Over half term, which feels like a while ago now, we went to see Oedipus at Wyndham’s Theatre. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a modernised version with a contemporary setting; I’ve seen a couple of very Ancient Greek style (not language!) productions before, and while I enjoyed the play when doing Classics A-level, I must admit it was the opportunity to see Lesley Manville and Mark Strong that tempted me as much as the play itself. It’s adapted by Robert Icke, who has form for great adaptations of Greek tragedy, and is set on election night, with Oedipus (Strong) as the candidate awaiting results of a vaguely presidential election, and also heading towards tragic revelation.

I found this setting absolutely believable; its nods to contemporary politics raised some wry smiles, and the family – Oedipus and Jocasta, with their children Polynices, Eteocles and Antigone – seem normal, loving, teasing. Yet the audience (mostly) knew what was coming (there was someone behind me who didn’t, and was audibly shocked at the end), and the production plays delicately with this foreshadowing. The inevitability of Oedipus’s fate weighed heavily over the scenes of family life, despite the moments of levity throughout (this production raised more laughs than expected). The relationship between the siblings, and Creon, Jocasta’s brother, contains early echoes of the next two plays of Sophocles’ trilogy, in which the sins of the father really are visited on the children.

It’s a compelling story. Whatever Freud said, I don’t think this is about unconscious desires; it’s about knowledge, fate, arrogance. Oedipus’s fatal flaw is his absolute confidence that he couldn’t have done anything wrong, even unwittingly; his arrogant determination to pursue his intention to find out the truth at all costs; and his angry refusal to listen to those who would warn him. Yet his love for his family, the relationship with Jocasta (who has a bigger part here than I recall Sophocles giving her), and his integrity as a politician make him a character for whom I was willing a different outcome from that I knew was coming. Strong and Manville are completely compelling, and two hours (without an interval) flew past. The last fifteen minutes are brilliantly traumatic. (If you’re going to see it, stop reading now).

You know what’s coming at the end of Oedipus – Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’s blinding – but you don’t know how it will be done; it’s as shocking as you’d expect, but the real power, for me, is what came afterwards: a couple of minutes of total theatre blackout, with the sound of a crowd shouting. For a short moment (which feels quite long), we experience Oedipus’s new, tortured reality. It’s a theatrical masterstroke.