part i: Oedipus Rex, still a hit after 2600 years
In 1984 the Summer Olympics were being held in Los Angeles. Just outside the L.A. Colosseum Sophocles' Theban Cycle (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone) was performed; the director tried to keep the production as faithful as possible to the original play as it was staged in Athens in the 5th century B.C. It may have won the approval of a few Classics scholars, but the play was a big flop.
So just what is the big deal about Oedipus Rex (Rex means king)? In addition to gaining fame with the title character having a complex named after him, this is one of the most widely-read plays in the Western world. Modern students might wonder why, but around the time of Sophocles, this was considered a superb example of Greek tragedy; in fact, in his Poetics Aristotle uses the play as his central example of how a perfect tragedy is constructed.
Of course Athenian values and tastes 2600 years ago are not the same as those found in America (or Greece for that matter) in the 21st century. The pacing may be too measured for some; the chorus mystifies (or bores) many contemporary readers and viewers; certainly the allusions are not current and may require us to run to the encyclopedia (or at least look carefully at the footnotes in the text).
The play, with powerful translations and some considerations to contemporary audiences, still does work, but it works even better when put in context.
The producers of the Theban Cycle presented in tandem with the L.A. Olympics ignored the fact that the original plays were part of a shared cultural and religious heritage of the ancient Athenians; most modern American audiences do not share that background. The ritual structure; the choral intrusions; the limitation of time, place, action; the grand pronouncements; the focus on larger-than-life characters--all are foreign :) to us. They made a lot of sense when they were written.
The plays were presented to whole communities as part of the two major religious festivals (following the sowing of crops and the harvest) each year. The festivals lasted days. It was a time for sorely-worked people to blow off steam, to exercise katharsis (a purging of violent, pent-up emotions) by watching powerful figures who through hubris (pridefulness) challenged moira (fate) to bring about their own destruction, often the destruction of all around them.
Nowadays popular horror movies, action/adventure thrillers, WWE Smackdown, Super Bowl night at the local bar all allow people to blow off steam by cringing, rooting, yelling as they experience larger-than-life contests second hand. For the ancient Greeks, the tragedies served that function.
Remember, they had different tastes, a different background.
In Poetics Aristotle tried to categorize how the plays worked, what sorts of techniques went into the creation of truly great theatre. For the Athenians, spectacle was the least important element (contrast that to the soon-to-follow Romans under Nero and to modern audiences who love a good car chase or explosion). The Greeks also did not look for shock (gratuitous sex and violence happened off stage) or suspense (everybody in the amphitheatre already knew the stories; they'd heard them since they were little kids).
What's left?
The illustration of the human condition, the struggle of the will, the power of fate and the gods and goddesses--these were at the heart of how the audience identified with the problems the protagonists wrestled with. No, they were not Oedipus, but humans sometimes get swelled heads, think they can overcome God, the gods, fate, nature, etc. Every so often people think they are exempt from the rules of life, the universe and everything.
For contemporary Americans, this independent spirit is at the heart of a lot of film heroes (the Buffy's and the Indiana Joneses who cheat death again and again). For the ancient Greek characters, it usually led to tragedy.
The Greeks knew that hubris would eventually lead to a big fall. What they were interested in is watching as the characters in the dramas slowly discovered their failure. There was nobility in the attempt to do what the individual conscience considered right, just, good; there was tragedy in the fact that try as they may these grand characters could not cheat their fate.
The tool that the great playwrights manipulated so effectively was peripeteia (sudden reversals). Again from Aristotle's Poetics:
Review the scenes with Jocasta and Oedipus (332+) and the messenger (339+), and the incredible irony of the situation hits the audience as it hits Jocasta and, eventually, Oedipus.Reversal (Peripety) is, as aforesaid, a change from one state of affairs to its exact opposite, and this, too, as I say, should be in conformance with probablilty or necessity. For example, in Oedipus, the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus by relieving him of fear with regard to his mother, but by revealing his true identity, does just the opposite of this....
Recognition, as the word itself indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, leading either to friendship or to hostility on the part of those persons who are marked for good fortune or bad. The best form of recognition is that which is accompanied by a [plot] reversal, as in the example from Oedipus.
Jocasta and Laius of Thebes, learning that their son will strike down the father and marry the mother, contrive to have him killed (much like Snow White) in the wilderness.
Much later, in Corinth, Oedipus, hearing that he'll kill his father and marry his mother, leaves Corinth. If he's not around his parents, he can't do what the prophets foretold.
On the way to Thebes he kills a man; then he solves the riddle of the Sphinx and is made king (Jocasta, recently widowed, is his queen).
The messenger annonces Polybus of Corinth has died, but Oedipus was not in Corinth when it happened; he's relieved that the prophecy to kill his father has not come true.
The messenger, puzzled, says that Oedipus need not have worried because Polybus was not his father! Years earlier, the messenger found Oedipus chained on a hillside and freed him and took him to Corinth to be raised by Polybus and Merope.
Bit by bit the characters recognize that Oedipus is the child that Laius and Jocasta sent out to die, and that in an attempt to thwart the gods he has unwittingly come back to Thebes where he has, yes, killed his father and married his mother.
part ii: Lysistrata, a break from tragedy
There is very little ancient Greek comedy that has survived. We have a handful of plays by Aristophanes, and a fragment of a play called The Grouch by Menander.
Nevertheless, the comedies were an integral part of the religious festivals that showcased the great tragedies such as Oedipus the King. The term "comic relief" applies to the satyr plays (very racy plays where men postured and whacked one another with giant leather phalluses or dressed as impossibly busty women--it was sort of the ancient equivalent of The Benny Hill Show); it also applies to the fully developed comedies that lightened the mood after an audience sat through one or two or even three cathartic tragedies.
