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The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Oedipus; Elektra review
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
The Guardian
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Oedipus review – delirious dancers and booming soundtrack shake the plasterwork
Dance in Greek tragedy – why not? The ancient Athenians did it, their choruses a weave of sound and movement, though no one really knows what shapes they threw back in the fifth century. They probably didn't give the hands-in-the-air delirium of Hofesh Shechter's spectacular dancers in this new version of Oedipus – but dance becomes the irresistible core of the tragedy. Shechter and Matthew Warchus co-direct a text by Ella Hickson (The Writer). In a freak of scheduling, they follow Robert Icke's inexorable modern-dress Oedipus: two very different takes on Sophocles' family values. Here, Thebes gasps with drought under a harsh red sun and Tom Visser's lighting, a dust storm in charcoal and crimson. King Oedipus resolves to save his people, either by leading them to fertile ground or solving the ancient murder that a faction of hardline believers argue has angered the gods. Big mistake, huge. Rami Malek's air of having dropped from another planet has served him well on film as a Bond villain or Freddie Mercury. He brings outsider vibes to Oedipus – speaking in an elusive American drawl, adopting the mantle of leadership like a haunted robot. Confession later fractures his speech – he becomes shambling, disjointed, bones awkwardly resettling in his body. The truth remakes Oedipus, and then undoes him. Oedipus claims to lead with 'courage, conviction and ingenuity' – the very qualities which brought him to power will destroy him as he stubbornly pursues his terrible identity. As the state's climate change emergency is derailed by a cold case, he sifts through box files and summons the prophet Tiresias. 'Bring in a raving hermit, that'll do it,' scoffs his wife, Jocasta – though Cecilia Noble makes a strikingly disgruntled seer, feet planted wide, unleashing the truth in a wide-mouthed cackle. Shechter's soundtrack of fervent chants and wild drums rattles the Old Vic's plasterwork, volume rising like panic, and his dancers are on fire. They're mosh pit ecstatics – hands raised in plea or pleasure, lolloping, squirming. They scrabble, shuffle or form a serpentine scrawl of bodies. There's no literal transposition of Sophocles' choruses – no dance equivalent of 'call no man happy till he dies' – but their delirium leeches into your blood. You feel them lost in the stomp, consumed by physical impulses even as Oedipus struggles to unwind a mystery. 'People need to struggle with nuance and difficulty,' Oedipus huffs. But while the movement offers a superb, needling ambiguity, Hickson's text is parched. She struggles to find a resonant public register ('we feel your pain') or an intimacy for her private scenes: 'Darkness is the soil in which I nurture my humility' sounds like a shonky translation. Indira Varma's elegantly sceptical queen (cheekbones, pashmina) gets the best lines, resisting her brother Creon (Nicholas Khan), a black-clad theocrat with an itch for power. The ancient pollution is named and rain falls again. The blissed-out chorus spin, feet raising happy spumes of water – they appear fundamentally unbothered by the destructive, seamy dynamics of the royal drama. You're left with a sense of futility – what has it all been for, the destructive pursuit of truth, the secrets and cries?
