Theatre review: Manhunt

In 2010 Raoul Moat, a former nightclub bouncer from Newcastle, was released from prison after serving two months, and within days had got hold of a sawn-off shotgun which he used to shoot at his ex-girlfriend, injuring her and killing her new boyfriend. He also blinded a policeman before escaping into the countryside, setting off one of the most notorious (and sometimes downright bizarre) police manhunts in British history, that only ended when he shot and killed himself. In 2025, Moat's story inspires Robert Icke's Manhunt, his contribution to the recent spate of dramas exploring violence and toxic masculinity that have included high-profile entries like Punch and Adolescence. Opening with him stalking around Hildegard Bechtler's prison yard-like set while CCTV films him from above, Moat (Samuel Edward-Cook) turns to address the audience in what looks like it'll be very much his side of the story.

So we hear about a campaign of harrassment against him by Northumberland police going back several years, and the numerous charges they unsuccessfully attempted to pin on him before finally getting him convicted of assaulting one of his children.

A couple of months in prison only worsens his mental health, and when he gets out and finds out his girlfriend is cheating on him with a policeman, he starts his campaign of violence both against them, and against the institution who've been persecuting him and now seem to be laughing at him. But it goes without saying that this isn't a reliable narrator, and what we start to see doesn't always add up. For one thing, while he continues to deny he was ever violent to his child and the play doesn't contradict this, we do see that he was violent to his girlfriend Sam (some brutal fight choreography from Kev McCurdy) every time she attempted to break up with him.

Sam (Sally Messham) was only finally able to dump him over the phone when he was in prison, but Moat didn't accept that happened so when she moved on to someone else he interpreted that as cheating. (Sam did lie to him about her new boyfriend being in the police, thinking it would frighten him, but instead it fed into his persecution complex with fatal consequences.) After the shootings, Moat still managed to convince a couple of his friends (Leo James & Danny Kirrane) to go camping with him and claim they were his hostages, so the story even has echoes of the way clearly toxic men have influenced others in the years since.

The inspiration for Icke to tackle the story actually came from then-Prime Minister David Cameron's comment on the events, "Raoul Moat was a callous murderer. Full Stop. End of story." His speech is played out over the end of the play and, for all his insistence that he only cares about the victims, comes across itself as extraordinarily callous about what would drive someone to kill others and then himself, not to mention cheerfully absolving the authorities of any responsibility to understand Moat, and prevent others from following in his footsteps.

In fact the play offers up any number of factors that contributed to his mental health problems: He was raised by his grandmother (Patricia Jones,) but after her death he was left in the care of his bipolar mother (Angela Lonsdale,) who alternated between flattering and bullying him. Later, his job as a bouncer made him begin taking a huge amount of steroids, which he then continued taking because he thought losing his physique would make Sam dump him.

As the narrative increasingly fractures we start to get other points of view, but they're not necessarily any more reliable than the narrator himself: In an extended sequence of total darkness, we hear from the officer blinded during the attacks; but a lot of his worries directly mirror Moat's, and he would also go on to die by suicide. Meanwhile what actually happened is no easier to piece together from the police's official account, as that consists of little actual information other than assurances that they did nothing wrong.

This isn't the first time the director has written his own script, but it is the first time it's been an entirely new work by Icke rather than an adaptation of a classic text. Without an existing structure to work around the generally strong evening does have moments that are muddled or clumsy - the aforementioned scene in darkness is powerful, but it does feel arbitrarily shoehorned into the action, like a break to let Edward-Cook catch his breath.

The odder moments work better when they feel like a deliberate glimpse into Moat's increasingly disjointed mind, which among other things imagines the father he never knew (Nicolas Tennant) finally reaching out to him in the woods. One of the most famously surreal things about the news story was '90s footballer Paul Gascoigne attempting to get to Moat with a bag of chicken and a fishing rod. Here we get a fantasy of a drunk, slurring Gazza (Trevor Fox) succeeding in finding him, and becoming the closest thing he gets to a therapy session*. Overall Edward-Cook's powerful but ambiguous central performance helps Manhunt get over some of the flaws in its construction, and gives us a final message we can all agree on: That in one way or another, David Cameron always turns out to be the ultimate villain of anything bad that happened in the UK in the tenties.

Manhunt by Robert Icke is booking until the 3rd of May at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*although the fact that he was never given therapy is another element of the unreliable narrator - he was offered it, but didn't go