Theatre: Cocteau’s Oedipus

While the Broadway air twangs with the sobs of commercial producers launching flops and losing money, many real theatre-lovers this season are going off by themselves to experiment with unusual plays. Typical is The Play Room Club, sponsored by Maxwell Anderson, Brock Pemberton et al. Planning to present five plays throughout the season, admitting only members and their guests, the club last week led off with The Infernal Machine by Jean Cocteau, adapted by Carl Wildman.

In a brick-walled room that was once a foundry, seated on 65 folding chairs, the audience applauded a modern version of an old story of incest and parricide. The same story, dramatized by Sophocles and called Oedipus Rex, moved an audience in Athens over 2,300 years ago. Sophocles’ tale of the great and virtuous king, who learns within one tense hour that he is unwittingly guilty of two hideous crimes, has never been surpassed for suspense and horror, is considered one of the world’s neatest jobs of play construction. In The Infernal Machine Playwright Cocteau has kept Sophocles’ characters in their ancient setting but has stressed the psychoanalytic implications of the story and told it in modern language. To The Play Room audience Cocteau’s attempt to make the legend significant in modern terms seemed so sincere that his anachronisms, his references to Theban nightclubs, and the sprinkling of slang did not sound forced. Jean Cocteau, once called “the most charming young man in Paris,” has always been a good showman. He has frequently set Paris on her ear with his expressionistic ballets. His surrealist film, The Blood of a Poet, produced visceral chills wherever it was jeered or cheered. His pictures drawn under the influence of opium are monstrous and unforgettable. Critics have found Cocteau difficult to classify. His Oedipus says, “Classifiable things reek of death. You must strike out in other spheres . . . quit the ranks. That’s the sign of masterpieces and heroes. An original, that’s the person to astonish and to rule.”