Reviews Round-up of Oedipus at The Old Vic starring Rami Malek & Indira Varma

"Delirious dancers and booming soundtrack shake the plasterwork"

"Rami Malek’s outsider vibes enliven seamy, superb new staging of Sophocles’ family tragedy"

"Dance in Greek tragedy – why not? The ancient Athenians did it, their choruses a weave of sound and movement, though no one really knows what shapes they threw back in the fifth century. They probably didn’t give the hands-in-the-air delirium of Hofesh Shechter’s spectacular dancers in this new version of Oedipus – but dance becomes the irresistible core of the tragedy."

"[Rami Malek] brings outsider vibes to Oedipus – speaking in an elusive American drawl, adopting the mantle of leadership like a haunted robot. Confession later fractures his speech – he becomes shambling, disjointed, bones awkwardly resettling in his body. The truth remakes Oedipus, and then undoes him."

"Indira Varma’s elegantly sceptical queen (cheekbones, pashmina) gets the best lines, resisting her brother Creon (Nicholas Khan), a black-clad theocrat with an itch for power."

"This Oedipus gets under your skin"

"Rami Malek and Indira Varma mine the best kind of pretentiousness and show their star quality at the Old Vic"

"You’ll get a sense of whether it’s your night from the first few wordless moments in a production I think absolutely succeeds in its co-director Matthew Warchus’s determination that “you won’t think it, you’ll feel it"."

"You may not know why you feel constant dread, why the emotions are so palpable even when faces are so fixed. With Shechter’s electronic tribal-clubby music pounding away, it feels urgent, grounded, groovy, grim."

"Hickson trims, tweaks, adds some wit, changes the fate of one of her characters in a big way, but gives us Sophocles all the same."

"Does Malek play to the back of the circle like a great tragedian? No, he’s more internal than that, handy though he is at the speechifying, and you have to study him closely for signs of his mental degradation. You’ll want to, though."

"... Varma handles wit, passion, practicality and grand pain with the same riveting ease. Don’t let her fluency fool you: this is acting of the first order."

"... I was utterly, utterly unbored. It’s pretentious in the best way."

"A stark, physical staging of Sophocles’ tragedy"

"Rami Malek and Indira Varma star in a London production that uses dance brilliantly but lacks emotional connection"

"There’s an elemental grandeur to the staging, but, while it’s spectacular, what it loses somewhere is the human pathos of the tragedy."

"The production looks sensational, the cavernous depths of the Old Vic stage sculpted by Rae Smith’s sliding screens and Tom Visser’s stark lighting"

"... there’s something here that doesn’t click. The dance segments mean the story is splintered, delivered in clipped, disjointed sections, and we lose the urgency and skin-prickling dread that should accompany Oedipus’s journey."

"Even so, the characters seem weirdly remote and disconnected: Malek’s angular, expressionless Oedipus feels like a man uneasy in his own skin, which makes sense, but he finds no change of tone as the devastating truths of his existence hit the light."

"Bewildering chaos with Rami Malek strangely mannered"

"Rami Malek seems like he’s on a different planet is this bewildering but oddly compelling production"

"First of all, there’s a lot of dance in it. A lot a lot. In fact, it’s what we get instead of a chorus: a cluster of dancers doing extraordinary things with their bodies, turning themselves into a frenzied, writhing, ritualising mass while percussive music by Schechter pounds around them, like Keith Haring figures come to life. It’s amazing, but inexplicable."

"Hickson has interesting stuff to say about populism, faith and fanaticism, but Oedipus works when it’s an inexorable plummet towards revelation and tragedy; here, whenever the tension starts to ratchet up, something weird like a sassy Tiresias (the wonderful Cecilia Noble) or a long dance sequence cuts it dead, like we’re flicking through different TV channels."

"That restlessness means the production can’t really build emotional depth, either, and it’s only the brilliant Indira Varma as Jocasta who brings any"

"... somehow, because of the disjointed madness of these miscellaneous spectacles, it’s weirdly compelling."

"Other-worldly production let down by stiff Oscar-winner"

"Matthew Warchusand and Hofesh Shechter summon up a timeless realm filled with mesmerising dance sequences. However, the script is need of poetic heft"

"At the Old Vic, Matthew Warchus and his co-director, the Israeli-born choreographer Hofesh Shechter, summon up a timeless realm more obviously rooted in primeval myth."

"Does it all work as drama? Most of the time, yes, although the text by playwright Ella Hickson is oddly lacking in poetic heft."

"At the centre of it all is a curiously stilted central performance from Oscar winner Rami Malek... His American-accented king is stiff rather than regal, his rigid facial expressions evoking all those socialite millionaires who’ve gone in for a few too many injections of Botox."

"There are lots of deft touches elsewhere. Christopher Shutt’s sound design adds a ghostly sheen."

"King Malek upstaged by Greek chorus of dancers"

"Sadly though, alongside Indira Varma as his unsuspecting mum, Malek isn’t the best thing about Matthew Warchus’s extraordinary primitivistic staging. That accolade belongs to a pulsating, gyrating chorus of dancers representing the desperate people of Thebes."

"And in his UK stage debut, he is a tortured weirdo familiar from the Bond film Never Say Die."

"... his best moments come when he learns he did indeed kill his father and sire children by his mother. Then he squirms in anguish like a jungle celebrity covered in lice."

