Whether you’ve seen Oedipus—Sophocles’ classic Greek tragedy—or not, I bet you know the main story beats: A man unwittingly murders his father and beds his mother, and then claws his own eyes out from grief and horror. The play has been shocking and engaging audiences for millennia and has become so embedded in our collective psyches that Freud even used it to describe what he said is a “primordial urge and fear” we all share.
And now, the story is back on Broadway, via a new modern adaptation by Robert Icke, a director-playwright who’s spent much of his Olivier-winning career reimagining ancient dramas for the modern age. Oedipus opened last month at Studio 54, where it runs until February 8, 2026. In Icke’s take, King Oedipus of Thebes has become a present-day politician, and we have been transported to his war room on election night. Nearly his entire family is there—and he, of course, does not know just how close he is to some of them.
But perhaps the greatest strength of the adaptation is that modernizing it invites audiences to take in its story completely anew. Its characters become not Greek statues, archetypes of some tragedy writ so large it could become camp, but rather flesh-and-blood human beings.
And it’s not just Icke’s writing. Breathing complex, nuanced life into the tortured characters are Olivier-winning acting legends Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, playing (respectively) Oedipus and his wife, Jocasta. Both are reprising their work from the production’s initial West End run last year—Manville won her second Olivier for the performance.
“It’s just such a great piece of writing,” says Manville of her first reaction reading the script. “You know how it’s going to end, but the journey that Rob’s writing takes you on is so amazing. I’ve done some extraordinary plays in my career, and I think Rob’s written me just about the greatest speeches I’ve ever had to give.”
Manville—who has also starred on TV in The Crown, Sherwood, and Mum—says the modernizing is a big part of what makes this Oedipus so indelible. “When these plays were written, they were done in that time—they were modern,” she says. “It seems odd to do productions of old plays now and feel that they’re only right if it’s set in the period that it was written. When we bring it to the current, we can’t just pretend that it’s distant from us and it’s not relevant to us anymore.”
And relevant—and shocking—it remains. “It’s such a bold notion, isn’t it?” remarks Strong. “Somebody who kills their father and sleeps with their mother. That gets to the very core of what you really don’t want to happen in your life.”
But that also means Strong and Manville are living in that disturbing, traumatic world night after night, and have been since last year. As for that all-important final scene where all horrible secrets get laid bare, Strong says Icke had them approach it carefully. “He said we wouldn’t rehearse that final scene until, like, the fifth week of rehearsals, which was a very good call.”
“Mark and I had not worked together before, and even if we had been doing scenes like we have to do, you can’t just instantly do them,” interjects Manville. “It comes from being with somebody and trusting them and getting to know what they’re like in a rehearsal room.”
It also allowed Strong and Manville to develop an Oedipus and Jocasta who are very much real people, and very in love. In Icke’s adaptation, we even see them engage in the kind of casual intimacy that one tends to associate more with horny teenagers. And the point of that is not to titillate or, in the context of the story of Oedipus, gross you out. It’s to show how much these people truly love and need each other, which makes the play’s final revelations all more devastating.
“What Rob has done is make it a love story,” explains Strong. “You want these people to be together. You understand how they need each other and want each other, what they’ve been through together. And now suddenly, fate has intervened.”
“They’re funny together. They argue. They laugh. They quarrel,” adds Manville. “We’re not just creating a chocolate-box version of them. You have to see them as human beings—you have to see them as a couple. That’s how the tragedy earns its keep.”
The other addition Icke has made to build the evening’s tension is a literal ticking time clock, which counts down throughout the play to the impending call of the election results. And, spoiler alert, said horrible revelations of this Oedipus, of course, come just as the clock runs out. Strong and Manville are coy about how this feat is achieved every night: “It’s nothing to do with us,” Manville reveals with a twinkle in her eye.
But, Strong says, whatever theatrical magic they do have is not actually always needed. Plays, he says, tend to clock in at shockingly similar times once the cast has the production set in their bones. “In the U.K., they tell you the running time when you get back to the dressing room, and it’s amazing how it’s usually within a minute or two of itself every night,” he says. “There were several times in London where nothing had to be done to the clock at all. We started and it finished at exactly the moment that it was meant to finish.” Another, less horrible form of fate, one supposes.
All of it adds up to an experience that is rather unlike any other play you’ll have seen on the Main Stem, which Strong says is the whole point.
“There are too many plays, I think, that are just okay, that are just fine,” he says (and no, he’s not naming names). “This play isn’t fine. This production isn’t fine. It takes you by the throat and drags you through and forces you to live with it in its darkest moments. There’s a catharsis in that.”
Mark Strong and Samuel Brewer in Oedipus
Mark Strong and company of Oedipus
John Carroll Lynch and company of Oedipus
Company of Oedipus
Lesley Manville in Oedipus
Anne Reid and Olivia Reis in Oedipus
Olivia Reis and company of Oedipus
Mark Strong and Lesley Manville in Oedipus
Mark Strong and Lesley Manville in Oedipus
Mark Strong and Lesley Manville in Oedipus
James Wilbraham and Mark Strong in Oedipus
