The Metamorphoses of Theseus in Oedipus at Colonus
by Brian Johnston

I. Three Actors in Greek Drama

Sophocles traditionally is credited with introducing the third actor in Greek tragedy and so with decisively shifting the focus of the drama from the chorus to the interplay of characters. Any thorough account of classical theater - for example, A.E. Haigh's The Attic Theatre (revised by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge in 1907) or Margarete Bieber's The History of Greek and Roman Theater – will allot some space to the three-actor rule. However, it rarely is taken into account as a major interpretive tool even when, as with Pickard-Cambridge and others, the author has shown a thorough awareness of the existence of the rule. Oliver Taplin, giving the subject barely a paragraph in Greek Tragedy in Action , believes there is no greater significance to the rule than a shortage of first-class actors during the Dionysian festival. Leo Aylen, in a finely detailed account of the Greek theater, does see the rule, which led to the practice of very creative doubling, had symbolic significance; nevertheless, he devotes only two pages to the topic and insists that four actors must have performed Oedipus at Colonus , for otherwise we would have the “ridiculous” situation of the role of Theseus being played by more than one actor. He thus misses one of the great subtleties of the three-actor rule in Sophocles' hands and especially in Oedipus at Colonus . David Seale, examining Sophocles' stagecraft, gives the rule no mention at all, whereas he shows a superb sensitivity to other aspects of physical presentation of the plays. These examples are typical of the way that the three-actor rule is treated by scholars of Greek drama; they either ignore the rule, or note it in passing but do not consider it essential to the actual interpretation of the plays. Yet the plays were written not as literary texts but as performative texts, and the use by Sophocles and Euripides especially of such a striking effect as having an actor change mask, voice, and style of gesture, crossing classes, genders, and ages (e.g., the Antigone actor also plays Tiresias and the Messenger) must have been calculated as essential to their meanings.

Mark Damen, in an article in Theatre Journal (October 1989), closely examines the three-actor rule in its many manifestations, especially as employed by Euripides. His essay is an excellent account of the symbolic possibilities that emerge from some of the astonishing doublings that occur. As I am convinced that the “meaning” of a Greek drama is inseparable from the experience of its performance, I believe the subject of Damen's insights should be central, not peripheral, to interpretation. What is required, I believe, is the placing of this feature at the heart of our interpretation of the plays.

Consider one startling but not unusual example of such doubling that Damen mentions: the fact that the Orestes actor in Sophocles' Electra also plays Clytemnestra. This entails the Orestes actor confronting his “sister” both as menace and as rescuer in alternative scenes. At one point, as Damen observes, the actor, entering the palace to kill his “mother,” becomes two persons, giving out his mother's death scream. To see the actor shift from the positive role of Orestes in the Prologue to the negative role of Clytemnestra tormenting her daughter and praying for Orestes' death and then, joyfully for Electra (and, surely, for the theater audience), return to the rescuing Orestes-role discourages readings that try to “see” this Orestes identity in negative terms. This is to read Sophocles' play in terms of Euripides' very different version where the Orestes actor undergoes no such startling change. In such a non-naturalistic art of changing voice, mask, costume, identity, and dramatic function, the impact of these role-changes should prevent the psychologistic or moralistic judgments one still encounters. David Seale, for example, complains that Orestes is “a secretive schemer…unheroic, unemotional …[who] spends most of the play ‘behind the scenes', and his one momentous act is virtually appropriated by his sister.” But this idea of Orestes is contradicted by the Prologue, which reveals an Orestes determined, clever, not taking orders from Apollo, merely consulting the oracle “how” to kill his mother and Aegisthus. It also is contradicted by the famous “chariot race” speech of the Paidagogus which establishes a heroic identity for Orestes even when the Orestes actor is now onstage as Clytemnestra, reacting to the report of his previous role's death – a performative irony if ever there were one! It was surely further contradicted by the reaction of the original Athenian audience which would have anticipated the actor's reversion to the Orestes role after this moment of Clytemnestra's triumph and Electra's collapse. It would have anticipated the actor's role-reversion as a miracle in the making. Orestes does not remain “behind the scenes”: the reality confronting the unwitting Electra, but known to the theater audience, in the doubled role of Orestes-Clytemnestra, is itself wonderfully and ironically doubled. Far from embarrassedly disguising the doubling, Sophocles focuses on it and exploits the performative irony of the dramatic situation.

Though the audience accepts the necessity of “believing in” the Clytemnestra

character it can not help but be aware of the other Orestes-presence

waiting to be resumed. It is as if the ghost of the previous impersonation is now

haunted by the Clytemnestra and waiting to annihilate it by resuming the Orestes

role. This demonstrates the awesome presence of justice even at the moment of

the seeming triumph of injustice. Modern productions that are blind to

Sophoclean irony and want, instead, the simpler dramatic effect of undistracted

sympathy for Electra's despair – e.g., John Barton's version of The Greeks –

omit the Prologue which assures us of Orestes' powerful presence. And by

distributing the roles to role-specific actors another important Sophoclean

dimension to the play is lost.

