“The opening is dazzling”, said Sarah Crompton in What’s On Stage. “A chant of Oedipus. A man trapped in a smoky shaft of light, unable to escape his destiny. A blackout and dancers emerge from the gloom, pulsing and writhing to the pounding soundtrack…” Then we catch our first glimpse of Oedipus (Rami Malek), dressed in a white suit and “raised on a gleaming stage”.
Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter’s new production of Sophocles’ family tragedy gets off to a “fabulous” start. But while there are “tantalising” flashes of “wonder” along the way, it struggles to sustain the “intensity” set out in those first few moments.
Touching down in the West End, in a “freak of scheduling”, just a few months after Robert Icke’s modern-dress version that reimagined the classic tragedy as a political thriller, Ella Hickson’s “Oedipus” could hardly be more different, said David Jays in The Guardian.
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Thebes “gasps with drought under a harsh red sun” and Oedipus “resolves to save his people” either by relocating to a city closer to water or by solving the mystery of who murdered King Laius two decades earlier. “Big mistake”.
Dance becomes the “irresistible core” of the production. A soundtrack of “fervent chants and wild drums rattles the Old Vic’s plasterwork” while Shechter’s “spectacular” dancers “scrabble, shuffle or form a serpentine scrawl of bodies” as they desperately try to persuade the gods to end the drought.
Though the dancers feel “separated from the main action”, they do successfully establish a feeling that a “debilitating religious fervour” has consumed Thebes in its “hour of need”, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out.
It’s a “compelling” backdrop, but Malek’s portrayal of Oedipus is “baffling”: the Hollywood star turns the titular character into a “detached, drawling figure who may or may not care about the drought, but seems to be so off his gourd it’s hard to tell”.
The question of whether Malek can “actually act” has always lingered over this “most idiosyncratic of performers”, said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph. After his “divisive” Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody”, casting him was “quite a risk”. Malek appears “almost entirely at sea” as Oedipus, his “curious tic-ridden delivery strangling almost every word at birth”.
It’s a “curiously stilted central performance”, agreed Clive Davis in The Times, and I found Ella Hickson’s script “lacking in poetic heft”. But there are “deft touches” throughout: Christopher Shutt’s sound design brings a “ghostly sheen” and Tom Visser’s lighting adds “ritualistic intensity”. “We can’t help being drawn into a harsh, elemental world.”
Indira Varma’s portrayal of Jocasta (Oedipus’ wife) is “characteristically intelligent, full of subtle thought and feeling”, added Crompton in What’s On Stage, and the supporting cast is “excellent”. In all, while the production is filled with “good ideas and powerful images”, it hovers on the surface of “Sophocles’ profoundly questing play, never quite piercing to its dark heart”.
At the Old Vic Theatre, London, until 29 March
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