THE OTAGO DRAMA CONFERENCE

St Margaret's College, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 4-7, July 2000

John Barsby
Department of Classics
University of Otago
Dunedin
New Zealand

The conference theme, 'Greek and Roman Drama: Translation and Performance', was chosen to bring together three related areas of current scholarly interest, performance in the ancient world, translation for the stage, and performance for modern audiences. Speakers included theatre practitioners and drama specialists as well as classicists, and parallel sessions were avoided so as to maximise the interaction between the different interests. The programme comprised lectures, workshops and performances, and full use was made of modern technology, with a number of computer simulations and with one speaker appearing by video.

The first day was devoted to tragedy in performance. Oliver Taplin (Oxford), as the first keynote speaker, reflected on his experience as adviser to productions by the National theatre in London and showed slides to illustrate the increasing number of performances of Greek tragedy in various countries around the world, including France, Germany and Japan. Robin Bond (Canterbury) and Harry Love (Otago), drawing on their own experience as translators and directors, explored the problems of presenting Greek tragedy to a modern audience, Love seeing the emotional dynamics of Oedipus Coloneus as the key to a successful modern presentation and Bond describing the use of modern production techniques to recreate the Dionysiac experience in a performance of Bacchae. After lunch Elric Hooper (Artistic Director of the Court Theatre, Christchurch) presented the viewpoint of the professional theatre, emphasising the considerable cultural problems inherent in presenting classical drama to a modern audience and underlining the importance of music and choreography in making choral songs effective. By way of a change of focus from modern performance to ancient, Chris Dearden (Wellington) used vase paintings from Magna Graecia as evidence of eye-witness responses to tragedy performed in the ancient world. The day concluded with a highly imaginative version of Antigone, performed by two female actors under the direction of Lilicherie McGregor (Otago); this explored the use of voice and body and related the burial customs of antiquity to their modern counterparts.

The second day was devoted to comedy. Richard Beacham (Warwick), the second keynote speaker, known among other things for productions of plays of Plautus in his own translations on a specially reconstructed Plautine stage, explored the levels of reality and fantasy involved in a modern performance of Roman comedy and showed some computer reconstructions of Roman theatres to illustrate the links between actors and audience. Sander Goldberg (UCLA) took the conference into the realm of acting scripts, again with reference to Plautus, and urged a careful distinction between these and the literary texts which emerged from them centuries later. Paul Monaghan (Melbourne) took this theme a stage further by distinguishing the literary text from the performance text with its 'rich density of signs', and followed this after lunch with a workshop on the effect of masked performance, using masks created for his own productions of Plautus and employing members of the conference as his actors. The rest of the day was devoted to Greek comedy, with Gail Tatham (Otago) describing how she enlisted a leading New Zealand composer to produce appropriate music for the chorus of Frogs, and Richard Williams (Glasgow) appearing on video to display virtual reality reconstructions of the Lipari masks of Menander and to explore the implications of these for performance technique and dramatic effect. In the evening members of the conference attended Harry Love's production of Oedipus Coloneus at Dunedin's Globe Theatre.

The third day covered a number of topics. The first speaker was Michael Ewans (Newcastle, NSW), who explored the possibilities and limitations of performance-based research with particular reference to a production of Ajax and to the pattern of movements discernible in Antigone. The rest of the morning was taken up with a panel discussion on translation, with Richard Beacham, Robin Bond, Michael Ewans and Oliver Taplin as the speakers and a large number of contributions from the floor. After lunch Ian Storey (Trent) investigated a matter of theatre history, the alleged cutting of the number of comedies at the Athenian festivals during the Peloponnesian War; Frank Sear (Melbourne) showed slides and computer visualisations to illustrate the work of the Melbourne Roman theatres project; and the conference ended with two items of reception, Dmitri Troubotchkine (Moscow) on performances of Classical drama in Russia in the 1910s and 1920s and Jessie Maritz (Zimbabwe) on Greek drama productions in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.

The conference provided much food for thought without breaking any startling new ground. The well known tension between the 'academic' or 'historical' goal of recreating and thus better understanding the original performance and the 'theatrical' or 'practical' goal of reinterpreting and re-presenting the play for a modern audience was largely resolved in favour of the latter. The interest and value of two disparate modern areas of research, namely the computer recreation of ancient theatres and masks and the investigation and archiving of modern performances, were amply demonstrated; the exploration of the potential links between the two areas was largely left for another time, with Richard Williams' paper pointing the way.

The papers of the conference are being published in dual form, with the website Didaskalia carrying the more visually based papers (or parts of papers) with accompanying stills and video clips, and a forthcoming issue of the journal Drama containing the text of the rest of the papers.[1] Synopses of all the papers are included on the website.

John Barsby

Department of Classics
University of Otago

1. This volume has since been published: John Barsby (ed.) Greek and Roman Drama: Translation and Performance, DRAMA Band 12, Suttgart and Weimar: J.B.Metzler Verlag, 2002. [Endnote added 13 October 2002]