How do you follow Oedipus Rex? Olivier famously offered Sheridan's The Critic as a sequel. At this cosy Islington pub-theatre, Robert Gillespie has had the even more ingenious idea of staging a play by a critic - Jeremy Kingston's Oedipus at the Crossroads - which provides a witty, neo-Stoppardian, anti-clerical gloss on Sophocles's original text.
Gillespie has not made things easy for himself by staging Oedipus Rex in the old EF Watling translation. It is full of lines such as: "A fig for divination!" (Contrast the more recent Robert Fagles version where Jocasta says "so much for prophecy".) When you add to Watling's fondness for exclamations hairy-legged actors in hessian mini-robes against a mock-classical, Pearl and Dean, set you get a production that falls all too easily into armpit rhetoric. But Sophocles survives; and, when Irene Rambota's Jocasta tells Oedipus not to be frightened of mother-marrying, since "many a man has dreamt as much," you are reminded of the dramatist's shocking, pre-Freudian awareness.
Kingston's play, however, comes off far better because it is a more relaxed performance, based on a bright idea. It posits the notion of a sceptical, autonomous Oedipus who, lately returned from Delphi, meets Laius at the crossroads and decides to outwit the oracle. But, having determined not to kill any man old enough to be his father, he finds himself at the mercy of the manipulative Tiresias, who cunningly engineers a tragedy to boost the prophetic status of the priesthood.
In one sense Kingston is unfair to Sophocles: even the original Oedipus, as Fagles points out in his eye-opening Penguin introduction, is not a victim of fate but a free agent responsible for the catastrophe. Kingston's play forces you to re-examine Sophocles and is also full of hilariously inventive detail: the gay Laius, for instance, has forsworn sex with Jocasta for the past 19 years, which means that she is a ripe - and even panting - candidate for remarriage. Kingston also makes the more serious, quasi-Marxist point that, in any civilisation, religion is politically exploited in order to achieve social cohesion.
At the risk of praising a colleague, this is a bristling, intelligent and funny play; and it is notable that Alex Hughes as Oedipus, Denis Delahunt as Laius and Richard Earthy as Tiresias look far more comfortable than they do in Sophocles. They even manage to overcome the sandals, which suggest fringe members of the Lib Dems on an Attic excursion.
· Until February 23. Box office: 020-7704 6665.
