It would be hard to find a play that has been more universally praised than Oedipus Rex ("King Oedipus"). Aristotle considered it the model tragedy, and that opinion has been widely held to the present day. No drama before or since has managed to so successfully combine a rapid, compelling plot, superb characterization, and elegant poetry into such a tight bundle.
Oedipus Rex (1992) (TV) + Oedipus Rex (1984) (TV)
...the city of Thebes was afflicted with a monster which infested the highroad. It was called the Sphinx. It had the body of a lion and the upper part of a woman. It lay crouched on the top of a rock, and arrested all travellers who came that way, proposing to them a riddle, with the condition that those who could solve it should pass safe, but those who failed should be killed. Not one had yet succeeded in solving it, and all had been slain.
Oedipus was not daunted by these alarming accounts, but boldly advanced to the trial. The Sphinx asked him, "What animal is that which in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" Oedipus replied, "Man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks erect, and in old age with the aid of a staff." The Sphinx was so mortified at the solving of her riddle that she cast herself down the rock and perished.
[ from Bulfinch's Mythology ]
"... I came here with the grey passport of a stateless person and a status of alien resident. On that typewriter I bought in Italy my Italian IRC guide placed this sticker "IRC" -- International Rescue Committee. But did I need a sticker to be recongnized as somebody who needed to be rescued?"
Sophocles:
Images
2005: Curse = War! Sphinx? TV?
Where?
Africa? Iraq? (I use my Ethiopian archive pix -- mix of Muslim and Afro costumes). Military is the same everywhere!
There are several directions in the conceptual thought: the Greeks, style ("Kabuki" is only a code name), Anti-Oedipus (Delueze and everything postmodern -- Freud, reinterpretation of the arch-type, such as Jesus with "another" father and the Son killing the Father; New vs. Old and etc.)
The Japan's old erotic prints (filmplus.org/03): the passion between mother and son...
More pix on set page: The Gate (from Rashomon), center stage (too traditional?)...
New images from filmplus.org/04 (classic):
Notes on images for the set and costumes:
Leading a family is harder than leading a nation. --Chinese Proverb
** hamartia is the word used in the original Greek of the New Testament for "sin". The King James Version has 172 instances. [ sin -- symbol? ]
Oedipus's tragic flaw is "his special ability to solve riddles, his detective ability, one might say, or his intellect. Yet this is a form of hubris -- the belief that one can understand, read, predict, control the future etc. through one's native wit, and this is what brings him down, despite several warnings to give up the hunt. Reason = Apollo." [ image ]
Socrates's dictum, "The unexamined life is not worth living"!
Arthur Miller wrote, "The flaw, or crack in the character [of Oedipus], is really nothing -- and need be nothing -- but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lots without active retaliation, are 'flawless.' Most of us are in that category." Miller adds that "the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy" comes from questioning the unquestioned.
