OEDIPUS THE KING
by SOPHOCLES
In a new translation by ANTHONY BURGESS
A bleak altar half hidden by incense smoke holds down the front of the stage. Shaman figures appear, chanting to a kind of voodoo drumbeat. On the altar, the body of a child is laid. The darkness is pierced by a primal scream. A priest plunges his hand into the human sacrifice and lifts out the heart, thrusting it, like a savage challenge, toward the civilized middle-class audience at Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater.
The setting for Michael Langham's staging of Oedipus the King seems less Thebes than a jungle clearing. The tribal-dancing choruses, shaking their amulets, mandalas and animal skins, are less out of Sophocles than The Golden Bough. When Oedipus (Len Cariou) makes his entrance, emerging from the palace portals as if they formed a monstrous womb, he is less the king of a Greek city-state than an archetypal Everyman in a loincloth.
Jung's Nightmare. Langham is performing an act of reviving violence. He is doing to the polite 19th century conventions of Greek tragedy what directors like Peter Brook have done to the polite 19th century conventions of Shakespeare. Pseudo-traditional versions of Oedipus are staged as refined pageants. Directors assign masks, write long program notes about catharsis, and advise their puzzled Oedipuses to express hubris, which generally leaves them looking like damaged Roman coins. Langham has cut through the decorum of Greek revival to present Oedipus as a nightmare by Jung.
The Langham-Anthony Burgess Oedipus goes back beyond Sophocles to the myth from which he borrowed. Here they find the king a primitive hero who lifts one evil spell—the Sphinx's—only to bring down a worse spell by violating the ultimate taboo: incest. On the Guthrie stage, dark as the predawn of civilization, this ritual circle of plot is made to stand out like an elemental curse: by solving its riddle,* Oedipus destroys the Sphinx; by failing to solve soon enough the mystery of his own identity—whose son he is—Oedipus destroys himself.
What gets lost in reducing a Greek tragedy to a demonic Pan-legend—a sort of Clockwork Orange run back through the time machine? Despite the passionate resourcefulness of Actor Cariou, this neo-Neanderthal Oedipus becomes an anachronism when sophisticated lines like "Wisdom is a mode of suffering" are delivered about his shaggy head, or when that barbaric stage is filled with the most subtle verbal portraits of pride in the history of theater.
Atavistic Souls. There is more to Sophocles than Jung had dreamed of. Langham has performed his own sacrifice: he has given up the head of Oedipus to secure that bloody heart, and the contradictions cannot always be contained as Sophocles goes one way and Langham another. The nice English-repertory accents that lurk beneath those animal skins are also jarring, and above the Afro-Greek beat of Stanley Silverman's score, one hears the vaguely Elizabethan cadence of Burgess's script. But Langham's sacrifice is worth it. He has taken 20th century audiences, prepared to yawn and genuflect obediently before a dead classic, and shaken them to the bottom of their atavistic souls. He has created an Oedipus that bleeds and thus lives. —Melvin Maddocks