Word: oedipus
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...modern, with a picture window to let in strong, clarifying, psychological light. Hamlet, called Tony Burgess, comes home-sulky, sneering, perverse-after two years in Asia, certain that his new stepfather was his mother's paramour, suspecting he is also his father's murderer. This is an Oedipus-uncomplex Hamlet, so drawn to his mother that he hated his father, so identified with the lover's role that to kill his stepfather would be to kill himself. Truth tumbles out in a climactic modern Closet Scene, but consequences take a therapeutic rather than tragic turn...
After months of bull sessions over tea and fruit salad at the Waldorf he became sincerely troubled. Unwittingly, society had struck a telling blow. It was Job and Oedipus brought up to date and it made sense. "Happiness is illusion. Only togetherness has meaning. Togetherness assumes similarity. Similarity means frustration. Frustration demands purpose...
...ideal drama should be grounded on a plot so firm that, "even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one." The highly stylized production of Sophocles' masterpiece now playing at the Brattle is sure to be the subject of heated controversy in many a Hum 5 section and coffee house; but the iron anatomy remains which no mode of production can bend. Even those who would...
...here is Greek tragedy as it should be done, like neither a Shakespearian character study and display of verbal pyrotechnics, nor a contemporary inquest into the septic souls of one's nerve-wracked next-door neighbors. To meet with Oedipus Rex on its own grounds, you approach it like neither Hamlet nor Death of a Salesman, but rather as if it were a Solemn High Mass. It reminds us that the "play" was originally a religious ritual, after all, even if this is a spirit our own age has successfully recaptured on the stage only in Eliot's Murder...
...similarity to Christian sacrament won't carry you to the core of Oedipus, either, for Sophocles' drama is above all else a pagan rite of purification. It is a religious outlook worthy of general reconsideration, and the present film will show you not only what the Athenians saw on stage twenty-five centuries ago but what they saw in the world and the cosmos as well. The masks of the actors bear a bizarre and wholly appropriate resemblance to the grotesque faces of the magnified reptiles and insects seen in the Brattle's introductory short subject. Tanya Moiseiwitsch has provided...