SOURCE: “Postmodern Classics: The Verse Drama of Tony Harrison,” in British and Irish Drama Since 1960, edited by James Acheson, St. Martin's Press, 1993, pp. 202-26.

[In the following essay, Huk discusses Harrison's adaptations of classical drama and traces how the poet brings a new life and a contemporary edge to the Greek classics.]

To understand this, it becomes necessary to level the artistic structure of the Apollonian culture, as it were, stone by stone, till the foundations on which it rests become visible.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

I

Over the course of the last two decades Tony Harrison, the well-known British poet and classicist, has brought his poetry to full power on stage. His metrical arguments, which have always addressed social issues and audiences rather than isolated readers, find their perfect venue there, despite the fact that, as Derek Walcott recently put it, the very idea of...