Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Sophocles’s Oedipus is a story of blind ambition: the cautionary tale of a proud ancient Greek ruler whose determination to avoid a terrible fate leads him into it headlong. There are no kings in the English playwright-director Robert Icke’s modernized 2018 adaptation of the play, written ”(long) after Sophocles,” as the script jokingly notes. Icke’s Oedipus (Mark Strong) is a star politician instead, with resemblances to several other 2010s leaders. Like Barack Obama, he is an inspirational family man derided by some as a foreigner; like Donald Trump, he’s a populist outsider who promises strong leadership; and like France’s Emmanuel Macron, he shares a scandalous past with his significantly older wife. On the verge of winning power, Oedipus presents himself as the bald, muscular, tough-talking hero-daddy his rudderless country needs: the reformist politician as badass motherfucker. Which in a tragic sense—spoiler alert—he already is.
Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
Oedipus is not really about the fall of a great man; rather, it’s about a great man coming to realize that he has already fallen. It is election night, the TV screen blinks with news, and Oedipus is surrounded by his family: his studious daughter Antigone (the lovely and sympathetic Olivia Reis); his twin sons, the sweet Polyneices (James Wilbraham) and the rakish Eteocles (Jordan Scowen); his sturdy old mum, Merope (Anne Reid, tasty as a crust of bread), whom Oedipus keeps blowing off. And above all there is his wife, Jocasta, who—as played by the great Lesley Manville—is a creature of effortless fascination: confident, worldly, intelligent, practical passionate, sexually frank and a touch narcissistic, with a hint of Sphinxlike inscrutability to shroud the trauma behind her drive. Oedipus seems untouchable. But as an onstage clock ticks down to his landslide win, the earth gives way beneath him.
Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
The process starts with an error on the campaign trail: Oedipus goes off script, straying from the remarks prepared for him by his speechwriter and fixer, Jocasta’s brother Cleon (a credibly frustrated John Carroll Lynch). He is cocky in the televised interview that begins the play, rashly offering to make his birth certificate public and to investigate the death of his predecessor Laius, Jocasta’s much older first husband. Unbeknownst to him, these promise open a can of worms that bait him into questions he shouldn’t be asking; and he is further hooked by an encounter with the prophetic cultist Teiresias (Samuel Brewer), a sightless seer twitching with predictions and proclamations about Oedipus’s life. (When Teiresias is reluctant to share them, Oedipus drops his nice-guy mask to threaten him: “You realise that, once tonight is over, there will be other ways for me to persuade you to speak.”) And so Teiresius drops the riddle bomb that will tick tick tick through the rest of the play until it explodes into clarity: “You bring the darkest shame on your parents,” he tells Oedipus. “Your father’s killer—and your mother’s lover.”
Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
Some 2,500 years after Sophocles premiered his play, we all know more or less where it will go, but Icke gamely works in a few wry foreshadows of the big reveal. “I actually tell people, I have four children,” teases Jocasta of her demanding husband. “Two at 20, one at 23 and one at 52.” For audiences who know the source mythology well, it is fun to see how Icke incorporates and updates aspects of the original: Antigone’s challenging streak and the hints of rivalry between Polyneices and Eteocles, for example, prefigure the tragedies that will follow in Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes and Sophocles’s own Antigone. It is also fascinating to think about elements that Icke has pointedly changed. In Greek lore, Laius was a pederast who raped the young son of a neighboring king. Icke retains the idea of child molestation, but applies it to Laius’s marriage to the teenage Jocasta, exploring the violation inherent to a practice that was common in ancient times; meanwhile, he migrates the Laius story’s queerness to an adult gay child whom Oedipus loves unconditionally. (Compare and contrast with Edward Albee’s 2000 neoclassical tragedy The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, a dramatic extrapolation from the canard that accepting gay people would lead to incest and bestiality.)
Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
Icke’s Oedipus is continuously engaging and smart, and it is exceedingly well performed by a cast that also includes Teagle F. Bougere, Bhasker Patel and Ani Mesa-Perez as aides and employees. Where it runs up against a wall—as many modern adaptations of ancient texts do—is in trying to make the story function without gods and fates. The possibility of divine machinations is brought up in passing here and there, but inconclusively. (Antigone: “I don’t believe in gods, I don’t think.” Merope: “Makes no difference whether you believe in them or not. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”) And that’s a particular problem for Oedipus, because the original play is about the backfiring impossibility of trying to avoid predestiny. Laius sends baby Oedipus away because a divine oracle said he would grow up to kill him; but it is only because he was sent away that Oedipus winds up killing Laius. Later, Oedipus leaves the people he believes to be his parents because an oracle has told him that he will kill his father and marry his mother—which is how he ends up killing his actual father and marrying his real mother. The oracles are at Oedipus’s core; without them, the plot is merely a series of massively unfortunate and far-fetched coincidences.
Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
The double bind that this play presents to adaptors—keeping the gods and fates makes it feel alien to us, but removing them makes it an especially lurid soap opera—is perhaps why, despite its harrowing subject, I have never seen an Oedipus that truly wrecks. But perhaps that’s a problem that can’t be cracked. In distinguishing between a paradox and a riddle, Antigone thoughtfully floats the idea that “One's got a solution—one's just something you have to live with,” and then critiques the idea that solutions are ever truly clear, using the Sphinx’s legendary poser (”What has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three by night-fall?”) as an example: “It’s pretending to be this tidy, neat example and actually it’s just a window onto how everything is open chaos.” In Greek mythology, it was Oedipus who solved the Sphinx’s riddle, driving her to suicide by robbing her of mystery. That made him a hero and the savior of Thebes; but its echo in Oedipus only brings self-defeat and suffering. Sometimes it pays to find the answers; sometimes, the play suggests, it’s better not to know.
Oedipus. Studio 54 (Broadway). By Robert Icke. Directed by Icke. With Mark Strong, Lesley Manville, John Carroll Lynch, Anne Reid, Olivia Reis, Jordan Scowen, James Wilbraham, Samuel Brewer, Teagle F. Bougere, Bhasker Patel, Ani Mesa-Perez. Running time: 1hr 55mins. No intermission.
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Oedipus | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
