Ralph Fiennes is magnificent as the doomed king, but only in despair
Oedipus
Olivier Theatre, London SE1
Fatal attraction: Oedipus (Ralph Fiennes) and his mother/wife Jocasta (Clare Higgins)
Problems besiege any production of the west's best known tragedy. Oedipus Rex is static, its terrible acts of violence happening either offstage, in the past, or in reported speech (a movie director would be using flashbacks all over the place). Its dialogue, even in a translation as accessible as this new one by Frank McGuinness, is non-naturalistic: characters declaim to us as much as they talk to one another. And it lacks that oil of all drama, humour. I counted just one laugh in the 100 minutes of Jonathan Kent's production: Oedipus tells the annoyingly opaque truth-teller, Teiresias, to buzz off: "Go and die. Do it quickly."
But most of all, to a 21st-century audience, the play draws the wrong conclusions about the universe. Oedipus and his wife/mother Jocasta are modern, rational people. "No man has second sight. No such thing as prophecy," says Jocasta, and later: "Nothing is ordained, no rhyme or reason. Our life is all random." Rock on sister. Oedipus, after his initial spell of blaming messengers, heroically demands to know his biological provenance although he is already pretty sure the truth will prove him guilty of patricide and incest: "Let whatever happens happen. I wish to know who I am." (A programme note, illuminating the play in terms of Freud's Oedipus complex, compares its progress to that of a course of psychoanalysis.) And for this, Jocasta ends up hanging herself and Oedipus mauls out his eyes?
A Martian would look at this revered text and see propaganda for gods, clairvoyants and a form of theocratic thought control that denies character any part in destiny. What was Oedipus guilty of? He went so far out of his way to avoid fulfilling the prediction that he would kill his father, that he left Corinth for Thebes. He is, our ET would conclude, merely a victim of bad luck. For those who look to art to tell truths about the human condition, Oedipus is a dead loss. But that does not mean a production cannot be eerily enthralling and plunge you into a distant world whose truths were utterly different from ours.
My feeling about this production is that it tries too hard to make it modern, relevant and psychologically readable. Kent would have been better to dress his cast in togas, or space suits, than the dark grey Armani suits he chose. They make for the drabbest production since Michael Frayn's business-suited Democracy (about the Willy Brandt government) five years ago.
When Oedipus's children come on the stage at the end they are dressed in short grey trousers like the Famous Five circa 1959. They look ridiculous, although I did enjoy the crumpled white linen suit chosen for Alan Howard's Teiresias. With his dark glasses and doomy rhetoric, he brought Harold Pinter to mind.
If the intention with the suits was to make us think of the cast as City of London bankers or Westminster politicians, it fails. The western economy is in a mess, sure but, as yet, the meat is not turning to manure in our mouths and women are not giving birth to buckets of blood, as in Thebes under the rule of Oedipus. Nor do our financiers, unlike this chorus, sing their lines like members of an outsized barbershop quartet.
Psychologically, there is some textual justification for finding a Freudian Oedipal complex in Oedipus Rex. Jocasta tells him that marrying their mother is "many a man's mad dream". Unfortunately, there is desperately little sexual chemistry between Clare Higgins as Jocasta and Ralph Fiennes as her son/husband. Never for a moment do you feel that Oedipus is battling fate on one side and an intense passion for Jocasta on the other.
Fiennes starts off poorly with the pretentious actor's trick of chopping up his lines so they. Make. No sense. He is not helped by the idiolect McGuinness has chosen for Oedipus, a combination of clichés and banality ("The wine was flowing once - nine sheets to the wind"; "We would as soon get blood from a stone"). He is the second-rater whose greatness has been forced upon him. Fiennes's Oedipus is magnificent only in despair. When he learns about his history, he keens like a seagull. From then on his speech develops a tragic rhythm, as does the production. By the end, the play hits you with terrible force, even if it makes you hesitate and ask: the force of what?
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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