Download I can remember exactly when I saw my first Greek Tragedy

The Passion and Power of Narrative in Greek
Tragedy
Frank McGuinness
Centre for Hellenic Studies 25th Anniversary celebrations
King’s College London, 22nd May 2014
I can remember exactly when I saw my first Greek Tragedy. It was as a teenager in my
Donegal home. The BBC broadcast a play on television called Electra played by the
magnificent actress, Eileen Atkins. Not merely did I know nothing about it before seeing
it, I also knew nothing about the story. The impact of Electra is with me to this day – the
face of the woman herself, the white shirt of her brother, the jewels of her mother, the
black scarf covering the hair of the neighbours scrutinising everything that happened.
Prior to seeing this, for me ancient culture consisted of Caesar’s interminable wars, the
impossibly intricate odes of Horace, all of this slog sweetened at times by lines from the
First Book of Virgil’s Aeneid, their relish, their radiance. From Virgil I got a smell of the
mystery that might lie in Latin literature, attracting me as surely as the obsession with
datives and pluperfects puzzled me. But there was no puzzle nor riddle about Electra. I
watched it and realized almost for the first time with any piece of theatre one absolute
fact – I know what this means. I know this woman’s passion – the necessity to articulate
that passion. I know the familiar loyalty that inspires such passion. I know the worst
crime is to betray that loyalty. I know the necessity to nurse a grudge until that nursing
turns into harming, self harming. I know, in short, the deep connection between love and
hatred that lies at the core of Electra, and I loved the play for its hatred, its purity, its
ferocity, its capacity to destroy. I knew these things – I recognised them in this
performance because as I said earlier of where I am from – Donegal, that place divided in
the no-man’s-land both north and south that forms the politics of our island , that isolated
county, that lonely, strange, savage, sophisticated community from which I sprang,
whose marks I bore and bear, that inheritance of peasant ferocity crossed with
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philosophic depth, depth that comes from years, centuries of brooding what it mean to be
of – what it means to suffer from – the intimate and exacting gods and demons of the
family, the tribe that gives, and, if necessary, takes life. In short, as a boy, I was ready for
Electra. But it would be many years before I would meet her again.
My career as a playwright began in the early 1980’s. My first plays concerned
themselves with work and religion. The shirt factory, industry of my native town,
Buncrana, lay at the centre of The Factory Girls. A troubled sexuality, violated too early,
provides the broken music of Baglady. The Protestant work ethic, its power and passing,
inform every episode of Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme.
The Roman Catholic traditions Donegal had steeped me in provided the secrets and
sacraments that pervade Innocence and Carthaginians, each seeking to violate the
sacredness I was then in the business of rejecting with as much violence as that same
Catholic Church had inflicted on me, and so many. But despite the joy of finding and
extending the range of my voice, I knew that were I to continue writing for the theatre, I
must seek sustenance and challenge in more than the materials of my own immediate life.
Opportunities to meet such challenges, to locate such sustenance, presented themselves
early to me in my career. In 1987 I was asked to provide versions of Ibsen’s
Rosmersholm for NTL and Lorca’s Yerma for the Abbey in Dublin. The gap between
these two authors is as wide as can be but to bridge them was for me an irresistible piece
of creative engineering. That began the practice I have pursued consistently over the past
25 years. I inform my plays with the experience I’ve tried to acquire from working on
the major authors of our shared European past. So it was in 1997 that I received a request
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from the Donmar Theatre in London – would I provide them with a version of Electra, by
Sophocles? And the memories sprang to life.
Sprang to life, I say, but shocked me into silence – or so this request first threatened. I
knew I could not see this text with the devouring eyes of a Donegal young fellow. I had
learned too much about theatre to have that particular type of hunger. So, for the first
time, I set down and read the literal the theatre sent. And I felt nothing. No compassion,
no closeness, nothing. These people and their dilemmas were a million miles from me.
This coldness told me I could not do what was being asked of me. Here was a task
beyond me. That, of course, enraged me. That was failure. So I read the literal again,
and in my anger, I had found Electra. She had come to me and saved the play for me, the
play that in my memory I had treasured so long, for now memory was only a weapon –
the necessity was to act, and to act in this case was to write, write as fiercely as possible,
write in white heat – beginning, middle and end. This was the only way I could work on
Electra, for I had convinced myself the play had possessed me.
