Oedipus @ Wyndham's Theatre...

Last Friday night Stuart and I went to see another modern reimagining of another Ancient Greek tragedy - this time Oedipus at the Wyndham's Theatre in London's glitzy West End.

 

Blimey, it was m*ther-f*cking excellent. In more ways than one (er..two!)

 

Directed by Robert Icke, here we see Oedipus (sexy Mark Strong) as a politician on election night with the polls predicting a landslide victory. Surrounded by his loving family, including his wife Jocasta (the brilliant Lesley Manville), everything seems to be going his way. There is even time for a lovely coming-out story. 

 

Only just then, a blind soothsayer pitches up and, rather like Macbeth's witches, gives him some rather unexpected news from old Dame Deidre Destiny herself; "Oedipus, you killed your father and will sleep with your mother." WTF!

 

Oedipus and his wife laugh it off. His father still lives and his mother is an old crone!

 

Not only that, but in a nod to Barack Obama perhaps, Oedipus ignores the advice of those around him and pursues the truth about his own birth certificate to secure the election. What will he find though? And what does his mother Merope (June Watson) have so desperately to tell him?

 

To compound his fate, Oedipus is also promising an inquiry into the death of Laius, the former king and Jocasta's first husband, without having run the idea past the wise Creon, his second-in-command. And Creon knows more than he's letting on. 

 

Will Oedipus get a nasty surprise? Well, it is an Ancient Greek tragedy so I'll leave you to work it out.

 

All the action takes place as an on-stage clock ticks down the 2 hour running time. And with such an ill-fated Greek hero, the ending, when it comes, was on time and was never going to be for the squeamish.

 

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 

As a side note: Oedipus's daughter is named Antigone - who is appearing in Alexander Zerdin’s current modern day Greek Tragedy renamed The Other Place at the National Theatre just across the river. Small world.