Ödipus (Oedipus)

The furniture is already being shipped out from the leading candidate’s election headquarters. Two hours before the results of the election are announced. For Oedipus, the lead candidate of a new political movement that stands for change, hope and a radical break with the past, victory is as good as assured.  For him and his family, the final few hours of privacy have begun. Soon he will be a statesman, soon Jocasta will once again be the nation’s first lady, and soon Antigone, Eteocles and Polyneices will be a politician’s children. When Oedipus’s mother Merope arrives unannounced and insists on talking to her son alone, and when a supposed clairvoyant conjures up the shadows of the past and the horrors of the future, Oedipus starts digging. Why have the circumstances of the fatal road traffic accident in which his predecessor died been classified? And why are attempts being made to dissuade Oedipus from publishing his birth certificate to silence the fake news questioning his origins once and for all? Oedipus digs deeper, asks questions and time rushes by until everything is revealed – apart from the election result.

As in his updating of Schnitzler’s «The Doctor», the British director and playwright Robert Icke has taken a stage classic and radically translated into the present. His reinterpretation is simultaneously a political thriller and a family tragedy. Icke looks behind the myth and lays bare the existential horror that remains so disturbingly fascinating about Sophocles’ «Oedipus»: that the assumptions which lives and seeming happiness are based on can crumble from one moment to the next, right down to their very foundations