They are—or were—the perfect couple. They’ve been together for years, and have adult children. Why should a little quirk in the family tree, only just discovered, mean everything has to change? Does a man really have to separate from his (loving, supportive, gorgeous, funny) wife just because she happens to be his mother?
The actress Lesley Manville had seen productions of Sophocles’s Oedipus before, but never one like the modern adaptation she stars in this autumn at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54 on Broadway (until February 8). This one leaves audiences shattered—the word devastating kept cropping up when it was staged in London last year. It’s set in a campaign office: Oedipus, a politician, waits with his wife, Jocasta, for the results of a major election. Their lives are about to change, though not in a way that anyone but a reader of Greek tragedy expects. “These two hours that you think are going to be quite straightforward—they’re going to decompress, they’re going to eat, the results will come in. They imagine this simple night, and slowly these unsettling events happen,” Manville tells me. A looming clock counts down the election deadline, though gradually we realize that something else is being counted down as well.
Manville, who plays Jocasta, says she knew that if the play was going to land, she and Mark Strong, who plays Oedipus, had to “create this fabulous couple”—so fabulous, in fact, that you’re somehow rooting for them to stay together. Let sleeping dogs lie? “He looks to her; they make each other laugh. They’re sexually hungry for each other. And she’s absolutely by his side in the best possible way. She is his equal.” In the middle of the play—in stage directions Sophocles certainly didn’t write—“they start to have oral sex, him on her.” It’s a high-wire act: Will the audience see intimacy or indecency?
For our interview, Manville suggests we meet for coffee in one of London’s most civilized spaces: the restaurant at Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair, all plush banquettes and Art Deco mirrors. She greets me teary-eyed, apologizing—it’s allergies, not heartbreak. She’s paired a soft leather Armani jacket, bought 30 years ago, with a Loewe handbag from the spring 2025 collection—appropriately since she’s a friend of the brand. She’s poised, elegant, utterly in command.
Ever since she played Princess Margaret in The Crown and earned her first Academy Award nomination in 2018, for playing Daniel Day-Lewis’s steely sister in Phantom Thread, journalists have been writing about Manville’s “late-flowering career.” Manville, 69, warns me to stay clear: “I kind of think, Oh, come on. In my 20s, I was at the Royal Court Theatre working with all those new writers. That was a pretty flowering career. I’ve worked extensively with Mike Leigh. I’ve worked for the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Almeida.” Indeed, she’s worked in theater, film, and television, seemingly relentlessly, ever since she was a teenager at a London stage school; she lived at home on England’s south coast, and every morning her father would take her to the train station in the taxi he drove for work. And so it’s not small praise when Manville tells me that this play contains “probably the most phenomenal speech I’ve ever had,” when Jocasta finally tells her husband, for the first time, that she had been raped when she was a child, and gave birth to a son who was immediately taken away from her. This would, of course, have been about the time her husband was born.
This production is Manville’s first time working with the director and playwright Robert Icke. In England, Icke’s interpretations of canonical plays by Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Schiller, Ibsen, and Chekhov have been prize-winning, must-see events, though he’s probably best known in America for his adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 that came to Broadway in 2017, and was so gruesome that it reportedly made some audience members unwell. The British press treats him like something of a boy wonder, though Manville wants me to know that he “has an emotional intelligence that you might not necessarily equate with a 38-year-old man. He understood the nuance of relationships, the subtlety, the pain, the complexities, the hunger, the passion.” Icke draws out what’s still thrilling and unsettling in old plays while being ruthless about chucking—as he likes to say—anything that seems like it now belongs in a museum. His Oedipus does away with the Greek chorus, and all the many references that would have made perfect sense in 429 BC (or thereabouts), but probably not to most of us without footnotes.
Icke insists that although he’s glad to win the approval of classicists (he usually does), his “biggest responsibility is to a 14-year-old who’s read nothing, knows nothing, who’s been dragged to the theater by a parent, grandparent, teacher, guardian. You want it to blow their head off,” he tells me from the South of France, where he’s making his operatic debut directing a new version of Don Giovanni. “And I think I’m prepared to sacrifice almost anything in the service of exciting that person.” He says that this doesn’t require celebrity casting or incessant references to pop culture, but “actually getting the play to talk to them about their life, which, if it’s a great play, it should be able to do, but you have to kind of clear off the accumulated dust.” The idea of setting Oedipus in a campaign office came to him after the 2016 American presidential election, when he wondered what Hillary Clinton was doing in her hotel suite on the night she lost to Donald Trump. “I remember thinking, God, that’d be an extraordinary film or play or something that explores what fights are being had right now about what she should do about that result.” He wrote the adaptation out of order—doing the bits he was most excited about first, then filling in the gaps, a “disorganized and sort of chaotic process.”
