Perhaps on brand for a play that relies on incredible coincidences, its announcement back in January created a drama of its own. Only half an hour after a press release revealed that Wyndham’s Theatre would host, in October, Icke’s long-awaited version with Mark Strong and Lesley Manville as Oedipus and Jocasta, the Old Vic chimed in with their own news that they too would be putting on an adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy (this time by Ella Hickson), starring Rami Malek and Indira Varma at the start of 2025. Cue arched eyebrows and embarrassment all around: the Old Vic claimed that their production had been in the works since 2019, not long before Icke had first planned to bring his Oedipus to the capital, albeit with Helen Mirren as Jocasta.
Scroll forward nine months, and London finally gets to see what the fuss is all about. Delayed by the pandemic, after acclaimed runs at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam and the Edinburgh Festival, and now without Mirren (who was unavailable due to scheduling conflicts), it presents us with a bang up-to-date telling: Oedipus is not a king but a party leader, hours away from an epochal landslide win. Rather than the prime minister we have in real life, who comes across like a particularly dull high street accountant, this fictional politician is a charismatic populist, a man of the people who promises to not only set up an inquiry into the death of the country’s ex-Prime Minister (and his wife Jocasta’s first husband) but, in a parallel with Barack Obama, also make public his own birth certificate – two things that his right-hand man and brother-in-law Creon (Michael Gould) strongly cautions against.
This ancient story is ripe for parody – just ask Tom Lehrer or Spymonkey – but it is played mostly with a straight bat here. Strong is mostly known for his film roles in action films like Kingsman and Shazam! and the British actor, with an Italian father and Austrian mother, slides easily into playing a man who, in his moment of triumph, discovers both his parents and his wife weren’t quite who he thought they were. He is not a natural theatrical actor, with only two credits in the last decade; the muscular performance here is more reminiscent of his Eddie Carbone in Ivo Van Hove’s A View From The Bridge. This Oedipus is a king in waiting, a coiled serpent on the precipice of power, striding back and forth in front of a digital clock in the background counting down to when the poll results will be declared. He shows supreme confidence when he fires Creon, but this gradually ebbs away – first after the invading prophet Tiresias (Samuel Brewer) predicts his downfall and demise, and then when his past is pieced together and everything cascades towards a tragic end.
Opposite him, Manville (seven years older than Strong) is a superb Jocasta, a family woman devoted to her husband but still carrying around the baggage of her first marriage. There’s no shortage of pathos as we hear how she was impregnated and then soon after wedded at 13, her baby son later taken from her to be abandoned in a forest. She digs deep into the tragedy of her past while clinging hard to her children with Oedipus and the life they have built together. The mask of happiness she displays sometimes slips (“why are we so obsessed with staring backwards into the abyss?” she rhetorically ponders at one point), adding to the complexity of an engaging portrayal. Her chemistry with Strong is a beautiful thing to see, and her eventual stark descent into despair makes her final brutal decision all the more chilling. Credit should also go to Gary Macdonald’s stirring cameo as Driver and a memorably explosive performance from June Watson as Oedipus’s mother.
Icke has, in the traditional style, suffixed his work’s title “after Sophocles,” but his bold contemporary update feels a country mile and a few left turns after Sophocles. The character names and the bones of the original narrative are retained, but much else is changed. Icke has been busy this year and received critical praise for Player Kings, a hit which closed prematurely when its star, Sir Ian McKellen, was injured falling off the stage. Oedipus strikes the audience harder, what comedy there is peppering a deeply intense work that holds us rapt through most of its two-hour, no-interval running time. He infuses the dialogue with dark wit (when one of his sons opines that children can be cruel, Oedipus replies saying that everyone is cruel but children are at least honest about their cruelty) and barbed exchanges (Oedipus’s mother to her granddaughter: “Your generation believes that the world began when you did.” The response: “Yours believes it should end when you do.”).
Even those who know where this story ends may be surprised by how smartly Icke adapts the twists and turns to create a work which is less a classic tragedy and something more akin to a taut political thriller. With Icke setting such a high bar, the question now remains: can Hickson and the Old Vic do better?
Oedipus is at Wyndham’s Theatre until 4th January 2025. Book your tickets here.
Words by Franco Milazzo
Photography by Manuel Harlan