What happened to the ancient Greco-Roman theatre after antiquity? The absence of evidence has generated much discussion because scholars have had difficulty in accepting it as evidence of absence. Byzantinists with a background in classical philology find it hard to imagine a culture where ancient drama was intensively studied but never staged or imitated for performance purposes. Historians of the theatre are baffled by the fact that Orthodox Christianity apparently did not generate the kind of mystery plays that gave rise to Renaissance drama in Western Europe. Historians of the Byzantine city, like myself, wonder how urban culture managed to maintain continuity in the Greek Middle Ages without an institution that had been fundamental to the existence and even the identity of the ancient polis.
Andrew Walker White, a theatre historian with a background in classics, takes issue with the persistent idea that drama inspired or infused Orthodox ritual, so that the Divine Liturgy became a theatrical performance, and certain other services for special feasts took on the form of mystery plays. He starts from the general premise that ritual and drama are not necessarily linked by a process of evolution from the former to the latter as a higher cultural form. His first two chapters are devoted to arguing that Christian ritual followed a divergent track from the theatre of the Late Antique polis. Christian liturgy developed in a private, domestic milieu that shunned the theatre and the public, pagan pageantry that went with it. Even after the public culture of the polis was effectively secularised by the Christian emperors of the fourth century, and the Church went public with monumental places of worship and large-scale sacred processions, the celebrants of Christian worship, typified by the vociferous John Chrysostom, rejected any confusion or association with theatrical performance. The Christian basilica, adapted from the generic model of the civic audience hall, represented a thoroughly different conception and function of spatial dynamics from the theatre; the superficial resemblance between the ancient scenae frons and the late Byzantine icon screen reflects no continuity or imitation. The church building did include dedicated performance spaces, notably the ambo, and the liturgy included performative elements, particularly the sermon, but these were post-theatrical developments, representing the intellectual sublimation of popular entertainment that intellectual bishops like Chrysostom derived from their philosophical and rhetorical education. While the Latin mass evolved in ways that profiled the clergy as agents of the Eucharist and performers of the sacramental narrative, the Orthodox rite emphasised the contemplation of the divine mysteries and the participation of all the faithful in harmony with the heavenly Liturgy of the angels and saints. Orthodox tradition consecrated acting only to the extent that it canonised actor-converts who abandoned the stage.
The texts and motions of Orthodox ritual thus marked a clear break with the ancient theatre. Only in liturgical music, which White discusses at some length in chapter 3, was there – despite the Church's ban on musical instruments – a discernible continuity with the Hellenic past and a significant overlap with Byzantine secular culture, which led, especially in the late Byzantine period, to the composition of chants that strove primarily for aesthetic effect.
In part 2, comprising chapters 4–6, the conclusion and seven appendices, White pursues the question of liturgical drama with a detailed examination of one late Byzantine ritual, which has been cited as the main evidence for a Byzantine tradition of sacra rappresentazione. This was the Service of the Furnace, a choral arrangement of texts from the biblical narrative (Daniel 3) of the three Hebrew youths who were cast into the fiery furnace of Babylon for their refusal to fall down and worship the golden image set up by King Nebuchadnezzar. The richly symbolic story of their miraculous preservation through the intervention of an angel, and the canticle and prayer ascribed to them in the Septuagint version, made them a favourite theme of Byzantine preaching, hymnography and iconography. By the late fourteenth century the Service had been instituted as an addition to Orthros (Matins) on the Sunday of the Holy Fathers (Sunday before Christmas). As such, it was witnessed in Hagia Sophia by two foreign visitors, one of whom, Bertandon de la Broquière in 1432, describes it as a mistere.
