West End theatre is in a weird and unsettling place. It feels as though something that might once have been good and exciting is coming to an end. Many of the big shows, the ones that might have posters on the tube, are TV or film adaptations, like The Devil Wears Prada. Or familiar staples, like Mamma Mia!. Or ones with star casting, like the much-derided The Tempest with Sigourney Weaver. Which is not to say all of these shows are bad, just that there is a kind of stasis. Nervous producers are chasing post-Covid, theatre-shy audiences at a time when the pipeline of new material flowing in from the increasingly impoverished subsidised theatre world is running dry.
In this mix, though, there is something surprising: a lot of Sophocles. One version of his play Oedipus the King, starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, has just finished. Another has just opened at the Old Vic, starring Rami Malek and Indira Varma. At the same time, Sophocles’ much less often performed Elektra is showing in the West End, starring Brie Larson (known to many as Captain Marvel in the movie franchise).
Why Sophocles? Greek tragedy is a place where unpalatable questions can get asked. These plays fail to conform to the model of allowing liberal audiences to watch a liberal play in which everyone gets to agree with each other. And Sophocles’ Oedipus, in particular, is an evergreen play that keeps offering meaning. It is also one of the best plotted plays ever written, unfolding with inexorable logic in real time. Aristotle was right when he said it was the perfect play.
That these productions should converge in London at the junction of 2024 and 2025 is, in a sense, a matter of chance. Matthew Warchus, the co-director of the Old Vic Oedipus, told me that his version, which the playwright Ella Hickson has adapted, had been on his hitlist for 30 years. Robert Icke’s production, the one starring Strong and Manville, originated at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam and has been seen in the UK before, at the 2019 Edinburgh festival, with a Dutch cast. Coincidence it may be. But Sophocles – at least according to those who have brought his plays to our stages – has something to say to us now.
It is not a straightforward matter to offer these survivals from a distant cultural, religious and political context to a 21st-century audience. I watched Elektra at Brighton’s Theatre Royal last week, before it arrived in the West End. The production leans into the often remarked-upon parallels between the play and Hamlet: Larson paces the stage moodily, as if a tormented teenager, contemplating her loathing for her mother, who has murdered her father.
The play presents a particular challenge: you are entering a story with a lot of backstory; if you’re not careful, it can have too much season-two energy. But in the play – even if their clarity was somewhat occluded in this production – is a set of enormous, irresolvable questions: do you love your mother or your father more? If one parent killed the other, what would you do? What if they had had some reason, some potential justification, for their actions? Greek plays go to extremes. We need that: we live in extreme times.
Icke’s Oedipus left no room for confusion. He went through the Greek text in great detail and then made an adaptation – very free, bringing in new characters and scenes – that was based on an intense relationship with the original text. Gone was the chorus, with everything that a Greek chorus implies – that a play is being worked out in a public place, with individual characters set against something that could be understood as a collective. That in itself is an interesting symptom of our times. We do not live in a culture of the collective, in western Europe in 2025, but in atomised post-internet culture.
Icke’s version takes place behind closed doors, in a private space, albeit with the public world of politics humming away very close by, since he imagines Oedipus as a politician on election night, waiting for the results to flow in. We are offered an inward-looking family drama. Of course, that means you lose a great tranche of Sophocles’ lyricism, religious commentary and philosophical heft. But there again, someone will do it a different way tomorrow, and Warchus and his co-director, the choreographer Hofesh Shechter, are a case in point. For their production, they do use a chorus, albeit a wordless one: a group of dancers. Warchus told me that along the way he had thought about Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, in which a grim story is interspersed with song and dance; the chorus in his Oedipus, he hopes, “creates a voltage, a wave to surf on”.
It is better, perhaps, to say that Oedipus is contingent, rather than evergreen. It offers new angles of vision with every playing, ones that shift to meet the moment. If the texts need serious adaptation to meet a modern audience, that would not, I suspect, bother Sophocles, who himself took an old myth, told briefly in Homer’s Odyssey, and radically manipulated it to build a play for his audience in about 429BC.
Fifteen years ago, I would have told you that Oedipus was at heart the original detective story, a drama of a man’s insistence to follow the truth wherever it led. But world events shifted the play’s meaning for me. By the time refugees were fleeing Syria, I began to think about how far the character of Oedipus travels in this play: at the start, he is ruler of a city. By the time the drama finishes, he has become a blinded exile, an unperson, a refugee. Such reversals are real; they happen every day.
In Icke’s version, we find ourselves rooting for Oedipus even as he is revealed as a killer and an unwitting committer of incest. As the writer-director pointed out at an event at the Freud Museum in London recently, one of the questions the play asks is: “Is incest that bad, in all circumstances?” That’s an almost shameful question to ask in our culture; it’s almost unaskable. These plays go deep into the realms of the unsayable and unthinkable. They reach into the darkest places of the human heart. Which is one of the many reasons we still need them.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
