Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
Photo: Arno Declair, 2015 
 

Oedipus the Tyrant

by Sophokles/Friedrich Hölderlin
Direction: Romeo Castellucci

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. 

Read more about the production in an essay by Joseph Pearson in our new column Pearson's Preview: Violence is What You Don’t Expect.

Stage and Costume Design: Romeo Castellucci
Artistic Collaboration: Silvia Costa
Collaboration Stage Design: Mechthild Feuerstein
Music: Scott Gibbons
Video: Jake Witlen
Dramaturgy: Piersandra Di Matteo, Florian Borchmeyer
Light Design: Erich Schneider
Répétiteur: Timo Kreuser
Duration: ca. 105 minutes

Premiered on 6 March 2015

Tour Dates

Paris (November 2015)