Performing Greek Drama in Oxford and on Tour With the Balliol Players

Performing Greek Drama in Oxford is an absorbing celebration of the performance and reception of Greek drama in Oxford and beyond

This fascinating book is full of surprises. It explores the remarkable variety of ways that Oxford students have put on ancient tragedies and comedies over the years. The touring productions of the Balliol Players are especially intriguing, extending from Aeschylus performed for Thomas Hardy in Dorchester to Aristophanes for Edward Heath at Chequers. Amanda Wrigley has unearthed a treasure trove of previously unknown material, both documentary and visual. Oliver Taplin, Consultant Director, Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford

Performing Greek Drama in Oxford encompasses scandals, social idealism and the struggles of women at Oxford University, and features a thrilling cast list of artistic, literary, musical, theatrical and political names.

In the mid-nineteenth century, classical burlesques of Greek plays were all the rage until the great London scandal of `The Young Men in Women's Clothes' which halted student drama for a decade. In 1880 Benjamin Jowett famously nurtured a serious performance of Aeschylus' Agamemnon at Balliol, which led to regular productions of Greek drama in the original language by the all-male Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) up until 1932. Meanwhile, women students at Oxford enjoyed their own performative engagements with ancient Greece, beginning with Robert Bridges' masque Demeter at Somerville in 1904. Professional female actors such as Sybil Thorndike and Penelope Wheeler had a special connection with Oxford through the classicist Gilbert Murray and poet laureate John Masefield's Boars Hill Players.

The final chapters tell the story of the Balliol Players. In the early 1920s this group of students---fired by post-war `missionary' enthusiasm and supported by the elderly Thomas Hardy---determined to take Greek plays in translation to school and public audiences in the south and west of England in their summer vacations. Born from a socially idealistic impulse, the tradition lasted for over five decades, during which earnest productions of tragedy gave way to satirical and irreverent re-writings of Aristophanes, typical of the spirit of the sixties.

Amanda Wrigley specialises in the archival investigation of theatre history and other performative engagements with ancient Greece in Britain, especially on BBC Radio. She was Researcher at the University of Oxford's Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama from 2001 to 2009 and subsequently held a one-year Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellowship in Classics at Northwestern University, Illinois. She is an Associate Lecturer for the Open University.