ÖDIPUS / ALMADA FESTIVAL

Francesco Chiaro in Persinsala 16 Julho 2022 | notícia online

Through a strikingly modern, minimalist writing style and a suspenseful plot, Thomas Ostermeier re-elaborates Sophocles’ masterpiece, Oedipus Rex, turning it into a contemporary fable of capitalistic amoralities and relational inhumanities to the delight of Almada Festival’s satisfied yet confused audience.

With a past artistic production mainly focused on overcoming class-, gender- and heteronormativity-based limits, it is no wonder that Thomas Ostermeier always baulked at Epidauros Festival’s requests to work on a Greek classic: not believing in the concept of destiny nor in any other imposition on personal freedom and expression and given that «every Greek play tells you not to cross borders», he could not have acted differently. But the theatre world can be quite stubborn at times and, after many a years of attempts, Epidauros’ artistic director Katerina Evangelatos finally convinced him; even though he could not «deal with this cosmology», as he himself admitted in a conversation with writer and cultural Joseph Pearson, Ostermeier ended up asking for help to his long-time collaborator, German playwright Maja Zade.

Far from being driven by the Ancient’s hubris, Zade graciously threw her hat into the ring, re-contextualising Oedipus Rex’s themes so that they could strike a closer chord with contemporary audiences, thus successfully giving birth to a psychological kammerspiel that still revolves around a family drama, but without any divine presence to it. Indeed, no gods, prophecies or oracles can be found in this “next-door Oedipus”, just like no greater truth that may give sense to the characters’ destiny. No one is there to fill the gap left behind by the modern death of the Olympians that plunged the whole world into a more believable (yet crushing) succession of random events and coincidences, and humanity is left alone to bear the full brunt of its own, utterly man-made, demise.

Despite all of this, however, Sophocles’ shadow still looms large over the play, which does a wonderful job at re-codifying Thebes’ divine and human power struggle, translating it into today’s secularised social hierarchies and borders. For example, the right-of-way argument that led to Laius’ death by the hand of Oedipus is brilliantly re-directed towards more modern “road rage” issues, while the Sphynx’ conundrum takes on a more ethical undertone that still splits the “ruling class” in half (the young and woke vs the patriarchal old guard), generating a more relatable succession feud than that of tyranny-led city-states, where divine morality is replaced by predatory corporate governances. What’s more, our new and shining Jocasta (Christina, played by riveting Caroline Peters), far from being a mere tool in the greater game that the Ancient Gods liked to play with their human (male) counterparts, actively takes over her late husband’s chemical company, thus becoming for all intents and purposes the actual boss of it all.

Loaded with the same intimate and violent psychological realism of in-yer-face theatre playwrights’ Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, Ostermeier’s ödipus zooms in (literally) on the fragility of our existences, presenting the audience with a truly outstanding contemporary tragedy filled to the brim with the very same dramatic irony that Sophocles so skilfully poured into his work. Funnily enough, the only vice that one could find in the director’s mise-en-espace (a weakness that is equally shared with its performers) lies in the lack of a more trenchant caesura between humanity’s sarcasm and fate’s irony. Indeed, once we finally reach the tipping point of the oedipal ordeal and actual physical violence starts to fill the stage, the characters seemingly remain trapped in the cheeky audacity showcased throughout the previous parts of the play, leading Almada Festival’s audience to laugh in the face of the protagonists’ pure psychological pain. It is only when death ultimately peeps out that silence befalls Municipal Theatre Joaquim Benite’s main hall, leaving us wondering whether our apparent lack of empathy can be blamed on actorial and technical issues (surtitles included) or solely on our own, godless times.

The show was played at
Municipal Theatre Joaquim Benite
Av. Prof. Egas Moniz – Almada (Lisbon)
Thursday 14 at 19:00
Friday 15 at 21:30

the TAlmada Festival presents
ödipus
by Schaubühne Ensemble

directed by Thomas Ostermeier
set design Jan Pappelbaum
costume design Angelika Götz
video Matthias Schellenberg, Thilo Schmidt
music Sylvain Jacques
dramaturgy Maja Zade
lighting design Erich Schneider
Cast Caroline Peters, Christian Tschirner, Renato Schuch and Isabelle Redfern