King Oedipus

King Oedipus was presented by the Atrium Theatre Company at the University of Glamorgan in February 2008. The production grew out of a sustained process of devising, experimenting and collaboration, and ultimately took the form of a journey that the audience made through several spaces within the university building. The audience began as one group in the main foyer area and theatre, and were then divided into three groups that undertook different journeys through other spaces of the building before regrouping for the final scene in the theatre. Each group had a set of guides who led them on their journey, and each audience member had a map that contextualised their journey. One of the key features was the use of a space to represent a particular character’s experience, and within this space several performers took on the role of that character. To this end there was a Jocasta room, a Creon room and a Tiresias room. So while each audience group visited each room, the order in which they encountered each character’s story was different. Three performers played Creon, three played Tiresias, and five played Jocasta. The play, and the context of its production, demanded a process that interrogated the many decisions to be made about production, adaptation and performance. We wanted to extend participants’ experience and challenge their thinking about ways of approaching texts beyond the more conventional ‘page-to-stage’ realisation. Utilising a collaborative devising process to explore the participants’ relationships to the themes of the stories of Oedipus offered us a more complex way of engaging with the written, translated texts.