Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic 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\u2019s clearly something else. \u201cAre you Robert Icke?\u201d she asks, tentatively. \u201cI am, yeah,\u201d replies Icke. She lights up. \u201cI just saw Oedipus. It was amazing \u2014 honestly the best production I\u2019ve seen in the West End for a long, long time. It blew my mind.\u201dAnd 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\u2019s staged a string of brilliantly redefined classics, including Aeschylus\u2019s 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 \u2014 a sort of box-set-binge approach to Shakespeare\u2019s two Henry IV plays \u2014 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\u2019s stunning reworking, Sophocles\u2019 harrowing tragedy becomes both a modern political thriller and an intensely moving personal enquiry into how much we ever know \u2014 or really want to know \u2014 about our own lives.One critic compared his approach to Dyno-Rod, the drain-clearing experts \u2014 not the most glamorous description, but you can see where she was coming from \u2014 and adjectives such as bold, audacious, radical follow him around. Does he feel bold?\u201cNo!\u201d Icke gives an embarrassed laugh and shuffles slightly in his chair. \u201cI don\u2019t mind \u2018radical\u2019. Because that word is from \u2018radix\u2019, meaning \u2018the root\u2019 in Latin. So if you\u2019re radical you\u2019re trying to get back to the root, back to the original impulse.\u201cI suppose that is how I feel about [theatre]. That you\u2019re on a search. What\u2019s 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.\u201d A bit like Dyno-Rod, then.The question, really, is: in what ways does Raoul Moat\u2019s story hold all of the things that we\u2019re struggling with about men?We\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2019s been working on a Saturday. He\u2019s just wrapped up the rehearsal room, he explains; the next step is to move into the theatre. There\u2019s a gear shift that allows a moment to draw breath. He studies the menu with interest. Is he a foodie? He grins. \u201cBefore we had a kid we used to love going to restaurants\u201d \u2014 Icke and his partner have a three-year-old daughter \u2014 \u201cbut now . . . I\u2019m just looking at this [menu] and going, black lime salt is not a thing that has been in my life.\u201dWe 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 \u2014 with black lime salt \u2014 are a must, says the waitress, and, since Icke clearly needs to experience black lime salt, we follow her advice.No alcohol. Icke doesn\u2019t drink \u2014 he simply never started, he says. \u201cWhen 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!\u201d We talk about his new play, Manhunt, at London\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s work \u2014 truth, grief, justice, a protagonist in crisis \u2014 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\u2019s a desperate tale. So why tell it?\u201cDavid Cameron [then UK prime minister] said in parliament that Raoul Moat was a monster pure and simple,\u201d replies Icke. \u201cI remember thinking, \u2018I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s true of anybody.\u2019 And of course the question, really, is: in what ways does Moat\u2019s story hold all of the things that we\u2019re struggling with about men?\u201dIt\u2019s a project freighted with moral dilemmas. The material is deeply distressing and raises a host of difficult memories, including the way Moat\u2019s case was romanticised by some on social media. And then there\u2019s the issue of dramatising real life. Icke explains that his script is based on Moat\u2019s own words. \u201cThere is so much of him giving testimony \u2014 a [handwritten], 49-page \u2018murder statement\u2019 that he left when he was on the run, hours of him on Dictaphones explaining what he did.\u201d Icke also feels that examining male rage is important right now: \u201cThere\u2019s certainly a part of me that thinks, \u2018I don\u2019t want to understand where he\u2019s coming from, I just want to go, this is a bad guy, he\u2019s nothing to do with me.\u2019 \u201cBut the answer can\u2019t just be to condemn people. You can\u2019t ever justify \u2014 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.\u201dManhunt 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\u2019s 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.\u201cBecause the Greeks were so concerned with what it was to be a society, theatre really served a social purpose for them,\u201d he says. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s something about facing what is scary that theatre can do because it\u2019s not real.\u201dIndeed, Icke\u2019s Oedipus made you care so much about the central couple and the deep bond between them that you found yourself admiring Oedipus\u2019s 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\u2019s the brilliance of live drama. It\u2019s 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: \u201cTheatre is both totally true, in that an actor can cry genuine tears for you, and also totally untrue \u2014 he\u2019s playing a fictional character.\u201d 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\u2019s background, in the post-industrial north, that he recognises. \u201cI went to school with kids like Moat. It doesn\u2019t feel like another universe to me.\u201dAs 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? \u201cBooky,\u201d he replies. \u201cMy house now is full of books.\u201d 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.\u201cIt blew my head off,\u201d recalls Icke, spearing a potato on his fork. \u201cSo I wrote to Grandage and said, \u2018Would you tell me how you did it?\u2019 He not only wrote back \u2014 he\u2019s such a lovely guy \u2014 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.\u201dSoon the teenage Icke had formed his own company and was staging Shakespeare at the local Arc Theatre: \u201cI was really blessed that there was a guy running the arts centre who was mad enough to go, \u2018Oh yes, that\u2019s a good idea, we should hand over the 400-seat main house to these kids.\u2019\u201dWith typical chutzpah, he started big. His first production was Julius Caesar. \u201cI 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.\u201dThe great plays are so great that you want them to survive. And they only survive if you carry them forward with usHe laughs at the memory. \u201cBut that pleasure of working with people \u2014 as soon as I got a taste of that, I realised I didn\u2019t want to practise piano on my own for eight hours every day.\u201d 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 \u2014 \u201cdive in!\u201d \u2014 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 \u2014 \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a separation for her between literature and life\u201d \u2014 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. \u201cIt sold out in half an hour.\u201dHence 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 \u2014 a \u201cperiod authentic audience\u201d 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. \u201cThe great plays are so great that you want them to survive. And they only survive if you carry them forward with us.\u201d 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 \u201ctoo too solid flesh would melt\u201d, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u201cthe backdoor key\u201d to a play. \u201cPart of that is being willing to say \u2018I don\u2019t know\u2019 for a long time . . . I\u2019m quite willing to change everything and to throw everything out and start again.\u201d So much of that is down to the skill of actors, he adds. McKellen was brilliant for \u201cthe jazziness of the way he approaches the text\u201d. We\u2019re 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\u2019s nearly three hours since we stepped through the door. Conversation winds reflectively. Icke discusses what he\u2019s learnt from working so intimately on the great masters: \u201cFor me, it\u2019s like being in apprenticeship to these incredible people.\u201d He talks in awe of Chekhov\u2019s 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. \u201cI think Ibsen would be the least interesting. He had the same lunch every day, didn\u2019t he?\u201d The Norwegian writer did indeed stick to a rigorous routine. \u201cAnd Chekhov \u2014 as a doctor, he\u2019s always quizzically diagnosing . . . \u201cShakespeare is the one you think, \u2018Oh I wish I knew more about him.\u2019 Because the humanity and the wisdom in those plays is so deep. I\u2019d 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.\u201dSarah Hemming is the FT\u2019s theatre criticFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic 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\u2019s clearly something else. \u201cAre you Robert Icke?\u201d she asks, tentatively. \u201cI am, yeah,\u201d replies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":263396,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-263395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263395"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":263397,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263395\/revisions\/263397"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}