Or maybe it was the person, the person of Electra herself. I knew before starting she
would be played by the great actress, Zoe Wanamaker. I had that superlative voice,
capable of registering any emotion, intelligent enough to confound any darkness, subtle
and strange enough to always be her own woman – that voice aided and abetted me in the
writing. And I admit that it was the power of that being Electra herself, that thrilled me
into taking on the challenge of the Greeks.
Electra
Divine light.
Sweet air,
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Again hear
My pain.
Divine light,
Sweet air,
Again hear
My pain.
Have you not witnessed when morning breaks
My heart break, my heart break?
When night falls, I do not feast
In this house of ghosts.
I lie alone.
My father’s dead.
He did not die in war.
He does not lie on a foreign shore.
Here, at home,
My mother’s hands turned red
With his blood. Adulteress,
Adulterer, she and Aegisthus,
Split him open with an axe.
The tree fell,
And father, I am left to dwell
Alone in your house, my back
Against the wall,
Weeping for my father dead,
Mourning my dead father.
But I swear, while my eyes see
The sun or stars in the sky,
I will never cease to cry out
My pain and my complaint.
I will be like the poor nightingale
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Who killed her young,
Then sorrow raped her heart.
That is the song I will spill
Through this house where blood was spilt.
I call upon Persephone,
I call upon the dead,
I call upon the Furies,
Revenge my father’s blood-stained marriage bed,
Revenge my father,
Send me back my brother,
I can no longer stomach the size of my sorrow.
At the core of her character is that declaration, that revelation, that torture, that threat,
‘My father’s dead.’ That grief, that pain – I made the focus of the part, and the part is, for
me, the beating, broken heart of the play. In trying to put it on a stage in London in 1997,
I saw my job as being to record the cry of loss echoing from the wilds of Greece down to
our day, always bearing in mind the wonderful warning of T.S. Eliot, ‘We think we know
more than the writers of the past. Precisely so – and they are what we know.’ Electra is a
wrenching study of the violence of mourning, mourning a murdered father, mourning
sharpened even more keenly by knowledge of his murderer – self confessed murderer
Agamemnon’s wife, Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra. The intense analysis of Electra’s
suffering is the blood of the play, but its flesh and bones are the war between mother and
daughter, avenger and revenger, each hell or heaven bent on proving the other wrong in
the exercise of their anger.
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Anger again – that dominant passion. I adored the fury of these women, the clarity of
their eloquence engaged as they were in the brute demolition of each other’s truth. And
behind it all one terrible gut wrenching question – when love is lost, what comes instead?
A grief to fill the earth, an absence never replenished, a sorrow beyond all sorrow, ‘I can
no longer stomach the size of my sorrow.’ The sheer scale of feeling operating in Electra
– the monumental sense of loss – the factions each convinced of their own correctness –
all these are meat and drink to the playwright, but there is in Sophocles an underlying
code that keeps these oceanic surges under his control, and that code is as simple, as
subtle as his story. If with Oedipus Sophocles is an extraordinary chronicler of how the
human mind copes with extremes of terror, the terror that lasts, the terror that defines,
then he matches that imaginative analysis with marvellous narrative dexterity. Electra’s
character is at the dramatic core of that play, but it is a character framed by technique,
and the technique is at times as sly as the speech is shocking.
Nowhere is that wonderful slyness more apparent than in the very opening of the text. If
Sophocles is master of anything, then it is in his adeptness at playing with time. History
here is a series of masks to be assumed and discarded as best befits the plot. Electra’s
past is defined by the death of Agamemnon and the ensuing grief that consumes her. Her
future, she believes, lies in her hopes for her exiled brother, Orestes – he will live to
revenge their father against their mother. But the drama opens with the arrival of Orestes
and a faithful family servant, bringing with them the revelation that Orestes will be
reported dead, crushing, apparently, all Electra’s hopes for her future. The result of this
disguise is that Electra, defined by her past, hoping for her future, loses her grip on the
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present which has become a complex meeting of life-in-death and death-in-life. She
believes in her brother’s slaughter as deeply, as utterly, as she believed him her saviour.
She listens to the Servant’s graphic, indeed cinematic, picturing of how Orestes met his
end in a chariot race. Clytemnestra’s reaction is a mixture of relief and regret. Electra
gives full vent to the violence of her loss, an intensity that reaches climax when Orestes
himself hands his sister what she imagines to be his ashes.
Electra
If those are his ashes, give me that to hold.
I’ll weep for that dust, and for myself.
I’ll weep for my whole family.
Orestes
Give this to her.
