Sophocles' Oedipus, the tragedy Aristotle used to define the form, reached the Old Vic in a new adaptation led by Rami Malek and Indira Varma.
The Old Vic staged a new adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus on The Cut in Waterloo, running from Tuesday 21 January to Saturday 29 March 2025, with Rami Malek in the title role.
Sophocles wrote the play around 429 BC for the Theatre of Dionysus, where it took only second prize at its first outing; Aristotle later used it in the Poetics as his model of tragic form, and it is now widely read as the most famous of all Greek tragedies. Before the action begins, Oedipus has already fulfilled the prophecy that undoes him, killing his father Laius on the road and marrying his mother Jocasta after answering the Sphinx’s riddle. The play itself is a hunt: Oedipus searches for his own city’s murderer to lift a plague, unaware the trail leads back to him. When the truth surfaces, Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus blinds himself. It is thought to be the fourth of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays, and Aristotle’s repeated use of it is why the play still sets the terms other tragedies are measured against.
Ella Hickson wrote this new adaptation, with Rami Malek as Oedipus opposite Indira Varma’s Jocasta, co-directed by the Old Vic’s artistic director Matthew Warchus and the choreographer Hofesh Shechter, whose movement work ran through a staging of roughly one hundred minutes without interval.