The Oedipus Plays: An Audible Original was in my wish list for a few months, but I couldn't bring myself to pay $7 for a bunch of plays I've already read a couple of times. When it was the Audible Daily Deal a week or two ago, I bought it, and I'm really glad I did. The three Theban plays, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, were written by Sophocles some two and a half miliennia ago, and they remain one of the earliest examples of high drama in the world. The "Oedipus" story has been around for even longer than that; Oedipus is the baby who is prophesized to one day kill his father, the king, and marry his mother, the queen, so he is abandoned in a forest, where he is raised by a woodsman and his wife. He grows up, of course, to kill his birth father and marry his birth mother.
Sophocles makes the story so much more than that, of course. The story was so well known at the time that he begins the Oedipus story with Oedipus as the king of Thebes, only referring to his origin story. Oedipus at Colonus describes Oedipus' late life and how he dies a blind beggar. It was written much after Oedipus the King and even after Antigone, which is the story of Oedipus' daughter, who breaks a royal decree not to bury her brother by giving him full funeral rites.
The acting in this Audible Originals production is simply superb, far above R.C. Bray's "Skippy the Magnificent," and Frank Muller's "Eddie Dean," two of my favorite audiobook performances. This is high art and high drama, produced and acted by real professionals. I cannot recommend it too highly.
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