There are some surprising flaws. Ralph Fiennes may have been born to play this vainglorious, bullying, tortured Oedipus, and gives a mesmerising performance. But he is sometimes hammy, and his voice and demeanour sometimes lapse, very oddly, into comic Leonard Rossiter mode. McGuinness's new text has a few lapses as well. "Done and dusted" is not the way for a messenger to announce the death of one king to another, in any culture. It's just clumsy. The centrally important line from Tiresias the prophet to Oedipus - "You are who you are seeking to find" - is also clumsy and

unrhythmical, especially for a major prophetic announcement at the centre of a mythic drama. It was also a mistake - even if it was
Sophocles' originally - to let Oedipus' young children in at the end, so he could cuddle his polluted little daughters, dripping his guilty blood on to their grey school uniforms. It was bathetic.

Oedipus is condemned to his terrible fate long before his conception. He was born guilty and the force of his destiny is absolute, dictated by the gods. This might seem entirely alien to the modern Western view of guilt and personal responsibility or of personal redemption and reparation.

Yet what's true of Sophocles' Oedipus is in some sense true of Ayckbourn's unhappy family in The Norman Conquests, and of Chekhov's miserable gentlefolk. They, too, are somehow condemned to their lesser fates and their stereotypical roles by forces of destiny that we now give different names. It makes very little difference how much the characters struggle against their invisible chains, and many of them come to understand and accept that fact. Either their inborn natures, or their environment, or the combination of both, mean that they seem to have almost no choices, almost no moral autonomy. The gods may indeed be absent, but whatever they once were is still tragically present. That's what's tragic, even when we laugh at comic stereotypes.