A new Robert Icke drama about the hunt for Raoul Moat, a revival of Sarah Kane’s final play, and a saga about a Chinese request for the return of a stolen artefact from the British Museum are among the standout pieces that have been announced as part of the latest Royal Court season.
The theatre’s artistic director, David Byrne, said the season was “internationalist” with South African (A Good House) and Palestinian writers (A Knock on the Roof) alongside more established British talent, such as Icke.
Byrne said: “It’s a combination of the best stuff I’ve seen over the last year and the most urgent bits of writing that need to be heard from our stages right now, things from our recent past to glimpses of what our future could be.”
Byrne believes that Icke’s handling of the Moat affair will be one of the most anticipated theatre moments of 2025. It could also be one of the most controversial.
There has been a book about the incident (Andrew Hankinson’s You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat]) and a television drama, ITV’s Hunt for Raoul Moat, which aired last year.
The search for Moat resulted in one of the largest manhunts in British history, as the bodybuilder and bouncer was pursued across Northumberland. As Moat camped out in woodland after killing one man and shooting two other people, survival expert Ray Mears was asked to help find him.
Before the ITV drama was broadcast, the Guardian visited Rothbury, the village where Moat was eventually apprehended and found several people who said the 2010 incident was still “too fresh in people’s memory”.
Byrne wouldn’t be drawn on whether all the saga’s twists and turns, including an appearance from Paul Gascoigne who appealed for Moat to turn himself in, would be included in Manhunt, which opens in March next year.
“It’s the part of the world where Robert is from, and it is an epic piece of work,” says Byrne. “He’s going to look at every aspect of that story and it’s a very different piece of work for Robert but he’s used to taking on those big stories and this is the modern version of that.”
A Guardian review of Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis said the play, which she wrote shortly before taking her own life in 1999, had “been trapped in the shadows” of what happened to her, but Byrne hopes the new production will reposition it.
“It’s going to be incredibly special, that original creative team returning to that show 25 years later in the space that they originally made it, plugs into a really deep theatre magic,” he said.
Byrne added that the new staging would hopefully cement it as one of the most “important and influential pieces of theatre writing of the last 100 years”.
The final performance of the play’s run at the Royal Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it transfers after the Royal Court, will be held at 4.48am in the morning, which is the time that Kane regularly awoke during the final stages of her depressive illness.
Joel Tan’s Scenes From a Repatriation tackles the restitution debate surrounding disputed artefacts in museum collections.
Byrne said the play, which will have its premiere in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, “has a cast of over 40 characters, none of whom appear in more than a single scene, in fact the only consistent character throughout is that statue.”
