Family Affair

Robert Icke’s new production of Oedipus—starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville—makes a 2,500-year-old play strikingly modern.

- Deborah Friedell

THE CANDIDATE Icke wanted a lead actor who seemed steady, principled, and devoted. Strong, he says, "feels like he could solve your problems for you." Oedipus opens on Broadway this month. Strong wears a Polo Ralph Lauren shirt and tie. Sittings Editor: Michael Philouze.

They are—or were—the perfect couple. They've been together for years, and have adult children. Why should a little quirk in the family tree, only just discovered, mean everything has to change? Does a man really have to separate from his (loving, supportive, gorgeous, funny) wife just because she happens to be his mother?

The actress Lesley Manville had seen productions of Sophocles’s Oedipus before, but never one like the modern adaptation she stars in this autumn at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54 on Broadway (until February 8). This one leaves audiences shattered—the word devastating kept cropping up when it was staged in London last year. It’s set in a campaign office: Oedipus, a politician, waits with his wife, Jocasta, for the results of a major election. Their lives are about to change, though not in a way that anyone but a reader of Greek tragedy expects. “These two hours that you think are going to be quite straightforward—they’re going to decompress, they're going to eat, the results will come in. They imagine this simple night, and slowly these unsettling events happen,” Manville tells me. A looming clock counts down the election deadline, though gradually we realize that something else is being counted down as well.