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THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002

Lorna Hardwick
Open University

The narratology of dress in 'Tantalus'

This paper analyses the role of dress in Peter Hall's and Edward Hall's staging of John Barton's 'Tantalus.' The production aimed to combine (flamboyantly but not always coherently) Barton's stress on using drama to narrate the story of the fall of Troy and Peter Hall's belief that live theatre can pose the kind of demanding questions about life, death and suffering which an increasingly simplistic society (his gloss) avoids or marginalises. I shall argue that dress (and undress) in this sequence of nine plays was developed as one of the narrative devices which guide the imagined audiences through a complex sequence of time scales, people and events. I describe and analyse the relationship in the action of the plays between ancient and modern dress, dress in and out of 'character', cross dressing, ritual dress- for sacrifice and for marriage. I also examine the relationship between the mask and dress and identify instances of the use of dress as a metatheatrical signifier.

The analysis shows that narrative in the plays operates at several levels and takes different voices. The effect of the directors' and designers' use of dress and undress is to communicate in different ways with various types of assumed audience (popular; theatre- familiar; classically educated). This results in the creation of audiences of 'insiders' and 'outsiders' and thus, in different ways, undermines the declared aims of both Barton and Hall.