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By: Charlotte Higgins / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com
Theatre in the West End [London's West End] is in a strange and worrying state. It feels like what could once have been good and exciting is coming to an end. Many of the big shows - the ones that might have posters on the tube - are adaptations of films or TV series, like The Devil Wears Prada. Or are they certain realizations, like Mamma Mia! Or are they the ones that have famous actors, like The Tempest with Sigourney Weaver - a show that has been widely criticized. That's not to say that all of these shows are bad, but there is a kind of stagnation. Producers are trying to attract an audience that is still reluctant to return to the theater - since the coronavirus - at a time when the source of new material is running out in an increasingly impoverished world even for subsidized theater.
However, there is something unexpected in this mishmash: a lot of Sophocles. A version of the tragedy has just been completed Oedipus the King, starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. Another has just been shown at the Old Vic, starring Rami Malek and Indira Varman. At the same time, a much less performed work by Sophocles, Electricity, is showing in the West End with Brie Larson in the lead role (known to most as Captain Marvel in the Marvel film series). Marvel(it).
Why Sophocles? Greek tragedy is a space where uncomfortable questions can be asked. These works do not fit the usual pattern of a liberal audience watching a liberal play where everyone agrees with each other. And, especially Oedipus Sophocles's is a timeless work, which continues to offer new meanings. It is also one of the most structured plays, which unfolds with an unyielding logic in real time. Aristotle was right when he said that it was the perfect drama.
In a way, it was a matter of fate that these productions were adapted to London, on the border between 2024 and 2025. Matthew Warchus, the co-director of Oedipus at the Old Vic, has said that his version, adapted by playwright Ella Hickson, has been on his wish list for 30 years. Meanwhile, director Robert Icke's production, starring Strong and Manville, first appeared at the Internationaal Theater in Amsterdam and then in Britain at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, with a Dutch cast. It could be a coincidence. But Sophocles - at least according to those who are bringing his works to the stage - has something to say to the world today.
It is not easy to offer works that come from such a distant cultural, religious and political context to a 21st century audience. Last week I saw Electra at Brighton's Theatre Royal, before coming to the West End. This production highlights the often-cited similarities between this tragedy and Hamlet-it: Larson moves restlessly on stage, like a humiliated teenager, reflecting on the hatred she feels for her mother who killed her father.
This text presents a particular challenge: you enter a story with a lot of backstory; if you're not careful, it can feel like the second season of a series. But in this work - although in this production the clarity was somewhat dim - big and unsolvable questions are raised: Do you love your mother or your father more? What if one of them had killed the other? What would you do? What if they had a reason, a possible justification for their actions? Greek tragedies take everything to the extreme. And we need this: we live in extreme times.
The version of Oedipus by Icke left no room for confusion. He studied the Greek text in detail and then created an adaptation - very loose, adding new characters and scenes, but with a deep connection to the original text. The chorus was completely removed, along with everything it implies in a Greek tragedy - the idea that the play is being played out in a public space, where individual characters confront something that can be understood as a collective. This, in itself, is an interesting symptom of our times. In Western Europe in 2025, we no longer live in a collective culture, but in an atomized post-internet culture.
This version takes place behind closed doors, in a private space, although the public world of politics is very close at hand – as he imagines Oedipus as a politician on election night, awaiting the results. What we are offered is an inwardly focused family play. Of course, this means that much of Sophocles’ lyricism, religious commentary and philosophical weight are lost. But someone else will interpret it differently tomorrow, and Warchus and his co-director, choreographer Hofesh Shechter, are an example of this. In their production, they use a chorus, albeit without words: a group of dancers. Warchus told me that while working on it he had been thinking about [the TV drama] The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter, where a dark story is interwoven with song and dance; he hopes that the choir in Oedipus his "creates a tension, a wave on which the play can move."
Perhaps it is better to say that Oedipus is conditioned by circumstances. Each interpretation of it brings new perspectives, which change to suit the times. If these texts need thoughtful adaptations to address a modern audience, I do not think that this would bother Sophocles who himself was based on an old myth, briefly recounted in The Odyssey of Homer, and radically transformed it to create a play for his audience of 429 BC.
Fifteen years ago, I would have told you that Oedipus was, in essence, the first detective story, a play about a man who insists on following the truth wherever it leads. But world events changed the meaning of this work for me. When refugees began to flee Syria, I began to think about how far the character of Oedipus travels: at first, he is the ruler of a city. By the end of the tragedy, he is a blind exile, a disfigured man, a refugee. These reversals are real; they happen every day.
In Icke’s version we find ourselves siding with Oedipus, even after he is revealed to be a murderer and an unconscious perpetrator of incest. As the playwright-director pointed out at a recent event at the Freud Museum in London, one of the questions the play asks is: “Is incest so terrible, in all circumstances”? It is an almost shameful question for our culture; indeed, it is a question that should not be asked. These plays delve deep into unspoken and unimaginable territories. They reach into the darkest places of the human heart. And that is one of the many reasons why we still need them. /Telegraph/