White's analysis of the Service offers, in effect, a massive disincentive to take the Burgundian spy too literally. Apart from the fact that Bertrandon never delivers his promised description of the performance, he had evidently observed it with the superficial eye of a distracted tourist, and decided to identify it in terms that made sense to him and his French audience. The Byzantine evidence, consisting mainly of the order of service in five different fifteenth-century versions (reproduced and translated in appendices 1–5), shows quite clearly that it was not a mystery play in the Western style. There were no props other than the ambo and solea of the church, no script other than the biblical text with some short additional hymns, the only actors in addition to the regular church cantors were the unmasked choristers who sang the biblical words of the Three Children, and the only extra was the Angel, represented by his icon that was suspended above the Children's heads. True, the variations in the order of service show that there was room for flexibility of interpretation. Yet it was precisely the author of the most ‘theatrical’ interpretation, archbishop Symeon of Thessaloniki, who in chapter 23 of his Dialogue in Christ (reproduced and translated in appendix 6) denounced the crude, material theatricality of the Latin sacre rappresentazioni staged by the occupying Venetian clergy, while defending the Service of the Furnace as an essentially traditional, spiritual and liturgical rite. All the same, Symeon's need to justify the Service, along with Bertrandon de la Broquière's remark, show that its addition to the liturgical calendar was a not uncontroversial innovation. White is surely right to suggest that this reflected the terminal crisis of Byzantine culture in the last century of its existence, when what was left of Byzantium awaited enslavement and apostasy at the hands of a new Nebuchadnezzar.
As a presentation and contextualisation of the Service of the Furnace with a substantial historical introduction, Andrew White's book is an unqualified success. The author writes engagingly, he grounds his work in the classic twentieth-century scholarly literature on Byzantine history and architecture, he cites the primary sources to good effect, and he is well up to date with scholarship on liturgy, music and hymnography. He discusses the relationship between ritual and drama with a light theoretical touch that is fully sensitised to the Byzantine context. Thus he draws a most valuable analogy between the representational strategies of the Orthodox liturgy and those of the holy icon: just as the latter deliberately avoids not only the subject matter but also the aesthetics of the Greco-Roman statue, so the former goes out of its way to put on a different kind of show from the ancient theatre.
As a history of theatre (or non-theatre or anti-theatre) in Byzantium, however, this slim volume stimulates more than it settles the question of what happened to Greek theatrical culture after antiquity. Like ancient statuary and pagan cult, the ancient theatre vacated an important cultural urban space by its demise. While it is naïve and dated to suggest that Christianity simply restocked the void with its own brands - icons, saints’ cults, and liturgical shows –, the fate of that space in the Byzantine world needs to be addressed, because it is a priori inconceivable as well as de facto untenable, that this whole area of human experience, and Greco-Roman civilization, simply shut down or contracted out of existence. So we need to continue to work from the assumption that Christianity did somehow make up for what it abolished. In the present case, we need to identify the ways in which Christian, imperial culture somehow came up with an alternative version, or versions, of the theatre. This means, firstly, revisiting the secondary literature: not only the recent studies on the logikon theatron of Byzantine intellectuals, but also the older works on the Byzantine theatre, which, however misguided, may still have something to offer. Thus the book by Venetia Cottas (1931), who saw theatre in almost every aspect of Byzantine public life, bears re-reading in the light of some recent trends, for example the choice of ‘display’ as the theme of the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies (London 2006), and an article by Anestis Vasilakeris on ‘Theatricality of Byzantine Images’. Secondly, in literature as in art, the Byzantine religious tradition has important dramatic material that Andrew White does not consider: the texts generated by the contemplation of Christ's Passion and Resurrection. Leaving aside the para-liturgical drama of Χριστὸς Πάσχων, the hymns of the Orthodox Passion service, sung on the Thursday evening of Holy Week, are charged with emotion, to the point that they could spark anti-Jewish pogroms in the Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire. Thirdly, the Christian condemnation of the theatre must not be read in isolation from the many passages where John Chrysostom, its most severe and vocal critic, uses the metaphor of the theatre in a positive sense. The subject merits extensive study; here we may just note that he often refers to the Divine Liturgy as ‘spiritual theatre’, and, developing a metaphor of St Paul (1 Cor. 9, 24), likens the Christian life of virtue to an athletic contest, making frequent and detailed comparisons with the Olympic games that were still held in his home city of Antioch. In the spiritual and the agonistic sense, theatre was compatible with Christian values, and theatrical culture did have a future in Byzantium.
