Oedipus
Opening Night: November 13, 2025
Theater: Studio 54
Website: oedipustheplay.com
Election night. The polls predict a landslide victory. Everything is about to change. Direct from a sold-out, record-breaking, Olivier Award-winning West End run, Sophocles’ epic tragedy is transformed into an explosive political thriller. Visionary director Robert Icke – the youngest Olivier Award-winning director in history – reimagines Ancient Greek mythology to bring the secrets of the past bursting into the present.
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November 13, 2025
Icke’s change in timeline trades catastrophe for suspense, ontological disaster for down-to-the-cuticles nail biting. Is this a fair exchange? Maybe. Is it electrifying? God, yes. The results are slick, sleek, mordant. It’s a spine tingler, if not quite the ethics tangler of the original.
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November 13, 2025
His Oedipus, while glowing with his usual whip-smart language, doesn’t have much fun in the toppling. Each domino falls (“I killed who?! You’re my what?”) with complete earnestness, and without broader examination, even though we’d been tipped off by an earlier character and our own cultural literacy. There’s simply no tension. Thankfully, there’s little of that, too, in wondering whether Icke’s next project – his every project – will be worthy of appraisal. And if you see me soon, front row, at Oedipus, it’s because there are far worse places to be than at a Robert Icke production, or in the company of Strong and Manville.
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November 13, 2025
Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, giving two of this year’s great performances, lead a brilliant cast that turns this millennia-old story of pride and familial dysfunction into a timely political thriller that resonates with uncomfortable questions.
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November 13, 2025
The biggest pleasure of this prestige production is watching how Icke pastes these modern references onto a classic story. It’s often fun to watch, but never more than clever.
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November 14, 2025
It’s where we learn her story in all its graphic detail, and though Manville is one hell of an actor—utterly at ease in one moment, ferocious in the next, destroyed in the one after that—even she can’t quite mask the overwriting, the authorial frisson over putting this character through really bad things, but, you know, in order to demonstrate that they’re really bad. It’s a shame, because this Oedipus, when it tries a little less hard, is also full of potency. Manville and Strong crackle together — their chemistry is steamy and genuine and, in some of the production’s best moments, after all terrible secrets have been revealed, so is their body-wracking devastation.
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November 13, 2025
Reid, Strong and Manville are transfixing as awful revelation after revelation comes to light. Strong’s nice guy gives way to brutishness and boiling blood, and Manville’s heretofore stalwart Jocasta crushingly crumples when the grotesque truth is finally revealed.
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November 13, 2025
And above all there is his wife, Jocasta, who—as played by the great Lesley Manville—is a creature of effortless fascination: confident, worldly, intelligent, practical passionate, sexually frank and a touch narcissistic, with a hint of Sphinxlike inscrutability to shroud the trauma behind her drive.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 13, 2025
Icke’s work is really something: I can’t recall ever previously being as riveted at a Greek tragedy. And my admiration for his show is increased by how Icke manages to stay remarkably true to so much of the original play while turning its dialogue into contemporary speech. This doesn’t read as something based on the Greek original — it feels like the play itself, reenergized with the kind of crackling relevance all too rare on Broadway.
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November 14, 2025
The taut spin on “Oedipus” now on Broadway after a West End run last fall is a rare and magnificent feat of adaptation: Writer and director Robert Icke draws Sophocles’ ancient play into the present while deepening its timeless explorations of power, desire and fate. As the doomed mother-son couple, Lesley Manville and Mark Strong deliver two of the most captivating performances on New York stages this year, in a production that combines the intrigue of a primal tragedy with a modern political thriller.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 13, 2025
After millennia, Sophocles’s mother lode of a play Oedipus Rex — a grand work of ambition, moral decay, and the pain of seeing yourself and others as they really are — has been swallowed up by pop psychology and armchair history… This new adaptation is less about what will happen or how, and without that thrust, Icke’s Oedipus struggles to find its meaning.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 13, 2025
Mark Strong and Lesley Manville deliver epic performances in this version that is as much political and psychological thriller as it is an examination of fate. While this Oedipus doesn’t fully succeed in translating the original’s poetic, grandiose style into modern terms, it provides a gripping theatrical experience that will be as much of a snob hit on Broadway as it was in London.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 13, 2025
Everything is politics, as the saying goes… And it’s most certainly true today, as we’re watching Robert Icke’s gripping, timelier-than-ever adaptation of Oedipus.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 13, 2025
It’s election night in Robert Icke’s “Oedipus,” a modern retelling of Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” that must be the buzziest, if not the chicest, Broadway offering of the fall season. The production, a prestigious London import that opened at Studio 54 on Thursday under Icke’s smart and sleek direction, stars a charismatic Mark Strong in the title role.
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