“O_Rex” by Belgian group Crew begins promisingly: there´s a call for volunteers and after four bold people have answered, rest of the audience is asked to vote for their favourite one. The winner will be Oidipus for the night. Director Eric Joris calls his performance a technological theatre experiment and one can not argue with that since there´s a constant fear that one of the robots will fall from the podium or just stop working and actually many of them do.
Yes, there are robots on stage, carrying sound and visual fragments to illustrate the well known story of a king Oidipus who kills his dad, fucks his mum and then looses his eyes. But the story is never acted, barely even told and the actor on stage just repeats the same lines over and over again to a point where you just don´t care any more. But he is not the main character of the night – our guy is: blindfolded, with big headphones cutting him off from the rest of the world so that he only hears the instructions given by the actor, wondering in circles on stage. It is a powerful and absolutely precise image of Oidipus as someone who is not only blinded physically and thus depending on the help of others but also mentally since he has no idea that the real reason of the prophesy is something his dad once did – raped a young boy and was for that cursed that if he should ever have a son, the latter will kill him.
The audience can only partly share what our Oidipus on stage is feeling as fragments of what he sees in his visual world through the video spectacles is projected on a big screen. But the main experience, being in two worlds – in a real and a visual one – at the same time and trusting yourself completely to absolute strangers fails, at least in this performance, to carry over to the audience, leaving it with it´s own thoughts in waiting for an ending.
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