Greek tears Our love affair with tragedy

Irish theatre seems to have a particular affinity with Greek classical tragedy, if the number of productions staged here in recent years - usually in the form of "new" versions by Irish poets and playwrights - is anything to go by.

Seamus Heaney has mined the plays of Sophocles to huge acclaim, reworking Philoctetes as the basis for The Cure at Troy, first produced by Field Day at the Guildhall in Derry in 1990, and Antigone as The Burial at Thebes, which was staged at The Abbey in 2004.

Conall Morrison has also done a version of Antigone - as has Brendan Kennelly, whose 1988 version of Medea was followed by The Trojan Women, at The Peacock in 1993.

Most of these reworkings stick close to the structure and content of the originals, while leaving scope for poetic imagination. There is, of course, a school of thought which says that Greek plays are radical enough in the original, and adaptations pandering to contemporary tastes are a kind of wimping out. Who - us?