Latest news with #RobertIcke
Telegraph
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
I spent five years trying to understand Raoul Moat. This is what I learnt
The second time I visited rehearsals for Manhunt, Robert Icke's new play about Raoul Moat, I couldn't watch. In an arts centre in Belsize Park - they'd moved from a previous rehearsal space due to the noise of a neighbouring musical - I sat on a blue plastic seat, averting my eyes from the actors, staring at a script, waiting for the scene to end. Most of us develop a strategy to cope with conflict when we're children, a way to manage the noise and fear and uncertainty of what might happen next. In the rehearsal room, despite it being scripted, I instinctively returned to mine: head down, don't look, don't become the focus of the person who just did all that or, shamefully, the person who it was done to. The scene ended. The room quietened. The actors became actors again. I looked up. A table had been broken, its legs snapped. Apologies were made. It wasn't supposed to happen, but also wasn't the first time. A new table was brought in, unpacked from a box, put on an imaginary stage marked out with red tape. More tables had already been ordered. The atmosphere never returned to what it was before the explosion. Its after effects lingered for the rest of the day, all of us doing the things we were supposed to be doing, but knowing that something ugly and bad and threatening was still among us. As someone working on the play I felt relief: it meant Robert and the cast understood rage. It was July 2010 when the Birtley gunman, as Moat initially called himself, left Durham prison. (He was arrested a dozen times in his life but found guilty just once – of hitting a child.) When released, he shot his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart, who survived, and her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, who died. He then hid in a tent with two friends near Rothbury, a small village in Northumberland; a place he visited as a child and fantasised about living one day. The next night they drove back to Newcastle where Moat shot a police officer, David Rathband. He was blinded and later killed himself. Moat and his friends returned to Rothbury and camped out for another couple of days. His friends went on shopping trips, they cooked food on a barbecue, they visited McDonalds and ate ice cream. After four nights, police discovered their hideout. Moat's accomplices were arrested and later sentenced to a minimum of 20 and 40 years in prison. Moat went on the run by himself, hiding in the trees and crags of Northumberland. Snipers, helicopters, sniper jets, police dogs and Ray Mears looked for him. He was found by a woman walking on the bank of the River Coquet. Police surrounded him, so he pointed his shotgun at his own head. For hours a negotiator tried to persuade him to give himself up. Moat said he would never be released from prison, so wasn't coming in. The police fired two experimental, non-licensed taser projectiles at him. One missed. The other hit him but didn't seem to work. Moat then shot himself in the head. I was living in London when it happened, a freelance writer looking for a story to turn into a book. In London, my media friends seemed sympathetic towards Moat, assuming he wasn't sufficiently looked after by 'the system': he never knew his dad, said his mum suffered poor mental health, and as an adult sought psychiatric help. In Newcastle, I found no sympathy, but a feeling of: 'I had a tough childhood and I didn't shoot anyone.' That split seemed worth writing about, so I arranged to meet Angus Moat, Raoul's brother, then I moved back to Newcastle, my home town, and started years of research: attending the trial of his accomplices and Moat's inquest, interviewing people, hiking in Rothbury with Angus, listening to recordings, but most importantly reading documents. There was a 'murder statement' Moat wrote on the run, a transcript of recordings Moat made on dictaphone tapes after the shootings, a transcript of the standoff, medical records, correspondence, hundreds of pages of documents from his home, plus the clandestine audio recordings he made in the years before his death, a sign of his paranoia. When I started writing the book I was looking for answers: Were the police conspiring against him, as he claimed? Why did the police tell him he was in danger? Why was there no police recording of his final moments? Why was a warning he intended to harm his ex-girlfriend not passed on to her? I think I found the answers I needed. I didn't find any conspiracy. I found lots of small failures, but nobody to blame other than Moat, a strong but diminished man who was unable to control his anger or stick to the facts, and whose decisions exacerbated his problems and ultimately ruined his life, as well as the lives of many others. He once said he could do something amazing with his life, if only people like the police left him alone. I used that for the title of my book – You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] – in which I tried to examine his excuses, testing the limits of empathy, while ultimately holding him to account for the choices he made. The book came out in 2016. Eight years later, Robert got in touch to say he'd read my book and was writing a play about Moat for the Royal Court, would I help him. I dusted off my USB drives and boxes of material, started corresponding with him, talking on the phone, explaining the material and the story, reading his drafts, offering advice. It's not my play, it's Robert's, and there are big differences in how we tell the story. An obvious example is his decision to include Paul Gascoigne, who famously tried to reach Moat during the standoff. But more than that is the feeling a writer puts into a true crime story: what the writer thinks the crime can say to the audience about the world. When I wrote my book, I went in expecting to write about the neglected north east of England, but when I saw Moat's victims or their relatives in court, then spent years reading and listening to his words, I saw only the story of an individual, whose brain misread inputs, who struggled to control impulse and ego, and whose dangerous body seemed bursting with testosterone. Robert had his own feeling for what the story was about. The phrase I expect people will use, one I resist because it implies group culpability for individual actions, is toxic masculinity; or a crisis of masculinity. Robert's script makes that aspect unavoidable: boys, men, fathers, father figures, suicide, fear, confusion, and a failure of men to give each other what we need. There is a trend, since I wrote my book, to focus on the victims and give the murderer no attention. I understand that, and I understand why people will be outraged that Moat is being put on stage. To me, however, the victims didn't do anything, something was done to them, so we don't learn from them. My natural focus is on the murderer, to try to understand one question: why. Ultimately, Moat took lives; he destroyed flesh and bones and nerves. He did something that seems completely inhuman, despite him being human, just like us. That's what mesmerises us about true crime: we all have the ability to kill, but we continually choose not to. So what made Moat – and all the others – choose the other option? From working on Robert's play, 15 years after I started my research, I began to feel that Moat believed there is a model of what a man should be, and he became his approximation of that, but when his creation was challenged, the rage came. What we want to know is: where did the rage come from, how can men control it, and how much does it control them?
