Martin Revermann

The competence of theatre audiences in fifth- and fourth-century Athens *

After dismissing various possible approaches to the question of audience competence in fifth- and fourth-century Athens, this article proposes to tackle this important and notorious problem with a novel strategy that is not ?top?down? but ?bottom?up?, starting with spectators rather than plays and focusing on the bottom-line of expertise which can be taken to be shared by the majority of audience members. An umbrella-notion of ?theatrical competence? is established before two central characteristics of drama performed in Athens are exploited: the participation of spectators in the citizen-chorus at the Great Dionysia, and the implications for the competence issue of frequent exposure to an art form which is as formally conservative as preserved Attic drama. What emerges is a model of stratified decoding by spectators (elite and non-elite) who share a considerable level of theatrical competence. In a final step, this model is applied to a number of case studies taken from fifth-century comedy.

Generalizing about Props: Greek Drama, Comparator Traditions, and the Analysis of Stage Objects

This chapter takes a broader approach—broader in theoretical and cultural terms by widening the disciplinary perspective through integrating Theatre Studies and the analysis of other performance traditions to illustrate the use of props in ancient theatricality into different relief. The theoretical concepts that feed into the analysis are chiefly borrowed from semiotics and, to a smaller extent and less overtly, psychoanalysis. The power of props resides not least in the fact that, qua not being based on verbal codes, they are immensely communicable, more communicable in fact than language itself. As visual mini-narratives with “stories to tell” props on the Greek stage exist both in the visual and in the narrative dimension. What is truly remarkable about the relationship between narrative and prop in Greek drama is that a significant number of props, certainly in tragedy, only exist in narrative and never physically materialize on stage. Keywords:ancient theatricality; Greek drama; props; stage objects