Lesley Manville: "Oedipus"

One thing I did not expect was the scene in which septuagenarian screen legend Lesley Manville removes her underwear and stuffs it in her pocket. Her spouse goes down on her--as she murmurs about her "baby boy." When this is interrupted, Manville (Jocasta) mentions that she needs to handle a brief Zoom meeting with a *head* of state. "Don't knock on the door. Things might get heated in there...."

"Oedipus" has everything I want from a play. It's a detective story. There was a terrible crime in the past--now, in the present, we're piecing together a hypothesis about what may have happened. As the investigatory work occurs, life also goes on. An office is stripped bare. A family dinner is launched (and then quickly torpedoed). Several outfits are selected, criticized, mocked, rejected, replaced.

The "present tense" material is gripping enough, but then we have many troubling clues about the past. If Oedipus the infant was abandoned in the woods, what can this mean about his ancestry? If Jocasta's *first* spouse was essentially Jeffrey Epstein--and Jocasta has buried this fact--what is the impact of Jocasta's secrecy? How is the story of trauma unfolding even now, as we continue to pretend it's not a story? ("It doesn't matter whether or not you acknowledge the existence of the gods," says Merope. "They just continue to do their work, whether you're ignorant or enlightened.")

I went to see this mainly for Lesley Manville; I wasn't disappointed. The child of a taxi driver, Manville once planned to be a ballet dancer. But talent has a way of announcing itself. It seems strange to talk about self-discipline in a theater review--but one thing I admired about Manville was her training. She is seventy; she performs a role that is physically and emotionally exhausting; she does this every single night. And yet you never worry about whether her sense of command will "slip." She is just great at her job. At the same time, she is able to be feral, spontaneous, dangerously vulnerable. The minutes between her epiphany and her death are some of the most thrilling I've witnessed in a theater. Each of her moves "externalizes" her sense of torment; each tiny, tiny choice is captivating, sickening. People say that suicide occurs when you realize you're in a burning building; it would be insanity to remain in the building, to let the smoke and heat slowly, slowly do their work on your internal organs and your skin. Manville is finally like a robot that has malfunctioned. I'll never forget her last four or five minutes in this play.

Mark Strong is terrific, as well.

Seeing "Oedipus" with a Barack Obama setting is (oddly) an invitation to think about Arthur Miller. When Miller wrote "All My Sons," he was thinking about Oedipus. The Jocasta story--coupled with a 21st century electoral battle--is really like a retelling of Arthur Miller's retelling. Here, Manville is retelling "All My Sons."

Bring it on, Laurie Metcalf. The Tony Awards might be unpredictable this year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/t-magazine/lesley-manville-mark-strong-oedipus.html

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