The lockdown has made many of us experiment
with new ways of accessing information and scholarship. I recommend these
new multimedia ebooks, which are
completely free to the public, created by my colleagues of nearly 25 years at
the Oxford Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama. I co-founded it
in 1996 with Oliver Taplin, and remain Consultant Director, these days by ZOOM rather than the dreaded X5 Cambridge-Oxford bus.
They are the brainchild of Fiona Macintosh,
Claire Kenward and Tom Wrobel. They offer a magical way to start exploring the
wonderful world of ancient drama. The first one is devoted to Euripides’ Medea
and is packed with materials from the APGRD's research and collections---illustrations,
photographs, video and audio clips and compelling interviews with creative
practitioners and academics. They tell the story of this seminal play onstage
and onscreen, in dance, drama, and opera, across the globe from antiquity to
the present day. There are stunning new visuals by Thom Cushieri as well.
The second play to get this lavish
treatment is Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The first instalment, Beginnings
& Whose Play? can be downloaded from Apple Books at https://apple.co/2WrZcYa. An EPUB version
for android and PC will follow. So will the other two instalments, including ‘Endings’, in which one of the interviews
is with yours truly. I discuss the uniquely tense and terrifying closure of the
play when Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, after seeing off a violent protest from
the citizens of Argos, formally inaugurate their joint tyranny.
I can’t recommend these materials
enough. I was involved heavily in the creation of the APGRD’s materials on both
plays, and can vouch for their vividness and the fascination of the stories
they tell. Anybody out there thinking of studying, performing or watching Greek
tragedy should enjoy them—they are funded by taxpayers’ money via the Arts
& Humanities Research Council and so are rightfully the intellectual
property of every single one of us. -
