One of the difficulties with Oedipus, the play, is the great and widespread familiarity with Oedipus, the myth and its ramifications even in psychoanalysis. It needs either words of enormous emotional strength and performances of searing emotional expressiveness, or it needs some new interpretation to make an impact on today's tired and knowing audiences. Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy's new text for the Storytellers Theatre Company takes the latter approach and manages, with some success, to turn Sophocles's searing tragedy of two-and-a-half millennia ago into an ironic comment for the current millennium on the cruelty of rigid codes of morality and conduct.
Purposefully written in rather mundane everyday language of today, under Alan Stanford's very orderly direction, the text has apt resonances for today's society (the avowedly atheistic Jocasta, for instance, has not much time for the pronouncements of elderly celibate priests or oracles), although her son/husband accepts his moral guilt in what is clearly exposed as a trick of the gods. And, as might be expected from Storytellers, the narrative, shared out among the members of a highly interactive chorus, is compelling: seldom has the story been more clearly or grippingly told.
The chorus, from whose ranks come most of the main and lesser characters, provides for the most part a body of 20th-century politicians, worried about catastrophic crises, leaning on their leader for resolution of the problems, yet ready to sell him out if his way might ever seem maybe not the best way for themselves.
Barry McGovern is the upright Creon, alienated by Oedipus's accusation that he has been involved with Tiresias in a conspiracy to take power. Stephen Brennan is the honourable Oedipus, searching only and always for the truth which he believes (erroneously, of course, because the gods are out to get him) that truth will set everyone free. Susan Fitzgerald is the loving yet complaisant Jocasta who hopes that solutions may come from avoidance of the truth, and Simon O'Gorman is the leader of the chorus (the tribunal, perhaps, with today's resonances) which keeps producing all those surprise witnesses and asking all those difficult questions. Lalor Roddy, Steve Blount and Brendan Conroy all have their moments in both guises.
Bruno Schwengl has provided a nicely minimalist setting in black and white with a revolving dais lit (sometimes a bit flatly, sometimes a bit patchily) by Nick McCall. The night is perhaps more social comment than searing tragedy, but for those few who do not know the story, it has seldom been so clearly told. And for the rest of us, it is grippingly, if ironically, entertaining.
Runs tonight and tomorrow; to book phone 021-270022. Then it transfers to the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from Tuesday until February 19th; to book phone 01- 6771717
