Review Roundup: Did Rami Malek Impress in OEDIPUS?

Ella Hickson’s epic and revelatory version of Sophocles’ transcendent tragedy, Oedipus, co-directed by Hofesh Shechter and Matthew Warchus has now opened at The Old Vic.

Academy Award winner Rami Malek and Olivier Award winner Indira Varma star in the ancient tale of love and vengeance. What did the critics think?

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Alexander Cohen, BroadwayWorld: But Oedipus is no muscular warrior. Rami Malek’s beguiling casting shades him as an awkward technocrat shrunk by a baggy grey suit, his skeletal frame barley strong enough to hold it up, body bobbling unevenly as if he is a marionette uncannily manipulated by invisible strings dangling from above. Oedipus may be in charge but he’s never in control.

Clive Davis, The Times: Does it all work as drama? Most of the time, yes, although the text by playwright Ella Hickson is oddly lacking in poetic heft. For long stretches, in fact, it sounds more like the work of an AI programme commissioned to generate soap opera chat laced with the sort of noir-ish boilerplate that would sit nicely in a Tarantino film. No wonder there were some uncomfortable ripples of laughter in the stalls.

Claire Allfree, The Telegraph: 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. Granted, Hickson conceives her Oedipus as a ruler consumed more by a personal God complex than by devastatingly blind integrity, something Malek’s affected demeanour naturally leans into. 

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: 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.

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out: I actually found the production too bizarre to hate, and there is something about it that works on a visceral level, if not a textual one. But taking the sting out of the end of Oedipus is like making a Superman film that’s just about Clark Kent working for a newspaper. 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.

Patrick Marmion, The Daily Mail: 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. Martialled by Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter, they lay on a narcotic display of flashing feet and flailing limbs, set to pounding drums that pin you to your seat and reverb in your thorax.

David Jayes, The Guardian: Rami Malek’s air of having dropped from another planet has served him well on film as a Bond villain or Freddie Mercury. He 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.

Oedipus is at The Old Vic until 29 March

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