An Introduction to Greek Tragedy

more than any other art form I've had experience of great tragedy does one particular thing and that is look suffering a human misery directly in the face and it can't stare it down but it stares at it no other art form is so unflinching about it I think part of the reason that Greek Theater transcends cultural and temporal boundaries is because it's the them are so Universal that even though it's set in a culture which is very different to our own the basic themes still speak to us today because they're Universal we still have difficulty with our relationships we still have to make painful decisions in our own lives and we still have to Grapple with the unfairness of the universe and the fact that people seem to suffer when they don't seem to really deserve to the first really important St study of Greek tragedy was by a fourth Century Greek philosopher called Aristotle and Aristotle thought for a very very long time about what made Greek tragedy effective and he actually came up with a formula and that is that the heroes of tragedy needed to be um good but not so good that um you sort of couldn't relate to them people trying to be good but making mistakes like cron he is actually trying to be a good King of Thieves he's just not getting it right he's making lots of mistakes I wish says that one of the key things that leads to tragedy is what he calls the hamartia the era of judgment and tragedy is actually about real people making bad decisions that lead to terrible results real people making bad decisions often for good reasons so tragedy is about the idea that we live in a flawed world full of suffering and full of Injustice and misery but it also shows us that those things are caused by our actions and they're therefore remediable by our actions almost all the plays actually have someone die in the course of them and so what we watch is is not only their reactions if they know it's going to happen and those um of the people who are left behind but even in the ones where people don't actually die the main characters have a peculiarly intense relationship they're usually held in the grip of the past somehow through their dialogue with the dead many characters in Greek tragedy who know they're about to die or fear they're about to die address the sun one of the strongest metaphors for death for the ancient Greeks was I'm going to leave the light or I will never look upon the sun again that means I I will die because they believed that after death they were consigned to this dark Nether world beneath the Earth Greek tragedy is a very stylized genre and its structure is relatively fixed it always starts with a prologue which sets the scene after that then the chorus come on and sing an introductory OD which both comment on the previous scene but also allow for the passing of time um so a coral ode might only last 5 minutes but the audience can imagine that perhaps several hours have gone by and so something important offstage can have happened during that time one of the real Innovations made by the Greek tragedians in in in in literature is in the way they constructed their plots what they learned to do over that 80 years was make everything happen in their plays in less than the time between a sunrise and a sunset so you get this very very very skillful writing that means you can unravel many many many things that have led to This Disaster and often much of the future if the god comes along and gives you some predictions all concentrated into this tight action of a single day that has had an unimaginable impact on the future of dramatic writing it's difficult to underestimate the impact of Greek Theater on the theater in Europe that's developed in in the years since really especially since the Renaissance um there are modern playw rights who do deliberately attempt to use the structures and ideas of Greek tragedy I mean most famously I suppose the American playr Arthur Miller who deliberately sets out in plays like Death of a Salesman to to to copy the structure of a Greek tragedy and follow it through in many ways I think that the uh modern form of entertainment that that uses the same kind of material as ancient Greek tragedy rather you know astonishing is soap opera the actual plots of soap opera which are set very much in the community you have the community reaction involve these close family dramas we often have two brothers fighting you very often have um um tragic and unexplained deaths you have inappropriate sex the affair is the absolute staple you have powerful matriarchs um you have illegitimacy so they carry on having their um impact um in our most popular form of entertainment Aristotle talks about a thing called catharsis which in ancient Greek means cleansing or purifying and he says that when we watch the end of a tragedy we feel pity and fear and those emotions get purged they get cleansed in some sense what he probably means by that is the sense of emotional draining um that the experience of watching a play somehow purges you of your all your emotions and that it's a cleansing process that it's traumatic but it's also um a good experience that you come out of it perhaps feeling drained and I think anybody who's ever burst into tears at the end of a movie knows you can actually feel better for that if it gets in touch with some sort of strong emotion in you about oh I really hope that doesn't happen to me or that poor woman uh weeping over it can actually rather paradoxically strengthen you that's what catharsis is tragedy is about confronting suffering death mourning loss all of these things um what and what it does is it enables us to to find Reflections uh of our own lives and see that these feelings and ideas are shared these feelings and ideas are part of a community they're part of a tradition

Channel: National Theatre

Views: 469,083

Keywords: ntdiscovertheatre, National Theatre, NationalTheatre, theatre, theater, London, play, show, stage, drama, nt greek theatre, greek theater, edith hall, sean mcelvoy, greek chorus, chorus, antigone, sophocles, greek tragedy, plato, soap opera, The Oedipus Play, The Oresteia, laura swift, aristotle, christopher ecclestone, hamartia, catharsis

Id: dSr6mP-zxUc

Length: 6min 32sec (392 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 11 2013