There will surely not be a more powerful production in the UK this year. Robert Icke, who in 2015 created a searing 21st-century Oresteia, now brings to London his version of Oedipus, first seen in Amsterdam and Edinburgh in 2018. It is electric.
Tension speeds the evening: in one of many extraordinary phrases, secrecy is said to be in the air, “like bleach”. I knew full well that our hero will have slept with his mother and killed his father, but found myself not only wishing but almost believing that things might turn out differently. Unforgettable images are sparely planted on Hildegard Bechtler’s cleverly institutional design: a massive stain of blood on a glass panel; teenage children being hurled through swing doors; a stiletto heel advancing towards an eyeball. Yet each twist of the action is subtly disclosed and tethered to a 21st-century reality. Oedipus’s father is killed in a car crash; Oedipus swears to seek out the truth that will destroy him as part of an election campaign; his snippy daughter Antigone wears an Oedipus T-shirt (in the style of Shepard Fairey’s Obama). On display throughout the evening, a digital clock counts down the minutes to the result of the ballot – or a different revelation.
A tremendous cast seem to have the complexes and complexities of the plot running through them like blood. A jostling family scene – down-to-earth and yet premonitory – anchors what follows. June Watson towers and crumbles magnificently as the matter-of-fact mother who is – like so many here – not exactly what she seems. Michael Gould’s Creon slips through the action like a warning shadow. Lesley Manville’s Jocasta and Mark Strong’s Oedipus are transfixing: magnetised by each other, aiming high; she translucent, he monumental.
Irony snakes through the preposterous action. “Baby!” yelled out as a sexual endearment has a particular ring when the two lovers are more closely related than they know. A dig at the Freudian analysis for which the oedipal complex was to be so central is administered when a character complains that it does not help to talk. Yet the unconscious is everywhere, tripping characters’ tongues, steering or blinding their eyes: “Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.” Next year Ella Hickson’s new version of Oedipus will be staged at the Old Vic, starring Rami Malek and Indira Varma. Icke has already made Sophocles’s drama look like a play for today.
Timothy Sheader’s first season as artistic director of the important Donmar has got off to a flying start. Justin Martin’s production of The Fear of 13 has something of the same crackle as his 2022 staging of Prima Facie with Jodie Comer – and an echo of the ingredients. The star billing (Adrien Brody of The Pianist); the plot hinging on a legal dispute – the real-life case of Nick Yarris, who spent 22 years on death row in Pennsylvania for a murder he didn’t commit.
It hits with fury. At the slovenly incompetence, the casual disregard of the legal assistance provided to America’s poor. At the sheer bad luck of those trying to appeal: some crucial evidence is lost, some is contaminated; a packet containing crucial material bursts open in the post. “I’m going to the electric chair because of fucking FedEx,” Brody snarls. Lindsey Ferrentino’s script gets its drive from the plot and its emotion from the social implications. A thread of myth-making adds distinctiveness: Yarris is locked up because he “confessed” to a murder he didn’t commit. Loopy and musing, Brody is off-whack and beguiling. No wonder that his prison visitor (with a PhD in poetry) falls for him and the many words he learns in the library (“incredulous” is one of them): Nana Mensah is just right in her crispness and compassion.
Miriam Buether’s design – a bare space for jail and a cosy house trapped behind a glass screen – punches home the distance between inmates and the outside world: like two hands on a prison visit unable to touch. When the lawyer rings his client to explain that their appeal is failing, he is seen disentangling strings of Christmas lights while Brody stands in bleakness as his fellow prisoners beat on the bars of their cells. DJ Walde’s music and the soundscape by Ian Dickinson for Autograph are crucial. A cappella singing – love song, protest and caustic commentary – is woven through the action; a backdrop hiss of rain is so convincing that as I left the theatre I looked – incredulously – at the dry pavement.
Time-travelling does not always transport. Jodie ex-Doctor Who Whittaker, who first appears in The Duchess (of Malfi) crooning persuasively into a mic, her blazing white face and crimson dress like an image of bone and blood, is forthright and clear, but Zinnie Harris’s updated version of John Webster’s 1613 tragedy, first staged five years ago in Edinburgh, directed, as now, by Harris, and reviewed for the Observer by Clare Brennan, is a muddle.
The apparent aims are admirable: to rescue the play – in which the Duchess basically gets locked up and tortured for acting freely and having sex – from endorsing the misogyny it displays, but the result is a jarring mishmash of 17th-century attitudes and 21st-century expression: “Take off your top,” says the Cardinal to his about-to-be lover. Shorn of the undercurrents of Webster’s rich language, the extravagant violence – always hard to bring off and here translated into clever sonic torture and various gunnings-down – looks merely arbitrary. Against Tom Piper’s design of white metal walkways and staircase – a cross between prison and a chic art gallery brightly lit by Ben Ormerod – the generally feeble acting is cruelly exposed: when the men aren’t yelling they are faltering. The play’s best-known line may serve as the production’s epitaph: “Cover her face.”
Star ratings (out of five)
Oedipus ★★★★★
The Fear of 13 ★★★★
The Duchess of Malfi ★★
