Theatrical Space

By the fifth century, Athenian drama was performed in the specially designated space of the theatre of Dionysos. The physical parameters of this theatre remained unchanged, while its stage area was subject to only gradual minor alterations and additions (stage furnishings, e.g. altar, statues) intended to conform with the demands of individual plays and playwrights, as was discussed in detail earlier (see 1.1). The form of the theatrical space itself provided emphatic spatial expression for the fundamental ideas of the Athenian monocentric polis®®, for it was a microcosm of Greek society, embodying the relationship between, on the one hand, the community as a whole, represented by the audience, and, on the other, the special forum for political action, represented by the stage area, the focal point of the audience's attention.

Assigning to dramatic productions their own clearly demarcated theatrical space meant also establishing a frame to which social meaning a c c r u e d . A t h e n i a n citizens would arrive and take their seats in the

®® See De Polignac, 1984: 87-90; Longo, 1990: 12-20. Croally (1994: 163-174) comments

on the centrality of the Athenian civic space, which was 'also a well-defined, enclosed space'

(p.169), and on the important role space had 'in determining civic, individual and gender

identities' in the Greek polis (p. 173). See also Loraux, who summarises the arguments of Lévêque & Vernant, and argues that 'in Athens power is located only "in the centre"', 1993:

15; also 42f.

As a counterpart to the Greeks' use of a relatively fixed theatrical space - a practice also

taken up in the Elizabethan theatre - , in the twentieth century a trend emerged for freeing the

theatre space from all architectural boundaries; so, for instance, the English director Peter

auditorium, immediately assuming the role of spectator. They knew they were about to view the representation of a fictional story and not some impromptu event which they just happened to witness; the dramatic world would act upon them in an aesthetic way (as well as religiously, politically, etc., as we shall see in a moment) and not merely in an empirical or quotidian way. This simple cognitive difference assured their physical non­ interference with the dramatic action; spectators were aware that they ought not to jump out of their seats and rush to the stage area, physically interacting with the actors in order to prevent an undesired outcome in the enacted series of events. They would attentively witness the performance, oblivious to the theatrical environs irrelevant to the dramatic action; they would allow themselves to be drawn into the fictional dramatic world, and empathise with the fates of the dramatic figures, experiencing the gamut of emotions which the playwright had in store for characters and spectators alike. The set of plays being performed were produced by a playwright whose previous plays members of the audience may well have seen performed in the same location before, whereas the dramatised myth will probably have been the subject of previous representations by different dramatists; memories of this sort along with personal preferences for one or another playwright or actor were among the factors which determined the spectators' immediate response to the play.

The dimension of theatrical experience that I have been emphasising hitherto in this section has been what we might call aesthetic: it is a response to a fictional event whose fictionality may not be predominant in the spectators' consciousness at every moment, but is never entirely suppressed and can be called up at any moment, reminding them that what they are witnessing and participating in so deeply is not an indifferent part of their ordinary lives, but a special, at least partly, independent domain, one

which — unlike ordinary life — is shaped by an artist's will and can be broken off at any moment. But this aesthetic dimension was, of course, then as now, permitted, created, and structured by numerous social mediations which ensured that, even at its most imaginative and idiosyncratic, it possessed a coherent set of intrinsic institutional meanings. If until the last several decades most classical scholars tended to view Greek tragedies as being essentially literary, fictional works, ones much like the Renaissance and modern plays which directly or indirectly hearken back to them, more recent scholarship has come to recognise the fundamentally political and religious dimension of Attic drama.

The scholarship of the last decade has emphasised, on the one hand, that all the Greek tragedies were performed as a public, official offering on the part of the city of Athens to the god Dionysos within the context of his established cult worship, and that it was imbued with religious sentiment in every regard; and, on the other, that, like almost all Greek religion, the Athenian cult of Dionysos was not simply a religious institution, but also a highly political one, and that the Greater Dionysia not only included the dramatic performances of tragedies and comedies (and dithyrambs) that have survived to our days, but also staged a massive patriotic spectacle representing the wealth, ephebic prowess, and military power of Athens, as well as the loyalty and subservience of her tributary a l l i e s .These matters

are by now too familiar for it to be necessary to linger upon them here. Instead, I should like to point to another, perhaps less well-known, but no less interesting fact, namely, that the explicit indication within the dramatic text of these religious and political contexts for Greek theatre, which for a

G2 See Goldhill, 1990. Cf. also most of the other articles collected in Winkler & Zeitlin (eds.),

long time was thought by scholars to be excluded from tragedies by some sort of generic law and permitted only in comedies, is in fact no less typical of tragedy than of comedy, though in ways quite different from this latter. Thus, recently a critic has pointed out that choral self-reference, so far from being restricted to the parabasis and other moments of comedy in which the dramatic illusion is broken for comic purposes, is also found at particularly critical junctures in tragedy as well, when the straining of the illusion has an effect which is not ludicrous, but deeply disturbing.®^ And another critic has now reminded us that while the traces of the fact that the dramatic poets produced their plays in direct competition with one another take the form of explicit references only in comedy, these traces are none the less evident in the texts of tragedy for the refusal of the tragic poets to criticise one another by name (a license restricted to what we call Old Comedy anyway).®"^

In both of these last regards, self-referentiality and competitiveness, Euripides has always been thought to be more extreme and more innovative than either Aeschylus or Sophocles. Whether or not this is true, it is certainly the case that Euripides can play with great dramatic effectiveness upon the conventionality of the dramatic conventions within which he, like his colleagues, is obliged to work. The theatre of Euripides is a highly self- conscious theatre. This is particularly true of Euripides' late plays, like the Ion, and it manifests itself with special clarity in his use of dramatic space, as we shall see in the following section.

®® See Henrichs, 1994-95. T h e tragic chorus [...] collectively embodies [the] continuity of

ritual performance [...] as a self-conscious performer of the Dionysiac dance in the orchestra

and as an active ritual participant in the festival of Dionysos' (p. 69); 'such choruses invite the

audience to participate in a more integrated experience, one in which choral performance in the orchestra merges with the more imaginary performance of the rituals of polytheism that

take place in the action of each play' (p. 59). ®"^ See Seidensticker, 1996.