PATRICK MARMION reviews Oedipus at the Old Vic Theatre: King Malek upstaged by Greek chorus of dancers

Oedipus (Old Vic Theatre, London)

Rating:

What oracle could have predicted that Freddie Mercury and Oedipus Rex, might cross paths? 

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening now at London’s Old Vic. 

The ancient King of Thebes famed for slaying his father and marrying his mother is being played by Rami Malek – winner of an Oscar as the lead singer of Queen in the 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody.

Sadly though, alongside Indira Varma as his unsuspecting mum, Malek isn’t the best thing about Matthew Warchus’s extraordinary primitivistic staging. 

Rami Malek and Indira Varma in Oedipus at the Old Vic Theatre on Tuesday

What oracle could have predicted that Freddie Mercury and Oedipus Rex, might cross paths? Yet that’s exactly what’s happening now at London’s Old Vic, writes Patrick Marmion

That accolade belongs to a pulsating, gyrating chorus of dancers representing the desperate people of Thebes. 

Martialled by Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter, they lay on a narcotic display of flashing feet and flailing limbs, set to pounding drums that pin you to your seat and reverb in your thorax.

Such is the unrest with which Malek has to contend as their remote and moody, Versace-clad monarch. 

And in his UK stage debut, he is a tortured weirdo familiar from the Bond film Never Say Die. 

Accused by the Delphic Oracle in the faintly absurd form of a clapped-out, reel-to-reel tape recorder, his best moments come when he learns he did indeed kill his father and sire children by his mother. 

Then he squirms in anguish like a jungle celebrity covered in lice.