Oedipus the Tyrant

A plague is laying waste to the land. King Oedipus sends his co-regent Creon to consult the oracle about lifting the curse and summons the seer Tiresias. But all the signs always lead back to himself: he is supposed to have killed the previous king, Laius, and thus provoked the punishment of the gods. Incensed, Oedipus suspects a plot by Creon and Tiresias until evidence is brought before him which unmistakably proves that he himself is Laius’ son, who slayed his father and married his own mother, Jocasta. Upon learning the truth, Jocasta hangs herself in the palace. Oedipus gouges out his eyes with her hairclips.

For the third time after »The Four Seasons Restaurant« (2012) and »Hyperion. Letters of a Terrorist«, which was his first work in German at the Schaubühne in 2013, Romeo Castellucci takes a poetic text by Hölderlin as the basis of a theatre production.Again, Castellucci has women interpret the text by Hölderlin, whom he regards as a »quintessentially female poet«. He approaches the Oedipus material from the greatest possible distance, helped in no small way by the strangeness of Hölderlin’s frequently drama-disabling language, in order to cast a new light on this »prototype of tragedy« and to lay bare the archetype of familial and sexual trauma and taboo.