75 Michaela Antoniou Time, space and acting tragedy in Greece: A Relationship This paper makes some suggestions regarding the signiicance of spatial and temporal conditions in relation to acting, using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope; this term deines “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”. 1 I propose that this is also valid for a performance. It also describes the diferent nuances that an acting performance acquires in relation to the speciic chronotope of each artist and her/his audience. To explore the acting conditions concerning tragedy at the end of the nine- teenth century we will focus on two performances, from 1897 and 1899, by two diferent theatre companies, representing two diferent chronotopes. The irst is Antigone by the Society for the Instruction of Ancient Greek Dramas in 1897, 2 and the second Jean Mounet-Sully’s performance of Oedipus the King in Athens in 1899. The irst tragedy performed by a professional company in Greece was An- tigone by Sophocles in 1863, 3 and was staged in line with the conventions of neoclassical tragedy, namely, it was performed on a proscenium arched stage with a conined chorus; the play was divided into acts and it was acted more in a melodramatic style rather than a speciically “tragic” one. This was the com- mon practice of the period. Neither the actors nor the audience acknowledged any diference between the two genres. 4 Generally, all professional productions followed a similar patern where costumes, sets and props were the same for all productions of the companies’ repertoire, including those of ancient tragedy. The music was composed by famous, oten foreign composers. For instance, in- cidental music that had been composed in 1841 by Felix Mendelssohn-Barthol- dy was used for the 1863 production of Antigone. 5 The German composer, whose intention had evidently been the phantasmagorical representation of plays, had composed his piece quite independently of the Greek production, representing a completely diferent tradition and culture. The music, which is the only ele- ment of the performance that survives today, explicitly indicates that the style of each production was deeply inluenced by the neoclassical approach to Greek tragedy. The actors tried to follow the dominant currents of the European theatre. The foundations were laid by the famous actor of Greek performances in Bucharest, Konstantinos Kyriakos Aristias. Aristias came to Athens right ater the founda- tion of the Greek State in 1830. However, his work in Bucharest did not have the