Feminisation of Male Characters in Two Contemporary Stagings of Greek Tragedies: Carme Portaceli’s Prometheus and Miguel del Arco’s Creon

Abstract

In Classical Antiquity, where theatre was an exclusively male sphere, there was a gender split: a male playwright wrote a female character, giving her a conventionalised speech in order to project, from a masculine perspective, the idea of femininity predominating in society. This character was later performed by a male actor, who embraced the contradiction of said female character showing a negative vision of patriarchal society. This article analyses a staging with a contemporary aesthetics, Prometeo (2010) by Carme Portaceli, and another one with a timeless aesthetics, Antígona (2015) by Miguel del Arco. In particular, emphasis is placed on studying the transgression of the dramatic conventions about gender in Greek tragedy, as well as the dramaturgical transformation of male characters into female ones, to observe what happens nowadays, and what is intended to be communicated on stage, when there are women playing traditionally masculine roles. This gender perspective can be used to modernise tragedy by adding a feminist and vindictive lens, as in Prometeo, or else the main character can be feminised in order to reformulate the gender conflict, underlining other ones, as in Antígona.