How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (42 page)

It's something when you can reach the end of
Iphigenia at Aulis
with no sense that anything of great import—the morality of the characters' political goals, the fate of their marriages and households, the destinies of their royal houses, their honor, their lives—had ever really been at stake. But then, there are no stakes if you see this as being about real people in plausible situations—if you smooth away the baroque artificiality of the plot and diction, and therefore make nothing of the deeper questions that such artificiality raises. Sobel is good at producing real-looking surfaces, and as far as they went, I suppose you could say that these answered some questions. You knew this was Greece, for instance, because the characters went around in classical-looking tunics, and you knew there was a war going on, because there was a rack of very real-looking spears downstage left. But you didn't learn much else. Why does everyone in the play change his or her mind at some crucial juncture? What are the public pressures that might compel a man who is at once a general and a father to kill his own child? What is this play telling us about war and what it does to people's characters? In such a production as Sobel's you neither know nor care. The narrow focus of Sobel's production on what, to us, looks reassuringly familiar and
“relevant”—on the domestic, private nature of the pain in Euripides' play—ultimately robs it of its truly tragic stature, and effect. True, Aristotle argues that the best dramas are those about families, and this play is nothing if not a drama about one of the most dysfunctional families in world literature. But Sobel's failure to provide any sense of the vast public, imperial, and martial ramifications of this family's actions (ramifications that the Athenians would have felt) trivializes what Euripides wrote.

It's not that you can't do
Iphigenia
“straight,” as Sobel clearly wants to do; others have, with impressive results. In Michael Cacoyannis's harrowing if uneven 1977 film version of the play, the director devotes a great deal of time to a lengthy opening sequence showing the restive soldiers grumpily hanging around next to their becalmed ships, bickering and getting into scuffles out of sheer boredom, and after seeing a few dozen shots of this sort of thing you had a very solid sense that the lack of favorable wind was more than a meteorological annoyance, but rather a potentially disastrous political and military crisis just waiting to explode, with fearsome consequences for Agamemnon, his rule, and indeed for all of Greece. It was clear, because Cacoyannis had made it clear, that the heroes at Aulis would welcome a fair wind at any price, even the price of a young girl's life piteously cut short. Sobel gave you none of this. Or, maybe, half: there was pity, but no fear.

 

In many ways Tadashi Suzuki's Sophocles—a Noh-inflected
Oedipus
, performed in Japanese with English surtitles at the Japan Society last fall—represented a huge improvement over the Pearl Company's Euripides and showed a thoroughgoing understanding not only of the spirit of classical drama but of its style. Suzuki has devoted much of his distinguished career to staging Greek tragedy, and his highly stylized technique (which arises out of philosophical antipathy to technology, and which emphasizes the alternating containment and explosion of “animal energy” by the actors onstage) has suited the highly stylized Greek texts very well. In his printed comments on the
Oedipus
produc
tion, Suzuki rightly notes the affinities between the Japanese and Greek theaters:

It would have been difficult to find a more starkly beautiful representation of Sophocles' great drama of fate and self-knowledge (and ignorance) than the one Suzuki presented. The pared-down, elemental quality you want from performances of tragedy—that is, the sense of distillation that makes allegory and allusiveness possible—was present here in a number of ways, starting with superb performances that, in the classical style, made use of a limited but extreme gestural vocabulary, conveying a great deal with a fierce economy. I suppose there is a way that a real woman might react on hearing she'd borne four children to her own son, but Sophocles isn't interested in that—in his play, the incest and parricide are part of more abstracted and elaborately coded theatrical and mythic discourse about selfhood and otherness and “knowing.” The brilliantly drawn-out, stylized recoil of Suzuki's Jocasta, when she finally realizes who her husband is, suggested extremes of horror, loathing, and abjection in a way that no realistic enactment could ever have attained.

Suzuki's deeply classical technical emphasis on patterns of movement, on alternating compressions and explosions of physical energy, is, indeed, ideally suited to the highly conventional structure of Greek tragic action, which itself is organized as a series of compressions and explosions: dialogic exchanges, each beginning more or less calmly and climaxing in anger or violence or revelation, are framed between choral interludes of comparative calm. This is nowhere more the case
than in
Oedipus
, which is constructed as a series of confrontations between Oedipus and various other characters, during each of which Oedipus gleans another piece of information that leads him to the identity of the criminal whose crime, we learn, is so terrible that it has brought a plague down on Thebes. First there is the priest who appeals to him to discover the cause of the plague; then his brother-in-law, Creon, who returns from a mission to Delphi with an oracle saying that the cause of the plague is a sinner who lives among the Thebans; then the seer Teiresias, who eventually reveals that the sinner is Oedipus himself; then his wife, Jocasta, who tells him to pay no heed to silly oracles, since after all she and her late husband once had an oracle saying that the husband would be killed by his son, which never came to pass (he was, she says, killed by some robbers at a crossroads just before Oedipus came to town); and so forth. What's interesting is that not only that each successive dialogue is of increasing urgency, but each dialogue is itself constructed as a progression from calm to explosion. Oedipus begins by listening to his brother-in-law attentively, only to explode in rage later on, accusing Creon of taking bribes; he is polite enough with Teiresias, but that exchange also ends in rage and in threats that Oedipus makes against the old man; and he similarly threatens physical harm at the end of his exchange, late in the play, with the old shepherd who's brought in to testify about what he knows about a certain baby who was supposed to have been exposed years earlier. And so on.

