GREEK THEATRE PROGRAM

I’m delighted to lead this course for BADA – it is a unique opportunity to explore Greek theatre throughout the ages with constant practice-based sessions designed to deepen understanding of its cultural and historical legacy. The course represents the perfect alignment of BADA’s rich tradition of training in London and Oxford, with the huge benefit of exposure to the sites of Ancient Greece. We have created an incredible itinerary, with access to academics and practitioners with compelling expertise in research, archiving and performance.

There will be a maximum of 18 participants on this course; the small group size allows us to tailor aspects of the course to meet this unique group’s interests.

Paul O’Mahony Course Director, Greek Theatre

2025 Dates 

Sample Programme Schedule

• Athenian Tragedy in Performance Spanning performance practice in the ancient world up to and including its reception today. How have generations reimagined tragedy to speak to their own eras?
• Athens and Empire 5th Century BCE Athens was a fledgling democracy with a large empire. The tension inherent in this duality is often manifested in tragedy. This module explores the historical context of tragedy in Athens and its legacy today.
• Lectures & Guided Tours Talks and discussions sessions with visiting academics as well as expert-led tours of ancient sites

Studio work:

• Performing Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides This will comprise of acting classes on how to approach scenes, monologues and choral work. There will be sessions in movement work, and opportunities to explore the plays through informal offerings in Greece and Oxford.
• Masterclasses Practical and technique-based sessions with guest artists

• Theatre reports (4 total)
• Research papers (2 total)

Ten days in London will be spent with time split between the classroom and the studio. Classes will cover the context of tragedy’s creation and early performance, and the reception of Attic tragedy in the UK and US, including workshops on the influence of ancient texts in the work of Shakespeare. Studio sessions will focus on performance technique, with choral work and acting classes incorporating speech and scene work. Masterclasses will be provided by leading practitioners working with the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

There will be a guided tour of the British Museum and two trips to see performances in London.

The British Museum was founded in 1753 and opened its doors in 1759. It was the first national museum to cover all fields of human knowledge, open to visitors from across the world. Enlightenment ideals and values – critical scrutiny of all assumptions, open debate, scientific research, progress and tolerance – have marked the Museum since its foundation. The Museum is driven by an insatiable curiosity for the world, a deep belief in objects as reliable witnesses and documents of human history, sound research, as well as the desire to expand and share knowledge.

We will then spend 10 days in Greece where we’ll retrace the route of the Panathenaic Festival procession in Athens, and visit the ancient sites of Delphi, Mycenae and Epidaurus. In Delphi we will rehearse in a private amphitheatre. We’ll hold a series of classes in Nafplio, and continue to work on scenes and monologues throughout our stay. There will be masterclasses with a leading actor and director from the National Theatre of Greece, and a choreographer from Greece’s National Opera company. You’ll be accompanied by the course director throughout, who will tie together the theory and practice of the course’s syllabus in the very locations which inspired and hosted the first performances of tragedy.

During your stay in Greece, you will see a number of ancient sites, including:

The Acropolis Museum is an archaeological museum focused on the findings of the archaeological site of the Acropolis of Athens. The museum was built to house every artifact found on the rock and on the surrounding slopes, from the Greek Bronze Age to Roman and Byzantine Greece. More than 4,250 objects are exhibited over an area of 14,000 square metres.

We return to the UK for our residency in Oxford. There we will be based at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, the foremost resource in the world for the study of tragedy and its reception. We’ll have full access to the archive with guidance from an archivist and a talk from Fiona Macintosh, along with workshops and classes eminent academics and artists. We’ll attend the post-graduate Theatre and Classics Symposium held by the APGRD in conjunction with the Royal Holloway Theatre Department, at which we will perform scenes and monologues from tragedy.

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology Established in 1683 to house the library and curiosities collected by Elias Ashmole — which included coins, books, and geological and zoological specimens  (among them the stuffed body of the last dodo seen in Europe) the Ashmolean Museum is the oldest university museum in the world. Today the collection includes a coins (Greek, Roman, Celtic, Byzantine, Medieval, Islamic and Chinese), Pre-Raphaelite paintings, majolica pottery, Victorian art and furniture, Chinese art (from the Neolithic period through to modern paintings and prints), antiquities from the Sudan and Ancient Egypt, and the Messiah Stradivarius violin.

