Watching the Old Vic’s much-hyped first production of the year, a million what-ifs come to mind, the most important of which: what if this Oedipus hadn’t opened just a couple of months after another version of the same Sophocles play took the West End by storm? What if it wasn’t a Frankenstein mashup of dance and theatre, but just one of those? Or something else entirely like an opera or a musical? What if this Oedipus was fronted by someone other than Hollywood megastar Rami Malek?
Despite not having been part of a professional stage production since 2007, the erstwhile Bond villain takes to his role with charm and the studied ease of an experienced thesp. Sacrifices have been made to not stretch him too far: he gets to keep his American accent, albeit in the form of a Southern drawl, and he swans about in modern clothing, despite everything and everyone else suggesting this is set thousands of years in the past.
Opposite the man with the boyish looks and Bart Simpson profile is British actor Indira Varma. She doesn’t get anywhere near as much stage time as Malek, but makes every minute count in a committed performance as Jocasta, the atheist queen who fell in love with Oedipus after the previous king was murdered. In more enlightened times, this play would have been centred on her desperate plight: her city is suffering from a drought, her brother Creon is angling for the throne, and her husband is caught between running away with her and their daughters and acceding to the public demand for religious intervention.
When the gods are called upon by a reluctant Oedipus through an oracle (a brilliantly imposing Cecilia Noble as the earthy seer), the message is clear: the killer of his predecessor must be found and brought to justice before the rains return. In one of the weakest scenes, we then see the king turn into some kind of private investigator looking for clues but, as he leafs through box file after box file, he comes across more as a PA than a PI. What he eventually discovers leads to the royal family’s lives being turned upside down and Creon providing his own take on the classic ending.
It is rare to have two directors on board, even rarer for them to be from different art forms. Old Vic AD Matthew Warchus and Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter jointly steer this ship in a bold move that largely comes off. The former has been at the Waterloo venue for a decade and steps down next year after a raft of successes, not least two brilliant Tim Minchin musicals Matilda and Groundhog Day as well as his unique A Christmas Carol which has become something of an annual London institution. Shechter has ploughed his own path, his powerful works like Political Mother and Theatre Of Dreams bringing new audiences to contemporary dance.
The actors and the dancers hardly ever appear together in the same scene. Instead, while Malek et al play out what is happening inside the royal court, Shechter commands the feelings of the people outside the palace walls as they go from thirsty natives calling out to the gods to wildly celebrating as the rains finally fall over them. Lighting designer Tom Visser makes heavy use of blackouts in the general and specific sense: sometimes he completely blinds the audience in total darkness, foreshadowing Oedipus’ fate; on other occasions, he conceals parts of the stage, enabling dancers to pop up or disappear in a cinematic cutaway fashion. Rather than bowing to theatrical conventions, Shechter has turned them on their head to his advantage.
Those who have seen Robert Icke’s version, which recently played at Wyndham’s, may be wondering whether it is worth shelling out again to see effectively the same story played out elsewhere. Reach for the wallet, because Ella Hickson’s text gives new life to Sophocles’ original, and this new staging offers a refreshingly different and engaging slant.
The West End is heavily reliant these days on importing famous screen actors from across the pond to give middling productions instant kerb appeal and ticket sales but, based on what we are seeing this winter, that is no longer a formula that adds up. Sigourney Weaver didn’t exactly go down a storm in Jamie Lloyd’s The Tempest, the Brie Larson-starring Elektra is hardly electrifying audiences, and Billy Porter has so far proven to be more glitchy than glitzy in his new role as Cabaret’s Emcee. Putting Rami Malek atop Oedipus has paid off to an extent but is not the jaw-dropping casting that the Old Vic thought it would be when it announced the show a year ago. One final question: what if theatre, instead of drafting in a raft of ‘green screen gods’, relied on established actors with stage experience to pull in audiences?
Oedipus is playing at The Old Vic until 29th March 2025, tickets at: oldvictheatre.com
Words by Franco Milazzo
Photography by Manuel Harlan
