Introduction: Remaking Modern Classics

The "classics" have always been reworked, updated, or made the basis of new plays — think of Shakespeare's variations on Seneca, Racine's versions of Phedre and Iphigenie en Aulide (later reused again by Hoffmannsthal), Yeats's or Cocteau's treatments of Oedipus. Ionesco's or Stoppard's or Heiner Muller's rewriting of Shakespeare. As Brecht once famously remarked, the strength of a literary tradition rests on its plagiarism. Modem playwrights have turned to the classics perhaps more frequently than any of their predecessors. When the director entered the scene, variants and new interpretations of the standard repertoire multiplied; and increasingly during the last century "new readings" have changed the original texts so extensively as to constitute new plays: the director as dramatist. Now even the modem classics of the last 100 years or so have been seized on as suitable material.