- School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe masks of PseudolusMONAGHAN, PAUL ( 2001)Looking for evidence of ancient performance is a project of 'theatre archaeology' as described by Pearson and Shanks (2001). What we 'find' is inevitably conditioned by not only what has survived, but also where one looks, the way in which one looks, and by who is doing the looking. The evidence is fragmentary, often illusive and contradictory. It 'always has a multiple identity. Objects as clues are inherently unstable' [Pearson & Shanks, 2001, 61]. The existential condition of such a search is always one of interpretation, reconstruction and recontextualisation. It is an assemblage of fragments which attempts to represent past activities rather than record them accurately. Julian Thomas (1994, 158) describes archaeology as involving 'the production of narratives which stand for the past, rather than constituting faithful replicas of the past'. The documentation of performance practice (which is always 'in the past') therefore involves a degree of poesis, a creative leap of the imagination whose feet nevertheless strive to remain rooted in the remains of the past.
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ItemMedea in Australia: responses to Greek tragedy in contemporary Australian theatreMONAGHAN, PAUL ( 2006)In this article I briefly examine three productions of Medea that reflect some of the dominant responses to Greek tragedy in Australia during the past twenty years. I experienced these productions at first hand in Melbourne between 1984 to 1993 – some were also performed elsewhere. To avoid preconceptions of theatrical forms I call these styles ‘hysterical/realistic’, ‘body theatre’, and ‘opera-theatre’. I have expanded my analysis of these performances more recently through archival research in preparation for a much larger project on the reception of Greek tragedy in Australia from the beginning of European settlement late in the eighteenth century to the present. Of all the extant Greek tragedies, Medea appears to have received the most attention here. As I argue in another paper that focuses on the 2005 Indigenous Australian production (Black Medea, in preparation) a number of Australian productions and adaptations of Greek tragedy invite a scathing postcolonial critique. Here I simply analyse some of the trends that the three productions of Medea illustrate. Each of them deserves a fuller analysis than is possible here.