This year’s play will be performed at the Greenwood Theatre, London Bridge (SE1 3RA) from 28-30 June 2023 (nightly with 14.30 on the 28th and 29th).
To celebrate 70 years of the KCL Greek Play and the 30th anniversary of Actors of Dionysus (a joint centenary celebration!) we are excited to announce that the King’s Greek Play 2023 will be a reimagining of the story of Iphigeneia.
This year’s play offers a fresh perspective on the multiple moral dilemmas that are so central to the girl’s mythical life, examining the cyclical nature of violence and conflict which impact generations to come.
Through a re-telling of Iphigeneia's tragedy in a modern context, we wish to confront the audience with this question: No one wants war - but how much are you willing to pay for peace?
The play was performed at the Greenwood Theatre, London Bridge (SE1 3RA) from 22-24 June 2022 (19.00 nightly with 14.30 matinées on the 22 and 24).
Antigone is on trial. She has defied King Creon’s edict and secretly offered funeral rites to her dead brother Polynices. As she awaits her fate she relives her family’s recent history, slowly unravelling the violent and incestuous cycle of the House of Cadmus. Telling the mythical story of Oedipus from the perspective of his courageous daughter Antigone, the King’s Greek Play 2022 examines how our history can shape our actions and beliefs, as well as reflecting upon the unexpected ways in which the present moment might shape the lives of future generations.
Created by current King’s College London students, The Plague at Thebes offers a contemporary response to Sophocles’ plays. This continues King's College London’s recent history of pushing the boundaries and conventions of the Greek Play to explore how contemporary performance of Greek drama can help us engage with the fraught times in which we find ourselves living. The performance will incorporate original ancient Greek text and new writing in order to present a work that speaks to the social and political consequences of an unprecedented pandemic, civil disobedience, and the place and responsibility of an individual within society.
This year’s play will again be ideal for those studying Classical Civilisation – Oedipus the King is a prescribed text for the OCR A level syllabus – as well as students taking Classics, Drama, and English.
The King's Greek Play 2021 will be a little different. After the success of 2020's experimental Dionysus in the Underworld, performed only a few weeks before the UK went into national lockdown, this year students from across the college will create an entirely new play that draws on extant and fragmentary Greek tragedy.
Led by Professor Edith Hall and Dr David Bullen, students will engage in depth with ancient texts before developing their own new material in response. The results will be performed in an online production in June 2021
The sixty-sixth annual Greek Play was Sophocles' Antigone, directed by Helena Ramsay (third year BA Classical Studies).
KCL brings Sophocles’ thrilling exploration of resistance and responsibility to life in a daring new production. Ancient questions are re-framed for the twenty-first century: when personal values clash with the government, is duty to your beliefs or to the sanctity of the law more important? How acceptable is civil disobedience against an unchecked power? These questions play out in this battle of the individual against the state, staged under the relentless scrutiny of twenty four hour news. Following the success of last year’s acclaimed production of Medea, which played to over a thousand audience members across its run, the 2019 Greek Play celebrates another defiant woman of Greek tragedy and will again be performed in a combination of ancient Greek and English.