When I was in first grade our teacher used to trick us into
being quiet by telling us to put our heads on our desks and listen for her to
drop a pin. It worked. We were as still and quiet as we could
be. I thought of that Monday night as
the tension mounted at director Robert Icke’s riveting reimagining of Sophocles’s
Oedipus Rex. The audience was intensely
focused on the stage at Studio 54, spellbound by a story for which they already
knew the outcome. But then, it’s
unlikely anyone has experienced anything like Icke’s Oedipus.
Mark Strong and Lesley Manville give powerhouse performances
as Oedipus and his wife, Jacasta. When
the show played London’s West End last fall the production was nominated for
four Olivier Awards, winning one for best revival and another for best
actress. I expect similar results with
the Tonys in June, except I would honor Strong and Icke with top honors as
well.
A taut two hours with no intermission, the show takes place
in the present, although no location is mentioned. Oedipus is a politician rather than a king
and it’s election night after a hard-fought campaign that he is expected to win
in a landslide.
I liked Hildegard Bechtler’s single set, although it doesn’t
look like any campaign office I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been in plenty as a
former political reporter and press secretary.
It’s far too neat and sparse for a campaign office, even at the start of
the effort, but it’s a good choice. With
little more than a large table with chairs at the center and a sofa on the far
right, and with Natasha Chivers’s bright lighting, our attention is focused
fully on the unfolding story. One
important detail is a digital clock measuring days, hours and minutes, ticking
them down as the play progresses.
Before we get to this set, though, Tal Varden’s full stage,
floor-to-ceiling video projection shows the candidate surrounded by supporters
carrying Oedipus signs on sticks as he continues with his speechifying, using
language that could be attributed to Zohran Mamdani or Barack Obama.
“They deliberately dragged us backwards to a time when the
rich were rich, and the poor were poor, backwards to when people who weren’t
like us deserved persecution, backwards until rumors and lies were the same as
truth, and we’ve seen that in this campaign.
My opponent loves the idea this country isn’t my country. He doesn’t say I couldn’t do the job. He says I’m not from here. My identity doesn’t fit.”
And he promises he will release his birth certificate to
appease some critics. Of course, unlike
Barack Obama, we will learn that releasing his birth certificate is one promise
Oedipus can’t keep.
Another reference to our times is when Jacasta is revealing
her painful past. She talks about the
considerably older man who sexually abused her for years when she was a young
teenager, which sounds like the testimony we’ve heard from Jeffrey Epstein’s
victims. I was amazed by Manville’s
timing of this revelation. As soon as
she uttered the final word the digital clock went to 00. I never saw her look at the clock and yet she
timed her heartbreaking disclosure to the second. This is especially impressive because Icke
didn’t allow Manville and Strong to rehearse the horrifying conclusion until a
week before previews began, telling the New York Times they “had to
understand what was going to be lost before that loss counted for anything.”
The supporting characters are all skilled but the show
belongs to Strong and Manville, who are onstage for nearly the entire, tense, two
hours.
