Oedipus the King (1986 TV Film)

 "Judge no man's life until he's dead!"

This is the first of three TV films made for the BBC, in 1986, of Sophocles' "Theban Plays", all both translated and directed by Don Taylor, known to this blog for being recently noted as a director in Dead of Night. The Theban plays are an odd beast, really. They were never intended as a sequence, all are quite unconnected, so this isn't like Aeschylus' Oresteia, a slightly earlier BBC version of which I blogged a while ago.

Anyway, there's a certain inherent awkwardness about this particular play, isn't there? More than any other Ancient Greek play, we all know the plot; we come pre-spoiled. And, well, it's icky. About as icky as plots come.

So the first half of the play consists of the slow unravelling of a mystery which, for us viewers, is already known. The total lack of dramatic irony is less of a problem than might be expected, though. The process of unravelling what happened- relying rather more on hearsay and soothsayers than anything we moderns may regard as proper policing- is entertaining. And we get to know Michael Pennington's assured and kingly Oedipus, confident in his own wisdom and cursing the criminal, with no idea of the sheer horror that is to befall him. Claire Bloom is superb as Jocasta, at first sceptical and then consumed with horror and denial of a truth too awful to contemplate. The great John Gielgud gets a nice little cameo.

But it's the last few scenes where things get unexpectedly intense. Because the words hammer home that Oedipus was always doomed, he never did have any agency. None of this is his fault: he did all he could to avoid the terrible prophecy. Yet fulfil it he did, and he must suffer. As the chorus says 'Ignorance made you happy; the truth has made you blind'. She here he is, a blind beggar, doomed to exile and misery, all waiting for him from the moment he was born. And it gets even worse, with Oedipus really doubling down on his own degradation, wishing he could lose his hearing as well as his sight and, perhaps worst of all, making it clear that he expects to remain blind in the underworld.

And the way this production, purposely stagy though it is, reveals Oedipus' blindness is... effective to say the least.

Yeah... that's dark. Is Sophocles always this dark? The next two plays will be interesting...