Theatre in Review: Oedipus (Studio 54)

	Mark Strong, Lesley Manville. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.

The most remarkable thing about Robert Icke's modern-dress reimagining of Sophocles' tragedy is its composure. Early on, you can sense the drumbeat under the dialogue that hints, quietly but unmistakably, that disaster is coming for the title character in the form of revelations that cannot be disregarded or suppressed, And yet, until the final minutes of Oedipus, voices are rarely raised; Icke (who also directed) and his company are confident that the truth, when it becomes evident, will land with the force of a sledgehammer on human tissue. It is the sense of restraint that jacks up one's sense of dread to nearly unbearable levels. A shattering, life-crushing series of events unfolds before us, and it is impossible to look away.

As his productions of Hamlet and The Oresteia, seen at Park Avenue Armory in 2022, can attest, Icke has a way with classical tragedy that few of his colleagues can match. Here, he updates Oedipus Rex to the world of contemporary politics, making the title character the front-runner in a "change" election unfolding in a country that looks like the UK, yet which appears to be emerging from a dark era of authoritarian rule. The attention-getting prologue, the work of video designer Tal Yarden, shows Oedipus confronting the press outside his campaign headquarters on election night. The sequence immediately establishes him as charismatic, eloquent, and freethinking, fearlessly facing down challenges about his origins and questions about his marriage to the older Jocasta; he also offers an irresistible vision of the country's future. Noting the rapid rise of his candidacy, he adds, "My point is: Things change fast."

Those words will come back to haunt him: Riding on the high expectations at the ballot box, Oedipus promises to release his birth certificate that evening. He also vows to reopen an investigation into the death of Laius, Jocasta's first husband, a previous ruler (albeit one marked by personal corruption and dictatorial instincts). If these decisions don't guarantee his destruction, events are already moving in that direction: His mother, Merope, flees her husband's deathbed to deliver an urgent message about Oedipus' birth. Tiresias, the half-mad member of a visionary cult, brings dire warnings that are both mysterious and hard to ignore. And new concerns are raised about the accident, many years earlier, in which the young Oedipus was a participant, and which was mysteriously hushed up.

It's fascinating to see how Icke has created a modern tragic hero whose history carries traces of Barack Obama, Ted Kennedy, and Emmanuel Macron, among others. Mark Strong captures Oedipus in all his charisma and contradictions, whether he is lovingly reprimanding his gay son Polynices, not for coming out but for being reluctant to do so, or lashing out at Creon, his brother-in-law and campaign manager, accusing him of jealously undermining his candidacy. ('You can't just put words in my mouth," he snarls. "That is literally what speechwriting is," replies the baffled Creon.) Even those close to him must struggle with his oxygen-sucking ways. "Your famous emotional intelligence only extends so far," snaps Merope, who is fed up with being ignored. It's one of many offhand comments that will come home to roost in the play's later passages.

Indeed, it is the news Merope has come to impart, urging Oedipus to drop the matter of his birth certificate, that sets in motion the play's irrevocable final revelations. Strong reacts to them with a remarkable stoicism that nevertheless signals his psychological implosion; when he hurls his three adult children to the ground, howls in an animal-like agony, and, ultimately, commits his infamous act of self-mutilation, one isn't surprised, so well has the actor prepared us for them.

Plotting a similar course is Lesley Manville's Jocasta, a lusty, power-loving political spouse who turns oddly brittle when certain subjects, especially the death of her firstborn child, come up. A veteran of the political wars, she is nobody's fool. Losing patience with her husband's high-minded (and sometimes high-handed) ways, she schools him in the facts of life: "This isn't a campaign stop, boyo, and you know as well as I do that we live under blankets feathered with lies, the lot of us, everyone, everyone, every-one lies: politics, government, schools, the facts of the world we live in." Indeed, she is sitting on a powder keg of unspeakable truths; the details of her life with Laius, which include (but are not limited to) pedophilia and rape, have a skin-crawling authenticity, especially right now, when the Jeffrey Epstein files are so current in the news. Manville's quiet, unsentimental recital of these horrors has a quiet precision that is likely to haunt you for days.

Everything in Icke's staging contributes to the play's awful clarity of vision. Even with two supercharged stars dominating the stage, there is fine work from John Carroll Lynch as Creon, horrified at losing his grip on Oedipus' public image; Teagle F. Bougere as a frightened driver who alone knows the truth about Oedipus' long-ago accident; Samuel Brewer, teetering on the edge of schizophrenia as Tiresias; and the beloved veteran Anne Reid, astonishingly vigorous at ninety, as Merope, baring a secret that will rain down ruin on the son she loves.

It all unfolds on Hildegard Bechtler's set, a photorealistic rendering of an anonymous rented office space, lit with clinical accuracy by Natasha Chivers. Wojciech Dziedzic's costumes capture the characters' milieu of tailored business suits and upscale leisure wear. Tom Gibbon's sound design includes almost subliminal underscoring and effects that add to the unsettled atmosphere. Yarden's video design includes nonstop news feeds on a couple of wall TVs, tracking the success of Oedipus' campaign even as he faces catastrophe.

I have no words for the play's final minutes, when Oedipus and Jocasta, forced to see themselves as they really are, unemotionally dress for a victory, then fall on each other in a frenzy consisting of equal parts fury, lust, and loss. (There is, of course, worse to come.) We rarely get theatrical tragedy of this scale and intensity, and the modern political world, with its carefully curated imagery and brutal power games, is the perfect setting for it. As Americans, we want to believe that all lives are subject to reinvention; Oedipus reminds us that some things are too terrible to bear. --David Barbour