That is not only true of the pandemic we are also the origin of an even bigger drama, the drama of our time: global warming.” “Oedipus himself is the origin of the plague, because he killed his own father. When asked by the Guardian’s theatre critic “What play do you think most speaks to this time we are living through?”, Ostermeier answered Oedipus, saying: Multiple crisesĪs if in response, Doerries’ The Oedipus Project named its themes as the pandemic and the climate crisis. While some revelled in the fresh take on Oedipus these performances brought, at least one critic wondered if maybe we shouldn’t search for a direct parallel between the Theban plague killing Oedipus’s subjects and COVID-19. The Athens/Epidaurus festival reopened in its ancient venues with a version of the play first produced at Berlin’s famous Schaubühne theatre, ödipus, written by Maja Zade and directed by Thomas Ostermeier. The play, directed by Bùi Nhu Lai, was performed and streamed at the 6th Asian Theatre Schools Festival held in Beijing, by the Hà Nội Academy of Theatre and Cinema.Īnd as pandemic restrictions began to ease, Oedipus came back to stages. Vietnamese audiences saw what’s believed to be the first-ever Vietnamese production of King Oedipus through an online festival in May 2021. The excellent Theater of War company, under the direction of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Bryan Doerries, produced a star-studded zoom version in May 2020, The Oedipus Project, dedicated to first responders.

My new edited volume follows global trends in how theatre artists receive and interpret Greek tragedy in contextualizing a Montréal-based theatre company’s new translations of Greek tragedy. In the pandemic, out of the shadows of Freud, the world remembered Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus ( Oedipus Rex /Oedipus the King) was not just a psycho-sexual drama, but a play about a city-devastating plague, most likely first produced in 429 BCE after an unknown disease swept through Athens. A figure from ancient Greek myth who was fated to kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus has been most famous over the last century for the controversial “complex” that Sigmund Freud named after him. Now that the World Health Organization has said COVID-19 “no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern” but is instead “an ongoing health issue,” how will theatre makers and audiences read plague- and pandemic-themed plays?ĭuring the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the character Oedipus and the ancient Greek drama based on his tragedy was suddenly everywhere.

Oedipus rex