theatre research international · vol. 31 | no. 3 | pp260–269
Federation for Theatre Research 2006 · Printed in the United Kingdom doi:10.1017/S0307883306002227
C International
Antigone Remembers: Dramaturgical Analysis
and Oedipus Tyrannos
freddie rokem
Dramaturgical analysis brings together theoretical issues of hermeneutics, text analysis and
performance theory with practical, creative work in the theatre. It is a complex, heterogeneous activity
connecting research and practice and is designed to reflect on, as well as to develop and enhance,
creative work in the theatre. The aim of dramaturgical analysis, as it is examined here, is to open up
new dimensions for productions of classical texts, by trying to illuminate these texts from new and
innovative perspectives and laying the basis for integrative scenic images that can later be developed
for the actual stage interpretation of this text. This article addresses some of the issues concerning
dramaturgical analysis by examining the process that led up to a production of Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannos where the author worked with the Swedish director Leif Stinnerbom, the artistic director
of the small and highly respected Västanå Theatre located in the Swedish province of Värmland.
The Oedipus Tyrannos production analysed here was performed at the Odense municipal theatre in
Denmark in 1999, where Stinnerbom was invited as a guest director.
. . . Oh woe is me
T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see.
Ophelia in Hamlet
The aim of dramaturgical analysis is to open up new dimensions for the production
of classical texts by illuminating these texts from fresh and innovative perspectives and
thereby laying the basis for integrative scenic images that can later be developed for the
actual stage interpretation of this text. Dramaturgical analysis and directorial practice no
doubt overlap and in the end they are two sides of the same coin, even if dramaturgical
analysis is more closely connected to textual analysis while directorial practices are more
directly involved with the actors and their work on the stage. It goes without saying that
it is not necessary to employ a dramaturg in order to carry out such a dramaturgical
analysis. In many cases, though, because of the interaction between the dramaturgical
analysis and the directorial practice, the dialogue between two individuals filling these
different functions can be fruitful. The dramaturgical analysis, at least as a function, even
if it was not carried out by a dramaturg, has become quite prominent in the modern and
contemporary theatre because of its implicit demand that every production of a classical
play, and this goes for modern classics as well, must be a totally new interpretation of the
dramatic text.1
Dramaturgical analysis brings together theoretical issues of hermeneutics, text
analysis and performance theory with practical, creative work in the theatre. It is a
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complex, heterogeneous activity connecting research and practice designed to reflect on,
as well as to develop and enhance, the creative work in the theatre. Theoretical reflections
and research, like this article, are a side product of dramaturgical analysis, not its main
task. In this article I shall address some of the issues concerning dramaturgical analysis by
examining the process that led up to a production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos where
I worked with the Swedish director Leif Stinnerbom. Stinnerbom is the artistic leader
of the small and highly respected Västanå Theatre located in the Swedish province of
Värmland, approximately half way between Stockholm and Oslo. The Oedipus Tyrannos
production was the second production we had worked on together and it was performed
at the Odense municipal theatre in Denmark, where Stinnerbom was invited as a guest
director.2 Odense, where the famous Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was born,
is the largest city on the small island of Fyn, and it is not far from the small coastal
town of Svendborg, where Baggårdteatret, the theatre which performed this production,
is located. This is the town where Brecht spent the years of his Danish exile between
1933 and 1939. The premiere of Oedipus Tyrannos took place in February 1999 and it was
preceded by almost two years of preparations and discussions with the director. The
rehearsals themselves, which I also attended for shorter periods, lasted approximately
eight weeks.
In my discussion of the production of Oedipus Tyrannos I shall primarily focus on
the textual issues and how they presented a set of options for the director by applying a
certain strategy of interpretation of the text. It is important to stress already at the outset
that the aim of this form of dramaturgical analysis clearly differs from the traditional
form of literary interpretation in that it does not seek to give a full account of the text. Its
main function is rather to create the basis for a specific production, exploring different
options which the director developed into the specific mise-en-scène of the production on
the basis of his own stylistic preferences and his work with the actors, the set designer, the
costume designer and the musicians. By examining how the directorial concept gradually
evolved from the textual analysis it will be possible to discuss some theoretical issues
relevant to dramaturgical analysis, a field that is ambiguously but also playfully situated
between theory and practice.