The striking physical control emphasized by the Suzuki technique, the emphasis on alternations between restraint and release, was therefore ideally suited to the structure of
Oedipus
, and clarified Sophocles' text in subtle ways. In what is surely one of the greatest dramatic gambles ever made by a playwright, the truth of Oedipus's real identity—that he is the pollution he seeks; that he is the incestuous parricide he searches for—is announced to him by Teiresias very early on in the play. (The old seer doesn't want to tell the young king what he knows at first, but the arrogant Oedipus ticks him off so much that he finally reveals all.) Since the drama is, at one level, about the Theban ruler's search for the criminal whose past actions have brought a plague on his city, the play could conceivably collapse at this point; after all, we're told who the culprit is a third of the way through the action. But of course this is really a drama about knowledge, and self-knowledge. The genius
of Sophocles' play, encapsulated in this scene, is the way in which it suggests that it is the process of knowing, rather than the possession of mere data, that is crucial to our humanity.

To bring off this moment you need to have the sense that Oedipus, the man who solved the Sphinx's riddle and thereby saved Thebes, is so intellectually and morally self-confident that Teiresias's words simply don't penetrate—with the result that the revelation of the truth all the characters are searching for doesn't feel like a revelation at all. In Suzuki's production, the sense of Oedipus as disastrously isolated in his self-sufficiency was admirably conveyed. The fierce Oedipus of Kiyosumi Niihori sits absolutely still, facing the audience, during the seer's tirade; that uncanny, almost ritualized, self-absorbed stillness (which will soon explode into violent movement as Oedipus in his turn rails at Teiresias) explains a lot about the character, about both his past and his present inability to see the evidence that is right before his eyes.

The physical production similarly emphasized to great effect the way in which minimalist, allusive style yields the greatest results in the staging of classical texts. The stage at the Japan Society was equipped, as was the Theater of Dionysos at Athens, with the bare minimum of structures necessary to convey both an interior space (the palace), in which things—terrible things—took place, and a public space outside, in which those things were revealed: there was a small platform downstage for Oedipus to speak from and to be spoken to, and some sliding screens upstage from which entrances and exits were made, sometimes with unnerving stealth. (One of the screens seemed at first to be nothing more than a mirror, but turned out to be transparent as well, so that characters could see both themselves reflected in it and other characters revealed behind it; this was a superbly well considered effect for a drama in which every “self” turns out, disastrously, to be an “other”: the husband a son, the wife a mother, the detective a criminal, the city's rescuer its vile pollution, the king an outlaw, the foreigner a native.) The effect of these minimalist sets was to focus your attention fiercely on the characters—or, rather, on the magnificent costumes, by Tomoko Nakamura and Kana Tsukamoto, that these characters were weighed down by: ponderous, heavily embroidered robes and gowns and crowns that well conveyed the imperial status that these private persons enjoyed—or were oppressed by. In tragedy, as in its distant de
scendant, nineteenth-century opera, what makes the private agonies particularly unbearable is the fact that they are often endured in public, where the characters' royal status squarely places them.

 

And yet the costumes may have been the only thing that did fully convey the larger, political aspect of the Oedipus drama—the sense, one that Sophocles goes to great lengths to underscore, that the terrible things happening are not merely happening to a private person but to the leader of a city, one that he himself had once rescued and one indeed that has turned to him for salvation once again. Suzuki has commented not only on the similarities between tragedy and Noh, but on what he sees as the differences:

There is no question that what is admirable in Sophocles' Oedipus is his heroic desire to know even when it is clear that the knowledge he seeks will bring disaster. But “indefatigable power of the human spirit” sounds suspiciously sentimental, and if there is anything that distinguishes the classical sensibility from the contemporary it is the former's almost total lack of sentimentality.

This is nowhere truer than in tragedy, a genre that draws our attention as unrelentingly to its protagonists' deficiencies of character as to the piteousness of the punishments that in some sense “correct” those deficiencies. Indeed the text that Sophocles has composed suggests over and over again that what Oedipus is fighting against is as much his own nature as some randomly hostile fate. (At least one aspect of Oedipus's nature that clearly ought to arouse suspicion is one that Suzuki's style of direction nicely underscores: those explosive rages against older
men—indeed, against every other male character in the play. Classicists like to observe that Oedipus doesn't have an Oedipus complex, but it would be hard to find a character who has bigger “issues” about older male authority figures than this one.) And yet even despite the care with which Sophocles limns his protagonist's character, Oedipus is much more than simply a heroic individual, tormented by psychological demons against which he struggles alone, valiantly, in his quest for knowledge. The grandeur and horror of Oedipus's position owes much to the fact that the acts he commits as an ostensibly private person—or at least within what we'd think of as the private sphere (he has serious problems with road rage; he marries an older woman)—have terrible public ramifications: there is, after all, a plague going on that's afflicting all of Thebes, and Oedipus and his past crimes are the reason why.

It is Oedipus's public role that Sophocles emphasizes throughout the play, particularly at the beginning. The curtain, so to speak, rises to reveal him surrounded by supplicatory priests and citizens, appealing to the killer of the Sphinx to find once again a solution to a civic crisis—the plague. The next scene, an exchange with his brother-in-law Creon, demonstrates the ruler's anxious concern for his people. (In the prologue, Oedipus assures the priest that he has already sent to Delphi for a clue about what's causing the plague; Creon's entrance, as he returns from his mission, is a concrete demonstration of the truth of his claim.) When it is revealed that the plague is a divine scourge in response to the presence among the Thebans of the old king's murderer, it is Oedipus the ruler—Oedipus
tyrannos
, Oedipus
rex
—who lays the famous curse on the killer, “whoever he or they may be”—unaware all the while that he is condemning himself.