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This paper examines how modern theatre companies adapt Greek plays for contemporary audiences, considering the impact of ancient performance practices.

May 28, 2026Open Access

Greek Drama, Modern Stages

CMC W MarshallUniversity of British Columbia

Key Points

This paper examines how modern theatre companies adapt Greek plays for contemporary audiences, considering the impact of ancient performance practices.
Analysis of various Greek plays adapted for modern theatre, focusing on audience reception and engagement.
Review of Cole's work with Punchdrunk Theatre on immersive productions and scholarly insights into performance conventions.
Identified specific choices made by theatre companies that affect audience engagement with ancient texts.
Demonstrated that purely replicating ancient performance styles does not resonate well with modern audiences.

Abstract

A theatre company choosing to present a Greek play in the twenty-first century faces many choices, and decisions made must inevitably involve compromises of one kind or another.For 50 years, heralded particularly by O. Taplin's The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: the Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (1977), the 'performative turn' in the study of Greek drama has provided analytical tools that allow scholars to understand what happened during performance on an ancient stage. 1 It does not follow, however, that simply replicating ancient performance practice will be meaningful and emotionally impactful for a modern audience.Replication will create theatrical meaning differently for an audience less familiar with mythical narratives, less attuned to perceiving religious dimensions in theatrical entertainment and less habituated to publicly performed poetry.Most modern productions do not take place in single performances with an outdoor stage and an audience numbering in the thousands, and ancient performance conventions were conceived with these constraints, and many more, in mind.In different ways, the books under discussion stake out how specific choices have been made, and offer models from which a contemporary production can learn.Cole's Punchdrunk on the Classics: Experiencing Immersion in The Burnt City and Beyond offers invaluable insights into a truly challenging and exciting piece of theatre.The Burnt City is 'the example par excellence of twenty-first-century immersive theatre' (p.3), building on the company's radical revisioning of Macbeth, called Sleep No More (first presented in 2003).Cole worked with the company as 'an embedded researcher and dramaturg' (p.16), and her rigorous scholarly insights pull back the curtain on this amazing production that drew on Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Euripides' Hecuba.Her involvement with the company had begun earlier with Kabeiroi, based on the fragmentary tragedy of .As a work of reception scholarship, Punchdrunk on the Classics is a model for performance ethnographical research.

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