"Rami Malek is fragile and neurotic"

"Striking imagery and starry casting bring attention-grabbing spectacle to this shallow Sophocles adaptation"

"Bursting with bold visuals and angsty, unsubtle performances, this ambitious, often incoherent take on Sophocles’ classic myth puts style firmly ahead of substance. Co-directors Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter draw on their extensive experience across opera and dance to bring a melodramatic, ostentatious sensibility to the production, replacing the chorus’ commentary with intense passages of vigorous dance, while punchy dialogue scenes strip the play down to its key revelations."

"... Ella Hickson’s contemporary-language adaptation reimagines Oedipus as a slick politician. But while Icke’s version was rooted in a recognisably real world, Hickson’s story takes place in a timeless, mythic Thebes"

"Indira Varma gives a consummate, focused performance as Jocasta, grounding the production with heartfelt naturalism. While Oedipus chooses a path of superstition and scapegoating, which eventually destroy him, she remains coldly rational, relentlessly agitating for practical solutions rather than empty ritual."

"Rami Malek and Indira Varma start strong, finish stifled"

"The opening is dazzling... It’s fabulous, an absolute vindication of this new production of Sophocles’s great tragedy of self-knowledge, co-directed by Matthew Warchus and choreographer Hofesh Shechter who provides not only the dance but also the music. But it can’t sustain the intensity it promises. By the end, there’s not much catharsis and without that, there’s not much tragedy. Yet en route, there are tantalising glimpses of wonder."

"All of this is consistently absorbing. Varma’s performance is characteristically intelligent, full of subtle thought and feeling. Malek, making his UK stage debut, begins well, cast as a kind of JFK orator who will offer balm for all society’s ills, but as he disintegrates, he struggles to change gear, and to mine the devastating effects of his odyssey. His lack of emotion is emphasised by a script that choses to offer an unusually tentative ending rather than searing revelation and despair."

"Rami Malek presumably has his fans – but have they actually seen him act?"

"This overcooked, jarring production is the latest iteration of West End star casting and the craze has surely reached a nadir"

"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."

"A more marmite decision is the depiction of the people through lengthy pugilistic choreographed sequences from co-director Hofesh Schechter... 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."

"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."

"Rami Malek is weirdly indifferent to the freakish turns of this slack, disjointed staging of Oedipius"

"Sudden blackouts blind the audience, but set design is the most interesting thing about this unbalanced production of the Greek classic"

"It’s Rami Malek, looking like he’s been dragged from cold storage and reanimated by an ancient spell."

"... the only things this stately, disjointed staging has in common with Icke’s literal blinder of a production is a title and a few lurid plot details."

"The text itself has been rejigged by Ella Hickson, who keeps its Greek setting and leavens it with jarring notes of humour. If all the creatives in this unbalanced production have a shared aim (though often it doesn’t feel that way) it’s to make sure that no one in the theatre has any idea what’s coming next."

"It’s impressive, but there’s oddly little interaction between the Shechter crew and this play’s actors – and the talky bits feel like they’re sapped of all tension and energy by comparison. Malek plays his part with a haunted detachment"

"These are earthly gods, not real people. But that makes it almost impossible to actually care about them."

"Rami Malek fans might want their money back after seeing Oedipus"

"The Oscar winner is all adrift in this misfiring production"

"The Old Vic offers even starrier casting in the form of Oscar winner Rami Malek – but he’s all adrift in a bewilderingly centrifugal production."

"In Ella Hickson’s adaptation the couple are distant from the start, Jocasta (Indira Varma) crisp, rational and frustrated with her husband’s faith in oracles and prophecies."

"Whereas Icke’s hurtling set-up had us gripped from the start, it’s mighty hard to feel invested in any of this, not least because Malek speaks in a strange drawl that suggests he has toothache. His Oedipus is an emotionally detached man, superficially calm yet full of a coiled stubbornness that borders dangerously on monomania. It is very hard to escape the feeling that Thebes would have been considerably better served with Jocasta as its leader; Matthew Warchus’s production certainly benefits more from Varma’s presence than it does from Malek’s."

"Rami Malek and Indira Varma star in a bizarre dance-theatre remake of the Ancient Greek classic that tinkers the tragedy out of the drama"

"Where the West End Robert Icke-directed version was a naturalistic, meticulously modernised restoration of the tragedy in which the director had gone to great lengths to try transpose the old impact into new language, the Old Vic Oedipus – adapted by Ella Hickson – is just completely fucking nuts."

"... though the pounding, techno soundtracked movement sequences feel oddly separated from the main action, they do effectively establish the sense that the city of Thebes has been overrun by ecstatic fanatics, a debilitating religious fervour consuming the city in its hour of need."

"It’s a compelling backdrop but the foreground stuff is… baffling. Hollywood star Rami Malek plays Oedipus as a detached, drawling figure who may or may not care about the drought, but seems to be so off his gourd it’s hard to tell."

"Hickson seems to amuse herself with moderately interesting tinkering that ultimately diminishes the play’s impact. Concluding that Jocsta’s original fate is too cruel is one thing; having her totally shrug off the play’s tumultuous revelations is borderline sociopathic."

"I’m all for interrogating a text, but just taking out the stuff that has kept Oedipus popular for 2,500 years is, is, ironically, the biggest display of hubris in the show."