ABSTRACT
In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of sacrifice was not only reintroduced into Western culture through action and performance art that radically questioned the traditional social and symbolic order. It was also put on the agenda by taking recourse to the oldest theatrical form that deals with sacrifice and which is the oldest form of choric theatre as well, to which Reinhardt took recourse when creating his new people’s theatre: ancient Greek tragedy. Since Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, the relationship between tragedy and sacrifice and, particularly, Dionysus’ dismemberment, is at the heart of any discussion on the relationship between theatre and ritual. In the 1970s, performances of Greek tragedy experienced a veritable boom. This not only included tragedies that already had a long performance history on modern European stages such as Oedipus Rex or Antigone, but also tragedies that had almost no performance record at all – for example, Euripides’ The Bacchae. Before the 1960s, this play had only been performed very rarely. At the beginning of the century, Gilbert Murray’s fascinating translation seemed to spur a performance history. In 1908, William Poel, famous for his Shakespeare productions, staged the play at London’s Court Theatre. However, no other performances followed. The Bacchae was performed twice in the Ancient Theatre of Syracuse in 1922 and in 1950 (this time starring Vittorio Gassman as Dionysus). The tragedy was never performed in an American professional theatre.
