In true whodunit fashion, the play careens toward Oedipus’s ruin as he learns not only that it was he himself who killed Laius, but that Laius was in fact his father and that his wife Jocasta, Laius’s widow, is actually Oedipus’s own mother.
This paternal rivalry traces all the way back to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex: the eponymous originator of Freud’s Oedipal complex, this play traces the downfall of King Oedipus, who is ordered by an oracle to find the murderer of the previous king, Laius, to end a plague that has settled on the kingdom. If we search back through the dustiest annals of dramatic history to find the most effective and oft-used tropes, this dynamic likely comes out on top, alongside the union between lovers whose families disapprove and the complications caused by spousal infidelity, real or suspect. This is the kind of multilayed tension on which great dramas are built. The son – who is urged on hopefully by his father’s example, but also possibly by a fear of not measuring up to his idea of his father, or to his father’s idea of him. His son can symbolize a threat to his livelihood, can be a mirror forcing him to face his own mortality. The father – who wants the best for his family and hopes to live up to his responsibility to them but is perhaps afraid of the competition his son poses as a representative of the next generation of men. This indefinable moment creates a cascade of shifts, and dynamics must be re-negotiated, especially in the relationship between father and son. There comes a unique moment in a family’s timeline when a child reaches the age where they no longer need to rely on their parents in the same way – they may become something more akin to their parents’ peer, and for the first time have the real option to give their own desires and dreams greater precedence than their parents’ hopes for them. In a heteronormative patriarchal society, the father figure is widely seen as the head of a household. Is there anything more inherently dramatic than the challenging relationship between father and son?
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