By Helen Musa

Most people have heard of Sigmund Freud’s idea that sons may see their fathers as rivals for their mother’s affection – the Oedipus complex.

Now Canberra audiences will have a rare chance to see the ancient play from which that idea takes its name.

Admired by Aristotle as the perfect play and the quintessential tragedy, Oedipus the King presents a world in which the god Apollo appears to have planned a man’s fate. Yet Oedipus insists it was he himself who struck the fatal blow.

The drama has many strings to its bow. A university professor once told me it is essentially a detective story, with Oedipus both detective and perpetrator. Known as the cleverest of men, he became king after solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus vows to uncover the murderer whose crime has brought plague upon Thebes. 

Yet he cannot see the truth before him. Only the blind prophet Teiresias perceives it clearly.

In an act of supreme dramatic irony, the playwright Sophocles ensures that we the audience know the truth while Oedipus does not. We watch him caught in his own net. The tension produces a classic example of catharsis, the emotional release that tragedy can evoke.

Michael Smith, founder of the producing company Greek Theatre Now, a journalist and administrator who studied opera at the Victorian College of the Arts and later at the Royal Academy of Music in London, has been singing since he was 15, when he was a student at Melbourne High School.

He moved to Canberra from Victoria in late 2017 to work in public affairs for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, but resigned after three months. He now works as a physical exercise instructor and plans to run the historic Athens Marathon in Greece this November.

Smith is also expanding his Canberra-based company into a travelling troupe, with a booking in Perth in September and hopes of speaking with the Greek government about performing at one of the ancient sites in 2027.

As Smith directs this colourfully costumed Oedipus, he says, he has wondered whether Freud’s theory may not be entirely fanciful.

In the play, Jocasta tries to calm her husband by saying that many men have dreamed of lying with their mothers and that such thoughts should be dismissed and for Smith, the theme has a personal resonance. 

His mother, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, often needed his care.

“Many nights she was in pain,” he recalls. “She was so sick that I lay beside her in bed trying to calm her. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I was lying where my father lay.”

“I’m a carbon copy of my dad, the same personality and the same singing voice. Later I realised I was lying where he lay.”

‘These people are exactly like us’

Smith also reflects on the famous moment in the play when Oedipus encounters his birth father, Laius, at a crossroads. Both men, he notes, are seized by the same road rage; the quarrel escalates and Oedipus strikes the older man down.

“These people are exactly like us,” Smith says. “But the play also has the presence of the divine. Far from being outdated, these works are absolutely up to date.”

He believes there is renewed interest in Greek mythology among younger audiences, evident in popular children’s series such as Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the Goddess Girls books.

This production, however, is primarily for adults, though Canberra schools have expressed interest. Smith notes that Dionysus, the god of wine, is also the god of theatre, an art form he believes should remain free from social constraints and excessive political correctness.

“I worked with a trauma psychologist who once told me that the lips and the mouth are the digestive system of the mind, you have to express the horror in your head,” he says.

With that in mind, he has deliberately cast a younger actor, Andrew Mackenzie, as Oedipus opposite the more mature Kate Blackhurst as his mother and wife, Jocasta, a choice he describes as “a little bit gross and a little bit in your face”.

Another in-your-face moment comes when the blinded Oedipus appears with bloodied eye sockets while embracing his young daughters and telling them he is both their father and their brother.

Smith has also developed the script for the production, working from the celebrated translation by Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, widely regarded as the academic gold standard.

“I went through it line by line, updating it everywhere,” he says. “You have to know exactly what every line means.”

Oedipus the King, Burbidge Amphitheatre, Australian National Botanic Gardens, April 1-6. Paperchain Bookstore will host a conversation with Michael Smith and Tatiana Bur, of the ANU, on March 31.