Scott Klavan: Review of Oedipus

Oedipus, created by Robert Icke and Sophocles

Broadway, Roundabout Theatre @ Studio 54

Reviewed by Scott Klavan, Dec. 6, 2025

Oedipus, adapted and directed by Robert Icke, transferred from England to Broadway by Roundabout Theatre at Studio 54, is a sincere but disappointingly flat re-thinking of Sophocles’ 5^th-century BCE original. There are moments of inventiveness and high quality acting, but more of prosaic writing and staging, and additions/changes to the classic story that tend to clutter and obscure, rather than deepen, the drama.

This Oedipus was first produced in London from Oct.’ 24-Jan. ’25, and its stars, Mark Strong as Oedipus and Lesley Manville as Jocasta, repeat their roles in NYC.  The tale is moved to the present, while using the character names and basic plot pegs from the ancients. Oedipus is not a king but a modern political leader waiting on election night for the votes to confirm his victory. Nervous about the outcome, he has dinner with his wife Jocasta, the former wife of the late, previous leader Laius, teenaged daughter Antigone and sons Polyneices and Eteocles, in their 20s. The family bickers and make up, or don’t. All is watched over by Jocasta’s brother Creon, Oedipus’ adviser, whom Oedipus suspects of scheming against him. Oedipus’ own mother Merope, stricken with sadness by the certain fatal illness of her husband, Oedipus’ father, tries in vain to meet privately with her son. Then, unkempt blind seer Tiresias barges in, warning that it will soon be revealed that the politician has killed his own father and slept with his mother. Oedipus angrily rejects the prophecy but coming revelations prove it true, resulting in bloodshed and despair.

There are numerous modernistic alterations here: an opening speech by Oedipus to his supporters shown on wide-screen video; a ticking clock on stage counting down to the announcement of the election results; the inclusion of Oedipus’ sons, spoken of but never shown by Sophocles; descriptions of a long-ago car crash rather than an attack by bandits that results in Laius’ death; an expanded role for Antigone, who, along with her sister Ismene, is only briefly and silently on stage in the Greek version. Most notably, Jocasta, featured by Sophocles but in a comparably small part, is here a major co-lead with Oedipus and her story dominates much of the second half of the show.

The mix of contemporary interaction and ancient elements is enjoyable at the start, but soon we wonder at its effectiveness, stepping back to watch the awkward connections and clash of time periods, rather than unreservedly entering the world of the play. Eventually, the adaptation, while earnest, takes a middle path, failing to go one way or the other. While there seems to be an honorable attempt to avoid a blatant, obvious Trump/strongman analogy here, what replaces it is something general, prescribed and dryly academic. We miss the Greeks’ primitive boldness and inhibition; ironically, the old way was more provocative and profound.

The Greeks were noted for unpretentious theatrical language that found its beauty in clarity and simplicity, rather than the florid poetical complexity of Shakespeare and other later Europeans. But, here, Icke, praised for productions at London’s Almeida Theatre, and NYC shows at the Park Ave. Armory such as The Doctor and his version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of The People, is unable to emulate the pure precision of the ancients.  There is a commonplace television-style bluntness to the interplay. This is especially true of scenes that are completely made up, meaning not in the original, such as dinner table conflicts with the brothers and sister, and Jocasta’s long climactic monologue about the birth of her child with Laius, emphasizing her status as essentially an abused child during her first marriage.

Staging, too, comes off as rudimentary and practiced; we catch the seams showing. After the first use of video, engaging and imaginative tech is at a minimum. Maybe this critic was unfairly anticipating something along the lines of the elaborate colorful craziness of fellow Europeans Ivo Van Hove (Network) and Marianne Elliot (The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Night-Time), but the walking around, sitting, standing, and talking grows repetitive. (An instance where one of the sons playfully brandishes a gun produces little excitement, or threat.) While I was embarrassingly hoping for more blood and gore at the end, the famous final suicide and blinding do work, with a loud, seemingly unending sound cue appropriately unsettling. But it’s a long time coming; more of the same would have drawn us in, thrown us off.

Tech aside, overall, Icke fails to create a compelling atmosphere here. The melding of classic and contemporary, surreal happenings amid down-to-earth talk, seems to have needed a bent, malleable, hypnotic world creation, something out of the ordinary to make the invisible palpable, the unthinkable undeniable, a physically theatrical metaphor for the play’s themes of Oedipus’, and all of our, horrifying struggle with our rational sense of personal authority giving way to the inevitable surrender to a grand supernatural unknown. The set, perhaps meant to be futuristically cold, is utilitarian at best.

