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.
Rami Malek played the title role in a new adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus at The Old Vic in Waterloo, from Tuesday 21 January to Saturday 29 March 2025. Indira Varma played Jocasta.
Sophocles wrote the play around 429 BC for the Theatre of Dionysus, where it took only second prize. 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. He has killed his father Laius on the road and married his mother Jocasta after answering the Sphinx’s riddle.
The play itself is a hunt. Oedipus searches for his 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.
Ella Hickson wrote this adaptation. The Old Vic’s artistic director Matthew Warchus co-directed it with the choreographer Hofesh Shechter, whose movement ran through a staging of roughly one hundred minutes without interval.