What a glut of Greeks on the London stage. Within four months, two productions of Oedipus, one of Elektra. Before Christmas, Robert Icke’s superb rendering of Oedipus showed what Sophocles can offer in a desolate age: steady clear-sightedness and tumultuous feeling; an urgent present and the recovery of a long past; the recognition that injustice, though deeply buried, will rear up, and that no creed offers an instant solution. We have, like creatures at a play, to look steadily, without moralising, at the world we have made.
These illuminations are not realised in this past week’s productions. Still, there are glints. The most radical stroke in the new staging of Oedipus by Hofesh Shechter and Matthew Warchus is the most exhilarating. The wordless chorus is made up of dancers, choreographed by Shechter. They stamp and spring: advancing in a line as if performing a haka; huddled together, swaying, reaching upwards and outwards so that they look like an unclenching fist. They do not outline the plot, nor are they characters, but they are more than simply mood music. They act upon the drama – and where more needed than in Oedipus? – like a bubbling unconscious. They move to Shechter’s score, which has at its centre an insistent drum like a heart taking revenge. A rhythm like a train gathering speed runs through the evening.
