On Being Robbed of Polite Boredom: Finding the Code. Interview with Director Robert Icke
George Rodosthenous*
“Every actor needs a different director. Every safe has a different code that unlocks it. You’re trying to listen as hard as possible to what each performer brings, how they describe themselves, what they’re asking for, and what they need in order to do their most exciting work.” Robert Icke
Robert Icke stands as one of the most distinctive and seminal directors of his generation. An award-winning writer and director for stage and screen, his body of work is both vast and profound, including acclaimed productions like Oresteia, Mary Stuart, Hamlet and Oedipus, which have transferred from not-for-profit theatres to the West End and beyond. Renowned for his radical, award-winning adaptations of classical texts – from the Greeks to Shakespeare and Chekhov – Icke’s work is defined by a rare fusion of intellectual rigour, raw emotional intensity, and fearless formal innovation. He is a theatrical archaeologist who does not simply unearth classic plays but detonates them, reassembling the fragments into urgent, contemporary mirrors that reflect our most divided inner selves.
His signature is a stage that breathes with a potent, almost musical sense of time. Through expansive running times that respect the audience’s capacity for deep engagement, a pianist’s understanding of time, and a conductor’s awareness of rhythm, Icke makes the very passage of time a central dramatic character. His directorial philosophy, which he likens to that of a psychoanalyst, is one of intense presence and meticulous attention, seeking not to impose a vision but to unlock the unique creative code within each actor and each text. The result is a theatre that is perilously alive, one that seeks not to comfort but to confront, aiming to “lock you in a room with things you don’t want to think about.”
This extensive interview, distilled from three one-hour Zoom conversations in November 2025, while Icke prepared Oedipus on Broadway, journeys to the core of Icke’s artistic oeuvre. It explores the foundational experiences that shaped him, delves into his unique processes like the “grenades” that keep performances fresh, and interrogates his mission to bridge the chasm between ancient stories and modern audiences. With characteristic candour, Icke also offers a piercing critique of the current theatrical landscape from the expensive machinery of Broadway to the “anti-excellence” trend in funding, while charting a hopeful, disruptive path forward for an art form he believes must remain dangerous, democratic, and profoundly alive.
On the Beginnings
George Rodosthenous: Your path into theatre was through an academic background in English at the University of Cambridge and not a drama school. How has this particular lens shaped your approach to directing for the stage, especially when deconstructing classic texts?
Robert Icke: Where I really started was in Stockton-on-Tees, running a theatre company with my friends as a teenager. We did Shakespeare in a big theatre. I had no training; I’d never been in a rehearsal room. We did Julius Caesar, then A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and Richard III. There was something about delivering those plays to an audience who didn’t know them, an audience up for a great evening. They weren’t ever going to be a reverent audience. That exploratory process was where the search began.
When I was 13/14 I wanted to be a concert pianist, which is the one thing I’ve got training in, but decided that maybe that wasn’t a life that would suit me: I didn’t want to sit on my own for 6 hours a day and practice. And while I love playing the piano, and still love playing the piano – my amazing piano teacher Mrs. White taught me about music and rhythm, giving me a direct understanding about the way music exists in time – that wasn’t going to be for me and that I needed something else.
By the time I got to Cambridge, it was an extraordinary code switch. I’m not sure I’d ever met posh people before. I went there because I knew I wanted to be a director. I’d read a huge amount about theatre, and it seemed an English degree from Cambridge was the price of entry. I thought, “Okay, well, I’ll do that!”
I was very lucky. I wanted to write about Ben Jonson [and worked] with Anne Barton. She literally wrote the book on Ben Jonson and I had to be interviewed by Anne to see whether she would take me on. From the first meeting, I understood this was somebody very special. I immediately thought, “I’m gonna do whatever you say. I can feel you have a massive amount to teach me.”
I did my first dissertation with Anne, and then she said, “Maybe you should do your second dissertation with me as well.” I kept up this connection with her until her death, a few years after I graduated. I got to spend a lot of time in her company, talking about Shakespeare, about drama and text. She was a fantastic teacher. She was very tough, took no prisoners, and was unforgiving of imprecision.
Through her, I met her husband, John Barton, who together with Cicely Berry were the twin pillars of the Royal Shakespeare Company. I knew all about him, but to get to talk to him about his famous Richard III, about his Twelfth Night… to listen to them arguing about the textual history of The Taming of the Shrew was a glorious education.
What have been your main influences in your directing?
Shakespeare, Chekhov, Greek Tragedy, particularly Sophocles, Sondheim and Peter Brook. I read The Empty Space when I was very young and it blew my mind. I then read everything else I could get my hands on by Peter. I was lucky enough to get to know him. He wrote to me, invited me to lunch, and that was the beginning of a friendship which lasted until him leaving us. He was a big influence.
Then, there’s the films of Stanley Kubrick. And TV series: The Sopranos, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, The West Wing. The Sopranos is a masterpiece. It’s so useful as an 86-hour-long text. They espouse the things I most value: uncompromising, emotional, morally ambivalent, willing to present two completely contradictory sides of a thing in the way that Shakespeare is. I am really not interested in expressing myself. Zadie Smith says, “Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.” I am interested in the creation and curation of something that can stand by itself. I’m not interested in writing about my own life or identity.
