Oedipus, adapted by Robert Icke  Performed at Wyndham's Theatre, London, from October 2024 to January 2025

Robert Icke's representation of Sophocles' tragedy is contemporary in style, pointed in context, and on message for today's world. The play, enacted in real time with an onstage (doomsday?) clock counting down to the big reveal— ostensibly of an election result, but audiences know the fundamental revelation to come is something more personal and devastating—opens with video reportage of Oedipus (played by an unbending and temperamentally explosive Mark Strong) as a populist candidate promising the media and his supporters truth, honesty, and openness if he is elected as their leader. Crucially, Oedipus ignores the advice of his election team and brother-in-law handler, Creon, by pledging to investigate the circumstances surrounding Laius' death and to quash rumours about his parentage through releasing his birth certificate.

From this political pitch the curtain opens on the home of Oedipus and Jocasta (played by a strong and passionate Lesley Manville), albeit a home still populated with the remains of his campaign team. There, Oedipus' family have gathered to celebrate his anticipated victory. From this point the political becomes very personal. Oedipus' celebratory bubble is punctured by the intrusion of Tiresias, a blind seer who indirectly reveals uncomfortable truths to which Oedipus is blind: that he is the killer of his father, Laius; he is the lover of his mother, Jocasta; and that Creon will become ruler in his place. It becomes clear there are circumstances surrounding the death of Laius that Creon and Jocasta are anxious to protect him from knowing about. It emerges that he was implicated in the death of Laius by causing a motor accident, but that he was quickly despatched from the scene by Laius' driver because their journey was unofficial, and taken for reasons that would have discredited his eminent passenger had they been disclosed. So a political cover-up was hatched that attributed his death to illness rather than accident.

While there is much angst