Oedipus West End review – Mark Strong and Lesley Manville’s Greek tragedy is a political thriller

The progress of Robert Icke’s devastating modern-day version of Oedipus is from ceaseless noise to stunned silence.  It opens with Mark Strong’s smooth-talking, charismatic political leader talking on film about his promise to bring truth and honesty back to politics, surrounded by excitable crowds.  It ends with him alone, amidst the rubble of his hopes.

In the course of the two-hour playing time, Icke ratchets up enough tension to cause gasps in certain parts of the audience who have either forgotten or perhaps never knew that when Freud talked about the Oedipus complex, he was taking his terminology from Sophocles.

It’s quite a tribute to a Greek tragedy, written nearly 2,500 years ago, that it can still surprise. But, as he showed with his magnificent adaptation of the Oresteia in 2015, Icke knows exactly how to create a realistic, involving drama while allowing the prefiguring dramatic irony of the language – Oedipus is constantly speaking the truth even when he doesn’t know  it – to foreshadow events.

The result, helped by magnificent performances from Strong and Lesley Manville as his wife Jocasta, is as gripping as a thriller, yet weighted with the terrible sense (emphasised in a surprisingly tender epilogue) of what might have been. Where Sophocles emphasised the role of fate in Oedipus’s tragedy, the way that all-unknowing he can never outrun the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, Icke teases different thoughts out of his predicament, filling it with emotion.

When we first see him striding across Hildegard Bechtler’s conference room set, which is gradually stripped of furnishings and colour as the evening progresses, Strong’s Oedipus is a man confident of his integrity, in love with the sound of his own voice, passionate about his political career.  He’s disregarded advice and promised to publish his own birth certificate – and investigate the unexplained death of his wife’s first husband, Laius, previously the ruler of the country he now hopes to lead.

There’s hubris there, but also love. His relationship with Manville’s flirtatious, supportive Jocasta sets them at the centre of a dysfunctionally functional modern family, where the children’s scrapping – again prefiguring what happens in the next part of the story – is part of a web of affection. Only the arrival of his mother Merope, an offstage presence in Sophocles, but placed by Icke at the centre of the action in the extraordinary form of the superb June Watson, tough, frightened and tender, suggests the problems to come.

There’s lots of cleverness here: it’s Creon, for example, (an urbane and slightly sinister Michael Gould) who solves the riddle of the Sphinx in a conversation with the already challenging Antigone (Phia Saban). At the close, Jocasta painfully pulls on a green dress with gold pins, in a nod to the original. The script constantly plays with the notions of time that run through Greek drama, suggesting that an obsession with the past will undo the present. A clock at the back of the set ticks down, painfully, to the moment of revelation, a reminder that this is a drama that observes the unities.

The production is astonishing for all the moments when it rests in the affection between Jocasta and Oedipus, whose physical longing for one another is shown very explicitly, or Oedipus for Watson’s Merope who tells him he is adopted in a voice thick with emotion and longing, making every word count. It is also notable for its stillness; all the activity of the early scenes, the playfights and the rushing, ultimately resolve into stark passages where Strong sits or stands, simply listening.

As he realises the horror of his life, Strong seems to lose power, his face freezing into a mask of sadness, reverting to childhood as he hunches up on the arm of the sofa, finally curling into a foetal position on the floor. Opposite him Manville is equally charged, motionless with tension and increasing pain, the bright, confidence of the early scenes bleaching away until she is a husk of her former self.

By the close, their suffering has become almost unbearable to watch, a modern reminder of the power of Greek tragedy to lay bare all the grief of the human soul.