Sophocles is pursuing a much larger meaning than audience empathy for his heroine: he surrounds Electra's despair and her resolve to undertake a suicidal attack upon her mother and Aegisthus with a godlike (or Homeric) assurance to the audience that her desperate mission is right , that she will be rewarded, that her stubborn emotions, seemingly self-destructive, are at one with a larger dikê or justice visibly present onstage. Both the Prologue and the actor's double role as Orestes-Clytemnestra add the dimension of tremendous irony to the situation. The same actor embodies both aspects of Electra's destiny: her curse and her blessing, her trial and her reward in his dual impersonation: two extreme and opposite aspects of her fate, testing the Electra role to the limit of endurance so that it will “earn” the miraculous deliverance. The character doubling puts the audience in a godlike position of joyful expectancy even as the Electra-actor must exhibit the greatest despair and grief. The play is about the truth and rightness of Electra's disastrous-seeming constancy, and so the Electra actor retains the same role throughout: but Electra, like a harassed saint, is surrounded by tempting (Chrysothemis), menacing (Clytemnestra and Aegisthus), devastating, and then “wonderful” (Paidagogus and Orestes) forces taken on by the other two actors. One is forced to see this whole powerful play, as performance , in a much more complicated - and much less “psychological” – way than most interpretations allow.

Another equally startling example noted by Damen occurs when the Pentheus actor in The Bacchae also plays his own mother and killer, Agave. When Agave enters with Pentheus' head, it is most likely that the actor is carrying the bloodied mask of his previous impersonation. To the spectator of the play, the Pentheus actor, “toughly” impersonating the leader of an all-male armed camp (the women have fled the city) and confronting a “feminine” seeming Dionysos, followed by bacchantes, visually becomes more and more feminized and manic before our eyes, in contrast to Dionysos' increasing potency, until the Pentheus actor exits, dressed as a bacchante/maenad, to become the most dangerous of maenads, his crazed mother. What we experience here is the terrifying shifting of identities into their opposites that only the doublings supplied by the three actors and the masks could provide. Damen mentions other symbolic doublings and triplings in the play (e.g., Dionysos-Tiresias, Cadmus-Servant-Messenger). He does not draw my conclusions, for he is pursuing different aspects of the three-actor rule; nevertheless his article is an indispensable introduction to the richness of this subject. I don not think it is good sense to separate the interpretation of Greek plays from the visual experience of them; the Greek term for ‘theater' ( theatron ) meant a place for seeing .

The rule is more than the display of actor virtuosity, though many of the displays are stunning enough. Surely the reason that practitioners of Greek drama never felt inclined to change the rule was that it allows dazzling examples of skill both by actors and playwrights that undoubtedly neither would want to forfeit. Tremendous difficulties are set up for both; but difficulty is what the best art always sets itself. It helps explain the high esteem in which Menander was held, for a play like Dyskolos becomes immensely more impressive when one realizes its whole world of genders, classes, ages, and types (rural and urban) has been whirled into being by the astonishingly adroit deployment of the three actors and their stock of masks. What is suggested is a philosophic vision where all human reality is nothing more that such a whirling succession of personae. This, after all, is the theme of Aristotle's pupil and successor and Menander's mentor, Theophrastus.

Clearly the doublings were meant to be recognized by the audience not only as part of the playwright's and actors' great skills but also as part of the play's meaning. As the main actors (protagonists) competed for first prize the obviously intended their virtuosity to be appreciated, not impenetrably concealed. The three-actor rule was not likely to have been a necessary inconvenience of the festival competition but far more plausibly a deliberate aesthetic convention, an intrinsic part of the competition and thereby a means by which an audience could objectively assess a dramatist's skills and intentions. This is the opposite of the passive theater audience ludicrously postulated by Brecht's idea of “Aristotelian” drama. To have added extra speaking actors (mutes and supernumeraries were used) would no more have improved the art-form than adding extra instruments to a string quartet. There is additionally the likelihood, as I have long thought, that a Greek play was not a finished script waiting for rehearsal, but instead the incremental result of rehearsal in the theater. Thus the meaning is inseparable from the performance, from the worked out disposition of the roles and actors as tried out in the physical space of the theater by the playwright-director-choreographer, himself quite an impressive switcher of roles.

The skill with which the same actor in The Women of Trachis could play two such intrinsically opposite roles as the intensely feminine, domestic, gentle Deianeira and , after the death of this role, the immensely “macho” Herakles must have been impressive enough in terms of performance skills. However, as Leo Aylen shows, this astonishing doubling also conveys the meaning of the play:

The Women of Trachis is about how love destroys both Deianeira and her husband Heracles. The leading actor plays first the weak and helpless woman, and then the tough warrior, now wracked with the poison from which he is dying. Both people are in a sense one victim of one action. The convention helps Sophocles to point his meaning.

Aylen further notes that this also “makes sense” of the “diptych” form of the play which had struck some critics as being “broken-backed” and thus defective. Again, attention to the performance situation is an indispensable guide to the play's meaning.

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