PVCRS is very much a companion publication to our ejournal New Voices in Classical Reception Studies and our Eseminar Archive. All add to the range of resources that are made freely available on the Open University Reception of Classical Texts Research Project website. New Voices provides a refereed platform for newer researchers to publish their work. The Eseminar Archive makes available the records of the annual seminar that discusses all aspects of classical reception. Practitioners' Voices is a response to the growing awareness that Classical Reception research has to recognise the full range of processes that shape the impact of classical material in new contexts. Its aim is to provide a Forum in which theatre directors, designers, dramaturgs, actors, poets, translators, and all involved in the creative practices that are so crucial to classical receptions can discuss the relationship between their work and the classical texts, themes and contexts on which they draw.

We hope that the Forum will also lead to further dialogue between creative practitioners and critics and academics (who are after all also practitioners).

Current Issue

Issue 8 (2017)

Special Issue: Australasian Practitioners

Marguerite Johnson introduces this special issue of Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies, which features conversations with three Australasian practitioners: Phillip Mann, Anna Jackson and Ben Ferris.

Phillip Mann

Phillip Mann was born in North Yorkshire, and studied Drama and English at Manchester University. He has worked extensively in Theatre in Europe and America and established the first programme of Drama Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 1970, where he was later made Professor of Drama. Recently he has been appointed MNZM (Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit). He takes a special pleasure in directing new plays and in finding ways of making Greek Classical Drama available to modern audiences. In addition to his theatre work, Phillip Mann is a freelance writer and has published Science Fiction novels as well as essays and works for younger readers.
This interview with John Davidson was recorded in Wellington on 21st October 2016.

Anna Jackson

Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet whose six collections include Catullus for Children (2003) and I, Clodia (2014). She has an article, ‘Catullus in the Playground’ in Living Classics, ed. Stephen Harrison (OUP, 2009) and two articles on writing in response to the Classics coming out in 2017, ‘Clodia through the looking-glass,’ in Antipodean Antiquities (Bloomsbury) and ‘I, Clodia: I had a dream I was a ghost’ in From Athens to Aotearoa (Victoria University Press). An Associate Professor in English at Victoria University of Wellington, she has published several academic books on topics ranging from Children’s Gothic to Verse Biography.
This interview with Maxine Lewis was recorded on January 25th 2016 at the University of Auckland.
Photograph by Elvira Edmonds.

Ben Ferris

Ben Ferris is a film writer/director whose films have screened at festivals throughout the world (in Paris, Athens, New York, Tokyo, Karlovy Vary, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Skopje, Singapore, Sydney). His short film The Kitchen (2003) won the Grand Prix at the Akira Kurosawa Memorial Short Film Festival in Tokyo in 2005, and his short film Ascension (2004) won the Grand Prix at the 4^th One Take Film Festival in Croatia in 2004.
His debut feature film Penelope, an Australian-Croatian co-production, screened in National Competition at the 56^th Pula Film Festival in Croatia in 2009, and won a Van Gogh Award for Best Fantasy Film at the Amsterdam Film Festival in 2010. His second feature film, 57 Lawson (2016), captures daily life in a social housing building in Redfern, under the shadow of impending development. Ben is currently the Artistic Director of the Sydney Film School which he co-founded in 2004. He was the curator of the Sydney Cinémathèque in 2015, and his writings on cinema have been published worldwide in both French and English.
This interview with Leanne Glass was recorded via Skype on 13th January 2016.

Issue 9 (2018)