The dramaturgical analysis began by considering the dramatic text of Oedipus
Tyrannos as a riddle. In the most basic sense of the term, a riddle is an enigmatic text
which has to be given a solution or an answer, similar to the ways in which a performance
of a certain dramatic text provides a ‘solution’ to this specific text. A basic feature of a
riddle text is that it must have at least two possible answers, and sometimes even more,
otherwise it would not be possible to give the ‘wrong’ answer to a riddle, i.e. an answer
which, on the basis of the text itself, is logically possible but for different reasons is not
considered to be the ‘correct’ one.3 Riddle texts are ambiguously constructed to mislead
us to give the ‘wrong’ answer. Since this answer, even if it seems perfectly logical, usually
leads to some form of embarrassment for the person providing it, a different solution
must be found. The inherent ambiguity of the riddle text transforms the riddling situation
into a kind of game, because the seemingly obvious solution, which as a rule is sexually
provocative, has to be rejected in favour of a solution which is more difficult to find but
which generally is more ordinary or everyday.
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There were two reasons for choosing the strategy of riddle-solving in the
dramaturgical analysis of Sophocles’ text. The first was that the play itself begins by
looking back at the solution Oedipus had given to the riddle of the Sphinx, a solution
which through its supposed cleverness had made him the king of Thebes as well as
ended the plague from which the city had suffered. Now, as the play itself opens, because
there is apparently still an unresolved riddle question concerning Laius’ death, Thebes
suffers from a new plague. Second, a performance could be seen as one of the possible
solutions to a dramatic text. The notion of performance practice as a form of riddlesolving can also serve as a more general principle for dramaturgical analysis. The aim
of the dramaturgical analysis is to provide the basis for a new concrete scenic ‘solution’
to classical dramatic texts that have already been given numerous solutions in previous
productions of that text. This does not necessarily mean that these performances gave the
‘wrong’ solution of the text, or that a new performance ‘refutes’ previous productions,
but rather that every staging of a classical text, at least according to the modernist and
contemporary notion of directorial theatre, aims at providing a new, unique and original
reading of the dramatic text qua riddle. This approach to dramaturgical analysis also
makes it possible to relate to previous productions of a certain text through inter-textual
strategies.
Perhaps the direct relevance of this interpretative approach for a performance
of Oedipus Tyrannos is not immediately obvious. There is, however, something quite
disturbing, even uncanny, about the answer Oedipus provided to the riddle of the
Sphinx. On the one hand, he had obviously given the correct solution, answering ‘man’
to the question about the creature with one voice whose legs are transformed from
four, to two, to three. At the same time this ‘solution’ had unknowingly lead him to the
nuptial bed with his own mother, realizing the second half of the Delphic oracle.4 Very
early in our discussions we decided that this paradox, leading to the tragic outcome,
even after giving the ‘correct’ answer to the riddle, had to be addressed in some way
by the performance. The way to confront this issue was by trying to provide additional
solutions to the riddle through the performance itself, at the same time as the performance
itself attempted to give an additional solution to Sophocles’ drama as a textual riddle.
Proceeding in this way, it became clear that we were dealing with different levels of
riddling, and dramaturgical analysis was a way to tackle the complex interactions between
these levels.
In order to integrate the various levels of riddling we decided to explore the
possibility of focusing the production on the character of Antigone. Even if Antigone only
appears very briefly at the end of Oedipus Tyrannos, she is the central figure in Sophocles’
own narrative sequels to this play, in Oedipus at Colonus, and most prominently in the play
bearing her own name. And when Antigone walks away with her blinded father/brother
at the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus she even provides a new solution to the riddle,
serving as a cane, the third leg for her father, while both together constitute a four-legged
creature. Obviously Oedipus could not have known this answer when he became the
ruler of Thebes. But as the dialogue with Stinnerbom developed we wanted to find a
way to integrate this new solution into the performance itself. Exactly how this became
possible will be discussed in what follows.
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Lacan’s reading of Antigone became an additional key to the dramaturgical analysis
of Oedipus Tyrannos and to the ways in which the riddles of this text were interpreted.
Lacan calls Sophocles’ Antigone ‘an unimaginable highpoint, a work of overwhelming
rigor’,5 and he begins his discussion by pointing out that the word Até , meaning ‘border’
or ‘limit’, appears twenty times in Sophocles’ text, repeatedly drawing attention to
Antigone’s crossing of some kind of threshold. In particular, this happens when she
enters the cave, and no one can follow her. ‘She is inhuman’, (p. 263) Lacan claims, an
enigma that cannot easily be resolved in rational terms. She approaches this limit, Lacan
goes on, ‘because of something that is linked to the beginning and a chain of events,
namely that of the misfortune of the Labdacides family’ (p. 264).
