This one is from the Times:

Chewing gum, high heels, booming amplifiers and other modern plagues are seriously damaging Greece’s 2,500-year-old outdoor theatres and should be banned, according to the country’s powerful archaeological establishment.

As the shows become more elaborate, with bulkier sets, highvolume speakers for acoustic shock effect, and high heels clattering on the ancient marble, experts fear that theatres such as Epidavros, built 2,400 years ago for men in leather sandals and relying on natural acoustics, are under threat.

Add the countless wads of used chewing gum that regularly stud the old terraced marble seats, requiring painstaking removal, and the Central Archaeological Council has declared war on modernity. “We find ourselves regularly cleaning kilos of chewing gum from the Herod Atticus theatre,” said Kathy Paraschi, an architect working on the Parthenon restoration. “It’s an amazing and awful situation.”

She added: “Speaking as a woman and an Athenian, I like my fashionable spiky heels.” But wearing them to Epidavros is “like taking a hammer and splitting the blocks apart”.

The Central Archaeological Council is considering a ban on chewing gum and high heels, though the Herod Atticus theatre on the south side of the Acropolis is made of tougher Attic marble and can better stand up to modern footwear fashion.

As if that were not enough, avant-garde directors are being blamed for damaging the sites where ancient writers once performed their plays. “Despite repeated warnings,” the council said in a recent statement, “stage sets seem to be getting bigger and decibel levels louder. This could inflict damage on the ancient structures.”

Some see the archaeologists’ complaints as part of a conservative campaign. At Epidavros last month Matthias Langhoff, a German director, interrupted his production of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, revamped as a modern antiwar play. In mid-performance he harangued his audience to denounce what he called “Greek culture-politics”. The council had previously objected to Mr Langhoff’s large set and avant-garde interpretation, which they said took unacceptable liberties with Sophocles’s original text.

Mrs Paraschi complained that many modern directors “don’t respect the rules about keeping the theatres safe and clean”. “Is Greece really protecting its antiquities?” wrote a reviewer in Kathimerini newspaper.

“We love them, of course, [but] in any other way, in all the other crucial ways that actually matter, we don’t really pay them that much attention.”

Perhaps more interesting is a letter to the editor from the Times archives (August 10, 1937):

The acoustic properties of the theatre at Epidaurus, and the other Greek theatres mentioned by your correspondents. are well known. I am surprised that no traveller has mentioned the little theatre at Delphi, from whose back seats a listener can hear a whisper from the orchestra. The big theatres of Asia Minor, notably those at Ephesus and Pergamnos, are also remarkable for their acoustics. Surely the explanation is to be sought not in the clarity of the atmosphere, as one of your correspondents suggests, but in the care taken by the ancient architects in selecting their sites. All these theatres are built into hillsides; thus the actors had a wall behind them and a rising slope befole them. if the audiences of ancient times could take a part in this correspondence we might hear another side to the question. It is obvious that when theatres became large enough to accom- modate crowds of 40,000, as they did in Hellenistic and later times, there must have been some difficulty in hearing the actors, no matter how good the acoustics may have been. It was for this reason that the Greeks installed microphones in their theatres to catch and distribute the sound vibrations. These instruments were inverted bell-shaped vessels of bronze, which were placed in niches about the building, presumably all round the Kot.ov, or cavea. The architect Vitruvius tells us that the Greeks called these microphones hXeia, and that it was possible to adjust them (or " tune-in ") to any required musical pitch. I am, Sir, your obedient servant. H. V. MORTON.

Mr Morton's contentions have, of course, been recently scientifically confirmed in regards to site selection ...