Let it go, man

Oedipus needling his way to his own downfall is just one of this week's cultural highlights

Jordan Scowen (Eteocles), Mark Strong (Oedipus) and Lesley Manville (Jocasta) in Oedipus at Wyndham’s. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Well, bloody hell. Who’d have thought that one of the shows of the year would be a two and a half thousand year-old play about a man who just can’t sodding let it go? 

What I’ve seen 

Robert Icke’s thoroughly modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is a work of genius, in my view. His Oedipus, played brilliantly by Mark Strong, is a contemporary politician, waiting for the result of an election he’s bound to win by a landslide. 

Giddy with the whiff of victory so close to his nostrils, he pledges (against the advice of his brother in law and adviser, Creon, subtly and perfectly pitched by Michael Gould) to lay to rest what he deems dangerous and nonsensical claims that he’s an outsider by publishing his own birth certificate after the result (sound familiar?). 

For good measure, he’ll investigate the unexplained death of his wife Jocasta’s first husband, Laius, the country’s former leader. A prophecy, introduced by Samuel Brewer’s Teiresias, gets under his skin before the result is announced, but ultimately just accelerates a process that has been inexorably underway, without his knowledge, for more than thirty years.

Strong’s Oedipus is so recognisably a full person. His fundamental decency feels totally convincing, as do the hot temper and ego that undermine it. His obsession with the truth is bound up with his own self-image as a self-made man who makes hard decisions for the greater good. 

His fondness for the sound of his own voice, and his politician’s habit of speechifying even to his family (which rings so true, especially when the couple’s teenage kids drown out his retelling of a well-worn story by recounting all the usual lines) mean that this contemporary speech adaptation of a poetic work skates over most of the possible clunkiness.

Everyone is good in this, from Phia Saban, James Wilbraham and Jordan Scowen as those kids, Antigone, Polyneices and Eteocles, to Gary McDonald as a driver with a story to reluctantly tell, and the always-excellent June Watson as Oedipus’s mother Merope, who gets one hell of a moment quite late on. 

I noticed when I saw Icke’s Hamlet (the one with Andrew Scott) that he’s one of those directors who takes time with every actor on stage, even if they have barely any lines, to make sure that at every moment they know what they’re feeling, what’s underneath what they’re saying or doing. It may well be a sign of a certain obsessiveness on his part, but it makes for a seamless experience, and two hours without an interval fly by.