ABSTRACT
Athens has a Roman theatre, the Theatre of Herodes Atticus, at the south-western foot of the Acropolis. That theatre, or Ô deion, which really means concert hall, is barely a quarter of a mile from the site of the Theatre of Dionysus where the first productions of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and probably Aristophanes were staged. Pompey got round the regulations by building a very small shrine at the back of a very large theatre and claiming that it was actually a shrine with a theatre attached, rather than a theatre with a shrine on top. The theatre for the first performances of Roman New Comedy was a marketplace theatre, made of wood and scaffolding, with temporary bleachers for the audience. But to find the real genesis of A Funny Thing Happened we need to go back to ancient Rome and its open-air performances.
