Series | Lexis Supplements
Edited book | Il mito degli Atridi dal teatro antico all’epoca contemporanea
Chapter | Envisaging the Past Behind Aeschylus’ Agamemnon
Envisaging the Past Behind Aeschylus’ Agamemnon
Abstract
This paper looks at the ways that Aeschylus’ Agamemnon conjures up the past – the ‘back-story’ – and asks how, or how far, this can be conveyed for modern audiences. The two most prominent episodes, evoked in very different ways, are the feast of child-flesh served up to Thyestes by Atreus, and Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis. Generally speaking productions from the last 50 years have made little of the Thyestean feast, and much of the figure of Iphigeneia. This is illustrated from the productions directed by Ariane Mnouchkine in Paris in 1991 and by Katie Mitchell in London in 1999. While it is not obvious why so little Thyestes’ feast is evoked beyond its repellent ‘Senecan’ horror, the emphasis on Iphigeneia is clearly related to an increasing (and in my view justified) concentration on the figure of Clytemnestra.
Submitted: Oct. 13, 2022 | Accepted: Oct. 20, 2022 | Published July 7, 2023 | Language: en
Keywords Iphigenia • Agamemnon • Modern productions of Greek tragedy • Thyestes
Copyright © 2023 Oliver Taplin. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-709-8/001
