These
are interesting times for Robert Icke to be bringing his reimagining of Oedipus
to the UK when it opens at Edinburgh International Festival next week. As Dutch
audiences have already discovered watching Icke’s production for Ivo van Hove’s
Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly Toneelgroop Amsterdam), Icke’s
version of Sophocles’ story puts Oedipus in a very familiar setting as he awaits
the result of an election that will put him into power. Once there, the
inadvertent indiscretions and skeletons in his closet that even he isn’t aware
of will bring about his downfall in the bloodiest fashion.
“I
really liked the idea of all this happening in real time,” Icke says of a
production in which a clock counts down the seconds throughout the play’s
two-hour duration, “so you get this slow burn towards the sunset.”
Icke
did something similar a few years ago when he directed Romeo and Juliet for the
Headlong company when he was its associate director. Neither is it the first
time Icke has ripped into the Greeks. That came in 2015 with the Stockton-On-Tees
born director’s four-hour free adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia at the
Almeida, where his production featured a seventy-minute self-penned prequel
charting the sacrifice of Iphigenia. The production was hailed as a
masterpiece, and transferred to the West End.
Then
came further reinventions of the classics, including Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and
a production of Mary Stuart in which Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams tossed a
coin at the start of the night to decide who would play Mary and who would take
on Elizabeth I. Icke went on to direct Andrew Scott as Hamlet in a Scandi-noir
styled production which went on to itself be shown on TV. Like all of them,
Icke dived deep into Oedipus for his Dutch language production that features
film star and classical stage veteran Hans Kesting in the title role.
“I
wanted to get back in touch with the original impulse of the play,” says Icke
of his approach. “I slowly and laboriously waded my way through the original
Athenian, and in doing that, two things stuck out. We know the play as Oedipus
Rex, but in the Greek it’s Oedipus the Tyrant, which is a completely different
thing. I kept with the pejorative use of that and not the more poetic idea of
Oedipus as the chosen one.
“In
the play, Oedipus has been chosen by the Greeks, and that released something
for me. I instantly became interested in the idea of a politician who’s just
come into power. At the time, Trump wasn’t long in the White House, and we
talked about Macron and Clinton, and all these other figures that were forces
for change of one kind or another. The title of the play has a Sophoclean irony
to it, and thinking about the play in that sort of context gave the play a real
jumping off point. What if Oedipus is a guy who’s not long been elected, and what
if the country’s in trouble and he’s just what’s required?”
Talking
just before Boris Johnson moved into Downing Street, Icke’s thesis could
similarly apply here.
“In
the UK at the moment there’s a complete lack of vision and a complete lack of
leadership,” he says. “Oedipus is all about vision, right down to the end of
the play when he blinds himself.”
As
Icke discovered as well, the play is about more than just Oedipus.
“The
other thing that struck me was Jocasta,” Icke says, “who in the Athenian is
called Epicaste, so the audience don’t immediately go, oh, that’s his mum. The
really great thing about the play is that all this stuff happens before it
begins, and the revelation of what’s gone before comes later. I love that
trick, so you see his wife and not his mother, and one thing I wanted to do was
to find out how big a red herring can I put in to make you think it’s not his
mother. We’ve also got his father on a life support machine, and it’s making
you hopefully stare at these things, while all the time the real story is going
on behind. The whole thing is an attempt to make it more immediate.”
Icke’s
approach to Oedipus seems a perfect fit for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Under
Van Hove’s leadership, the company has taken a provocative approach to the classics
in accord with Icke’s own.
“I’d
seen some of the company’s work in London and Amsterdam and loved it,” he says,
“and when Ivo van Hove got in touch with an invitation to come and make work in
Amsterdam, it was the perfect time for me. It allowed me to make bigger work,
and after I’s done Oresteia in London, I knew I wanted to do more Greek. I also
knew that if I did Oedipus in London the two would be compared, but if I did it
in Amsterdam no-one would have a clue.”
The
result fits in with Icke’s reputation for shaking up expectations of how
classic plays should or shouldn’t be done.
“I
find the Greek plays very deep and profound, and that’s really exciting,” Icke
says. “Oedipus is about someone who thinks they’ve got everything sorted, only
for it to all go horribly wrong in a way that’s beyond their control. That’s a
very simple idea. There’s thousands of years of human culture in that, and
there’s something very moving about it. If the audience isn’t being shaken up
by that, I’m not sure I’m doing my job right.”
Oedipus,
Edinburgh International Festival @ King’s Theatre, August 14-16, 8pm-10pm,
August 17, 3pm-5pm.
The Herald, August 10th 2019
ends
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