The Metamorphoses of Theseus in Oedipus at Colonus
by Brian Johnston

III. Increase of Theseus's miimetic authority

One sees that Theseus' role gradually increases in mimetic authority as it is taken up, in succession, by the third, the second, and finally the first (Oedipus) actor. This increasing dignity of the role matches the increase, through the plot, of Theseus' authority until he earns the right, as it were, to be “performed” by the Oedipus actor. He has become the closest to Oedipus, underscored by the fact that he, not Antigone or Ismene, is privileged to witness Oedipus' wonderful death.

This approaching closeness is subtly manifested in a number of ways. At the beginning of the play Oedipus and Antigone are the closest. Ismene, though “sympathetic, “ is more distant, not sharing Oedipus' exile like her sister but coming from Thebes and bearing news of its menace – and bearing also the oracles' pronouncement of Oedipus' divine power. At this point the Chorus implores Oedipus to offer a libation to the Eumenides. Oedipus agrees and gives this task to Ismene. Why it is not Oedipus or at least Antigone who should be given this urgent and holy task? The performative reason is that one of the three actors onstage must become Theseus. And Theseus is not “ready” just yet (i.e., he has not established his dramatic and thmeatic significance) to be performed by the Antigone actor. We have not yet seen him deserve this closeness to the Oedipus figure.

When Actor 3 enters as Theseus, however, he exhibits that same mixture of courtesy and pity before the monstrous figure that Neoptolemus showed to Philoctetes. He accepts Oedipus as a guest, promises to defend him, and is not horrified by the family history that so appalled the Chorus. As a character, we can say, he is beginning to emerge from the other Athenians as conspicuously noble. His “role” promises much, and the promise will be fulfilled. Therefore when he exits at the close of the first episode, he will not again be played by the third actor.

Actor 3, in fact, exits to become Creon, the worst and “lowest” of Oedipus' opponents. (Ismene – (Actor( 3) – has been kidnapped by Creon's men – a melodramatic plot-element symbolically fitting for Creon, who cannot rise to the dignity of tragic contest.)  When Actor 3 enters he offers first deceit and then violence as his men drag Antigone from the scene (and skene ). Creon remains onstage where he is engaged long enough in recrimination with Oedipus for the Antigone (Actor 2) to change into the rescuing Theseus. The Speeches and behavior of Theseus in the following episode fully justify his histrionic elevation – an elevation which must be at the expense of the Antigone role (now Actor 3) and the Ismene role, now relegated to a mute actor. Theseus (Actor 2), in fact, already is closest to Oedipus (Actor 1).

As Oedipus at this point is out of danger, Theseus plausibly can exit temporarily so that (Actor 2 can become Polyneices. In contrast with Creon, Polyneices is not only the closest of Oedipus' antagonists – his son – but also a tragic rather than a melodramatic figure. There is no large fall of stature, then, for the Theseus actor to transform to Polyneices, who carries with him in Athenian theatrical memory greater tragic identity than Creon. Polyneices' dialog. with his father is truly tragic. His reaction to the sight of Oedipus exhibits genuine grief and sense of guilt. He displays reverence towards Poseidon, and, unlike Creon, he is honest about his mission. His roll-call of his allies and their six leaders is a deliberate recollection of The Seven Against Thebes , and it gives to Polyneices the tragic dignity – and destiny – of Eteocles in Aeschylus' great play. Both the Chorus and Antigone are sympathetic towards him, and the tremendous blood-curdling curse which Oedipus now utters upon him and his brother only reveals the tragic futility of his human contrition before the daimonic power he has offended. His departure has dignity, touched with the love clearly displayed between himself and his sisters – a clear 'retrospective premonition' of the Antigone .

It is after this episode when, through the agon with the Polyneices figure, the play has elevated itself to full tragedy, that Sophocles now takes the drama beyond tragedy to a form of mystery play just as Aeschylus took The Oresteia beyond tragedy to divine comedy in The Eumenides . Thunder, as implacable as Oedipus' curse, now summons the old hero. This is how Oedipus understands it. The Chorus is terrified, however, and calls upon Theseus to come from his holy sacrifices where he is priest-king, and to joint with Oedipus. Again, Theseus shows himself fully able to respond to Oedipus' nature, in this instance to his holy, not his monstrous identity. In this way he has “displaced” Antigone and this “earned” the second actor status. Oedipus cannot utter the “great mysteries” to anyone but Theseus, and he promises that these will be tremendous blessings – as tremendous as the curse on his sons and on Thebes.

The action of the play now moves into the miraculous. The blind old hero who had to be led can suddenly “see” and lead the others. The hideous pariah has become a revered demigod. As all the characters exit, following Oedipus (into the interior of the skene ), the Chorus offers up a hymn to Oedipus and a prayer for his acceptance by the world of the Dead. The pattern both of Oedipus' whole life and of this play have come full circle. The pharmakos expelled from Thebes and at first received with horror by the citizens of Athens now has become a demigod, revered by the community.