She means no harm to it.
She’s a friend to him, or one of his family.
Electra
Orestes, the man I loved most,
This is all that is left of you.
I sent you away from here, full of hope,
But your return has emptied all hope from me.
Now you are nothing,
And I hold you in my hands,
But the day you left, you were the light of day.
I wish I had died before I saved you from death.
I sent you into a foreign land.
You could have fallen here beside your father,
You could have lain with him in his grave.
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But you died in exile, far from home, from your sister.
It was a sad death.
I was not there.
I could not wash your lovely corpse with my hands.
I could not snatch your lovely bones from the pyre.
Strangers’ hands buried you.
You come back to me as dust, a handful of dust.
I nursed you as a baby, I didn’t mind the bother,
You were never your mother’s child, you were mine.
No one else in that house cared for you but me.
You called me sister – sister you called me.
All vanished in a day, dead with your death.
The wind’s come and blown everything away.
Your father’s dead, and I’m dead, and you’re lost.
Those who stand against us laugh.
Your mother, who is no mother, is mad with joy.
Her crimes, I know, you would have put a stop to them.
But fate is cruel, your fate and mine.
It does not bring me your beautiful face.
No, it delivers cold ash and useless shadow.
Pain –
Pain –
Pain –
Pain –
Pain –
You have destroyed me, my loved, loved brother,
Yes, you have destroyed me.
Take me with you.
I am nothing, let me turn into nothing with you.
We live as one together on this earth.
Now I want to die with you in the grave.
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For the dead to not mourn, they do not mourn.
We, the audience, listen to that terrible lament, that near asphyxiation of ‘pain-pain-painpain-pain’ and we know it is for a man not dead but alive on stage. It is as if two times
schemes are now operating – that which is, and that which might be. Action is
theatrically invested with a double meaning, and each is immediately effective. We are
instantaneously involved in and removed from Electra’s suffering, the suffering at the
core of her character, but not at the core of the play. What lies there is the story, the
whole story of the plot, and that demands resolution. It is resolved – Orestes kills
Clytemnestra with the aid of Electra, and when that deed is done, even before that deed is
done, Electra, that great woman, has served her dramatic purpose. There is a deep irony
here, in that the death of her mother is the death of her daughter’s dramatic power. When
the object of her hatred has been eradicated, what is there left of Electra? Orestes, but he
has already sounded warnings to her
Electra
Who could be silent? Who could say nothing?
I’ve seen you.
I never thought – I gave up hope.
Orestes
You see me here because the gods told me to come now.
Electra
If the gods brought you here, this is their greatest gift.
And in your being here, I see the hand of heaven.
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Orestes
I don’t want to limit your happiness, but it’s too great –
You’re frightening me.
Electra exhausts the energy that has kept her alive, allowing her to carry the burden of
grief life has hurled at her. The play divests her of that burden, but more is to follow.
There is no peace – no leisure – the plot must continue. The only constant is suffering,
and retaliation for that suffering. Yet these can take many forms, never entirely
predicable, as is the case of Hecuba by Euripides.
After working on Electra, I let its power settle and hoped it would infiltrate my own
writing. It did in strange fashion – in paradoxical fashion. My next play, Dolly West’s
Kitchen, centred on the powers shared by mother and daughters, but this time the mother,
Rima West, diagnosed from her own isolation the isolation afflicting her children, Dolly,
Justin and Esther. She sets in motion events that will allow – that will demand the young
choose their destiny, and those choices will free or enslave them. It is up to them how to
determine their fate. It is a fate that will leave one at home in Donegal, and fate that will
take the others into exile. That theme of exile, that choice of fate, led me to my next
obsession in Greek theatre – as I said, Hebuca.
Like Electra, Hecuba was performed at the Donmar Theatre in London. Again a
magnificent actress, Clare Higgins, played the central role. I had seen her work and
respected it greatly for its astounding powers of concentration and the searing intelligence
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that allowed her to illuminate the deepest pits of darkness. She is an actress that
understands, above all else, loneliness, and as the prophet Tiresias is the loneliest of men,
so Hecuba is, for me, the most lonely of women. The great queen of Troy, the mother of
the tribe, the lady who has fallen to the very depths, Hecuba has haunted the European
imagination since the story of her city’s destruction has first been told. She has become
the embodiment of loss – the mother weeping, the woman abandoned, an emblem of
those without power, the most dispossessed of the dispossessed, her life a long elegy, her
agony beyond bearing. And yet there’s more to it in the play of Euripides. The play
caught my attention and would not let it go by reason of its contradictions. Why and how
does the pitiful Hecuba turn pitiless? What way can the victim use her victimhood to turn
victor? She who has received such violence at the hands of men, how does she prove
herself as violent – more violent than them? The mother who lost all her children, who
loses two children, a son and a daughter, in the course of the play’s action – how can she
arrange without hint of compassion the murder of more children, her enemy’s children?
