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Just as it’s hardly Oedipus’s fault that he kills his dad and sleeps with his mum - sorry if you didn’t know that, but 2,500 years and your own Freudian subconscious should have given it away by now - it’s not this production’s fault that it comes in the immediate wake of a brilliantly agonising adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy by Robert Icke, starring Lesley Manville and Mark Strong.
Oedipus at the Old Vic review: bewildering chaos with Rami Malek strangely mannered Fate is a funny thing.
That restlessness means the production can’t really build emotional depth, either, and it’s only the brilliant Indira Varma as Jocasta who brings any: incredulous that Oedipus won’t do the sensible thing, constantly ignored, increasingly rageful, and finally broken and defiant.
Hickson’s doing one thing, Warchus another, Schechter a third, Malek something else besides, possibly on another planet.
In fact, it’s what we get instead of a chorus: a cluster of dancers doing extraordinary things with their bodies, turning themselves into a frenzied, writhing, ritualising mass while percussive music by Schechter pounds around them, like Keith Haring figures come to life.
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