The wunderkind of British theatre talks ‘Oedipus’, Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, and why he’s written a play about Raoul Moat
Regularly accused of being a genius, Stockton-on-Tees-born director Robert Icke spent his twenties and early thirties scoring West End hit after West End hit with everything from a bone-shudderingly intense take on George Orwell’s 1984 to a three-and-a-half-hour rewrite of Ancient Greek tragic trilogy Oresteia. Based at Islington’s Almeida Theatre, his cerebral-but-emotional modern dress takes on the classics did much to lead the way for British theatre’s Europhile drift in the ’10s.
Since leaving the Almeida in 2019 he’s somewhat disappeared from view, working abroad and on a puppet-based adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm that received rave word-of-mouth on an extensive UK tour but hasn’t come to London.
This year, however, has seen him back in a big way. In spring his Ian McKellen-starring Player Kings mashed up Shakespeare Henry IV Parts 1 + 2 to scintillating effect and now London finally gets to see his take on Oedipus, which premiered in Amsterdam in 2018. Produced by Sonia Friedman and originally intended to run in 2020 with the great Helen Mirren starring as Jocasta opposite Mark Strong in the title role of the great statesman who has unwittingly married his own mother. It finally arrives four years late with Lesley Manville starring opposite Strong….