It’s election night. Oedipus is a slick 21st-century politician who promises to clean things up: his supporters campaign for honesty and truth with neat Obama-style graphic posters. But still, it’s clear he’s going to be dragged back down into some filthy, ancient muck. On stage, a digital clock is counting down the minutes and seconds to… what, exactly? Writer and director Robert Icke’s brilliant reimagining of Oedipus achieves the monumental feat of taking a Greek drama where (almost) everyone thinks they know what’s going to happen, and turning it into an exercise in tension, one that etches its message with the painful efficiency of a tattoo gun.
Oedipus first premiered in Amsterdam in 2018, performed in Dutch, then played Edinburgh International Festival a year later. This belated West End visit retains the original’s stark European feel, but has a new cast anchored by the undeniable chemistry of its stars Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. Strong is full of a fearless, sometimes fearsome integrity as Oedipus, with Manville bringing a brittle sensuality to the role of his wife Jocasta.
This Oedipus rose to power by promising to blast away hypocrisy and keep no secrets, but now his shining castle of principles is assailed by the blunt battering ram of his own past. Fate is cruel, old, tricksy. The blind seer Tiresias (Samuel Brewer) shambles into Oedipus’s clean white office to predict his fate – the politician dismisses it as “new age fear-mongering”, with Icke drawing subtle parallels between ancient Greek mysticism and today’s resurgence of superstition and populism. But Oedipus isn’t immune to the old ways, either, something that Icke shows by patterning riddles and wordplay through his text, inescapable as political spin. “We live under blankets feathered with lies,” says Jocasta, as deceptions pile up.
The couple’s three children arrive for an election night dinner bringing awkward truths. Icke beautifully captures the bluntness of these young adults, twin brothers Eteocles (Jordan Scowen) and Polyneices (James Wilbraham) tussling like wolf cubs, tearing open each other’s secret love lives, and brutally honest Antigone (Phia Saban) clashing with her tradition-bound grandmother Merope (June Watson) like a knife sawing into sinewed steak. Sex and relationships are something to play with, something to joke about here. Jocasta constantly goads Oedipus, making a joke of Tiresias’s seemingly impossible prophecy that he’ll sleep with his mother – making the eventual revelation still more jarring and painful.
There’s something incredibly potent about how Oedipus and Jocasta visibly reckon with their bodies’ changed relationships, here: Manville clambers and slithers over Strong, their sinuous sexual embrace turning into a symbolic birth that leaves them both bleeding out. When she has to change into her smart politician’s wife outfit, she experiences a moment of shame at baring her breast in front of her husband, like a banished Eve, adrift in a role that once felt so natural.
Icke deliberately follows ancient Greek dramatic tradition by setting his play in a single space, the action spooling out in real time – which makes its eventual departure from convention yet another shock. The truth is literally blinding, here – and deafening, too – but he makes it impossible to look away, even for a moment.
Oedipus is at Wyndham Theatre until 5 January 2025