Manhunt Reviews Round-up – Royal Court Theatre, London

"After a slow start Robert Icke’s Raoul Moat drama reveals itself as a compellingly weird journey into the heart of toxic masculinity"

"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."

"Edward-Cook’s vulnerability and direct pleading to the audience is effective but also rather aggressively underscores the point that Moat’s traumatic childhood informed his adult actions – a point we would surely have got if it had been made more subtlety. Still, that’s Icke’s lookout and it’s worth saying Manhunt is just 100 minutes long - he has chosen to compress and heighten things. And Edward-Cook is deeply compelling as Moat"

"Where the play really finds its feet is in an unexpectedly tangential scene that concerns David Rathband, the officer Moat shot and blinded on his rampage."

"Icke was born to collaborate with greatness - polishing up ancient tragedies, finding fresh meaning in Shakespeare, unearthing the emotional side to works that have otherwise desiccated with the centuries. Coming up with his own story exposes his limits: not least the limits to his subtlety. But his core strengths remain. Manhunt may spell things out a bit much, but it’s also emotionally vivid and compellingly other, blessed with great performances and an unnerving grandeur as Moat’s cracked, Kurtz-like odyssey takes him towards his own heart of darkness."

"An unflinching study of the life and death of Raoul Moat"

"With a superb testosterone-saturated central performance, this drama from Robert Icke at the Royal Court is gripping and sobering"

"Fresh from deserved success at the Oliviers for his impeccable Oedipus, director Robert Icke gives us – over a visceral, intense, gripping 90 minutes – his treatment of something little less gruesome: the story of Raoul Moat."

"... Icke’s manifest argument – that men are often perceived as scarily problematic these days and that Moat’s extreme case reflects a more generalised fracture – persuasively positions this hate figure as an overlooked harbinger of where we are now, when a troubling swathe of the male population seems lost, alienated and angry."

"... Samuel Edward-Cook’s superb central performance feels complete in its testosterone-saturated way."

"More could surely have been made theatrically of the resource-draining manhunt, and attendant national hysteria, itself. But while this isn’t in the same league as Oedipus, it amply justifies main-stage attention, and deserves to tour, too."

"Challenging, shattering and strikingly humane"

"Robert Icke’s fact-based drama about the Raoul Moat case is a harrowing, relentlessly bleak study of male violence"

"Without ever attempting to excuse or explain Moat’s dreadful actions, this challenging, shattering and strikingly humane play from celebrated writer-director Robert Icke pushes back against such a simplistic assessment, instead using Moat’s grim story to frame potent questions about toxic masculinity."

"Icke’s commitment to exploring his subject with non-judgemental detachment leaves many questions unanswered, especially as Moat’s unreliable narration becomes increasingly detached from factual events."

"Samuel Edward-Cook is mesmerising as Moat, unflinchingly exploring the killer’s horrible, yet disturbingly recognisable, motivations. He frequently reveals flashes of sensitivity or vulnerability, then shamefacedly hides them."

"While most of the story’s violence is left implied, fight director Kev McCurdy ensures that those few moments that are depicted realistically are bone-jarringly impactful."

"... he is one who – in our era of rampant misogyny and a deepening crisis in male mental health – remains chillingly recognisable."

"Raoul Moat play Manhunt is so unsettling, the audience fell silent"

"Robert Icke turns his attention to the grisly events of July 2010, when killer Raoul Moat sparked the biggest manhunt in British history "

"After the recent impactful Netflix drama Adolescence, we might call Manhunt another terrifying update from the frontline of toxic masculinity. Except Icke is far too clever a theatre-maker to opt for one neat tick-box answer."

"... Icke’s fluidly stripped-back production uses a cast of eight to represent various characters and eras in Moat’s chaotic life"

"The most moving section is the most unlikely sounding: a conversation between Paul Gascoigne (Trevor Fox) and Moat as during that infamous July week... what Icke imagines is a dialogue of beautiful, sorrowful honesty between two broken men from the North East, both full of a bottomless rage and self-loathing whose only outlet comes in the warped form of hurting themselves and the women who love them."

"Robert Icke’s pulsating new drama about the 2010 hunt for killer Raoul Moat boasts a powerhouse performance from Samuel Edward-Cook"

"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."

"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."

