16 - The dramatic legacy of myth: Oedipus in opera, radio, television and film

Summary

This chapter will investigate what happens to ancient drama in performance as opera, radio, television and film. Understanding the media is like learning a new dramatic language. Drama is as old as man if we believe Aristotle and associate it with the mimetic instinct. One might say the first act of communication for all of us - the infant's first cry as it greets the world - is a form of drama.

Drama was used to propitiate the gods and amuse viewers. Flourishing in both Greek and Roman theatres, and later on elaborate stages, opera married music to text as it revived mythical themes. Modern media transformed drama further. George Eastman first manufactured transparent celluloid film in 1889, and Auguste and Louis Lumière showed the first motion picture using film projection in 1895. Guglielmo Marconi first sent radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901. Television can be traced to John Logie Baird in 1926. Whereas the modern media are just about a hundred years old, drama has been staged in front of live audiences for thousands of years.

To illustrate the transformation that takes place when classical drama is reproduced in modern media, I will take as an example Oedipus plays and the varieties of treatments they have received from those media. For ease of comparison, I shall discuss only those plays, but the discussion applies to almost all Greek and Roman drama because of the media used for performance.

Oedipus is a singularly fitting choice since, throughout the centuries, his myth has served as a Rorschach for philosophical and psychological theories from Freud to Nietzsche to Lévi-Strauss. This parable of a man who unwittingly commits the vilest crimes - murdering his father, marrying his mother, and engendering children with her - also describes a man who will not give up, and is certainly a memorial to man's capacity for survival.