ARCHIVES 2009 / Sous l'Oeil d'Oedipe

The heroes of ancient Greece have always been a subject of questioning for playwrights. Their history, at the very origin of the theatre, has constantly been treated in plays, through all periods and styles. It is in recounting the events and gestures of the large family of the Atridae that Aeschylus, when he composed The Oresteia, crossed the centuries and unintentionally put the history of another family in the background, that of the Labdacid. These were the descendents of Cadmus, founder of Thebes and the father of Labdakos, himself father of Laius who, with Jocasta, gave birth to Oedipus. Wishing to have heard what he himself defines as a “modern Jocasta”, Joël Jouanneau took off on the tracks laid out by Sophocles and Euripides, in search of the children of the house of Labdakos. Twenty-five centuries after their first appearance on a stage, they will be there, with us, reinvented in the light of encounters that the author and director made in contemporary literature: Pierre Michon, Henri Michaux, Paul Celan, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Caroline Sagot-Duvauroux, Claude Louis-Combet and especially Ritsos, spokesman of the clan's last survivor – Ismene. In a world in upheaval, which deeply doubts and worries, Joël Jouanneau asks an eternal question: must you write your destiny to love it? He answers in the affirmative, doing it elegantly like Sophocles. Interested in penetrating the mystery of the curse, he rewrites this saga in a 21st century language enriched with that of the Greeks to better liberate itself from it. Between mandatory faithfulness and necessary impertinence, his trilogy revisits the bloody destiny of this Theban dynasty, brings back to life the known heroes (Oedipus, Antigone, Tiresias...) and those who have vanished from our memories (Cadmus, Ismene, Polynices, Eteocles...). Like a link between our founding mythology and the world that surrounds us, they will be here and there, taking us behind the walls of the Greek palaces, where the history of our civilisation started. JFP