The Pagan-Christian Admixture in Romeo Castellucci's Oedipus the Tyrant

In 2015, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci presented Oedipus the Tyrant at the Schaubühne in Berlin. His staging was based on the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of 1804, which is known for its peculiar linguistic, philosophical, and theatrical approaches to Greek tragedy. In this article Keld Hyldig examines how Castellucci, in a response to Hölderlin's translation and commentaries on the tragedy, staged Oedipus as a theatrical and philosophical confrontation between religious and rational approaches to knowledge. The staging was seemingly simple, showing a group of nuns performing Oedipus in a monastery. However, the nuns’ Christian and feminine performance of the pagan and masculine tragedy was the basis of a metatheatrical complexity, which was reinforced through a film projection showing Romeo Castellucci getting tear gas sprayed in his eyes, making the relation between physical reality and fictional representation problematic. Keld Hyldig is an Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen. He has published several articles about the Ibsen tradition in Norwegian theatre and is currently working on a monograph on that subject.