“Wunderkind”; “enfant terrible”; the “great hope of British theatre” … these are all labels that have quite reasonably been bestowed on Robert Icke, the Stockton-born writer and director who has stormed the UK theatre establishment over the past decade with a string of radically reworked versions of classic plays. It’s not just critics who love him: he’s a hit machine, rewiring dusty theatrical standards by everyone from Schiller to Schnitzler and hurling them unerringly at the heart of the West End.
He’s known for close working relationships with an inner circle of trusted actors; none more so than Joshua Higgott, who has starred professionally in five of Icke’s shows, and assistant directed two. In fact, their relationship goes back further: they first met in their early 20s, on a 2008 student production of Romeo & Juliet. “We were walking around the campus having a conversation about Shakespeare and he pulled a Complete Works out of his bag in order to illustrate a point,” says Higgott. “Apparently he just carried one around with him at all times. I remember him telling me that he would listen to recordings of Shakespeare plays on his iPod instead of music. I don’t know if he still does that!”
Icke was regarded as something of an iconoclast during his tenure as associate director of London’s influential Almeida Theatre, rewriting numerous untouchable classics while frequently holding forth on the failings of the entire British theatre establishment during interviews. But we’ve heard less from the 35-year-old in recent years.
In part that’s because he’s been concentrating on international work, alongside a puppet-based UK touring adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. But the pandemic scuppered the two London shows he was meant to direct in 2020: a Helen Mirren-starring adaptation of Oedipus – apparently still happening, sans Mirren – and the West End transfer of his final show for the Almeida, The Doctor. Now, after two years on ice, The Doctor is finally here, and this one has held on to its star, the wondrous Juliet Stevenson. Ahead of its return, here’s a guide to Robert Icke’s boldest and most brilliant adaptations.
1984
Previous stage and screen adaptations of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece have come up short because it can be difficult to reconcile the devastating ideas of the novel with the fact that it’s basically a book about repressed 1940s office workers. But Icke’s first big hit – which he co-wrote and directed with the playwright Duncan Macmillan in 2013 – is a truly monumental adaptation. The pair chose to home in on the little-noted fact that the book’s indices are written in the past tense, suggesting the totalitarian regime had in fact ended, rather than carried on endlessly. Hero Winston Smith was therefore shown as a man suffering from the after-effects of torture in a post-Big Brother (or was it?) world. The story was told in flashbacks, filled with disorienting explosions of darkness, light and sound that conveyed his terrible PTSD. The result was a stage version that bordered upon the horror genre – a dramatic form that finally matched the power of Orwell’s bleak vision.
Oresteia
Icke entered his imperial phase with this almost-four-hour 2015 adaptation of Aeschylus’s trilogy of ancient Greek dramas. It transferred to Trafalgar Studios on the wings of ecstatic reviews, making it probably the single most audacious West End hit of the modern era. It was the point when it became apparent that Icke was willing and able to rewrite classic plays into drastically different and (whisper it) in many ways better new versions, which took the powerful themes and structures of the originals and added a real modern sense of humanity. “I think Rob is very good at pinpointing the central dilemma in a play, and finding ways to interrogate and complicate it in his adaptations,” says Higgott. “The original trilogy starts with Klytemnestra’s murder of [her husband] Agamemnon, but Rob’s adaptation goes back further, starting with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of [their daughter] Iphigenia: you see the reasons Klytemnestra did what she did.”
The entirely Icke-written opening hour is the most devastating bit of the show, a 2,500-year-old classic improved on.
Hamlet
No English director is arrogant enough to rewrite Shakespeare’s masterpiece. So 2017’s Hamlet wasn’t an Icke “version” in the sense that Oresteia was. Nonetheless, Icke’s Andrew Scott-starring modern dress take was utterly transformative. The intensely compassionate reading heightened the play’s moral ambivalence, leaving it very unclear whether Scott’s sensitive, teary prince was right to surmise that his father had been killed by his stepfather Claudius. And the verse has never been spoken more clearly, or less stagily: “Rob would always push us to be as natural as possible with the language – to almost treat Shakespeare as we would a modern text,” says Higgott.
It was a beautiful and sad production, less a Jacobean bloodbath than a picture of an extended family of people who loved each other deeply, but couldn’t help but hurt each other.
The Doctor
Probably Icke’s most drastic rewrite to date, The Doctor is a wild new take on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 drama Professor Bernhardi. In the original, the eponymous Jewish physician loses everything after refusing to allow a priest to give last rites to a patient who is unaware that they’re about to die – a gesture of compassion that causes an antisemitic backlash. In The Doctor, Juliet Stevenson plays a no-nonsense physician who refuses to allow a Catholic priest to see a 14-year-old girl dying of a botched abortion. In doing so she offends … basically everyone. “Professor Bernhardi explores ideas of religious identity,” says Higgott. “Rob’s version takes that central question and adds many more layers, thinking about racial identity, gender identity and sexuality as well.”
Finally transferring to the West End after a two-year hiatus, it sometimes seems perverse that somebody as daring as Icke keeps scoring commercial hits, but Higgott reckons West End theatregoers are braver than they’re given credit for. “Ultimately, I think audiences like to be challenged,” he says. “It’s a satisfying feeling to leave a theatre not being sure of all the answers, knowing you’ll be thinking about what you’ve seen for the next few days – and Rob’s work leaves you with that sense.”
The Doctor is at the Duke of York’s Theatre, 29 September-11 December
