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[title]Regularly accused of being a genius, Stockton-on-Tees-born director Robert Icke spent his twenties and early thirties scoring West End hit after West End hit with everything from a bone-shudderingly intense take on George Orwell’s 1984 to a three-and-a-half-hour rewrite of Ancient Greek tragic trilogy Oresteia. Based at Islington’s Almeida Theatre, his cerebral-but-emotional modern dress takes on the classics did much to lead the way for British theatre’s Europhile drift in the ’10s.
Since leaving the Almeida in 2019 he’s somewhat disappeared from view, working abroad and on a puppet-based adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm that received rave word-of-mouth on an extensive UK tour but hasn’t come to London.
This year, however, has seen him back in a big way. In spring his Ian McKellen-starring Player Kings mashed up Shakespeare Henry IV Parts 1 + 2 to scintillating effect and now London finally gets to see his take on Oedipus, which premiered in Amsterdam in 2018. Produced by Sonia Friedman and originally intended to run in 2020 with the great Helen Mirren starring as Jocasta opposite Mark Strong in the title role of the great statesman who has unwittingly married his own mother. It finally arrives four years late with Lesley Manville starring opposite Strong.
When you were in your twenties you had a reputation as a bit of an enfant terrible who would slag off the entire British theatre establishment in most interviews. But you don’t speak to the press much these days. Did you get bored slagging off the entire British theatre establishment?
‘You don't choose the archetype you get slotted into. And that was the available one for me at the time. And I didn't really know how to manage that. But also the real answer to your question is Player Kings was the first new thing I've made in London since 2019. Most of the new work I’ve made since has been in Europe. You’re expected to talk about yourself over here. But in Germany, no one gives a shit. They're like: what have you done and why are you doing it?’
Okay: what have you done to Oedipus and why are you doing it?
‘I've always really liked Oedipus, it's a masterpiece. The language knows what's going on in the play, but none of the characters do. So Oedipus says: “Children, my brothers and sisters” and you're like, yes, in fact, your children are your brother and sister. When I’m adapting I always ask what feels important? What is most primal about it? With Oedipus it’s the terror that you might not know who you are – that you might not know anything about your life and that if you pull one thread, the whole thing might just come away completely.’
In your take Mark Strong’s Oedipus is a politician on election night – how did you come up with that idea?
’Hillary Clinton had just lost the 2016 election when I was first thinking about this in 2017 and she didn’t leave her hotel for days. What conversations happened in there? All you need to understand is Oedipus is about to win a big election by a landslide, and he and his family are locked in this place until the result comes in.’
Do you have any qualms about dramatically modernising these ancient plays?
‘My goal is always to say: well, the Greeks took a story from Homer and retold it so it was surprising to them. Unless [a production] is surprising and astonishing and it makes you feel something, what's the point of it? You're just involved in a museum recreation.’
There was some brouhaha earlier this year when your production of Oedipus and an Old Vic production of Oedipus were announced on the same evening – what happened there?
‘I'd be lying if I said I thought that wasn’t pretty bad form, given Mark Strong signed up in 2018 and we were gonna be on first anyway. I think they’d attempted to sort of race their announcement in front. They made the classic mistake of trying to ambush Sonia Friedman. And I think Sonia Friedman went into sixth gear and we actually were first announcing by like, 12 minutes or something stupid.’
In fact it was originally going to run here in 2020 with Helen Mirren starring – Lesley Manville is a tremendous replacement but Mirren would have been a coup. Do you think she’s done with theatre now? How did you persuade her to say yes?
‘She did a reading of it with Mark Strong and said yes in the reading. And then for various reasons I think was a bit nervous about coming back to the theatre post the pandemic. She has said to me since that there is a play in her and I have an idea for her that I've actually got about a third’s worth in various pieces of paper in my desk. If I ever get myself organised and get it finished for her, I would love to think she might think about doing it.’
