Edipo: Nadie es ateo

In the genesis of Edipo: Nadie es ateo, the creative impulses of David Gaitán, actor, director, and playwright of renowned standing in Mexico, went beyond his fascination with Sophocles’ text. The death of his father and the end of a romantic relationship intersected in his life. All of this fuelled the contemporary backdrop of a work which, according to its author, “has marked Western civilisation so decisively and influenced so many spheres (scientific, social, emotional, psychodynamic) in such a categorical way, that it has transformed from a simple story into a concept.”

Premiered in 2019 in Mexico, Gaitán’s production received three Metropolitan Theatre Awards: Best Leading Actor, Best Playwriting, and Best Direction. In this work, he sets forth a contemporary notion of the oedipal as a way of relating to “peers, politics, and reality,” while retaining the central plot of Sophocles’ tragedy around the fulfilment of a sentence foretold by the oracle. Its revelation becomes the fatal consequence of a process that Gaitán interprets as a confrontation between faith and truth: in a Thebes strewn with animal corpses, dead for no apparent reason, the plague spreads, and following the oracle’s advice, Oedipus calls upon the citizens to speak the truth, through letters they are asked to write. However, this practice of truth as a viable path to solving problems leads to the discovery of another, more terrible truth.

Around a large table set diagonally and ringed by a dozen chairs, a transposition of the government palace, the plot unfolds in Edipo. Nadie es ateo, in which five young actors, including Gaitán himself, perform the tragedy with natural ease and without bombast. There, in that single space, political conflicts and the intimate love lives of rulers intertwine, dissolving the boundary between the public and the private. “It puts on the table,” says the author and director, “how the most intimate impulses of the characters shape public policies that can lead a city down one path or another, for better or for worse.”