Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Gospel at Colonus

Taking Sophocles’ least-known play and reinterpreting via the hymns and songs of gospel music is, damn it, just the sort of thing that you expect from Edinburgh* in August. Thankfully, Lee Breuer’s plundering – adaptation is too limited a term – of Oedipus at Colonus is a monumental success. If you ever get the chance to see it in London, New York, DC, Chicago or wherever then for god’s sake get yourself a ticket.

Most of the reviews of the Gospel at Colonus have focused, understandably, on the music and, unavoidably, on the tensions between Christian and classical Greek theology and you can certainly argue that the production loses some of its force in Act Two as Oedipus prepares for and accepts his end.

And yet taking liberties with the material can rarely have been as satisfying, and as punishingly powerful, as this. This is a show, anyway, in which commonalities of form and function are uncanny. The chorus, sung magnificently by Harlem’s Inspirational Voices of Abyssinian, are alive and, as they should be, vital to the pageant.

But it’s the link – unspoken but ever-present – between the helplessness of meagre man in Greece and the experiences of African-Americans in the cotton fields of what would become the Confederacy that provides the foundation for all else and ties these two seemingly distant worlds together. Injustice abounds, man is not free and, often literally, in chains. Oedipus’s attempts to understand, let alone come to terms with, his predicament are placed in subtle counterpoint to the African-American story and so the gospel music and the pentecostal preaching become a means of coping with or mildly ameliorating an impossible, crushing, position.

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