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by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, adapted by Ted Hughes, directed by Simon Cotton

The Bridge Theatre Training Company, The Cockpit, London, GBR

June 27-30, 2024

Chorus: “A man’s fear of fate is often his fate. Leaping to avoid it...he meets it”

The chance to see any play by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BC-AD65) is so rare that any true theatre-lover should jump at the chance to see it. I couldn’t believe my luck that a production of Seneca’s version of Oedipus was being staged during my visit to London. It was performed by the graduating class of The Bridge Theatre Training Company in the now-classic 1968 adaptation by the poet Ted Hughes. The compelling production directed by Simon Cotton proves that Senecan tragedy has its own virtues, in contrast to the tragedies of ancient Greece, by reflecting a world tumbling ineluctably into chaos.

The best-known version of the story of Oedipus is that of Sophocles in his Oedipus Rex (c.429BC). London will be seeing two productions of Sophocles’ play within four months. One production directed by Robert Icke will run at Wyndham’s Theatre from October 4, 2024 to January 4, 2025. The other directed by Matthew Warchus will run at the Old Vic from January 21 to March 29, 2025. Famous as Sophocles’ play is, it was Seneca, rather than any of the ancienct Greek dramatists, who had the greatest influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy in England and on neoclassical treagedy in France.

In Seneca’s day the story of Oedipus was material to be treated in its own way and for the audience of his time. Comparisons between Seneca’s text and Sophocles’ show that Seneca was familiar with Sophocles’ work and that he has chosen to follow the same general outline in telling the story. Before the action of the play, Oedipus, who has been brought up by the king and queen of Corinth as their own son, learns from the oracle at Delphi, through whom the god Apollo speaks, that he will kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid this fate he fled Corinth and headed toward Thebes. On the way he met a belligerent man and his charioteer and slew them both in an altercation.

Once in Thebes he found a city terrorized by a monster called the Sphinx, who killed anyone who could not solve its riddle. Oedipus solved the riddle and as a reward he is given the throne left vacant by the dead King Laius and is married to Laius’s widow Jocasta. After this victory, however, a plague began to ravage Thebes and Oedipus takes it upon himself to find its cause. Step by step Oedipus uncovers information as to the source of the plague only to discover that it is himself. In trying to avoid the fate decreed by the oracle at Delphi, he has actually fulfilled it.

Though retaining this general framework, Seneca’s telling of the story has quite a different nature. In Sophocles, Oedipus is depicted as full of hubris in his belief both that he can determine the reason for the plague and that he himself has nothing to do with it. In contrast, Seneca depicts Oedipus as fearful from the start. He can’t believe he has anything to do with the plague because he has fled from those he thought were his mother and father. Yet, he is filled with doubt. He has sent Creon, Jocasta’s brother to the oracle at Delphi to determine how to end the plague. Creon states that the plague will last until Laius’s murder is avenged. Oedipus calls the prophet Tiresias to interpret the oracle’s words.

In Sophocles, Tiresias states he knows who Laius’s killer is but will not say, a stance that only causes Oedipus to claim that Tiresias must be complicit in Laius’s murder. In Seneca, Tiresias does not know the killer’s name and instead carries out the sacrifice of a bull and heifer, using extispicy, or the examination of the animals’ entrails, to divine the answer. Extispicy is a specifically Roman mode of divination, one adopted from the ancient Etruscans, and Seneca’s use of it in the play is one of the key signs of how he has adapted the Greek material for a Roman audience.

More than this, however, the description of the animals’ sacrifice and the gruesome detailing of the examination of their entrails point to an entirely different world view in Seneca from that in Sophocles. In Sophocles, Oedipus pursues his inquiry into Laius’s murder point by point. Oedipus may not like what he hears, but Sophocles upholds reason as a great human gift that can uncover any truth no matter how uncomfortable that may be for the investigator.

Seneca, in contrast, introduces scenes of divination into the story to show that the world of the play is in even greater disorder than the killing of a king could cause. Seneca undoubtedly knows that curse on the House of Cadmus does not end with Oedipus’ story. Tiresias’ assistants Manto and Iadne find that none of the organs in the heifer’s body are where they should be. Stoics like Seneca believed in a correspondence between the body and the universe, so that the findings via extispicy point to a world that is completely disordered. Worse, for Oedipus’ inquiry, the examination does not reveal the name of Laius’s killer.

At this point Tiresias recommends an even more extreme form of supernatural intervention, one also absent from Sophocles. Tiresias proposes to bring back Laius from the dead to name his killer. Creon observes the procedure and recounts it in horrifying detail. Creon knows who the ghost of Laius accuses but refuses to tell Oedipus. Oedipus rages so at Creon that he finally reveals the name, only for Oedipus to accuse him of lying and being in league with Tiresias to have him, Creon, replace Oedipus on the throne.

Nevertheless, details of what Creon heard Laius say cause Oedipus disquiet since they seem familiar to him. Through a quick succession of messengers, Oedipus learns that the man he thought was his father is dead, but that the king and queen of Corinth were not his parents. Finally, a shepherd arrives who confirms that Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta.

In Sophocles, Jocasta has divined the truth before Oedipus and rushes to her chamber to hang to herself. In Seneca, Jocasta’s death comes later. Instead, Oedipus rushes off stage and contemplates how best to punish someone so steeped in crime as he is. He does not stab out his eyes with Jocasta’s brooches as in Sophocles, but scratches out his eyes with his fingers, a process Seneca describes in prolonged and sickening detail.

Contrary to Sophocles, it is only after Oedipus has blinded himself that he meets Jocasta. It is from seeing what Oedipus has done that Jocasta understands her own crime and kills herself on stage by stabbing herself in the womb, a far more horribly symbolic death than Sophocles gives her.

