Theatre in Contemporary Culture: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King

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The play Oedipus the King is a Greek tragedy that is written by Sophocles and was performed for the first time in 429 BC circa. The play has been regarded by the public as the Greek’s best tragedy play (Ibsen, Henrik 1998). The director attempts to portray in this film, some of the peoples’ positive characteristics as the sources of their downfall. In this case, Oedipus is a very determined and proud individual. Throughout he was determined to achieve whatever he set out to achieve. In his quest, he showed exemplary pride as he could not accept what he came across and this has been his undoing.

The play starts at a time when Oedipus has been king for a while and also having fulfilled the dreaded prophecy, his doomed fate which he had been trying to avoid. In the first scene, he undergoes suffering from his subjects as he states his vow to bring the king’s murderers to justice. The director aims at portraying Oedipus as a confident person and this is very evident in Oedipus’ opening speech in the play as it exudes the authority of a father to his people and brings out his strong characteristics of pride and confidence in the way he is accustomed to facing everyday issues.

The director chose the plot that influences the main aspects of the whole story to be brought into focus. He has used artificial devices of the Greek theatre to artistically render this plot, and it’s the plot he used unlike the story itself that has enabled the play to come across to the audience as tragic. This is evident in the fact that we don’t concentrate on the main story as it was originally written covering an expansive period, but the director has used his plot to collect the essentials of the story and repackage them in a confined period on a stage without necessarily changing the storyline. Thus he maintains its logical composition.

Oedipus’ past is reverted to via his acquired consciousness, without relaying the story as a disjointed record of events over time. He has thus employed swift conflicts leading Oedipus to rediscover himself and his origin as the culprit he is so determined to bring to justice for slaying Laios, his predecessor.

With this plot, the play is portrayed as a tragedy not due to what Oedipus had already done, but due to his reawakened conscious recollections, he realizes the appalling and bizarre nature of his past actions. By the swift recall of these mental agonies, they are made passionate realism in the present only by the plot due to Oedipus awareness.

It was tragic for Oedipus’ parents to plan to kill their son. Later on, Oedipus gets to marry his mother and they have a son and a daughter who are his brother and sister. This is tragic since, in all societies, incest is not viewed favorably. This misfortune befell Oedipus because of deception in the play. When Oedipus came to know the truth of what he had done, he bore out all his eyes. This is quite a tragic end to Oedipus a king and a son who loved his mother and was loyal to her.

Oedipus’s parents did not take time to explain to him about the prophecy, maybe if they had, nothing of the sort would have happened because he might have always put it in his mind to avoid it in the future. When Oedipus was adopted, his new parents did not bother to tell him who he was and where he came from, or who his parents were. This deception contributed greatly to the tragedy that later befalls Oedipus.

In the tragedy of Oedipus, the imagery of blindness, sensory deficiency, and deafness are highlighted. All these are caused by the refusal of Oedipus to accept the truth. This can also be attributed to the significance of the senses of sound and sight to the acceptance of the by the characters in the play and also by the audience. The literary devices used to enhance this reliance upon physical perception include the ever-present synesthesia, or mixing of the senses, as well as the use of music and poetical passages, all of which underscore once again the necessity of sensation and feeling to the explication of human emotions.

The proceedings have been introduced gradually to build suspense and add irony. Dramatic irony is whereby the audience knows the fate of a character before it happens. This has been used to project the tragic nature of the story which is mainly enhanced by the contrast between Oedipus’ unawareness and the audiences’ consciousness.

The Chorus has agonized with Oedipus and they have steered our interest to the truth personified in their vision of the human circumstances which have been portrayed as defined by fate. Various characters attempted to evade fate by changing destiny at many opportunities but they were always thwarted by the gods. This has portrayed them as always making wrong judgments and therefore it is on the humans’ ability to make choices and fate that the play is based.

Oedipus decides to find the truth about the people who murdered Laius. His main intention could have been to save the people of Thebes, but because of this choice that he made, he unknowingly put himself in danger since he administers his very own lethal injection. Teresias comes in and warns Oedipus about the possible consequences of the choices that he makes when he prophesies the consequences of the search for the truth.

Because of Oedipus’ pride and ego which had come as a result of the pedestal fame that the people of Thebes had placed on him, he refused to take the help that Teresias was offering and he persisted in searching for the truth that he desperately needed ( Sophocles 1984). On the other hand, his opinion of him being above all the other gods made him assume and shun the assistance that Jocasta was offering when she once again warned him of the possible consequences of looking for the truth of the people who murdered Louise.

Since people make their own choice and everyone is held accountable and responsible for what he or she does, Oedipus failed in one way or another and his mother Jocasta can not be held responsible for the mistakes that her son did and neither can she be criticized on his behalf since she honorably tried all the possible ways to save her son but the high image that he had on himself would not let him accept the help that was being given by Heresies and his mother Jocasta.

Another outstanding theme in the play is the consequences that the sins of the parents have on future generations (Sophocles 1984). Oedipus was not told about his origin not only by his parents Laius and Jacasta but also by the queen and the king of Corinth Merope and Polybus who adopted him after his parents thought that he was dead. If Oedipus was informed that Merope and Polybus were not his real parents and if he was told who his real parents were, most probably he could not have killed his real biological father Laius and he could not have slept with his biological mother Jacasta after he was crowned the new king of Thebes after overthrowing Sphinx.

This hiding of the truth to him leads him to live in darkness for a long time until he realizes the truth of the crimes he had committed against morality and when his real mother Jacasta committed suicide (Ibsen, Henrik 1998). If the parents did not hide the truth from their son Oedipus they could not have died prematurely. His parents died because of their sin and possibly they could not have died at their age if they had not attempted to disobey and defy the gods. The consequences of the sins of Oedipus are that Oedipus was treated as an outcast and even his children and the other generations that followed were also not accepted in the society. This was quite impractical because the generations that followed were innocent and maybe they could not understand why they had to suffer the humiliation.

The first fateful choice occurs when a prophecy is made that when Oedipus is born he would slay his father and marry the mother. Oedipus’s fate was sealed as he was born because when his parents learned of the prophecy they planned to have him killed to evade the prophecy.

This led to failure to change fate as he does not die as planned. Another stab at changing fate was when Oedipus was in Corinth as an adult and heard about the prophecy from the drunkard and he went to find the truth but he did not get a conclusive answer. After this, he left his adopted parents and homeland to escape the curse and protect his parents, but this was in vain as he soon met his father and unknowingly killed him.

Mimesis can be referred to as the simulation of life is the imitation of life, the formation of, by use of plot, the creation of an alternate realism with independent through the plot of an alternate reality with its original meaning. Oedipus is a person like everybody else and his life’s riddle is comparable to the ambiguity of reality to humans, but the play does not try to relate to us any of the said similarities. In this play thus mimetic drama has been used to generate in the audience a touching reaction instead of clarification of issues.

Works cited

“Defining Characteristics in Oedipus Rex.” 123HelpMe. Web.

Free Essays. “Jocasta is Not to Blame in.” 123HelpMe. Web.

Ibsen, Henrik. Four Major Plays. Trans. James McFarlane and Jens Arup. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1984.

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Theatre in Contemporary Culture: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King

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