It is hard to imagine a single person watching Oedipus who does not already know the hideous way this story turns out. This was true when Sophocles first staged his play, based on well-known myths, in fifth century BC Athens; it is certainly true with this modern reimagining, written and directed by Robert Icke.
As the Cambridge University classics professor Simon Goldhill writes in the programme, “It is a story we cannot stop telling.” Why? What is it about this particular atrocity that audiences throughout history find so mesmerising? I thought of this question as the lights dimmed. Then the sheer force of this production knocked it from my mind completely.
As the subtitle “After Sophocles” implies, this is not Greek tragedy done straight: Icke’s script is a contemporary reworking, rather than a translation, reimagining Oedipus as an insurgent politician standing for election. It seamlessly transports the play’s themes of power, politics, arrogance and the human thirst for knowledge into the 21st century: by no means an easy feat, as the original plot involves prophecies, fortune-tellers and a talking sphinx. The suspicion over Oedipus’s origins and his status as a foreigner to the city is transfigured into a political scrap over whether he should release his birth certificate (the allusion to Donald Trump and Barack Obama is not subtle). The altercation on the road between Oedipus and the old ruler Laius 34 years earlier (making Oedipus the unwitting killer of his father) is revised as a car crash. The characters, tensely waiting for the election result after the polls have closed, wear suits and branded baseball caps. The set, designed by Hildegard Bechtler (an expert at staging Greek tragedy), features a coffee machine on the edge of the campaign HQ scene, a TV screen in the corner playing newsreels, and a giant digital clock counting down the agonising minutes until Oedipus is announced victorious. You might expect it to jar. It doesn’t.
Much of this is down to the exceptional cast. Mark Strong, onstage throughout the play’s two hours, exudes energy, a larger-than-life Oedipus with a politician’s charisma but also a father’s tenderness. Lesley Manville captivates as Jocasta, her witty carelessness making her eventual emotional collapse all the more harrowing. The pair begin with the easy rapport of a long-married couple, progressing to burning sexual chemistry, played out to its excruciating erotic conclusion before an audience wincing at their unknowing incest. They are disarmingly sympathetic.
Oedipus poses a challenge: how to make this tragedy resonate when the story is so outlandish and relies on so many gut-wrenching coincidences? Icke’s production answers by emphasising normalcy. A good-natured spat at the dinner table that could play out in any family kitchen. The tensions when adult children face the decline of elderly parents. A husband and wife who persevered through decades of struggles, believing there was nothing they did not know about each other. Those who know the story can spot the clues, but we are also shown why Oedipus, a man who believes himself uniquely capable of pursuing knowledge, does not. As the set is gradually deconstructed, mirroring how the layers of ignorance are gradually stripped away, the audience watches realisation dawn on the characters – and that realisation is no less distressing for the fact we already knew it.
The tragedy of Oedipus is not what he did three decades ago: killing a man he did not know was his father, marrying a woman he did not know was his mother, raising a family created from incest. It is that he must discover it now. His intentions, Icke shows us via his well-meaning politician hero, are genuine. That does not save him. Sophocles’ message is an uncomfortable one: are there some things it is better not to know? A theme as relevant now as it was then, it is nonetheless rare for a contemporary production of any ancient text to achieve such a level of catharsis. By removing anything that might distance ourselves from the protagonist – archaic speech, choral odes, motives that strain our moral norms – this retelling does not take us further away from the original but closer to it. It evokes for a modern audience the intimate horror Athenians would have felt two and a half thousand years ago. And it is devastating.
“Oedipus” runs at Wyndham’s Theatre in London until 4 January 2025.
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate