Robert Icke

0:06Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures discuss the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the theatre director and writer Robert Icke. With his radical new versions of classic plays, Icke has built a reputation for revelatory productions. Born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1986, he made his name in 2015 with an epic new version of the Greek tragedy Oresteia, which he'd adapted himself. It won several awards, and at 29, Ike became the youngest ever recipient of the Best Director Award at the Olivier's.

0:44More acclaim followed for his 2017 production of Hamlet, starring Andrew Scott, his adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler play The Doctor, and his new version of Oedipus, which transferred to Broadway in 2025. His latest West End production is Romeo and Juliet, starring Sadie Sink of Stranger Things fame. Robert Icke has been described by Variety magazine as the great hope of British theatre.

1:11Robert Icke, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much. You're renowned as one of Britain's most innovative directors, working in a very ancient art form, live theatre. For you, why theatre? And what does it offer all of us in the 21st century? Start easy. I think theatre fundamentally has two components, which is people and time. You know, if you're going to watch a movie, you're watching a kind of Frankenstein's monster of things that could have happened over years and years and years in lots of different countries, in lots of different places, and some of it's CGI and some of it isn't.

1:48And there's something about the clarity of theatre, particularly now when we all feel so overwhelmed and distracted and kind of divided, where actually you're locked in a room with some people and they do a thing and when they stop the thing is over, that increasingly seems to me like people are almost relieved to have that space when it works and when it tells you the truth, which is not always. But I suppose why theatre for me is one of those questions I can't really answer because it feels like a choice I've made without making it. Well, maybe we'll explore over the course of this conversation why theatre for Robert Icke.

2:23You were born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1986, so you're still in your 30s as we speak. Only just, yeah. Tell me about your upbringing. What did your parents do, first of all? My dad was a tax inspector. They were both teachers, actually, first, and then I think when I was born, my dad said he couldn't cope with kids all day and kids all night and so pivoted to work for the HMRC where he worked till he retired. And my mum taught, I think, kind of computerised accounting and then did bits of accounting work, but not arts jobs. Like, nobody in my family was in the arts. What about at home? I mean, was there an interest in culture, in books, in film, in music?

2:59Yes. I mean, they're both super interested, but I think the leap was the profession. We sort of didn't know anybody who was a professional artist of any sort, and that always felt like the sort of promised land, particularly in Stockton-Hunties, where there's not a great local theatre, there's not a great local concert hall. You know, you kind of have to travel. You have to get in the car for an hour. if you want to see anything other than cinema or TV. So you wouldn't have gone to the theatre as a kid then? That wasn't part of the... We did bits and pieces, but it was only when I got a bit older that my dad started tracking me out to see the RSC at Newcastle and going to Sheffield Crucible.

3:31That was when I first started to meet theatre of a sort of, I suppose, a different ambition.

3:41On This Cultural Life, Robert Ike, my guests choose the influences and inspirations that have had the biggest impact on their own creativity. and your first choice for this programme is piano lessons. So when did you first start playing? I was four, I think, or five. I think both of my parents, and it's funny, since I've become a parent, I have a very different lens on this, you really realise the way in which you consciously and unconsciously go shopping for the things you wish you'd had in your childhood. And my dad particularly, I think, has a big curiosity to learn, but because my dad grew up on a dairy farm in Shropshire, there just wasn't the options for him.

4:17as in like he was needed on that farm and so for example when I applied to Cambridge I found out after I'd got in that he'd been asked to do the extra Cambridge entrance term and his dad wouldn't let him because he needed him on the farm and so my like that was the sort of thing that could have maybe happened for my dad but circumstances didn't allow and I sort of suspect looking back on it that the fact that kids were going to have music lessons was a thing that both of them felt this is a fantastic thing to have. To be compensating for their own... Yeah. So the opportunities that they didn't have.

4:49Well, then I think piano particularly, I feel very grateful that I was sort of forced through it when I was little. And I think for me it really solidified when I was sort of in my mid-teens and like all kind of art, I suppose, very simple and very difficult at the same time. You start to understand that you can't really play the second note until you've played the first note. and that the first note is a strange mystery because it comes out of silence. And so whatever you do with it, you're breaking a silence to make something begin and then you're developing that something with the second note you play and then again with the third note.

5:24And when you hear a really great pianist, you have that strange suspended sense of time where you feel like they've begun something and then 25 minutes later, a window opens and you're back in your real life again and you think, you just pulled my attention. through this kind of timeless period. And I'd started to understand, I'd sort of begun to see some of the power of that, which is completely carry-a-crossable. It's not a word. It's completely transferable in terms of theatre. Well, I was going to say, because the way that you've just described those series of notes is that there is drama there, there's tension, and then there's almost a narrative because you're creating a story with those notes.

6:06So you're relating those lessons in your understanding of music to what you did later in life, do you think, with the storytelling? Oh, 100%. And I think it's sort of, when I eventually landed with Mrs White, who is still teaching incredibly at 95, in the same room in her house in Middlesbrough that I was taught in, and that's where I did my kind of final grades and I was going to do a performance diploma and then I sort of ended up doing my A-levels and getting a bit distracted. And I think, honestly, by then I'd worked out that a career as a concert pianist was going to be too lonely for me.

6:36But you considered it there? I really did consider it. You know, in theatre I chose a really difficult art form because I need a theatre and a load of other people and a budget. Like, I'm resource heavy. Whereas actually a pianist just needs a piano and some time to practice and a novelist's even better. You just need a pencil and some paper. And the art form I'm in is very dependent on resource. But I really did consider it. Did you perform when you were growing up as a child, either at school or in local concert halls? or people other than your teacher and your parents hear you play. They did.

7:11And I played for school assemblies when I was a primary school child. And I was paid to play in a church. Paid? Yeah. And so instead of a paper round, which is what my brother did and had to get up in the early hours to go and post the Evening Gazette through people's doors. You were accompanying the hymns. I was. And I worked for an opera company, which was like an incredible challenge in a way because they often couldn't afford the piano reductions. and so often I was looking at a six-stave orchestral score and trying to reduce it to two hands while there's a lot of people trying to sing it.

7:43Do you still play? I do. Yeah, I do. I mean, only for myself. I sort of talk about it to actors all the time because I think quite often when you're doing plays, people say, well, everyone knows the ending. I respond to that by thinking, well, everybody knows the notes of Happy Birthday, but if you hear Sinatra sing Happy Birthday, you feel like you don't know where you're going to go. You don't know where he's going to take you. And there's something about the pleasure of the knowing and the unknowing that I think is essential to how theatre works. The sonata was all about jazz, though, wasn't he?

8:13Making things sound fresh and new and unexpected. There's a kind of jazz approach, then, to your theatrical direction. Well, it's still the song. It's still Fly Me to the Moon, but it's not four square. I made the mistake of doing an opera last year, which is not a mistake I'll repeat, but the best thing about doing the opera was getting to watch Simon Rattle up close, who was conducting. and he doesn't beat time. You know, he's not... A lot of conductors who I've watched in concert and things over the years, one hand is like a metronome showing you where the beats of the bar are. Right, he's got a swing.

8:43Yeah, and there's sort of... Like a heartbeat, there's a sort of rhythm that comes through him and he's doing a kind of strange one-man dance, really. You know, what he's doing would be very, very hard to kind of write down. But then sometimes I'd say to him, tell me what you're hearing in that bit. We were doing Don Giovanni and I said, tell me about what is coming through the music for you. And he'd say something like, it's a garden and it's in fast motion and the flowers are blooming and then they're dropping. And like, there's this incredible, incredible imagination. But there was that heartbeat underneath that he's sort of transmitting to everybody that is undeniable when you're in the room with it.

9:19So why would you not do opera again? Why was it wrong? You know, I've never encountered a sort of mode of production that was so fundamentally anti-creative. The expectation is that everything is decided four years ahead and that you just come in and do what the singers describe to me as park and bark, which is you stand there and sing it like that. So you had no artistic freedom there? You couldn't change the movement? What's the point of bringing you in? What is the point of bringing me in? It's a good question. And I wish I could ask that question. Did you not ask them? This was at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, wasn't it?

9:53And it was a very strange circumstance because my great friend and sort of mentor, Pierre Audi, who had talked me into it and had speed-dated me with Simon Rattle, which was the only reason I had gone anywhere near it, died of a heart attack two weeks before rehearsals began. And so Simon and I were in this strange position of being at this festival, both of us having been brought there by Pierre. And again and again I thought, God, I wonder what Pierre would make of this. There's something so strange about being kind of parentless in that context. And I'd never been in an opera rehearsal room other than when I was playing the piano when I was a kid, which was a very different deal.

10:28You know, when you're working with any great actor, or really any actors, but like, I've been lucky enough to be in the room with some all-time greats. In my job, I think you're an idiot if you think you can prescribe usefully what Ian McKellen or Leslie Manville or Andrew Scott is going to do. Because what you're going to do is think together about what the material is, what the valency and weight and tension and tone and you're going to explore together, but then they're going to do something. They are active. You know, they are the actor. Something then happens inside them. And very often with the great ones, you're surprised and you're astonished and you go, oh, wow, I'd never have guessed that.

11:09And then often my job is to go, yeah, go further. That's great. So what was the problem with the opera, that the singers didn't have that acting ability? Or was it that the demands of the opera such that the movement is almost locked in because the music demands a certain movement around the stage? Strangely, neither of those things, because Simon was completely flexible and the singers were fantastic, but you have three weeks to rehearse a three-hour plus opera and the pressure from the production to have it all prescribed and locked down from the first second means there's no space for exploration.

11:41And so when you can't search, you don't find anything other than what you brought in. And what's the point of the rehearsal if it's just going to be a sort of reheat of some food you cooked two years ago. You know, I guess I've come to believe that it works best when everybody is searching together. That word director, it's not that you've got a sort of treasure map with an X on it. It's kind of gone, I think we're going over there. And maybe as usefully, we're not going that way. The kind of crazy frustration of the opera was, everybody had said to me, oh, you'll hate working with the conductor and you'll find the singers really frustrating.

12:18And I loved working with the conductor and I really enjoyed the singers. But the mould of production, I thought, I never want to be in this place again. I never, ever want to do this again. Because it's impossible to change. It's impossible for me, anyway, to make great work like that.

12:40Your next choice for this cultural life, Robert Icke, is the absolutely pivotal moment when your father took you to Sheffield to see a production of Richard III, which starred Kenneth Branagh, and it was directed by Michael Grandage. Just tell us about that performance and why it was so important to you, first of all. We watched this performance. I knew nothing about Richard III. I'd never seen it before. I'd never read it. I'd seen some Shakespeare before. I'd found it boring and figured it wasn't for me. It was a bit like algebra, like it was a thing one had to study, but like it wasn't really of profound interest or importance.

13:09And a lot of it just, I couldn't believe it was Shakespeare. I just had that lovely experience of feeling like this can't be 400 years old because it feels so funny and so spontaneous and so dangerous. And then at the end of it, this guy came out with a mic and all the actors came out and this guy started to take questions. And I was like, who's that? And that was Michael Grandage. I'm not sure I would have known really what a director was. And so I wrote to Grandage after that and I said, I don't know how you did that, but it wasn't boring. Like, I want to know what you did differently. And he replied.

13:43He did. Amazingly replied and said, I can't write this down, but why don't you come and see me and I'll try and tell you. So you went there to what you came to London to see. At that point, he was, I think, about to run the Donmar Warehouse. We're talking like 2001, 2002, I think. And he spent a good hour and a half with me and just said fantastic things, you know, and said everything that you put on stage has to be there for three good reasons. And because it looks good is not a good reason. And because you like it is not a good reason. Think everything through. And he said something to me, which I'm still actively doing now, which is he said, I don't do a read-through.

14:17What's the point of a read-through? They've all read the play. They've signed up to be in the play. get started on the first day, get going, get working don't waste time everything that is there because this is always how we do it which again explains some of my discomfort with opera, anything that's there just because it's been there for 200 years no, ask the question of is this the best use of our time what are we searching for here and how do we search for us were you an academic child? I was an academic child and I was bookish but of course that was dangerous in my school so I had to work out how to not seem bookish in order to not get beaten up I went to school with kids who, you know, went on to start businesses who went on to university, some of them went to prison like there was one kid in our tutor group who used to claim anyway that he went out burgling with his dad and go, I'm knuckered today, I'm completely knuckered and you'd say, oh why?

15:07and he'd say, oh I just was out nicking and then I remember one day he said to somebody I know where you live, it was extraordinary it was a bit like a city, so many kids So in the school, we're talking about sort of what? I think about 1500 to 1800, we weren't really stratified into sets. And so I feel like I learned so much there about being in the world, I suppose. It was a social education as much as an academic. Yeah, definitely it was. So I've read that you started your own kind of mini theatre company around this time, 1516, in direct response to that meeting with Michael Grandage. By the time I met Michael, my friends and I at school knew we wanted to do a play.

15:45and I had talked my way into Stockton Arts Centre, ARC, which had opened in like the late 90s, I think, with a load of Arts Council money and then gone bankrupt. And so for most of my childhood, it had sat there on Dovecourt Street, dark with the lights off and it's a big glass front of building. So you could really see there was nobody in there. And then one day we were in town doing something or other and the lights were on. And so I think I literally pushed the non-automatic automatic doors and introduced myself and said, we want to do a play. and amazingly the guy running it at that point said yes and decided it was a good idea to let these kids do, of all things, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

16:23Not an easy play. Did you know it already? No. So you just decided that if you were running a theatre company you would have to put on some Shakespeare and this is a well-known play. And also it had a murder in the middle of it. I think that was attractive and it had a lot of tension leading to a murder and then a battle. And so we ended up doing five Shakespeare's. We did a Shakespeare every year for five years. For paying audiences? for paying audiences and that audience grew very rapidly so we did I think like three nights of Julius Caesar basically to parents and you were always the director you were leading the troupe yeah in Presario yes the company there was lots of us in the company together and we sort of all did everything but looking back on it very yes I was I was always in in that position did you think at that time this is what I want to do then this is the obvious career route if I can put these things on I can persuade my friends to stage Shakespeare and people will come and apparently and enjoy it.

