Kerala - Thrissur   

A modern retelling of the Oedipus story

—Photo: K.K. Najeeb

Cries and whispers: A scene from the Iranian play, ‘Jocasta’, staged at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala in Thrissur on Monday.

Thrissur: The world is eternally indebted to a Jew for a few dynamic thoughts about human behaviour and relationships.

When Sigmund Freud wrote that man was driven by a dynamic unconsciousness over which there is little control, it revolutionised western thought in the 20th century.

His observation that the child feels sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and desires the death of the parent of opposite sex, named Oedipus complex, gave a new dimension to ‘Oedipus Rex’, a play by Sophocles.

“His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours –- because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so,” wrote Freud.

Iranian director Mohammed Aghebati presented a modern retelling of the Oedipus story, ‘Jocasta’, at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala here on Monday.

The original story has Jacosta marrying Oedipus not knowing that he is her abandoned son. In Aghebati’s interpretation, Jacosta and Oedipus navigate a thorn-filled course of love, passion and guilt, knowing they are mother and son. The play throws up searing questions. What is sin? What is taboo?

Jocasta’s sureness and striking presence are contrasted with the weakness and confusion of Oedipus. And there is the representation of her alter ego. It indicates that Jocasta’s viewpoint is uppermost in the director’s mind.

Offering a breathtaking audio-visual experience, the director employs a series of devices -- pregnant silences between dialogue; a soundscape punctuated with menacing intakes of breath, sighs and whispers; symbolic use of props; imaginative use of light and shadow to control space; and hooded representation of characters to suggest their motives, thoughts, feelings and desires.

In short, the play can be described as snapshots of a nightmarish Oedipal dreamscape. The visuals, especially the climactic ones, are chillingly grim.

In its fundamental concern with silence and darkness, known and the unknown, desire and guilt, sureness and uncertainty, the re-telling is essentially Beckettian.

There have been several attempts in modern theatre, like the one by Frank Galati, to meld the psychological underpinnings of Sophocles’ play to the autobiographical roots of Freudian theories.

In Galati’s ‘Oedipus Rex’, Freud is a character. He recounts his own dreams about his mother and his anger at his father, a Jew, for not standing up to a Christian bully.

Agherbati’s play may tempt viewers to challenge the argument by some modern psychiatrists that many of Freud’s theories, especially those about the universality of the Oedipus complex, are flawed. If at all Freud is wrong, he is so in truly interesting ways.

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