Thanks to a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust, Tony Harrison is coming to the Centre as Artist in Residence Spring 2011, to develop a new version or adaptation of Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris. As our project develops, additional web pages will be added here. It is hoped one day to see the new text performed in the ancient theatre at Chersonesos in the western Crimea, with the Black Sea archaeologist David Braund acting as our consultant: for more details click here. At the end of the journey it is hoped that something will have been added to our understanding of the diffusion and continuing cultural influence of ancient Hellenic myth and drama, as well as an answer provided to the question of why this particular play was so beloved by the inhabitants of the pagan ancient Mediterranean themselves. The play's central interests seem always to have been, as they are today, female intelligence, male friendship, family reunion, ethnic difference, religious ritual, exile, escape, and survival.

The evolution of Harrison's version runs in parallel with the academic project Adventures with Iphigenia: Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy in Historical Perspective

Edith Hall is beginning the research for a new study of the impact of Euripides' now neglected tragedy Iphigenia among the Taurians, to be published by OUP New York and presented as work in progress in conjunction with the Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture in lectures during 2010 and 2012: see http://www.onassisusa.org/usp.series.htm. This Iphigenia is the nearest thing to a 'quest heroine' in ancient drama: intelligent, courageous, and specially loved by the goddess Artemis, she secures her escape, with her brother Orestes, from the remote corner of the Black Sea (near Sebastopol in the modern Crimea), in the land of the Taurian barbarians where they have both been stranded. This book examines the cultural impact of her remarkable tragedy from its first performance in the penultimate decade of the fifth century BCE to the third millennium. In the first six of twelve chapters, the importance of her adventures in cultural history are traced from fifth-century Athens and the cult of Artemis in Attica, through the fourth-century export of Greek tragedy across the Mediterranean world as reflected in vase-painting, to the drama and theatre of Republican and Augustan Rome, the wall-paintings of Pompeii and the sarcophagi carved across the Roman Empire, to the escapades of heroines in the ancient novel, the comic theatre of Oxyrhynchus and the tirades against human sacrifice and pagan mythology to be found in the early Church fathers.

The second half picks up the story in the Renaissance, and follows Iphigenia's adventures in opera, dance, spoken theatre, the visual arts, and poetry, across every continent of the modern world. Although this play inspired high-profile adaptations by Goethe and Gluck, the original Euripidean version did not receive its UK premiere in 1887 at Bedford College, London, later to be merged with the CRGR's own Royal Holloway.

It is hoped one day to see a new translation of the play performed in the ancient theatre at Chersonesos in the western Crimea; the poet and dramatist Tony Harrison has agreed to collaborate provisionally, with the Black Sea archaeologist David Braund to act as our consultant. At the end of the journey it is hoped that something will have been added to our understanding of the diffusion and continuing cultural influence of ancient Hellenic myth and drama, as well as an answer provided to the question of why this particular play was so beloved by the inhabitants of the pagan ancient Mediterranean themselves. IT's central interests seem always to have been, as they are today, female intelligence, male friendship, family reunion, ethnic difference, religious ritual, exile, escape, and survival.

Chapter Titles

1. Iphigenia in Attica: Aide to Artemis
2. Iphigenia in the Black Sea: Colonial Encounter
3. Iphigenia in South Italy: Intriguing Spectacles
4. Iphigenia in Rome and Tomi: Roman Men and their Emotions
5. Iphigenia in Oxyrhynchus and India: Greek Tragedy for Everyone
6. Iphigenia across the Roman Empire: Prose Transformations
7. Iphigenia in the Florentine Renaissance: Greek Page to Italian Stage
8. Iphigenia in Enlightenment Paris and London
9. Iphigenia in St Petersburg: the Russian Annexation of Tauride
10. Iphigenia in Weimar: Goethe, Gender, Colonialism, and Classicism
11. Iphigenia in the Avant-Garde Dance Theatre
12. Iphigenia in the Global Village

Staging the Greeks in Halifax: Productions of Ancient Drama by Northern Broadsides Theatre Company

Centre for the Reception of Greece & Rome in collaboration with Northern Broadsides Theatre Company

The writer and director Helen Eastman has been awarded our collaborative doctoral studentship to investigate the past and incipient productions of ancient Greek drama by this touring theatre company, jointly supervised by Edith Hall at the CRGR, Barrie Rutter and Sue Andrews (Artistic Director and Executive Director of Northern Broadsides respectively).

The project addresses the history of performances of ancient Greek drama by Northern Broadsides. The company's interest in Greek theatre was inspired by its performance in 1995 of two new plays by Tony Harrison which adapted material from ancient Greek and Roman literature and drama, The Labourers of Herakles and The Kaisers of Carnuntum, followed in 1998 by a production of Harrison's adaptation of a Sophoclean satyr play in The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. Thereafter, Northern Broadsides applied its unique performance approach to ancient Greek plays including Euripides' Alcestis in Ted Hughes' version (2000), Sophocles' Oedipus (2001) and Antigone (2003) and Aristophanes' Lysistrata (under the title Lisa's Sex Strike, 2007) in the Yorkshire-dialect translations of Blake Morrison. It also staged Tom Paulin's translation of Euripides' Medea (2010).

