This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Oedipus as Keir Starmer? Hold that thought. Robert Icke’s retelling of the Greek saga of a family that turns out to be rather too close turns Oedipus Rex from tragic victim of bizarre circumstances, first recorded around 420 BC, into a hungry if bland Westminster politician, looking nervously to a victory on election night, until the fates arrive to prove the exit polls wrong.

In the Wyndham’s Theatre’s new production, Mark Strong in the central role and Lesley Manville as Jocasta, his wife (and more), are a top-notch duo.

Frankly, that is just as well given the serious suspension of disbelief we are going to have to accept to project the twisting story of Oedipus onto a modern setting — a rented apartment of the kind Lord Alli might have ponied up for the Starmer machine.

Strong’s Oedipus is expansive, assertive and shot through with the undertone of masculine unease he has channelled since we first got to know him as chippy Tosker in the BBC’s milestone drama, Our Friends in the North.

Running on a “change and transparency” ticket and pledging to clean up the mystery of the death of a previous Theban King Laius, with a splash of Barack Obama’s determination to expose the “Birther” lie about his origins, his is an absorbing tumble from imminent power and control of events to disaster.

Pledging to produce his birth certificate — which horrifies his spin doctor Creon (a wonderfully threatening Michael Gould) and bossy (presumed) mother Merope (June Watson) is a neat Icke-ish way of getting us fast into that convoluted action.

From the moment a tattooed vagrant turns up as Teiresias (Samuel Brewer), the blind seer, trouble is written on the matt grey campaign HQ walls.

Strong is one of our most prolific and under-garlanded actors, with a penchant for playing antiheroes and dubious authority figures: with penetrating brown eyes and an edgy physicality, he can be a menacing presence in gangland sagas — or a mendacious or compromised Securocrat (The Imitation Game, Zero Dark Thirty).

In Icke’s retelling of Sophocles’ play, his very energy will be his undoing, and the quest for truth in a power structure will inevitably turn out to be destructive.

When Strong and Manville are together (a remarkably sexually frisky duo for a couple with student children in the house and an election on), there’s a twitchy electricity between them which ratchets up as the past coincidences are unearthed: the fatal encounter at the Three Ways crossing where Oedipus unwittingly killed Laius is turned into a half-remembered car-crash, covered up by “protocols” as the deep state finally yields its secrets.

Manville gets to the truth first, and the levels of denial are riveting: does she sleep with her husband already knowing that she’s his birth mum? The ambiguity keeps a busy plot rolling along.

There’s also enough comedy in the tense family evening meal for a shaft of light relief with in-law friction between Jocasta and hovering mum Merope competing for Oedipus’ attention and the student kids (Polyneices, Eteocles and Antigone) having a “No, you shut up” squabble. Antigone (Phia Saban) and mum are especially at odds: ”Why does everything have to be about you?” (a generally salient question in Greek drama).

All of this seems a fair enough re-working to me — families will feud, from the BC era to 2024, though having the clan divided about Polyneices coming out as gay would hardly have troubled the homoerotic Thebans.

It teeters into bathos however in one storyline: namely that Laius was in essence a paedophile, given Jocasta’s young age when he bedded and wedded her.

Icke has done his research and found she was just 13 when she gave birth, which would be a year younger than the window for marriage in classical Greece of 14 to16 (given life expectancy was around 40 for women), but it’s still one twist too many to project modern age-appropriate thinking onto the ancient world.

The blinking red electric clock ticks down to Teiresias’ buzzkill riddle: that Oedipus will gain power and lose. Both he and Manville channel the horror of the revelation of their biological tie chillingly: his fury at a fate beyond his control consuming his sense of self, her shift from sexy confidence to self-loathing as the dress rail arrives with their camera-friendly attire for the acceptance speech (Lord Alli would doubtless have paid for that as well).

When the children bound on stage to announce the election result, he hurls one of his sons through a revolving door (kudos to Hildegard Bechtler’s clever set design and Strong’s aim). After that, there will be blood and one of the most blood-curdling deployments of a stiletto heel I’ve seen (through my fingers) on stage. Oedipus, the man who saw a future as the truthteller, is finally blinded by the facts.

On it will go, oh-so-Greekly. Creon, Jocasta’s brother, ends up with the top job and will morph into the punishing autocrat in the subsequent tragedy of Antigone. This lot are beyond family therapy.