The bumping up of the grown children and particularly Jocasta’s roles, while a well-intentioned, even noble effort, serves mostly to thicken and cloud the play’s through-line. There is seemingly a desire to adhere to the current cultural crusade to “correct” past plays’ focus on (white) men as the fulcrum of theater stories. But while Jocasta takes stage with her descriptions of her abuse at the hands of a much-older Laius, Oedipus fades to the background and we literally forget what he wanted/needed in the play. Mark Strong, revered for his work in Van Hove’s A View From the Bridge a few years ago, as well as numerous TV and movie roles, plays Oedipus as basically kind-of-a-nice guy. (Icke has him easily and immediately accept his son’s gay identity.) The fiery, egoistic if ultimately decent king of Sophocles has a few initial moments of energy and pique but gradually pulls back, deferring to the forceful Jocasta. This notion of fairness and inclusion in playwriting has its drawbacks: too often, if everybody’s story is told, the story as a whole becomes diffuse, even garbled. (It should be mentioned that players Anne Reid as Merope, Bhasker Patel in the  invented role of Jocasta’s loyal protector Corin, Teagle F. Bougere as the Driver in the fatal car accident, and Samuel Brewer as Tiresias, do really well, lifting the production.)

A couple of closing gripes: at the performance this critic attended, Lesley Manville as Jocasta was out, replaced by understudy Denise Cormier. Cormier was highly competent and truthful in an almost impossible task, but one can only wonder whether the somewhat bland feel of the show might have been ameliorated by the presence of the vibrant Manville, famed for many shows at The National Theatre, Mike Leigh films, Princess Margaret in The Crown, and the winner of an Olivier Award for the London Oedipus. We assume and trust her absence was due to illness. But on a personal note, I have performed as understudy and with understudies, both on and off Broadway, and perhaps beginning with Covid, but really before, actors will now sometimes miss shows due to family and personal commitments, other brief( film and TV) acting jobs, or even—continuing this current-day theme—in an effort to be “fair” to understudies and give them a chance to do the play. The Show Must Go On is viewed as a hoary thing of the past (even by Brits!) There is a push to make theater into a “regular” job, not a cause or calling requiring inordinate sacrifice. That’s all well and good, but even with excellent understudies all over town, this practice cannot help but cause the play, and the audience, to suffer a little. Also—in another unfortunate trend experienced in other theaters—from where I was sitting in good expensive seats on the side in the orchestra of Studio 54, the famous disco transformed into a popular, versatile playhouse, I was unable to see virtually one third of the happenings of the play, including the ticking clock, which was obscured. Theater is hard, as they say; I get it. But at these prices, there really is no excuse not to design the set, and direct the actors, so that every moment is seen by every person; that, too, is fairness.

Much thought and ambition went into this new recreation of Oedipus. But the ancient Sophocles play is underserved; it is waiting for an update as electric, moving, and powerful as the one from long-ago. 

Scott Klavan, theatre writer at Escape Into Life, is an actor, director, and playwright in New York. Scott performed on Broadway in Irena’s Vow, with Tovah Feldshuh, in regional theater, and in numerous shows Off Broadway, including two productions of The Joy Luck Club for Pan Asian Rep. His stage adaption of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” was produced off-Broadway by Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB), and his play Double Murder was published in Best American Short Plays of 2006-2007. For twenty years, Scott was Script and Story Analyst for the legendary actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and for companies including HBO, CAA, and Viacom. In 2015, he was featured in A Soldier’s Notes, an episode of the Web Series Small Miracles, alongside Judd Hirsch, and earned a nomination for Outstanding Actor in the LA Web Series Festival. Scott directed the one-woman show My Stubborn Tongue, written and performed by Anna Fishbeyn, off-Broadway at The New Ohio Theater and at the United Solo Festival; and directed and appeared in the solo play Canada Geese, by George Klas, in the 2016 New York International Fringe Festival. In 2019, he directed a 60-minute version of the Sondheim/Lapine classic Into the Woods, cast solely with senior actors, for Music Theatre International (MTI) and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House; the show was written up in The New York Times. He helped to develop and directed Eleanor and Alice, by Ellen Abrams, about Eleanor Roosevelt and her cousin Alice Longworth, for the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park and the Roosevelt House in NYC. He directed Night Shadows, by Lynda Crawford, about the poet Anna Akhmatova, for the On Women Festival at Irondale Center. He is a Lifetime Acting Member of The Actors Studio and a member of the Studio’s Playwright/Directors Workshop (PDW), where his own play The Common Area, was chosen as part of the PDW’s Festival of New Works in 2019. During the pandemic, Scott figured out how to direct on Zoom! Scott teaches at the JCCManhattan and other arts organizations.