Undoubtedly the important, formative artistic director I’ve worked for is Ivo van Hove. I made four productions at his theatre. I love Ivo’s work and I loved those actors in that ensemble. The experience of seeing their work and working with them changed a lot about the way I did things. As a young director, reading about theatre, I always thought I would end up at the Royal Shakespeare Company (where I have never directed). The fantasy of having a collegiate view of a bigger project than just a single show always really appealed to me. The nearest I’ve had to that was the time I spent working at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam.
On the Directorial Style
How do you direct?
The honest answer is, differently every time. My best analogy is it’s like being a psychoanalyst. You’re trying to clear the space so that things can be brought to it: the play, the actors, their impulses. You’re trying to get everything else, often the institution you’re working for, out of the way. We’re going to begin with some magic. We’re going to find a way of making this an adventure. A lot of it is elimination. What is absolutely necessary? If it’s not essential, can we not have it? That keeps pushing us to a more extreme place.
Every actor needs a different director. Every safe has a different code that unlocks it. You’re trying to listen as hard as possible to what each performer brings, how they describe themselves, what they’re asking for, and what they need in order to do their most exciting work. That is a form of paying attention, staying very present to what’s going on.
In rehearsals, I don’t look at a script. I let the stage managers look at the page. I just look at the actors. I often sit on the floor. I will rehearse “in the scene.” I remember doing a lot of the Oedipus rehearsals of the dinner scene sitting at the table, among the family, to collapse any sense of a dividing line between performance and audience. I like it to feel like we’re all just sifting through the material, trying to get to the centre of it together.
How do you choose your projects? You just have an internal yes. You instinctively go, “Yes, I’d like to do that with that person.” You rationalize it afterwards, but there’s some initial, internal hunch, very much like dating. I’m not interested in theatre feeling like a museum or churchy. I’m not interested in it feeling safe. I want it to feel dangerous. I want it to make your heartbeat faster. The route to that is different on every play with every group of actors.
Each actor needs a different thing. Some need to be part of a discussion. Some will want to WhatsApp at nine o’clock at night. Lesley Manville, a couple of times I was halfway through a note and she squeezed my hand and said, “Thank you.” She’d got what she needed. There have been times with Lesley where I have just given her a hug at the end of a scene, neither of us speaking.
That communication is very different to the way I would communicate with Ian McKellen, who wants an incredibly granular discussion about every little corner and moment. He’s hunting the whole time. Ian and I would have dinner once a week during the run of Player Kings, continuing a discussion about Falstaff we’d started two years earlier. We were still working, still busying away. They all need different things because they’re completely different people.
That is analogous to being a therapist. Each patient approaches from a different place. You have to be present with the person who is on the couch right now and listen. The necessity for clearing the workspace of the noise of the industry, the shallowness of a lot of conversations. I think earlier in my career I gave the impression I was an iconoclast, coming to demolish something. Actually, that’s just the first step to being able to work, getting rid of the distractions to create open space.
When I first met the wonderful actor Annie Firbank, I asked what works best for her. She twinkled and said, “I like to go on an adventure.” I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’ll do.” It always mildly offends me when actors say, “That was a great job.” It’s not a job. It’s a profound life experience. I want the actors to come away feeling nourished and changed, like they’ve surprised themselves, gone beyond what they expected. When that happens, we are in very good shape. The company is really switched on. Different things are happening every night. If one domino falls, it knocks a lot of other dominoes in a really interesting way. It feels very live. That’s nourishing everybody working on the production. And the audience.
In Mary Stuart, there was the famous coin-toss at the start of the show, which determined the night’s casting. Do you believe that theatre needs to be “different every night” and how can this be achieved?
Such a huge question. The big question we’re always asking is, how can it be exciting, touching? How can it be alive and not dead? It depends on the culture you’re working in and the actors you’re working with.
I love Mary Stuart as a play I wrote the adaptation in about three weeks. I started writing it in prose and realised it just didn’t work. I realised I was going to have to try and write it loosely in blank verse. The blank verse puts this rhythm underneath the whole action. The whole play happens at emergency stakes; all the red lights are on. I am always looking for the way the form of the evening and the content can be each other. Can I catch the argument in a formal idea that is the production? I’m trying to follow Shakespeare, the great master of that.
I knew I was going to do it with Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams. I realised that rather than answer the question of which Queen plays which role, if I could put the question on stage and not answer it, if I could leave the question wide open, that was a more exciting proposition than any possible answer.
The coin toss was partly to express formally the similarity and the loneliness of those two women. It was partly about the deep relationship they have with each other; each obsessed with the other one, with the other crown. It was partly about the fragility of the circumstances that led them to be where they are. Formally, it began with a head, the queen’s head dropping into a bowl, and it ends with the Queen’s head dropping into a bowl in a completely different way. The first thing anybody said was “Heads” introducing the key notes in the key order. By the end of the evening, those notes would have developed and deepened in resonance.
