Οιδίποδας | Robert Icke

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

A clock on the wall is counting down. When it reaches zero the votes will be counted, a country will have its next leader, and a man who has spent the evening certain of his own decency will know precisely what he has done. Robert Icke's Oedipus runs in real time — one unbroken evening in a single campaign room — and the Onassis Stegi brings it back to its Main Stage from 12 November after a first run that sold out 46 performances.

Icke is among the most argued-about directors in European theatre, known for stripping Greek and Shakespearean tragedy to the bone and resetting it in the present. His adaptation arrives with an Olivier Award and seven Tony nominations behind it. Nikos Kouris takes the title role, Maria Kechagioglou plays Jocasta, with Lazaros Georgakopoulos as Creon and Rania Oikonomidou as Merope — a Greek-language staging of a text already tested in front of award juries abroad.

The seats fill with people who already know how the myth ends and come anyway to watch the trap close — readers of Sophocles, followers of Icke's work, and a large contingent who missed the sold-out first run and waited a year for a ticket. It plays like a thriller even though everyone in the room knows the verdict.

The world onstage is contemporary and airless: campaign posters, a kitchen, a family waiting on a result, all in one space that never changes across 140 minutes. There is no interval — Icke refuses to break the real-time spell — so the dread has nowhere to discharge. The sound stays naturalistic until the ticking clock becomes the score. Doors open Wednesday through Saturday at 20:30, with a Sunday matinee at 14:00.

What Icke does is turn dramatic irony physical. You watch Kouris's Oedipus chase the truth with a politician's confidence, congratulating himself on his honesty, while the clock strips minutes away and Kechagioglou's Jocasta sees the shape of it before he does. By the time the count comes in, the myth has gone unbearably ordinary — a family at a kitchen table, learning who they are.

If you want the chorus, the masks, and the marble of a traditional Oedipus, this production discards all of it. But if you want Sophocles rebuilt as a present-tense political thriller where the horror arrives on schedule, this is the version that sold out twice over.

The Onassis Stegi sits on Syngrou Avenue, accessible by metro a few minutes from Syngrou-Fix station. The run is 12 November to 13 December, 140 minutes with no intermission; the Sunday performances on 22 November and 6 December carry English surtitles. Tickets range from €10 to €43, and the lower-price seats go first.

Forty-six performances sold out the first time; this return runs barely a month, and the clock does not stop for latecomers.