Paul O’Mahony (Course Director) is an actor, writer, director and producer. He is artistic director of the multi award winning theatre company Out of Chaos whose work has toured extensively in the UK, Europe, the US and New Zealand. Several Out of Chaos productions have been inspired by Greek literature. He is associate director of Actors From The London Stage with whom he has toured the US, playing leading roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing and Richard III. He was Eminent Artist in Residence at the University of Wyoming in 2015 and is an Associate of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. He is the artistic director of Reading Greek Tragedy Online – a global initiative he started with the CHS when the world went into lockdown. His acting credits include The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Orange Tree Theatre and English Touring Opera. For BADA he has directed three productions, and taught on the London Theatre Program and Midsummer in Oxford. He is currently working on a stage adaptation of the Aeneid, and a musical set in Delphi.

Fiona Macintosh (Principal Academic) is the Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama (APGRD). Professor of Classical Reception and Fellow of St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. She joined the APGRD as Senior Research Fellow in 2000 after holding a lectureship in the Department of English, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. She was Reader in Greek and Roman Drama (2008-2014) and has been the Director of the APGRD since January 2010. Her publications include Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork, 1994; New York, 1995), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2005, co-authored with Edith Hall), Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Performing Epic of Telling Tales (Oxford University Press 2020, co-authored with Justine McConnell). She is editor of The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance (Oxford University Press, 2011), co-editor of Choruses, Ancient and Modern (Oxford University Press, 2013), and of Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Greek Theatre Faculty come from top institutions and are foremost scholars in their fields or leading figures from the British theatre.

The Faculty have included:

Marcus Bell is a 3rd year D.Phil student whose project, titled Choreographing Tragedy at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, considers how tragedy is used, responded to, and reworked by international dance-artists and choreographers like Akram Khan, Pina Bausch, and Dimitris Papaioannou. Marcus is a queer dancer and choreographer themselves and so they are also interested in practice-based, and practice-as-research. Through the development of their thesis, they are aligning queer theory and theatre and performance studies with classical reception studies and critical new materialisms. This work is situated within a broader movement to decolonise the study of ancient Greece and Rome through theory and practice, which Marcus does with a collaborative network: Critical Ancient World Studies. They are also one of the co-conveners of a research network whose objective is to generate radical imaginaries, methodologies, and feelings with/against the Classical, broadly defined.Marcus teaches at University of Oxford and at Goldsmiths University in London, dances with Oxford-London based dance company Thomas Page Dances and they are an artistic associate with By Jove Theatre company. Their other interests include Roman pantomime dance, Epic, poetry, philosophy, and Film studies.

Leo Wringer went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize. His classical work includes: Michael Grandage’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Noel Coward Theatre; Blackta for Young Vic; Fool in King Lear with the late Corin Redgrave as Lear, Prince of Verona in Romeo and Juliet directed by Peter Gill, and Duke of Ephesus doubled with Doctor Pinch in Tim Supple’s production of Comedy of Errors – all for the RSC. For Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory, Bristol, he played Brutus in Julius Caesar, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus and the title role in Othello – director Andrew Hilton; Camillo in The Winters Tale for Complicité; Cinna The Poet in Julius Caesar at the Barbican, then King Of Athens in Fiona Shaw’s Medea in Dublin and West End, both productions directed by Deborah Warner. Among the modern work he’s played in: Perseverance Drive, Sixty-Six Books & Two Horsemen – all at the Bush Theatre, the latter achieving a Time Out Award; Zinnie Harris’s The Wheel for National Theatre of Scotland, directed by Vicky Featherstone; and Search and Destroy at the Royal Court directed by Stephen Daldry. Film and TV credits include: Nighthawks, Death in Paradise, The Kitchen Toto, Silent Witness, Judge John Deed, Canterbury Tales, Casualty, Law and Order, Rebus, and the role of Thomas Peters in Simon Schama’s Rough Crossing.