On the “different every night” question, in Amsterdam, I don’t need to strategize in the same way as I do when a company is playing eight shows a week. In Amsterdam, they only play four or five times a week. With Hans Kesting and Marieke Heebink, they didn’t need any help; it would be different every time. I don’t believe in it being perversely different. That can become a weird fetish. But you’ve got to be emotionally present. In the English-speaking world, with 8 shows a week for 20 weeks, you need ways to stop it from going stale. When I did Hamlet with Andrew Scott, whatever was in Andrew that evening would be in Hamlet that evening.
You have a technique called “Grenades” – how does it actually work?
I started “Grenades” on Oresteia. Angus Wright said, “This line is about crying. What if I’m not crying?” I said, “I’ll write you a different line. So, you have a crying line and a non-crying line.” I then did that in 10, 15 other places. I wrote alternate lines and speeches, left the cues the same, but changed the rest. I only gave them to the actors who spoke those lines; everyone else on stage heard the new line for the first time in front of an audience. The rule is you learn the new line and don’t tell anybody. Then, when you want to, you play it into the production in front of an audience. I warn the company a round of grenades has gone in. After that, it’s up to the actor whether they play the left road or the right road. They are, in a gentle way remixing, every night.
By the time Mary Stuart had completed a long-subsidised run, a West End run, and a national tour, I’d put in four rounds of grenades. By the end, there were probably 40 places where actors were making active decisions about which of two roads they want to go for tonight. One example in Mary Stuart, Calum Finlay was playing the French ambassador. We rewrote a four-line speech into a 16-line speech, but 14 of those lines were in French. He launched that at Juliet Stevenson one night, who was not expecting it and doesn’t speak French.
I’ll sometimes do a “double show,” where I ask everybody to repeat one line they don’t normally repeat. It’s never done in a gamey way. It’s always trying to stay true to the deep river underneath the production, to reconnect the actors with that. The danger is such techniques can get flippant and glib. In that way, it’s always going to be “different every night” because the feelings are different every night. The inquiry is how you feed that difference and keep it deep. You’re trying to establish the fence that separates the good ways from the bad ways. If everybody knows where that line is, then great. You want everybody to organically know where that line is, so that, without thinking, you’re all exploring the same terrain.
Your productions place an emphasis on time and musicality, allowing for an expanded production length. How do you view this aspect of theatrical time in relation to real-life time?
It’s a good question. I had this experience doing my first (and likely last) opera. One of the singers asked me, “But what is acting?” I said I needed to get coffee and think before answering: I’d never been asked that so directly before. When I came back, I said, “When you act on screen, the dislocation in time from the audience is total. We can watch a performance given 100 years ago. When you’re on stage, you are using up your life at a rate of 1 second per second. You’re still alive.”
I’ve always been interested in stage time as time in life, where everybody in the room is there together, and everybody is present. The strangeness of theatre for me has always been its duality. You can be really moved by Hamlet, but you also know that’s not really Hamlet. You sit in two contradictory places at the same time. The same thing is true of theatre time. You know, however, many years have not passed between Act 3 and Act 4. But you also don’t know that. You accept that multiple things are going on at once. If you focus too much, they really do contradict each other.
How long has it been since Hamlet Sr. died? Ophelia says “’tis twice two months, my lord.” The phrasing makes you think: is that exact? Has it been 4 months by the time she says that? Hard to know. Hamlet talks about it like it has been 10 minutes. Yet, the first court scene implies it is time to move on. Laertes going back to Paris suggests there’s been a period for the funeral and wedding. How long has it been? It seemed to me like two timescales were running. One was Hamlet’s time, and one was everybody else’s time. In everybody else’s time it had been quite a while; in Hamlet time, it had been 30 seconds. You couldn’t ever make an adjudication about which was real: surely a deliberate construction of Shakespeare’s. But that’s good, because in theatre, nothing is real. That’s the joy of it.
If an actor offers an audience member a piece of chocolate and they eat it, is that chocolate fictional, or is it real? The calories are real. If it’s poison chocolate, the poison is real. Or is it? What if it’s pretend poison on real chocolate? I get really interested in that game. Deep naturalism has never really meant much to me. I’m a disciple of Peter Brook, who conceptualized the theatre’s lack of realism, and yet total realism in the space of the theatre.
On the Greeks
In both Oresteia and Oedipus, you used a clock. As a musician, this seems like conducting the action through the seconds. Can you comment on the use of the clock?
I try not to think about it too much thematically, because that way you can go stale. But I do seem to be drawn to it.
That exploration started with Romeo and Juliet. I did it at university, discussed it with Anne Barton, did it professionally in 2012, and am doing it again in 2026. One thing I love about that play is it is obsessed with time, obsessed with coincidence. You keep getting told what time it is in scenes. “Good morrow, cousin.” “Is the day so young?” “But new struck nine.” It keeps timestamping all the time. That 2012 production was my first clock. I projected the day and the time. We showed you what time it was exactly to the second. The whole point is that if he were to turn up a few minutes later at the end, he’d find her awake and they’d be fine. These fragile few seconds make all the difference. That is baked in dramaturgically.