Already in the beginning of Antigone she has reached a point where, according to
Lacan,
she literally cannot stand it anymore. Her life is not worth living. She lives with the
memory of the intolerable drama of the one whose descendence has just been destroyed
in the figures of her two brothers. She lives in the house of Creon; she is subject to his
law; and that is something she cannot bear.
(263, my emphasis)
At the same time there is also a sense that her experience of the past and her memories
are a source for strength and courage. Already in her speech opening the play bearing her
name Antigone declares that the misfortunes she and her sister Ismene have experienced
have been inherited from their father, because they are, as the text emphasizes, already
in the very first line, ‘of the same womb’. This common life-source, and this goes for her
relation to her father as well, is the reason for Antigone’s boundless commitment to the
burial of her brother Polynices. In the opening scene of the play, however, it is Ismene
who reminds herself and her sister of their common past:
Oh my sister, think
think how our own father died, hated,
his reputation in ruins, driven on
by the crimes he brought to light himself
to gouge out his eyes with his own hands –
then mother . . . his mother and wife, both in one,
mutilating her life
(60–6)6
This past is certainly something that Antigone herself is also aware of. When Creon
confronts her and she admits having buried her brother, she proclaims, with the kind of
pride and courage that distinguishes her throughout,
Die I must, I’ve known it all my life –
how could I keep from knowing? – even without
your death-sentence ringing in my ears.
(512–14)
Antigone acts and reacts, it seems, because she remembers her past. But how is it possible
to make Antigone and her memories the focalizer of the performance?
The unifying dramaturgical concept for the Oedipus Tyrannos production which
gradually evolved from these discussions was that what the audience would actually see
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on the stage were Antigone’s memories: a flashback that becomes dramatized just before
her suicide. In discussing this approach on a more abstract level, we also conceived of
this production as a pilot project for a possible future and much more extensive project,
bringing together all the three plays of Sophocles’ Theban cycle. This project should begin
with Antigone, the first of the three plays Sophocles wrote. What happens on the stage in
Oedipus Tyrannos, the second play in the cycle and the second to be performed (although
it is the play with which the narrative begins), will then be filtered through the memory
of the grown-up Antigone, who is now facing her own death as has already been shown
in Antigone. The last play to be performed in such a project, which is traditionally also
considered Sophocles’ last play, will be Oedipus at Colonus. The Danish performance of
Oedipus Tyrannos was, however, conceived of as an independent performance, standing
by itself.
The basic hermeneutic gesture of considering what is seen on the stage in a
performance of Oedipus Tyrannos as Antigone’s childhood memories was never explicitly
shown on the stage or pointed out directly in the performance itself. It was only
implied by having a woman, the major actress of the theatre company, play the chorus
leader, symbolizing, but not actually playing, Antigone’s memory, considering her a
representation of Antigone’s consciousness. It is, the production implicitly wanted to
show, the knowledge that Antigone has acquired by witnessing Oedipus’ painful struggle
to gain certainty about his own identity that makes her unique and distinguishes her
from her sister Ismene. In spite of the fact that Ismene survives her sister, she, in George
Steiner’s formulation, ‘no longer exists meaningfully’.7 And as the basic form of the
production gradually began to take shape we realized that Antigone’s unique situation
could be closely tied to the recollections of her early childhood experiences of a series of
primal scenes that she was now recollecting on the stage.
By focusing on Antigone’s role already in the first part of the Oedipal narrative
we wanted to critique the twentieth-century ‘obsession’ with the Oedipus conflict
introduced by Freud. Instead, by going back to the earlier, Romantic interest in Antigone
as the model for the tragic character, as explored by, for example, Lacan and Steiner, we
wanted to create a counterpoint to this twentieth-century male-focused position. Our
aim in making Antigone the focalizer for remembering and showing Oedipus Tyrannos as
the outcome of her early childhood recollections was also to draw attention to a possible
dialectical balance between the two ‘tragedies’ represented by Oedipus and Antigone
respectively.
The chorus, led by the woman who represented the ‘kernel’ of Antigone’s memory,
included four other performers, two women and two men, who at relevant points in
the action took on different character roles. One of the male members of the chorus
played Teiresias and the Shepherd, the other actor played Creon and the Messenger
from the court of Corinth, while the two actresses played Jocasta and the messenger
who bears the news of Jocasta’s death. The characters whose performers did not take on
the role of any other character were Oedipus and the female chorus leader, as well as
an important addition, a seven-year old girl who was present on the stage throughout
the whole performance, witnessing everything that was happening, mostly without any
direct participation. She was only directly identified in the very last scene when she called
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out ‘Father’ to Oedipus. Her name – Antigone – was never mentioned in the performance
itself.
