Greek de Steven Berkoff (1980): l'arriscada conversió de l'Èdip rei de Sòfocles en una love story

Resum

Can Sophocles Oedipus Rex be transformed into a love story, as seen in Steven Berkoffs Greek? While some critics read Greek simply as a provocative drama that by no means aims to justify incest, directors, actors and critics in the end become enthralled by the powerful love story that ensues between Eddy and his wife and mother. This would demonstrate that Berkoffs adaptation, meant to illustrate the social degradation of Great Britain in the 1980s, becomes a quite risky proposition, as it implies a flat denial of the tragic awareness of contemporary men and women. However, if this is the case, readers and audience, apart from the undoubted pleasure they take in the performance of Greek, may wonder, even from a non-fundamentalist perspective within the classical tradition, whether it is sensible to take inspiration from Sophocles text, which shows precisely the great tragic awareness of the Greeks.