In the last decades of the twentieth century, and at the beginning of the twenty-first, adaptation has come to the forefront of theoretical debates about the limits (or lack thereof) of our engagement with the classical past. At the same time, the adaptive process takes on an increasingly performative character, moving away from the text-centred approaches that had dominated earlier eras and towards new idioms that privilege visuality at least as much as textuality, or enhance the text through its scenic realisations and refractions. Theorists are now careful not to ‘treat performance as merely a derivative citation of the text’;1 text and performance are viewed as being in a state of constant interaction, complementarity, and mutual redefinition, in which performance may actuate in numerous ways the performative potential of the dramatic text, while the text may be conceptualised afresh as a result of being performed. In particular, to study the adaptation of Greek tragedy in both textual and performance media is not only to explore intertextual or ‘intervisual’ relations but also to map out the various avenues through which plays once considered sacrosanct, qua indisputedly part of the Western cultural paradigm, are increasingly being appropriated into different performance and cultural contexts, value systems, and conceptual frames, and are as a result often challenged, questioned, contested.

Given the multi-perspectival context of our volume, we thought it necessary to bring three renowned theatre artists into the room and invite them to share with our readers their insights on adaptation as a practice of high interpretative value. To this purpose, I conducted a series of interviews with two theatre directors and one playwright, all of whom internationally acclaimed. The discussion that some of the questions generated addressed the challenges – dramaturgical, stylistic, and ethical – that are part and parcel of the philosophy and the special dynamics of adaptation; in other words, of the conceptual base from which directors and writers embark and of the creative choices they make in their attempt to bring Greek tragedy closer to the emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual needs of the present-day spectator.

This chapter explores the ways in which stage adaptation, as a form by definition open, volatile, and thus susceptible to both the marvels and the injuries of interpretation, is forever attached to the unresolved debate pertaining to directors’ so-called ‘respect’ and ‘loyalty’ towards the original text. Whether adaptation is seen as an invitation to deepen and expand the source material or (at the opposite extreme) as a gratuitous statement of ultimately uninspired defiance, one needs to address and perhaps attempt to settle the issue of directorial freedom and/or mediation in a process that is inevitably indebted to an inceptive core. Focusing on auteur directors’ adaptations of Greek tragedy, this chapter interrogates such controversial notions as authority and deference to the received primary agent of creativity, namely, the writer of the original text – a text which qua material for adaptation bears the brunt of change, be that appropriation, growth, abuse, or subversion. The problem of directorial freedom is especially pronounced in the case of ‘canonical’ texts, which are customarily regarded as agents of authority and may generate a range of audience expectations and directorial responses, from absolute reverence to the text’s accepted meaning to a radical reinterpretation of the source text.