Published in the new Methuen Classical Dramatists series
A dramatist whose trademark was the unexpected, Euripides has constantly challenged and intrigued audiences, from Athens of the fifth century BC to the present. The three plays in this volume demonstrate Euripides' versatility. Hippolytos (which was turned into Phèdre by Racine), deals with sexual passion, incest and abstinence; Suppliants (a version of the Antigone story) sets the play in Eleusis and dramatises the moment when the mothers of the dead sons of Oedipus beg Theseus to go to Thebes and demand their sons' bodies for burial. In Rhesos, all the confusion of sentry duty, the intrigue of spies and intruders, disguises and deceptions are crammed into a single night when the fortunes of war turn against the Trojans by a mixture of devious behaviour and sheer bad luck.
Euripides was born near Athens between 485 and 480 BC. His first play was presented in 455 BC and he wrote some hundred altogether of which nineteen survive – a greater number than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined – and which include
Alkestis,
Medea,
Bacchae,
Hippolytos, Ion and
Iphigenia at Aulis. He died in 406 BC.
Kenneth McLeish studied Classics and Music at Worcester College, Oxford. Once a full-time translator, author and dramatist, he published extensively including The Good Reading Guide, Shakespeare's People, The Theatre of Aristophanes, Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century, Myth, The Listener's Guide to Classical Music and Crucial Classics (both with Valerie McLeish) and The Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought (as general editor).
His original plays and his translations - from ancient Greek drama, as well as from Strindberg, Ibsen Moliere and Strindberg - have been widely performed, most notably by the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
J. Michael Walton has published and edited seven books on classical theatre history and has nine translations of Euripides plays in print, many on the Methuen Drama list. He is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Hull where he taught from 1965 to 2002. While there he directed numerous plays and taught courses in Classical Theatre, Masks and Puppets, Russian Theatre, American Theatre, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Theatre, Directing and Acting.
Frederic Raphael was born on August 14th 1931 in Chicago, and emigrated to England with his parents in 1938. He was educated at independent schools in Sussex and Surrey, before studying at St John's College, Cambridge. His career spans work as a screenwriter and a prolific novelist and journalist.
In 1965 Raphael won an Oscar for the 1965 movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He collaborated on the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut, and wrote a controversial memoir of their time together, Eyes Wide Open in 1999.