In Sophocles, Oedipus’ blinding himself and exiling himself from Thebes is sufficient to undo the curse of the plague. Seneca makes a far more disturbing point by placing Jocasta’s death after Oedipus’ blinding. Oedipus believed that he was expiating his two sins by destroying his two eyes – one for killing Laius, one for bedding Jocasta. The gods of Seneca’s world are much crueller and senselessly demand Jocasta’s death. Seneca does not present us a picture of a world restored as in Sophocles but of a frightening world ruled by gods who are evil and irrational. As the blinded Gloucester says in Shakespeare’s King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport”.

Simon Cotton’s production fully captures the doom-laden world of Seneca’s play. He imagines the entire action as a terrible ritual of expiation that Oedipus must undergo. Rather than the steady progress of reason to an answer as in Sophocles, Seneca presents Oedipus’ journey as a trial of horrors where not his blinding but the suicide of his mother/wife is foregrounded. Her death makes Oedipus refer to the god Apollo, god of reason, as “O Phoebe mendax” (“O liar Phoebus”).

Cotton has therefore reimagined the chorus not as Theban elders, but as the Fates themselves. They have no names in Seneca, but Cotton calls them Clotho, Atropos, Kratos, Nona, Decuma and Morta. The first two are the names of the Fates in Greek mythology plus the personification of strength; the second three are the names of the Fates in Roman mythology. This change in the Fates’ status alters what they say from observers to instigators. Judith Pollard has dressed the chorus in black calf-length leggings and sleeveless tops with their faces painted black from the hairline to below the eyes, giving them a look both menacing and otherworldly. They stand on black boxes as if looking down on the action, but descend to perform ritualized dance, speaking sometimes individually, sometimes in unison, always with forcefulness and precision.

The best performances of the evening come from Jack Prince and Concetta Clarizio. Prince plays Creon with a full, resonant voice and clear diction. Prince as Creon intimates the worst when he tells Oedipus that the oracle has given such a vague answer. When Creon has to report on Tiresias’ waking Laius from the dead, Cotton has Creon recreate the scene with the chorus eerily clad in white masks. Prince so involves you in the narration that you feel an increasing sense of dread, and when Creon dons a black mask as Laius and alters his voice to mimic that of the dead king, the effect is truly chilling.

Clarizio also excels in narration. Her role is that of the Messenger who tells the assembled crowd how Oedipus came to decide on blinding as his self-punishment and how he committed the act. Senecan tragedy, and those it influenced like Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and French neo-classical tragedy, is filled with exquisitely wrought reports by Messengers who unwilling relate news that they know will profoundly disturb the hearer. Clarizio is wonderful in depicting how agonizing it is for the Messenger even to speak of the horrible thing Oedipus has done, straining her rope-entwined hands as if unable to escape from a terrible duty. Clarizio’s tale is structured with increasingly horrific detail. Clarizio plays the role as one forcing herself to speak the unspeakable. Clarizio’s narration was so vivid I had hoped we would see Oedipus’ face bandaged since nothing physical could depict what Clarizio caused us to imagine. Yet, unfortunately, Cotton did decide to show us Oedipus’ wounded face.

As Oedipus and Jocasta, Michael Ajoku and Aleksandra Kennedy began the first act not quite secure in their characterizations. Ajoku presented Oedipus as both angry and distraught but not entirely centred. When Oedipus decides that Creon is lying about Laius’s words and accuses him of treason, suddenly the Oedipus I hoped for came into focus. From that point on to the conclusion, Ajoku rivetingly portrayed rage combined with fear as it becomes more certain what Oedipus has done. By the end Ajoku shows Oedipus as a broken man, still with enough strength to decry the Fates’ decreeing Jocasta’s death, but with barely enough left after that to trudge into exile.

Kennedy seemed compelled to portray Jocasta as a fairly severe regal personage, more self-possessed than anyone else on stage. Yet, in Act 2, when news of Oedipus’ past becomes more troubling, Kennedy shows that Jocasta’s façade of calm dignity is crumbling. At the end when Jocasta has to decide how best to commit suicide, Kennedy indicates that Jocasta’s severity has now turned on itself, as she intentionally chooses a suicide that is not in line with decorum but is symbolically gruesome.

One of the great benefits of seeing plays performed by theatre schools is that everyone involved has closely studied the play and everyone knows exactly what they are meant to do. Even if some don’t always bring it off, the intention is clear, and as a result, the themes of the play are also clear. The was the case with the current Oedipus. Critic Brian Arkins in discussing the playability of Seneca today, notes, “no surprise that a century which has witnessed the Holocaust, the Gulags, Hiroshima and much else should be engaged in the rehabilitation of Seneca’s tragedies. Far from being contemptible as drama, these tragedies speak directly to our experience”. Ted Hughes’s adaptation emphasizes the raw violence of Seneca’s vision rather than the stylized rhetoric in which he expressed it. Under Cotton, the cast clearly enjoy speaking Hughes’s stark, meaty poetry.

This exciting production by the Bridge Theatre Training Company makes one wish more classical theatre companies would consider Seneca’s plays as projects. There has been a revival of interest in Seneca since the 1960s and no less a dramatist than Caryl Churchill has adapted Seneca’s Thyestes. In their depiction of an incomprehensible world filled with horror and ruled by fear, Seneca’s tragedies now feel more relevant than ever.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Aleksandra Kennedy as Jocasta and Michael Ajoku as Oedipus; Michael Ajoku as Oedipus; Jack Prince as laius with the Chorus; members of the Chorus; Concetta Clarizio as Messenger. © 2024 Steve Gregson.

For tickets visit: www.thebridge-ttc.org.