Bleeding Life

By Melvin Maddocks

OEDIPUS THE KING

by SOPHOCLES

In a new translation by ANTHONY BURGESS

A bleak altar half hidden by incense smoke holds down the front of the stage. Shaman figures appear, chanting to a kind of voodoo drumbeat. On the altar, the body of a child is laid. The darkness is pierced by a primal scream. A priest plunges his hand into the human sacrifice and lifts out the heart, thrusting it, like a savage challenge, toward the civilized middle-class audience at Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater.

The setting for Michael Langham's staging of Oedipus the King seems less Thebes than a jungle clearing. The tribal-dancing choruses, shaking their amulets, mandalas and animal skins, are less out of Sophocles than The Golden Bough. When Oedipus (Len Cariou) makes his entrance, emerging from the palace portals as if they formed a monstrous womb, he is less the king of a Greek city-state than an archetypal Everyman in a loincloth.

Jung's Nightmare. Langham is performing an act of reviving violence. He is doing to the polite 19th century conventions of Greek tragedy what directors like Peter Brook have done to the polite 19th century conventions of Shakespeare. Pseudo-traditional versions of Oedipus are staged as refined pageants. Directors assign masks, write long program notes about catharsis, and advise their puzzled Oedipuses to express hubris, which generally leaves them looking like damaged Roman coins. Langham has cut through the decorum of Greek revival to present Oedipus as a nightmare by Jung.

The Langham-Anthony Burgess Oedipus goes back beyond Sophocles to the myth from which he borrowed. Here they find the king a primitive hero who lifts one evil spell--the Sphinx's--only to bring down a worse spell by violating the ultimate taboo: incest. On the Guthrie stage, dark as the predawn of civilization, this ritual circle of plot is made to stand out like an elemental curse: by solving its riddle,* Oedipus destroys the Sphinx; by failing to solve soon enough the mystery of his own identity--whose son he is--Oedipus destroys himself.

What gets lost in reducing a Greek tragedy to a demonic Pan-legend--a sort of Clockwork Orange run back through the time machine? Despite the passionate resourcefulness of Actor Cariou, this neo-Neanderthal Oedipus becomes an anachronism when sophisticated lines like "Wisdom is a mode of suffering" are delivered about his shaggy head, or when that barbaric stage is filled with the most subtle verbal portraits of pride in the history of theater.

Atavistic Souls. There is more to Sophocles than Jung had dreamed of. Langham has performed his own sacrifice: he has given up the head of Oedipus to secure that bloody heart, and the contradictions cannot always be contained as Sophocles goes one way and Langham another. The nice English-repertory accents that lurk beneath those animal skins are also jarring, and above the Afro-Greek beat of Stanley Silverman's score, one hears the vaguely Elizabethan cadence of Burgess's script. But Langham's sacrifice is worth it. He has taken 20th century audiences, prepared to yawn and genuflect obediently before a dead classic, and shaken them to the bottom of their atavistic souls. He has created an Oedipus that bleeds and thus lives. --Melvin Maddocks

Michael Langham, the Guthrie's artistic director, wears the infinitely patient, sensibly ascetic look of an English missionary in a foreign country. At 50, he is a veteran member of a famous order: the British directors-in-exile (D.I.E.) The son of a Calcutta jute merchant, Langham was born in Somerset and began acting under an assumed name while a law student at the University of London. He spent most of World War II in a German prison camp, then came home to begin a repertory directing career in the Midlands. From Belgium to Australia, from Stratford on Avon to Stratford, Canada, he has preached and practiced one mission: repertory theater, the gospel of the Old Vic.

In August 1970, Langham's pilgrimage brought him to Minneapolis, where seven years before the ranking saint of D.I.E., the late Tyrone Guthrie, had founded his theater. By the time Langham arrived, the Guthrie seemed to have fallen under its own curse. Its 1,437-seat house was playing to only 60% capacity, and the best acting was reserved for backstage feuds.

Part of the job of playing a British D.I.E. is knowing how to charm the natives. "You have to court a community like a lover," Langham explains. The wooing has paid off. In a little over six months, $600,000 was raised from local contributors to settle the 1970 deficit (the Ford Foundation has just added a grant of $618,000). Langham directed a production of Cyrano de Bergerac (also in a Burgess version) in 1971 that set a box-office record, and attendance last year went from the alltime low of 1970 to an alltime high.

Langham has become one British D.I.E. who can maintain the repertory ideal in style: a 40-member company; five productions in repertory at a time; a ten-week rehearsal period; even a full-time fencing coach, every repertory director's dream.

In January, Langham is presenting a musical version of Cyrano, starring Christopher Plummer, which is destined for Broadway in the spring. But the man who declined to become the first director of Lincoln Center's company back in 1964 will return to Guthrie's promised land.

Eyes bright with repertory evangelism, Langham confesses: "When I first came here, I thought Guthrie's selection of Minneapolis extremely bizarre. Now I realize that in a kind of monotonous way, Tony was absolutely right. I think it's very doubtful that any important American theater company can be developed, for instance, in New York. One needs the luxury of a gardener: time for growth. To a New York audience, the only question is: 'Is it a hit or a flop?' But give Oedipus to a Minneapolis audience and they're willing to experience a classic just like a new play. This allows a director and actors freedom--even the freedom, now and then, not quite to succeed."

*The Sphinx's riddle: What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? The answer--and the biggest riddle of all--is of course Man.

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