Carsen and the elaboration of the past of Oedipus at Colonus

In the Greek Theatre of Syracuse, this Oedipus at Colonus stands out, transformed by grief, now blind, a beggar dressed in rags, whom Robert Carsen's direction at times leaves completely alone on stage, at the foot of the steps on which is that green forest of allusive cypresses, a sacred place that he feels is his final destination and where he stops waiting to cross it to go and die.

Giuseppe Sartori, leaning on a stick, gives it life and a truth that expresses inner suffering through the body, all involved from the bends of the head to the contractions of the toes, and modulations of the voice with echoes of a certain high-sounding otherness and at the same time of heartfelt, poetic humanity: "When I am no longer anything, is it really then that I am a man?".

The scene is still a staircase, designed by Radu Boruzescu, which refers to the one that led to the palace of Thebes and that Carsen in 2022 had made a defeated, cursed, undone Oedipus Rex descend. A staircase that is opposite and concludes the circle of the one in the theater's cavea, with Oedipus who enters the scene passing among the spectators, as if to allude and give a sense of theatricality to his life and at the same time make it appear that only after having staged it all can he die peacefully, having elaborated and internalized it with the awareness of not being able to be said to be guilty because he was completely unaware of what he was doing (having killed his father and then married his mother).

An end no longer through violence or suffering, but in a dimension of sacredness, of sublimation of one's inner being, which frees itself of its mortal remains by disappearing among the trees. It is where the Eumenides, bearers of peace, live, whom Carsen makes appear among the cypresses dressed in green between feminine sinuosities or incisive mimetic gestures, sharing with them the part of the chorus that Sophocles had reserved only for the citizens of Athens. A spectacularization without excesses, as well as the scenographic use of clay craters that pour symbolic water, for a text that offers almost no possibility of it. Sophocles wrote 'Oedipus at Colonus' at the age of ninety and puts an intensity and delicacy in his discovery of fragility, in his human unraveling, in which he probably reflects his own and investigates the mystery, the inconceivability of death. Alongside this human dimension, however, he also highlights a political discourse. The tragedy took place in 401 BC when the Greek polis, the greatness of Athens, with Sparta as the victor, is the victim of its own mania and strength of power, here represented by Creon (Paolo Mazzarelli), dressed in black like Oedipus and all those who come from his past, including his son Polynices (Simone Severini), who would like him back in Thebes only because an oracle predicts that the place where Oedipus will be buried will be forever protected and invincible. On the contrary, King Theseus (Masssimo Nicolini) indicates the alternative, dressed in white like the chorus of all the other inhabitants of Athens, who welcomes and protects Oedipus in the name of compassion, justice, and hospitality of the stranger despite the fame he carries with him. Oedipus, almost a forerunner of King Lear, with his two sons whom he does not forgive because they fight each other for power, also almost always has on stage with him two compassionate daughters who are at his side in the misery of his pilgrimage and in his last days, in a shared dialogue, played with evident loving kindness and questioning anxiety as Antigone by an intense, luminous Fotinì Peluso and Ismene by a no less apprehensive Clara Bortolotti.

A tragedy of pain and destiny, which from extreme suffering leads to liberation, which is, given the inevitable differences, the same path of 'Electra', the other text by Sophocles that alternates with 'Oedipus at Colonus' in this sixtieth season of the Ancient Drama. A double choice therefore that seems to make sense in this moment of tormented days, of wars and suffering, a metaphor of suffering and hope for an awareness that the world should elaborate. And the full moon that shone high on the ancient stones of the Greek Theater was hopefully a good omen in pushing for reflection.