Unexpectedly – and here I come to the missing star, or rather the one star more than it actually deserved! – it didn’t really work. In this case, my rating is less fair and more subjective than the one for “Macbeth” because the production as such was mediocre, but it will be explained!
The promise of a complete contemporary rewrite reminded me of the superb “Phaedra” with Janet McTeer, but it didn’t come close. There was nothing wrong with the idea, on the contrary, and some of the sub-plot was great too – like the unhappy teenage Antigone with whom the gleaming image sits uncomfortably. But apart from the main protagonists, Oedipus and Jocasta, there wasn’t really a reason for most of these people to be there. That Oedipus and Jocasta turned out much more convincing was mostly due to the actors. This time I had been looking forward to seeing TWO of my favourites live on the stage for the first time: Mark Strong and Leslie Manville. Leslie Manville I have seen on NTatHome a few times – she is very busy on the stage. She was as great as she always is, but not really a surprise. Mark Strong I have only seen in “A View from the Bridge” which was praised – I think he even got an Olivier award for that! – but I didn’t find it that special. Seeing him live on the stage, though, blew me away.
Talking with my friend later, we agreed that it is really difficult to make this play work as what it is – apart from this exemplary tragedy: a great thriller where the dreaded revelation should be ANTICIPATED all the time but not already known. As it is, everybody knows everything about Oedipus’ past, which makes it really difficult to tell his story in an interesting way. Nonetheless it should be possible. A more imaginative rewrite would have drawn us in notwithstanding, fascinated by the PROCESS of the truth being revealed and fearful for the characters facing the subsequent horrors. This kind of thing happened only once to me - when I saw these teenage boys sitting at the table, knowing that, very soon, they would have to realize that their father is also their brother and their mother also their grandmother. Felt like the world being turned upside down … but it was just a glimpse of what could be done with this play.
There is basically one reason why the update worked in the end. Mark Strong. I already had him down as an actor with an uncanny understanding of extreme characters and predicaments, still he surprised me. As I wasn’t exactly spellbound by the action most of time, I observed myself watching, and that was interesting. I just love Leslie Manville. She is one of these actors, like Toby Jones, I just cannot look away from because they are such a joy to watch. There is so much variety in what they are doing, so many different little things going on ALL AT THE SAME TIME. So, even when they were both on the stage, I was looking at Leslie Manville, that is, I had consciously to look away from her and look at Mark Strong. This irked me a bit but not much because I noticed that I didn’t miss anything when I wasn’t looking at him. He was still PRESENT and kind of radiating meaning, even when he wasn’t doing anything. There was only one other time I remember something like this happening: in the spectacular production of “No Man’s Land” with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, where Ian McKellen is talking all the time and Patrick Stewart is sitting in his chair, just watching him, expressing his absolute disgust with this human being without saying a word or moving a muscle of his face. I have been lucky to be able to stream it recently, years after seeing it in the Cinema, because I didn’t remember how incredibly good Ian McKellen was in this. I think that is actually the best, most nuanced and humane, performance I have ever seen of him – even better than his great Lear. Still, I only remembered Patrick Stewart, the one actor I thought could actually play a chair and I would want to watch him for two hours. Now there are two.
(I just devised the shortest play ever, named “Chairs”. No dialogue, just Patrick Stewart and Mark Strong sitting in chairs and staring at each other. More of a performance, though, as I reckon after about ten minutes they’d spontaneously combust or something because of the energy they’d create.)
So, even though I wasn’t always watching, I had this crystal-clear notion, almost from the beginning, what is wrong with Oedipus – even though there is nothing wrong with him. (See below!) Afterwards, thinking about this extraordinary effect his acting had on me - more than once but never like this – I explained it by the observation that, even though he is physically so recognizable - GREAT body, by the way! – there is virtually no trace of the human being Mark Strong left in the characters he is playing. It appears to me that most actors use personal content – physical or emotional expressions, personal experience and so on – very successfully to “build” their characters. (Successfully because these bits, getting into a different context, are totally transformed and instrumentalized. I even like these recognizable bits, most of the time, but with actors I favour I am always looking forward to seeing them play a character that is totally “unlike them”.) Mark Strong is the only actor I know who doesn’t seem to do that, to a point that it is inexplicable to me. And the effect of this superhuman clearness seemed enhanced on the stage. Other actors, like Leslie Manville, always seem to be their own (great) size. (Being so tall probably helps? I didn’t even NOTICE before that he is tall!)
So, this “Oedipus” looks like the Mark Strong show? In retrospect, it certainly was. This should have been a weakness of the production, but it wasn’t really, which explains the four star experience. The reason is that the existential bit in “Oedipus” – the experience I was so pleased to have, and the truth I would have wanted so much NOT to learn – is located in the lead character and was transmitted by the actor with maximum impact. Oedipus really is one of the good guys, a politician after our own heart, somebody who cares. In particular about the truth. So much in fact that – against the advice of his experienced campaign manager! – he persists on looking into his own past. So perfect, charismatic, attractive … though maybe a bit naïve and self-centred? There certainly are these little warning “blips” at the back of our minds almost from the beginning. Nonetheless, he is “like us” – or rather as we would WANT to see us. Of course we are always telling the truth – the people that are lying twice (or 200 times, statistics differ!) in 24 hours are certainly not us! OF COURSE we want to know the truth, no matter what. We are even actively searching for the truth, about the world, about our own lives … At least I am.
Actually, it’s a strange thing about the truth because I was kind of aware that I was kidding myself. It was this well-known Greek tragedy, though, and Mark Strong’s Oedipus, that enabled me to nail THE TRUTH ABOUT THE TRUTH once and for all. When Oedipus is looking for the truth, he is looking for something he already knows (= that there is nothing fishy about his descent!), something he will be able to control when he knows the specifics. Something that will make the doubts and the threat to his career go away. What he will find is exactly the opposite. And sharing his own belief that he is such a great guy makes it easier for “us” to see that we are exactly the same: good people who consider the truth to be important and living a lie not sustainable. What we are actually doing, though, when we are looking for the truth, is to look for the facts that fit our own world view and how we see ourselves. Never – not ever! – are we looking for the facts that threaten our beliefs!
Don’t get me wrong: looking for the “truth” is an important activity which should be more wide-spread than it actually is. It makes us review and affirm our values and beliefs and act good and productively on an everyday scale. But, at least occasionally, we should listen to the annoying teenagers, like Antigone, whose brains are still flexible enough and whose beliefs not settled enough to spot the chinks in the perfect surface. We should be AWARE that what we are looking for, important as it may be, IS NOT THE TRUTH.
The truth - and there I was thrilled to find how close we still are to the ancient Greeks! – is what we cannot know, what we don’t want to know. What would destroy us, if we knew it. Globally, I am kind of aware of the threats – or like to believe so! - but please, spare me the details! Do we really want to KNOW if it will be one and a half degrees until the end of the century, or two and half, or even more …? And what FATE dealt us – the things we don’t know about our past, or have conveniently forgotten? What really awaits us in the future? What our end will be …
THE TRUTH? PLEASE, SPARE ME!!!
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