Royal Court Theatre

Interview: Robert Icke ‘if theatre isn’t astonishing, what’s the point?’ Robert Icke made his name directing boldly reimagined takes on some of the greatest plays ever written: Hamlet, Professor Bernhardi, The Oresteia and last year’s Oedipus (which cleared up during this year’s theatre award season). Despite the sense that he has genuinely added something to millennia old works, it’s still a big deal to make his debut as a ‘proper’ playwright. Even his most outrageous rewrites have had somebody else’s ideas at their core. Manhunt, his play about Raoul Moat, is all him. And to be clear – and I’m going to shock you here – it’s not as good as Hamlet. Nonetheless, after a tentative start where it looks like it’s going to serve as a sort of well-intended apologia for Moat, Manhunt really settles down into something compellingly weird. It’s an examination of toxic masculinity, yes, but in the same kind of way that Moby Dick is an examination of toxic masculinity. The early stages see Samuel Edward-Cook’s triple-jacked double-stacked Moat in the dock for a variety of changes. If you have any familiarity with his short, brutal, bitterly absurd rampage across the north east, you’ll get that this trial can’t possibly have happened – it’s a vague existential framing device designed to get Icke’s Moat to defend his actions almost from the off.  There is undeniably something gauche about his pleading about the state of his mental health and hard childhood. And there’s a level of...

Genre-bending Singaporean playwright Joel Tan throws a lot into the mix to make a play about whether we should return artefacts to China not dull, and quite a lot of the time he succeeds: his Royal Court debut is a playful, disjointed collection of scenes-cum-installations which enjoyably ignore convention, and definitely one of the more ambitious shows there’s been in the Royal Court Upstairs recently.   A mummified figure sits on a plinth at one end of the space, its form turned into twists and distortions by the layers of cloth and rope wrapped around it. This is Guanyin, a (fictional) sacred Chinese statue that was nicked by some Brit at some point and plonked in the British Museum. The Chinese government wants it back. Starting with a protest from some Islington witches, each subsequent scene plays out with new characters, hopping between people and places (doddery art historians, political prisoners, activist students, dodgy billionaires), building up the history of the statue and arguments that now blaze around it; the cultural and political stuff, the institutional context, the history of it, its artistic value, its spiritual significance, but also the personal encounters people have with the object.  The constant drop away of meaning and context between each scene is enjoyably disorienting: it takes a minute to work out if or how one sequence is connected to the last. Under directors emma + pj, some scenes are dance, tableaux, non-literal. Some are earnest, others...

Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis is one of the most famous productions in Royal Court Theatre history, not least for the circumstances under which it was originally staged: just 18 months after hear death, the bleak piece – which is in many ways closer to a poem than a play, with no discernible characters – was memorably described by the Guardian’s Michael Billington as ‘a 75-minute suicide note’.  This revival comes precisely 25 years on, in the Court’s tiny Upstairs theatre where the play originated, and sees director James Macdonald reunite with his original creative team and the original cast – particularly notable because one of them was RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans. Despite how faithful it is to the past in many ways, the plan is not to simply restage a quarter century old production, but reinvent the play anew and perhaps banish the spectre of Kane’s death from proceedings. The play is, after all, endlessly malleable and open to interpretation. Inevitably this will sell out incredibly quickly as the decision to stage upstairs means supply will inevitably outstrip demand. As an RSC co-production – perhaps the cost of securing Evans’s services – it will go on to the more spacious Other Space in Stratford, with a final performance taking place, rather extraordinarily, at 4.48 in the morning.

Katie Mitchell’s second play for the David Byrne-era Royal Court threatens makes last year’s non-linear poetry adaptation Bluets look positively commerical. A collaboration between the legendary avant-garde director, playwright Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, Cow | Deer – apparently you’re not allowed to say it ‘Cow-slash-deer’ – it’s a wordless work about a dsy in the life of a cow and a deer that aims to further the eco-minded bent of Mitchell’s work by ‘decentring’ humans from a work. Truly, who can say what this will mean or look like, but presumaby it’s about as out-there a thing as you’ll see on a stage this year. Actors will apparently be involved, though it’s unclear precisely what they’ll be doing.

David Byrne’s Royal Court seasons have proven almost aggressively eclectic so far, with surefire commercial smashes rubbing up against stuff that comes across as genuinely quite mad. Coming a year after West End transfer Giant made its debut, Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers certainly looks like another big hit: the great Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Curious Incident) will make her debut at the venerable new writing theatre, in Payne’s first Court play since his huge hit Constellations, with design by the legendary Bunnie Christie. The cherry on the cake is the marvellous Nicola Walker, who will star as a woman whose son disappeared seven years ago and for whom time has now fractured, causing her to experience every minute of every year gone by simultaneously. Okay, that’s a pretty mad concept, but if anyone can pull it off it’s this A-Team of theatrical talent.