'Oedipus' review — Mark Strong and Lesley Manville deliver gut-wrenching performances in Robert Icke's reworked tragedy

Read our review of Oedipus, now in performances at the Wyndham's Theatre to 4 January 2025.

2024 has been a bumper year for talented young director Robert Icke. First came the success of Player Kings — a condensed version of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, starring Sir Ian McKellen — and now, finally, the West End is being treated to his much-anticipated take on Sophocles’ great tragedy Oedipus at Wyndham’s Theatre.

The show has already been on quite a journey, having premiered in a Dutch language version for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam in 2018, with a stint at Edinburgh International Festival the following year. The West End was next, with Mark Strong and Helen Mirren cast as Oedipus and his mother Jocasta, before Covid had other ideas.

Four years later, and Strong returns with the production, while Lesley Manville delivers an astonishing performance as Jocasta in this lean and pacy production, which reframes Sophocles’ story of incest, power, and ignorance within the context of a political contest. It is election night and Oedipus is on the brink of claiming victory, prematurely toasting his success with his wife Jocasta, their three children, and brother-in-law and advisor Creon (a calculating and slightly unsettling Michael Gould). As they await the results of his sure-fire win, devastating revelations about Oedipus’s true parentage surface, with repercussions for both his family and the country.

In an era of endless sleaze, cover-ups, and political PR disasters, there is no question that Icke’s reworking is timely, though the visual parallels with Barack Obama’s “Hope” campaign posters, as well as doubts surrounding the authenticity of Oedipus’s birth certificate, tie the production most closely to the 2008 presidential race.

The production opens with an election campaign video projected onto the stage curtains, in a directorial move typical of Ivo van Hove (whose company first staged Icke’s Oedipus). Thankfully the video work is left there, serving its purpose of getting the audience up to speed with the premise of this reworked play. And this is where Icke excels, as director and writer. He makes this classic story accessible to new audiences, drawing out the layers of dramatic irony and playing with the language throughout, such as Jocasta telling Oedipus “you are not one of the children."

Strong and Manville certainly bring star power to this production, and despite an unbelievable parent-child age gap in real life (Manville is 68, to Strong’s 61) their chemistry as lovers-turned-relatives has absorbing, agonising friction. In particular, the intermingling of desire and revulsion once they discover the truth is magnetic, as they writhe on the floor and cover each other in hungry kisses, before dragging their bodies apart like peeling a scab from a wound. Tom Gibbons’s choral sound design signals their moral reckoning.

Strong’s principled Oedipus is painted as a man we can trust. Publicly, he calls out the lies of his political opponent, while behind closed doors, he shows compassion and support when his son comes out as gay. This measure makes his spiralling downfall all the more shocking to watch, as he regresses to a child-like state following Jocasta’s realisation, curled up in the foetal position, and releases his rage on his three children. Strong handles the switch expertly, his statesmanly bravado unravelling as the final seconds of the stage’s ever-present countdown clock run out, the deafening tick signalling that their lives are about to implode.

Manville’s performance is equally absorbing, her identity as proud wife to an ambitious political leader shattered in a moment of total, horrifying clarity. Awareness rips through her body and emerges in a screech, all breath leaving the once busy, now stripped back, campaign room, as silence descends the stage, the clock finally quiet.

Just like the original, Icke’s reworked tragedy, framed here as a tense political thriller, reveals the crushing weight of truth and knowledge. He has shown it is a text that still has the power to shock and move audiences, almost 2,500 years later.

Oedipus is at the Wyndham's Theatre to 4 January 2025. Book Oedipus tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Oedipus (Photos by Manual Harlan)