Theatre director Robert Icke and I are some way into our conversation when the waitress approaches to enquire if everything is all right. It is, we reply. She hesitates. There’s clearly something else.
“Are you Robert Icke?” she asks, tentatively. “I am, yeah,” replies Icke. She lights up. “I just saw Oedipus. It was amazing — honestly the best production I’ve seen in the West End for a long, long time. It blew my mind.”
And that, in essence, is why we are meeting. Icke, now 38, has the ability to bring such dazzling immediacy to an ancient Greek tragedy that a complete stranger will feel compelled to talk to him about it. One of the outstanding directors of his generation, he can make even the most familiar texts feel as if they have just been pulled from the printer.
During the past decade he’s staged a string of brilliantly redefined classics, including Aeschylus’s Oresteia (2015), which unfolded as an urgent courtroom drama, and an achingly sad Hamlet (2017) with Andrew Scott at the helm. Last year, Player Kings — a sort of box-set-binge approach to Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays — featured a magnificent, mercurial Ian McKellen as Falstaff.
And then, most recently, Oedipus (staged first in Amsterdam, then London, and due to open on Broadway in November). In Icke’s stunning reworking, Sophocles’ harrowing tragedy becomes both a modern political thriller and an intensely moving personal enquiry into how much we ever know — or really want to know — about our own lives.
One critic compared his approach to Dyno-Rod, the drain-clearing experts — not the most glamorous description, but you can see where she was coming from — and adjectives such as bold, audacious, radical follow him around. Does he feel bold?
“No!” Icke gives an embarrassed laugh and shuffles slightly in his chair. “I don’t mind ‘radical’. Because that word is from ‘radix’, meaning ‘the root’ in Latin. So if you’re radical you’re trying to get back to the root, back to the original impulse.
“I suppose that is how I feel about [theatre]. That you’re on a search. What’s really happening here? What are we really exploring? With any great play there are great answers to that. But you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves.” A bit like Dyno-Rod, then.
We’re tucked in a corner in Cinder, a tiny, friendly restaurant in Belsize Park. Outside, a hint of warmth has coaxed some diners on to the pavement; early spring blossom tumbles about idly on a pleasant breeze. There’s a well-manicured village feel to this little enclave of north London: en route, I spot a smartly dressed gentleman picking up litter.
Icke, in a charcoal jumper and jeans, has arrived from nearby rehearsals for his new show, Manhunt, with a bounce in his step and in surprisingly laid-back mood, given that he’s been working on a Saturday. He’s just wrapped up the rehearsal room, he explains; the next step is to move into the theatre. There’s a gear shift that allows a moment to draw breath.
He studies the menu with interest. Is he a foodie? He grins. “Before we had a kid we used to love going to restaurants” — Icke and his partner have a three-year-old daughter — “but now . . . I’m just looking at this [menu] and going, black lime salt is not a thing that has been in my life.”
We decide to share two starters: leeks with pecorino and hazelnuts (cheesy and delicious) and grilled bread with garlic tahini and tomato salsa, then smoky lamb chops for him and an aubergine dish for me. The triple-cooked potatoes — with black lime salt — are a must, says the waitress, and, since Icke clearly needs to experience black lime salt, we follow her advice.
No alcohol. Icke doesn’t drink — he simply never started, he says. “When I was a kid, where I grew up, learning to drink was bottles of White Lightning [strong cheap cider] on the school field and I never really fancied that . . . So I just sort of missed it. And then I realised it was cheaper to miss it!”
We talk about his new play, Manhunt, at London’s Royal Court. A tough subject and, at first sight, a huge pivot from the bulk of his work. For a start, Icke has written it from scratch, rather than forging a new version of an existing text. Second, it’s not about a fictitious or distant character but a real, recent and notorious person: Raoul Moat.
Scratch below the surface, however, and many of the themes that wheel through so much of Icke’s work — truth, grief, justice, a protagonist in crisis — are present. And here, they come into particularly stark focus.