These were the questions driving me to find out more about how the play worked, and
what was the specific imprint of Euripides as a playwright on this story?
He gives us full access to the enormity of Hecuba’s anguish. The ghost of her last
surviving son sets the scene.
The ghost of Polydorus enters.
Polydorus
I am Polydorus, son of Hecuba.
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Priam is my father.
I am dead.
I come from that darkness –
The abyss, the gates of godless hell.
Son of Hecuba,
Priam is my father –
He sent me from Troy,
Besieged by the Greeks;
Fearing the fall of Troy,
He secreted me
Away to Thrace,
To the home of his friend,
Polymestor, old friend
Who ploughs that fertile land,
Who rules its horsemen.
My father hid with me
A hoard of gold.
Should the walls of Troy fall,
His children would not want.
I was Priam’s youngest son.
The runt with no spear,
The arm without armour,
That’s why he sped me
In secret from my home.
The war went our way –
The city was not shafted –
The towers did not break,
Troy, towers of Troy,
And my brother Hector,
He won the lucky day.
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Then I was the pet, the pup,
Fawned on by my father’s friends,
Honoured guest in Thrace,
Through my pampered heart ached.
Then, Troy fell, destroyed,
And so too did Hector.
My father’s hearth smashed,
Razed to the ground,
He too turned to dust,
At the altars our gods built,
Slaughtered by Achilles’ son,
His dirty blood hand.
My father’s friend killed me,
His friend killed myself.
He did it for the gold,
I had none to defend me.
He kicked my corpse,
Kicked it into the ocean.
He did it for the gold,
To keep it in his house.
Times I lie on the shore,
Times I roll in the sea’s swell,
The water’s ebb and flow,
None to mourn me,
Nor to bury me.
Now I leave my corpse,
I fly above Hecuba,
My mother – three days,
The same days since she,
My heart-sore mother,
Came to this alien land,
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From Troy – Troy.
The Greeks and their ships,
They sit idle in Thrace.
Achilles’ ghost has appeared
Above his tomb.
He’s halted the army’s sails
As they steered the sea to home.
He desires my sister,
He asks for Polyxena,
He wants her as his sacrifice,
Her life for his honour.
He’ll get what he craves –
His crones will see to that.
My sister will die today.
That is sealed and settled.
My mother shall look down,
She’ll see two dead children,
Her son and doomed daughter.
The broken waves carry me
To land at a servant’s feet –
That way I will be buried.
I asked a favour from the dead,
From those who rule over them.
Free me into my mother’s hand,
Let her put me in the earth.
That’s what I want – what I’ll get.
But I’ll back away from her,
Get out of Hecuba’s way.
She’s seen me somehow –
She’s frightened,
She who was queen,
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Housed in a palace.
Now your days are bondage,
You are last who once was first,
Your good fortune’s soured to bad,
For a god devours you.
In that brilliant condensation of the Trojan War, Euripides turns his focus entirely on
Hecuba as survivor. The dilemma he will dramatize is not simply how is she survivor
nor what has she survived, but what will survival do to this woman? Is the price to be
paid too high? Is the price so high that in essence she ceases to be who she is, becoming
instead nothing more than a casualty of the war? Is the sacrifice such that she stays being
Hecuba? Has suffering destroyed her as completely as her city of Troy is destroyed?
Hecuba is a woman in pain, yes – she is also a woman in panic. Panic is what creates the
initial drama, the panic of losing as human sacrifice to dead Achilles, her beloved
daughter, her good girl, Polyxena. Wily Odysseus comes for the girl, ignoring Hecuba’s
pleas. Polyxena herself manifests astounding courage – a tribute to her mother’s rearing,
a contrast to her mother’s frantic attempts to save her child’s life. The Greeks are
adamant, the virgin must die. She does die, and her method of dying is told in some
detail by the old Greek, Talthybius and how Polyxena meets her end like a champion, a
match for any of the men of her tribe.
Talthybius
I wept when your daughter died.
I’ll weep again telling you how.
