The question of whether Rami Malek can actually act has always hung over this most idiosyncratic of performers, whose Oscar winning turn in Bohemian Rhapsody has gone down as one of the most divisive in the Academy’s history.
It’s quite a risk, then, to cast him in Oedipus, even in light of the apparent bunfight among theatre producers to outdo each other when it comes to star casting in Sophocles: Mark Strong and Lesley Manville triumphed in Robert Icke’s adaptation of the same play late last year while Captain Marvel’s Brie Larson opens in Elektra this week.
Malek has his fans of course – it’s surely the only reason why he’s been cast – but one has to wonder if the craze for celebrity casting has this week finally reached its nadir.
Icke turned his Oedipus into a moving political thriller; Ella Hickson’s new adaptation, set in a future drought-afflicted Thebes, reimagines it as a parable of religious delusion. The people are convinced only the gods can save them; Oedipus and his wife Jocasta, a tartly sceptical Indira Varma, think a greater chance of salvation lies in moving to a city that has water. But when the oracle declares the rain will come only when the murderer of King Laius is exposed, Oedipus seizes on the chance to become the saviour of the people by solving the 20-year-old mystery, at one point absurdly donning sunglasses to pore over the archives and motivated crucially by vainglory than ethical principle.
Hickson’s overcooked adaptation turns on questions of faith and the mob, fake news and cult leaders, false prophets and the snake oil of rhetoric, but nonetheless finds an eerie persuasiveness in this era of populist leadership and febrile ideological conviction. Matthew Warchus’s production finds an equally eerie beauty in the aesthetics of climate change, with a colour saturated set that summons burning red skies and endless desert amid the retina-scorching white heat of the sun.
A more marmite decision is the depiction of the people through lengthy pugilistic choreographed sequences from co-director Hofesh Shechter, in which a crack troupe of dancers pummel the ground and themselves with ritualised abandon. I loved these sequences which even in their stylised abstraction possess an earthy veracity that’s conspicuously lacking everywhere else.
For Malek is almost entirely at sea with Oedipus, his curious tic-ridden delivery strangling almost every word at birth, his American drawl soaked in a lazy grandiloquent insincerity, like an unholy blend of Trump at his most disingenuous and Biden at his most incoherent. Granted, Hickson conceives her Oedipus as a ruler consumed more by a personal God complex than by devastatingly blind integrity, something Malek’s affected demeanour naturally leans into. But his relationship with Varma, who outclasses everyone on stage, is consistently jarring. Theirs is a marriage we are required to believe is founded on love; instead it resembles a confused arrangement between two people of almost entirely different species.
Hickson boldly changes the ending, by giving Jocasta agency over her own story, which seems a case of her as adaptor having cake and eating it. Moreover her point is rammed home by Nicholas Khan’s Creon – a misogynistic zealot in puritanical frock coat. Her irreverent adaptation risks humour in unexpected places but ends up compounding the production’s prevailing lack of conviction. A hodgepodge mess of a night.