In July 2010, Moat, a 37-year-old former nightclub bouncer, was released from Durham prison. Within two days, he had shot and injured his estranged girlfriend, shot dead her new partner and shot and blinded a police officer. He then went on the run for a week, prompting a massive police manhunt across north-east England, before killing himself. It’s a desperate tale. So why tell it?
“David Cameron [then UK prime minister] said in parliament that Raoul Moat was a monster pure and simple,” replies Icke. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m not sure that’s true of anybody.’ And of course the question, really, is: in what ways does Moat’s story hold all of the things that we’re struggling with about men?”
It’s a project freighted with moral dilemmas. The material is deeply distressing and raises a host of difficult memories, including the way Moat’s case was romanticised by some on social media. And then there’s the issue of dramatising real life. Icke explains that his script is based on Moat’s own words. “There is so much of him giving testimony — a [handwritten], 49-page ‘murder statement’ that he left when he was on the run, hours of him on Dictaphones explaining what he did.”
Icke also feels that examining male rage is important right now: “There’s certainly a part of me that thinks, ‘I don’t want to understand where he’s coming from, I just want to go, this is a bad guy, he’s nothing to do with me.’
“But the answer can’t just be to condemn people. You can’t ever justify — how could you? He killed somebody and ruined lives. But if we want to understand what happened, the only place to try and do that is inside him.”
Manhunt opens at a time of intense concern about violence, misogyny and the malign influence on young men of certain online voices. But what can theatre bring to this sort of discussion?
For Icke, it’s an opportunity to examine a difficult issue within a safe framework. Moat, he suggests, offers a case study as to why voices like that of self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate are landing. Plus, theatre is communal. Icke takes his cue from the ancient Greeks, pointing out that their foundational tragedies often focused unflinchingly on the darkest corners of human behaviour.
“Because the Greeks were so concerned with what it was to be a society, theatre really served a social purpose for them,” he says. “It wasn’t to lecture people about what the right thing to do was, but it was to be confronted with how little we know ourselves really. Take Oedipus. There’s something about facing what is scary that theatre can do because it’s not real.”
Indeed, Icke’s Oedipus made you care so much about the central couple and the deep bond between them that you found yourself admiring Oedipus’s integrity yet rooting desperately against his quest for truth. In his version too, nearly everyone on stage had a truth that needed to be revealed or concealed. For Icke, that’s the brilliance of live drama. It’s driven by empathy. It excels at foregrounding paradox and the fact that two things can hold good at the same time.
Duality is built into the very form, he points out: “Theatre is both totally true, in that an actor can cry genuine tears for you, and also totally untrue — he’s playing a fictional character.” The complexity of that experience is hugely valuable, Icke argues, in a world where public discourse is so frequently dominated by aggressive certainties.
Despite the path of his own life, then, there is much in Moat’s background, in the post-industrial north, that he recognises. “I went to school with kids like Moat. It doesn’t feel like another universe to me.”
As our main courses arrive we reflect on that background. Icke grew up in Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham, son of a tax inspector and a teacher. What was he like as a child? “Booky,” he replies. “My house now is full of books.”
He played piano well enough to earn money accompanying a local opera group. But it was when his dad took him, aged 15, to see Richard III, directed by Michael Grandage, that everything changed.
“It blew my head off,” recalls Icke, spearing a potato on his fork. “So I wrote to Grandage and said, ‘Would you tell me how you did it?’ He not only wrote back — he’s such a lovely guy — but I met him at the Donmar Warehouse [in London]. I spent about an hour and a half with him, and he just said a whole load of very practical things about how to direct a play.”
Soon the teenage Icke had formed his own company and was staging Shakespeare at the local Arc Theatre: “I was really blessed that there was a guy running the arts centre who was mad enough to go, ‘Oh yes, that’s a good idea, we should hand over the 400-seat main house to these kids.’”
