Oedipus Broadway Reviews

Critic's Pick. Icke’s change in timeline trades catastrophe for suspense, ontological disaster for down-to-the-cuticles nail biting. Is this a fair exchange? Maybe. Is it electrifying? God, yes. The results are slick, sleek, mordant. It’s a spine tingler, if not quite the ethics tangler of the original.

I thought what might follow would be Mr. Icke’s most provocative—and logical and interesting—departure from Sophocles, an ending of a more ambiguous and less gruesome kind. Instead he reverts to tradition. It’s an understandable move: Many might feel shortchanged if Mr. Icke had chosen otherwise. Nevertheless, it’s a Grand Guignol finish to what has previously been an effective, affecting and strictly naturalistic new interpretation of this canonical drama.

But Oedipus’ strengths — the keenness of his mind, his heroic commitment to truth and transparency — mustn’t be overlooked. Strong, who won an Olivier Award for his performance in Ivo van Hove’s revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” exposes the boyish vulnerability within the sophisticated politician in his sympathetically beguiling portrayal.

Icke’s work is really something: I can’t recall ever being as riveted at a Greek tragedy. And my admiration for his show is increased by how Icke manages to stay remarkably true to so much of the original play while turning its dialogue into contemporary speech; this doesn’t read as something based on the Greek original, it feels like the play itself, re-energized with the kind of crackling relevance all too rare on Broadway. With Shakespeare, of course, theater artists pretty much have to stick to the original text. But since Greek tragedies were not written in English, everything has always been an adaptation, thus freeing creativity. Spectacularly so, here.

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.

Ickes’ staging mainly proves powerful throughout, from the digital clock in the background that counts down the time, not only to the election results but also the revelation of the truth that shatters the characters’ lives (unity of time, don’t you know), to such visual devices as having a team of workmen gradually stripping the office of its furniture, mirroring the losses they endure.

Icke—whose last Broadway outing in 2017 was an adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, which he cowrote and codirected with Duncan Macmillan—has retained the characters’ names and the core of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, but otherwise, he has completely rebuilt the centuries-old tragedy from the ground up. And when a play has endured for nearly 2,500 years, it can withstand an extreme home makeover. Even the merch is up-to-the-minute: The T-shirt, coffee mug, and even direct mailings are emblazoned with the grabby tagline “Truth is a mother**ker.

The biggest pleasure of this prestige production is watching how Icke pastes these modern references onto a classic story. It’s often fun to watch, but never more than clever. Icke also panders to one of the theater’s largest demos by having one of Jocasta and Oedipus’ sons, Polyneices (James Wilbraham), be outed by his brother, Eteocles (Jordan Scowen), at a family dinner. Because he’s such a wonderful father, Oedipus reassures Polyneices of his love and support by delivering a speech written by someone at PFLAG.

Reid, Strong and Manville are transfixing as awful revelation after revelation comes to light. Strong’s nice guy gives way to brutishness and boiling blood, and Manville’s heretofore stalwart Jocasta crushingly crumples when the grotesque truth is finally revealed.

Sure, ignorance may indeed be bliss, the truth doesn’t always set you free, and, yes, love may be blind. But ending “Oedipus” on an upbeat flashback is the greatest tragedy of this otherwise impressive update.

Like Teiresias, Merope understands that Oedipus’ world is about to implode — though Ickes smartly insures that no one character has the full picture of the family history until the elements leak out bit by bit. By the time that countdown clock hits zero, and the penny drops for both Oedipus and Jocasta, there is no turning back. The final scenes, as Strong and Manville wrestle with the full ramifications of their unwitting actions, unspool with a furious inevitability that is difficult to watch and impossible to look away. Ickes and his cast have achieved something truly remarkable, producing a classic that doesn’t feel like a revival at all. Oedipus may be the best play of the decade, and also the most contemporary.

While the absence of real tension (besides that signaled by the countdown) is frustrating, Strong and Manville find dramatic urgency in their relationship, played as misplaced optimism (or is it opportunism?) and passionate drive. The clarity of their want for one another, and their shared desire to propel themselves to power, rings sharp and crystalline. Even as doubt sets in, Strong and Manville’s dynamic is magnetic and explosive, like it's about to set the whole world on fire.

It’s a shame, because this Oedipus, when it tries a little less hard, is also full of potency. Manville and Strong crackle together — their chemistry is steamy and genuine and, in some of the production’s best moments, after all terrible secrets have been revealed, so is their body-wracking devastation. These heights arrive at the crux of the breakless two-hour play, after Oedipus (Strong) has been engaged in his bullheaded pursuit of the truth for some time. (“Your honesty fetish is going to pull everything apart,” snarls one of his allies.) Here, Sophocles’s king is figured as a people’s politician, holed up at his campaign headquarters on election night with his family and key staff, awaiting news of what’s sure to be his landslide victory. (Elected to what? Icke never likes to get down to terms, but the implication is president or prime minister, with more than a splash of supreme leader.)

Robert Icke is one of our best and most exciting theatrical talents, full stop. Any announcement of new work from the writer-director, known stateside lately for his incendiary updates of the Oresteia, Hamlet and The Doctor (from Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi), are reason enough to immediately secure at least one round of tickets. So it’s curious that he’s hit a wall with Sophocles’ Oedipus. There’s still the baseline level of competence for which he’s come to be known – a sleek, glass-paneled modernist set by Hildegard Bechtler; laser-sharp performances, this time led by the phenomenal pairing of Mark Strong and Lesley Manville – that is leagues above most others’ hopes for excellence. But without the profound insight (modern and timeless) he’s excavated from those other works, there’s little to generate the same theatrical electricity.