Jocasta Regina

To write Jocasta Regina, Nancy Huston slipped into the two fables of Oedipus and gave a voice to Oedipus Rex’s wife, Jocasta, who has been silent for more than two thousand years. She shows us a Jocasta amidst her own people. Jocasta the wife, the mother of four children, the queen, she who cares for a city struck by plague. She is passionately in love with her husband Oedipus. Jocasta’s voice is heard through the women of the play: her daughters and her servant woman. She confides to them the family secrets carried by all women. Through the warmth and intimacy of a modern Jocasta, Nancy Huston summons the themes most dear to her - eroticism, motherhood, love, creation, and makes a tender tribute to this woman, a symbol of the fullness and invincible nature of maternal love. A piece composed as a huge poem, in which tragedy and comedy alternate, Jocasta Regina invites us to observe our own compulsions, and to identify what makes us so compulsive ...