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In this play, it all starts in a really creepy setting as if it is trying to tell a story in the beginning, but having some type of suspicion throughout the beginning. There is tons of fog that sets what the play is symbolizing in that moment and having some interesting music. This play tells about a tragic story of a child who was abandoned in a field by his parents in order to escape attempting to kill his father and marrying his mother. The play filmed in 1984, shows a performance of many characters.
The technique worked in bringing the audience into the setting. Watching this play, made me better understand it than just reading it because it is better to see how the character throughout the play talk and how the voices are different. Oedipus is recognized for his compassion, justice, and action. In his first speech, he delivers to a priest. When Creon retold Laius’s murder, Oedipus was shocked that the investigation of the murder of a king was dropped for no further questions (145-147). Oedipus creates moments of irony in the play, since the relationship between his past and his present situation. For example, when the priest tells Oedipus that the people of Thebes are dying, he says that he could not fail to see this (68-72).
Some irony is when Oedipus states that he possesses the bed of the king, and that marriage might have created “blood-bonds” between him and Laius (294-300). In addition to the irony stated, the conversation between Tiresias and Oedipus is filled with references to sight and eyes. As Oedipus grows angrier, he taunts Tiresias for his blindness. The Chorus’s, speech is full of images of caves, darkness, lightning, and wings, which suggest darkness, the unknown, and, most significantly, terror striking from the skies. The gods are still present in this speech, but they are no help, because they know the truth. After Jocasta intrudes in the fight between Oedipus and Creon, Oedipus calms down and recalls that there is a riddle before him that he has to solve the puzzle.
We see that Oedipus pursues the truth when not actually having an idea of what the truth really is. When Oedipus explains detail of the three-way crossroads (805–822), he proves that he was not attracting attention in the first scene of the play when he expressed his desire to be straight forward and honest with his citizens. When he learns that there is still a piece of the puzzle left unsolved, Oedipus seems persistent to ask questions until the whole truth is out. Jocasta, solves the riddle before Oedipus and she realizes she is his mother. Oedipus must realize that something has gone terribly wrong, when Jocasta leaves the stage screaming.
The speech of the Chorus, with which this section begins (1311–1350), turns the images of the plowman and ship’s captain, which formerly stood for Oedipus’s success and ability to manage the state, into images of his failure. And the way in which it does so is quite extreme, focusing particularly on the sexual aspect of Oedipus’s actions. Oedipus and his father have, like two ships in one port, shared the same “wide harbor,” and Oedipus has plowed the same “furrows” his father plowed (1334–1339). The harbor image ostensibly refers to Jocasta’s bedchamber, but both images also quite obviously refer to the other space Oedipus and his father have shared: Jocasta’s vagina. Images of earth and soil continue throughout the scene, most noticeably in one of Oedipus’s final speeches, in which he talks to his children about what he has done (1621–1661).
These images of earth, soil, and plowing are used to suggest the metaphor of the sturdy plowman tilling the soil of the state, but they also suggest the image of the soil drinking the blood of the family members Oedipus has killed (1531–1537). Oedipus’s crimes are presented as a kind of blight on the land, a plague symbolized by the plague with which the play begins that infects the earth on which Oedipus, his family, and his citizens stand, and in which all are buried as a result of Oedipus’s violence.
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