There was a theatre-world kerfuffle last year when both the Old Vic and West End producer Sonia Friedman announced productions of Sophocles’s two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old classic Oedipus on the same evening.
In actual fact it is hard to imagine two theatre shows with less in common, based on the same story or not. Where the West End Robert Icke-directed version was a meticulously modernised restoration of the tragedy in which the director had gone to great lengths to try transpose the old impact into new language, the Old Vic Oedipus – adapted by Ella Hickson – is just completely fucking nuts.
A start would be to note that it’s co-directed by Old Vic boss Matthew Warchus and the great choreographer Hofesh Shechter. So there is dance in it: though the pounding, techno soundtracked movement sequences feel separated from the main action, they do effectively establish the sense that the city of Thebes has been overrun by ecstatic fanatics, a debilitating religious fervour consuming the city in its hour of need.
Having been subject to the enlightened rule of Oedipus for the past 20 years (ever since the last king died mysteriously), Thebes is now paralysed by drought and superstition. The people dance frenziedly to try to persuade the gods to bring them rain. But none is forthcoming. Climate change is never mentioned, but given Hickson’s main thrust seems to be interrogating the religious assumptions that underpin the story, it feels like there’s an underlying question about whether gods or man have turned the taps off. Whatever the case, Tom Visser’s lighting is stunning - there is a real Dune thing going on, a ravening orangey-redness that threatens to consume all.
It’s a compelling backdrop but the foreground stuff is… baffling. Hollywood star Rami Malek plays Oedipus as a detached, drawling figure who may or may not care about the drought, but seems to be so off his gourd it’s hard to tell. I’m inclined to believe this a choice rather than bad acting, though his performance is hardly the strangest thing about this show. Our own Indira Varma is Oedipus’s wife Jocasta, who lacks the religious intensity of her cityfolk and acts somewhere between unphased and angry as her be-cassocked brother Creon aggressively pushes a faith based explanation for the city’s woes.
Not wishing to spell it out, but the story comes to a head with the usual revelations, following which there seems to be an aggressive commitment to making the most famous tragedy of all time not actually tragic. Spoilers: Varma’s Jocasta is virtually unbothered when Oedipus’s true parentage comes to light. And Malek’s Oedipus’s final act of self-mutilation comes across as more of a cynical political gesture to save his own skin than an act of despair.
Where Icke had palpably laboured over finding a contemporary scenario that would cause the characters to behave in the same way as the original, Hickson amuses herself with moderately interesting tinkering that diminishes the play’s impact greatly. Concluding that Jocasta’s original fate is too cruel is one thing; having her totally shrug off the play’s tumultuous revelations is borderline sociopathic.
I found the production too bizarre to hate, and there is something about it that works on a visceral level, if not a textual one. But taking the sting out of the end of Oedipus is like making a Superman film that’s just about Clark Kent working for a newspaper. I’m all for interrogating a text, but just removing the stuff that has kept Oedipus popular for 2,500 years is, is, ironically, the biggest display of hubris in the show.
