Oskaras Korsunovas’ Oedipus Rex – Playing Man

Oskaras Korsunovas’ travel from the contemporal urgency to the Sophocles’ tragedy written in the 5th century B.C. and the universalness of Greek myth could be precisely defined by the main idea of the Homo ludens – the book by Dutch thinker Johan Huizinga: “If we’d analyze any human activity right till the limits of our cognition, it will appear to us as not much far from a plying”.
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The human culture appears from the play and burgeons as the play. Policy, trial, art are such. Undoubtedly such is and the theatre. At the beginning Oedipus performed by D. Gavenonis plays the investigation of his own case.
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Not accidentally Oedipus who plays in a sandbox is accompanied by chorus that consists of bigheaded babies whose coryphaeus is a huge bear. It’s somewhat ironic O. Korsunovas’ hint of the Antique actors’ cothurni and stuffed costumes worn to make characters similar to gods.
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Skilful director already since the “There to Be Here” multiplies the series of beings very similar to human ones as if they were from the pages of comics. Such series of beings once were called pastiches by postmodern critic Frederic James who has borrowed the term from the imitative art. Pastiches are the imitations of human being those annihilate individuality.
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It’s already long time since we have known the Korsunovas’ ability to create the elite art from the infantile mass culture’s clichés. However, this time the director’s decision stuns by its impudence – to fix Mike Mouse masks to the chorus! Only at the denouement these Mike Mice will turn into the stylizations of the Antique theatre’s masks.
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“Oedipus Rex” – performance of unusual beauty: the marvelous choreography of Vesta Grabstaite and Oskaras Korsunovas, the plastic of the cast – it embraces the crawl of babies as well as the Antique postures and gestures those seems as the unobtrusive quotations of ancient Greek vases’ drawing.
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One more important person in performance is percussionist Arkadijus Gotesmanas, who strokes the rhythm of “Oedipus Rex” and its emotional culminations. He is the one who first pronounce the peripeteias of characters lives.
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And the music of Gintaras Sodeika. In the ancient Greek theatre actors used to dance, sing and speak in accordance with special music. It now seems that in the O. Korsunovas’ performance this music got rebirth, although it may seem impossible – music is the only one element of Antique theatre that totally perished, any note of it has left. Still, everything is possible in the theatre.

Valdas Vasiliauskas