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This new introduction to Euripides’ fascinating interpretation of the story of Electra and her brother Orestes emphasizes its theatricality, showing how captivating the play remains to this day. Electra poses many challenges for those drawn to Greek tragedy – students, scholars, actors, directors, stage designers, readers and audiences. Rush Rehm addresses the most important questions about the play: its shift in tone between tragedy and humour; why Euripides arranged the plot as he did; issues of class and gender; the credibility of the gods and heroes, and the power of the myths that keep their stories alive. A series of concise and engaging chapters explore the functions of the characters and chorus, and how their roles change over the course of the play; the language and imagery that affects the audience’s response to the events on stage; the themes at work in the tragedy, and how Euripides forges them into a coherent theatrical experience; the later reception of the play, and how an array of writers, directors and filmmakers have interpreted the original. Euripides’ Electra has much to say to us in our contemporary world. This thorough, richly informed introduction challenges our understanding of what Greek tragedy was and what it can offer modern theatre, perhaps its most valuable legacy. The final volume in the Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy , Euripides’ Electra offers a short, comprehensive exploration of the play in eight chapters, followed by a ninth that discusses important translations, productions and adaptations of Electra up to the present day. Major topics include the theatrical and festival context in which Euripides worked; a dramaturgical breakdown of the plot and action; earlier versions of the story (Aeschylus, Sophocles) and the way Euripides incorporates, rejects and transforms traditional elements; the dramatic characters and Chorus, and the challenges they pose for actors; the language of Electra (diction and word choice, rhetoric, poetry, thematic clusters, choral lyric, aphorisms); the material aspects essential to the play’s production (setting, costumes, props and corpses); issues surrounding gender, sexuality, maleness and motherhood; the conflicts between wealth and poverty, mortals and immortals, and humans and natural world; and the place of myth in coming to grips with these intractable issues. The chapter on the reception of Electra focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, including productions by Granville Barker (Gilbert Murray translation), Kostas Tsianos and Ivan van Hove; adaptations by Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Giraudoux, and Marguerite Yourcenar; and the film of the play by Michael Cacoyannis. Written clearly and without obfuscation, Euripides’ Electra will prove useful for students of Greek tragedy, ancient Greek culture, and theatre history, as well as for actors, designers, directors, and audience members drawn to Greek tragedy in general, and to Euripides in particular.

K. has produced an essential resource for future work on Euripides' fragmentary Alexandros, consisting of an introduction, a text of testimonia and fragments with English translation, a commentary and a brief appendix giving a text and translation of Ennius' fragmentary Alexander. She makes some new suggestions at the level of detail, particularly supplements in the Strasbourg papyrus fragments, but most substantial proposals she has published elsewhere (e.g. the probable agonistic framework of the scene between Deiphobus and Hector, ZPE 178 [2011], 35-47, and her reconstruction of lines 4-6 of the hypothesis (T1), ZPE 202 [2017], 35-47). The work's outstanding feature is its comprehensiveness; virtually all conceivable evidence for the play is assembled here, though it is not always easy to navigate. The reader who agrees with her statement that 'the fragmentary state of the play requires that every possibility should be explored' (p. 29) 1 will find it invaluable; others may find it slightly overwhelming. K. has personally inspected the relevant manuscripts and papyri, and through the inclusion of some beautiful colour plates (also digitally accessible) she invites the reader to perform the same autopsy. Her meticulousness extends to present-day sources; her discussion of performance reception is enriched by her conversation with the director of a recent reconstruction and staging of the full trilogy, and she has an extraordinary command of the secondary literature. She provides extensive bibliographies for virtually every issue raised by the evidence for the play, and I expect that subsequent work will frequently include notes along the lines of 'see bibliography in Karamanou 2017'. (Needless to say, there are no such 'forwarding address' footnotes in her work.) Her approach to reconstruction is equally inclusive in scope and admirably judicious in nature; she carefully works out lines of possibility for everything from individual letter supplements to plot reconstruction to staging, including even those possibilities that she considers most unlikely, and all with clear reminders of the inherent limits of such exercises. The 57-page introduction includes eight sections with subsections covering all the usual bases: the mythology as presented in non-tragic sources, other plays known to have treated the same topic, the characters, plot structure, staging (including broader performance questions like the distribution of parts), the trilogy, the text and reception. Much of this has been recently and well covered in the equivalent sections of L. Di Giuseppe's 2012 monograph, Euripide: Alessandro, a volume that has a narrower purpose than K.'s work (focusing on the reconstruction of the play), but that overlaps substantially with it. K. gives a greater wealth of detail, but in the longer sections it is an embarrassment of riches, and without clear signposting it is easy to get lost in the density of the evidence provided. For example, K., after a summary of the most general features of the myth, begins her discussio...

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