Icke admits that when casting, he often thinks, “Who’s like this?” rather than, “Whose acting is like this?” He says that he wanted Manville to play Jocasta because he thought that she was extraordinary in Phantom Thread, and also, crucially, because she “feels like a mum”—which she is, to a son she raised after a brief marriage to the actor Gary Oldman; he’s now 36, a camera operator for film and television. For a similar reason, Icke wanted whoever played Oedipus to seem steady, principled, devoted to his family, and also like someone who could plausibly run for office and win. Strong usually plays villains (Robin Hood, Shazam!, Cruella, Kick-Ass) and spies (Kingsman, Zero Dark Thirty, Body of Lies, The Imitation Game, Deep State, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy—among others!), despite having a reputation for being supremely warmhearted. “He feels like he could solve your problems for you,” Icke says, and he was impressed by Strong’s “integrity and his articulate calm.” Three years ago, when Icke found out that he was going to be a father, Strong—who is married to the producer Liza Marshall, with whom he has two sons—was one of the first people Icke went to for advice. “I was like, Come on then. Tell me what you did. Tell me what I should do.”
I meet Strong at Wyndham’s Theatre: It’s the late-Victorian monument next to the Leicester Square Tube station, in the heart of London’s West End. This is where he performed in both A View from the Bridge and Oedipus, and so he’s able to show me around, pointing out where Maggie Smith used to have her dressing room. He moves through the building with the ease of someone who belongs there, or indeed, like a seasoned politician with a kind word for everyone. He’s also tall and lean, with a great voice—it’s easy to see why Icke would want his face on a campaign poster. Though when Strong describes his background, I wonder if it’s also not a coincidence that he’s played all those international spies. His name at birth was Marco Giuseppe Salussolia—his father was Italian, his mother Austrian. He went to school in England, and studied law in Munich—where he met drama students, and realized they were having more fun than he was. He defected, and by his mid-20s, he was at the National Theatre with small parts in King Lear and Richard III, studying the luminaries from the wings.
He’d never worked with Manville before, and when they first met he was “conscious that I didn’t want to appear anything other than reliable and professional and somebody that she could certainly count on.” So: no “Hi, Mum!” jokes to lighten the tension. They have a kindred way of working: high drama onstage, calm professionalism backstage. They don’t “get lost in the mysticism of being an actor,” he says. “When you’re standing this side in the wings, you are literally saying, ‘I’ll have a cup of tea. I’ll see you in a moment.’ And then that side of the wings, you are on.”
I push Manville and Strong to tell me what they’re like off the clock—what do they do in their spare time? Their answers are similar: What spare time? Strong tries to start his mornings by walking his miniature schnauzer and, when he can, plays soccer with his friends. His great indulgence is the “little bolt-hole” he has near Brighton, where he can swim. Manville regrets that she doesn’t have more time to read—“I’ve had the latest Sally Rooney sitting on my bedside table for weeks,” she says—but any free evenings are usually spent learning lines. She lives alone, and needs solitude for her work: “I don’t like to run my lines with other people,” she says. She’s passionate about interior decorating and after 15 years in the same West London house, misses the thrill of a new project. “I think people imagine creatives live in a chaotic world,” Strong tells me. “Actually, the opposite is true. You need discipline to allow yourself to find what we did in that production.” He’ll keep up his exercise routine in New York, but says that’s about it: “I’m not going there to party.” The last time Manville worked in New York was in 2018, when she starred in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and stayed in an apartment that belonged to her friend, the late actor Alan Rickman: “He had such a brilliant interior eye.” She admits to some ambivalence at being away from home this time: She’s “obviously very excited to be on Broadway,” but also anticipates missing her new granddaughter.
Adaptations of classical plays are supposed to be bold—otherwise, what’s the point? But a play about incest poses more than the usual challenges. There were careful discussions about whether to involve an intimacy coordinator. But “Mark and I have both done things like this before,” says Manville, “and so we just felt, we can sort this out.” The only part of the show they kept putting off rehearsing was the ending—“building up the gunpowder,” as Icke puts it. By the time they finally ran those scenes, Manville says, everyone understood, on a visceral level, just how high the stakes were. The ending has little dialogue—indeed it’s mostly silent. It’s such an extraordinary moment of theater that Manville says she sometimes wishes that she could be in the audience, watching it all unfold. The first time they ran through the whole play in the rehearsal room, the stage management were in tears. Strong assumed that they were just being polite. They weren’t.
In this story: hair, Leigh Keates; makeup, Kirstin Piggott; manicurist, Ella Vivii; tailor, Chloe Cammidge.
Produced by Nicole Holcroft-Emmess.