Last autumn, I wrote in Prospect about two ultra-contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedy then dominating the London stage. Rob Icke’s version of Oedipus, starring Mark Strong and Leslie Manville, won rave reviews from other critics; I preferred The Other Place, Alexander Zeldin’s French-influenced adaption of Antigone.
This month, the battle of the Greeks is back on in London, where two more major tragedies opened on successive nights in the first week of February. At the Old Vic, there’s another Oedipus, this time starring Hollywood’s Rami Malek and the always-enthralling British stage actress Indira Varma. Over in the West End, you can see Brie Larson raging against the world as the vengeful Sophocles heroine Elektra, in a production directed by New York’s off-Broadway darling Jonathan Fish. Neither of these are likely to see the critical success enjoyed by Strong and Manville’s Oedipus last autumn, but this second Oedipus is decidedly more interesting than Fish’s vacuously pretentious Elektra.
Why Greek drama now? The Old Vic’s Oedipus, clearer than any of these other recent productions, tells us. The Greek tragedians confront a world in which the personal is political—and where both are usually in crisis. Malek’s Oedipus is a ruler entrusted with the survival of his people during a climate crisis. This much is true to Sophocles, but the environmental theme is made more explicit here: where Sophocles tells us the city-state of Thebes is lingering under a loosely defined “plague”, the playwright Ella Hickson makes this a drought.
Over the course of Sophocles’s original, Oedipus eventually establishes that the gods have cursed his city to punish his own unknowing incest and parricide. In Hickson’s version, reflective of our own contemporary battles between rationalism and superstitious fervour, we never know for sure whether to accept this eco-spiritual explanation or to reject it, as Varma’s atheist Jocasta does, as a coup engineered by the theocratic politician Creon. But the rains do fall once Oedipus is deposed, blinded; and the city’s feverish population, twisting and writhing in a series of extended modern dance sequences choreographed by Hofesh Shechter, rejoice in the certainty of faith.
In many ways, this Oedipus is less slick, less polished and less powerfully performed than Icke’s version last year. It is set in a mythic city-state with a South Asian flavour, which allows Shechter’s choreography to borrow too much from Akram Khan. The length of these dance sequences can disrupt the drama’s progress. As other critics have already noticed, Malek himself lacks the emotional cohesion to show us Oedipus’s unravelling; Varma, who specialises in performances of cool dignity, gives him common sense advice—but the pair have little erotic connection. (She is also, as only eight years Malek’s senior, completely unconvincing as a woman we are told is in fact 17 years older than her lost son.) Fayez Bakhsh’s Creon, twitching his clerical robes, is a cartoon villain. I was reminded of scheming cardinals in the recent movie Conclave, and not in a subtle way.
Yet this Oedipus has something that Icke’s production fundamentally lacked. Director Matthew Warchus understands a core truth of Greek tragedy: that we as human beings slide into breakdown when our societies break down. Throughout Greek tragedy, the protagonists’ wider community is usually represented by the chorus. Icke’s version dispensed with the chorus altogether. His Oedipus was a politician, but a politician so successful that he could afford to spend election night ignoring TV screens in order to interrogate his children about their love lives and snuggle with his wife. If his city was cursed or his rule endangered, it wasn’t visible to the audience.
We as human beings slide into breakdown when our societies break down
News from the outside world only occasionally intruded when a flunky brought in a slip of paper and handed Strong’s Oedipus a discreet update, seemingly positive. Unlike Malek’s Oedipus—and Sophocles’s original—he never seemed to be losing control of his people. Consequently, at no point in this production was there a sense of external threat; the pressure on Strong’s Oedipus, unlike that on Malek’s version, was purely internal. His story was revealed in secret, only to his family. Impressive as Strong and Manville were in revealing its devastating impact, I found myself wondering why this PR-savvy power couple—with strong echoes of Mr and Mrs Macron—didn’t simply respond with another political cover-up, rather than confession and self-destruction.
In an age of Trump, terror and global breakdown, this matters: we turn to Greek drama because it warns us when the political-personal nexus will break us, and how we might swerve it and survive. (Often the answer is not to look at reality too closely—but, Sophocles asks, is that an authentic way to live?) Those questions also dominate Fish’s production of Elektra, in which Larson rants about the murder of her father while an audio track plays descriptions of atrocities.
Elektra is a young woman awaiting the return of her exiled brother, Orestes, in the hope he will avenge the death of their father. Yet, as Fish emphasises, their family history is utterly intertwined with the brutality of the Trojan war. Their mother, in a star turn by Stockard Channing, is her husband’s killer, but regards him as a war criminal.
Unfortunately, the result is so thoroughly adolescent as to barely merit serious engagement. Perhaps this stuff feels new in Brooklyn, but I was left instead with the impression of a sixth form directing experiment at one of the posher girls’ schools and had to imagine that this was all the consequence of an indulgent classics teacher licensing cod-rebellion in the form of punk Greek tragedy. (I know whereof I speak.) Larson sports a shaved head and a T-shirt with the phrase “Bikini Kills”. She slathers herself in black paint, just in case we didn’t know she’s an emo teen. There’s even a ’zine given away with the programme.
There’s been plenty of scholarly research. There is a laudable attempt to mimic the way a Greek chorus would develop their own ritual gestures: the young women gathered around Elektra spit when they utter the name of her hated stepfather, Aegisthus, and conversely beat their chests in rhythm to the sound of Orestes’s name. Yet where the chorus in Warchus’s new Oedipus serves to remind us of the suffering population outside the palace walls, this chorus only amplifies Elektra’s self-obsession. Larson and Fish want to tell us that we should be angry about the world’s pain. But they ask us to sympathise with a portrait of a profoundly insular adolescent, surrounded by a chorus, set and supporting characters constructed solely to mirror her rage. No one else even gets a microphone. Channing, when she appears, is charismatic but sidelined.
As journalist and classicist Charlotte Higgins put it last week: “Greek plays go to extremes. We need that: we live in extreme times.” But the problems of 2025 will not be solved by Larsen’s Elektra, nor by any teenager who refuses ever to leave her bedroom. Malek’s Oedipus offers a more nuanced model of what not to do: don’t disengage from the populace; don’t wobble and change course; don’t try to appease the religious and ideological fanatics, or they’ll simply consume you. We endeavour to protect our sanity and our privacy, barricaded behind our walls. But the thirsty chaos of the world is always out there, itching to break in.