Sometimes it feels older artists of the stature of Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen are unwilling to work with younger directors…
‘It's a big deal. If you're Ian McKellen, and you're gonna play a Shakespeare part you've never played before then if you fuck it up, you're Ian McKellen fucking it up and so no wonder there's a desire for security. Player Kings started because he came to see the Hamlet that I did with Andrew Scott and was very nice about that and emailed me and I was like “I got an email off Gandalf!!!”. And then we just started to talk. We hung out a lot together in the pandemic, and it was a lot of me going: you should play Falstaff, you'd be amazing – it's not the part you think it is.’
It’s incredible he can still turn in a performance like that in his mid-eighties
‘It was such a pleasure working with him, and we're gonna do more – I think he's gonna do more stuff again probably next year.’
You’re taking Player Kings to Broadway?
‘America and here, though probably not London. Because he's really very passionate about touring, he’s the only actor I've ever met who actually wants to go on tour.’
Presumably that’s to make up for the regional dates he had to withdraw from after falling off stage in London?
‘Yes. There were a lot of people who asked for refunds who wanted to see him, which is fair enough. It was a very difficult decision to not let him go back, he was kind of keen to go. And I think we just had to be like: you have to recover, you actually have to recover. He did this genuinely gorgeous thing, which is on the final Saturday of the tour, in Newcastle, he’d sent the company a slightly maudlin video of himself singing We’ll Meet Again. And so they were all watching it on an iPad at Theatre Royal Newcastle and halfway through We'll Meet Again the real Ian emerges clean shaven, looking 20 years younger and after about 40 minutes, I was thinking, if they don't all stop crying, we may be not able to do this. He and I got the train all the way up from King's Cross up to Newcastle to surprise them, which was a wild journey in itself, trying to smuggle somebody that famous on a national train line is quite tricky.’
Shakespeare nerd question: some people were outraged that you had Prince Hal cheat to beat Hotspur during their climactic duel in Player Kings – are you going to say that was all in the text?
‘Yes! It's clear from the play that everyone expects Hal to die. He's a terrible fighter ’cos he's just been getting pissed with Falstaff the whole time. There is absolutely nothing to suggest in the text that Hal has got any fucking chance at all. Sometimes you have to be ruthless, and he does a very Falstaff thing in our version: he sees an opportunity to get ahead. It's dishonourable, but it's the thing that's gonna keep him alive, and he takes it.’
When is London getting your production of Animal Farm?
’You're hopefully gonna get it either next year or in ’26, it’s all being talked about at the moment. God knows quite where or how – it’s a big thing. Lots of people in there. Lots of puppets in there. My diary is hard to navigate, [puppeteer] Toby Olie’s diary is hard to navigate, [designer] Bunnie Christie's diary is hard to navigate, and all the smaller West End playhouses are hard to get these days in a way that they weren't in 2014.’
You’re always referred to as ‘director’ rather than ‘playwright’ but are you not in fact a playwright as well?
‘I suppose I’m more of a European sort of director. There's a play I'm gonna do next year which is a sort of good test case for this. I probably can't say too much about it, but I think I'm allowed to tell you that it's about Raoul Moat.’
I’m sorry, what?
‘I wanted to make a show about masculinity, and I kept joking to people in 2018 about identity politics in theatre, and I was like: I hope it calms down because if it keeps going, I'll only be allowed to make shows about Raoul Moat. Then after I said that a few times I was like – maybe there is a good production about him, because actually, he's a really compelling, ambivalent, difficult figure – a kind of violent alpha, but also lost little boy kind of masculinity. His dad turned up at the inquest, having never met him. Gazza turned up during the hostage standoff. He died by suicide, as did the policeman that he blinded in Newcastle, as did eventually the guy who owned the taser company that supplied the taser that was fired at him that didn't work. There's so many things I think are interesting in it about the conversation we have about men and boys.’
Is it a tragedy?
‘It's a misconception of the idea of what a tragedy is that it’s about a nice person who had a bad hand; actually it’s nearly always about people making choices. You know, Hamlet chose to kill a lot of people. So I’m interested in what it feels like to try and make one of those productions around a real person who lived and who exists very much in living memory.’
Oedipus is at Wyndham’s Theatre, Oct 4-Jan 4 2025. Buy tickets here.
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