When I was commissioned to write an adaptation of Sophocles’s Ajax for a theatre festival in lower Manhattan in 2004, I immersed myself in the various translations and editions of the play, which of course included editorial notes and commentaries. These notes often emphasized the great poetry of Ajax’s monologues and the unevenness of the play’s structure. But every single one of them discussed at length the staging of Ajax’s suicide. There are numerous ideas of how this scene was originally staged and of its significance to the logistics and aesthetics of Greek staging practice, dramaturgy, and reception. The suicide is considered important because it is one of the few moments in Athenian tragedy in which an act of violence may have been staged in view of the spectators. As a playwright and director, I was compelled by the challenges of staging that moment and looked to the editorial notes and commentaries for information and suggestions. As a theatre historian, I was also interested in exploring how the moment of Ajax’s suicide came to be understood as such a compelling piece of theatrical history. In reading the various versions of play, I was initially struck by the difficulty the writers had in describing the stage action at this key moment of the play. Sir Richard Jebb’s translation, from 1893, has the most straightforward stage direction: “Ajax falls on his sword.”1 Jebb suggests that the action is visible but does not fully address the logistical concerns of the original staging, which begs a central question for a director and a theatre historian: how does the actor portraying Ajax fall on his sword? Since we may assume he doesn’t actually fall on an actual sword, which would likely kill him, Jebb requires us to imagine the staging

中文翻译：

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上演阿贾克斯的自杀：历史编纂

2004 年，当我受委托为曼哈顿下城的一个戏剧节改编索福克勒斯的《阿贾克斯》时，我沉浸在该剧的各种翻译和版本中，其中当然包括社论和评论。这些笔记经常强调阿贾克斯独白的诗意和戏剧结构的不平衡。但是他们每个人都详细讨论了阿贾克斯自杀的过程。关于这个场景最初是如何上演的，以及它对希腊上演实践、戏剧学和接待的后勤和美学意义，有很多想法。自杀被认为很重要，因为它是雅典悲剧中少数几个可能在观众面前上演暴力行为的时刻之一。作为剧作家和导演，我被那一刻的挑战所逼迫，并查看了社论和评论以获取信息和建议。作为一名戏剧历史学家，我也有兴趣探索阿贾克斯自杀的那一刻如何被理解为如此引人注目的戏剧历史片段。在阅读不同版本的剧本时，我最初对编剧在描述剧本关键时刻的舞台动作时遇到的困难感到震惊。理查德·杰布爵士 (Sir Richard Jebb) 于 1893 年的译文具有最直接的舞台方向：“阿贾克斯倒在他的剑上。”1 杰布表示动作是可见的，但并未完全解决原始舞台的后勤问题，这引出了一个核心问题导演和戏剧历史学家：扮演阿贾克斯的演员是如何倒在剑上的？由于我们可能会假设他实际上并没有落在可能会杀死他的实际剑上，因此 Jebb 要求我们想象舞台