Word: oedipus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...true hero is Oedipus, who dared to learn the terrible truths about himself and paid the price of self-awareness: the perpetual burden of guilt and responsibility without which there can be no lasting morality. By contrast, May treats such facile Utopians as Charles Reich to sympathetic though sharp criticism. After calling Reich's book, The Greening of America, "an impressionistic painting of the Garden of Eden...for children and not for adults," May downgrades Consciousness III. It is he says "no consciousness at all, for it lacks dialectic movement between 'yes' and 'no,' good...
...OEDIPUS THE KING...
...setting for Michael Langham's staging of Oedipus the King seems less Thebes than a jungle clearing. The tribal-dancing choruses, shaking their amulets, mandalas and animal skins, are less out of Sophocles than The Golden Bough. When Oedipus (Len Cariou) makes his entrance, emerging from the palace portals as if they formed a monstrous womb, he is less the king of a Greek city-state than an archetypal Everyman in a loincloth...
Jung's Nightmare. Langham is performing an act of reviving violence. He is doing to the polite 19th century conventions of Greek tragedy what directors like Peter Brook have done to the polite 19th century conventions of Shakespeare. Pseudo-traditional versions of Oedipus are staged as refined pageants. Directors assign masks, write long program notes about catharsis, and advise their puzzled Oedipuses to express hubris, which generally leaves them looking like damaged Roman coins. Langham has cut through the decorum of Greek revival to present Oedipus as a nightmare by Jung...
...Langham-Anthony Burgess Oedipus goes back beyond Sophocles to the myth from which he borrowed. Here they find the king a primitive hero who lifts one evil spell-the Sphinx's-only to bring down a worse spell by violating the ultimate taboo: incest. On the Guthrie stage, dark as the predawn of civilization, this ritual circle of plot is made to stand out like an elemental curse: by solving its riddle,* Oedipus destroys the Sphinx; by failing to solve soon enough the mystery of his own identity-whose son he is-Oedipus destroys himself...