The whole army of the Greeks gathered,
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Waiting at the tomb for her sacrifice.
Achilles’ son took Polyxena by the hand.
He stood her on the top of the mound.
I watched close by, so did young men,
Selected from among the Greeks,
Their hands ready to restrain her
Should your lamb make any leap.
Achilles’ son took a chalice, solid gold.
His two hands raised it up, full on high:
A libation to his dead father.
He signalled this command to me –
Proclaim silence among the Greeks.
I stood in their midst and cried,
Keep silence, all of you, quiet – silence.
The crowd grew calm, no breath of wind.
He said: Here, Father, son of Peleus,
Here is wine to please. To summon the dead.
Come drink the virgin’s dark devout blood
The army and myself offer up to you.
Hear us graciously, let us leave for home,
Free our ships so we sail for home.
That’s what he said – the army prayed with him.
He grasped his sword by the neck,
He bared it from the sheath,
He gave the sign to the chosen lads,
They were to grab hold of the girl.
She saw that, then she had her say.
Greeks, you have ridden roughshod through Troy,
But I will die of my own free will.
Let no man’s hand touch my body.
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I give up my neck without flinching.
I die a free woman – do not bind me.
I call on the gods, I am royal birth,
Do not shame me, a slave among the dead.
The boys roared their approval.
Agamamnon ordered, do not touch her.
They followed his command.
She heard this word from her masters.
Then she seized her robe.
She ripped it.
From her shoulder to her waist.
The middle of her waist.
The pit of her stomach.
She showed her breasts.
Beautiful as a statue.
She sank to the ground.
She spoke her bravest words.
Do you wish to slash my breasts?
Hit here.
Is it my neck you crave?
My throat is waiting.
With pity for the girl –
He did not want to – Achilles’ son had
To cut the breath from her body
With his iron sword.
Streams of blood spouted.
She was dying, but no man saw
What she did not want seen.
She died a good girl,
A modest girl.
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When she breathed her last
Each of the Greeks honoured her,
All in his separate way.
Some covered her corpse with leaves.
Others built a pyre with logs of fir.
Any man doing nothing stood accused.
Why do you not honour this girl?
Pay homage to her great heart.
Salute her noble soul.
That is what I say about your dead daughter.
You have been blessed with the best of children.
But woman, yours is a sorrow beyond sorrow.
The great question posed by this play – its great theatrical challenge – is when, precisely
when, Hecuba starts to stop being the grieving mother and becomes the avenging
warrior? I would argue that it is a mark of his greatness as a dramatist that this is where
Euripides starts that profound change, not in what is being said but in what is being
heard. It is her silence that marks the transformation of Hecuba, the silence that will end
the play, the silence in which she will end her days. The rage that will possess her – the
madness that will unfetter her – to complete the annihilation of Polynestor and his son,
here is where they find their origins. ‘Woman, yours is a sorrow beyond sorrow’,
Talthybius sympathises with her; so, at this stage Hecuba is moving beyond sorrow,
beyond sympathy, into what? Into what she herself describes when she sees the corpse of
her last son, Polydorus.
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Hecuba
Son.
I see my dead son.
Polydorus – dead.
He was safe in Thrace.
Here they were saving him.
I don’t want to go on living.
I can’t go on.
Son – child –
No more – no more.
In a dream is saw this,
It came in a dream.
The gods devoured my child.
Chorus
You saw your son’s remains?
You knew it was him?
Hecuba
I see things come to pass.
I do not believe my eyes.
Look at me – look and smile.
This suffering, it is crass.
I wish the truth were lies.
List out all my trials.
Chorus
It is rough – we suffer –
Hecuba
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It is rough.
Son, your mother wants to know
How did you die?
Who threw the dice?
What fate – what man
Did fate or man decree?
Chorus
I don’t know.
I found him –
The shore – the sea –
Hecuba
Delivered his body.
The sand, was it red?
Did a spear bleed his body?
Chorus
The waves left him,
Water carried him –
Hecuba
To me, mourning.
I closed my eyes.
The world was wild,
Black as your boot.
Sleep was savage.
I knew what happened.
It meant my child,
My son was dead.
God had devoured him.
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‘The gods devoured my child’, and now it is time for Hecuba to devour, if not like the
gods, then in a manner somewhat similar, a manner beyond human feeling, beyond
remorse, beyond pity, metamorphosized into a killing machine as efficient as any army
assembled within and beyond the walls of Troy. So ruthless is she in her pursuit of
retribution , it is clear that were she in command of every side, this war would have
ended more rapidly, even more viciously than it did. She will betray every maternal –
every nurturing instinct, twist it instead to her aggressive advantage, leaving none in
doubt of a woman warrior’s indomitable strength. ‘Where will you find an army ?