"Moat’s dangerousness and his difficulties vibrate brilliantly through Hildegard Bechtler’s design, Azusa Ono’s lighting and Tom Gibbons’s soundscape."

"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."

"Like the Icke’s Oedipus which has just won the Olivier Award for Best Revival, Manhunt is sophisticated in structure and thought, and its treatment of its damaged protagonist is never less than interesting – people were locked in discussion long after it had finished. But in its attempts to be fair to both Moat’s tortured psychology and the suffering of his victims it doesn’t quite land as cogently and powerfully as you might hope."

"It begins brilliantly with Samuel Edward-Cook’s shaven-headed Moat pacing the stage, with a camera overhead beaming his every movement onto a front-screen, caught like a rat in a cage by his anger at his treatment by what he sees as a hostile society."

"There’s a sense of constant movement, underlined by a restless soundscape and incessant music, and video designs by Ash J Woodward that incorporate Moat’s text messages and Facebook posts. Although the scenes are invented, the words are his own"

"Icke’s direction and command of an excellent cast playing many roles is disciplined and often audacious."

"It’s in the final scenes that the play asks the key question: why is it only through violence that Moat can make people listen? Why as a society do we ignore the damaged men in our midst? But the message feels muffled. It’s a play fully of chewy ideas and superb commitment, yet its fidelity to the events on which it is based seems to prevent it from flaring into the brilliance it promises."

"A terrifying lead performance"

"Manhunt seems to hedge its bets but has a terrifying lead performance by Samuel Edward-Cook as Moat"

"It’s a tense and unnerving 100 minutes, driven by a frankly terrifying performance from a pumped-up, bullet-headed Samuel Edward-Cook as Moat. But where Icke brought phenomenal clarity to Aeschylus, Chekhov and Shakespeare, he makes the story here as muddy as possible. Was Moat failed by society, or was he a “callous murderer, full stop, end of story” as then-PM David Cameron put it? Neither? Both? Icke isn’t saying."

"At times the show resembles a dark-side version of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, another tale of an outlaw pushing a self-serving myth - especially when Moat holes up in the countryside with two dimwit hostages/accomplices."

"Before the last of many threats to commit suicide, sawn-off shotgun barrel socketed under his jaw, Moat has a speech about the crisis of masculinity. It feels timely, but like everything here it’s ambiguous, half-plea and half threat. Icke is one of the most gifted theatre artists working today – his magnificent 2024 Oedipus has just won a string of awards – but for all its intensity, Manhunt feels like it’s hedging its bets. Or worse, can’t make its mind up."

"Inside the feverish mind of Raoul Moat"

"Director Robert Icke’s portrayal of a doomed fugitive may be disorienting, but the raw emotional intensity makes it a compelling watch at the Royal Court"

"For the first hour of this hallucinatory drama, Icke creates an almost unbearably intense portrait of a drifter who is a combination of volcanic anger and paranoia. He certainly draws an incandescent performance out of Samuel Edward-Cook."

"Just when you think the play is going to eclipse the much more conventional Punch, the piece begins to lose focus. (I couldn’t help thinking of how the second half of Icke’s over-praised Schnitzler adaptation The Doctor lost its way, too.) A blackout monologue recording the tortured reflections of Rathband starts promisingly, but begins to drag."

"When Icke moves the setting to Moat’s final bucolic showdown, the momentum drops even further. No longer a commanding physical presence, Moat wallows in self-pity."

"Manhunt is an intense and empathetic study of Raoul Moat, but its message is uncertain"

"Samuel Edward-Cook is effective as the prowling fugitive, but Robert Icke’s risk-taking production is not as compassionate as it makes itself out to be"

"Incisive writer-director Robert Icke’s take on the story lands like a glass of cold water, thrown into our collective faces. Bracing. A belated antidote to all that hysteria. But somehow it lacks Icke’s usual ability to winnow complex source material into one, coherent message."

"Manhunt is tense, too: but there’s something forced about its tension, like we’re being strapped into our seats for a Clockwork Orange-style dose of aversion therapy, with sudden blackouts, percussive sound, and hyper-violence."

"Icke is intensely interested in Moat’s psychology, and in the task of making him more than a ripped video game assassin. But it feels like his approach tells us too much – in detailed, therapy-like conversations between this man and a barrister who’s attempting to understand him – and shows us too little."

