King Oedipus of Sophocles, as interpreted by Robert Icke

© jan versweyveld 

nowadays, a presidential election evening. it's just over an hour and a half before the results are announced. the politician who is highly expected to win the election comes together with his family for a dinner in the conference hall being temporarily transformed to the campaign center. the politician is understanding and loving towards his family, and ambitious, honest, and confident. he also believes in transparency so that he will permit the investigation into the cause of death of his predecessor when he is elected. while the excitement of the results of the election is being experienced, the facts about the politician's past remaining hidden even from himself are revealed one by one. when the election countdown is over, at the peak of the tension, the moment when it is announced that the politician has won the election and the moment when he realizes the hardest truth about his past coincide. the politician's name is oedipus. yes, king oedipus, the famous tragic protagonist of sophocles.

© jan versweyveld 

young british theatre director robert icke portrays king oedipus as a contemporary politician in oedipus, a modern-day adaptation of sophocles’ oedipus rex, which he rewrites and shows us, as a contemporary drama. the slow dissolution of oedipus, who confidently claims at the beginning who he is and that he knows himself well.

icke emphatically and effectively expresses the sense of emptiness and existential nothingness which oedipus fell into, overlapping it on one hand spatially with the gradual evacuation of the nonfunctioning campaign center (stage design: hildergard bechtler), and on the other hand visually with his gradual undressing from the identity of the politician in the suit at the beginning to his nakedness even taking off his socks and leaving nothing on but underpants and a shirt. the great actor hans kesting, who portrays oedipus, also has a big share in this effect. kesting does wonders with his face that first gets shocked and then saddened as he learns unacceptable truths one after another, with this gaze that first hesitates and then is terrified of what he has done, and by transforming his massive body from a self-confident man into an unprotected and easily injured child - even into a newborn baby.

oedipus continues to assume that “things do not happen just because he doesn’t see them”, and that “things are enigmas just because he doesn’t understand them” as he is told by different people throughout the play until he figures out that the answer to tiresias's riddle "what turns everything around but continues to stand still itself?" is mirror towards the end of the play. 

© jan versweyveld 

throughout the play icke knits, loop by loop, the spiritual dissolution of oedipus as an honest, self-confident, loving man who believes in transparency in terms of learning and explaining the truth and has control over his life. in a scene in the middle of the play he makes oedipus suck on his wife jocasta's breast while making love to her, whom he will learn to be his mother. towards the end icke arranges a similar lovemaking scene, which he has positioned on the floor again, but this time with a stylized choreography, staging jocasta's birth to oedipus, and eventually makes oedipus lie on the floor on his back in the form of a baby for a long time as if he just emerged from jocasta's womb. icke also makes oedipus use the pointy-heeled shoe which jocasta wears for the election victory speech to poke his own eyes out at the end. thus, in return of the words of tiresias to oedipus, "you said it yourself, we are sick, sick with looking without sight, blinded by the surface of things and never seeing the core” at the beginning of the play, oedipus completely gets rid of his blinded sight by literally blinding himself at the end.

© jan versweyveld 

icke skillfully reveals the clues preceding the conflicts which we are familiar with from the mythology and other tragedies and which will arise in the future between those around oedipus, especially his children antigone, eteocles and polynices and creon in just one family dinner scene. he also lets jocasta's voice to be heard louder than ever before, who has traumas of being impregnated at the age of 13, and of her baby, whose fate she could not learn afterwards, forcefully pulled out of her. 

throughout the play, icke also insistently makes jocasta feel the lack of glasses (oedipus tells her that she should wear glasses once, and once she tells to herself the same thing), and towards the end, he makes jocasta see the bitter truth.

at the end of the play, icke makes a flashback and shows us the first time jocasta, blindfolded by oedipus, is brought to the place that will be turned into a grave by her suicide. when she gets rid of the blindfold and sees the place, she says, "this is the place, i like it." thus, the answer to the question “why do we keep staring back into the abyss?" which jocasta asked towards the end, has already been given by tiresias at the very beginning: "time has set its course and that course faces backward."

fabulous marieke heebink portrays jocasta with great sensitivity. for example, while facing the painful secrets of her past, jocasta suddenly withdraws her body from her husband oedipus, who is coming towards her at this very moment when she realizes that he is her son. this gesture of heebink has such natural and layered meanings.

© jan versweyveld 

the most interesting question on my mind about the production is whether the use of shepard fairey's famous visual design for barack obama as the election poster of oedipus is one of icke's mischievous comments. is icke overlapping oedipus and obama solely because of the birth certificate issue (obama was allegedly not born in the u.s. and there was a birth certificate controversy). or, does icke also want to question how reliable a person like obama, who was loved and appreciated by the american society and the world during his presidency, was as a politician through the character of oedipus, who starts the play with a sincere self-criticism and forward-looking constructive vision about state affairs and sovereignty by saying "the state is sick", who is also loved by the public and will win the election but is unaware of the facts about himself? maybe that's why icke lets jocasta tell in a scene, “we all know that we live a life based on lies. everyone is lying: governments… banks… about the environment… the world turns on lies.”

ita (international theater amsterdam) opened the 2020-21 season with simon stone's medea, an adaptation of an ancient greek play presented via the live broadcast program italive in october. during the season, the company brought huge productions such as ivo van hove's legendary shakespeare adaptations of the four-and-a-half-hour kings of war and the five-and-a-half-hour roman tragedies to the audience via italive. the next livestream will be the things that pass, ivo van hove's adaptation of a novel by louis couperus, on april 25th.   

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[The Turkish version of this article is published on Tiyatro Tiyatro Dergisi.]