To write Tomorrow, Hanks and Glossman adapted several of Hanks's own short stories, most notably “The Past Matters to Us,” which he had long hoped could become a film. Most of the problems arise from confusion about how the script should differ from the script – the number of locations, the placement of minor characters, and so on. And frankly, Burt isn't good enough for Hanks. Ever since I spent the day at the Shed, I've been mentally choosing it elsewhere. We should see his director in Our Town. Or his Willy Loman.
However, I recommend this story, which gives some insight into the strange discord in Tomorrow. This makes it clear that Burt the Billionaire is a Billionaire. boor and that he hides the reason for his trips from Cindy – according to the story, she is his wife, “the fourth and youngest.” Bert's sudden interest in Carmen seems to be the intoxication of a shiny new thing, which is reflected in the fact that the World's Fair is actually a product competition. In casting the obviously sweet and decent Hanks, the team had to go with Bert, who is also sweet and decent, but the story lingers with the whiff of that selfish ur-Bert. “Their future then was better than what we have now,” Bert tells M-Dash, and that’s a damn nice thing to say about people in 1939. But Bert has a girl he's courting, and so the world—this poor, poor world—will have to fend for itself.
There is something almost Oedipal in the devotion of some men to the women of the past. Is it significant that Bert falls in love with a woman from a previous generation? What an undemanding fantasy Carmen is: an old-fashioned stoic from the greatest generation, who is also young and has never heard of women's freedom. What would Freud say about such a relationship? It's a mystery. How lucky we are to be able to consult the mother of all such May-December romances now that the fall's biggest West End transfer of the fall has arrived at Studio 54.
In Robert Icke's stunning Oedipus, the director's reworking of Sophocles' great tragedy, the bones remain the same: a prophecy tells Oedipus (Mark Strong), who seems to be a man of almost unlimited luck, that he unknowingly killed his father and slept with his mother. In Ike's modern version, Oedipus is a candidate on election night, on edge as promising results roll in. Throughout, Ike builds up the erotic energy between Oedipus and his queen—in this case, political wife—Jocasta (Lesley Manville), even slightly past the point of the damning romantic revelation that she is his mother. (You can buy merchandise in the lobby that says “Truth is a Bastard,” in case you're worried about spoilers.)
Oedipus' terrible night The action takes place at his campaign headquarters—a series of impersonal white conference rooms designed by Hildegard Bechtler—as black-clad movers clear them out for the next tenant. (Ike calls attention to the cyclical nature of tragedy; every ending is a beginning is an end.) As the stage empties, Oedipus's family gathers to distract him from the results of the vote: his wife jokes about how she is about thirteen years older than him; his daughter Antigone (Olivia Reis) brings with her a philosophy textbook for college, and she and her uncle Creon (John Carroll Lynch) discuss the riddle of the Sphinx; and Oedipus' apparent mother, Merope (a stunning Anne Reid), continues to pester him for his word, concerned about his last-minute campaign promise to reveal his birth certificate.
Meanwhile, a countdown clock in the background counts down to when the voting results will be tallied. In the director's wonderful peacocking, at the very moment the clock strikes 00:00:00, Oedipus finally learns everything he needs to know.
Strong, whose magnanimous Oedipus flares with resentful irritability whenever he encounters even the slightest resistance, clenches his jaw to the limit, and this should be foreshadowing enough. But Ike can't resist warning us about the wit of his script, including plenty of double entendres—”You will be the death of me,” Jocasta says, looking adoringly at her husband—and flirting with the line between horror and farce. Ike's sensitivity is disturbingly disgusting: he forces an accidentally incestuous couple to fondle, kiss, and fumble in each other's underwear. However, he eventually redirects the night back into a more genuinely felt sense of tragedy, relaying the eleventh-hour monologue to Manville, who delivers a long speech about the past that Jocasta hoped to bury with a certain child. Ike destabilizes the old Sophocles calculus: what happened to Jocasta at age thirteen far exceeds anything that befalls Oedipus. But, of course, his name is on the tent. Mothers never get enough recognition. ♦