Agamemnon chides, and he receives his answer.
Hecuba
I will finish what needs finishing.
Agamemnon
How? What will you do?
Take a sword in your wrinkled hand?
Kill the barbarian?
Will you poison him?
Who will help you?
Who will unite with you?
Where will you find an army?
Hecuba
Among the women of Troy – hidden here.
Agamemnon
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How can women win against men?
Hecuba
Who can stand against a tribe –
A wild tribe of wise women?
Agamemnon
Wild, yes, but women cannot kill –
I believe that.
Hecuba
Why believe it?
Women have slaughtered
Their own sons.
They have taught men
A murderous lesson.
What’s said has been said –
Enough.
The panic, the pain are replaced by calm decisiveness. The plot is clear cut, its
execution certain. The broken heart of humanity has not healed – it has simply petrified,
and having turned to stone, it can bear witness to what it now decrees must be done,
having gone beyond the limits of human endurance. She declares to Agamemnon,
‘Agamemnon, I am – whatever it is I am./ There’s nothing more can be done to me’, and
I deliberately echo the terrible resignation of Synge’s Maurya in Riders To The Sea, far
of all the Greek plays I know, Hecuba is closest, I believe, to the deepest experience of
Ireland, recording as it does what genocide or the threat of it does to the psyche of a
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people, and their reaction to those who afflict it. With hideous irony, those who suffer
learn above all how to cause suffering, strengthening the chain of human misery.
‘I am the mother of all misfortune,’ Hecuba asserts to Agamemnon, and in the next Greek
play I became engrossed with, I tackled the man who is unquestionably the father of all
misfortune. He is Oedipus, King of Thebes. Twenty years ago when I was working in
Maynooth College, I commissioned a literal translation of Oedipus from my colleague in
the Classics Department there, Ciaran McGroarty. I had been asked to teach the play as
part of a course on tragedy and theatre, and it had entirely baffled me. I believed if I
wound my way through its intricacies I might grasp the power of the whole play, but as
things happen in university courses, our teaching format changed and I no longer had to
lecture on this topic. For many years it lay untouched, unread, until I receive a
commission from the National Theatre in London in the summer of 2008 to provide a
version of the play scheduled for production in the autumn of that year, directed by
Jonathan Kent who’d had put Hecuba on stage at the Donmar, and starring the English
classical actor, Ralph Fiennes. I mention the tight deadline between commission and
delivery because without its demands I wonder if I could have taken on this work. The
doubts and fear I’d faced when I was younger, trying to make a fist of this play, might
have arisen again had I not been forced to sit down and tackle what I’d been asked to do
immediately. There was also one great difference in my own life in the 20 years between
getting Ciaran’s literal and doing my version. My father had now died – I mentioned this
because as I worked through this play I sensed more and more it was turning into a
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lament for him – something I had always avoided writing and now 10 year after his
passing, this play of Oedipus was giving me opportunity to create at last.
When I say it gave me opportunity it might be more accurate to say it gave me structure,
gave me space to explore and articulate my mourning long delayed, long buried
mourning in the discipline of its succinct plot. The sharpness of the story of Oedipus has
long been admired. It is a mark of the supreme mastery of Sophocles as playwright how
no twist nor turn in the plot is wasted, no excess of technical flourish is on display to
divert concentration from the shock of the truths to be confronted here – a man has killed
his father, and married his mother. The text itself strips away the accretions that have
gathered around about, within, without the play itself. The recklessness of its narrative
matches the recklessness of its hero. Just as he will find out precisely who he is, the play
will unfold exactly as it needs to. There is no hiding place for casualness in the
construction of Oedipus. Everything serves its purposes – no more, no less. Every secret
will be revealed. Every lie will be exposed. Every comfort will be erased. It is a theatre
that insists on telling its truth, and all touched by these truths will be transformed. It is
then a world without stability, and so it is essential that, focussed on such disturbance, the
story telling must be crafted with as sure a hand, as balanced a mind, as compassionate a
heart as have ever been created in theatre before or since. For that reason, the
intelligence of the narrative design of Oedipus has long been admired. The assuredness
of its poetry has long dazzled the eye and entranced the ear. The depth of its analysis of
human motivation and divine mystery has long rivalled the most complex and threatening
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insights of any great author since its composition. But if I must single out what I regard
as one supreme quality in this play, it is courage.
