Oedipus (Wyndham’s Theatre, London)
Verdict: Hit and myth
The Duchess (Of Malfi) (Trafalgar Theatre, London)
Verdict: Exterminate!
Suddenly incest is all the rage in the West End. Two eye-popping examples have landed this week alone. One stars Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, in a retelling of the father- killing, mother-loving king of Thebes, Oedipus.
The other sees former Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker in a misconceived reworking of John Webster’s gruesome Jacobean tragedy The Duchess Of Malfi — in which the titular Duchess is sexually assailed by her twin brother.
Both come in the wake of Alexander Zeldin’s modern re-spin of the tale of Oedipus’s daughter Antigone, The Other Place, which opened at the National Theatre last week.
First, Oedipus. The trouble with Robert Icke’s re-imagining is it turns the big man into a Westminster politician, and demands too much suspension of disbelief. Togas into suits won’t go. A savvy modern world in which no one’s heard of the Oedipus myth is for the birds.
Mark Strong and Lesley Manville in Oedipus at Wyndham’s Theatre in London
Manville and Strong attending a press night on October 15. When they’re alone, they are sensational. Out of his suit, Strong no longer bores everyone with his thoughts on power, parenthood and personal morality
We’re meant to be impressed by this PM-in-waiting, who we meet in video-recorded hustings declaiming turgid platitudes, uninterrupted by reverent hacks and supporters. Campaigning on a ‘change’ ticket, he is as bland and disengaged as his M&S suit.
The original, by Sophocles, intrudes like a bad smell. The blind prophet Teiresias (Samuel Brewer) pops up like a disturbed homeless person in a campaign office, wittering about ‘prophecies’. Surely he should be a paranoid crank, known to police?
And must Oedipus’s children, including the great moralist Antigone, be reduced to the cliché of surly teens? But if the ancient and modern go together like a horse and marriage, the story does eventually work as a portrait of marital collapse.
When they’re alone, Strong and Manville are sensational. Out of his suit, Strong no longer bores everyone with his thoughts on power, parenthood and personal morality.
And Manville sheds her patina of politeness to lay on the shock of discovering she is Oedipus’s wife and mother. Her account of an abusive relationship with her late first husband (Oedipus’s father) is a gothic blood chiller. But still to come is her recollection of giving birth to her son… while she was just 13.
All that is complicated by a palpable sense of the couple’s sexual hunger for each other. They make a formidable pairing, plumbing the depths of the sobering message from antiquity. Strong’s form, frozen in terror as he listens to the tale of his origins, won’t be any more easily forgotten than Manville’s primal scream, or her skin seeming to creep in self-disgust.
As representatives of our age, Icke’s writing makes them both feel like anodyne functionaries. Yet the pedigree of Strong and Manville will likely ensure this show goes gangbusters at the box office.
The Duchess (Of Malfi) is a different kettle of vice which might better have been titled Doctor Who And The Borgias.
In Zinnie Harris’s dismal 2019 expurgation of Webster’s misogynist tragedy, Whittaker’s bland Duchess is held captive and murdered by her brothers. I’ve always struggled to make sense of the plot, but thanks to this I have — and wish I hadn’t.
The Duchess (Of Malfi). Jodie Whittaker stars in a misconceived reworking of John Webster’s gruesome Jacobean tragedy
The incest angle is the torch carried for the Duchess by her twin Ferdinand (Rory Fleck Byrne). He triggers a bloodbath, also taking down their depraved Catholic Cardinal brother (Paul Ready).
Why Whittaker took the role is a mystery. Perhaps she wanted to put galaxies between herself and Doctor Who. But, ironically, Tom Piper’s set entombs her in what looks like a black-and-white Sixties’ TV studio with an overhead gangway.
In Harris’s leaden production, she is insipid and inexplicably besotted with Joel Fry as her dopey, angsty servant. I couldn’t get out fast enough. Where’s a Dalek when you need one?
Oedipus is booking until January 4. The Duchess (Of Malfi) runs until December 20.
Leave a Reply