Claire Catenaccio is a scholar of Ancient Greek literature, particularly drama, and its modern reception. She has published on the imagery of dreams in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, on singing heroes in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, and on the transformation of the myth of Orpheus in the Broadway musical Hadestown. As a dramaturg and director, she has worked extensively with modern stagings of ancient texts. She teaches as a member of the faculty at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Claire will be joining the program as a guest lecturer in Oxford.

Oliver Taplin was a fellow and tutor of Classics (Literae Humaniores) at Magdalen College, Oxford. Professor Taplin is author of several books, including ‘Greek Fire’, a celebration of the capacity of Ancient Greek culture to stand the test of time and influence modern art, thought and society. The book accompanied a Channel 4 documentary series of the same name. He set up the APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama) in 1996 with Edith Hall. It is devoted to the international production and reception of ancient plays since the Renaissance. He has also worked with productions in the theatre, including The Oresteia at the National Theatre (1980–81), The Thebans at the RSC (1991–92), and The Oresteia at the National Theatre (1999–2000). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995. Professor Taplin will be joining the program as a guest lecturer in Oxford.

Joel Christensen (Course Consultant) is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University and teaches courses in Greek Epic and Archaic Poetry; Rhetoric and Literary Theory; Linguistics; Mythology. He taught previously at the University of Texas at San Antonio (2007-2016). He received his BA and MA from Brandeis (’01) in Classics and English and his PhD in Classics from New York University (2007) where he also received an Advanced Certificate in Poetics and Theory. Professor Christensen has been a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies (2013) and has received the Society for Classical Studies’ Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Collegiate Level (2013). In addition to articles on language, myth and literature in the Homeric epics, he has published a Beginner’s Guide to Homer (One World, 2013) and also Homer’s Thebes (CHS, 2019) with Elton T. E. barker as well as A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice (Bloomsbury, 2018) with Erik Robinson. In 2020, his “The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic” comes out from Cornell University Press. Joel lives with his family in Dorchester, MA. He spends his ‘off’ hours posting material to the popular Classics-oriented website. www.sententiaeantiquae.com and tweeting about it (@sentantiq).

Schedules permitting, we will be joined by artists for workshops and masterclasses during the course.

Guest Artists have included:

Argyris Xafis graduated from the National School of Dramatic Arts in Greece, and has performed ancient tragedies numerous times in Epidaurus. He has won several awards for his cinema and stage work and he’s also an acting professor at Athens Conservatory Drama School. IMDb

Sofia Paschou studied at Arhi Drama School, and at LISPA (London International School of Performing Arts), where she completed (and worked afterwards) the pedagogical training program. She is Artistic Director of Patari Project, a physical theatre company based in Athens, for which she directed the performances: 10cm up, Odyssey, Shoe catcher on the piano, Νose, Chionani, Theogony: a great fiesta (Epidaurus Festival), Four Seasons (Greek National Opera). She has also directed The Seesaw (National Theatre of Greece), Τhe Slave (Porta Theatre, co-direction with Thomas Moschopoulos), MUTE (Neos Kosmos Theatre), and Who discovered America? (National Theatre of Northern Greece). As an actress she has worked with Lilo Baur, Helen Chadwick (Royal Opera House, London), Dessislava Stefanova, and with Out of Chaos. She has signed the movement of the works Iphigenia in Tauris, Arrival – based on Homer’s Odyssey and The Frogs, all performed at the Epidaurus Festival, The trial of K and Candide (Porta Theatre), Fahrenheit 451 (Athens Festival), MANON and Return, both at the Greek National Opera. She is a drama teacher at the Athens Coservatoire’s drama school. She has also taught at the Birmingham School of Acting and at the National Theatre, London.

