Fate is a funny thing. Just as it’s hardly Oedipus’s fault that he kills his dad and sleeps with his mum - sorry if you didn’t know that, but 2,500 years and your own Freudian subconscious should have given it away by now - it’s not this production’s fault that it comes in the immediate wake of a brilliantly agonising adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy by Robert Icke, starring Lesley Manville and Mark Strong.
In fact, if it weren’t for the supernova-level pull of Oscar-winning actor Rami Malek, it’s likely that this Oedipus would have felt like one tragedy too many, especially opening in the same week as another Oscar winner, Brie Larson, takes on another Greek tragedy, Elektra.
Weirdly, this one and Icke’s even open in the same way: Oedipus has just become leader of Thebes; cheering, adulation. And then, well, to say the two productions diverge is an understatement.
Where Icke’s was all sleekness and surgical precision, this one, co-directed by Matthew Warchus and choreographer Hofesh Shechter, takes Aristotle’s unities and rubs them in the old philosopher’s face. Why have unity when you can have the mad and slightly ridiculous chaos of several different creative visions squeezed into 100 minutes?
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First of all, there’s a lot of dance in it. A lot a lot. In fact, it’s what we get instead of a chorus: a cluster of dancers doing extraordinary things with their bodies, turning themselves into a frenzied, writhing, ritualising mass while percussive music by Schechter pounds around them, like Keith Haring figures come to life. It’s amazing, but inexplicable.
Then the play proper starts, adapted by Ella Hickson as a climate crisis drama in which Thebes is ravaged by drought. Rae Smith’s spare set, just recessing proscenium arches, beautifully suggests desolation, and mostly yields to Tom Visser’s stunning sculptural lighting, icy cool inside the palace, and swelteringly, orangely hot outside. Oedipus needs to decide between telling the city to up sticks and migrate (good but hard option) or to give into the clamour of religious zealots and consult the oracle (bad but easy). Guess which one he does.
Hickson has interesting stuff to say about populism, faith and fanaticism, but Oedipus works when it’s an inexorable plummet towards revelation and tragedy; here, whenever the tension starts to ratchet up, something weird like a sassy Tiresias (the wonderful Cecilia Noble) or a long dance sequence cuts it dead, like we’re flicking through different TV channels.
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That restlessness means the production can’t really build emotional depth, either, and it’s only the brilliant Indira Varma as Jocasta who brings any: incredulous that Oedipus won’t do the sensible thing, constantly ignored, increasingly rageful, and finally broken and defiant.
Then there’s Rami Malek, being very Rami Malek. His body, strangely small in a too-big suit, like a boy on the first day of school, twists in odd ways. Sinister and expressionless, he delivers every line in a strangely mannered way, and every word sounds like one long vowel. His speeches incline towards shouting and intensity, though that’s actually where he works best: when he’s violent and angry, we finally see some emotion.
So, a lot going on in a production that favours big picture and not little details. In fact, it’s about six big pictures fudged together into a bewildering chaos. Hickson’s doing one thing, Warchus another, Schechter a third, Malek something else besides, possibly on another planet.
But somehow, because of the disjointed madness of these miscellaneous spectacles, it’s weirdly compelling. Yes it’s all a bit much, but for the first time in 2,500 years you can watch Oedipus and not quite know what’s going to happen next.
