Greek Tragedy, Agonistic Space, and Contemporary Performance

This article combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy’s contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. It focuses on Athenian tragedy’s competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance-space, understood in relation to the cultural trope of the agon. Drawing on David Wiles’ structuralist analysis of Greek drama, which envisages tragedy’s spatial confrontations as a theatrical correlative of democratic politics, performed tragedy is here re-framed as a site of embodied contest and struggle; as agonistic spatial practice. This historical model is then applied to a current case-study; Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women as co-produced by Actors Touring Company and The Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2016-17. It is proposed that the frictious effects, encounters, and confrontations generated by this production (re-staged and re-articulated across multiple venues and contexts) exemplify some of the potentials of agonistic spatial practice in contemporary re-performance of Greek tragedy. Throughout, is contended that re-imagining tragic theatre, both ancient and modern, as (in Chantal Mouffe’s terms) ‘agonistic public space’ represents an important new approach to interpreting, and creatively re-imagining, interactions between Athenian tragedy and democratic politics