Following 2022’s hit production of Bernstein’s Candide, Scottish Opera returns to community and promenade opera with Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex performed in the National Museum of Scotland as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. This year’s Festival theme is ‘Rituals that Unite Us’, and Oedipus Rex fits the bill: Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau adapted Sophocles’ timeless tragedy, written for the Ancient Greek theatre that codified many traditions of Western drama, through the lens of 1920s surrealism. 
Oedipus Rex director Roxana Haines in rehearsals. Scottish Opera 2024. Credit Ruby Pluhar.
Director Roxana Haines is also a perfect fit. A former Scottish Opera Staff Director who worked on Candide and directed operas including Hansel & Gretel (2023) and Rubble (2022), she is now in the middle of her MSc in Dramatherapy at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. She is keenly interested in the idea of ritual and the benefits art can provide to its makers, participants, and audiences. She sees symbiosis between her studies and the Festival theme – indeed, in the dramatherapy course there was a whole module on ritual theatre.
Each scene in Oedipus Rex involves a ritual – a funeral procession, a coronation, a public unearthing of secrets – or a surrealist exploration of the unconscious, such as a nightmare scene. ‘You can follow the whole narrative arc through these large-scale enactments,’ she explains. Roxana hopes this invites audiences into the story and encourages thoughts about rituals today – including those of the theatre, and those lost in modernity. ‘I think anyone who has been surrounded by the arts can resonate with the anticipation before the curtain rises. Opera has amazing rituals and strange traditions,’ she says, noting the repetition of the Gloria in Act II that occurs with ‘no dramaturgical reason’: due to operatic encore conventions, however, repetition is normal – even expected. ‘We’re gently playing with human rituals and with opera rituals. It’s multi-layered.’
The creative team have even created their own rehearsal rituals. ‘My work is process-based as opposed to product-based,’ Roxana explains. ‘One of the first things we asked was, “what are the things that we do as humans that we might see these characters do in the show?”’ This led to conversations around operatic conventions – many of the community chorus have not performed in any staged work before, let alone opera. One ritual that emerged is ‘silly opera questions’, allowing a judgement-free zone of knowledge sharing and discovery. The opera is as much for the performers as for the audience.
‘I don’t think it matters that people come with their own preconceived ideas,’ Roxana adds. ‘I enjoy if they do because we get to question those stereotypes or archetypes.’ Oedipus is one of the oldest written stories, and many have encountered it through Sophocles, the BBC, Sigmund Freud, or even EastEnders. These myths and archetypes become shorthand, influencing audience and performer interaction with the piece. ‘We don’t go to the theatre, watch a film, or experience art because we don’t know how it ends,’ Roxana says. ‘There’s something joyous in how it’s told. There’s something beautiful about being told exactly what happens at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet. We’re also told in Oedipus Rex what happens, but we want to experience it.’
Roxana first consciously encountered Greek myths at university. ‘I loved the drama, the conflict, the trauma, and the blood and guts and I want to share that with people – not the blood and guts necessarily, but the drama of these crazy characters and stories,’ she says. ‘I don’t think your background or education has anything to do with enjoying them. We can all experience the catharsis. When we know it’s not going well, we should feel like we want to get involved.’
Shengzhi Ren (Oedipus) in rehearsals for Oedipus Rex. Scottish Opera 2024. Credit Ruby Pluhar.
Roxana hopes the promenade staging where audiences can follow a certain character encourages a ‘non-judgemental stance’ towards these tragic, mythic figures. ‘Part of my approach is that people are not good or bad – towards the end of the opera the chorus sings that Jocasta is to blame. We don’t say that about Laius, Oedipus’ father. We can view these characters as deeper than their archetypes.’ Stravinsky and Cocteau’s surrealism bears the influence of Carl Jung and Freud. ‘Surrealism provides a lot of creative liberty that roots us in those big themes of Jung and Freud – how we’re led by the unconscious, dreams, and things that can seem irrational. Stravinsky’s writing is not naturalistic. Opera is not naturalistic. It gives us freedom. We can play with the movement and ritualistic gestures.’
