Theatre review: Oedipus (Wyndham's)

The same plays or themes do sometimes crop up several times in quick succession - particular stories will strike multiple people as topical after all, and theatres can be too far into their own production by the time they find out someone else has had the same idea - but earlier this year two competing productions of Sophocles' Oedipus were announced within minutes of each other, which has to be some kind of record. At least they're not quite overlapping, and first motherfucker out of the gates is Mark Strong, who plays the tragic king for adaptor-director Robert Icke. It's a return to Greek Tragedy after Icke's epic Oresteia, but while there's a lot that's powerful about the performances, the overall show didn't live up to its predecessor for me. We're in a modern political story, in a state that isn't named, but the Greek writing on the screens suggests it's a version of the original's Thebes.

It's campaign headquarters on election night, and Icke manages to get one of his beloved countdowns on stage as there's evidently a specific time the result will be announced - of course this will coincide with another huge secret being revealed.

Oedipus is pretty sure to be elected by a landslide, and this will make his wife Jocasta (Lesley Manville) first lady for a second time - she's thirteen years older than her husband, and had previously been married to a former leader who died in office. Early on Oedipus is shaken by the appearance of soothsayer Teiresias (Samuel Brewer,) who tells him he's destined to kill his father and marry his mother. His father is dying in a distant hospital, and his mother Merope (understudy Celia Nelson) has arrived unexpectedly with urgent news that Oedipus doesn't quite have time for just now, can she maybe wait until the countdown clock's closer to the most dramatic moment possible?

Icke has done an extensive update of the story from one of Brinze Age royalty to one of modern-day politicians, and I think the way he's gone about it may be the main reason I felt coldly distanced from the action. It's common enough to see the original setup of classic plays applied to modern dress to know that suspension of disbelief can easily handle that and see any modern parallels, but Icke doesn't do that; nor does he go the whole hog and just do a completely new story that's loosely inspired by the original but not necessarily bound to its plot, like the National's current The Other Place.

Instead the details have changed but the story beats are all the same, and at times it feels like the pieces are being smashed together to try and make them fit: I can just about go with this modern political context where wandering soothsayers are a thing, and apparently very popular with the young (Gen Z do like their horoscopes so OK,) but in what seems like a very Presidential election*, we've also had a couple of decades of chaotic coalition governments it's hoped Oedipus' landslide will finally end.

The Election Night setting also constantly distracted me with the fact that these crucial hours have been entirely put aside for time with his family, as well as with the fact that it asks us to believe that some of these instances of everything happening at once were actually planned, like Corin (Bhasker Patel) announcing his retirement as Jocasta's bodyguard because he's now so old he keeps forgetting where he's put Chekhov's Gun. (This production also features an appearance by Chekhov's stiletto heels.)

I also wasn't sold on some of the characterisations - Strong is for the most part a sympathetic, even-handed Oedipus, but his violent arguments with Michael Gould's Creon, who he believes is trying a very weirdly-timed power play, come and go abruptly, and Merope deals with her husband's impending death and that massive family secret she could only tell her son on the most inappropriate night possible with a general air of... stroppiness†.

Also in full-on awkward teenage rebellion mode is Antigone (Phia Saban,) who has an uncomfortable moment with uncle Creon that nods at that family's questionable attitude to intimacy, as well as their conflict in later plays. There's also a semi-playful, semi-serious rivalry between Oedipus and Jocasta's sons Eteocles (Jordan Scowen) and Polyneices (James Wilbraham) that both sets up the family dynamic that will eventually come crashing down, and makes reference to the fact that they will kill each other later in the story.

Maybe it's knowing a bit too much about the original stories that made me pick this apart so much, and it'd be interesting to know what people completely unfamiliar with what's going on think of the show (Phill was pretty familiar with how the story panned out going in, and still said he got confused about which of Oedipus' unseen fathers was being discussed at any given time.) Maybe the adaptation is just too clever for its own good at times (Jocasta jokes about the popular theory that all boys want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers... now if only there was some kind of name for that complex.)

And at the end Strong and Manville geniunely do bring the power and emotion as their worlds implode around them, almost drawing me back in, but it's the very end of a long two hours that kept me at arm's length. With politics at the moment being all about who can manipulate the truth, it's a canny idea to reframe this as the story of a politician whose attempts at scrupulous honesty are his tragic flaw (in a filmed prologue he promises to find his birth certificate to combat claims he wasn't born in this country, which explains the production's use of the Obama Truth poster trope; doesn't change the fact that that trope's been done to death and should have been retired a decade ago, though.) Minutes from the end there's also a very powerful image mirroring the real relationship between Oedipus and Jocasta, that I think might have worked better for me if I'd been more invested in the play. As it is, the emotional distance I was at meant I wasn't sure if I found it effective or unintentionally comical.

Oedipus by Sophocles in a version by Robert Icke is booking until the 4th of January at Wyndham's Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours straight through.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*it's also plot-significant that Creon is his deputy and will inherit power if anything should... happen to Oedipus

†Merope also has a line about how humans don't behave like animals, that kill and eat each other, and I have some very bad news for her about that shepherd's pie she's tucking into