I timestamped that play repeatedly to show sliding doors, double scenes. Here is a version of the opening fight where the two lots walked past each other, and there is no fight. Rewind! Same timestamp. This time, someone tries to light a cigarette, burns their thumb, puts their thumb in their mouth, and someone else says, “Did you bite your thumb at me?” Suddenly, you’re off. This tiny little thing. The clock articulates that these scenes are moving back and forward in time.
Then, in about 2014, I saw Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies, which had a clock like the clock I’d used, but in a different way. I felt a family resemblance to this work. I loved Roman Tragedies; I thought it was incredible. I recognized things that were in Romeo and Juliet achieved to the power of 10. I forget exactly how those clocks work, but I think it says, “There’s 3 minutes till the death of Julius Caesar,” “2 minutes till…” as if you’re on a ride, and the production knows where these points are going to come. Seeing that gave me confidence.
By the time I came to make Oresteia, the genesis of that clock was that I went to a sentencing hearing for a woman who had killed her children. I was fascinated by how metered the court was in terms of time. Court started at 10 minutes past 2. They would all run across the corridors. A funny thing would sound, and people would go on the intercom: “We’ve got 4 minutes, court is beginning again in 4 minutes.” All the courts in the building began at the same time. I said to the QC, “What happens if you’re late?” She said, “There is NO late.”
I knew Oresteia was originally performed in the place where they would have done trials. By the time you do that final twist into the final play, it’s like, we’re in a court! But we’ve always been in a court. It wasn’t a big scene change, so much as acknowledging the place the audience had been sitting the whole time, drawing an analogy between the drama of the first two plays and the practice of a courtroom. The whole thing both was and wasn’t set in a court. I was looking for a vocabulary for a way to make a production that both was and wasn’t set at a trial. The version we went for was that the times of death we stamped into that production were not fictional time, but theatre time. If Iphigenia died at 5 past 8 that evening, and Klytemnestra died at 5 past 9, as if you were watching a courtroom re-enactment, but you didn’t realize that until you got to the end.
We found thrilling ways to work into that idea. When Orestes turns up to kill his mum, I was trying to dramatize Pylades. The idea that Aeschylus has two actors, then Sophocles adds a third, is disproved by the scene where you’ve got Orestes, Klytemnestra, and then Pylades talks: three actors onstage are talking. Clearly Aeschylus loved the drama of somebody being silent, silent, silent, then suddenly saying something (it’s also true of Cassandra). I was thinking about how to capture that for a modern audience, mark that moment of hesitation for Orestes.
One thing we did was put up, because by then you’d seen Iphigenia die, Agamemnon die, Cassandra die, all timestamped, then you saw Klytemnestra: “Time of Death.” The clock was running live. You knew this was the scene in which she was going to die. You watched them negotiate, knowing this is where it was supposed to go, and then it didn’t go there, something else happened, and eventually, suddenly, when she is dead, you have skipped out the murder, there’s a static timestamp and a body, it all dislocates. I remember feeling we’d really understood something about the play when, at the end, Orestes stood there, and that clock ran again, and it said Orestes’ Time of Death, and that clock ran out into the end of the evening, reconnecting the story’s time with the audience’s lives. Orestes gets a life sentence: he has to keep living.
I get fascinated by the way the end of a production segues back into the real life of the audience, how the roads join each other, that you go back into real life resuming as you go into a curtain call and the house lights come on. To not make that feel like a series of hard joins. I have tried various ways over the years of exploring and articulating those transitions.
The moment of killing Iphigenia was perhaps one of the most chilling moments in contemporary theatre (Rodosthenous, 2016). How did you envisage that heart-breaking scene?
Iphigenia’s death came out of a conversation with Simon Goldhill. He told me it was the most holy death, an aspirational death. I had a version where she was going to kill herself at the table, where the child would reach for the bread knife and make the decision herself.
I remember the conversation where he said it’s a beautiful death, a straight-to-heaven death. I thought, what is our equivalent of the nicest way to die? I saw a documentary about Dignitas, a Terry Pratchett documentary, where he was looking at Dignitas, wondering if that would be his end. You watch a guy take the pills and die. I found that very disturbing and touching.
Thinking about the modern equivalent of that Greek death, the idea that she would feel nothing and fall asleep sounds gorgeous, as long as you don’t have to sit and watch it. Because, if you have to sit and watch it, it’s immensely disturbing. All the more disturbing for the fact that you have to sit there and wait for it to happen.
There’s another principle that comes up with the Greeks. It’s easy in Oedipus to make the audience go, “Ugh, incest.” The difficult thing is to make them want the incest to continue. The challenge is to take the audience to the place they didn’t know they could go.
With Oresteia, you want to create a feeling of, “Of course we should kill the child, it’s the best decision.” Only then, once confronted with the reality, we feel ourselves split. So much theatre picks the default liberal side and iterates it. It’s boring, because it’s what many of us already think. By saying the death of children is bad, I stay disengaged. The second I engage with being pro the death of children in these specific fictional circumstances, that feels like a useful exercise. Something expands.
