The premiere was 2446 years ago.
The play is an absolute hit: an unsolved murder case, almost forgotten, is suddenly reopened.
Years ago the king was murdered, but those involved from back then seem strangely indifferent today.
The investigator is stunned: Even the victim's widow has come to terms with the fact that her husband's killer got away scot-free.
Does Iokaste know more than she says?
But why should the queen be silent?
Hubert Spiegel
Editor in the features section.
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Thoughtful, irritated, but determined and self-assured, Steven Scharf steps up to the ramp of the Bochum theater and looks into the audience as if the choir of this ancient tragedy and Thebes king owed an answer. Just like everyone else, he was standing in the background of the stage, not a ruler, just a black silhouette in front of a bright red sky, in which flocks of birds perform their enigmatic choreographies several times on this extraordinary theater evening: patterns that find each other and then lose again. It is said that priests know how to read the will of the gods from it. But the priest is silent. Now, at the front of the ramp, the investigator persistently tries to find out for himself what the gods want from the people. He won't spare anyone, especially himself.That will be his great achievement. And his curse, his fate and his downfall.
Highly concentrated and intense
The “King Oedipus” of Sophocles, the epitome of tragedy and its most perfect example, as a quiet, highly concentrated chamber play on an almost empty stage?
Has this happened before?
With this intensity, with these resources?
Johan Simons, the director of the Bochum Theater, works with light, economical video recordings, electronic music that is fascinating but can also teach fear, and a great ensemble that focuses entirely on the text and trusts it.
The new Bochum version of the piece is called "Oedipus, Herrscher", by Elsie de Brauw, Mieke Koenen and Susanne Winnacker, is slim, supple and written in a language that knows how to assert itself: against antiquity, the present, the pathos.
Slowly but steadily, this version shifts the balance: from the factual investigation of the crime with which it begins, to the gradually looming catastrophe of its clarification, from Iocaste, the queen, to Oedipus, the king, who is her husband and her son, the Father and brother of their children and the murderer of their ex-husband who was his father. And then, at the very end, quite surprisingly, something shifts again. A victim is denied. This piece is always about the fact that someone wants something and another should sacrifice something for it.
First Iokaste speaks.
Elsie de Brauw stands in front of the stage and reports on Theben's great misery: fields wither, animals perish, people despair.
It was like this before, twenty years ago.
At that time a stranger appeared, solved the riddle of the cruel Sphinx, freed the city and received as a reward the hand of the queen, who had just become a widow.
Since then, Oedipus has ruled Thebes as king.
Ancient court drama, ageless
Twenty years later, Oedipus sends his brother-in-law Creon to Delphi to consult the oracle. According to Creon's message, the plagues would only pass when the murder of old King Laios was atoned for. Oedipus immediately goes to work, suspects Creon of an intrigue, questions servants and shepherds, pressures the blind seer Teiresias until he finally accuses the king himself of the crime against his will. He doesn't believe him because he never knowingly met Laios. And now, inexorably listing evidence after evidence, Oedipus reveals everything he did not know: who he is and what he has done.
An ancient court drama, ageless. Kleist has recognized that the judge who investigates a crime that he himself has committed can change from a tragic to a comic figure if he knows from the start that he is the perpetrator. Like village judge Adam in the "Broken Jug". Johan Simons has recognized that in the judge, who continues to investigate, although he suspects that he himself is the perpetrator, there is not only righteousness but also a grain of Kohlhaas, namely a grain of cruelty. From the jovial ruler who wants to redeem the people and the city from their misery, Steven Scharf transforms himself into a fanatic of justice and self-knowledge that penetrates and undermines him. Oedipus decays. When the last doubt has been removed, Steven Scharf stands very still, extends his arms a little,turns the palms forward and lets the eyeballs wander back before closing the eyelids. Well, at the moment of certain knowledge of the truth, a blind man stands before us. Then the stage gets dark again, the musician and composer Lukas Tobiassen, who sits on the right side of the stage for the entire performance, lets his electronic siren sounds and Erinyes chants swell again, and Oedipus emerges from the depths of the stage once more: Now the eyes are gouged out The face is covered in blood, the body is shaking with convulsions, it babbles as if it had lost its mind when it had to find out who it is and what it has done. Iokaste kills himself at Sophocles'. With Simons, she refuses to make a sacrifice. Elsie de Brauw plays Thebes Queen like a CEO: controlled, strategically clever,confident in dealing with one's own abysses. Because she loved Oedipus, the man, the son, the murderer. But she loves something else even more.