The History Of European Theatre

Episode 1 An Introduction to the podcast and your host. Pre-history and how the urge to mimic and present might have been the start of theatre. Religious ritual and Shamanism. The Abydos Passion play and the Egyptian Book of ...

Episode 2 An overview of the history of Greece to the 5th Century BCE including Minoan and Mycenaean periods, the Greek dark age and the rise of the city state. The development of the religious festivals and their main featur...

Episode 3 The vocabulary of the theatre we inherit from the Greeks The layout of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens and it's main features Developments in the theatre over time The Chorus Stage Machinery Masks and costume The ...

Episode 4 The situation of Athens at the time of the first extant tragedies. The very earliest dramatists and the little we know of them The life of Aeschylus including his service in the Persian Wars His earliest surviving p...

Episode 5 A detailed review of Agamemnon, the first part of The Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus

Episode 6 A detailed review of The Libation Bearers and Eumenides, the second and third part of The Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus

Episode 7 The life of Sophocles almost spanned the 5th Century BCE and included events from the defeat of the Persian invasion to the relentless grind of the Peloponnesian wars. We look at his life and times and get an overvi...

Episode 8 A detailed look at the first of the Theban plays by Sophocles. Greek drama gets personal as the end of a great family drama is acted out, but it's also a political debate as Sophocles questions what happens when man...

Episode 9 We travel back into the heart of the Oedipus myth with Sophocles' interpretation of this dark story. Seen by many as his greatest work it is a dark tale of unwitting patricide and incest that relentlessly leads to t...

Episode 10 The story of the death of Oedipus was Sophocles' last work and puts the role of the Greek hero into a new light. We travel to Colonus, the home town of the playwright, to see the end of Oedipus' troubled life.

Episode 11 A summary of the life and times of Euripides, the youngest and most daring of the three great Greek tragedians, but who suffered from a mixed reception in his own time.