Natalie Papoutsis: Identifying with Oedipus: The Audience’s
Collaboration in the Re-Construction of Ancient Tragic Figures on Radio
Despite
the spatio-temporal fragmentation inherent to radio, its audience
paradoxically
experiences an immediacy and intimacy that can not be achieved in other
media. While radio drama exists in a
technological landscape of highly visual stimulation and saturation, it
relies
on the agency of sound to appeal to something more potent: the
imagination. Individual audience
members, through their imagination, complete the dramaturgical frame as
the
radio drama producer’s active collaborator and the playwright’s
co-conspirator.
This is particularly evident in the adaptation of classical tragedies
to
radio. Given Aristotle’s assertion that
‘spectacle’ is of diminished importance in classical tragedy, the
inherent
orality of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides would appear
to make
them eminently suitable for radio. Utilizing several examples from
English-Canadian radio (CBC productions, 1946-2001) where ancient
tragedy has
proven to be particularly popular (with Oedipus Tyrannos
receiving no
less than three new productions from 1946 to 1954, for example) this
paper will
illustrate the unique nature of the audience’s collaboration.