Barker, Euripides and the War Effort in North America

When the outbreak of the First World War put paid to his theatre experiments in Britain, Harley Granville Barker found himself invited to stage a season of work at the Wallack’s Theatre in New York. It was an invitation that then Prime Minister H. H. Asquith urged him to accept, believing that it would serve to further strengthen the ties between the two countries and to build support for Britain’s efforts in the war. While the season was an artistic and commercial success, it was Barker’s impromptu decision to extend his stay and tour the tragedies of Euripides to major colleges on the east coast that saw him realise Asquith’s goal. Through close examination of these productions and the discourse that surrounded them, this paper details how Barker used Euripides as a tool for propaganda through which to engage and educate the largely isolationist and non-interventionist North American public. His choice of plays – Iphigenia in Tauris and The Trojan Women – was calculated, allowing him to draw direct parallels between Ancient Greece and contemporary Europe. Of further significance was his decision to stage the productions in the open-air stadia of such colleges as Yale and Harvard. Not only did this give Barker more freedom and space in which to experiment, but it also brought an average audience of between 5-8,000 people comprising a range of ages and professions. The productions thus became huge community events, bringing together different sections of society to experience the spectacle as a unified group. In these events, Barker brought new meaning and a new resonance to Euripides’s words, using them to lay before the audience the horrid reality of the war taking place across the Atlantic and calling on them to intervene