As with buses, so with productions of Oedipus: you wait for ages for one to come along and then two arrive almost simultaneously. Writer/director Robert Icke set the bar teeteringly high last autumn with his thrilling reimagination of the story on a contemporary election night, with blistering performances from Lesley Manville and Mark Strong as the ill-omened married couple. The Old Vic offers even starrier casting in the form of Oscar winner Rami Malek – but he’s all adrift in a bewilderingly centrifugal production.
What Icke’s take did so compellingly was to emphasise the connection, the chemistry, the sexual frisson between Oedipus and Jocasta, thus making the play’s domino chain of revelations even more devastating. In Ella Hickson’s adaptation the couple are distant from the start, Jocasta (Indira Varma) crisp, rational and frustrated with her husband’s faith in oracles and prophecies. In this modern-dress no-man’s-land of a perilously drought-stricken Thebes, religious observance is expected from its leaders. Yet as Donald Trump discovered recently, flaunting your faith is politically useful until you come up against an obdurate bishop.
Whereas Icke’s hurtling set-up had us gripped from the start, it’s mighty hard to feel invested in any of this, not least because Malek speaks in a strange drawl that suggests he has toothache. His Oedipus is an emotionally detached man, superficially calm yet full of a coiled stubbornness that borders dangerously on monomania. It is very hard to escape the feeling that Thebes would have been considerably better served with Jocasta as its leader; Matthew Warchus’s production certainly benefits more from Varma’s presence than it does from Malek’s.
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Read MoreWarchus has decided to replace the traditional Greek chorus – a device that looks ever more alienating to modern eyes – with 10 contemporary dancers from the Hofesh Shecter Company and an opening scene of frenzied movement is eloquently redolent of a desperate society in the fever of religious ecstasy. The dancing is undoubtedly powerful and emotive, but the trouble with these lengthy, wordless episodes is that they fatally disrupt the momentum of what should be the undiluted hurtle of Sophocles’s storytelling.
There are a couple of misguided attempts at humour – the prophet Tiresias (Cecilia Noble) is narked at being summoned to the royal presence when she was about to enjoy a cup of tea – and one unfortunate late exchange arouses considerably more audience mirth than is desirable in the closing minutes of a Greek tragedy. This is in keeping with the project overall, which is a well-intended misfire. Malek’s star name means that very few tickets are left and the prices are predictably hefty. Yet the bandwagon of American Oscar winners in Greek tragedies rolls confidently on: tonight Brie Larson opens in the West End in Elektra.
To 29 March, Old Vic, London (0344 871 7628, oldvictheatre.com)
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