Marios Pontikas’ latest play, the ‘stage triptych’ Neighing, focuses on themes that have come to be characteristic of that author’s recent (post-2004) dramatic writing: namely, a profound and sarcastic mistrust towards human logos, as well as a despairing awareness of the advanced (and advancing) degeneration of humankind itself, whose self-congratulatory complacency Pontikas consistently undermines and satirizes. Populated by mythical figures taken right out of the Greek tragic or mythic tradition (Cassandra, the Centaur Chiron, the Erinyes, and, implicitly, Prometheus), Νeighing engages, either explicitly or allusively, in a dialogue with central Greek texts — principally, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Prometheus Bound, and the fragments of Heraclitus. This article is a first attempt at identifying and decoding the intertextual play of signs that permeates Neighing, by focusing on those aspects of it that are informed by classical Greek drama and philosophy. Notably, it is argued that Pontikas’ multiple and repeated invocations of classical antiquity are not to be seen as a means of self-legitimization, or as an appeal to an authority perceived as uncontested; on the contrary, they establish a subversively self-reflective discourse, whose affinities with the aesthetics of post-dramatic theatre are briefly discussed at the end of this paper.
