Postdramatic Theater and Politics: The Oresteia Today

This contribution examines the recent history of productions of Aeschylus's Oresteia . In the 19th century, when efforts of restaging the ancient drama began, this early and sole surviving trilogy became a key object of philosophical and cultural reflection. For a long time evolutionist thinking has been the dominant paradigm, paired with a realist aesthetics. After 1968 and with the upcoming linguistic turn as well as with the deconstruction and poststructuralism of the 1970s, however, interpretations of a historical progress projected onto the lengthy series of entanglements and denouement in the house of Agamemnon were explicitly questioned, and the trilogy was staged in more or less radically innovative and experimental styles. Anton Bierl argues that in the last fifteen years performances of the Oresteia are characterized by two features: since the end of the cold war and the fall of the Soviet Union they have highlighted current political events in a fresh and unforeseen manner, i.e., historical circumstances of a newly won freedom and democracy as well as waves of hostilities and violence, and, on the other hand, they often realize and revolve around the contemporary postdramatic discourse of theater practice