Rethinking Greek Tragedy Through Women's Voices

When it comes to Ancient Greek tragedy on modern stages, men's voices dominate the conversation. Dr Emma Cole, armed with an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), is challenging this status quo.
Cole, an expert in theatrical translation and adaptation, brings impressive credentials to this mission. Her award-winning research has included working on immersive experimental theatre with British theatre company Punchdrunk, funded by a UK Innovation Fellowship.
A striking statistic sparked Cole's current project: at England's National Theatre, the country's premier stage, fourteen of fifteen Greek tragedy translations were by men.
The gender bias runs deep. While female writers get commissioned for adaptations, they're often working from male-authored translations. Even more concerning, Cole notes how crucial elements like sexual assault sometimes get muddled in translation. While she acknowledges male translations aren't inherently flawed, she argues that "when translated texts are always funnelled through male voices, it doesn't give you a full understanding of what voices exist."
Cole's ambitious project starts with translating two challenging, fragmented works: Euripides' final, partially corrupted play, and a tragedy surviving only in thirty fragments. Rather than smooth over these broken texts, she'll embrace their fragmented nature, and make them performable drawing inspiration from modernist writers like Samuel Beckett.
Her research will dig deeper into Oxford's Archive of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama, analysing the patterns that have kept male translators in power. Her goal is to create translations that challenge the established order and carve out real space for women's voices in theatre.
This isn't just an academic exercise - Cole aims to reshape how Greek tragedy lives and breathes on modern stages, making room for perspectives long pushed to the margins.