Interview: Robert Icke ‘if theatre isn’t astonishing, what’s the point?’
Robert Icke made his name directing boldly reimagined takes on some of the greatest plays ever written: Hamlet, Professor Bernhardi, The Oresteia and last year’s Oedipus (which cleared up during this year’s theatre award season).
Despite the sense that he has genuinely added something to millennia old works, it’s still a big deal to make his debut as a ‘proper’ playwright. Even his most outrageous rewrites have had somebody else’s ideas at their core. Manhunt, his play about Raoul Moat, is all him. And to be clear – and I’m going to shock you here – it’s not as good as Hamlet.
Nonetheless, after a tentative start where it looks like it’s going to serve as a sort of well-intended apologia for Moat, Manhunt really settles down into something compellingly weird. It’s an examination of toxic masculinity, yes, but in the same kind of way that Moby Dick is an examination of toxic masculinity.
The early stages see Samuel Edward-Cook’s triple-jacked double-stacked Moat in the dock for a variety of changes. If you have any familiarity with his short, brutal, bitterly absurd rampage across the north east, you’ll get that this trial can’t possibly have happened – it’s a vague existential framing device designed to get Icke’s Moat to defend his actions almost from the off.
There is undeniably something gauche about his pleading about the state of his mental health and hard childhood. And there’s a level of intentional obviousness: Icke wants to get straight to the point that Moat wasn’t a cartoon bogeyman, and that the measure of sympathy he found during his brief spell in the national spotlight wasn’t totally unwarranted.
Edward-Cook’s vulnerability and direct pleading to the audience aggressively underscores the point that Moat’s traumatic childhood informed his adult actions – a point we would surely have got if it had been made more subtlety. Still, that’s Icke’s lookout and it’s worth saying Manhunt is just 100 minutes long - he has chosen to compress and heighten things.
And Edward-Cook is deeply compelling as Moat, a sensitive brute whose unnerving mix of violence, vulnerability and monstrous physicality often seems genuinely unearthly. Flitting between the courtroom and flashbacks to Moat’s fateful few days after leaving prison, Edward-Cook’s pleading, panic-attack delivery and Tom Gibbon’s naggingly loud, organ-based score give a real sense of Moat’s fraying grip on reality.
Where the play really finds its feet is in an unexpectedly tangential scene that concerns David Rathband, the officer Moat shot and blinded on his rampage. The room is plunged into darkness and for the only time in the play Edward-Cook isn’t on stage. Instead we get a haunting, tortured monologue from Rathband (Nicolas Tennant). In it, he describes the devastation that his blinding wrought and his despair at going from ‘hero PC’ to tabloid punching bag after cheating on his wife. Icke is clearly drawing parallels with Moat: both were vulnerable men, poorly cared for by society; while one was a hero, one a villain, they both met the same end.
The blackout is clearly there to simulate Rathband’s blindness, but with pleasing audacity it also covers a major set change, as Hildegarde Bechtler’s design moves from hard concrete to grassy bucolic as Moat goes on the run in the Northumbria countryside. It’s here that the play clicks, warping from something literal into something borderline metaphysical, a psychographic journey into the hinterlands of toxic masculinity rather than an attempt to literally explain what happened.
The true story feels evasive of conventional narrative because its farcical elements are difficult to reconcile with the darker stuff. In particular the profoundly random appearance of Paul Gascoigne during Moat’s final standoff with police feels too juicy a detail to ignore but too bizarre to comfortably fit into a serious story. But I was surprised to find Trevor Fox’s turn as Gazza to be my favourite bit of the play. A cracked, Ahab-like figure who regales a bewildered Moat with a seething account of his England career, he is deeply odd and compelling – at the climax of his story he simply emits two bloodcurdling screams. This didn’t happen: Gazza was turned away and never spoke to Moat. But Icke embraces the incident brilliantly, and the play gains in power as it leaves literalism behind.
Icke was born to collaborate with greatness - polishing up ancient tragedies, finding fresh meaning in Shakespeare, unearthing the emotional side to works that have otherwise desiccated with the centuries. Coming up with his own story exposes his limits: not least the limits to his subtlety. But his core strengths remain. Manhunt may spell things out a bit much, but it’s also emotionally vivid and compellingly other, blessed with great performances and an unnerving grandeur as Moat’s odyssey takes him towards his own heart of darkness.
