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A Director's Process for Staging Ancient Greek Tragedy in an Era of Crisis—Fragility, Resilience, Resonance

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Thesis(24.97 MB)

Date

2026

Authors

Luton, Holly

Supervisor

Brannigan, Ross
Milligan, Christina

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Doctor of Philosophy

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Volume Title

Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

This creative practice doctoral research explores how staging Ancient Greek Tragedy in contemporary contexts might inform our current lived experiences in an era of crisis. I, as researcher and director, reflect on my own body of work directed for the purposes of this research—two productions, staged in a contemporary manner in non-theatre sites: Euripides’ Women of Troy and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. These productions, along with a post-production reflective drama workshop with the actors, served as testing sites of iterative discovery for the research. In 2020, I created my own theatre company, Corvus Theatre Co., which has enabled me to stage my productions through an exploratory research mode and professional theatrical setting. Undertaken during a time marked by local, national, and global turbulence—from pandemics to economic uncertainty, institutional and cultural reckonings, conflicts, and political instabilities—making theatre under such conditions was neither easy nor straightforward. Crisis, I argue, is our zeitgeist—the spirit of our age. Despite this turbulence, I positioned my research to see crisis as something to embrace, embody, and employ rather than merely a storm to weather—engaging with and utilising crisis as an opportunity to navigate, re-imagine, and make sense of our era through theatre. Staging ancient Greek tragedy in contemporary contexts, I highlight the enduring power and relevance of these plays to resonate with and provoke reflection on themes concerning war, women, power, trauma, survival, and resilience. How do we make sense of ourselves and our theatre practice in these chaotic and turbulent times of crisis? Staging my productions by necessity in unconventional non-theatre spaces—spaces designed without the intention of theatrical performances, but which I adapted for performance—I discuss how we might utilise and employ found spaces and come to recognise them as sites of theatrical possibility and potential during this era. I explore how crisis fosters opportunities for resilience, while simultaneously revealing the fragilities within our practice. I consider whether, as artists, we should wait for a crisis to be a catalyst for change, or if we have an obligation to prepare ourselves and our practice for the next once-in-a-lifetime crisis? As a critical storytelling device, I use the myth of Pandora’s Jar—recontextualised by Natalie Haynes —to symbolically convey this era as a moment of fragility and resilience. Significantly, in a moment of peripeteia, my production of Agamemnon was cancelled after the first full dress rehearsal due to health and internal human resource crises—situations which fundamentally challenged my assumptions underpinning my methodology. This disruption prompted anagnorisis, a deeper reflection from me about the limitations of seeing crisis as an opportunity—revealing that some crises cannot always be harnessed, redirected, or made generative. The collapse of Agamemnon became a critical point in my journey—a site that exposed the fragility of both theatre practice and practitioner, acknowledging that resilience has its limits. My final creative practice component for examination, An Exhibition of a Director's Process: Staging Tragedy in an Era of Crisis, demonstrated the processes involved in producing, directing, designing, rehearsing, and performing the two productions for a public audience. The exhibition consisted of artefacts, resources, properties, costumes, and set pieces and includes photographs, videos, commentary, and written artefacts that document the process and challenges of staging the two productions. The exhibition invited attendees to contribute their own moments of fragility and resilience in making and participating in theatre in an era of crisis—placing our moments of chaos and our hopeful expectations into Pandora’s Jar.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/20948

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Doctoral Theses