Theatre review: Romeo & Juliet(Empire Street Productions / Harold Pinter Theatre)

What if, instead of giving a written instruction to a servant who can't read, you gave it to one who can? If Capulet (Clark Gregg) had handed the invitations to his ball to the Nurse (Clare Perkins,) she could have found the guests herself. Instead the illiterate Peter (Jamie Ankrah) needs help from a stranger in the street, who invites himself along to the party to stalk a girl he fancies. Once there Romeo (Noah Jupe) falls for Capulet's daughter Juliet (Sadie Sink,) who enthusiastically returns his interest. This teenage infatuation is given an entirely unnecessary sense of peril and urgency by the fact that the pair's families have an unexplained, deadly rivalry, leading them into an elopement within hours of their first meeting. A number of other avoidable accidents and violent acts interfere over the next couple of days, and trying to navigate them while keeping their big secret sees the affair end in tragedy.

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.

Theatre review: Oedipus (Wyndham's)

The same plays or themes do sometimes crop up several times in quick succession - particular stories will strike multiple people as topical after all, and theatres can be too far into their own production by the time they find out someone else has had the same idea - but earlier this year two competing productions of Sophocles' Oedipus were announced within minutes of each other, which has to be some kind of record. At least they're not quite overlapping, and first motherfucker out of the gates is Mark Strong, who plays the tragic king for adaptor-director Robert Icke. It's a return to Greek Tragedy after Icke's epic Oresteia, but while there's a lot that's powerful about the performances, the overall show didn't live up to its predecessor for me. We're in a modern political story, in a state that isn't named, but the Greek writing on the screens suggests it's a version of the original's Thebes.

Theatre review: Player Kings

A few years ago in his one-man show, Ian McKellen answered a question about Falstaff by saying that he'd always wanted to play the character until he saw Roger Allam play him at the Globe. Like many people he considered the performance definitive, and decided there was no point him tackling the role because there was nothing he could add to it. I wonder if the fact that he spent much of last year performing with Allam has anything to do with him changing his mind and, after years of turning it down, accepting Robert Icke's offer to join Player Kings, Icke's compressed version of both of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays. Falstaff is, at least as far as he's presented at the start of the show, something of an East End gangster, comparatively affable as far as crime bosses go but still involved with planning and, despite his advanced years and increasing waistline, carrying out robberies that can easily turn violent.

Theatre review: The Doctor

When an Artistic Director leaves their theatre, their final production is generally made a big deal of. Less so in the slightly more nebulous role of Associate Director, but Robert Icke’s time at the Almeida has seen him shoot up to superstar director status, so his last time in this particular role has been worthy of much comment. As with many of his biggest hits at this theatre, The Doctor sees Icke do his own radical rewrite of a European classic, and after more famous works like the Oresteia, Mary Stuart and Uncle Vanya, he bows out with a more obscure work, Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi. It’s not one I’d heard of before but apparently it’s a classic clash between science and medicine, Christian and Jew; in Icke’s hands it becomes a clash between much more – and so much more than we can even see. Ruth Wolff (Juliet Stevenson) is founder and head of a private hospital specialising in dementia research, and a familiar figure from medical dramas – the brilliant but not-particularly-likeable, abrupt and no-nonsense surgeon.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Almeida)

Now a fixture as well as a draw at the Almeida following a number of reinterpretations of foreign classics, Robert Icke turns to English theatre's most famous play; but if the text of Hamlet doesn't need translating, the director still finds ways to edit and reshape it. It's a respectful edit that still feels true to Shakespeare but also opens up plenty of opportunities to look at the story from a different angle and throw up a few surprises even to people familiar with the play (which means once I get into details about the production there will be things that could be considered spoilers, even if you know the story inside and out.) Icke's profile means he can get a big name to take the lead, and indeed the days when Andrew Scott was London theatre's secret are long gone. But for all the fanbase he's built on TV, this proves a reminder that it's on stage that he really shines - and not quite in the way that might have been expected of him.

Theatre review: Mary Stuart

My first theatre trip of 2017 should have been one of my last of 2016, but the performance I was due to see was one of several cancelled due to cast illness - presumably the gastroenteritis that's knocked out half the West End and got me last month as well. But everyone's back on their feet now for the latest of Robert Icke's classic reinventions at the Almeida, Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart. In the battle of wills between the last Tudor monarch and her great rival, Icke sees the women as two sides of the same coin - literally, as two actresses share both roles, with a coin spun at the beginning of the performance to decide who plays who. Tonight Lia Williams called heads and won, so the assembled cast bowed to her as Queen Elizabeth I, who's been ruling for eight years and has restored Protestantism to England - along with a stability the country hasn't known for a long time.

