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This article addresses the issue of the Event, which is of great importance for XX century’s philosophical thought (A. Badiou, V. Bibihin, M. Heidegger), but has its roots in Ancient “Poetics”, where Aristotle sees it as the basis of ancient Greek art and ancient Greek drama in particular. We examine the Sophocles’s tragedy “Oedipus Rex” to illustrate the duality of the Event as it unveils itself during the performance, combining theatricality, introspection and observation with action and pathos. The Event in full measure reveals itself through the main character, Oedipus, creating the tragic universe of the apollonian harmony and dionysian knowledge. It should be noted that previously mentioned characteristics of the phenomenon do not only reveal themselves on the stage, but have their roots in a real life experience, so we can refer to them as to the very beginning of the theatre. The Event has the ability to organize and emphasize special moments of the awareness and consciousness in the world of chaos and instability, and so becomes an “impulse”, the beginning of the theatricality itself. Thus, this peculiarities of the concept let us compare and analyze two distant epochs such as Ancient Greece and Modernism: find more similarities than differences in the operas of Sophocles, Artaud and Beckett despite the gulf of time which separates them, which is also a significant contribution of the Event.

This article tries to reveal a connection between fi ne art (painted images) and modernist theatre (A. Artaud, S. Beckett). Apart from the fact that critical essays of these authors are filled with various references to the artists and their paintings, diff erent forms of visual art become an integral part of dramatic performances and lead us to raising the question of their relation to the verbal form of expression. One of the ways to create images during the play is ekphrasis, the poetic description or visualisation of something that is not presented on stage, which blurs the lines between verbal and aesthetic and sets up the conditions for the most authentic and genuine expression of the author’s worldview. For both Artaud and Beckett a word alone is insignificant and shallow, it cannot speak the truth, but has the ability to create a vision, a number of images, which now constitute the core of modernist theatre.