Robert Icke: ‘if theatre isn’t astonishing, what’s the point?’
Why are there so many Sophocles plays on at the moment?
I’ll tell you why there are so many Sophocles plays on at the moment: while about 95 percent of the press night audience to Robert Icke’s take on Oedipus were clearly aware of the plot beforehand, you could hear every single ticket holder hitherto unaware of the two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old play’s ‘big twist’ gasp in horror when it came. If they ever stopped horrifying us we’d stop staging them, but the Ancient Greeks were basically sicker bastards than everyone else in all of history.
And so we love them: Icke’s Oedipus opens a week after the National Theatre opened a version of Antigone called The Other Place and a couple of months ahead of the Old Vic’s, uh, Oedipus.
In fact this is one that Stockton-on-Tees-born directorial genius Icke made earlier: Oedipus premiered in Amsterdam six years ago and it now makes its English language debut after a long, Covid-y road to the West End (it was originally going to open here in 2020 with Helen Mirren starring).
Icke can do fiddly and complicated when the mood suits him, but as with his phenomenal 2015 adaptation of the Oresteia, his Oedipus benefits from a lethal but compassionate decluttering, a singularity of purpose that distils a famously lurid story into something empathetic, lucid and quite, quite devastating.
Mark Strong is Oedipus, a passionate, self-serious politician whose upstart party is on the verge of securing a landslide victory in a sort-of-British version of Thebes. The entire show takes place in real time (shout out to the classical unities) as Oedipus, his wife Jocasta, their kids and their entourage sequester for the night to watch the election results roll in. Only Oedipus and his wife won’t make it through the night, annihilated by an awful, unsuspected truth about their lives that burns everything to ash in an instant.
In a pre-recorded video section set immediately before the on-stage action starts, Strong’s loquacious Oedipus addresses reporters, going off script in a way that vaguely horrifies his brother-in-law and campaign manager Creon (Michael Gould) as he pledges to release his birth certificate and reopen the investigation into the death of Laius, previous ruler and Jocasta’s first husband.
Nonetheless the vibes in campaign HQ are at first unsinkably buoyant: nobody wants to say Oedipus has the election in the bag, but he clearly does. A baleful unexpected visit from his mother Merope (stage legend June Watson, pushing 90 and still extraordinary) does little to shake this, but he’s finally rattled when a scruffy fortune teller – hey, it’s still Greek myth – named Teiresias (Samuel Brewer) makes a number of truly disturbing predictions.
It unravels quickly, but gracefully. Icke finds time for some detours, especially a lovely, tender scene between Phia Saban’s aggressively sassy Antigone and Gould’s straitlaced Creon that foreshadows the bitter events of Antigone. But mostly this is about Oedipus and Jocasta, Strong and Manville. He’s got a little boy quality: a clear, simplistic, appealing moral compass, but a need for attention that manifests in thinly veiled annoyance when other people are getting it, a fatal desire to make it all about him. Manville’s boho Jocasta is laidback and vivacious, initially amused by Teiresias’s fanciful predictions. But in his adaptation Icke has added a lot of meat to her character’s bones, and while Strong is excellent, you can see why Mirren was at one time willing to return to the theatre for this - Manville’s halting, pained descriptions of her relationship with Laius and the baby she gave up aged 13 is beautiful, compassionate stuff taken in isolation, even as you know where it’s all going.
Icke’s Oedipus isn’t deadly earnest - there is a lot of blackly comic foreshadowing of the eventual cataclysmic revelation of his parentage, plus also a scene where he gives Jocasta head under the table. I was a bit on the fence about the levity - Icke has said it’s reflective of the original text, but his dialogue is essentially naturalistic, whereas Sophocles’s wasn’t. Oedipus lecturing his son Polynices (James Wilbraham) on the importance of tolerating love of all kinds is deliciously ironic, but there’s a danger it looks like Icke showing off.
The other big intervention in Hildegard Bechtler’s wilfully anonymous conference centre-style set is a countdown timer, which I’m pretty sure is something Icke nicked off Ivo van Hove. Nominally it’s there to say when the election results will be called; in actual fact it’s a countdown to destruction. I can see it might be distracting, but I liked it, like a schedule for an asteroid hitting, a reminder that whatever detours this might make, this is still a Greek tragedy.
The complication of Greek tragedy on the modern stage is that it revolves around punishments meted out by gods we no longer believe in. What I think Icke has smartly done is rewire Oedipus’s tragedy. In Sophocles he is punished for his actions - he may not have known the secrets of his own past, but there was no way he was going to escape them. In Icke’s version, he could have lived his whole life without ever finding out the terrible things he has unknowingly done. But the bullish, off-the-cuff pledge to a reporter in the video at the start is what ends him - he believes he knows who he is and that there is nothing to look into because he is always right. But this time, he is wrong.
Things of course get very grim at the end. The jokes fall away. But as it all slips into ruin, Icke’s play remains defiantly humane, a graceful, elegiac note sidestepping the WTAF nature of the final revelations. There’s an incredible scene where Strong’s Oedipus and Manville’s Jocasta numbly get changed for the victory party, simply too overwhelmed by revelation to do anything else, their minds genuinely blown.
It’s not the audacious invention of absolute peak Icke, but it is, nonetheless, really bloody good, with two astonishing leads. Even if you’re aware of every twist and turn of the story, this Oedipus glints with a deadly sharpness. I may not have actually gasped, but I was looking at the end through my fingers.
