The week in theatre: Oedipus; Elektra review

The Guardian

09-02-2025

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.
Seven years ago in The Writer, Ella Hickson proved herself a dramatist who can shrewdly and subtly unpick certainty. Her version of Oedipus has vivid flashes, sometimes with a Stoppardian turn: 'People are always dying. It is their defining feature.' She gives the plot a plausible climate crisis background – those dancers stamp first through dust and then rain – and grants Oedipus's wife-mother, Jocasta, a particular scepticism and strength. Indira Varma is both stately and intimate. She subdues Hickson's excessive casualness, giving idioms – 'not everything is up for grabs' – an ironic roll. She blends with the sculptural quality of Rae Smith's design: a translucent white platform, the steady eye of a setting sun, long depths glimpsed at the back of the stage; majesty made uncertain by Tom Visser's lighting, with its melting blues and violets.
Varma's is the performance of the evening. She is not matched by American actor Rami Malek – he of Bohemian Rhapsody and more ominously Mr Robot. It might be that his rigid face is an imitation of a Greek mask. Perhaps his awkward, angular movements are an attempt not only to suggest Oedipus's bad foot, but to externalise his anguish. It is hard, though, to find any reason for his weird phrasing, with words arbitrarily emphasised and long pauses in the middle of lines leaving verbs and their subjects vainly waving at each other. This is the latest bit of star casting not to work.
The Canadian poet Anne Carson, translator of Elektra at the Duke of York's, has described the play's heroine as a 'vessel of eccentric sound', a woman whose voice, 'a thesaurus of screams', is her sole weapon as she seeks revenge for the death of her father, Agamemnon, at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra. Marvel superheroine Brie Larson is the main reason for seeing Daniel Fish's all-over-the-place production. Shaven-headed, in a Bikini Kill T-shirt, she snarls into a handheld mic, slides in and out of song, lashes the stage with her anger. She is a cross between Hamlet and the unlistened-to prophet Cassandra.
The other jewel is Carson's translation itself: caustic, forceful, filling the air with memorable images without losing the pulse of action. For Elektra, her mother is 'a punishment cage wrapped round my life'; the death of a character is 'just a crack where the light slipped through'.
Nevertheless, the words are glimmers in a murky evening. This is a sprint of 75 minutes but it trudges. Fish directed a revelatory Oklahoma!, stripping away traditional swagger to create one of the best shows of 2022, but here he does not so much strip back as flay the drama into separate pieces: some are striking, but none of them feed each other. Ted Hearne's impressive music is sung by a silvery-voiced chorus, but the staging is sluggish: seated on a revolve (yes, yes, revenge is a cycle), the women in backless satin gowns might be decorative models on a wedding cake. As Orestes, Patrick Vaill bursts in dressed as a rally driver, capably delivering a gabbled commentary. Stockard Channing (in furs) is a sceptical but stolid Clytemnestra. Jeremy Herbert's design is baffling: a white wall behind the revolve that rises and sinks unpredictably; mics, lighting equipment, and an uncommented-on barrage balloon dangling in one corner. At times, it looks like a rehearsal room. If only this were just a rehearsal.
Star ratings (out of five)
Oedipus ★★★Elektra ★★
Oedipus is at the Old Vic, London, until 29 March
Elektra is at the Duke of York's theatre, London, until 12 April