I draw a subjective difference between courage and heroism. For me, heroism is for
show – courage is for survival. Oedipus is a man troubled from the first by plague, the
plague threatening the city, Thebes, of which he is king.
Oedipus
My people, my friends, you come before me – why?
You are begging, you are praying – why?
The city, why is it sore with weeping?
Why is this whole city suffering?
I want no messenger to stand here and tell me –
I have come here myself, Oedipus.
You all know who it is I am.
Old man, I turn to you – speak out.
I want to give you all the help I can.
My heart’s sore, for you are a black pity.
‘You all know what it is I am’, and by play’s end, he and we will certainly know most
intimately, more shattering, most destructively know who is Oedipus. His cruelty to
Tiresias, his dismissal of his wife Jocasta, his pride at being king, at being a man among
men – these are not endearing qualities. Oedipus is not a pleasant fellow. He and Jocasta
mock the power of prophesy as soundly as Oedipus dismissed the threats of the prophet
Tiresias
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Oedipus
Douse the flames at Delphi –
Strangle the screeching birds –
So I would kill my father?
He is buried beneath the ground.
I did not lift a finger.
My sword is still sheathed.
Did he desire to see his son?
That is how he perished –
That way I willed his death?
You sweep all before you, Polybus –
To hell with prophecies.
They are worth nothing now.
Jocasta
Long ago, did I not foresee this?
Oedipus
I still feared –
Jocasta
These things no longer trouble your heart –
Oedipus
I must not still look at my mother’s bed –
Jocasta
What has a man to fear,
When luck is on his side?
Nothing is ordained,
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No rhyme nor reason.
Our life is all random –
Lead it as you’re able.
Forget this foolish stuff,
Marry your mother?
Many a man’s mad dream.
Be free of a child’s fancy.
That’s the way to thrive –
Take life easy.
Oedipus is a passionate, violet warrior – he has killed the Sphinx, he has saved Thebes,
he has married and fathered children with the most powerful woman in the city, widow of
the slain king Laius. The Chorus tells us ‘His were golden arrows –
Chorus
His were golden arrows
Whose path Zeus controlled.
He heard the Sphinx singing,
Solved that strange beast’s riddle.
Its answer is, myself –
Then Thebes fell at his feet.
Honour was his house guest.
Fortune his best of friends.
His were golden arrows.
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Where, though, are the arrows heading? All comes to dust, bloodied blinding dust.
The terrible truth outs – where three roads meet Oedipus unknowingly killed his father
Laius. He completes the curse placed on him by marrying, again unknowingly, his
mother/wife Jocasta. And what is most theatrically effective in so effective a piece of
theatre as this play? It surely is the accuracy of the grief that Jocasta communicates when
she finds out what she has done. There is a foreshadowing of that enormous sorrow
when she recollects the origins of that curse
Jocasta
An oracle came to Laius once.
I don’t say from Apollo.
No, from his followers.
They say he would die –
Laius himself would die –
At the hands of his own child.
But we know the real story –
Laius was killed by robbers –
Foreigners – where three roads meet.
But we know the real story
Jocasta
Our child, when three days old,
No more, no less –
Laius pierced his feet together.
Threw him into another’s hands.
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Let the baby die abandoned,
Alone on a bare mountain.
So Apollo did not succeed –
The child did not kill his father.
Laius did not die as he most feared,
At the hands of his son.
The mother’s pain at parting with her child clearly indicates her unease as she seeks to
defy the gods by harming her own flesh and blood. Sophocles does not underplay the
biological anguish of Jocasta here, domesticating the dire consequences of divine
intervention. She is a woman then who has known enormous affliction, losing a son and
husband before the miraculous arrival of the triumphant hero, Oedipus, to save the day
for her and for her city. But the events of this day on which the play is set will
relentlessly strip her bare of all such illusions. ‘May you never know who you are’,
Jocasta wishes for Oedipus as she exits, leaving life forever knowing that such a wish
will not be fulfilled, for she ends by declaring to the man she loved, as infant and as
husband, ‘You are lost – lost./ I’ll say nothing again.’
More must be said. That more is the rest of the story. Oedipus finds out who exactly he
is, what has been done to him, what he has done. All that remains is for him to react to
the news of this horror. He blinds himself, and then speaks of himself, in full knowledge
of his history, in some knowledge of himself,
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Oedipus
I refuse your counsel and your comfort.
