Tony Harrison: The Common Chorus

Relationship to Classical text The first two plays in the sequence are adaptations of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Euripides’ Hecuba, set at Greenham Common.

Classical/post-Classical intertexts In the Introduction included in the 2002 edition Harrison quotes from Caroline Blackwood’s On the Perimeter (Heinemann, 1984), recording the sexually abusive language directed at women in the Greenham Common peace camp by soldiers defending the military base (p.195-6).

Comment Originally part of an unperformed trilogy of plays set at the USAF base at Greenham Common (Harrison imagined them being performed by the women of the peace camp). Part 1, Lysistrata, was first published in the Agni Review, no.27 (Boston University, 1988).

Note Collected in Tony Harrison Plays 4, Faber, 2002.