Evelyn Miller trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She is a member of the RSC education department and has led workshops and acting classes at universities and colleges including Wellesley, Vassar, Notre Dame, UCLA and UT Austin. With the Playground Theatre she facilitates writing and play reading groups with service users at the mental health ward at St. Charles hospital, as well as with the charities Age UK and Open age. Theatre includes: Deep Night Dark Night,The Taming of the Shrew (Sam Wannnamaker Playhouse); Pericles, The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, (Shakespeare’s Globe); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sheffield Crucible); Jane Eyre (National Theatre/ U.K Tour); Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, The Famous Victories of Henry V (RSC); The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III (AFTLS);Swallows and Amazons (Bristol Old Vic); Romeo and Juliet (Orange Tree Theatre) and The Little Prince (Royal Opera House). Television includes: Flowers in the Attic – The Origins, Holby City, Doctors

Nina Bowers graduated from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2017. She trained on the CDT course (collaborative and devised theatre – BA 3 years) which enjoys a creative partnership with the award winning Complicite. Recent work: Cassandra in GIRL ON AN ALTAR at The Kiln Theatre, directed by Annabelle Comyn. The all-action supernatural adventure series LOCKWOOD & Co, written and directed by Joe Cornish and based on the bestselling novels by Jonathan Stroud and PANIC for Amazon Prime Video. Nina completed a year at The Globe Theatre as part of their Ensemble company performing Shakespeare’s History Cycle across the 2019 Globe Theatre Summer Season and the 2019-2020 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Winter Season. Directors were: Federay Holmes, Sarah Bedi and Sean Holmes. Other theatre credits include DEAR ELIZABETH, (The Gate Theatre); directed by Ellen McDougall; THE WOLVES, (Theatre Royal Stratford East); directed by Ellen McDougall; THE MAGIC FLUTE, (Aix-en-Provence Festival), directed by Simon McBurney; CRAVE (The Pit, Barbican) directed by Julie Cunningham; The one woman play TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992 (The Gate Theatre) written by Anna Deavere Smith and directed by Ola Ince. For this ground-breaking piece of verbatim theatre Nina played over 19 characters; TOMORROW I’LL BE TWENTY, directed by Catherine Alexander for Complicite.

While in Oxford, we will be based at the APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama). The APGRD is a pioneering international centre for research into performances of Greek and Roman drama worldwide, from antiquity to the present, on stage, screen and radio, in opera and dance.

Based at the University of Oxford, the APGRD’s rich collections and activities have been made possible by generous support from the AHRC, The Leverhulme Trust, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Onassis Foundation.

As well as hosting a high-profile series of public talks, the APGRD supports new writing and works closely with practitioners engaged in the creative arts and beyond.

Research
The provision of cutting-edge research is one of the APGRD’s primary aims, with a publication record to match.

Our research team of experienced and emergent scholars has produced pioneering studies and our digital resources include freely available databases of both ancient and modern productions. New research programmes include Performing Epic; Translating Ancient Drama, and Interactive Multimedia e-books.

The APGRD aims to create a wider community of scholarship, drawing upon experts and practitioners from the worlds of classics, theatre, music and dance. This unique, multidisciplinary, and inclusive approach gives the APGRD additional vitality and relevance.

Preserve
Our archives contain over 10,000 items relating to modern performances of Greek and Roman drama. The centrepiece of the archive is the Leyhausen-Spiess collection, which documents European theatre history from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Managed by a professional archivist, the APGRD archives are accessible to scholars and practitioners. To make an appointment to consult the collections, please see our Visit us page.

Our video, audio and manuscript collections provide the raw materials for future scholarship and allow modern performances to be preserved for posterity. Donations to the archive are welcome.

Create
From commissioning new plays to hosting rehearsed readings, the APGRD works to further the understanding of ancient theatre – where western drama began and where the first musical theatre appeared.

The APGRD’s members have been producers, academic advisors and consultants on internationally acclaimed productions. The APGRD provides directors, writers, actors, choreographers and composers with a space to speak and engage with academics and students.

Please note: Greek Theatre is a physically demanding course with a packed schedule that includes a number of walking tours and site visits. Teaching spaces and accommodations are accessible but the historical nature of the ancient sites allows for limited accommodations.

