Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- I Stagings: Plays of Space
- Chapter 1 A Body Bending: Removing the Boots of Beckett and Proust
- Chapter 2 (Silence): Scripting Absence
- Chapter 3 Blood on the Wall: The “True Tragic Pleasure” of Medea
- Chapter 4 Coriolanus in the Marketplace
- II Sightings: Sites of Time
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Blood on the Wall: The “True Tragic Pleasure” of Medea
from I - Stagings: Plays of Space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- I Stagings: Plays of Space
- Chapter 1 A Body Bending: Removing the Boots of Beckett and Proust
- Chapter 2 (Silence): Scripting Absence
- Chapter 3 Blood on the Wall: The “True Tragic Pleasure” of Medea
- Chapter 4 Coriolanus in the Marketplace
- II Sightings: Sites of Time
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad … Hence they are in error who censure Euripides just because he follows this principle in his plays, many of which end unhappily. It is, we have to say, the right ending.
—Aristotle's PoeticsFor the stagehand who watches the actors from above and from behind the curtain, even the most tragic spectacle is just another show to be put on—he has seen it all before.
—André Green, “The Psycho-Analytic Reading of Tragedy”From the Breath of Beckett, and his Endgame onto silence, the varied absences engendered there, I move now to a less theoretical or textual engagement with theater, and (momentarily leaving the modern era) to my own eyewitness account of a classic Greek tragedy, a contemporary adaptation that I attended of Euripides' Medea. Here, it will prove to be less the silences that resonate, the absences that threaten, and more the enduring impact and provocation of theater's lived event, the persistence of its crafted illusions, and of the actor's capacity to persuade those still seeking persuasion, still seeking signs of life. For upon the stage one evening, remembered and recounted, the ancient actions of Medea unfolded violently before me, tragic events that—like Beckett's empty boots, or his “miscellaneous rubbish” strewn upon the stage—were to appear only for an instant before finally disappearing, before transforming into next to nothing at all.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sites of PerformanceOf Time and Memory, pp. 25 - 38Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2014