Interview: Lesley Manville on the "Indescribable Love and Warmth" of Her Tony-Nominated Run in Oedipus

When director Robert Icke’s thrilling production of Oedipus transferred from London’s West End to Broadway last fall, it arrived with a raft of high expectations and proceeded to shatter them. As Jocasta, the emotional center of Icke’s modern reworking of Sophocles, Olivier winner Lesley Manville made a long-overdue Broadway debut and stopped the show nightly with a harrowing monologue which will be one of those things people talk about for years.

Yes, you read that right. Despite a decades-long career on the British stage, and various theatrical appearances around New York City, Oedipus surprisingly marked Manville’s Broadway debut. The triumphant run was capped, months after it ended, with seven Tony nominations, including the very first for Manville herself. For this great actor, the nods are not just the icing on a delicious cake, but a lovely validation of an experience she already considered a win.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Oedipus was one of the best productions of the theater season, and everyone is in universal agreement on that.
Well, that’s lovely of you to say.

You could hear a pin drop in the audience the night that I was there. Were you aware of the profound effect the play was having each night?
Mark [Strong] and I were very in tune with the feedback that we were getting on a nightly basis. We’d bound back to our dressing rooms, just kind of thinking “We’ve done another good show,” and greeting people coming ’round to see us who were shattered and torn and broken and in need of some reviving.

So, you were aware of the effect it was having on people.
We knew it was an impressive evening in the theater, and one that stays with you, for sure.

Looking back on the whole experience, dating back to 2024 when you were first putting it together in London, what does this kind of recognition now mean to you and Mark and Robert Icke?
It’s a kind of indescribably feeling of love and warmth. The kernel of this whole thing was a wonderful company of actors in a rehearsal room in Southeast London, just slowly getting to grips with this epic piece of drama and loving it and feeling safe and feeling that we could mine the depths of this very complex relationship and bring something rather wonderful to the stage.

I’m so pleased for all the nominees; I mean, we got Best Revival; Hildegard [Bechtler], who did our set, Natasha [Chivers], who did our lighting, and Tom [Gibbons], who did the sound design. They’re all extraordinarily gifted people who were part of this whole thing. It’s not just me and Mark and Rob; it’s so many ingredients and an amazing cast on both sides of the Atlantic.

So, I feel very warm and full of love for all the people that we made this extraordinary production with, and very grateful to have had the opportunity to bring it to Broadway, which I’d never done.

Given your extensive stage career, it’s genuinely hard to believe this was your Broadway debut.
I’d never done Broadway before! I’d done BAM a couple of times [in Ghosts, 2015, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 2018], and the Public Theater [in Top Girls, 1982], but never Broadway. It has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? I’ve been on Broadway and now I’ve got a Tony nomination. It’s thrilling. It really is thrilling.

Was the Broadway experience what you wanted it to be, or what you imagined it would be?
What I wanted was for Broadway to embrace our production and embrace the work that we’d all put in. And they did that wholeheartedly.

How did it feel to have seen New York audiences embrace this transfer so completely?
It feels like we won. I think that we won Broadway. We brought our English production to your fantastic stage at Studio 54, which was glorious, and people came in their droves to see it, and were as moved and shaken as the audiences were in London. So, yeah…We did good. And…Who knows? I may never play Broadway again. I’d like to!

I hope you do. But I’ll come back to BAM to see you any time.
Ok, good!