Oedipus: Mark Strong and Lesley Manville star in 'devastating' production

Robert Icke's modern adaptation of the Sophoclean tragedy is 'riveting' from start to finish

Mark Strong and Lesley Manville in Robert Icke’s production of Oedipus.
The show features 'tremendous' performances from Mark Strong as Oedipus and Lesley Manville as his wife Jocasta
(Image credit: Manuel Harlan)

Surely the most powerful production the UK will see this year, Robert Icke's adaptation of "Oedipus" turns Sophocles' 5th century BC drama into an electrifying "play for today", said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. I already knew how this most shocking of tragedies would end, yet I "found myself not only wishing but almost believing that things might turn out differently".

Featuring "tremendous" performances from Mark Strong as Oedipus and Lesley Manville as his wife Jocasta, the evening is "as gripping as a thriller, yet weighted with the terrible sense of what might have been", said Sarah Crompton on What's on Stage. It's a "devastating" production, which brilliantly restates the "power of Greek tragedy to lay bare all the grief of the human soul".

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It's a slick production, but it seemed to me that for all the doominess of the counting down clock, the play's "sickening implacability" didn't grip to the extent that it should, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. "The liberal use of ironic foreshadowing in the dialogue – references to mothers, knowledge and the like abound – came across as more of a knowing comic device than a horrifying tragic one", and there is a flabbiness to some of the dialogue. Still, Strong and Manville are "desperately moving in the extraordinary final scenes, which play out as the most unbearable of love stories".

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