquity to the world of contemporary tragic performance or indeed to onboard artists to the ancient theatrical world due to its specificity of subject, but for more seasoned travellers on either road it is a compelling and useful text. For digital artists, theatre-makers, theatre scholars, Classicists, and anyone who inhabits multiple worlds at once, this volume is proof that tragedy and the digital have much to say to and through one another.
