Word: oedipus
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...diamond anniversary of Greek drama at Harvard, the Harvard-Radcliffe Classical Players are offering a gem of a production. Those who witnessed the 1881 production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex can now see what eventually happened to the King in the play's sequel, Oedipus Coloneus, the last of the dramatist's seven extant tragedies...
...Oedipus is to Greek mythology very much what King Lear is to British mythology. In the current show we see the last hours of the self-blinded and aged King in exile. This play lacks the searing impact of Oedipus Rex, but exhibits instead a glowing mellowness and profound restraint. It is the wisdom of old age--the old age of both the King and the dramatist. They both are telling us that man is a prey to Fate, which he cannot control but should learn to accept...
Director Brooks is also obviously an actor of considerable experience. He gives a virtuosic performance as Oedipus, who dominates all the scenes of the play. With a sonorous and resonant voice, he conveys to perfection the character of a man who is physically helpless but spiritually strong; a man who, like King Lear, proclaims himself "more sinn'd against than sinning;" a man who, although having committed incest and parricide, is not morally guilty, and arrives at a wiser view of sin in which his past deeds are not crimes but sorrows. The denunciatory "kakon kakiste" speech to Oedipus' wayward...
Glen Bowersock does a splendid job with the long Messenger's narration, one of the loveliest and deepest speeches ever penned, in which he describes Oedipus' last moments on earth and his mystical, saintly end. But instead of having the Messenger quote the words of the gods, Brooks has these lines delivered by an unseen voice on the second-floor ambulatory as a modern counterpart of the ancient theologeion, a special platform for the gods...
...Thus Oedipus at Colonus will be the groups first post-war Greek production, and typically the club has returned to Sophocles...