Oedipus at Colonus
By Sophocles
Cambridge Greek Play 2022, Cambridge Arts Theatre
Performed in ancient Greek
This piece is so passionately performed in Ancient Greek that you cannot take your eyes off the actors.
Saffron Waldon Reporter
With high production values, incredible performances, and flawless ancient Greek, the production does not fail to startle, challenge and entrance.
The Cambridge Student (TCS)
Oedipus at Colonus is a fantastic example of a Greek tragedy brought back to life in a modern reworking.
VARSITY
Oedipus at Colonus is the second play in Sophocles’s Theban Trilogy. Set some 20+ years after the discovery of his cruel fate, Oedipus is a blind old man, wandering through Greece, with only Antigone by his side. When he arrives at Colonus, he remembers a prophecy which has foretold that Colonus will be where he dies. Unknown to him is another prophecy – that where he dies will become blessed and a new power in the land.
When he is discovered at Colonus by a passerby, a political battle begins. Creon wants to take him back to Thebes at all costs, Theseus promises to protect him, and his estranged son Polineices comes begging for his support in his battle against his brother Eteocles.
Sophocles’s play, his final masterpiece before he died, is an incredible meditation on death and old age, family and legacy, love and fear from a writer who was looking death in the face and trying to tell us what he saw.
Cast
Lily Bickers (Chorus), Harry Burke (Theseus), Harry Camp (Polineikes), Will Hale (Chorus), Sara Hazemi (Antigone), Alicia Hussey (Chorus), Eleanor Lind Booton (Creon), Alice Murray (Chorus), Sophie Scott (Chorus), Rosy Sida (Oedipus), Vee Tames (Ismene), Alice Tyrrel (Chorus), Jamie Wigley (Chorus)
Creative Team
Daniel Goldman (Director), Alex Silverman (Composer), Jennifer Wallace (Producer), Rebecca Laemmle (Producer), Jemima Robinson (Set and Costume), Richard Williamson (Lighting Design), Xavier Velastin (Sound), Julia Leino (Assistant Director & Student Publicity), Theo Sawkins (Assistant Producer), Katherine Wills (Assistant Producer), Lucia Revel-Chion (Deputy Stage Manager), Tim Otto (Assistant Set and Costume Designer), Zhiyu Melanie Chen (Assistant Lighting Design / Surtitles), Amy Hill (Assistant Lighting Design / Surtitles), Ashley Mehra (Assistant Dramaturg), Molly McNicholl (Assistant Video Design), Zaynab Ahmed (Assistant Stage Manager), Anna Sayles (Assistant Set Designer), Gabriel Humphreys (Production Photographer)
I was very honoured to be chosen as the director of the Cambridge Greek Play 2019 and it gave me the chance to do one of my all time favourite plays. I’d fallen in love with Oedipus at Colonus when I was a student. I found it to be a profoundly moving play, a work full of pathos, sadness, anger, and laser-precise in its commentary on war, inheritance, family, betrayal and legacy.
The play tells the story of the last few hours in life of the tainted Oedipus. The idea for the staging of the play in a hospital came from two sources. The first was personal experience – my dual experience of sitting with my dad plugged full of wires post a heart valve operation and missing doing the same when my beloved grandmother passed away and only arriving at the hopsital from abroad a few hours after she had passed away. The second was Pinochet’s visit to the UK to seek medical care – a tainted dictator calling on favours abroad as none existed at home, surrounded by family, to whom he was still a father and grandfather, in spite of crimes he’d commited and the thousands of dead he was responsible for.
And then, in terms of the soundscape and foley work that became so integral to the piece alongside Jemima and Richard’s designs, it was an idea that emerged in rehearsals and was developed beautifully by Xavier and Alex, and helped us develop an exciting, inclusive, radical way to reimagine the chorus and what the chorus could bring to the piece.
All photos © Gabriel Humphreys / Richard Williamson