In many ways, Robert Icke’s “Oedipus” resembles the classic tragedy many people know and learned in school.
You can expect the horror of revelation as the title king learns that, despite everyone’s efforts, he has fulfilled his fate by murdering his father and marrying his mother. Icke’s script, like Sophocles’ nearly 25 centuries ago, pummels breathlessly toward its climax, unfolding in real time with its dramatic ironies inescapable. And references to eyes abound, presaging the gruesome moment when Oedipus mutilates himself into blindness.
But when you hear mentions of eyes in Icke’s “Oedipus,” now on Broadway, starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, they come out quite differently from the time of Sophocles. Perhaps with a bit of a wink, Icke has the king tell Jocasta, his mother-wife, “I have eyes only for you.”
It’s a modern turn of phrase for a truly modern version of the play. And it’s an approach to theater that Icke, at 38 one of Britain’s great directors, has become known for in New York. To the Park Avenue Armory, he has brought radical treatments of classics like Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” and Aeschylus’ “Oresteia.” With “The Doctor,” he gave fresh vitality to Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi”; he did the same in adapting George Orwell’s “1984,” his only Broadway production before “Oedipus.”
In an interview, Icke compared his brand of theater to the restoration of an old master painting. “There’s a school of thought that if you were going to look at a Rembrandt, and you were leaving it to get really dusty and for all the colors to fade, that in some way you are doing something authentic by looking at it with all the dust on it,” he said. “Rather than cleaning it, stripping it, trying to recreate the experience that Rembrandt wanted you to have when he painted it in the first place.”
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