La ricezione di Sofocle nel teatro di Michèle Fabien: Jocaste e Déjanire

Michèle Fabien worked at the rewriting of Sophocles’ tragedies in two moments of her life: in 1981, when she debuted with Jocaste, a monologue based on Oedipus the King, and in 1995, a few years before her death, when she created Déjanire, a remake of the Trachiniae. In these two plays, she dealt with the theme of female emancipation. The analysis of Fabien’s texts and notes preserved in the Fonds Fabien shows that these works are separated by a remarkable ideological hiatus. In Jocaste, Fabien adhered to an optimistic idea of the ‘tragic’: in opposition to Sophocles, Jocasta frees herself from her role of incestuous mother and takes on that of Oedipus’ partner. In Déjanire, the concept of the ‘tragic’ is more pessimistic: the crisis of Deianeira’s certainties is not followed by any moment of reconstruction and dialectical synthesis, so that she remains, as in the Trachiniae, dominated by her husband Heracles.