Things you can't unsee: Robert Icke, Greek tragedy, and theatrical formula
How I Met My Mother
By Tim Bano
There are some things you can’t unknow, like the fact the woman you’ve had sex with at least three times judging by the number of children at the dinner table (and, judging by the readiness with which you eat her out at the same dinner table, probably more) happens to be your mum.
And things you can’t unsee.
For me, the things I can’t unsee from a decade of theatre reviewing include this: Angus Wright’s Agamemnon, tall, paternal and terrified, sits with his young daughter Iphigenia on his knee, coos, reassures, and quietly feeds her a cocktail of drugs that kills her.
I love you
Water, daddy… water
After that silence, the winds come. The doors of the Almeida slam open and a loud, brutal cannon of air fills the auditorium like a bomb-blast.
And this, almost ten years later:
Oedipus stands next to his wife Jocasta, both of them crumbling after the revelation that she’s his mother. They both undress silently, stunned.
I’m thinking hard to find a way in which we might be wrong.
And can you?
I love you, for you. It was all you, always you.
Two of the most wracking scenes I can remember in theatre, unforgettable, un-unseeable moments, from plays that are more than two thousand years old, which have had the crusts cut off by someone called Robert Icke, who made theatre cool again with this exact formula:
sexy set (if something slides then big tick)
screen to make us think of cool things like TV or film rather than boring things like theatre
intervals, ideally three
dialogue that often sounds quite normal but occasionally sounds like something only people who keep a running iPhone note of their own poetry would say
pop music (folk acceptable, classical forbidden)
clock (optional)
and, sexiest of all, dramaturgical clarity and precision.
Watching a Robert Icke show after watching most theatre is like switching from ITV3 to HBO. Everything’s a bit glossier and sexier, the definition higher, and accompanying the undeniable coolness is a thrum of self-satisfaction that the coolness is undeniable. Critics throw stars at him: theatre that’s clever AND not boring?, they say, who knew such a thing was possible?
I love what Robert Icke does to Greek tragedy. It’s not my favourite stuff he’s ever done – that would be his directing of the Simpsons-inspired post-apocalyptic play Mr Burns by Anne Washburn at the Almeida in 2014, which left the older members of the critical community yelling at clouds. But nine years ago I saw his three hour and forty minute, triple intervalled (see?) adaptation of the Aeschylus tragedy trilogy Oresteia, and reviewed it for Exeunt. It was the first time Icke had adapted something solo as well as directing, and the first time I remember seeing an ancient Greek play that was both faithful and completely fresh.
Almost a decade later, his take on perhaps the best-known Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Oedipus, is in the West End. This version premiered in the Netherlands in 2018 and, before Covid, was meant to come to the West End with Helen Mirren (as Icke has slipped from subsidised to commercial theatre his contacts book has got starrier; see Andrew Scott in Hamlet and Ian McKellen in Player Kings before he fell off the stage). Now, it stars Lesley Manville opposite Mark Strong. And it is Icke at his best.
The formula is applied but, to be honest, one great advantage over his other pieces is that it’s about an hour and a half shorter. You can credit Icke with clarity, but you get the sense he’s never been overheard saying “oh thank god it’s 90 minutes straight through”. You will get your money’s worth, he demands, and you will enjoy it.
And we do! Svelte Oedipus (two hours) is both a good Icke production and a good Greek production. In fact, it’s the sharp end of a Greeks invasion that involves Alexander Zeldin taking on the sequel Antigone, Elektra with Brie Larson, and a brace of Oedipuses (Oedipodes?) blanketing London in motherly love from now until March, with Icke’s closing just before a version by Ella Hickson opens at the Old Vic.
Icke’s take on Greek tragedy works well because he gets the balance of fidelity and irreverence right. So many Greek tragedy translations sound awful. Icke’s Oedipus, for example, does not say “My daughters! My little virgins! Poor little things!” (Theodoridis, 2005) but instead stuff like “Honey, my mum is here”.
And I know people loved his Hamlet (3hr40, two intervals, Bob Dylan), but with his Shakespeares, there’s too often a sense that either Icke is getting in the way of Shakespeare or Shakespeare’s getting in the way of Icke. When it comes to tragedies, it’s freer reign. The tragedy of Greek tragedy on modern stages is that adapters often treat it with a kind of sanctity that ossifies and alienates. The structure of those old plays is really odd, and they’re surrounded by a moral and religious framework that’s almost impossible to reconstruct today, unless you enjoy making sacrifices to Apollo. Icke distils: here are a couple of humans – doesn’t matter when or where – going through impossible situations.
You can play spot-the-overlap between Oresteia and Oedipus. Agamemnon was framed as a modern politician, so is Oedipus. There was a clock in Oresteia, marking the time of death of the characters in the play. In Oedipus, the signature clock starts counting down from 1 hour 50 minutes: in the world of the play, towards the moment that the result of an election is announced. For the audience, a countdown to revelation: killed father, married mother etc.
Oresteia tried to be everything, and sometimes failed quite interestingly – the third act court trial was a bit odd – but Oedipus is a much tauter, more self-contained affair, whose two hours tighten the noose unbearably. But the most striking point of similarity is that they both believably take place in the same world: not this one, not an ancient one, not necessarily a real one. A world that wobbles between ancient and contemporary, which is their great strength and occasionally their downfall.
Aesthetically, it’s clean lines and white blank walls; props to Hildegard Bechtler whose designs are so much of what makes the productions so fresh. The politics seem modern, and so do the human relations. But the specifics of that place are ambiguous. When Creon asks Oedipus “where did the accident take place” and rather than pinning his world to a fixed point – “the A12 near Chelmsford” or “the road between Athens and Thebes” – he says “where the road out of the city splits, there are three roads that come together”. Icke doesn’t want to break the illusion of this in-between space.