Lysistrata, still performed, is a rich example of Greek comedy. It's a blend of bawdy humor, double entendres, slapstick, barbed satire and gelas (the Athenian convention of laughing at pain and ugliness). Most of all, as far as the Greek audience was concerned, it was complete fantasy, an absolute escape from the problems of the real world.
It's also a play that speaks differently when viewed 2500 years later with contemporary eyes and a modern sensibility.
Looking at the background of the play, we might wonder how the play was any sort escape at all.
The Athenians had been at war with Sparta on and off for many years; the Greek civil war had cost each city vast fortunes, destroyed villages, taken many lives. The general population of Athens was war weary. Lysistrata's plea for an end to war seems reasonable enough to us, but to its original audience it was a flight of fancy.
First, the pridefulness (hubris) of the Athenians was not about to make way for war-weariness. In fact, although they'd lost some key naval battles and Sparta was offering a truce, the Athenians believed they had sufficient money and force to beat the Spartans. Soon after the play was presented, Athens launched a losing campaign and fell. The audience viewed the play as a funny idea, not a reasoned plea for peace.
Second, although it might strike us as clever, the tactic of withholding sex so that the men of various nations would throw down their weapons and make peace was impossible. Women were little more than slaves in ancient Greece; they had no political or economic power and were subject to the will of their parents and later their husbands. A woman really acting like Lysistrata or Lampito or Myrrhine would most likely have been killed by her husband, and he would not have been prosecuted.
It's obvious why the play was exhumed and presented frequently in the 60's--it speaks of conscientious objection to war and the empowering of women. Both of these ideas were alien to the ancient Greeks.
So what would they have gotten from the play?
With men playing all of the roles, dressed outrageously, making obscene gestures through much of the play, there was an emphasis on sex (logical enough considering the plays were part of a fertility festival).
There was lots of wordplay:
The names of the women are nearly all obscene; Lysistrata--loosener or disbander of armies--is relatively tame, though it does have a double meaning.
There is double entendre, as in this scene where Calonice comes to hear Lysistrata's plan
CALONICE: What's up? Somethin big?
LYSISTRATA: Very big.
CALONICE: [Interested] I sit stout, too?
LYSISTRATA: [Smiling] Yes indeed--both big and stout.
CALONICE: What? And the women still haven't come? (396-7)There are sight gags such as the scene where the messanger comes with a scroll under his cloak and the Magistrate asks, "Is that a spear you've got under your cloak?" (422). It's a line that Mae West would update and become famous for in the early days of talkies.
There is the free-for-all battle between the feeble chorus of old men and old women.
There are jibes at the laziness and shamelessness and drunkenness of women (women were in charge of the family wine supply and were known to indulge; after all, their lives were not all that rosy); there are potshots at the ineffectualness and pompousness of politicians; there are the slurs against people from other cities.
The play certainly does make some serious statements. A prime example is the scene where the Magistrate tells Lystrata that war is a man's business:
MAGISTRATE: Dreadful! Talking about thrashing and winding ballso of wool, when you haven't the slightest share in the war!
LYSISTRATA: Why, you dirty scoundrel, we bear more than twice as much as you. First, we bear children and send off our sons as soldiers.... Then, when we ought to be happy and enjoy our youth, we sleep alone because of your expiditions abroad. But never mind us married women; I grieve most for the maids who grow old at home unwed. (411-12)
Also, Lysistrata's solution of dealing with one problem at a time rather than trying to unravel a whole knotted ball of problems is also often pointed to as a wise, simple approach to problem solving.
Still, the Athenians laughed; they didn't hear pathos and logic and wisdom in the play. Instead, they pledged "unity against the barbarians!"
By 404 B.C., Athens was in ruins.
part iii: and what of the chorus?
They dance back and forth across the stage spouting a lot of poetry. Modern readers often skim over those bits, but I suspect the ancient Greeks would have liked those parts most of all (much the same way modern viewers like the songs in musicals, even though it doesn't make sense for two gangs in West Side Story, for example, to start singing during a gang fight). The drama, due to the limited technology of the time, was fairly static. The main characters wore elevator sandals and huge heads with leather megaphones for voice amplification. They had to stand and proclaim because the theatres were huge (holding entire communities), and the folks in the cheap seats could not see subtle movements, hear whispered asides. The chorus was much freer.
Oscar Brockett, in his History of the Theatre suggests that the chorus had at least six functions:
the chorus functioned as a character in the play, giving advice, asking questions, expressing opinions, even taking on an active role in the play's dramatic action
the chorus served as a kind of moral barometer, revealing the common ethicial viewpoint from which the tragic figure often deviated
it served as an "ideal spectator," reacting to the play at precisely the points where the playwright would want his audience to react
the chorus helped to set the mood of the play or "heighten dramatic effects"
the chorus added movement, dance, and song
it helped to establish the play's rhythm by creating pauses between the episodes wherein the audience could consider what had just happened.
There are two more functions of the chorus that he left out:
it presented the background of the story (of course the Greeks would already know the stories, but for modern audiences, a brief recap is very helpful)
the chorus sang hymns of praise to the gods and goddesses; these were, after all, religious festivals
We are NOT ancient Athenians, but these plays still have impact. Understanding the traditions in which the plays were written adds another dimension. But even if we don't have extensive background in 5th century B.C. Greece, the issues these plays raise (the individual attempting to rise above his/her condition; the battle between human intellect and religious tradition; self-sacrifice in the cause of justice) are certainly still relevant.