Orchestra and Stage in Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus and the Theater of Dionysus

Orchestra and Stage in Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus and the Theater of Dionysus Stephen Scully The first part of this paper—concerning the possibility of a raised stage in the fifth-century Theater of Dionysus—addresses a question of fundamental theatrical importance to which there can be no firm answer because of scanty literary evidence and inconclusive archaeological data. What evidence we do have, however, suggests two distinct acting arenas for the fifth-century Theater of Dionysus: orchestra and a slightly raised stage. The second part of the paper, though not strictly dependent upon the first, discusses the role of the chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, an interpretation which can be expressed spatially if the theater is visualized as having both orchestra and stage. PART I It is hard to imagine Sophocles agreeing with Aristotle’s premise that tragedy “succeeds in producing its proper effect when merely read.”1 Tragedians, however philosophically inclined, were writing 1 Poetics 26.1462a11–13; cf. 6.1450b15–20 and 14.1453b4–7. See S. Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chapel Hill 1986) 341. 66 Syllecta Classica 10 (1999) for opsis, spectacle, and for performance, and more centrally for my point, they were writing for a particular theater, with the physical realities of the Theater of Dionysus very much in their minds as they imagined plot, character, thought, diction, song, and performance. From this perspective, a playwright’s written text might be seen as a transcript of words and movement conceived for and in the spatial configurations of the Athenian theater.2 It is difficult to agree, therefore , with Oliver Taplin when he dismisses the question of the raised stage as unimportant on the grounds that movement between actors and chorus was fluid in fifth-century drama. Taplin’s dismissal of this question coincides with the “little attention” he pays to choral songs since they “move into a different world” and are “not as a rule closely involved in the action and plot of tragedies.”3 But to ignore the chorus is to amputate half the body of tragedy, the challenge of performance being the interplay between plot and that “different” world of gods, faraway times, and distant landscapes. This question of tragedy’s form leads us back to a question of the theater’s acting spaces and the physical conditions of performance. In considering these matters I shall center my comments around the most recent work to discuss orchestra and stage and the semiotics of theatrical space for the fifth-century theater—David Wiles’s Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning. According to Wiles, the idea of a stage for this period of the theater’s history is a “twentieth-century chimaera” and contrary to a democratic desire of protagonists being “of a kind with the chorus” and “not elevated 2 For an anti-Aristotelian emphasis on the importance of the theatrical experience , see the fine comments of L. Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Landam, Maryland 1996), especially 15–38. For what M. Issacharoff calls the “spectacle of discourse,” see his Discourse as Performance (Stanford 1989), originally Le spectacle du discours (Paris 1985); see also A. Ubersfeld , L’école du spectateur: Lire le théâtre 2 (Paris 1991) and her Lire le théâtre (Paris 1978), and K. Elam, The Semiotics of Theater and Drama (London 1980), all influenced by B. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, J. Willett, ed. and trans. (New York 1964), and A. Artaud, The Theater and its Double, M. C. Richards, trans. (New York 1958). 3 Greek Tragedy in Action (Berkeley 1979) 13. Scully: Orchestra and Stage in Sophocles 67 to the status of a hero.”4 The orchestra as a single acting area functioned as “a moral leveller,” a visual reminder that individual and community were on the same plane.5 The stage, nullifying “the complex and shifting relationship between actor and chorus,” was only introduced in “the Hellenistic era, when democracy had become institutionalized and the theatre was concerned with individuating human beings, whose existence had become sharply separable from that of the polis and of divinities.”6 For Wiles, the fifth-century theater consisted of two central acting areas...