Conversations with Iphigenia

Suhayla El-Bushra is a screenwriter and playwright. Her recent stage work includes Arabian Nights at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, The Suicide (National Theatre), The Iphigenia Quartet (The Gate Theatre, London), Pigeons (Royal Court), Cuckoo (Unicorn Theatre) and The Kilburn Passion (Tricycle). She has been a core writer on C4 shows Ackley Bridge and Hollyoaks, and has just made Bush, a short with Film4.
Chris Thorpe is a playwright, and was a founder member of Unlimited Theatre, with whom he still works and tours. His recent work includes Victory Condition (The Royal Court), The Iphigenia Quartet (The Gate Theatre, London), Confirmation (Warwick Arts Centre), and Hannah (Unicorn Theatre). He also plays guitar in Lucy Ellinson’s political noise project #TORYCORE and works with the National Student Drama Festival.
Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. She has five collections of poetry; her most recent, In These Days of Prohibition (2017), was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Her stage work includes The Trojan Women (Gate Theatre), Sixty Six Books (Bush Theatre), The Trial of Dennis the Menace (Purcell Room, Southbank Centre), Chamber Piece (Lyric Hammersmith,) and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Northern Stage.)
Lulu Raczka is a screenwriter and playwright. She has worked in the writer’s room on Riviera (series 2) and Medici: Masters of Florence. Her stage work includes A Girl in School Uniform (Walks Into a Bar) (New Diorama), The Iphigenia Quartet (The Gate Theatre, London), Grey Man (Theatre 503), Some People Talk About Violence (New Diorama/Camden People’s Theatre), and Nothing (Lyric Hammersmith/Warwick Arts Centre/Camden People’s Theatre).

Two roundtable discussions were held at University College London and the University of Bristol in May 2016 with these four playwrights of The Iphigenia Quartet, which was performed at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill. This feature contains the transcripts of the discussions, together with an introduction by Christine Plastow. 

Penny Boreham, with Prodromos Tsinikoris, Giles Lewin, and Anastasia Bakogianni

Penny Boreham has been working as a radio producer and broadcaster for the last 30 years. She was on staff with the BBC until 2003 but since then has worked independently for the BBC, the child rights agency ‘Child to Child’, The Open University and numerous other organisations. Her mother named her Penelope because of her love of ‘the Odyssey’ and then read her the Greek myths as a young child. She has loved them ever since. 
Prodromos Tsinikoris was born in Wuppertal, Germany. Today he lives in Athens. He is the co-artistic director of the Experimental Stage-I of the National Theatre and works as a dramaturg, performer and theatre director. 
Giles Lewin is a British violinist and music composer, but also a vocalist who can play the fiddle, vielle, rebec, gittern, shawms, recorder, mandolin, pipe and tabor. He is particularly interested in old musical instruments and styles.
Penny, Prodromos and Giles worked together on a radio programme for the BBC World Service entitled Telling Tales: The Odyssey, which juxtaposed the stories of refugees on the Greek island of Lesvos with Homer's Odyssey. Anastasia Bakogianni was academic consultant on the programme; she conducted the following interviews with Penny, Prodromos and Giles for Practitioners' Voices in Classical Reception Studies.

Past Issues

Issue 8 (2017)

Featuring Rachael Lloyd, Mark Bruce, Anna Parker, Frances Eley, Laura Martin-Simpson and Rachel Bagshaw, Maciej Paprocki, Amy McCauley, Malcolm Atkins, Jo Balmer, Howard Hardiman, Mercedes Aguirre, Phillip Mann, Anna Jackson, and Ben Ferris. 

Issue 7 (2016)

Featuring Alexandra Anthony, Seamus Heaney, Umberto Passeretti, Emily Hauser, Scott Eaton, Renato Gabriele and Sarah Walton.

Issue 6 (2015)

featuring Alexander Stoddart, Robert Icke, Eugenia Manolidou, Marcus Romer, Liz White and Caroline Horton.

Issue 5 (2014)

featuring Jeannette Nelson, Gillian Bevan, Deborah Bruce, Andrew Simpson, John Woodman, Ben Jasnow, David Mercatali, Jon Dryden Taylor, Antony Gormley, Polly Findlay and Avra Sidiropoulou.

Issue 4 (2013)

featuring Jane Alison, Tiffany Atkinson, Josephine Balmer, Elizabeth Cook, Marie Cosnay, Marie Darrieussecq, Barbara Köhler, Gwyneth Lewis, Alice Oswald, Jo Shapcott.

Issue 3 (2012)

featuring Christie Brown, Richard Shirley Smith, Marian Maguire, Robert Crawford, Norman McBeath and Craig Hamilton

Issue 2 (2010)

featuring Josephine Balmer, Maureen Almond, Oliver Taplin, Martin Wylde, Helen Eastman, Michael Ewans and Ian Ruffell.

Issue 1 (2007)

featuring Dorinda Hulton, Jane Montgomery Griffiths, David Stuttard and David Fitzpatrick