Simon Critchley's latest book ends with an anecdote about a public conversation he had with the actor Isabelle Huppert. “Of course, what theatre is about is aliveness, a certain experience of aliveness,” she told him. “That's all that matters. The rest is just ideas.” The remark left him “internally stopped” at the insight that theatre is indeed an “experience of sensory and cognitive intensity” that is “impossible to express purely in concepts”. The story explains the genesis of Critchley's book: it articulates a struggle by a person trained as a philosopher, dedicated to the study of concepts, to explain his fascination with theatre in general, and ancient Athenian tragedy in particular.
Critchley has a longstanding interest in the relationship of literature and philosophy: as an undergraduate at the University of Essex, he began a degree in the former before switching to the latter. A philosopher of an eclectic kind, he is interested in continental thinkers such as Heidegger and Levinas, but has also published on football, suicide, subjectivity, David Bowie, Wallace Stevens and humour. Critchley's central goal in his new book is to suggest a way of doing philosophy that acknowledges and somehow participates in the “aliveness” of theatre. At the same time, he offers a vibrant introductory ramble through Athenian tragedy and its reception in Plato and Aristotle.
Almost all extant works of ancient Greek tragedy were composed in Athens in the fifth century BCE, to be performed in the big open air Theatre of Dionysus, at a huge city-wide civic and religious festival, the Great Dionysia. The multi-day event included three days of theatrical competition, in which three playwright-director-producers each put on a tetralogy consisting of three tragedies followed by a satyr play – where the hapless, hard-drinking, horny, hairy followers of the god Dionysus got up to their goatish antics. Tragedy typically featured elite households from the mythical past; mythical characters – usually human, often female – grapple with their relationships within the family and within the wider community.
Athenian tragedies were composed in metrical verse, with elaborate music and dancing to accompany the lyrical choral passages. All were created and performed entirely by men. The actors wore masks to indicate their gender and role in the play. The audience consisted largely, perhaps exclusively, of men: mostly Athenian citizens, and some visitors from other Greek-speaking communities. We do not know if slaves were present at any time.
As scholars of the genre often emphasise, tragedy was one of the most important cultural products through which the Athenians defined their own civic identity both for other Greek-speaking cities and for themselves. Tragedy explored the cultural and ideological fault-lines that ran through the city, such as tensions between the elite households and the wider community, or between the old social structures – of tyrants and powerful aristocratic households – and democracy, which had been implemented relatively recently. The mythic wars of Troy and Thebes, set on the tragic stage, gave Athenians a language to meditate on the traumas and triumphs of their own wars against Persia and Sparta.
The off-stage violence and on-stage debates of tragedy provided a complex mirror for real violence, real law courts and real political disagreements. The assertive, articulate, passionate female characters of the tragic stage, who kill or save or grieve or lust after their children, husbands and parents, gave Athenian men a reminder of the humanity and agency of their wives and daughters, as well as providing emotional justification for keeping them safely shut inside, deprived of voting rights and a voice in the Assembly. Much of the academic work done on ancient tragedy involves tracing out the ways that these plays about ostensibly universal subjects, such as justice, family, pain, recognition and reversals of fortune, are embedded in their own distinctive, long-gone cultural contexts.
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