Besides the riddle of the Sphinx, with which the performance began and ended (and
I will expand on this below), this was the only line in the performance that had been
added. This short but very significant word, pronounced as if the young Antigone were
suddenly waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, calling for her father,
was the only instance in the play that clarified that this young girl is actually Oedipus’
daughter. Through the double perspective of the chorus leader and the young girl the
whole performance was thus implicitly transformed into a recollection of the ‘primal’
scenes that Antigone had witnessed as a child. What she saw during those fatal days,
when her mother committed suicide and her father finally discovered his true identity by
solving the riddle of his identity, has marked her for life. This kind of flashback, telling
the story of Sophocles’ play, was what we finally decided to show on the stage in the
production of Oedipus Tyrannos.
When the young girl came running onto the stage at the very beginning of the
performance she was met by the chorus leader, who carefully and lovingly arranged her
dress, signifying (but never explicitly explaining) the double temporal perspective of an
older Antigone recollecting her childhood. The performance literally ‘re-collected’ and
presented the fragments from her childhood. The first time the young Antigone became
directly involved in the action itself, not just passively witnessing what was going on,
was when Jocasta left the stage to commit suicide. In this scene the young girl followed
her mother closely and when Jocasta, strongly lit up, entered a small alcove in one of
the edges of the oval stage, Antigone ceremoniously closed the curtain behind her as
she disappeared in the darkness. This scene was conceived as an image where the stage
membranes, the ‘boundaries’ of Antigone’s memory, suddenly burst, immediately to
become sealed again. This represented the Até explicated by Lacan.
When the basic dramaturgical concept had been fixed and was gradually developed
it was important not to create any additional semiotic cues regarding the identity of the
young girl until the very end of the performance, when she became directly involved in
the performance calling out ‘Father.’ We wanted the performance, telling this well-known
narrative, to contain an enigmatic, riddle-like quality regarding its inner structure. For
those spectators who were interested to decipher this aspect of the performance, it should
remain an enigma that could only gradually be solved. At the same time, though, it was
important not to draw too much attention to this scheme in order not to disturb the
progression of the play’s central narrative of how Oedipus reveals his identity. I must
admit that for some of the spectators who were less interested in this structural aspect
of the performance and were mainly concerned about ‘getting’ the basic narrative of
the play presented for them, the scheme of recollecting became somewhat taxing. And
looking back at the performance after several years it is difficult to say what is the best
balance between the two perspectives, the play narrative or the dramaturgical narrative.
The dramaturgical analysis tried to find the suitable dialectics between them.
All the seven actors, including the young girl, were present on the stage more or less
throughout the whole performance. This became possible by establishing a convention
of having one of the chorus members visibly take on the clothes of the character he or
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she was going to perform on top of the more or less neutral costume they were wearing
as chorus members before they made their ‘entrance’ on stage as a specific character.
When the scene with one of these characters ended and this character made an ‘exit’, he
or she took off the character costume in view of the spectators and immediately joined
the chorus again. While an actor dressed up in order to step into his or her character
in order to make an ‘entrance’, the remaining members of the chorus made a wide
circular movement around the stage. And just before the character was about to enter,
the remaining members of the chorus stopped their movement, bent down and clapped
their hands on the floor in unison in a kind of ritual action that brought the character
forward. This clapping on the floor signified the moment when Antigone’s memories of
her childhood became embodied on the stage.
The stage was designed to make it possible for all the actors to be present on
the stage throughout the whole performance. It consisted of a large oval-shaped space
surrounded by the spectators on both longer sides of the oval and with two narrow
bridges, one situated at each narrow ‘corner’ of the oval. These bridges led up to the
two balconies behind the spectators where the four musicians and sometimes also the
characters were situated. On the stage floor itself, which had the shape of a hugely
magnified eye, referring to the themes of ‘seeing’ and ‘blindness’ in the play, at one end
of the stage there was a bare tree (a kind of leftover or memory from a Godot production)
around which the religious rites in the performance were conducted, and at the other end
there was a chair, signifying the throne and political power. During the performance the
chair slowly moved in the direction of the tree, until at the very moment when Oedipus
recognized his true identity, it was suddenly turned over by the tree.
