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International Theatre Conference: Directing and Authorship in Western Drama Panel
Four
Dr. Jure Gantar, Dalhousie U |
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One of the main dangers of a modernist staging of a classical text is that it may confuse interpretation with transposition. In their attempt to prove themselves as authors, many contemporary directors resort to moving the setting and, even more commonly, the costumes of the play they are directing from their original historical period or cultural environment to another, distinct and usually consistent, era and location that somehow parallels the world envisioned by the playwright. In other words, they approach a text as if its meaning were organized in harmonic clusters of signs whose morphological attributes enable us to perform them in different keys. Using a few examples of recent productions of ancient Greek drama, this paper will try to demonstrate that a mere modernization of the script's implied performance values does not in itself constitute a new reading, and not that the idea of an innovative staging of classics is inherently flawed. That is to say, it will argue that transposition is, in its very essence, a reductive strategy that simplifies rather than enriches the performance of a classical text. |