Introduction: ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’

This chapter introduces the main arguments of the book and creates a broad framework, outlining its theoretical and methodological approaches. Taking its cue from Craig’s woodcut of Hecuba that features on the cover, it presents engagements with Greek tragedy that were not necessarily text-based or resulted in specific productions of plays. Rather, in ways that mirror both Hamlet’s and Craig’s quoting of Hecuba, it sets out to explore the kinds of experiments in performance that were facilitated, embodied, experienced and experimented with by such recourse and remobilisation of Greek tragedy. Sometimes these experiments reached performance and were successful, but usually they were failures – creative, constructive failures but failures nonetheless, all enacted through quotation and repetition of notions of Hellenism. It presents a summary of the chapters that follow and the ways that the term Hellenism itself is re-worked through these modernist experiments in performance, as embodied, hybrid, geopolitically international, and not necessarily ‘classical’ in the strict philological sense. It presents the modernist encounter with Greek tragedy as rehearsing the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, especially when redefining the ethico-political aspects of theatricality and spectatorship, and stresses the Platonic aspects of much modernist theorization and experimentation in performance.