Robert Icke goes on disrupting, reinventing what we see on stage. His new production, Manhunt, does not have the sleek incisiveness of the superb Oedipus with which he lit up the theatre last year: it sprawls, tries to lasso too much, is sometimes overexpository. Yet it is coruscating. It transmits indelible images. Not moving but transfixing.
Manhunt is a departure for Icke: a modern, real-life story that he has written as well as directed. This is a portrait of Raoul Moat, who in 2010 shot his former partner, killed her lover, blinded a policeman and caused one of the biggest manhunts in British history. He was described by the then prime minister David Cameron as “a callous murderer, full stop, end of story” – and glorified on Facebook. Drawing on Moat’s own words (he wrote a 49-page letter to Northumbria police), Icke abstains from simple condemnation (superfluous) or sentimental exculpation. He does what theatre does best: embody a human being, not dilute him into case history, horror or sob story.
Samuel Edward-Cook is phenomenal as Moat. He is something like Ross Kemp as EastEnders’ Grant Mitchell: shaven-headed, muscled-up (tattoos bulge on one arm), swerving into sentiment when not punching out or throwing a table across the stage. He also resembles the amazing busts made in the 18th century by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt – a roaring head trapped in a block, rage made rigid, his own character a cage. It is an extraordinary performance, not least because there is no room in this personality for inflection: Edward-Cook is nonstop blast and yet is never monotonous.
Moat’s dangerousness and his difficulties vibrate brilliantly through Hildegard Bechtler’s design, Azusa Ono’s lighting and Tom Gibbons’s soundscape. Before a word is spoken, Edward-Cook is seen pacing behind a black metal grid; his head lit up bright and white like a grotesque party balloon, later gleaming like a cannonball. The air is full of clash and grind. When Edward-Cook, stock-still but bursting, faces out to the audience, he glistens with sweat.
There are unexpected digressions that do not immediately propel Moat’s story but are among the evening’s most interesting episodes. The footballer Paul Gascoigne, who in real life turned up, high on drink and drugs, when Moat was ringed by police, but did not speak to him, is here imagined in conversation as a woozy therapist; he is hauntingly played by Trevor Fox. As David Rathband, the policeman who two years after being blinded by Moat, hanged himself, Nicolas Tennant has a commanding soliloquy, performed in total blackout so that the audience are immersed in his darkness.
The attempt to make one man’s terrible history the occasion for a general examination of male violence (adding to the debate sparked by Adolescence and Punch) leads to some superfluous spelling out. Yet the core of Manhunt – the steady look at the central figure – is strong, unflabby. This looked like a giant leap for Icke. From Oedipus to Moat. Yet there is a thread. Fathers. The damage caused to men by not knowing a good one.
I have long anticipated – feared – an epidemic of Covid plays. Wrong. The Zoomed dramas produced during lockdown – small casts with bedheads for backdrops – did not lead to a new genre. Though any mention of plague, such as the RSC’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, carries a new charge of recognition, theatres have shied away from explicitly evoking the experience of the pandemic.
Now here is Scott Le Crass’s production of James McDermott’s Jab, a vax drama, first produced last year at the enterprising Finborough, which is also a jab of an evening: a short, sharp-edged two-hander with cutting dialogue.
In lockdown a marriage slowly unravels. What begins as playful chiding – to the tune of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) – turns bitter. The children have left home. A woman tells her husband of 20 years: “You’re non-essential.” She works for the NHS and provides for the two of them; his shop cannot open. He burps, crunches crisps loudly when she’s trying to watch The Durrells, sprawls behind the Daily Mail. She looks wan and responsible. He wants sex; she doesn’t. When the vaccine arrives, she administers it; he refuses to have it.
Kacey Ainsworth is all filigree, Liam Tobin a bravado lump. There is at the beginning almost too much detail in their fine acting, as if to make up for a plot in which the divisions appear too pat, the sympathy too obviously partisan. McDermott has explained that he based the play on his own parents, whose marriage deteriorated during Covid. Yet a basis in truth does not guarantee the sound of authenticity. Though circumstances – the daily announcement of deaths, the doorstep clapping, the automatic reach for hand sanitiser – are all too recognisable, the opposing traits of the characters look rigged. Still, in an echo of one terrific work of pandemic art, poet Simon Armitage’s lyric The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash, the evening ends on an evocative image – both sad and tinged with promise. A woman stands alone at a window, separated from the outside world but looking towards it.
Star ratings (out of five)
Manhunt ★★★★
Jab ★★