The 2025 Greek Theatre Program fees are: $8,850

Program fees include all excursions (theatre trips, site visits, museum admission and tours, etc.), air transportation to/from London to Greece, all ground transportation and accommodations while on the course.

• London Accommodations – should you wish to arrange your own accommodation for the London portion of the course, then the reduction in the course fee will be $825. Participants must confirm on acceptance whether they wish to make their own accommodation arrangements or use that arranged by BADA. Due to the high demands for accommodation in London during the summer months, we cannot guarantee that rooms can be made available should a later decision be made to take up the offer of accommodation booked through the course.

All fees are payable in US dollars. Please contact Acting Finance Director Helen Ainsworth at hainsworth@bada.org.uk should you wish to settle the fees in UK Sterling so that an appropriate rate can be agreed.

On acceptance, in order to hold their place, applicants will need to pay a non-refundable deposit of $500 and indicate whether they wish to make their own accommodation arrangements or use those arranged by BADA.

The remaining fees are due as follows:

The balance of fees payable become non-refundable on the due dates above.

* The balance due on May 2nd for those opting to arrange their own London Accommodations is $825.

Please note, in addition to the fees payable to BADA, participants are responsible for:

• Roundtrip Airfare to the UK
• Insurance
• Meals
• Spending money

Spending habits obviously vary widely between participants, but London is an expensive city. We recommend a minimum of £150 ($190) a week for food, laundry and transport if you mostly prepare your own food and use only public transport. Regular coffees, takeaways, meals out or use of cabs can quickly push the cost of subsistence and transport up beyond £200 ($250) per week.

Greek Theatre Program Refund Policy

A deposit of $500 is required on acceptance, which is non-refundable. The balance of fees payable fall due as stated above and become non-refundable on those dates.

If the program is canceled by BADA due to circumstances beyond our control, all fees, with the exception of the application fee, will be refunded. BADA accepts no responsibility for personally incurred expenses such as flights or pre-booked ground transportation.

Financial Assistance 

Limited awards from the BADA scholarship fund are available to assist accepted applicants in defraying the costs of attending BADA’s summer programmes. These awards are based on need and merit.

Before applying to the program, please note the fees and consider how you will fund the experience should you be accepted.  Only a very small number of applicants accepted to the summer 2025 programs will be chosen to receive scholarship funding from BADA. Awards could be a small as a few hundred dollars. Most accepted applicants will need to provide their own funding.

If you would like to discuss the possibilities of receiving scholarship funding prior to submitting an application, please feel free to contact our Summer Programs Admissions Coordinator, Jennifer Rockwood: jrockwood@bada.org.uk.

Accommodations in London will be shared twin rooms at the Stay Club North Acton. Accommodations in Greece will also be in shared twin rooms. All rooms in Oxford are single occupancy.  Further details on accommodation will be sent to you as part of pre-arrival materials.

BADA is not an accredited US institution; we are unable to provide academic credit for the course.

With its intensive workload, 94 contact hours and 86 further unsupervised work hours, this program has a suggested credit equivalency of two 3 credit courses, in line with other programs BADA runs. You will finish the program with a portfolio of work, and the course director can provide a written assessment for your home institution.

Classroom and Coursework breakdown by hours

94 hours of contact time

Classroom time in London – 16 hours
Acting classes in London – 12 hours
Trip to British Museum – 3 hours
London masterclasses – 4 hours
Greece – 2 masterclasses – 4 hours
Greece – guided tours of Delphi, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Acropolis of Athens – 12 hours
Greece classroom time – 9 hours
Greece acting class time – 18 hours
Oxford classroom time – 8 hours
Oxford acting classes – 8 hours

86 hours of unsupervised work

London – 2 theatre trips – 6 hours
Greece – 2 theatre shows – 6 hours
Report on each theatre show we see – 4 x 2 = 8 hours
Oxford seminar – 8 hours
APGRD access time – 10 hours
Performance writing/prep – 40 hours
2 papers x 4 hours – 8 hours

Hear what some of our Participants have to say about their time on the course: