OEDIPUS (Old Vic Theatre, London)

Greek tragedies are like London busses: you wait for ages and ages for one to arrive, then two come at once.  Case in point, only a moment or two ago I was watching Mark Strong’s political Oedipus emerge from Leslie Manville’s groin at Wyndham’s Theatre and yesterday I saw Rami Malek’s dancing Oedipus wresting with the oracles and with Indira Varma at the Old Vic.  These two Oedipusses (Oedipi?) could not be more dissimilar from one another, heading in completely different directions from Sophocles’ bus stop, the former journeying West to an Obama-esque, Shephard Fairey-designed contemporary Election Day, while the latter dances East to a timeless kingdom in the midst of a devastating drought.

Matthew Warchus co-directs OEDIPUS at the Old Vic with much lauded choreographer Hofesh Schechter, and the piece is as much dance as it is theatre, possibly moreso, but, hey, I like theatre and I love dance and I absolutely adore motherfuckers, so I was first in line for a weekday matinee show with all the other oldies spending their grey pounds.  The process of getting into the theatre was halted due to old Vic having “technical issues” (don’t we all, love?) and I found myself jammed into the lobby next to an ancient woman who read the cast list aloud and observed, “Antigone?  That’s an unusual name, in’it?  You don’t meet many Antigones these days.”  Seriously, how does a person get to be as old as Sophocles himself and ask such a ridiculous question?  I replied, “Exactly how many Oedipussies have you met recently?”  And I had in my mind an image of a maternity hospital and a baby nuzzling enthusiastically into his mother’s ample bosom while scowling homicidally at his father, who asks of his partner, “So you’re absolutely sure you want to call him Oedipus?”… but I wisely decided to keep it to myself.

Other than making me question human intelligence and weigh up the likelihood of our species’ imminent extinction, this brief foyer exchange did go some way to explaining why Ella Hickman included quite so much exposition in her play.  She assumes her audience knows sweet FA. Between the extended dance segments, there is very little time to tell the story with any nuance or new interpretation, and I am afraid the playwright lets down the performances, the strong ideas behind this adaptation and the astounding choreography with poorly executed dialogue and an inconsistent tone that veers disorientatingly from physical comedy and one-liners to melodrama and horror.

Performance-wise and against the bulging muscular forms of Schecter’s dancers, Rami Malek is so slight as to almost not be in evidence at all.  His cheek-bones are razor sharp and his shirt falls from his waif-like shoulders at a right angle, perpendicular to the stage floor.  He is otherworldly and ethereal, beautiful and terrifying.  The performance has highs and lows, an unevenness caused by Hickman’s wanting adaptation, unfortunately.  He deserves better.  And as for the rest of the cast, they were fine.  Forgettable and fine.  🤷🏻‍♀️

The strong ideas behind the production are ones to which we return time and again: how do we know what we know?  Do we value empirically evidenced knowledge over our intuition or our faith?  How do we reconcile the uniquely human higher ideals of love with our base animal appetites for sex?  How do we avoid (as Jocasta observes) “confusing nature and morality”?  The driving concept is a meditation on blood and water, on which is the thicker of the two, riffing on blood lines and inherited traits and natural elements, and the idea of inextricable blood in the proverbial water.

So far as I see it, Hickman’s primary task (with Warchus) is to exploit the highbrow medium of words to fight the corner for intellectual and empirical knowledge, while the fight for our animal nature primarily falls to Schecter.  Moving to a tribal rhythm not unlike a pounding heartbeat (and, equally, not unlike a rave or a nightclub), the dancers are athletic and strong, very much physically present and corpulent, pounding the stage and throwing shapes reminiscent of the March of Progress: long-armed, stooping apes morph into man.  The writing and dancing move closer and closer to one another during the course of the play’s insalubrious revelations, representing the need for human beings to ultimately unite their intellectual and base selves in order to become whole (although I note the final two minutes or so of OEDIPUS - the ‘last word’ so to speak/move - is for dancing, which tells us something).

If I had to pick a winner in the battle between our higher and lower selves further to the Old Vic’s production of OEDIPUS, I’d heartily embrace the latter.  Schecter’s choreography is the star of the show: powerful, sexy and instinctual.  So, saddle me up and put me in the paddock with the wild animals, please (although… obvs I would fully comply if Rami Malek felt the need to break me in…. 😳). ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Previous review of Robert Icke’s OEDIPUS with Mark Strong and Leslie Manville: https://open.substack.com/pub/katewilson/p/oedipus?r=1n54mh&utm_medium=ios