Oedipus Rex

Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that the ideal drama should be grounded on a plot so firm that, "even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one." The highly stylized production of Sophocles' masterpiece now playing at the Brattle is sure to be the subject of heated controversy in many a Hum 5 section and coffee house; but the iron anatomy remains which no mode of production can bend. Even those who would have preferred a less liturgical and more "human" enactment of the tragedy, therefore, will leave the theatre convinced again that Aristotle could not have picked a better paradigm of elemental power and dramatic impact than Oedipus Rex.

To take this production on its own terms, you've first of all got to disabuse yourself of the notion that you're watching a film. You may be looking at a screen, but what you're seeing is the stage production done by the Shakepearian Festival Players in Stratford, Ontario, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie. Otherwise, the narrow confines of the stage, the incessant shouting of the actors, and the occasionally excessive posturing needed to impress the last rows of the balcony, will prove annoying. If you want to, it's also easy to laugh at the formal gestures, fantastic masks, and chanted choruses taken over from the ancient theatre: but don't.

For here is Greek tragedy as it should be done, like neither a Shakespearian character study and display of verbal pyrotechnics, nor a contemporary inquest into the septic souls of one's nerve-wracked next-door neighbors. To meet with Oedipus Rex on its own grounds, you approach it like neither Hamlet nor Death of a Salesman, but rather as if it were a Solemn High Mass. It reminds us that the "play" was originally a religious ritual, after all, even if this is a spirit our own age has successfully recaptured on the stage only in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

Yet the similarity to Christian sacrament won't carry you to the core of Oedipus, either, for Sophocles' drama is above all else a pagan rite of purification. It is a religious outlook worthy of general reconsideration, and the present film will show you not only what the Athenians saw on stage twenty-five centuries ago but what they saw in the world and the cosmos as well. The masks of the actors bear a bizarre and wholly appropriate resemblance to the grotesque faces of the magnified reptiles and insects seen in the Brattle's introductory short subject. Tanya Moiseiwitsch has provided lighting, costumes, and a set too stark ever to suggest some transcendent tempering of the harsh natural order of things. And Yeats' translation of the chorus' last lines--"Call no man fortunate that is not dead./The dead are free from pain"--crystallizes the pessimistic fatalism and brooding sense of ultimate doom that pervade the whole from the outset, and to which only a production of this nature could have done full justice.

Anyhow, Mother enjoyed it.