Publication details
Site-specific Seneca
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | There have been strong debates throughout last one thousand years on the performability of Seneca's plays, which are often considered too verbose, rhetoric or monologic, and, thus, inadequate for modern performance. Arguable as these objections are in themselves, they have been further contradicted by numerous successful performances all around Europe, as well as by the fact that in some countries (France, Portugal) the question of their performability was never any pressing. On the contrary, the form of Seneca's drama seems to fulfil the requirements of postmodern theatre, especially its branch of post-dramatic theatre, nourished primarily by non-dramatic texts, which provide authors and performers with endless possibilities concerning the theatrical strategies used in the performance. My paper is going to explore the possibilities of performing Seneca's plays, using mainly the example of the site-specific performance of Octavia (being written in Seneca's style, if not by the author himself), which the author of the paper participated at as a dramaturg in 2010. |