Chapter 9 - Violence in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy

Summary

This chapter addresses the treatment of onstage and offstage violence in contemporary Anglophone adaptations of Greek tragedy. By way of illustration, I start with Bacchae and two twentieth-century adaptations. I argue that adaptation is by nature disposed to break tragic conventions about onstage violence, and in particular to stage events that were originally narrated; and that onstage violence is almost a necessary condition for serious adaptations of ancient tragedy. I then offer closer case studies of Steven Berkoff’s Greek, Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats … with a view to interrogating the relationship between the violence in those plays and that of their putative originals. I suggest, finally, that violence in adaptation can be seen both as a rejection of ancient dramaturgical convention and as a recuperation of the sympathetic and radical humanism which is (some would say) fundamental to Greek tragedy.