Abstract:This article combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy's contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. It focuses on Athenian tragedy's competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance-space, understood in relation to the cultural trope of the agon. Drawing on DavidWiles' structuralist analysis of Greek drama, which envisages tragedy's spatial confrontations as a theatrical correlative of democratic politics, performed tragedy is here re-framed as a site of embodied contest and struggle; as agonistic spatial practice. This historical model is then applied to a current case-study; Aeschylus' The Suppliant Women as co-produced by Actors Touring Company and The Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2016-17. It is proposed that the frictious effects, encounters, and confrontations generated by this production (re-staged and rearticulated across multiple venues and contexts) exemplify some of the potentials of agonistic spatial practice in contemporary re-performance of Greek tragedy. Throughout, is contended that re-imagining tragic theatre, both ancient and modern, as (in Chantal Mouffe's terms) 'agonistic public space' represents an important new approach to interpreting and creatively re-imagining interactions between Athenian tragedy and democratic politics.

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The translation of ancient tragedy is often considered at a linguistic level, as if the drama consisted simply of words being written, spoken, and heard. This article contends that translation for the stage is a process in which literary decisions have physical, as well as verbal, outcomes. It traces existing formulations concerning the links between vocal and bodily expression, and explores the ways in which printed texts might be capable of suggesting modes of corporeality or systems of movement to the embodied performer; and sketches some of the ways in which the range of possible relationships between language and physicality might be explored and understood, drawing upon recent practice-based research into the work of three modern poetic translators of Greek tragedy. Stephe Harrop is a theatre practitioner and academic whose work explores the links between text and physical performance. She originally trained as a dancer, and currently teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London. David Wiles is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway. His research interests include Greek theatre, masked performance, and drama in translation. His most recent publications include A Short History of Western Performance Space (2003) and Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy (2007).

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