How could tragedy be staged to show the ways in which fate and responsibility affect individuals and societies? In your answer, refer to your study and experience of TWO texts set for study.

The Aristotelian definition of a Tragedy is a man of high estate who falls from grace in his attempts to defy a predetermined fate, and avoid their destiny/responsibility in order to maintain their hubristic lives. In the attempts to avoid his or her fates and responsibilities the protagonist plunges deeper into tragedy which eventually ends in the loss of himself and those around him, a sufferance he seemingly deserves from having tried to avoid his fate. Through the use dramatic techniques such as setting, chorus, lighting and movement this definition has manifested itself into my own personal adaptations of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in order to portray the way fate and responsibility affect individuals and societies.
Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles is a classic Aristotelian Tragedy about a man who sets out to find the killer of his father in order to set the people of Thebes free from famine and pain. Throughout the play Oedipus is given signs that it is he who has sinned against the gods, but he ignores these prophecies and tries to write his own fate which ultimately leads to his own demise. In order to stage this avoidance of fate I have chosen to use tiny LED lights embedded in the ceiling of the stage to represent the fact that Oedipus’s fate was always ‘written in the stars’ and cannot be avoided.
Throughout my production the lights will create different stellar formations but as Oedipus tries to continuously defy the fate and ‘danger’ that he ‘cannot see’ the ‘stars’ will slowly shine into the formation of an arrow pointing to the pin which he will eventually gauge his eyes out with. Just before Oedipus gauges his eyes out