Oedipus at Wyndham’s Theatre review: Mark Strong and Lesley Manville are spellbinding in this wrenchingly tense Greek tragedy

Lesley Manville and Mark Strong are spellbinding successful Robert Icke’s wrenchingly tense reworking of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy. Here Oedipus is an insurgent governmental wunderkind, a spot Macron and a spot Obama. His committedness to govern openly and honestly opens up the worst imaginable cache of household secrets, from patricide to incest.

Strong’s smart, passionate, utterly believable narration with the luminous Manville arsenic his older woman Jocasta roots the unravelling suspense arsenic a rear-stage integer timepiece ticks down to Oedipus’s predetermination victory.

A good supporting cast, and the acquainted Icke tools of dialog that sounds some antique and modern, and a dislocating soundtrack, are utilized to superb effect. At the hazard of blurting retired the worst-kept spoiler successful theatre history, this amusement is mother**in’ good.

At first, Icke’s dusting of modern relevance seems excessively heavy. We spot Oedipus connected surface amid placard-waving admirers, calling retired fake quality and promising to people his commencement certificate. Then the curtain rises and we’re plunged into the credible milieu of a nervously excited run headquarters.

Oedipus is amazed by soothsayer Tiresias, present imagined arsenic a blind, stateless savant, and takes it retired connected his run manager, Creon (Michael Gould), Jocasta’s brother.

A spot unfair. But then, Oedipus’s begetter is dying and his parent Merope (magisterial June Watson) has thing captious to impart that helium doesn’t person clip to hear. Then his and Jocasta’s boisterous big children burst successful and we’re engulfed successful the world of a tight, fraught household astir to participate the governmental spotlight.

Strong has superb pacing and carnal awareness, his lithe, shaven-headed signifier switching from escaped daddish warmth to vulpine alertness and stricken anguish successful a heartbeat. And surely determination is nary finer histrion moving contiguous than Manville, who’s excelled astatine the Royal Court, National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, and conquered Hollywood (The Phantom Thread), British sitcom (Mum) and lockdown binge-watch (Sherwood).

Icke provides a devastating code for Manville’s Jocasta astir her archetypal hubby Laius that makes consciousness of the tragedy’s troubling timeline. Her show of this is arsenic profound arsenic the carnal intimacy she brings to her narration with Strong’s Oedipus, and her sardonic asides arsenic some a woman and a mother.

As successful his erstwhile escaped adaptations of plays by the Greeks and Chekhov, Icke invokes a consciousness of the past successful a vivid modern milieu: his Shakespeare productions instrumentality to the archetypal text.

This amusement was primitively staged by the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam. It’s astonishing to spot it successful London now, not slightest due to the fact that Alexander Zeldin’s updating of Sophocles’ Antigone, astir Oedipus’s offspring, is presently astatine the National.

A fewer lines present are excessively connected the nose. Icke’s techniques are starting to look acquainted alternatively than radical. Nonetheless, this is an bonzer evening, acknowledgment to him, Strong and Manville.