Oedipus The King

OEDIPUS THE KING

It's been thousands of days since I washed my hands clean of high school English Literature. Antigone - daughter of Oedipus. Oedipus, the king who killed his father and married his mother. When your memory clearly fails you and everyone's looking at you for signs of intelligence and culture in Sophocles' ancient Greek tragedies, given that tiny mousehole of an opportunity to prove yourself, you say: "Yes, sick man. That Oedipus. Sick man, he was."

As the play unfolded before me on Saturday night in the Playhouse at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, I began to realise that Oedipus was a freak by no fault of his own, but was doomed long before he was even born, by the Gods' cruel game of sealing a murderous and incentuous fate upon a 'could have been' innocent man.

All of us, my colleagues and I, thoroughly enjoyed the play so much that we vowed to make another night of it. Something else of course - Greek tragedies are so terribly intense, but I must say it has renewed my interest in good quality plays. Front row seats like what we had would be perfect as well, the tickets this time with compliments from David.

A few note-worthy moments:

• Lead actor, Marcus Graham, apparently has a permanent, let's call it, deformity on both his little toes such that they both stick out conspicuously. According to Qing and Nicola, that was all they could focus on for the first half hour. They could even work out the bung toes from inside the leather shoes he wore from thereon, or so they say. :)
  
  
• Jocasta the Queen and wife/mother of Oedipus, so casually says that the mother is every male child's first fantasy, as in, before a man desires any other woman, he first desires his mother. OK, we loved the play and all, but them Greeks had some weirddd ideas, hey??
  
  
• Oedipus, after witnessing his wife's/mother's suicide proceeds to stab his eyeballs, then throws a colossal tantrum on his back in the city of Thebes, kicking around, screaming and spinning about, a sight to which I suddenly broke into uncontrollable giggles.
  
  
• The narrator (bear in mind that this was a modern interpretation) sums up the story towards the end, in the most sensible and discreet way, by calling Oedipus the father-killer and the mother... , and she left it there.
  

Good night to you all...