The research will contribute exactly the kind of cultural inputs to the public cultural sector that have been developed in the course of previous AHRC-funded research by Edith Hall at Oxford University's APGRD, which she co-founded. This research project has actually been singled out for praise on the AHRC website 'impact' page, on the grounds that it has deepened the quality of contemporary productions of classical theatre, drawn in new audiences, brought acclaim to the UK theatre sector, strengthened it by helping to develop new skills, insights and ways of working for creative artists, and helped to create an appetite for classical theatre through public engagement activities. The work of Northern Broadsides has also earned it great respect and made a public impact acknowledged to be wholly out of proportion with its tiny size and finances, praised by Michael Billington in the Guardian (14/09/09) for having created 'a public hunger not only for Shakespeare but for Greek tragedy', and described in the Liverpool Daily Post (5/11/3) as revealing that Greek tragedy could be 'gripping entertainment'. Numerous reviews of its Greek plays echo that of its Alcestis in the Independent, which reported that produced in an audience of initially unresponsive teenagers 'a transformation that was...unexpected and magical' and gales of applause (23/09/2000). This collaborative project will foster interest in the ancient classics within performance culture, enhancing creative endeavour and output and international understanding of the collectively owned cultural past. As Northern Broadsides' own company slogan puts it: 'maximum impact-minimum paraphernalia'.

Following an enthusiastic response, we were delighted to host an intensive, interactive, and inter-disciplinary “sandpit”  at the Institute of Classical Studies on Saturday 31 January 2015 sponsored by the Centre for the Reception for Greece and Rome and the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway, the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts, the Institute of Classical Studies, and the Council of University Classics Departments.

The aim of the sandpit was to bring together researchers to share their interests in the dynamic dialogues taking place between Classics and contemporary feminism.

Key provocations included (though this is a far from complete list):  

• What are the current sites of feminist knowledge and understanding? Do we live in a post-feminist world? What is distinctive, if anything, about the European dimension/dialogue compared with the American/French domination of earlier though still resonant feminisms?    

• Is there still a place for feminism in Classics or are feminist politics no longer pertinent to (our) Classical scholarship? Can the Classics make a difference in the current developments and debates in feminist thought?        

• What are the contemporary voices/issues that inspire graduate students and those entering the Classical professions?      

• Feminist approaches flourish in Classical Reception, but what about feminist studies of the Classical world itself? Are such studies forgotten?

We were proud to host a mix of senior scholars and emerging young voices from across the Humanities from the UK, France, Italy, Netherlands, United States, and Australia. We had a programme that makes space for engagement with issues as diverse as philosophy, science, pedagogy, contemporary women’s writing, intersectionality, motherhood. 

This is a supplement to Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, edited by Edith Hall and Phiroze Vasunia. It arose out of a conference held in London in 2007 to mark the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence and the 150th anniversary of the 'Mutiny'. The volume brings together people who work on colonial India, the growing field of reception studies in Classics, and other scholars. The papers throw light on the triangular relationship between Classics, Britain, and India, from a variety of different perspectives. Britons ruled India for about two hundred years, and the colonial encounter had a significant impact on the study of Indian culture and history; but the encounter also affected the study of the European past and brought it into a charged relationship with ancient India. The ancient past and the colonial present interacted with each other, in Britain and India, and informed people's responses to political power and cultural developments. We explore an array of connected topics, including the 'Mutiny', neoclassical architecture in Britain, the understanding of the Roman Empire in relation to the British Empire, Homer in Bengali circles, T. Rice Holmes and his writings on India and Rome, Rudyard Kipling and Rosemary Sutcliff, and Greek drama. While most of the chapters focus on the period of British colonial rule, the final two essays extend the ambit of the collection by evaluating theatrical responses to hybridity and political resistance in postcolonial India and Britain. The book also includes a wide-ranging introduction by Phiroze Vasunia which situates the essays in broader intellectual, cultural, and historical contexts.

An attempt to explain the extraordinary cultural stamina and global penetration of the Odyssey, in fifteen chapters covering translation, theatre, opera, cinema, fiction, colonisation, exploration, sex, race, class, violence, revenge and death.

'Is there anything in the Western literary canon with more abundant, potent or frolicsome offspring than Homer's ODYSSEY? Clearly not, to judge by THE RETURN OF ULYSSES, Edith Hall's enlightening and entertaining cultural history… Hall… fills her pages with sharp and often surprising observations about the ODYSSEY and its spiritual children… Reading her good-humored and accessible book is like conversing across the ages' [Steve Coates]

Reviews in:

• New York Times
• New Statesman

Interviews available online:

• Hear Edith Hall's interview with Lewis Lapham on Bloomberg Radio.
• Hear an interview about the book with WICH Public Radio.