see also the accompanying essay—
Oedipus as Evidence: The Theatrical Background to Freud's Oedipus Complex
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The cover of the October 1901 edition of Le Théâtre, revue mensuelle illustrée, which featured a retrospective on Jean Mounet-Sully for the twentieth anniversary of his Oedipus, his most famous role. Mounet-Sully was the definitive Oedipus of the 19th-century French stage and arguably of the European stage of that entire century. He was a gifted tragedian who played all the major roles, including Hamlet and Lear, but who had a deep personal identification with Oedipus. While Freud was studying in Paris with Jean Charcot at the Salpêtrière, he saw Mounet-Sully in a performance of Oedipe Roiwhich, according to Freud's biographer Ernest Jones, "made a deep impression on him" (177).
A native of Bergerac, Jean Mounet-Sully (1841-1916) originally studied to become a Protestant pastor before embarking on a professional acting career in 1868. He enjoyed brilliant success as an actor in Paris, becoming a sociétaire of the Comédie Française and later its august doyen. In 1909, he played the part of Jesus in the silent film The Kiss of Judas.Of his idiosyncratic style, a contemporary critic said:
He is a born actor, not the made actor, and certainly not the actor who, born with genius, has strengthened it by study. He can act merely as he feels today. He rarely plays the same part twice alike... He is only good when the part exactly suits his oriental and barbaric and somewhat ferocious temperament.
(cited in Coward ix)
Louis Jouvet described the initial sense of disbelief one had when seeing the famous actor for the first time:
Mounet-Sully entrait en scène... Les gens qui le voyaient pour la première fois, des provinciaux attirés par le seul renom de l'acteur, dès que Mounet rugissait, se disaient: Non, ce n'est pas possible! Mais qu'est-ce qu'ils lui trouvent donc, les autres? Et ils regardaient autour d'eux, étonnés: Tous ces gens-là ne prennent pas cela au sérieux? Cela durait un certain temps, puis on voyait l'auditeur étonné, être pris à son tour. (24)
On his own view of the role, Mounet-Sully wrote in his memoirs:
Quel est mon sentiment lorsque j'incarne Oedipe? Je m'absorbe et je m'identifie de tout mon être au malheureux héros. Toutes choses s'abolissent pour moi, hormis le rôle. Il me semble qu'une responsabilité sacrée pèse sur moi... Celle de représenter, à ce moment, devant les hommes, le grand symbole de la lutte éternelle entre le Destin et l'orgueilleuse faiblesse humaine... Oui, en vérité, j'ai toujours joué, je joue Oedipe avec un repect religieux. J'entre en scène, chaque fois, comme un prêtre monte à l'autel. (Mounet-Sully 127)
Oedipe roi at the Comédie Française. (Image 3) Oedipus forces the shepherd to reveal the last horrible truth. (Click for close up). The set is Greek in inspiration, but not in design; it resembles the set for a period drama but lacks the articulations of Greek theater space, most notably the orkhestra or central "dancing ground" where the Greek chorus was positioned. The translator, Jules Lacroix, had replaced the Sophoclean chorus with three soloists, and the director filled out the cast with silent extras, who are arranged as a human backdrop to the action. Incidental music was composed for the production by Eduard Membrée. These alterations of the original Greek text made the work appear more like a 19th-century historical drama; the translation into French Alexandrine verse also put the Sophoclean text more in line with Racine and the "classical" dramas of the French baroque period. (Click for more on staging.)
More Photographs of the Comédie Française (click on photo to see enlargement)
Creon announces the oracle of Apollo. (Image 4) Tiresias confronts Oedipus. (Image 5) Compare this scene with that of the Reinhardt Production
Jocasta and "Theban maidens." (Image 6) Lacroix had diluted the chorus of Theban elders into a small group of young Theban girls with a male coryphaeus.
Blinded Oedipus emerges. (Image 7)
Mounet-Sully as Oedipus at the ancient theater of Orange. Act 1. Oedipus addresses the plague-stricken Thebans. Contemporary illustration by Louis Loeb for the Century magazine. (Image 8) Mounet-Sully enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to perform this play in the ancient Roman theater at Orange, one of the very first such ancient spaces to be adapted for modern productions. The plays were performed at night with electric lighting and drew crowds from far and wide, including America. In 1895, the Century Magazine published an account of the Orange performances by Thomas Janvier, including several illustrations by Louis Loeb.
As Freud completed Gymnasium, one task given to him at the Matura examination was to translate from the original Greek the speech of the Priest to Oedipus from this scene. He was the only one to receive the "good" mark, but he told his friend, "This passage I had also read on my own account, and made no secret of it" (E. Freud 1960: 4). In his later years he remarked, "...I have always been proud of how much Greek I have remembered (choruses from Sophocles, passages from Homer)" ( E. Freud 1970: 71).
Mounet-Sully as Oedipus, Orange. Final act: The emergence of blinded Oedipus (Image 9) Contemporary illustration by Louis Loeb for the Century Magazine. Thomas Janvier, reporting for the Century Magazine, observed the following about the Orange theater, a semi-ruinous Roman construction:
It was a direct reversal of the ordinary effect in the ordinary theater, where the play loses in realism because a current of necessarily appreciated, but purposely rejected, antagonistic fact underruns the conventional illusion, and compels us to perceive that the palace is but painted canvas, and, even on the largest stage, only four or five times as high as the prince. The palace at Orange — towering up as though it would touch the very heavens, and obviously of veritable stone—was a most peremptory reality. (178)
The strong gusts of the mistral threatened to upset the performance, Janvier reports, but the actors managed to work it into the performance. The emergence of Oedipus at the end of the play was just such a case:
For a moment, as he came upon the stage, the horror which he had wrought upon himself—his ghastly eye-sockets, his blood-stained face—was visible; and then a gust of wind lifted his mantle and flung it about his head so that all was concealed; and an exquisite pity for him was aroused—while he struggled painfully to rid himself of the encumbrance—by the imposition of this petty annoyance upon his mortal agony of body and soul. (178)
The ruined state of the theater lent itself to "poetical advantages which made the tragic action still more real" (179). In particular, Janvier notes the effect on Oedipus' exit:
Over in the corner...was a tangled growth of figs and pomegranates; and thence, extending almost to the stage, was a light fringe of bushes growing along the base of the rear wall among the fragments of fallen stone. It was through this actual wilderness that Oedipus, crossing half the width of the theater, passed from the brilliant stage into shadow that grew deeper as he advanced, and at last, entering the gap in the stonework where once the doorway had been, disappeared into the dark depth beyond. (179)
This same type of lighting contrast was later used by Max Reinhardt to great advantage.
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