Talking About Greek Tragedy

Extract

Greek plays were made in the theatre. We must watch our language when we talk about them, for we too are in the theatre. Most of us receive our critical training with works of art that are constructed and exist on the written page. We study word generating word, images interacting. And when we apply these techniques to plays we learn much; the way a playwright uses language, all the hidden things that make a play what it is. And some plays, an Ajax, or a Trojan Women, read so well that we are tempted to forget, or at least disregard that they were not in the first place made for reading. Not that the words are unimportant, but they point beyond themselves to realization in performance. They are as blueprints to a finished building.

This does not mean that the critic must spend his time filling the gap between text and production. He will too soon find himself lost in speculation or tangled in archaeological problems. Rather, whatever we say of the words of a play must be conditioned by the fact that they are words for the theatre. A play cannot be something that it could not be on the stage. A sense of what it was in performance is at the same time the starting point and the final criterion of our criticism.