Your adaptations are renowned for making timeless stories feel urgently contemporary. In the past you have stated that “I think of adaptation as like using a foreign plug. You are in a country where your hairdryer won’t work when you plug it straight in. You have to find the adaptor which will let the electricity of now flow into the old thing and make it function” (Icke 2015). In your adaptation process, what is your primary goal?
I began thinking a lot about Shakespeare, and from there found my way to Greek Tragedy. I’ve always felt the hard border between writer and director is arbitrary – I don’t really understand it. Same with the border between “new play” and “adaptation.” The project of Greek tragedy is not “I’ve come up with a new story,” it is “I’m gonna tell you that story, and I’m gonna tell it a bit differently.” You can see why Sondheim’s Into the Woods is an important text to me. It is doing the same thing: here are the fairy stories you think you know. It’s the same, but it’s different. The energy of Sophocles is the tension between the version of the story the audience thinks they know (from Homer, originally), and this new version. It’s the same with Shakespeare.
It’s kind of mad that Shakespeare is co-opted by the invention of the writer as distinct from the director. There were no directors when he was writing; he was an actor in the plays. He is a creator of a theatrical experience, rather than a playwright who is then served by directors who bow down before the tablets. I don’t like the theatre made in that mode, where the playwright offers cryptic texts to a series of sycophantic interpreters. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Shakespeare is all, by our modern definition, adaptation. It isn’t new writing in the way we think about new writing. The weird solipsism of “I have made this, and it is mine,” well, I don’t understand that. There’s a real joy and humility in understanding a tradition and trying to contribute to it. It’s not an accident that where Western theatre begins in Greek tragedy, that’s the gesture. The whole project is looking back and being present now, understanding the similarities and the differences.
My creative practice is the same attempt as the tragedians’ in relation to Homer: asking big questions, bringing it up to now, allowing it to resonate now, not presenting it as a museum recreation. That’s why I love doing Shakespeare, Greeks, Chekhov. Chekhov offers a different project: it’s all about ordinary life. If I present Chekhov in period dress, with loads of Russian names, I’m killing its gesture, robbing it of its theatrical project: which is “ordinary life.” I’ve always felt more committed to that gestural understanding: “What was this trying to do, and how can we allow it to do that thing?” Looking at Shakespeare exactly as it would have been in 1599 has an academic utility, but I don’t think it has an emotional commitment or any theatrical truth. It doesn’t have immediacy. It doesn’t have danger.
I think that’s why in our theatre culture sometimes, an audience feels too safe. It lets them off the hook. “It’s not about me, it’s not about now.” There’s something very confronting about theatre when you’re locked in a room with it, and it starts to make you think about things you didn’t want to think about. But that’s the way it works.
You have often adapted the work you direct.
It is frankly just me being a product of the culture I am in. If there’s a certain number of really great new plays produced every year, most are produced on commission to a subsidized theatre. If they are produced by a subsidized theatre, the artistic director has first refusal to direct the play themselves.
If you are, as I currently am, not attached to a particular venue, by the time a new script is offered out to freelancers, it’s probably that the artistic director doesn’t want to do it. Are there new plays in the last decade that I would have loved to have a crack at? Yeah, but did they come my way? No. Because often they’re guarded by the building that they’re first delivered to. I don’t run a company, so I’m not in a position to commission plays for myself to direct. That’s how the culture works. When I did Oresteia, it was considered slightly heretical that I was rewriting them rather than commissioning a poet for a translation. Mainland Europe, where I’ve made a lot of work in the last decade, is not really a new play culture. The place for me to work with living writers would either be here in the US or in the UK.
On the International Scene
You have worked a lot in Europe as well as the UK and on Broadway. How have these experiences shaped your perspective?
I’ve not done a whole lot on Broadway. This is only my second. That’s partly through choice. I’ve never wanted to direct celebrities for the sake of celebrity.
Broadway is not a great place to make new work. It’s wildly expensive and heavily unionized. Oedipus is costing between eight and ten times more than it cost in the West End and needs to basically sell incredibly for the whole run to have any chance of making its money back, which is ludicrous.
But, I love American actors. I can always do better working in English because it’s the language I exist in. As much as I enjoy the exercise of working in translation, it’s language that’s just never going to be mine in the same way.
When I first went to Amsterdam, I did Oedipus. Then, I went to Germany and Switzerland: I did the Oresteia and a new production of The Crucible in German. That was a really interesting year because before that I’d never been in a room where I couldn’t necessarily follow what was being said. I had to let go of language as sense and respond to language as sound, to follow them on instinct. Interestingly now, I tend to not even have a script. I just sit on the floor and watch what the actors are doing. I try to be very present with what’s happening. I think that did shift.
Amsterdam rehearses a very short day. They all learn the lines beforehand. When I started with them, on Oedipus and Children of Nora, that ensemble basically had two settings: acting at full and talking. There’s no middle, no marking it. They went racing off into a scene to try and sniff out what’s happening. That was huge for me. That process of making Oedipus is the most formative rehearsal process I’ve ever had.