Theatre review: The Red Barn

After his transatlantic success in Ivo van Hove's A View From The Bridge, Mark Strong returns to the stage to work with a director who's always shown van Hove's influence in his work; but in Robert Icke's first production at the National, it's a legendary film rather than stage director who immediately comes to mind. David Hare's new play The Red Barn is an adaptation of crime writer Georges Simenon's novel La Main, taking place in the winter of 1968-69 in New England, where lawyer Donald Dodd (Strong) and his wife Ingrid (Hope Davis) have their friends Mona (Elizabeth Debicki) and Ray (Nigel Whitmey) visiting. On the way back from a party they get caught in a blizzard, and only three of them make it back to the house: Despite Donald going back out to search for him, Ray is never seen alive again. Although the storm causes a number of deaths, Donald's jittery behaviour makes this one seem particularly suspicious.

Theatre review: Uncle Vanya

For the second of his Good But Incredibly Long shows at the Almeida (if the rumoured Andrew Scott Hamlet pans out, I imagine we'll be looking at a trilogy,) Robert Icke jumps forward a couple of millennia from the Oresteia to Chekhov, and his rural tragedy* Uncle Vanya. When his late sister married a noted academic and was given a farm as a dowry, John (Paul Rhys) dedicated his life to managing it, sending the money to his brother-in-law to fund his writing. When his first wife died, Alexander (Hilton McRae) got remarried, to the much younger Elena (Vanessa Kirby.) Now retired, Alexander has brought Elena to live on the farm with him, and actually spending time with the man he idolised for years has made John realise a harsh truth: Alexander is in fact a very minor, derivative scholar, and John's worked 25 years to fund an academic legacy that will actually be instantly forgotten.

Theatre review: Oresteia (Almeida Theatre)

Freud used characters from Greek tragedy as archetypes and now Robert Icke reverses the process, turning Aeschylus' Oresteia into a complex psychological study of Orestes - his actions, the contradictory aspects of his personality, and above all the unreliability of his memories. And that's only one of the ways Icke rewrites the rulebook in his glorious headfuck of a production, which it seems ridiculous to even attempt a short review of: By the second interval I already thought I could write an essay about it. It's unlikely a recording of it will be commercially released but I hope it's at least easily available to students, as it could be good fodder for dissertations for years to come. The story, at least, is the same one it always was: To help him win a war, Agamemnon (Angus Wright) sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. On his return, his wife Klytemnestra (Lia Williams) murders him in revenge.

Theatre review: The Fever

In a luxury hotel suite in a poor country with a terrible human rights record, a wealthy man from a First World nation is struck down with a fever that gives him constant bouts of vomiting. Stuck in his beautiful room in the middle of abject poverty, he goes over the moral crisis that's been plaguing him, and which is probably the cause of his psychosomatic illness: He cares that there are people in the world suffering appalling conditions, and wishes that they didn't have to. But his own way of life - even the most basic elements of it like knowing he can make himself a coffee first thing in the morning - is only possible in a world where there are people much worse off than him. Wallace Shawn's The Fever is the second in the Almeida's season on money; as the first play in the season is still playing at the theatre itself, Robert Icke's production has been located as near as possible to the real thing, in the Amber Suite in the luxury May Fair Hotel off Piccadilly.

Theatre review: Mr Burns

Some shows come with such a Marmite reputation that it feels odd to find yourself quite firmly on the fence about them. Anne Washburn's Mr Burns had a love/hate response when it debuted off-Broadway, and the reaction to its London premiere has ranged from one star to five from the critics. Its basic conceit is certainly an interesting one: Some time in the near future, disasters at a series of nuclear power plants have wiped out most of the US population. The survivors are left to try and get by in a world without power (Mr Burns is subtitled "A post electric play.") Small groups band together for safety, and as one of these welcomes, cautiously, a newcomer (Demetri Goritsas,) we see the ways they've tried to maintain a network of communication. But we also see how they try to keep their spirits up by reliving a comforting story from their earlier lives: Around the fireside they try to remember and retell an episode of The Simpsons.

Theatre review: 1984

Headlong's latest tour, and the last to be programmed by Rupert Goold, sees Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan attempt to bring George Orwell's 1984 to the stage. The most famous dystopian novel and one whose key phrases have entered the language (and inspired a couple of TV shows that were probably not... quite what Orwell had in mind,) it creates a very specific alternate universe that might have been hard to bring to life. The way they've done it is not to try and expand out into Big Brother's world, but to focus right into the mind of Winston Smith, to the point that what's real and what's in his head blurs - just as his eventual torturers want, of course. In a world where the Government controls everything people say and tries to control what they think too, Winston (Mark Arends) has rebellious thoughts. When he meets Julia (Hara Yannas) and falls in love, his thoughts spill out into action, but Big Brother is always watching.

Theatre review: Boys

This week's theatregoing on POV is sponsored by testosterone: After Monday's posh boys, Tuesday's army boys and Wednesday's boys who sleep with boys, I end the week with two plays with "boy" in the title. Ella Hickson's Boys is set in an Edinburgh flat during a heatwave that unfortunately coincides with a binmen's strike. Mack (Samuel Edward Cook) and Benny (Danny Kirrane) are students who've just graduated. They share their flat with chef Timp (Tom Mothersdale) and violin prodigy Cam (Lorn Macdonald,) all living the stereotypical student lifestyle of drink, drugs and sex. With Mack and Benny having to confront life after university, a riot on the streets coincides with a riot among the friends.