Ancient Greek comedy survives largely in fragmentary form, a condition traditionally regarded as a major obstacle to both philological interpretation and theatrical practice. While fragmentary tragedy has increasingly attracted the interest of theatre practitioners, comic fragments remain strikingly underrepresented on the contemporary stage. This article argues that this im-balance stems not from the dramaturgical limitations of comic fragments, but primarily from the absence of accessible and systematically organised research infrastructures capable of mediating between philological material and theatrical practice. Institutional and practical factors within theatre culture may also contribute to their marginal position on the modern stage. Drawing on cogni-tive approaches to perception and spectatorship, the article reconceives fragmentation as structurally compatible with contemporary theatre. Meaning in performance emerges through the integration of partial stimuli; fragmentary comedy therefore need not be reconstructed to function theatrically. What it requires is visibility, accessibility, and contextualisation. The article proposesthat digital research infrastructures can function not merely as repositories of information, but as epistemological tools that render dispersed evidence visible, navigable, and theatrically usable. Using the Menander Redivivus project as a developing model and presenting, as a case study, a performance proposal for the fragments of Menander’s Hēros, the article explores how digital mediation can reposition fragmentary comedy within contemporary theatre culture.