On a few fronts, Amsterdam showed me a completely different way of doing things. There’s no stage management. The technicians take their own cues. The actors remember where they went. There’s just a lot more responsibility taken by everybody. The Broadway system is wildly infantilizing. In Amsterdam, they’ll tell you if they want a tea break. Faced with union rules for tea breaks, they’d have said “We don’t need one, let’s keep working.”
When your work is translated, for example your Oedipus in Athens, how involved are you in that process?
Pretty involved. It depends on my relationships with the theatre and with the translator.
I have a little tiny bit of Greek. I have Greek enough to stumble through the Sophocles very, very slowly. But again, I haven’t looked at the translation in Athens. Lizzie Manwaring, my associate, who has been directing that process, knows the English text inside out. And of course, there’s no better way of interrogating a translation than getting actors to try and act it. And we always try and give them, at least when they’re doing my production, a bilingual script so they can see the Greek translation, they can see the English, in parallel columns. And that tends to mean that actors will catch anything that’s gone wrong.
In Stuttgart, I met Christina Schloegel, a translation assistant at the time, and I could see that this young woman was having reactions to the discussions in rehearsal. I was over to her in the coffee break going, “I feel like you’re thinking things and I want to know what they are.” It turned out she was not only fluent in English, but just incredibly sensitive and intelligent. And there were things in that German translation that were misreadings of what was written in the English. So, I said to her, rather than do this the normal way, which is some playwright who doesn’t consult me, why don’t you make a translation? She did – and we’ve worked together on my plays in German ever since.
There is a growing tendency in contemporary criticism not to criticise but merely to describe shows. What is your opinion on this and what is the role of criticism if not to criticise? Is there a meaningful dialogue between the critics’ community and the artists?
Is there a meaningful dialogue at the moment? No, there isn’t. Should there be? Yes.
I have tended to not really read the critics. Of course, you’re aware of whether it’s been warmly received or not, in cultures where it matters; in some cultures, it just doesn’t. In Holland, if something is badly reviewed, that won’t stop it from being a word-of-mouth hit. Being savaged isn’t pleasant. But then, everything being praised is a dead culture: I think there’s a huge danger in allowing everything to revert to the mean. The thought that everybody’s equal and everybody gets a biscuit is not useful when thinking about works of art.
In British theatre, there’s certainly been a movement in the last 10 years. People like Michael Billington can be deeply old fashioned, but there’s a tremendous utility to that tradition. The fact that he’s seen so many Hamlets means he can bring a new production into the context of all the others.
One summer, I saw back-to-back nearly all the proms. And I remember seeing a very old-fashioned conductor who was beating time the whole time. One hand was always like a metronome, showing you where the beat of the bar was. And then the next night, Sir Simon Rattle was there, conducting his orchestra. And I was so struck by the fact that he didn’t beat time at all. He just showed them at the beginning – and then what he was doing was much harder to pin down: an emotional kind of like a sort of one-man dance really, which is kind of what he does having now spent a chunk of time this year watching him up close. And I remember just listening and hearing that the energy of that music was of a completely different quality and order to the stuff the night before. Which is to say, in my opinion, it was just better. What Rattle was doing wasn’t the ‘rules’, it was harder to describe or analyse than the man the night before – but the result was profoundly more powerful.
There are no perfect plays. But I think sometimes now there is a very British suspicion of anybody who wants to achieve on a very high level. There’s a lack of respect for the idea that it matters to try and make something really good. Sometimes I wish that the critics were more able to respond in that way. The depressing thing is when you look at the star ratings and you go, is that really equivalent? They are (of course) marking everybody on different grade boundaries and they are not really acknowledging that: a first-time director and Ivo van Hove, might both be three stars in the same newspaper. I’m not sure that’s useful.
There’s a huge role for genuine criticism. When it’s good it can really shape a culture. Kenneth Tynan is the obvious example. In the UK, the one who now is the most respected is Susannah Clapp. Her reviews are always incisive and always beautifully written. What Tynan and Clapp have got in common is when they are happy, the sound of them praising something is glorious; equally the sound of them going “this is not good enough” is brutal. As much as I disagree sometimes with their assessments, I do think that’s important: that the review is a piece of writing in its own right.
Reviews do not shift the dial much at all in terms of ticket sales. I think that’s a shame. I suspect that’s about a breakdown of trust. I think that’s to do with certain things in the liberal culture that make critics feel like they’re not allowed to criticise. The star (*) system does invite a kind of ranking, but then they don’t use it like that. If you are going to compare Alex Zeldin’s The Confessions to 95% of what else was on at that time, it should absolutely be five stars: whatever its flaws, it’s so much more achieved.
Sometimes, now, you read people who seem to be arguing that they should be able to get everything on a first viewing, as if complexity is a negative. “It’s overly complex. It’s dense.” I just think that’s inane. Why would you ever want that? One of the reasons these great texts are so sustaining is that they keep remaking themselves. The joy of Stanley Kubrick’s films is that on the 10th watch, you notice something you’d never seen before. I remember going to see Peter Brook not long at all before he died and he was sitting with The Tempest and said, “I’ve spotted something I don’t think I’d ever noticed before.”
