Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin

OEDIPUS by SOPHOCLES in a new version by Wayne Jordan

Let the day
Finish
What the night began
Shoot an arrow of hope
Into the heart
Of this broken city

 The city of Thebes hides a secret crime. Punished by the Gods, the citizens seek protection. They turn to their King. He saved them before. Can he save them again? Sophocles’ tragedy is an elaborate meeting of political drama, murder mystery and psychological thriller. Wayne Jordan’s new version of Oedipus invites us to confront vital questions of who we are and how we live together. Featuring an original score by Tom Lane and a cast of 19 actors, the Abbey Theatre is proud to present Oedipus as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.

BOOKING DETAILS FOR OEDIPUS

 24 September – 31 October Previews: 24 – 29 September on the Abbey stage Times: Mon – Sat 7.30pm, Matinees Sat 2pm Tickets: €13 – €45 / Conc. €13 – €23 Running Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Assisted Performances for Oedipus Sign Language Interpreted Performance: Thursday 22 October, 7.30pm Audio Described and Captioned Performance: Saturday 24 October, 2pm Related Events Talking Text Workshop: Oedipus 24 October workshop Oedipus Rex: A Reading 9 October reading

CREDITS

 Malcolm Adams Shepherd Karen Ardiff Chorus Fiona Bell Jocasta Muiris Crowley Chorus Hilda Fay Chorus Rachel Gleeson Chorus Peter Gowen Tiresias Mark Huberman Creon Esosa Ighodaro Chorus Nicola Kavanagh Chorus Damian Kearney Chorus Ger Kelly Chorus Ronan Leahy Stranger Charlotte McCurry Messenger / Chorus Pat Nolan Chorus Helen Norton Chorus Barry John O’Connor Oedipus Robert O’Connor Chorus Shane O’Reilly Chorus Wayne Jordan Director Ciarán O’Melia Set designer Sinéad Wallace Lighting designer Catherine Fay Costume designer Tom Lane Composer, musical director and sound designer Suzanne Savage Singing coach Sue Mythen Movement

The story of Oedipus was familiar to most citizens of the Greek city states in the period before Sophocles began to consider the legend a fit-ting subject for drama. Indeed, Sophocles’ older contemporary Aeschylus (525BC – 456BC) had devised his own trilogy of plays based on the legend but only his Seven Against Thebes has survived. Sophocles (497BC – 406BC), an eminent citizen, soldier and dramatist who was born in Colonus and lived in nearby Athens, wrote 123 plays but only little more than a handful have survived. He was a member of the triumvirate of great ancient Greek dramatists also including Aeschylus and Euripides. Sophocles’ Theban Trilogy which also includes the plays Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone is clearly his masterpiece. It reaches far beyond mere drama to encompass an entire period of history that has possibly not yet reached conclusion. The fundamental in-novations he introduced are still current, still form the basic vocabu-lary of theatre and narrative art itself.

The first consideration that must have occurred to Sophocles was how to present a story that was so well known to most Greeks, the myth of Oedipus ‘swell foot’. (Oedipus means swollen foot in ancient Greek for Oedipus was born with a serious disability and thus cast out onto the hillside as was the tradition in Greece at this time. Of course this tradition foreshadowed the modern practice by criminal regimes of eugenics or natural selection.) Therefore, the story begins in media res, when most of the important, conclusive elements are complete. Thus Sophocles discovered plot in the modern sense of a well-known story presented in an interrupted format that bypasses exposition and consists of flashbacks, recollected anecdotal evidence, dialogue and prophecy. This contributes to the ironic foreshadowing of the final act when the cruel dénouement explains all of the preceding events. The deck of cards that encompasses the story is therefore scattered and reassembled to stunning effect. The point is that the audience by the end of the play must realise that the world of order, creation and sense is illusory. Oedipus is over-whelmed by the intimate knowledge that the universe is finally senseless, amoral and meaningless. Even the chaos that engulfs Oedipus is insufficient to describe the nihilism that pervades his mind. The play describes an unstated dichotomy between the heroic life that Oedipus has seemingly chosen and the reality of his existence which is predicated upon a cruel destiny chosen for him by the gods or fate. The play demonstrates how human existence is balanced between the forces of determinism or fate and blind chance.

