The Originality and Influence of Tony Harrison’s The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus

This chapter explores the highly original contribution that Tony Harrison made to the world of ancient Greek drama performance through his ground-breaking production, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. This created a change in attitude towards the play fragment, which was often overlooked by playwrights and directors in favour of its complete tragic counterparts, such as Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Oedipus. Harrison gave the ancient ‘lost’ play an opportunity to publicly grace the stage again, in a world in which the context and relevancy of the satyr play had been forgotten. The chapter discusses how Harrison engaged with the surviving approximately 400 lines of script that were discovered in an Egyptian rubbish heap, and rather than attempting to ‘complete’ the play, with his own interpretation of what may have concluded the original, bookended the script with new scenes. He used the relatively unknown light-hearted genre of the satyr play to open discussion about serious contemporary topics such as class, education, and social disillusionment in 1980s Britain, through the lens of the ancient. Harrison’s utterly original approach has influenced playwrights and directors not only to engage with the fragmented plays of Ancient Greece but also to utilize this new approach to have open discourse on contemporary issues.