King Oedipus

page last updated 05/06/2010

text from the the director's programme notes

Ravenshead Theatre Group is branching out into new dramatic territory with this play from classical Greece. Oedipus is perhaps the best known of the ancient Greek texts, an extraordinary tale that has more than stood the test of time. The story would have been as familiar to the Greeks of 5th century BC as Robin Hood would be to us today.

The story of Oedipus starts before the play begins. Young Laius as a guest of King Pelops of Elis, became the king’s son’s tutor for chariot racing, but contrary to the laws of hospitality Laius abducted and raped him. In punishment, the gods laid a curse on Laius that he should be killed by his own son. To prevent this Laius, now King of Thebes, with his wife Queen Jocasta have their new-born son, Oedipus, cast out upon a hillside with his feet riveted together, to die.

Oedipus is secretly rescued and brought up in far away Corinth. Years later Oedipus learns from an oracle who tells that he is doomed to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified he runs away from home and his supposed parents.

He wanders the world until, at a place where three roads meet, he is involved in a road-rage incident where, out of character, he kills an old man and so unwittingly fulfils the first part of the prediction – the old man is his father, Laius.

When Oedipus comes to Thebes it is in the grip of a deadly monster, the Sphinx, who kills all who cannot answer her riddle. "What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?" Oedipus replies, "Man" (as an infant it crawls on all fours, later walks upright, and in old age needs a stick). Oedipus kills the Sphinx and is rewarded with the crown of Thebes and the hand of Queen Jocasta, unknown to all, his mother. The prophecy is thus fulfilled.

Sophocles’ play opens fifteen years later; by now Oedipus and Jocasta have two sons and two daughters … and the gods can no longer accept this affront against nature …

The original production was a single performance to the whole of the male (and possibly female) population of Athens; about 14 – 17,000 of them. There was a cast of three with each (male) actor taking many parts, each identified by a different mask. By contrast our performance, in the round and with a full cast, will be more intimate. We bring you much closer to the human drama that unfolds.

This production, in the hands of a strong cast headed by talented newcomer Richard Kinnard as Oedipus, is directed by Mark Breach who previously brought Under Milk Wood and Great Expectations to the Ravenshead stage.

Shakespeare is well known for his tragedies; we have all heard of King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth and may well be quite familiar with them. The power of tragedy as a dramatic form is well established; Shakespeare was certainly not the first to use it as Oedipus, a play two millenniums older attests. Tragedy is an art form depicting human suffering which by contradiction gives pleasure to the audience. Indeed Oedipus exemplifies one definition of tragedy as “a work of literature that results in a catastrophe for the main character … a king or a hero … the cause of the tragedy is a tragic flaw, or weakness, in his character”.

Freud is credited with using Oedipus as one of his ‘complexes’. In this he was far from original. Listen carefully and you will hear Jocasta briefly develop this idea; in lines written 2500 years before Freud got hold of it.