With this third production of a work by
Friedrich Hölderlin, director Romeo Castellucci’s fondness for the
German Romantic poet grows clearer. Hölderlin was obsessed (literally,
to the point of madness) with penetrating to the core of meaning even
if that meant ignoring more conventional ideas of comprehensibility:
his 1804 translation of Sophocles’
Oedipus
The King is so literal that it generally even follows the
original Greek word order. Castellucci cherishes Artaud-derived ideas
of disrupting the audience’s expectations of theatre in order to allow
the deeper truth through unexpectedly, such that those already
wrestling with Hölderlin may realise what a blessedly easy time they’ve
had of it so far.
And yet, for once, the net effect here is not simply to add several
further layers of opacity. It may seem, shall we say, somewhat wacky to
set the play in a silent-order nunnery, but the first half-hour of this
two-hour staging sets up the idea of a particular society in the city
of Thebes into which Oedipus arrives as a personification of
disruption. Only when a novice (played by the redoubtable Angela
Winkler) discovers a book hidden in one of the cells do we hear the
first word of German uttered. Oedipus himself appears as a Christ-like
figure (he saved Thebes from the Sphinx, after all), high on a
pedestal, Sacred Heart glowing before him… but portrayed by a woman,
Ursina Lardi, her right breast bared. In a cheeky twist, the only man
to appear onstage, Bernardo Arias Porras, is playing Tiresias, the
blind prophet who has himself undergone a change of sex at the command
of the gods.
The sense of ritual is pervasive and powerful – both the ritual
in the story, of Oedipus’ quest to
discover who has brought the curse upon the city, only to learn that it
is he himself, and that
of
the story, its importance both to the collective notion of the Greek
city-state and to our core sense of individual responsibility. The only
flaw in Castellucci’s approach is that this hasn’t been necessary to
rediscover hidden meaning; Sophocles’ play has been the clear and
palpable essence of drama for two and a half millennia. This version is
only as potent as any other.
Written for the Financial
Times.