It’s early on Election Day, and Oedipus, populist candidate confident that he’ll be swept into office, makes two off-the-cuff public promises that will blow up in his face: He will release his birth certificate, and he will investigate the death of his predecessor Laius, whose widow, Jocasta, is now Oedipus’s wife.

In his modern adaptation of Sophocles’ 2,500-year-old play, writer and director Robert Icke makes two promises of his own to the audience, in a production now on Broadway that stands out for its exceptional cast, with performances of remarkable intensity by Mark Strong as Oedipus and especially Lesley Manville as Jocasta, making a much-welcomed Broadway debut. But Icke’s two implicit promises are largely at odds with one another. 

Icke establishes from the start that the basic plot will be the same as Sophocles’, which virtually the entire audience already knows – Oedipus will discover he has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, to his horror and Jocasta’s.   But the details will be changed to fit modern times. That first scene is a pre-recorded video of Mark Strong as Oedipus speaking at a press conference on a city street filled with a crowd of supporters. In it, he explains he is releasing his birth certificate in response to attacks from his political opponent who accuses him of being an ineligible foreigner, part of a campaign in which “rumors and lies were the same as truth.” The script, first produced in 2018, is making an obvious, almost cheeky allusion to the so-called birther attacks on Barack Obama by Donald Trump. And so Icke is promising an “Oedipus” that will be directly relevant to current public and private life.

Icke was nicknamed the boy wonder of British theater for having been the youngest-ever winner of an Olivier Award, for his direction of his adaptation of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” (which was brought to New York in 2022.) When he discusses the plays he adapts, Icke exhibits a scholarly understanding of the original text. But his apparent priority as director  is to trigger an adrenaline-fueled response. This is most evident in his one previous Broadway production, his adaptation in 2017 of “1984.” Its startling sensory assault and graphic scenes of torture, I felt, overwhelmed the theatergoers’ ability to detect any special intellectual, emotional or contemporary political illumination of George Orwell’s dystopian novel.

The same impulse is expressed more subtly in his “Oedipus,” and more effectively.  Setting the play in the hours after the polls have closed enhances the tension  – there is even a working countdown clock that is ostensibly meant to show when the election results will be announced, but is also cluing us into zero hour for the explosive revelations. 

Icke uses this tension to help intensify the acting, in hopes that we will overlook the essential incompatibility with modern times of so many aspects of the plot. Many of his changes attempt to make it a better fit. There is no Greek chorus. Oedipus no longer slayed Laius, not knowing who he was. Instead, he accidentally ran him over in a car accident – because, you know, most modern politicians don’t go around slaying people; but the new version is beyond soap opera implausible.  

The play still includes a warning by Teiresias of the tragic revelations to come, but he is no longer an old blind prophet but a member of a cult whom Oedipus dismisses, by saying cuttingly: “It must be hard, I understand that, to accept that there’s no money now in new-age fear-mongering or fortune-teller cryptic crossword clues…” But everything Teiresias says turns out to be true.

 Oedipus’ daughter Antigone says (as any young woman might these days), “I don’t believe in gods, I don’t think,” her grandmother Merope (a character that is not in Sophocles’ original) responds  “Makes no difference whether you believe in them or not. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

Icke goes too far with the foreshadowing and the irony, which shade into gimmickry:

Long before the revelations,, Jocasta says to Oedipus: “You will be the death of me.” At another, she says jocularly because he’s been acting silly: “I actually tell people, I have four children, two at 20 one at 23 and one at 52.”

Can “Oedipus” still teach us something – that power can make us blind, that self-discovery is often painful, that some problems are not fixable?  That’s the hope. 

Oedipus
Studio 54 through February 8, 2026
Running time: 2 hours with no intermission
Tickets: $69 – $348 (Digital lottery: $45)
Written by Sophocles; New adaptation created by Robert Icke
Directed by Robert Icke
Scenic design by Hildegard Bechtler, costume design by Wojciech Dziedzic, lighting design by Natasha Chivers, sound design by Tom Gibbons, video design by Tal Yarden 
Cast: Mark Strong as Oedipus, Lesley Manville as ‘Jocasta.’ Samuel Brewer as ‘Teiresias,’ Bhasker Patel as ‘Corin,’ Jordan Scowen as ‘Eteocles,’ and James Wilbraham as ‘Polyneices.’ John Carroll Lynch as ‘Creon,’ Teagle F. Bougere as ‘Driver,’ Ani Mesa-Perez as ‘Lichas,’ Olivia Reis as ‘Antigone,’ and Anne Reid as ‘Merope,’  Brian Thomas Abraham, Denise Cormier, Karl Kenzler, and Oliver Rowland-Jones.

Photographs by Julieta Cervantes