In writing about Our Town last week, I urged that we all should "read what's there, not what you think is there". Let me amend that: "read what's there, not what you think is there ... or wish was there".I should take my own advice.
I so desperately want to be able to read Oedipus Rex
and find the suppleness I find in Shakespeare. I want it to transcend the theater it was written for, and become malleable. I want it to withstand the pressures of style. I want it to adapt into an intimate chamber drama.But it doesn't.
Some of it is translation, most of it is form. These are public rituals more than they are what we think of as theatre. They straddle the line between public worship and drama. The seeds of a character-driven play are there ... but they are just seeds: that's the realm of adaptation and of "what I wish was there". The Aristotelian Unities are partially responsible: with no passage of time or place, we only see public acts and public revelations: there is no contrast, no peek behind the scenes into what happens when these characters are not on stage.
I was struck again reading Oedipus Rex by just how well I know they story, just how I am waiting for it all to play out just as I know it will. But that's not unique to me, it is the essential element of this play. This was not a new story to the Athenians, either: they, too, knew what was coming. It's part of the play's force, this inescapable inevitability of fate and destiny. It's so deeply embedded in the text that it's where I'd have to start as a director: how do we heighten that sense that we've seen it before, instead of ignoring it?
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"This was not a new story to the Athenians, either; they, too, knew what was coming. It's part of the play's force, this inescapable inevitability of fate and destiny."
Not so much. Destiny or fate is not as much a theme in Oedipus Rex as we modern readers think it to be. The play is much more about human suffering than it is about a fixed series of incidents that Oedipus cannot avoid.
Think about it: if Oedipus was caught up in fate, required from before his birth to carry out a series of actions, the play would have no purpose. In fact, Oedipus never in the play is forced to carry out an action he did not choose. He chose to run away from his "fate" by abandoning Corinth. He chose to travel to Thebes. He chose to kill an old man who was unknown to him. He chose to even try to out-guess the Sphinx in a riddle.
The only way that fate in the play can be argued for is to say that perhaps Oedipus's destiny was preordained by his character. He was arrogant, stubborn, and constantly, without heed to consequences, in need of truth.
This drive for truth as Oedipus's downfall (not his fate of downfall) is even underscored by the many ironies of the drama. He calls Teiresias blind, yet Oedipus is blind to the truth. He curses the murderer when he himself murdered Laius. He tries to help Thebes by finding the murderer yet his discovery leads to more instability. And, of course, there are many more.
To say Oedipus Rex is not a character-driven play is nonsense in light of the fact that Oedipus's inquiries, his constant need to determine the truth drags the story into more and more tragedy. Oedipus's character- his stubbornness, his search for answers, and his arrogance- are the driving forces slowly unfolding the tangled plot. His character is the reason that tragedy befalls Oedipus; by first trying to escape his "fate," his avoidance leads him to fulfill it.
More importantly, his character brings up other questions: is suffering the only way to gain knowledge? which is more important, the ruler or the people? what all entails responsibility for past mistakes? and what are the consequences to pride?
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