Saturday Thoughts

Friday Laughter

Lesley Manville in OEDIPUS

WYNDHAM’S Theatre in the West End, I saw a preview performance of Oedipus, Robert Icke’s modern-day adaptation of the Sophocles tragedy. It stars Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, runs for two hours straight without an interval and is such an intense experience I was still trembling when I got home.

In a recent interview, Manville described it as ‘a slow-boiling pot of water and it just gets hotter and hotter, revelation after revelation, an epic play’.

She wasn’t kidding. From the moment Oedipus (Strong) first kisses his wife Jocasta (Manville) onstage, the tension builds and builds towards the mother of all exposures. Of course, the audience know the terrible, incestuous truth about their relationship and can only look on in queasy horror as events unfold.

Yet what makes this night so special is that it takes place in the sanctity of a proper theatre: a place where mobile phones, interruptions and random chatter are forbidden. A place where people, generally, still know how to behave.

Theatres are just about the last public spaces left where audiences can still enjoy the purity of a collective experience; of being in the moment together, focused as one on – in this case – the unbearable, unfolding horror. It is becoming a rare occurrence – and therefore so much more precious.

‘Everyone is cruel,’ says Oedipus at one point, ‘it’s just that children are more honest about it.’ We all gasped at the monstrous truth of that. Together.

Mark Strong & Lesley Manville. Credit Justine Matthew