Derek Mahon-Oedipus-Oedipus at Colonus

Pairing 'King Oedipus' and 'Oedipus at Colonus' creates a single play unified by the arc of the hero's tragic fate. SUNDAY PLAYHOUSE OEDIPUS by Derek Mahon after Sophocles' King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus With Stephen Rea in the title role Freud's reading of Oedipus mobilised most twentieth century interpretations of the plotline - boy kills father and sleeps with mother, then blinds himself in a fugue of self-loathing - but many modern anthropologists see the story as a liturgical ritual of scapegoating and human sacrifice, in which the victim is sufficiently like the community-in-crisis to represent it, and at the same time sufficiently different (Oedipus is a foreigner with a clubfoot) to stand for the apparently alien threat to its survival. Perhaps that explains why the play was performed as a Christian Passion Narrative in Constantinople during the Byzantine period and why Oedipus was identified as more saint than sinner, an innocent man accused unjustly of the monstrous crimes of patricide and incest - in short, more a lamb of god thanh a black sheep. Master poet Derek Mahon's fine new verse-translation of two of the Sophoclean plays in the cycle - Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus - completes a task begun last year by Seamus Heaney in his treatment of Antigone (The Burial at Thebes), and is affectionately dedicated to that nobel man. If either writer were to script a short and obscene satyr play to accompany the three dramas, we could watch the whole trilogy as performed in the Athenian theatre of Dionysos five hundred years before Jesus. Stephen Rea plays the clubfoot king to Sean McGinley's Creon and Susan Fitzgerald's Jocasta in a production in which a guard of honour of Northern and Southern actors bring to life the Theban and Athenian cultures of classical Greece in all their violence and religiosity. Producer: Aidan Mathews RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday 6 November 2005, 8.02pm ————————-===== Sophocles (496-406 bc) was the author of more than a hundred plays, of which only seven survive; these include three based on the saga of the royal house of Thebes: Antigone (c.442), King Oedipus (c.430) and Oedipus at Colonus (406). Rachel Kitzinger, writing of Derek Mahon’s Bacchae, noted that his ‘great achievement emerges most strikingly in the beauty of his choral odes’; and the same is true of Oedipus. This new version is striking too for its dramatic invention. It reminds us that Sophocles’ Theban plays aren’t only about Oedipus but about Thebes, the human community. The city is stricken by an unidentified plague: everyone suffers. Oedipus, the cause of this, will also bring redemption. Destroyer and saviour both, he will rescue Thebes through shocking self-discovery and expiation. By pairing King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus Derek Mahon creates a single play unified by the arc of the hero’s tragic fate.

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.