READING GREEK TRAGEDY ONLINE marks first anniversary with digital performance Euripides’ HELEN

Reading Greek Tragedy Online (RGTO) will mark its first anniversary with a re-stream of its first digital performance Euripides’ Helen.

The RGTO was created by Paul O’Mahony in the first few weeks of lockdown when his Brighton-based theatre company Out of Chaos (of which he is artistic director) found all its UK tours cancelled.

Paul contacted Harvard University’s Centre for Hellenic Studies, where he had previously visited and devised with them a project that would span most of 2020. The collaboration bore an online project whereby a group of international performers would read Greek Tragedies. 

The 90-minute episodes explore each of the Greek Tragedies and the relevance of the themes in modern times. By the end of 2020, the project had engaged 115 actors and academics from the UK, US, Canada, France, Greece, Mexico, Australia, Cyprus and India. 

In 2021, the RGTO moves to a monthly stream and as today (Wednesday 31 March) marks the anniversary of the first stream, it will return here at 8pm tonight for free. There will then be an episode on Wednesday 28 April of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica with Jackie Murray (University of Kentucky).

Paul O’ Mahony, Artistic Director of Out of Chaos and Reading Greek Tragedy Online, said: “We started Reading Greek Tragedy Online to create a community at a time when we were all separated from each other. I missed the sense of sharing something with people, and this was the perfect outlet for us to be creative. It meant we could work with artists from around the globe and explore plays with such extraordinary resonance for our world - plays that speak so closely to the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, leadership, identity and family. We’ve ended up with an extraordinary International ensemble, and we now want to build on the series’ success with workshops, masterclasses, performances and residencies in the future.”

Reading Greek Tragedy Online aims to explore how theatre can be created online and in different spaces whilst building an international ensemble of performers. Each episode is hosted by Joel Christensen of Brandeis University and is a modern and accessible exploration of Greek Tragedies. All presented in English, it is created a community at times of separation.