The language wobbles, too. There are long patches of chat that sound like conversation from today. Families squabble, parents chide their children. Then – wobble – something strangely unnatural or displacingly poetic. It’s all held in this fragile imaginative middle ground that has enough specificity to make us see the relation to now, but a generality that holds on to just a weensy bit of the solemnity with which a lot of Ancient Greek texts get handled.
That’s where the cracks, when there are any, appear. The action of Oedipus kicks off when blind soothsayer Tiresias tells him, dreadfully sorry but you know your dad? Well you didn’t actually, but you killed him anyway. And your mum? No, not that one, your birth mum, yeah she’s the person whose Oedipussy you’ve been enjoying.
In Icke’s Oedipus, Tiresias is a grubby randomer in a vest (“He’s one of the… people. The future-telling people,” says Creon. What?) and it’s hard to believe he could have found his way inside the campaign HQ of a senior politician, let alone that Oedipus would entertain him. Wobble.
But mostly, where some of Icke’s tricks just started to feel a bit repetitive when it came to Player Kings last year, his three hour and forty minute (two intervals, drum and bass) adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henries IV, Oedipus renews those tricks and gives them purpose again. I think it might be one of the best things he’s done – but the familiarity of the toolbox this time around also made me think it’s time for him to empty it out and refill it. His upcoming play at the Royal Court, a new play written and directed by him about the Raoul Moat incident, looks like it could do just that.
One of the reasons the old tricks work so well in Oedipus are to do with that starry contact book. How can you fault Mark Strong as Oedipus and Lesley Manville as wife/mum Jocasta? Strong’s an extraordinary actor, completely believable as a likeable politician, oozing clubbable charisma. He can do storming physicality and gentle vulnerability – and everything he does is shaded with this earnest desire to find out the truth.
And Lesley Manville. The best. She gets to show a bit of ice here. But while she snips and shouts at almost everyone around her, she shows nothing but adoration to Oedipus: smiles and loving eyes. In the meantime, June Watson quietly steals things as Merope, agonised, constantly silenced…until she finally gets to speak.
So Icke’s set the aesthetic template for doing Greek tragedy, but the big question with Oedipus is what we’re meant to get out of it. If you want to know the point – why we go back to it, what it’s meant to tell us – you’ll get about a thousand more answers than people you ask, especially if those people are theatre directors or classicists or, Apollo forbid, both.
A lesson in submission to divine will, in man’s impotence? A warning against overweening certainty? For classicist ER Dodds, “Oedipus is a kind of symbol of the human intelligence which cannot rest until it has solved all the riddles – even the last riddle, to which the answer is that human happiness is built on an illusion”, which sounds like the same impulse people have for reading Richard Osman books. Theorist Francis Fergusson saw the purpose of Oedipus as “a solemn rite of sacrifice that purges the community of its collective guilt by punishing a scapegoat”, an idea shared by Icke, according to an essay in the playtext. And then there was Freud, who came up with the mother of all Oedipus interpretations: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first murderous wish against our father.” Chill out, Freud.
Oedipus was already a familiar story to 5th century Athenians, and Sophocles heavily reworked it to suit the needs of his own time. Now so has Icke, making Oedipus not a popular king, but a popular politician. But he also makes the play about Oedipus’s crisis-inducing need to know who he is, and that feels like a pretty good theme for our times when everybody’s identity is in crisis, often as individuals, definitely as societies and nations.
Oedipus’s determination to know everything about everything – sending messengers to fetch files and people and information with the swiftness with which we look up instant, pointless facts on our phone – undoes him. A commitment to truth, the refuge of a noble politician, and a useless protection against a society which demeans and devalues the truth in increasingly strange ways. So the other option? Well, you do what Oedipus does and go blind. Stop yourself from ever being able to see something you can’t unsee, even if you can’t stop yourself from knowing what you can’t unknow. Plead ignorance, enjoy the silence.
For Oedipus it’s too late. And after he and Jocasta have thrashed things out they kiss, passionately. There’s this moment that you can see them thinking, what does it matter? We didn’t know, and no one else knows, and we love each other as the people we thought we were, not as mother and son. I wondered for a moment if Icke would end it there: this point of queasy ambivalence, the ending that lets their romantic love win out.
But that’s not how Sophocles’s play ends, and for all his tugging of the play into a contemporary space, Icke remains pretty faithful to the main beats of that text. So even when the clock has stopped, we’ve got a little bit to go. A bit of death, a bit of maiming, a dash of abject horror.
And it’s the best answer to that question about Greek tragedies: what is it about them that keeps us coming back? Why do we want to see these grim thought experiments in taboo-breaking, watching people endure the very worst things that could possibly happen to them, and then, often, dying? You watch Oedipus and realise: because it’s brilliant. Gripping, gruesome. Similar to why we watch horror – vicariousness, from the comfort of a safe seat.
Watching a rehearsal for his production of Oedipus at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Yeats said, “I had but one overwhelming emotion, a sense as of the actual presence in a terrible sacrament of the god”. That’s pretty near to what it feels like watching Icke’s production: something fuller and more overwhelming than real life, something sacramental, ritualistic, horrific – but with a weirdly divine edge of enjoyment.
The Greeks were messed up, but at least they made sure the grim bits all happened offstage, reported by some breathless messenger. Icke shows us the deaths. Little Iphigenia, swallowing down those pills; Jocasta’s brains dripping down a glass window. Things you can’t unsee.
“I only wanted to know,” says Oedipus, just before the end. And so do we.
Oedipus is at Wyndham’s Theatre in London till 4 January.
I still feel a bit odd why almost no one talk about Icke's brilliant Uncle Vanya which I like the most of his.