Oedipus

Oedipus, the tragedy by Sophocles, teaches the readers and audience about the importance of destiny, and that one should not attempt to avoid or escape their fate. Having read the play (twice), having paraphrased and performed the play (twice, as well), and now having seen the play performed as an opera, I can safely say that I have a firm understanding of the plot and messages of the work. When reading the play, I always pictured Oedipus as a greek guy with lightish skin and sandy-brown hair and a beard, wearing a toga or something. I had an image of Tiresias being an old man with no eyes, and always wearing a navy-blue robe. Jocasta, a somewhat old woman who looks very good for her age, an olive skinned woman with dark hair and wearing a maroon robe/gown. I had an image for every character in the play, and none of those images were too far-fetched. When I saw Oedipus performed as a Japanese opera in contemporary roman style, my images were a bit shattered. Not in a bad way, I might add. I never pictured any of the characters singing, which is what they all did in the opera (because it was an opera). It took some characters about 400 times longer to say their lines in the opera than it took them to say when it was performed, and the lines took even less time than that in my head. The aesthetics of the costumes and performance were very archaic, resembling crumbling and ancient stone. This makes sense, of course, because the civilization in which this took place is now very old, and it was, of course, made of stone. There were a lot of things that depicted decay. Even the chorus looked to be assembled of a mix of relics, for those costumes made the citizens of Thebes appear to be long dead. The opera captured the essence of tragedy and death in a way that I never did or could on my own.