An Easy Lay

James Davidson

  • Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne
    Cambridge, 417 pp, £45.00, June 1997, ISBN 0 521 64247 7
  • The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy edited by P.E. Easterling
    Cambridge, 410 pp, £14.95, October 1997, ISBN 0 521 42351 1
  • Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning by David Wiles
    Cambridge, 130 pp, £13.95, August 1999, ISBN 0 521 66615 5

A great deal is lost in the translation of any play from the theatre to the page, but to restore what is missing from the mere words of Euripides’ Medea, to rise from the soft paperbacked volume you might buy in any good bookshop and finish in an hour to the experience of an Athenian watching the play’s first performance in Athens in the Theatre of Dionysus in late March 2430 years ago, demands an imaginative effort much greater than would be required if you had plumped for a Pinter or an Ibsen or a David Hare.

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