Can theatre writing be taught? What, in your view, are the essential, learnable skills, and what must remain an innate, unteachable instinct?
I’ve come to believe that the ability to write dialogue is the gift. I don’t think you can teach somebody that thing where when the characters talk, you want to listen. If the dialogue has blood getting to it.
I think structure you can learn: how you hold tension, how you set things up and pay them off. I think that comes with practice and understanding. You learn the rules in order to break them and expand them. It’s not a set way, but you can give people permission to think in their own way about established traditions. The enemy of good writing is formula. Do you ever play that game when you watch TV of saying the next line before they say it? If it’s good writing, such guesses should always be wrong. It should defeat my expectation with something better, more surprising, more witty.
I’ve learned an immeasurable amount from up-close encounters with older plays, with the Oresteia and The Wild Duck, seeing how they’re built. In Sophocles’ Oedipus, the moment where they work it out is satisfying even in the worst production, which is all to do with construction: the way tension builds and releases, the way setups pay off. Shakespeare is the great model. He never seems to judge the characters; everybody is granted humanity and ambivalence. He also has a profound disrespect for genre, writing tragedy into comedy and comedy into tragedy. By mid-career, he’s making plays that burst the boundaries of genre.
I think the audience sometimes colludes in an unconscious desire to make it not hurt them; to make it flat and boring. When I did A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Stockton, a lady came up to me afterwards and said, “I think it’s disgraceful that you’ve updated the language.” We hadn’t. We’d cut a bit, but we hadn’t changed any of it – and certainly not modernised anything. She did not believe this – and she was furious. With hindsight, I realized she was offended because she had understood it. What she’d paid for was an experience of polite boredom where impenetrable language washed over her. I’d robbed her of that.
I think there is an audience who will try to diffuse tension with stupid laughter, to get the evening to not accumulate any power. It’s very different to a movie where they know they can’t control it. Unconsciously, they know they can interrupt by coughing, in the theatre. I do sometimes feel like they try to make it not hurt them.
I work on how to take the audience somewhere, even when it doesn’t necessarily want to go. On a deep level, the audience does want the deep stuff; it just doesn’t know it; if you ask people what they want from theatre, they won’t say, “I want to be shaken to my core.” But I think we do all want that. It’s only us professionals who would construct that answer. The vast majority of people will just say, “I want it to be a bit funny and I want to not be bored.”
Are there any performances that have really stayed with you, shaped you, inspired you or any moments that have really been really important to you?
Roman Tragedies remains the best Shakespeare production I’ve ever seen. I loved its ambition and the extraordinary use of the audience, but more than anything, I loved those actors. It was so luminously and fantastically acted. Hans Kesting and Marieke Heebink, both of whom were in that, went on to be Oedipus and Jocasta in my production of Oedipus. Then I wrote Judas for Hans and, before that, Children of Nora with a huge role for Marieke. So, lots of things came from the engagement with that company.
I remember seeing Kathleen Turner in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in the West End – extraordinary. I remember seeing the original production of August: Osage County when the National brought the American Steppenwolf Ensemble over. Michael Boyd’s production of Henry VI Part 1, 2 and 3 was incredible and so exciting. More recently, Mark Strong in A View from the Bridge. I remember the bit where someone says his eyes were like tunnels – a line I would usually be drawn to cut. I remember looking at him and thinking, “Oh, my God, his eyes are actually like tunnels. How is he doing that?” That was before I knew Mark and before we had worked together.
We’re emerging from perhaps the worst and weakest period in British subsidised theatre history, but before that was a period of extraordinary fertility, for about fifteen years from 2000. Dominic Cooke was at the Royal Court. Michael Grandage was at the Donmar Warehouse. Michael Boyd was at the RSC. David Lan was at the Young Vic. Nicholas Hytner was at the National. The tickets were cheap, and the standard of work was very high. The National offered an experience where it was like £5 for a young person’s ticket and £10 for the Travelex season.
You could do a thing that is now impossible for a young artist: you could see loads of work without spending a fortune, including work that wasn’t necessarily to your taste. It was cheap enough that you didn’t have to really select; you could see all of it. I feel super lucky that I was at that point in my development when there was this embarrassment of riches in London theatre. I feel really lucky that I got to see the great director Howard Davies making incredible productions of plays like The White Guard. When I first went with Bunny Christie, I remember talking to her about how she designed The White Guard and that scene change where it went backwards and wobbled because the character onstage was drunk. I paid a fiver to see that. I saw it three times. It’s not the mode of work I’ve been drawn to myself, but I’m so glad I got to see it. I had such a great time in the audience. That isn’t offered anymore. There is no equivalent to Howard Davies. There is nobody making that kind of aesthetically conservative, but very refined, work.
