There are four playwrights who represent the theatre of the classical age of Athens: the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comic writer Aristophanes. They wrote and presented their plays once a year to a crowd of about 50,000 Athenian residents, mostly men. The plays were enacted during a festival. Many of the terms of theatre come from this period: words like ‘chorus’, ‘tragedy’, ‘scene’, ‘orchestra’, even ‘theatre’.
The story is that theatre first used to be just one individual delivering his (and it was always a he, even when playing female parts) lines. The greatest of these was a man named Thespis. Before him, according to Aristotle’s Poetics , the chorus would chant the full play in verse. The idea of individual dialogue and a solo performance came with Thespis. A century or so after him, the four writers and directors named above arrived in Athens, roughly 2500 years ago.
They all had a sense of fun and were required to have one. This is because each of their tragedies was followed by a raucous and bawdy production called a satyr play. This had phallic props and very risqué dialogue and was, obviously, as popular as the tragedies, which had more classical material.
The regicide
Sophocles wrote over 100 plays in his time and won the annual prize over a dozen times. Only seven of his plays have survived in full. I am speculating but it is possible and perhaps likely that it was the best that made it through the centuries because they were read and enjoyed from generation to generation more than the others.
The extant work includes the Theban trilogy — Oedipus Rex , Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone . The story and the character of Oedipus constitute for me the most moving of any of the Athenian plays. The story begins with king Oedipus sending for advice from the oracle of Delphi about a plague in his nation. The oracle says that a sin has occurred which needs to be expiated. This sin is the murder of the former king. Oedipus is puzzled and sends for a prophet to divine what this means. He is told that the murderer is father and brother to his children, meaning he has slept with his own mother.
It turns out that Oedipus was the son of the king, and separated from his family at birth. When he is an adult, he encounters his father. Not recognising each other, they get into a quarrel, as a result of which Oedipus kills his father. He then takes his place as king and marries his mother.
On learning this, Oedipus is horrified. There are few moments in theatre as moving as those I have felt when reading the lines describing this man’s trauma. Oedipus tears out his eyes and is blind.
In the second play, Oedipus at Colonus , the blind Oedipus leaves his hometown and travels as a beggar. His kingdom, Thebes, is now ruled by his son. There is a conflict in the kingdom in which the man who emerges successful is Oedipus’s uncle/ brother-in-law, Creon.
The very cold and simple story of Oedipus, a man who has been horribly treated by fate, becomes more sprawling and complex in this second part. In the third, the plot again returns to an individual, this time the daughter of Oedipus, Antigone. Her brothers have been killed in the battle, fighting on opposite sides of each other.
The one who was on the losing side is Polyneices. The victor Creon says that he will not allow the ritual burial of this nephew of his, but instead keep him outside the city walls and let wild animals feed on his body.
Antigone arrives to confront him and as punishment Creon walls her into a tomb alive. She hangs herself and the play ends with everyone on the losing side.
A great wrong
Tragedy was supposed to be the telling of man unsuccessfully trying to take on fate and the gods. There is no better example of this than this story of Oedipus Rex. It is remarkable that a character so complex has survived the ages. It is true that what most people know or remember of him is only the fact that he slept with his mother.
His acute trauma at the moment he finds out and mutilates himself, and the hurt that he carries with him for the rest of his life, are things not as well communicated. Sigmund Freud coined the phrase Oedipus Complex, and he did a great wrong to the mythical king. Freud’s complex referred to the feeling of sexual desire that individuals supposedly have for one of their parents, and a hatred for the other.
But Oedipus does not have either of these. He does not hate his father, whom he is forced to kill in self-defence, and he wasn’t aware that the woman he then married because of custom was his mother. It is cruel to hold Oedipus up as an example of the Oedipus Complex and wrong to name it after him.
The best way in which this misapprehension can be undone is to read through these three slim works. The first of them, especially, is quite timeless and beautiful in the way it tells one of the most awful stories in history.
(A monthly series on the world literary classics.)
The writer is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works .