What has been happening inside the mysterious space of the Grove is now told by the Messenger. The Messenger must relate holy things, wonders – he must speak with the mysterious divine voices that called upon Oedipus, and must speak with the voice of Oedipus himself. Presumably chanted and sung, it is arguably the greatest speech in the play and perhaps in all of Greek tragedy. And there is only one actor capable of its tremendous range and power: the Oedipus actor. (Protagonists frequently were assigned the Messenger roles, 16 and any actor today looking for audition pieces should search out these virtuoso speeches.) This is confirmed when Antigone and Ismene (now Actors 2 and 3) appear immediately at the speech's conclusion. Theseus must appear later, for he had gone furthest into the Grove with Oedipus, and the Messenger describes him engaged in an ecstatic ritual of kissing the ground, raising his arms to the skies, and saluting the gods of Olympus and of the Underworld. Oedipus the pariah through three agons (with the Citizen and Chorus, with Creon, and with Polyneices) has at last “purged” himself from his tragic past preparatory to his death and apotheosis, and in a sense, both theatrically and symbolically, Theseus has been at his side throughout the process, himself embodying aspects of each of its stages.

But though Oedipus has transcended tragedy, his children have not. Antigone wishes first to do the forbidden, to seek out the place of Oedipus' death against Ismene's protest, then to return to Thebes. Any movement in this direction, to the eastern 'Theban' parodos, is burdened with Oedipus' terrible curse. This little scene is like a musical thematic tremolo from Antigone . And, of course, it gives the first actor time to exit and change costume and mask from the Messenger role to the Theseus role, 17 another instance where Sophocles converts a performative requirement into a symbolic meaning. Now Theseus appears, speaking with the authority of Oedipus and of the powers that took Oedipus to them.

The Messenger is the link between Oedipus and Theseus so that all three are played by the same actor in swift succession with whatever subtle modulations of voice and gesture the actor used to convey mystical similarity within difference. When Theseus appears, the miracle and the blessing are complete: the Oedipus voice (spirit) speaks through the Theseus mask: the spirit of Oedipus has entered Athens as a blessing through its most typical hero. Theseus himself has been transfigured by the process which is profoundly conveyed through the use of the three-actor rule. The metamorphoses of the Theseus role from third to second to first actor is a process of the growth in power and stature of the character that would have been manifest in the performance. It is the theatrical manifestation of Oedipus' gift to Athens.

I am not claiming that the three-actor rule is the sole key to the greatness of Greek drama, and in the discussion above I have left out much of what I also value in the play: the passionate and transcendent poetry, the depiction of Oedipus as the last in the extraordinary succession of “sacred monsters” of Sophocles' extant plays – a succession that began with Ajax. But I think “seeing” the performative terms of the plays helps us to understand what Aristotle meant when he elevated plot to the supreme dramatic virtue over character and poetry. We can only imagine what an original performance, with its speech, song, dance, gestures, music, costumes, etc., would have been or how much consciousness of the process of doubling was a fundamental part of the audience's appreciation. I believe that with such a discriminating audience at a contest the audience's awareness must have been acute. The analysis of the three-actor rule can take us only some way in the direction of recovering an idea of the nature of the festival of Dionysos. Whether consciousness of the rule can influence modern performances of these great plays remains to be seen. In my view, it does restore some idea of their performative brilliance and depth which modern performances or adaptations must try to match, even if in different terms.

NOTES

A. E. Haigh, The Attic Theatre: A Description of the Stage and Theatre of the Athenians, and of the Dramatic Performances at Athens, 3 rd ed., revised by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), pp. 224-34; Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 2 nd ed. (Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 80-81.

Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2 nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) pp. 135ff.

Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978), p. 13.

Leo Aylen, The Greek Theater (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1985), p.95.

David Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982).

Mark Damen, “Actor and Character in Greek Tragedy,” Theatre Journal, 41 (1989), 328.

Seale, Vision and Stagecraft, p. 79.

Taplin (Greek Tragedy in Action, p. 13), for example, bluffy dismisses the idea that such doubling represents “some metaphysical notion of the fluidity of personal identity.” But why should this idea be dismissed out of hand when it might add an enriching interpretive dimension to our experience of Greek drama and culture? It is not such a tremendous step from Sophoclean drama to Platonic philosophy and its concepts of realm of “Ideas” enduring above the fluidity and flux of material and human life.

Aylen, The Greek Theater, p. 96

Ibid.

Seale, Vision and Stagecraft, pp. 113-43.

To Simplify references to entrances and exits I have designated them thus as left and right: reversing this into its opposite in no way alters the argument. I am also seeing the scene directions from the audience's point of view and remembering the layout of the theater of Dionysos in Athens. Polyneices, as villain-victim, symbolically should enter

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