With typical chutzpah, he started big. His first production was Julius Caesar. “I remember very vividly when my grandma came into the bathroom where me and my friend had been working out how to do the blood on the daggers. There was [fake] blood all up the side of the bath and all over our hands. We were completely thrilled with ourselves, and my grandma made such a noise.”
He laughs at the memory. “But that pleasure of working with people — as soon as I got a taste of that, I realised I didn’t want to practise piano on my own for eight hours every day.”
In person, as on stage, Icke is tremendous company: funny, eclectic, deeply thoughtful. He suddenly breaks off conversation to offer to share his lamb chops — “dive in!” — and combines enthusiasm for The Sopranos with rigorous intellectual research. He counts among his mentors the distinguished Shakespearean scholar Anne Barton, who was his tutor at Cambridge — “There wasn’t a separation for her between literature and life” — and the great director Peter Brook. His work has taken him all over the world: from 2020-23 he worked with the influential Internationaal Theater Amsterdam.
But, for him, the acid test of any production is still whether it would appeal to the 15-year-olds he knew back in Stockton. Hence his concern about the prohibitive ticket prices that increasingly dog live theatre. He insists on capping the top price when he works in the commercial, rather than the subsidised, sector. For Oedipus, he added a low-price performance for under-thirties. “It sold out in half an hour.”
Hence too his drive to cook up a storm here and now: to tell any story in the present tense. For him, period productions are missing the most essential ingredient — a “period authentic audience” who would have arrived buzzing with the politics and preoccupations of their time.
The defining feature of theatre is its liveness, he says: lose that and you lose the point. “The great plays are so great that you want them to survive. And they only survive if you carry them forward with us.”
Immediacy is not just about costumes and set, however. Icke has a terrific knack for unlocking a play live in front of you. When Andrew Scott walked across the stage staring at his hands and wishing that this “too too solid flesh would melt”, you felt you were seeing Hamlet, wired and desolate, come face to face with his own mortality in real time.
Even more acutely, for Schiller’s Mary Stuart, about Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, the company flipped a coin at the start of each show to decide which actress would play which queen. Instantly, the audience was plunged into the jeopardy at the heart of that drama.
From the outside, Icke’s life looks to be peppered with moments of breathtaking confidence: writing to Grandage; setting up a company in his teens; rewriting Aeschylus in his twenties. Icke doesn’t see it like that. He rarely arrives in rehearsals with a blueprint, he says. Rather, it is about plugging away with a cast to unearth the core of a piece. He talks about finding “the backdoor key” to a play.
“Part of that is being willing to say ‘I don’t know’ for a long time . . . I’m quite willing to change everything and to throw everything out and start again.” So much of that is down to the skill of actors, he adds. McKellen was brilliant for “the jazziness of the way he approaches the text”.
We’re both now nursing a coffee and slowly consuming a delicate yoghurt mousse topped with rhubarb and pistachio crumble. A quiet has descended on the little restaurant. Around us the other diners have melted away and the staff are starting to reset for dinner. Outside, dusk is stealing on. It’s nearly three hours since we stepped through the door.
Conversation winds reflectively. Icke discusses what he’s learnt from working so intimately on the great masters: “For me, it’s like being in apprenticeship to these incredible people.” He talks in awe of Chekhov’s command of the four-act structure and of the musicality and rhythm of his writing, and of the beauty and genius with which Shakespeare refracts ideas right through a play, creating parallels and patterns: the poleaxing nature of grief in Hamlet, for instance.
So I wonder, as I ask for the bill, if Icke could have swapped his dining companion today, which writer might he have chosen?
He laughs. “I think Ibsen would be the least interesting. He had the same lunch every day, didn’t he?” The Norwegian writer did indeed stick to a rigorous routine. “And Chekhov — as a doctor, he’s always quizzically diagnosing . . .
“Shakespeare is the one you think, ‘Oh I wish I knew more about him.’ Because the humanity and the wisdom in those plays is so deep. I’d be so interested in knowing what he thought about being alive, being a parent, about how the world should work. Yes, Shakespeare is the one.”
Sarah Hemming is the FT’s theatre critic
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