Initially the stage at the Abbey was cluttered with chairs indeed I thought I was in a production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs. The mise en scene remains unchanged throughout the rest of the play. Not only is the stage cluttered but the text also, cluttered with the imprint of interpretations, translations, revisions, adaptations from William Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud, from W.B.Yeats to Jacques Lacan. It is impossible to watch the play now without it being in every sense a post-Freudian text, the key to Freud’s depiction of the Oedipus Complex as a form of knowledge, a compulsory parable regarding taboo and a gateway to discovery of the unconscious. We remember that Freud said: ‘The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.’ The play also summons up Shakespeare’s Hamlet, itself a story seemingly based upon the myth of Oedipus or bearing remarkably contrasting and also complimentary themes. In his seminal and influential The Interpretation of Dreams Freud depicts the work of Sophocles and Shakespeare as precursors of his specifically Viennese and nineteenth-century science of psychoanalysis. In this work Freud coined the phrase ‘Oedipus Complex’ as a starting point to begin to depict the workings of the unconscious and the gradual socialisation of the (male) individual. The Irish poet W.B.Yeats, a contemporary of Freud, created his own adaptation of Sophocles’ play, a work which can still be experienced since Tyrone Guthrie’s version (1957) is still on YouTube. (It is also possible to spot a youthful William Shatner among the chorus!) Guthrie presents a traditional, rhetorical and stylised version of the play replete with the beautiful, authentic masks used by playwrights in ancient Greece. However, Wayne Jordan presents a more colloquial version interspersed with fragments of Yeats’ poetry in the choral odes performed between bouts of frenetic activity and suspense. Furthermore, the cast wear contemporary gear, indeed there is no attempt to locate the play in its original context. This may be a deliberate strategy or reflect upon the impecunity of the Abbey theatre. The chorus is Jordan’s most distinctive innovation since the magnificent choral odes composed by Sophocles are sung rather than spoken or chanted. This offers a more operatic version of the play since the choral odes neatly and precisely divide the play up into segments of action where revelation is matched with suspense. Yeats’ version of the play requires a thesis in its own right since Yeats was dependent on a previous translation of the play which was banal and forgettable. He did not know ancient Greek (but once declared petulantly ‘I have lost all my Greek!’) yet somehow fashions great poetry from his study some of which can be found in the adaptation but fragments also found their way into Yeats’ poetry collection The Tower.

An important aspect of Wayne Jordan’s production is the sparsity of the text, its anti-poetic origins in colloquial language and its realist impulse totally opposed to the earlier version by Tyrone Guthrie which required authenticity and a classical feel yet also appears rigid and wooden. Of course Jordan’s play epitomises the demands of a different time when fluidity and modernity appear to simulate authenticity but it is quite obvious the play is far from being authentic. Probably the biggest issue that Jordan might face are allegations of elitism and remoteness which he has been forced to address. However, Jordan’s version may be closer to the original than it seems. Jocasta’s suicide, for instance, happens off stage, as does Oedipus’s self-blinding. These events are reported by a narrator who is given the hapless task of recalling the ensuing events to the citizens/chorus. In ancient Greek drama violence also occurred discretely offstage, an authentic element ignored by, for instance, Marina Carr in her play By the Bog of Cats. The actors reiterated the contemporary feel of the play by reading their lines in an authentic, contemporary manner. In Guthrie’s version the actors perform their lines with immense gravitas and a dignity that ultimately becomes pompous and self-consciously theatrical. However, Guthrie’s version was made at a different time when the shadow of the Second World War had hardly faded. Thus the seriousness of implied Modernism in his production is appropriate since the world at that stage lived under threat of nuclear destruction. For me the outstanding performer was Fiona Bell as Jocasta because it was never clear from her performance whether she really knew who Oedipus was. This is the crux of the play. Barry John O’Connor as Oedipus conveyed the growing sense of paranoia that is becoming intense and pervasive as Thebes is being destroyed by famine and pestilence that the gods have declared is a consequence of the murderer of Laius, Oedipus’s natural father, being at large in the city. Ultimately Creon, Jocasta’s brother and Oedipus’s uncle/brother, takes up the reins of power. He is also to be prominent in the next two plays in the trilogy. Oedipus, the unwitting plaything of the god Apollo, god of the sun and of music, has realised his tragic destiny. At the end of the play, he implies that this destiny is to be vital, sacred and prophetic. He thus bids farewell to his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, and wanders back into the wilderness outside the city gates, the place where he originated from. Of course incest was common among the ruling families of the ancient world, the practice whereby a ruling family could cling onto its monopoly of power. But this led to certain fatal consequences, the thinning of the gene pool and eventual genetic deformities such as mental illness being common. To counteract this, aristocratic families eventually were forced to share power by inviting outsiders and commoners to enter into marriage contracts with their members. Sophocles’ play is both dangerous and relevant because these archaic practices are still tried and tested methods whereby a dominant group retains its dominance through these shady practices and nefarious deeds. However, he details the consequences of such interference with our nature and his play becomes a palpable political and legal tract as well as a stunning drama. Wayne Jordan’s version of Oedipus by Sophocles is a text and performance based re-working of an original. It is hardly a visual feast but it is a lyrical one.

Paul Murphy, The Abbey Theatre Dublin, October 2015