*** Oedipus

A classic tragedy, repurposed a touch too slickly

Robert Strong and Lesley Manville in Oedipus. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Director Robert Icke is known here for his freehand adaptations, including the imports 1984 (2017) and last season’s The Doctor. This time around, his reworking of a three-millennia-old (give or take) storyline, which wowed London last season, is so sleek, it risks stifling any opportunity for cathexis.

A contemporary Oedipus – Mark Strong, alpha and then some – strides about his spacious, minimalist campaign headquarters (set by Hildegard Bechtler) like the natural-born leader he imagines himself to be. Icke has created a character so insufferably smug, so superficially PC, that even leftist sympathizers in the audience may find themselves rooting for his downfall.

For the moment, as the polls close, victory is assured. The family – wife Jocasta (Lesley Manville) and three young-adult offspring – gather for a celebratory supper, with campaign manager/brother-in-law Creon (John Carroll Lynch) and loyal retainer Lichas (Bhasker Patel) in attendance. Oedipus is hostile to Creon, wary of his ill-contained competitive urge, but gracious to Lichas, who – having seen to the family’s needs for decades – feels ready to retire. Oedipus’s snappishness toward Creon aside, the victor comes across as an agreeable gladhander savoring the high of his imminent ascendency.

So far so good – but what’s the point of inserting a long, musing speech by daughter Antigone (Jordan Scowen)? (Poor Ismene has been excised entirely.) And surely Oedipus’s hearty endorsement when one of his twin sons, Polyneices (James Wilbraham), comes out as gay is a scene inserted primarily to lend the pol full liberal bona fides. The other son (Jordan Scowen) has no particular role to play beyond representing the antithesis, a standard hetero bro. Still, they’re good kids all, and undeserving of Oedipus’s violent, visceral reaction once their lineage is exposed.

Ramping up to the big reveal, Ickes has Jocasta deliver a long, heart-rending account of her youthful abuse at the hands of a powerful older man. Though the scene jars a bit as a transparent nod to the Me Too movement, it’s certainly timely, and Manville is up to the task of milking every last drop of pathos. Once Jocasta spills the whole story (how she was forced to surrender the infant), the jig is up – violently, graphically, and true to the classic storyline. But to what end here?

The contemporary parallels are murky, difficult to draw. We all know that something is rotten in the District of Columbia – a whole lot of things, too many to enumerate. Ickes’s freehanded adaptation of this classic cautionary tale, though superficially timely, does little to address the miscarriages of justice we’re forced to witness daily.

In shaping his drama, Sophocles may have latched onto this particular myth to alert the polis to the possibility of a demagogue trailing a twisted backstory (even as he paid tribute to the power of gods’ whims). In Ickes’s hands, Oedipus’s enduringly relatable, universal tragedy – his cluelessness as to his identity and purpose – ends up shrouded in a miasma of glamour.

Kudos, though, to Samuel Brewer for his brief cameo as the oracular Teiresias, here depicted as a blind, homeless adherent to a sect claiming prophetic powers. That one early scene stands out in stark contrast to the atmosphere of domestic harmony that suffuses the stage for the bulk of the running time – right up until that pesky plot point is finally laid bare.

Details: Oedipus, to February 8