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As if on cue, another great male playwright offers another great piece of work about masculinity. Where James Graham devastated with Punch, and Jack Thorne shook the national conversation with Adolescence, now Robert Icke revisits the story of Raoul Moat who, in 2010, after shooting his ex-partner and her boyfriend, led Northumbria police on the biggest manhunt in British history.
For years Icke has been hacking and honing old classics to make them feel fresh and thrilling. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Schiller, Schnitzler: his range has been vast and, while directing those productions too, he has made some extraordinary pieces of theatre, not least last year’s Oedipus which just won two Olivier Awards.
This is a swerve. A big one. And though a kaleidoscopic display of his powers as a director, full of traces of his previous work (screens, surtitled times and dates, young children), it’s also fascinatingly and unexpectedly messy — not what we have come to expect from this master of absolute precision. Manhunt is a strange piece that sometimes suffers against the high standards Icke himself set.
Samuel Edward-Cook’s Moat paces and prowls behind a grille like a beast in a zoo. He pulls us inside his shaven head, telling us how the world is stacked against him: the social worker accusing him of hitting his child, solicitor advising him to plead guilty, police circling, courts condemning, council threatening to take away his house and kids. “I’m a bad man from every angle,” he laments.
Edward-Cook plays him as unexploded ordnance (until, of course, he explodes). He combines a heavy juggernaut quality with an extraordinary quickness, jabbing his lines at us and always in motion while the people that accumulate around him on stage stay still. He puts paranoia and persecution into his staring eyes and for every moment of rage and violence, he gives us one of deep vulnerability.
Icke sometimes dwells in that space, where this violent man can also be vulnerable. But he also ranges widely. He brings in ideas around reality and fiction — the case is so mired in conflicting accounts that Icke constantly undermines the reliability of Moat’s words — and meanwhile tries to hold onto the inherent strangeness of the story, where McFlurries and campfire sausages play a part as much as manhood and trauma. The diffuse approach doesn’t always work.
Yet some scenes absolutely blaze. A long blackout in which a policeman shot and blinded by Moat talks about taking his own life is a chilling centrepiece. Anyone who knows the story is waiting for the moment footballer Paul Gascoigne shows up, and something that might be played for laughs becomes instead a centrepiece in Icke’s study of masculinity: how easily men are bruised and ridiculed, how they turn to destruction of self and others.
You have to admire a man at the peak of his powers deciding suddenly to spin off in a completely different direction. Part-thriller, part-treatise, part bleak farce, part-memory play, as it drifts into a mythic, dreamlike denouement where boundaries between reality and fiction bleed, Icke refuses to take us to a place of certainty or clarity. He can’t bring himself to condemn Moat, then can’t bring himself not to. The result is a big grey smudge of a play, deeply ambivalent, but deeply felt.
★★★☆☆
To May 3, royalcourttheatre.com
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