( Oedipus means swollen foot in ancient Greek for Oedipus was born with a serious disability and thus cast out onto the hillside as was the tradition in Greece at this time . Of course this tradition foreshadowed the modern practice by criminal regimes of eugenics or natural selection .) Therefore , the story begins in media res , when most of the important , conclusive elements are complete . Thus Sophocles discovered plot in the modern sense of a well-known story presented in an interrupted format that bypasses exposition and consists of flashbacks , recollected anecdotal evidence , dialogue and prophecy . This contributes to the ironic foreshadowing of the final act when the cruel dénouement explains all of the preceding events . The deck of cards that encompasses the story is therefore scattered and reassembled to stunning effect . The point is that the audience by the end of the play must realise that the world of order , creation and sense is illusory . Oedipus is over-whelmed by the intimate knowledge that the universe is finally senseless , amoral and meaningless . Even the chaos that engulfs Oedipus is insufficient to describe the nihilism that pervades his mind . The play describes an unstated dichotomy between the heroic life that Oedipus has seemingly chosen and the reality of his existence which is predicated upon a cruel destiny chosen for him by the gods or fate . The play demonstrates how human existence is balanced between the forces of determinism or fate and blind chance .
Initially the stage at the Abbey was cluttered with chairs indeed I thought I was in a production of Eugene Ionesco ’ s The Chairs . The mise en scene remains unchanged throughout the rest of the play . Not only is the stage cluttered but the text also , cluttered with the imprint of interpretations , translations , revisions , adaptations from William Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud , from W . B . Yeats to Jacques Lacan . It is impossible to watch the play now without it being in every sense a post-Freudian text , the key to Freud ’ s depiction of the Oedipus Complex as a form of knowledge , a compulsory parable regarding taboo and a gateway to discovery of the unconscious . We remember that Freud said : ‘ The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious . What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied .’ The play also summons up Shakespeare ’ s Hamlet , itself a story seemingly based upon the myth of Oedipus or bearing remarkably contrasting and also complimentary themes . In his seminal and influential The Interpretation of Dreams Freud depicts the work of Sophocles and Shakespeare as precursors of his specifically Viennese and nineteenth-century science of psychoanalysis . In this work Freud coined the phrase ‘ Oedipus Complex ’ as a starting point to begin to depict the workings of the unconscious and the gradual socialisation of the ( male ) individual . The Irish poet W . B . Yeats , a contemporary of Freud , created his own adaptation of Sophocles ’ play , a work which can still be experienced since Tyrone Guthrie ’ s version ( 1957 ) is still on YouTube . ( It is also possible to spot a youthful William Shatner among the chorus !) Guthrie presents a