New York Times
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Oedipus' and ‘Rocky Horror Show' Are Returning to Broadway
Roundabout Theater Company, the largest nonprofit on Broadway, will present three very different classics next season: a Greek tragedy, a drawing-room comedy and a monster musical. The English writer and director Robert Icke's 'Oedipus,' a new version of the seminal Sophocles drama about a king who inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother, will come to Broadway in the fall. The production, starring Mark Strong ('A View From the Bridge') and Lesley Manville ('Phantom Thread'), had an enthusiastically reviewed previous run in London, and just received four Olivier Award nominations, for best revival as well as for the work by Icke, Strong and Manville. 'Oedipus' is a commercial venture, with Sonia Friedman as the lead producer; Roundabout is presenting it this fall at Studio 54 and will offer it to subscribers as part of the nonprofit's season. There were multiple versions of 'Oedipus Rex,' as the show is traditionally called, on Broadway in the early 20th century, but then it largely disappeared — the last production, a weeklong run in 1984, was performed in modern Greek. After 'Oedipus,' Roundabout will pivot to lighter fare: The musical 'The Rocky Horror Show' in the spring of 2026 at Studio 54, and the play 'Fallen Angels,' that same spring, at the Todd Haimes Theater. (The Haimes will close this fall for a renovation, which will include a restoration of the interior and an upgrade to the bathrooms, elevators and seats.) 'The Rocky Horror Show' is a 1973 sci-fi spoof by Richard O'Brien; it first ran on Broadway in 1975 and was revived once before, in 2000. The new production will be directed by Sam Pinkleton ('Oh, Mary!'), who had been scheduled to direct a version of the musical in 2020 at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, but that production was scuttled by the pandemic. 'Fallen Angels' is a 1925 comedy by Noël Coward about two married women with a shared ex-lover. This revival will be directed by Scott Ellis, the Roundabout's interim artistic director, and will star Rose Byrne ('Bridesmaids') and Kelli O'Hara (a Tony winner for 'The King and I'). 'Fallen Angels' has had two previous Broadway productions, in 1927 and 1956. Roundabout also has an Off Broadway theater, the Laura Pels, where next fall it plans to stage 'Archduke,' a play by Rajiv Joseph ('Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo') about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Darko Tresnjak (a Tony winner for 'A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder') will direct, and Patrick Page ('Hadestown') will star. Roundabout plans to follow 'Archduke' next winter with an Off Broadway production of 'Chinese Republicans,' a satirical workplace drama by Alex Lin, directed by Chay Yew.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Oedipus; Elektra review
What a glut of Greeks on the London stage. Within four months, two productions of Oedipus, one of Elektra. Before Christmas, Robert Icke's superb rendering of Oedipus showed what Sophocles can offer in a desolate age: steady clear-sightedness and tumultuous feeling; an urgent present and the recovery of a long past; the recognition that injustice, though deeply buried, will rear up, and that no creed offers an instant solution. We have, like creatures at a play, to look steadily, without moralising, at the world we have made. These illuminations are not realised in this past week's productions. Still, there are glints. The most radical stroke in the new staging of Oedipus by Hofesh Shechter and Matthew Warchus is the most exhilarating. The wordless chorus is made up of dancers, choreographed by Shechter. They stamp and spring: advancing in a line as if performing a haka; huddled together, swaying, reaching upwards and outwards so that they look like an unclenching fist. They do not outline the plot, nor are they characters, but they are more than simply mood music. They act upon the drama – and where more needed than in Oedipus? – like a bubbling unconscious. They move to Shechter's score, which has at its centre an insistent drum like a heart taking revenge. A rhythm like a train gathering speed runs through the evening. Seven years ago in The Writer, Ella Hickson proved herself a dramatist who can shrewdly and subtly unpick certainty. Her version of Oedipus has vivid flashes, sometimes with a Stoppardian turn: 'People are always dying. It is their defining feature.' She gives the plot a plausible climate crisis background – those dancers stamp first through dust and then rain – and grants Oedipus's wife-mother, Jocasta, a particular scepticism and strength. Indira Varma is both stately and