The scenic space, together with the circular movement which the chorus repeated
over and over again, created a very ritual performance structure that enabled the
characters to make their entrances and exits even if they were actually present on the
stage. Only Oedipus and the leader of the chorus, representing the memory of Antigone,
calling up the characters from the past in ‘her’ memory, as well as the young Antigone,
the child witness, did not go through any transformations during the performance. The
production thus implicitly presented Antigone’s retrospective retelling of her memories
from her early childhood from the point of view of the chorus, including herself as
the young girl witnessing the events in these recollections. As the rehearsals began it
became clear how easy it was to adopt the words of the chorus to the retrospective retelling
of the events in the play as a first-person narrative, narrated by the split ‘character’ of
Antigone presented through the double perspective of the chorus leader and the young
girl.
This double perspective also reflects the structure of the play, where Oedipus
gradually discovers his own identity through different clues from the past in front
of an audience, which certainly knows what the outcome of the events will be. In the
Danish production the additional double perspective of the two Antigones became
the organizing principle of the performance: Oedipus’ discovery unfolded through
Antigone’s gradual exposure of her memories from the traumatic events of her childhood
as they were ritually repeated on the stage. Antigone, as the leader of the chorus,
enabled the narrative to take shape once more on the stage as a series of recollections
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that forced themselves on her. Antigone remembers, and her recollections of her past,
including herself as a child voyeur, enabled the different characters to appear on the stage.
Antigone’s recollections structure the narrative as her own obsessive ritual of repetition,
somehow reflecting and perhaps even critiquing our own cultural obsession with the
Oedipal narrative. The experience of the primal scene was thus transferred to Antigone,
dislocating the male-gendered perspective of this formative scene as dictated by Freud.
There was also a ritual of repetition embedded in the performance itself, creating
a circular structure, returning to its point of departure at the end, integrating the riddle
of the Sphinx (a text which is conspicuously absent from Sophocles’ text) into the
performance itself, not only as a subtext but as an integral component. The performance
started in an inner foyer where the three non-permanent members of the chorus, without
the chorus leader, constructed a composite beast-like figure, asking the famous riddle.
While the spectators were watching this strange riddling creature, Oedipus appeared on
a balcony behind them providing his triumphant answer, ‘Man’, entitling him to the
throne of Thebes as a Tyrannos, meaning a ruler who has not inherited the throne, and
to the bed of the widow-queen, who turns out to be his own mother.
After Oedipus had given the ‘right’ answer the chorus guided the spectators into
the playing area with the oval stage where they were seated. Now the chorus leader could
be seen kneeling in front of the ritual tree while Oedipus danced around his throne. But
the gestures of triumph quickly disappeared and instead could be heard the sounds of
mourning and suffering caused by the new plague, actually breaking out several years
later, after Oedipus’ four children had been born. This is the point where Sophocles’ play
actually begins. This was also the point where the young girl appeared on the stage for
the first time. When she became aware of the chorus leader, who greeted her silently, she
slowed down, somehow acknowledging their special relationship as the chorus leader
arranges her dress.
The riddle was heard a second time at the very end of the performance. After calling
out ‘father’, the young girl began to lead the now blinded Oedipus with his hand resting
on one of her shoulders. This situation, taken from the opening of Oedipus at Colonus,
actually took place several years after the action of the previous play has ended, but
in the Danish performance it followed directly.8 In the performance this gesture was
interrupted by Creon, who had explicitly forbidden Antigone to follow her father into
exile, and forcefully and quite cruelly he pulled her away from him. The chorus leader,
who had been closely watching Creon’s violent outburst towards the young girl, now
took the position of the young girl and began to escort the blind man, who through this
gesture actually becomes her father, while she for the first time becomes the grown-up
Antigone. This exchange between the young girl and the chorus leader escorting Oedipus,
the father, was only presented visually, as a pantomime. It was never named explicitly in
the performance itself. The grown-up Antigone was now leading Oedipus to the ritual
tree where she had been sitting when the performance began.
While the chorus-leader slowly escorted the blinded Oedipus, with his arm on one of
her shoulders, the words of the riddle were heard in a whispering voice from somewhere
behind the audience. It was the chorus asking, ‘What has one voice and walks on two, on
three and on four ?’, implying that what we were seeing on the stage was a four-footed
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creature, a daughter compassionately leading her blind father. The chorus asking the
riddle again, and the chorus leader/Antigone leading the old man, even implied that
they was questioning Oedipus’ wisdom when he had given the sphinx his answer to the
riddle, an answer through which his tragic fate had become sealed and fully realized.