Opera has a reputation for a high barrier to entry – not an instinctual candidate for community art, but an effective one. ‘Opera at its core is multi-disciplinary and multi-art form,’ says Roxana. ‘It is the meeting place of many aspects of what theatre and performance can be – dance, music, scenic design, and drama.’ To newcomers, there is something ‘out of this world’ about operatic technique. ‘There is nothing like being in close proximity to an opera singer where you can literally feel the vibrations go through their body, hit the floor, and come back up through you,’ she says. ‘In promenade, audience members are suddenly in the middle of a scene. They might not know a singer is about to appear.’ Group singing is another vital transformative experience. ‘There is no feeling in the world like expressing yourself while surrounded by sound. You are singing as an individual and as a collective, which gives the sense of belonging.’ She and choreographer Alex McCabe attend community chorus rehearsals even when not leading them, learning the vocal parts and enjoying being amongst that sound. ‘Singing in a group is a ritual in itself.’
Roxana reunites with designer Anna Orton and associate designer Ailsa Munro, who all worked together on Weill’s The Tsar Has His Photograph Taken in 2021. All are interested in exploring social structures and class – ‘pulling apart layers of society in Ancient Greece that mirror society now.’ Public, royals, and gods are delineated in the production design.
While her work and study are driven by her interests, Roxana keeps the two roles – director and trainee dramatherapist – entirely separate. ‘There has to be a really clear line,’ she says, ‘even though they inform each other so much.’ One passion in both is accessibility: some may feel classical music, opera, or ‘canonical’ works are not for them – let alone all of these, with Latin text. Why a Greek play in Latin? ‘It’s for distancing,’ she explains. ‘We are removed from the action in a surrealist way. We are invited to bypass the brain and feel.’ Stravinsky’s complex, ‘punchy’ score – from his Neoclassical era, but full of dissonance – also helps with this effect. ‘Some sections feel problematic in a way that this story is problematic. We’re really working in a way where form equals content.’ 
Shengzhi Ren (Oedipus) and Roland Wood (Creon) in rehearsals for Oedipus Rex. Scottish Opera 2024. Credit Ruby Pluhar.
Jean Cocteau’s libretto is in Latin but the Speaker’s narration is always in the local dialect. Roxana sees the Speaker as a bridge between action and audience – and crucially here, a woman. Only men were allowed on stage in Ancient Greek theatres, and Stravinsky and Cocteau wrote the chorus for tenors and basses. However, with the publisher’s blessing, sopranos and mezzo-sopranos join this production’s chorus, led by Scottish Opera’s Chorus Director Susannah Wapshott. ‘This is the first time we will ever hear a four-part chorus in Stravinsky’s opera,’ she says. ‘It feels very important we hear women’s voices, not just Jocasta’s. Otherwise, she’s the only woman, and she is so penalised, criticised, and judged that it drives her to kill herself.’
Oedipus is famous for the taboo of his existence: fated to kill his father and marry his mother, he blinds himself upon discovery of the truth. Can it still shock? Maybe, Roxana explains. ‘It’s an opera, this high-octane, high art form,’ she says. ‘We’re distanced from it in terms of the Latin and costumes. Maybe our brain gets in the way and we don’t feel. But this reality still happens.’ Incest, suicide, and war are still omnipresent, and it is often impossible to know who is affected. The draw is both familiarity and uncomfortable human truths. ‘Greek plays are rooted in wars, death, and uncontrollable plagues. Some people see theatre as escapism. But I wonder if humans look for places where stories mirror lives, even if not our privileged, lucky immediate lives.’
Roxana describes herself as obsessed with taboo and its personal yet universal nature. ‘We all have our own relationship to what is or feels taboo,’ she says. Stravinsky left Russia never to return: perhaps he related to Oedipus the exile. Cocteau was nine when he lost his father to suicide: perhaps he related to the cycle of self-inflicted violence that permeates Oedipus’ family. ‘As a director, I try to excavate why these creatives were interested in telling these stories,’ Roxana says. ‘Oedipus feels trapped by his fate. The Speaker keeps saying he is ensnared. Through the Oedipus trilogy, almost everybody takes their own life. That feels really problematic to be telling that story now. But through opera, I need to demonstrate that we are the writers of our own stories. It gives us a chance to talk about how we change those endings.’
By engaging with life and art over time, possibilities emerge and cycles can break. Perhaps opera plays its part.
Oedipus Rex is co-presented with Edinburgh International Festival, kindly supported by The Scottish Opera Endowment Trust and part of Scottish Opera's 2024/25 Season.