Anthony Burgess’s second commission from Michael Langham, the artistic director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, was an adaptation of Oedipus the King by Sophocles. He had recently completed the novel MF, whose incest theme also reflected Burgess’s interest in Freud and Oedipus. He had little knowledge of Greek and a hazy knowledge of ancient […]

Anthony Burgess is well known for his anti-athletic approach to life, often expressed in heavy drinking and smoking, and for his general antipathy to sport. Apart from a commentary on the 1974 football World Cup for Time magazine, he had very little to say about sporting competitions. His autobiography records a single attendance at a […]

Anthony Burgess was fascinated by the life and work of Sigmund Freud. As a writer and composer, he often returned to the founder of modern psychoanalysis in his creative works. The list begins with his stage adaptation of Oedipus the King in 1972 (a consciously Freudian work). This was accompanied by the novel MF, which […]

Anthony Burgess was wonderful, extraordinary, kind of a good-looking guy, you know, tall, straight, chain smoker of these little cigarillos. He’s a great man now and everyone takes him seriously, but he was a lot of fun and especially with the wives we had a lot of good times. He talked about music a lot […]

Never performed or heard in the UK, Burgess’s Oedipus the King is a robust and powerful version of Sophocles’s classic text. The drama includes an invented language that Burgess created especially for the 1972 production of the piece at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, USA. This has been preserved in the International Anthony Burgess […]

Burgess and the idea of a single European language