Icke/Sophocles

From Left: Jordan Scowen, Olivia Reis, Mark Strong, Lesley Manville, James Wilbraham, Anne Reid and Bhasker Patel in Oedipus. (Photo: J. Cervantes.)

Robert Icke’s Oedipus, newly transplanted to Broadway from the West End, is, like his 2015 Oresteia, a modern version of a classic work that has resonated through time since the Greeks birthed tragedy. These are the weightiest cornerstones of the genre: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the only complete trilogy we have from among the theatrical constructions the ancient Greek playwrights submitted to the City Dionysia festival in Athens, invented dramatic cause and effect, while Sophocles’ Oedipus, which moves backwards and forwards in time without ever altering the setting, is a marvel of dramatic structure that no one has ever surpassed. Aristotle used it as his model for tragic dramaturgy in the Poetics. The ancient Greek world was a treasure trove of firsts – the Poetics pioneered theatrical criticism.

Icke isn’t the first modern writer or director – he’s a hyphenate – to modernize this most famous of all ancient tragedies, nor will he be the last. The most remarkable version I’ve ever seen is Denis Villeneuve’s Québecois film Incendies, where the origins of the man whose carnal interactions with his own mother are buried in the atrocities of a religious war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, until, inevitably, they rise to the surface. (Incendies, though little known, is one of the cinematic masterpieces of the last quarter-century.) This new Oedipus reimagines its title character (played by Mark Strong) as a presidential candidate on election day who seems poised to triumph but whose enemies have raised doubts about his birth. His political platform challenges the xenophobia that has overtaken Thebes in recent years. He vows, moreover, to open an investigation into the shadowy death of one of his predecessors, Laius, whose widow, Jocasta (Lesley Manville), Oedipus married during the intervening years.

I would count Icke’s four-hour Oresteia among the most thrilling evenings I’ve ever spent at the theatre. His Oedipus is brimming with intelligence and it’s fun to mull over afterwards with friends, but the actual experience of watching it is mostly medium cool. Weirdly, considering that Sophocles’ play, where present and past are braided tightly together and unfold with terrifying rapidity, in Icke’s the dramatic tension feels lax and many of the individual scenes overlong. (It runs about half an hour longer than the original.) When he goes to work on a classical Greek play he loves to weave in episodes that weren’t in the source material; the second female leading role in his Oresteia is Iphigenia, who doesn’t show up in Aeschylus’s cast of characters. I thought including her was brilliant, but the addenda in Oedipus, like the sexual lives of Oedipus and Jocasta’s grown sons, Eteocles (Jordan Scowen) and Polyneices (James Wilbraham), and the offstage cancer that kills the man Oedipus believes to have been his father, tend to feel superfluous. Perhaps Icke wanted the tensions in the family to lay the groundwork for the civil war in later years in which the two brothers will wind up killing each other, but in the performance they seem petty, like something out of a TV melodrama, and the play never indicates where they might be coming from – why the brothers want to expose each other’s secrets to their parents or why Antigone (Olivia Reis) behaves like a spoiled brat.

There’s one shining exception. When Jocasta finally tells the story of her first-born child – the one who, of course, turns out to be Oedipus – and we learn that Laius impregnated her when she was thirteen and only one in a series of pubescent girls he slept with, her feelings about the loss of the baby, which has haunted her for half a century, have so much potency and vitality that they enter the drama like an essential chapter that Sophocles never got around to writing. (I felt the same way about the Iphigenia scenes in Icke’s Oresteia.) This scene is the reason to see this production – not just because it’s so compelling in the writing but even more because Manville is sensational. When I was an undergraduate at Brandeis in the early seventies a friend in the MFA graduate program who gave a beautiful performance as Jocasta told me afterwards that she felt the character “knows without knowing” as Oedipus gets closer to the truth, which is why she begs him with increasing desperation to stop looking for it. Manville really illuminates that idea in her final scene.

Strong is a superlative actor and he’s very powerful on stage. I only saw his performance in the Young Vic revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in HD, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him, even though the gifted Nicola Walker played his wife. But though his Oedipus hits all the elements that make the Sophoclean hero fascinatingly multi-faceted, somehow he doesn’t sweep you up; his fate doesn’t resonate as it’s intended to. (It doesn’t help that Icke has staged it clumsily.)

The cast includes John Carroll Lynch as Creon, but the only other actor who makes an impression is Samuel Brewer, a younger Teiresias than we’re used to. Among the infelicities in the production is the way Icke introduces the gun that Jocasta will use to kill herself when the truth about Oedipus’s identity is revealed at the end. There’s also a timer upstage (there was one in the Oresteia too) what ticks down the two hours to the climax; it’s distracting, especially since the realist explanation for its presence – that when it reaches zero the election votes will have been tabulated – doesn’t make sense, because we know that’s not the way the process works. Hildegard Bechtler, who devised the stunning set for Icke’s Oresteia, collaborated with him here too; I’ve seen enough of her work by now to recognize her trademark monolithic simplicity and symbolism, and though I’ve been more stirred by other designs she’s done, there’s much to admire in her imagery here. Even apart from Manville’s acting, I was glad to have seen this Oedipus. But it didn’t knock me over.

Danny Burstein and Cynthia Nixon in Marjorie Prime. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

In the title role of Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, June Squibb gives a witty snap to her lines and as her daughter and son-in-law Cynthia Nixon and Danny Burstein, two of my favorite actors, bring as much sensitivity to their parts, I would surmise, as anyone could. (The fourth member of the cast, Christopher Lowell, whom I loved on TV in the series Life as We Know It and Veronica Mars, struggles with his.) But the play is wretchedly bad. It’s supposed to be about grief, but it’s rather impenetrable; Lowell’s playing a robot designed to stand in for Marjorie’s late husband, and at least some of the time everyone else is a replicant too, but the shifts are muddy. And since there’s no real play, the bot stuff plays as a gimmick anyway. Marjorie Prime is like most of the Pulitzer Prize winners of the last twenty-five years: the characters are flat, the dialogue is a series of trite truisms, and there’s no dramatic structure. Harrison should give himself a tutorial in Greek tragedy before he writes another play. The only surprise about this one is that Harrison was a finalist for the Pulitzer but didn’t win. You could have fooled me.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movie.