The riddle-solving with which the dramaturgical analysis had begun, and which
can be conceived of as a model for dramaturgical analysis searching for stage solutions
for a certain dramatic text, had thus developed into one of the implicit themes of the
performance itself. This dramaturgical analysis, adopting a strategy of riddle-solving,
had transformed the basic parameters of the fictional world of Sophocles’ play. Instead
of a drama where Oedipus searches for the answer to the question of who killed the old
king, Laius, finding out that it was he himself who was the murderer, and that Laius was
his father, the performance became a narrative where these events are recollected by one
of the principal victims of Oedipus’ unknowing transgressions, focusing on Antigone’s
recollections of the memories from her childhood leading up to Oedipus’ banishment
and her separation from her father as she recalls them at a much later point in time.
Instead of emphasizing the drama of fate the Danish production highlighted the pain of
recollection from Antigone’s perspective.
The fact that there are several solutions to the riddle of the sphinx was thus developed
into a central theme of this specific production. Oedipus’ solution, which drove him
directly into the arms of his mother, had created an illusory triumph, and while Oedipus
was able to solve the intricate intellectual puzzle of man’s universal identity, he did not
actually know his own identity. He was unable to identify his own parents. And at the
end of the performance an alternative solution to the riddle was presented. The paradox
of Oedipus Tyrannos is the tragic discrepancy between Oedipus’ universal knowledge,
providing a definition of man, and his ignorance of who he himself really is. This specific
production drew attention to the dialectics between an Oedipus who wrongfully believed
he had found the solution to the riddle, and an Antigone who knew she had reached an
impasse where there are no solutions, because of what she remembered, or as she herself
expressed it in the play bearing her name (not the name of her father): ‘Die I must, I’ve
known it all my life/how could I keep from knowing?’ This dialectics created a complex
intellectual as well as emotional challenge, a challenge that can only be fully explored by
continuing to develop the initial principles of dramaturgical analysis presented here.
1
2
notes
The freedom of textual interpretation in modern and contemporary performance practice is a topic
that has to be dealt with independently. Dramaturgical analysis is an outcome of this interpretative
liberty, even if playwright–directors like Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett had severe reservations
about such a freedom, at least with regard to their own plays. On the other hand, Brecht’s own version
of Antigone, can serve as an implicit model for dramaturgical analysis as adaptation.
The first production we worked on together was a production of Hamlet, which premiered at Västanå
Theatre in 1996, in Karlstad, the provincial capital of Värmland. The following year this production was
also performed at Riksteatern, the national travelling theatre of Sweden. For a description of this
production see my article ‘Constructions of Consciousness in Hamlet’, Performing Arts International, 1,
4 (1999), 13–24. Prior to the production of Oedipus Tyrannos in Denmark, but after the discussions
with the director had begun Galit Hasan-Rokem and I wrote an article “What does Antigone
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3
4
5
6
7
8
Antigone Remembers 269
Remember? A Dramaturgical and Folkloristic Analysis of King Oedipus”, in Telling, Remembering,
Interpreting, Guessing, eds Vasenkari, Pasi Engers & Siikala, Annateena, (Joeasuu, Soumea
Kansaatietouden Tutkijan Seurs, 2000), pp. 226–235.
On the notion of the riddle see Annikki Kaivola, Riddles: Perspectives on the Use, Function and Change
in a Folklore Genre (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2001).
For a detailed discussion on this dilemma see my article ‘One Voice and Many Legs: Oedipus and the
Riddle of the Sphinx’, in G. Hasan-Rokem and D. Shulman, eds., Untying the Knot: On Riddles and
other Enigmatic Modes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 255–70.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Essence of Tragedy’, in idem, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter
(New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), p. 257. All subsequent quotations are from
this edition and the page numbers are given in brackets in the text itself.
Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert
Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1984). All the quotations from the respective plays are from
this edition, giving the line-numbers in parentheses in the text itself.
George Steiner, Antigones, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 241.
This is the physical gesture with which Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus opens: ‘My child, child of the
blind old man – Antigone,/where are we now?’ (1–2), when she is leading her father to the grove of the
Furies in Colonus, where he will eventually die. This line was not included in the performance, even
though such an inclusion would have been possible.
freddie rokemis professor of Theatre Studies at Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, where he served as the
Dean of the Faculty of the Arts (2002–6). His book Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past
in Contemporary Theatre received the ATHE Prize for best book in theatre studies for 2001. His most recent book,
Strindberg’s Secret Codes, was published in 2004. He has also published numerous articles in scholarly journals
and in books. Rokem will serve as the editor of Theatre Research International 2007–9.
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