Fiona Macintosh

From Sculpture to Vase-Painting: Archaeological Models for the Actor

During an interview for France’s leading theatre journal Revue d’Art Dramatique in 1888, the acclaimed tragedian of the Comedie Francaise, Jean Mounet-Sully, invited the theatre critic into his studio to show him the “tools” of his trade. Next to a sketch for his Oedipus costume, which he had designed himself for himself, was a tragic mask, which Mounet-Sully had made and which acted as inspiration for his own (unmasked) performances of Oedipus. During the interview Mounet-Sully also referred to the studies he had made in museums and libraries of sculptures and vase paintings, which informed the movement patterns and “ gestes ” which he adopted for his performances in classical roles. In the Nietzschean equation, music has now found its place along side the Apolline spoken word, as a dancing chorus-strikingly reminiscent of figures on Attic red-figure vase-paintings-participates fully in the tragic action. Keywords:Jean Mounet-Sully; Oedipus; sculpture; theatre; vase-painting

The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’

Oscar Wilde was not simply the leading playwright, celebrity and wit of his generation; he was also an outstanding classical scholar during his time as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at Magdalen College, Oxford, and ancient Greece remained for him both a sounding board and touchstone throughout his life. Wilde’s pithy aphorism is therefore no mere, throw-away aside: on the contrary, it is informed by a deep understanding of perceived cultural differences at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In the post-Nietzschean, godless and increasingly industrial, modern Western world, the ‘soulless’ were regularly turning, as Wilde had been doing since his undergraduate days, to a pagan alternative where, as in humankind’s pre-lapsarian state, literal nakedness was the norm. The early Christian Fathers had denigrated the body; and the mediaeval Church had gone on to perpetuate the Platonic schism between body and soul, which Descartes confined absolutely to separate spheres during the seventeenth century. Behind Wilde’s witty summation is the widely shared view during the fin de siecle that, by turning to the Greeks, it might be possible to recover a ‘wholeness’ of being that Christianity and the modern world had torn asunder.