The Hytner National had the confidence to have Nick [Hytner] doing his Shakespeare in his crystal clear modern dress way, Katie Mitchell making a whole series of great productions in the Lyttelton, Howard [Davies] doing period dress Chekhov, his brilliant House of Bernarda Alba with Penelope Wilton, and then in the same theatre, Jerry Springer: The Opera and Marianne [Elliot] doing that fantastic production of Saint Joan with Anne-Marie Duff in the Olivier Theatre. It was an embarrassment of riches, and a huge diversity of styles and approaches. You thought, “Oh, all human life is here.”
On the Future
What is the future of the theatre?
The world has become a scarier, more divided place in the last decade. I hope we might see some greater engagement with those divisions because theatre is very good at being a divided form. The containment of different points of view is one of the things theatre does really incredibly well. It’s at its least effective when it tries to be an essay and make an argument, to tell you that this is this, or when it tries to be a sermon and it says we’re all good people because we all believe the same things.
I would like the future of theatre to be a re-engagement with what the form is and what it’s for, where it’s useful. The Greeks had a theatre that was genuinely civically useful. It had a real role to play in exploring primal terrors and unthinkably horrible situations. Now that doesn’t mean it has to be heavy and boring and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s full of lectures.
In a different way with Shakespeare, there’s the willingness to have the whole world on stage and to deal with every level of society and experience, to have jokes sit next to profound philosophical thought and to understand that everyone washes in the same river. He seems to see without judgment everyone in the same place.
I think ticket prices, especially subsidised ticket prices, are too high and I wonder if somebody will try and make the radical move: to run a theatre and have all the tickets free; to run it entirely off a donation model and remove the relationship of box office income. Or tickets for everything for £10. I would love someone to disrupt the whole ecosystem like that, because I think that would be very healthy.
When they did that at the National Theatre with the Travelex £10 system, that bore such extraordinary fruit in terms of artists and audiences. There’s a lot more work on screen for actors, and therefore for writers, and to a lesser extent for directors. There are generations of people coming through now who do their 20s and 30s as well-reputed, well-known actors and they are never on stage. That’s a loss for the art form.
I sometimes wonder if we do enough work to make that top talent feel welcome. The moment the Arts Council said it was abolishing excellence was a “head in hands” moment of “we’ve totally lost the plot.” It was ludicrous. In this “anti-excellence” moment we have been through, which is a wider cultural flow, I think there’s been a huge amount of damage done to the idea of art and to the practice of it in the subsidised world. Excellence and elitism have become conflated and I don’t believe that’s true; excellence in theatre can be incredibly democratic. If the ticket price is right, you get to watch world-class actors, Mark Strong and Lesley Manville doing this thing that only they could do and perhaps come to an understanding of a very ancient story through their understanding of it. Anti-excellence is anti-artistry. I think we’ve really paid the price for that in terms of the work that’s been on the stage in the last decade.
There was a moment in 2014-7, before social media turned completely poisonous, where there was a lot of discussion about the theatre. There were blogs and people were reviewing things in creative ways; this whole swirl of people writing about the things they’d seen. If people are coming to see the work and thinking about it in public, that allows other people to think about it in public too and it means that when school kids are brought to see it and they google it, there’s all this material they can read, something much more than a star rating and a brief summary on a newspaper website.
One of the amazing things about where we are in theatre in the UK, is that the commercial sector is thriving. It’s in great health. We put on an extra matinee of Oedipus last year, only for young people. It was for under 25s. All the tickets were £10 or £15. And it was completely sold-out in 20 minutes. That makes me excited.
When I was at the Almeida, I invented a thing called “Almeida For Free” and got a donor to pay for five performances of Hamlet to buy the whole house so we could give away those tickets to under 25s. If you have Margot Robbie or Ian McKellen or Daniel Kaluuya in a play, ordinary people who do not know about the art form, who do not consider themselves theatre fans, take notice and might go and see that. That demonstrates that the theatre and the world are still very much alive to each other: despite its problems, the art form is still alive.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: With many thanks to Manuel Harlan for giving permissions for the use of photographs from Oresteia, Uncle Vanya, Hamlet andMary Stuart and to Zoe Innes for sourcing the actual photographs, to Julieta Cervantes for the photographs from Oedipus on Broadway, and Morgan Zysman for sourcing them, to Andreas Simopoulos for the photograph from Oedipus in Athens, to Dim Balsem for the portrait photography of Robert Icke, and finally to Sophie Clark for organising the three Interviews.
Bibliography
Icke, Robert. “Robert Icke, Theatre Director: ‘Oresteia? It’s Quite like The Sopranos.’” The Guardian, 23 Aug. 2015.
Rodosthenous, George, editor. Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions. Methuen Bloomsbury, 2016.
*George Rodosthenous is Professor of Theatre Directing at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, where he held the position of Deputy Head of School from 2020 to 2024. Rodosthenous has edited the books Theatre as Voyeurism: The Pleasures of Watching (Palgrave), Contemporary Approaches to Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions (Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury), The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from Snow White to Frozen (Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury), Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen (Routledge) and co-edited Greek Tragedy and the Digital (Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury).
Copyright © 2025 George Rodosthenous
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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