Theatre review: Oedipus (Old Vic)

Oedipus cements his place as London's favourite motherfucker by returning with a new face mere weeks after he finished appearing in the guise of Mark Strong, while the Old Vic continues to pair Indira Varma with Bond villains: She plays Jocasta in Ella Hickson's new version of Oedipus, opposite Rami Malek as the titular king. A couple of decades earlier, the Corinthian prince arrived in Thebes and solved the riddle of the Sphinx that had been tormenting its people. The hero of the hour, he married the newly-widowed queen Jocasta, becoming king of the city and ruling successfully while raising a young family. But now a drought has brought misery back to the citizens and, supported by his queen, he proposes an extreme solution: Abandon the ravaged land completely, and move the entire city to a place that can actually support them.

But his brother-in-law Creon (Nicholas Khan) is the high priest, and he and the superstitious populace believe they are suffering because of some offence caused to the gods. Ignoring his wife and the warnings that digging into this will destroy his own family, he takes the short-term solution and appeases Creon by consulting an oracle.

The language in Hickson's translation is fresh and even funny at times, but her structure sticks a lot closer to the format of ancient Greek theatre than many adaptations: Death and violence take place offstage and get reported on later, while the solution to the story's riddle is pieced together by a series of visitors. So the unseen oracle and Cecilia Noble's stern prophet Tiresias offer grim prophecies that seem to contradict each other and the facts as Oedipus understands them. Meanwhile a former palace servant (Nicholas Woodeson) and a Corinthian messenger (Joseph Mydell) each holds half of the solution, and only when they're all finally put in the same room does the full, grim truth make sense.

Also sticking to the classics, but being twisted into a whole new shape, is the use of the Chorus. In the most distinctive feature of a very visually striking production, Matthew Warchus co-directs with composer and choreographer Hofesh Shechter, whose company of dancers provide this chorus. Not as a verbal commentary on the action but an entirely visual one, as the dancers perform a blend of Greek, Middle Eastern and Russian dance styles mixed with the frenetically contemporary. They give us the Theban people's struggle, their pleading to a higher power and to their politicians, and eventually their relief and rebirth as their leader's destruction brings their own salvation.

Their jerky, intense movements provide contrast with the much colder, calculated - but as it turns out calculated completely incorrectly - actions of the spoken scenes. This production seems to have gathered the kind of intense vitriol that I can't miss even by avoiding reviews, and while Hickson's translation, Warchus and Shechter's production, and Malek's performance are all imperfect, I can't see why (especially in contrast with something like Sigourney Weaver in The Tempest, where the criticism felt entirely justified,) people seem keen to already paint this as a critical, if not commercial, disaster for the ages. (I certainly can't see why anyone would go and see Rami Malek in a show and act surprised when he's alien and robotic.)

Hickson's text may stick largely to the original format without zooming in on a contemporary theme, but after I found Robert Icke's adaptation tripped itself up by trying to be too specific, that's not necessarily a bad thing. And it's not like relevance isn't there to be found: Hickson sticks closely to the original motivation of hubris against the gods being the source of all the tragedy, and so Malek's cold, dispassionate Oedipus, who genuinely believes that abandoning the city is the right move, becomes an oily politician who despite that will take the easier option of appealing to a religious and superstitious mob. The only way this doesn't show modern parallels is in him actually facing the consequences of his cynical choice of the easy route of finding a scapegoat - as it turns out the scapegoat is himself.

This coldness does mean the production fails to produce the big cathartic drama of the ending, which kind of fizzles out - Oedipus blinding himself offstage is true to the theatrical tradition but hardly a stomach-churning moment, while Jocasta, whom Hickson actually saves here, is pragmatic at the big revelation to the point of under-reacting to it. The idea here might be that she's too concerned with her two young daughters* to fully respond just yet to the news about her son. In any case the show does fail to provide a big impactful ending, but that doesn't negate the interesting ideas along the way: As well as the powerful dance breaks, the moments that veer into a Lynchean aesthetic (Rae Smith's symbolic red backgrounds, Tom Visser's ominously shadowy lighting design and of course the backwards-speak of the Oracle's prophecy) were also highlights for me.

Oedipus by Sophocles in a version by Ella Hickson is booking until the 29th of March at the Old Vic.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*Tiresias saying that Antigone still has stories to tell is a nice little nod to the mythology's continuity, except for the fact that the production has explicitly written out her two brothers, so unless she gets involved in someone completely different's funeral arrangements she doesn't actually have a trigger for her own story