The three Theban plays—Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone—tell the story of Oedipus and his family: of how the great King of Thebes was destroyed after he learned his true identity, of his mysterious death years later at Colonus, and how his daughter Antigone, inheritor of his destiny, defied the power of the state embodied in her mother’s brother, King Creon.

Although the three plays carry forward the development of one legend, The Theban Plays were not written to be performed as a group and are therefore not a trilogy in the sense of The Oresteia. Composed almost across the length of Sophocles’ long writing career, they stand, in fact, as a series of studies of the relationships between fathers and children: in Oedipus the King, the son kills his father and takes possession of his mother; in Oedipus at Colonus, the father disowns his rebellious children; in Antigone, the daughter who stood by her father is destroyed.

It is no mean task to capture for modern audiences the excitement that these plays held for the original Greek audiences, distanced for us as they are by 2,500 years of reverence and the conventions of classical Greek drama. In this superb version this task has been accomplished by means of an aggressively contemporary translation that remains true to the text; setting the plays in the past yet not the distant past, not any pinpointable past; and, dispensing with masks, using the finest classical British actors. 3-part series, 2 hours each.