intimate. She subdues Hickson's excessive casualness, giving idioms – 'not everything is up for grabs' – an ironic roll. She blends with the sculptural quality of Rae Smith's design: a translucent white platform, the steady eye of a setting sun, long depths glimpsed at the back of the stage; majesty made uncertain by Tom Visser's lighting, with its melting blues and violets. Varma's is the performance of the evening. She is not matched by American actor Rami Malek – he of Bohemian Rhapsody and more ominously Mr Robot. It might be that his rigid face is an imitation of a Greek mask. Perhaps his awkward, angular movements are an attempt not only to suggest Oedipus's bad foot, but to externalise his anguish. It is hard, though, to find any reason for his weird phrasing, with words arbitrarily emphasised and long pauses in the middle of lines leaving verbs and their subjects vainly waving at each other. This is the latest bit of star casting not to work. The Canadian poet Anne Carson, translator of Elektra at the Duke of York's, has described the play's heroine as a 'vessel of eccentric sound', a woman whose voice, 'a thesaurus of screams', is her sole weapon as she seeks revenge for the death of her father, Agamemnon, at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra. Marvel superheroine Brie Larson is the main reason for seeing Daniel Fish's all-over-the-place production. Shaven-headed, in a Bikini Kill T-shirt, she snarls into a handheld mic, slides in and out of song, lashes the stage with her anger. She is a cross between Hamlet and the unlistened-to prophet Cassandra. The other jewel is Carson's translation itself: caustic, forceful, filling the air with memorable images without losing the pulse of action. For Elektra, her mother is 'a punishment cage wrapped round my life'; the death of a character is 'just a crack where the light slipped through'. Nevertheless, the words are glimmers in a murky evening. This is a sprint of 75 minutes but it trudges. Fish directed a revelatory Oklahoma!, stripping away traditional swagger to create one of the best shows of 2022, but here he does not so much strip back as flay the drama into separate pieces: some are striking, but none of them feed each other. Ted Hearne's impressive music is sung by a silvery-voiced chorus, but the staging is sluggish: seated on a revolve (yes, yes, revenge is a cycle), the women in backless satin gowns might be decorative models on a wedding cake. As Orestes, Patrick Vaill bursts in dressed as a rally driver, capably delivering a gabbled commentary. Stockard Channing (in furs) is a sceptical but stolid Clytemnestra. Jeremy Herbert's design is baffling: a white wall behind the revolve that rises and sinks unpredictably; mics, lighting equipment, and an uncommented-on barrage balloon dangling in one corner. At times, it looks like a rehearsal room. If only this were just a rehearsal. Star ratings (out of five) Oedipus ★★★Elektra ★★ Oedipus is at the Old Vic, London, until 29 March Elektra is at the Duke of York's theatre, London, until 12 April
New European
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Vulnerable, terrifying Rami Malek will have you in rhapsodies
In contrast to Robert Icke's modern-dress and politically on-trend Oedipus last year, Hofesh Shechter and Matthew Warchus have come up with a more lyrical and poetic adaptation of Sophocles' classic that emerges literally and figuratively out of the mists of time. Dressed in a natty summer suit, Rami Malek in the title role delivers a high-definition performance in which he manages to be at once vulnerable and terrifying. Every movement, expression and vocal inflection has clearly been carefully thought through and the result is perfectly controlled poetry in motion. Stardom is a strange and indefinable quality that has nothing whatsoever to do with looks, but you can't take your eyes off an individual on stage who is blessed with it. Malek has this quality in abundance and more's the pity so far as his supporting players are concerned: Indira Varma as Jocasta and Nicholas Khan as Creon seem at best spectral characters beside him. Tom Visser's eerie lighting and Shechter's intricate dance routines and music interspersing the action add enormously to the power of the piece which the writer Ella Hickson has pared down to the essentials. Malek's stage experience is limited – before Bohemian Rhapsody and No Time to Die he trod the boards only in off-Broadway shows in New York – but he is the master of all he surveys in this assured and intelligent production. The memory of Malek's face, etched in pain and despair, as he realises the full horror of his situation, will stay with you long after the curtain has gone down. The best acting currently to be had in the capital.
