Reaching Athens

This book analyses discourses around community, democracy, origin and Western identity in stage adaptations of Greek tragedy. It addresses the ways in which theatre produces and perpetuates the myth of ‘classical’ Greece as the origin of Europe and how this narrative raises issues concerning the possibility of a transnational European community.

Margherita Laera is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent.

«Margherita Laera tackles a fundamental problem of our times: what do we do with our ancestors and with the myths of Greek tragedy and democracy? This is an ambitious project and an excellent piece of scholarship.» (Patrice Pavis, Professor of Theatre Studies, Korea National University of the Arts) «This book articulates original, important and wide-ranging arguments with elegance and verve. A stimulating deconstruction of myth, in the Barthesian sense of that word.» (Carl Lavery, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance, Aberystwyth University) «Margherita Laera launches her complex and compelling study of recent adaptations into waters that, seemingly charted as ‘the tradition’, reveal themselves to be deep and churning Sargasso Seas of ideology, politics and mythology. [...] ‘Reaching Athens’ fills an important role as it explores areas that are often neglected or given short shrift [... and it] complicates the polemic in an extremely meaningful way [...] This invaluable work deserves a wide audience and should encourage further investigation of the ideological role of present-day adaptations and the ongoing mythologizing of ancient, selective affinities.» (Norma Jenckes, Theatre Research International 40.1, 2015)

Contents: The cradle of Western civilization? Athens as beginning – Myth, community and the myth of community – Can we deal with the chorus? Performing collective identity and the decline of union – The ‘obscene’ and the limits of representation: false etymologies, censorship and performability – Constructing the audience as the demos of democracy: spectatorship and/as citizenship – The myth of the simultaneous birth of theatre and democracy in Athens – How can theatre and performance deal with, and respond to, the persistence of these mythologies? – Neither actualisation nor reconstitution: a manifesto in six points. Inhaltsverzeichnis