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 (Oedipusis 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
Ist TX RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday 6 November 2005
Sunday 14th April - Duration Part 1 - 47min53 secc