Theatre of Silence’s Seeking Oedipus is played out on a steeply raked ramp, where the private acts of the tragedy’s protagonists are pinioned in the glare of public scrutiny. The company go swinging, sprawling and scrambling across this space, torn between desire and fear of its consequences.
Aspasia Kralli’s production, choreographed by Zoe Chatziantoniou, uses the bodies of performers in conjunction and in space to explore the circling story of the ancient tragedy. Malamatenia Gotsi’s Jocasta begins as a poised, straight-backed girl staring fixedly into a mirror, but as the story unravels her body is transformed through the repeated contortions of copulation, birth and death. Meletis Ilias as Laius and Giorios Tsambourakis’ Oedipus are like macho mirror-images , locking horns in a violent death-struggle that is almost an act of desire.
The regular interventions of bird-woman-man-prophet Tiresias add little to the tension of the drama, and tend to slow the narrative to a stately, ritual plod. But Kostis Koronaios manages the difficult task of morphing from “shepherd” to “another shepherd” with consummate skill, and his subsequent transfiguration into the childless Queen of Corinth is marvellously detailed and authoritative.
The show exploits some shrewd symbolic insights, as the scarlet cord that binds mother and newborn child becomes the death weapon of Laius and the noose of Jocasta’s suicide. However, some of the drama’s central images – notably the recurring mirror – aren’t exploited so consistently, and the welter of clothes that tumbles from the sky to symbolise Thebes’ plague seems fairly arbitrary.
Working without words, the performers do not make the customary direct appeal for audience sympathy. Their inexorable progress through the sequence of events that leads to self-destruction is enacted with single-minded honesty that makes moral wrangling or hang-wringing irrelevant. Swift, stark and terse, Seeking Oedipus is an examination of tragic destiny to which the audience is witness, but not judge.