I did what I did for the best – don’t preach.
My father and mother wait for me in Hades.
Hanging is too good for their hideous son.
How can I see them and not bleed tears?
I thought the gods shone from my children’s eyes.
They were born for me to look at – no more.
Most noble, most notorious in all Thebes,
I turn my back on its towers and temples.
I hear its gods scorn me, their statues speak –
You have revolted the whole race of Laius.
Would I be able to look straight in the eye –
How can I face people, filth that I am?
Let me mutilate this body of mine.
Slice off my ear to suit my blind eyes.
Hide me away and let me hear nothing –
It is sweet to turn myself into deaf stone.
Why did you save me, mountains of Cithaeron?
Take me, kill me, on the spot I was found.
I was the ancient house of Corinth –
Polybus, my father, a beautiful man –
I boasted his blood bred my strong features.
What was festering beneath that fine mask?
I am the stem, the root of all evil.
I call to mind where I murdered my father –
The hidden glen, woodlands, the three roads meeting,
Drenched with his blood drunk from my bare hands.
Do you remember the deeds I have done?
What did I do next, coming to this city?
Who did I marry? Let me remember.
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Did I have children – where did they come from?
The same seed and womb that gave birth to me?
What are the words to answer my questions?
Husband and wife are mother and son,
Brother is father to kith and kindred –
Human beings turned to inhuman beasts.
No worse, there is none than what I have done.
In the name of the gods, get me from this city.
Kill me – drown me – never more set eyes on me.
Feel free to touch me – I will not taint you –
I am the sole carrier of my crimes.
In that terrifying concentration of the details of his life, ‘Husband and wife are mother
and son/ Brother is father to kith and kindred - /Human beings turned to inhuman beasts,
/No worse there is none than what I have done’, in that exactness he faces up to all he
himself and the gods have hurled at him. In the pit of darkness where he has been
thrown, through the blind eyes he has inflicted upon himself, he sees what is his story.
These last speeches are instances of astounding courage, for in them Oedipus dramatizes
the extent of human suffering, how much as a species we can endure, how much we can
survive. The blind man stumbling forward, in pain for what has been done, his pride and
pomp removed, and yet in his humanity, there in his love for his children, begging to
touch them, to keep them with him – a request Creon, now powerful in Thebes, refused, a
hint of what’s to come. For now the Chorus bid farewell to Oedipus
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Chorus
Look on Oedipus, lament him.
Remember and respect his deeds.
With envy we once eyed that man,
Now lost in a storm of sorrow.
The grave is waiting for us all.
Our comfort lies in the cold clay.
Turn to dust, and be contented.
There is still more to come. Oedipus must end his days in Colonus, helped by daughters,
Antigone and Ismene, rejecting his last son, Polynices, embracing the will of the gods,
spitting on mercy
Antigone
If my young years let me – I advise this.
Do what this man says, placate Poseidon.
Yield to what we ask – let our brother come.
If what he says annoys you, have no fear –
None dare force you to weaken your resolve.
What harm hearing him? If he means evil,
His smooth talk will betray his scheming mind.
You gave him life – he has committed sin,
Sin after sin against you, my father –
Do not meet bad with bad, show him pity.
That is the lenient, loving thing to do.
Others too suffer sharp ingratitude
From their cruel, most monstrous children –
But friends have calmed them into forgiveness.
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Your nature’s hard, but be charmed by your young.
Call to mind the past, play down the present.
Remember you’ve suffered, remember why –
Your father and your mother, look at them
And know – evil passes on evil to man.
Your blind eyes are proof positive of this.
Give in – no one should beg for justice.
You have been shown much mercy in this place.
Pay for favours granted – show mercy now.
The speech calls to mind another strangely dutiful daughter, Portia, and her hymn
to mercy but such mercy is rejected. Oedipus curses his sons and dies, blessed now by the
gods, received into earth, leaving behind the sentence of grief to be served by the family
he fathered. It is as if in these plays Sophocles has offered a new definition of that all
powerful word – father. Here, father is a synonym for fear, and none are untouched by it.
It is the business of narrative in Greek theatre to provide knowledge, and above all,
knowledge of the self. Acquiring such knowledge is a dangerous business, so the
obsession with paternity is appropriate, for there is nothing – there is no one more for the
child to fear more than the father, then, now, and forever.
Frank Mc Guinness
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