( 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