Perhaps the most difficult spatial polarity to extrapolate from dramatic dialogue is that of performers in the orchêstra and spectators in the theatron (watching place). Rather than ‘auditorium’ (listening place) I shall revert to the Greek term theatron in this chapter because of its visual emphasis. It is all too easy to forget the theatron if one conceives Greek ‘theatre’ as art for art's sake, and not as a social process. I shall end where I began by focussing on the premisses of Oliver Taplin, which exemplify a widely held set of assumptions. In a closely argued essay ‘Fifth-century tragedy and comedy: a synkrisis’, Taplin defines the actor/audience relationship in tragedy as being the inverse of the relationship in comedy. His account is in part a response to post-structuralist ‘metatheatrical’ readings of tragedy such as Zeitlin's account of Orestes or Segal's of The Bacchae. He finds such readings, with their emphasis on self-referential textuality, both incompatible with his experience of performance and, insofar as they have some validity, to be explorations of a genre at the point of demise.

Taplin arrives at two main conclusions. First he argues for a form of passive, individualized viewing. ‘The intense concentration of tragedy calls for silence – even your weeping should not disturb your neighbour!’, and the ‘helpless emotion’ of the chorus provides the audience with a model of how it should respond. Second, he repeats the Aristotelian claim that tragedy should deal in the universal, particularity serving to generate ‘timeless truths’.