"Icke’s boldest stroke is to have Moat’s child self appear on stage alongside him"

"Manhunt is completely engrossing to watch, like watching a tiger prowl up and down in its cage – Hildegard Bechtler’s set design creates a metal prison for this trapped man. But like a mismanaged zoo, it’s ultimately not as compassionate as it makes itself out to be."

"Reality and fiction meet uneasily in Raoul Moat drama"

"Robert Icke’s study of male violence at the Royal Court is bursting with ideas — but the diffuse approach doesn’t always work"

"As if on cue, another great male playwright offers another great piece of work about masculinity."

"For years Icke has been hacking and honing old classics to make them feel fresh and thrilling... This is a swerve. A big one. And though a kaleidoscopic display of his powers as a director, full of traces of his previous work (screens, surtitled times and dates, young children), it’s also fascinatingly and unexpectedly messy — not what we have come to expect from this master of absolute precision. Manhunt is a strange piece that sometimes suffers against the high standards Icke himself set."

"Edward-Cook plays him as unexploded ordnance (until, of course, he explodes). He combines a heavy juggernaut quality with an extraordinary quickness, jabbing his lines at us and always in motion while the people that accumulate around him on stage stay still."

"The diffuse approach doesn’t always work. Yet some scenes absolutely blaze."

"You have to admire a man at the peak of his powers deciding suddenly to spin off in a completely different direction. Part-thriller, part-treatise, part bleak farce, part-memory play, as it drifts into a mythic, dreamlike denouement"

"He can’t bring himself to condemn Moat, then can’t bring himself not to. The result is a big grey smudge of a play, deeply ambivalent, but deeply felt."

"Strangely plodding examination of life and death of Raoul Moat"

"Posthumous courtroom drama from writer-director Robert Icke seems unsure of – or opaque in – its intentions"

"This story seems like a left-field choice for Icke, who excels at rewriting stage classics for modern times: last year’s sensational Oedipus is a case in point. And as boldly high-wire as Icke undoubtedly is, this production is strangely plodding, a rather too expositional synthesis of events, despite the theatrical flourishes. It is neither revelatory nor emotional enough."

"Edward-Cook is a striking physical presence, muscle-bound, sweat-slicked and ready to burst, but his ex-girlfriend Samantha Stobbart (Sally Messham) and her boyfriend Chris Brown (Leo James) are little more than triggers for his anger."

"As promisingly as it begins – with Moat pacing behind a screen while aerial CCTV footage of him is projected on to the screen to suggest a sense of bifurcation and surveillance – the play as a whole is made up of dramatised summaries of Moat’s life."

"... this play never quite delivers in its dramatic power or its psychological insights. The production lacks pace too. Icke, usually so adept at suggesting the inexorable march of fate and time, uses screens to flash the date for each passing day as Moat heads toward his end, but this does not bring the charge it should."

"This story hangs in the air, unsure of – or opaque in – its intentions. Is this an anatomy of a breakdown? An investigation into the ways Moat was failed? Or a portrait of white, northern, working-class masculinity in extreme crisis? It seems like a bit of all, but not enough of one."

"‘Manhunt’ Is a Case Study in Fragile Masculinity"

"A new play by Robert Icke about a real-life police chase takes the form of an imagined trial."

"Edward-Cook is convincingly unconvincing in his self-serving prattle, beseeching the audience with imploring eyes and indulging in sporadic bursts of temper. The killer’s back story is imagined with some creative license and as much sympathy as is decent"

"... Icke has taken care not to relegate Moat’s victims. The theater is plunged into total darkness for 10 minutes while the blinded Rathband bitterly recounts his ordeal. He struggled to adjust to life as a blind person, and was haunted by PTSD"

"While the play deals admirably with difficult subject matter, it is a flawed work. A man in the throes of a self-pitying meltdown is usually tedious company, and Moat, as written by Icke, doesn’t have any of the compensatory charisma of, say, Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver”: His plaintive, repetitious whininess is realistic, but tiresome. A redundant closing monologue on male vulnerability labors themes already teased out in the course of the action."

"The implicit moral of “Manhunt” — that there’s an unloved little boy trapped inside every angry thug — is somewhere between a truism and a platitude. And not everyone is buying it"