This chapter refutes the notion (still widely held) that the ever-growing number of performances of Greek tragedies worldwide is due to their 'universality'. Instead, the chapter argues, such performances are evidence of 'pluri-locality'. Referring to the performance histories of Greek tragedies in West Africa and India as former colonies, and in Japan and China, this study explores the very specific conditions under which Greek tragedies were staged, and the potential purposes they were meant to serve in each case. The fact of their adaptation as well as its mode is traced back to conditions unique to each performance culture, placing the focus firmly on the different forms of localisation by which they were made productive for each local context. Presenting such productions at international theatre festivals appears as both a promising and a popular way to present a traditional performance aesthetic to international audiences.

This chapter uses archival material connected to the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain to reconstruct three performances of ancient tragedy in the first decade of its existence, from 1963 to 1973. The productions of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (1963), Seneca’s Oedipus (1968), and Euripides’ Bacchae (1973) each highlight different elements of the British theatre company’s investment in performing ancient Greek and Roman tragedies in this period. Archival material allows the researcher to plot performative trajectories which combine the personal investments of world-renowned artists and theatre professionals like Ted Hughes, Peter Brook, and Wole Soyinka with the angry responses of audience members and the anxious fears of the theatre company. By bringing to light a body of ephemeral evidence including letters, memos, accounts of meetings, telegrams, theatrical programmes, production notes, and stage managers’ reports, the resulting performative reconstructions go beyond the text of the play and bear vivid witness to the powerful emotions and cathexes that ensure the continued popularity of ancient tragedy on the modern stage.

In the Introduction I set out the argument of the book by drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics as well as on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, to establish the central concepts by which I define the subject of postcolonial tragedy. Key operative concepts that I will incrementally expand upon in the course of the book are introduced in this chapter. These include: tragedy itself, postcolonialism, colonial interpellation, suffering, systematic delirium, postcolonial edginess and precarity, giving an account of oneself, the Akan concept of musuo, causal plausibility, suffering, unruly affective economies, and ethical choice. I also lay out very briefly what I will be doing subsequently in the individual chapters. Thus, I provide minimal synopses of chapters on Shakespeare’s Othello, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and The Road, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.

I argue in Chapter 4 that Wole Soyinka’s essentially dramatic gifts are geared more towards anti-mimeticism than towards any form of naturalistic representation and that when staging character and setting in his anti-mimetic plays, he elects a dramatic medium that allows their largely aesthetic-political messages to be communicated through cryptic and often elusive ritual meanings. Thus, in The Road, Professor illustrates a sense of edginess through the amplifying delirium that he experiences in attempting to merge Yorùbá and Christian epistemologies in pursuit of the Word. While Death and the King’s Horseman presents a minute interpretation of the moving parts involved in an error of judgment, reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis that would have been much appreciated by Aristotle. The latter play also illustrates several elements reminiscent of the Greeks, such as a strong degree of disputatiousness, a carefully choreographed chorus-function, and an idea of the pharmakos that aligns sacrifice directly with the welfare of the polis.

Chapter 10 lays out the primary methodological motivations behind the book. Because both postcolonialism and tragedy are highly complex, constellation concepts, I argue that they instigate the necessity for thinking closely about the dynamics of comparison, critical theory, interdisciplinarity, and the ethics of reading. I then track the complex relations between historical context and literary texts in postcolonial studies and go on to show some of the ways in which the contrast and comparison of Western notions of tragedy with postcolonial examples forces us to rethink both sides of the coin. I conclude with remarks on the characterological types we have seen in the course of the book – namely the bold (Othello, Okonkwo, Sethe) and the quiet (the Magistrate and Murphy) – and show how they correlate to two different ideas of freedom. There are implications to be derived from postcolonial tragedy for how we think of freedom in today’s world.