Oedipus at the National Theatre (UK): Review
Great expectations can be a killer in the theatre. On paper this new production of Oedipus looked like a certain smash hit. It stars Ralph Fiennes in the title role, with Clare Higgins as Jocasta, and the great Alan Howard as the blind seer Teiresias.
Jonathan Kent is the distinguished director, that fine dramatist Frank McGuinness has come up with the new translation, and even the smallest roles are played by terrific actors.
Yet I watched this production of Sophocles’s great tragedy – a harrowing masterpiece that is also the world’s first and greatest detective story – with my pulse steady and my soul unstirred.
What’s gone wrong? Peter Hall has long argued that the emotions are so intense in Greek tragedy that it can work only with the actors wearing masks to contain the tragic anguish. I disagree, but one knows, in the vile modern phrase, where he is coming from.
There needs to be an element of control and restraint that allows us to see the play steadily and see it whole. Here there is a constant feeling of almost baroque excess.
The chorus, 14 men in grey suits resembling anguished city investors who have just learned that their hedge fund has gone bust, sing many of their speeches like ecclesiastical liturgy. Jonathan Dove has written the score, and it strikes me as overblown, constantly distracting from the meaning of the words in the search for emotional effect.
Paul Brown’s monumental set – a convex disc of copper and a massive palace door that revolve distractingly throughout the play – strikes me as similarly over the top, while McGuinness’s translation is an uneasy blend of stark poetry and sudden eruptions of banal colloquialism (“He’s dead and gone, done and dusted”).
The production’s greatest weakness, however, is its star.
Oedipus is one of the greatest roles in dramatic literature, but Fiennes, who with his sinister shaved head looks disconcertingly like the pub landlord, Al Murray, and who occasionally lapses into his old mannerism of sounding like Rigsby in Rising Damp, isn’t up to the task...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Jonathan Kent is the distinguished director, that fine dramatist Frank McGuinness has come up with the new translation, and even the smallest roles are played by terrific actors.
Yet I watched this production of Sophocles’s great tragedy – a harrowing masterpiece that is also the world’s first and greatest detective story – with my pulse steady and my soul unstirred.
What’s gone wrong? Peter Hall has long argued that the emotions are so intense in Greek tragedy that it can work only with the actors wearing masks to contain the tragic anguish. I disagree, but one knows, in the vile modern phrase, where he is coming from.
There needs to be an element of control and restraint that allows us to see the play steadily and see it whole. Here there is a constant feeling of almost baroque excess.
The chorus, 14 men in grey suits resembling anguished city investors who have just learned that their hedge fund has gone bust, sing many of their speeches like ecclesiastical liturgy. Jonathan Dove has written the score, and it strikes me as overblown, constantly distracting from the meaning of the words in the search for emotional effect.
Paul Brown’s monumental set – a convex disc of copper and a massive palace door that revolve distractingly throughout the play – strikes me as similarly over the top, while McGuinness’s translation is an uneasy blend of stark poetry and sudden eruptions of banal colloquialism (“He’s dead and gone, done and dusted”).
The production’s greatest weakness, however, is its star.
Oedipus is one of the greatest roles in dramatic literature, but Fiennes, who with his sinister shaved head looks disconcertingly like the pub landlord, Al Murray, and who occasionally lapses into his old mannerism of sounding like Rigsby in Rising Damp, isn’t up to the task...