Surely the most powerful production the UK will see this year, Robert Icke’s adaptation of “Oedipus” turns Sophocles’ 5th century BC drama into an electrifying “play for today”, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. I already knew how this most shocking of tragedies would end, yet I “found myself not only wishing but almost believing that things might turn out differently”.
Featuring “tremendous” performances from Mark Strong as Oedipus and Lesley Manville as his wife Jocasta, the evening is “as gripping as a thriller, yet weighted with the terrible sense of what might have been”, said Sarah Crompton on What’s on Stage. It’s a “devastating” production, which brilliantly restates the “power of Greek tragedy to lay bare all the grief of the human soul”.
The classicist John Tresidder Sheppard deemed Sophoclean language “hard to analyse, impossible to translate”, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Yet Icke has done an “astonishing job in both departments. An old play is masterfully analysed and made newly devastating.”
In this version, Oedipus is a smooth-talking, modern day politician, who has gathered with his family on election night while a huge digital clock counts down the hours to… what exactly? A modern audience could find this ancient story – with its prophecies, hubris and climactic revelation – far-fetched, “preposterous”, even. But here, it is riveting from beginning to end.
It’s a slick production, but it seemed to me that for all the doominess of the counting down clock, the play’s “sickening implacability” didn’t grip to the extent that it should, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. “The liberal use of ironic foreshadowing in the dialogue – references to mothers, knowledge and the like abound – came across as more of a knowing comic device than a horrifying tragic one”, and there is a flabbiness to some of the dialogue. Still, Strong and Manville are “desperately moving in the extraordinary final scenes, which play out as the most unbearable of love stories”.
Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2. Until 4 January