17:14So did you think this is it then? This is what my life will be? Like when we did Midsummer Night's Dream, which was the second year, a lady came up to me afterwards and said, were you the director? And I said, yes. And she said, she was really angry. Why did you update the language? And we hadn't updated the language. And she was really like pushy about it. And I remember that slight shock you feel when you're whatever I was, 15, and an adult is being aggressive with you because you're not in that position that often. And it only occurred to me some years later that she was angry because she'd understood it.

17:46You know, the experience she had paid for was polite, churchy, boredom. She wanted it to be distant, and the fact that it came to her was offensive to her and was not what she'd paid for. And I really... That kind of experience was formative because loads of that audience in Stockton on Tees didn't know The Taming of the Shrew. So it was doing it to an audience that was really going to take it or leave it, depending on how well we did it. I think that's informed everything I've gone on to do.

18:18Your next choice for This Cultural Life, Robert Icke, is something which also relates to your time as a teenage wannabe director. It's Peter Brook, the great director and author, whose seminal book about the theatre, The Empty Space, made, you said in your notes, an enormous impact on you. So in what way? I mean, sort of so enormous, hard to drag down into a kind of, oh, it was this and this. but I think the seriousness with which he considered theatre appealed to me from the very beginning and there's a sort of like vein of amateurishness in British theatre a sort of like oh well we'll throw it on we'll not bang into the furniture and we'll go to the pub it'll be fine I've never, maybe because of piano lessons and because Mrs White was a kind of fantastic rigorous teacher about how important detail was and how you couldn't build the overall shape until you'd made each individual piece clear.

19:11Every voice was clear. And so I think I've always felt like that about doing a play. I've never felt like it's good enough to just throw it on, as in it's not good enough for me. And there's something about Peter's writing that always says, no, this is important, and it's possible if you really apply yourself to get somewhere profound and to create something that is bigger than any of the component parts. And I think like all great teachers, there was a part of me that went yes you're articulating things I'd already had inside me and I couldn't put into words but when I met them in the empty space I just felt this sense of homecoming and a sense of yes, yes, yes, yes And you were already putting on your productions when you read the empty space?

19:55I think so, I can't remember and I can't remember quite how I got it either But after you read the empty space did you then seek out Peter Brook himself, his productions did you go and see any of his work? I did, when I was at university some of his things came to the Barbican and I mean he was old by the time I was at university like he was in his late 80s and 90s and I remember seeing the work and being quite nervous about seeing the work and wondering whether I would find the work disappointing and of course the problem with people who write about theatre, myself included is that there's no amount of well written bread recipe will compensate for the fact that bread tastes horrible you know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating it and so you kind of want to see the work And I remember seeing a production of Peter's called The Grand Inquisitor at the Barbican, which is a bit of the Brothers Karamazov that he distilled into effectively a monologue where the Grand Inquisitor interrogates Jesus.

20:46And it just was so, you just couldn't take your eyes off it. And it completely compelled your attention. And yet there was no tricks. You know, there was no flashy, you know, there was nothing done to you. Like, it was just about Peter's great principle in a way, elimination. it was that anything extraneous had gone but that yielded a sort of very deep momentum and pressure and form where you felt like every thought had been considered So you went to Cambridge University That's right. To study theatre? To study English and really only because by the time I'd started the theatre company I'd read quite a bit about theatre directing and I'd worked out that if you wanted to do it you had to go and do English at Cambridge that was what they all did and I luckily for me didn't know that that was a difficult thing to do.

21:34And what did you learn about theatre at Cambridge? The supposed sort of hot house? Not a lot. You know, I went thinking I was going to learn loads about theatre and actually, understandably, it's student theatre. You know, it wasn't a hugely influential place for me in terms of my artistic practice, but I was made a better reader. I paid better attention by the time I left. Did you ever meet Peter Brook? I did. I got to know Peter really well. I got an email in 2016, subject line from Peter Brock, out of nowhere, in response to an interview I'd done. It just said something like, I very much enjoyed your comments on whatever I've been talking about.

22:13And I feel we might have a lot to share. Can I take you to lunch? That was such a kind of, it was like being hit in the face. And I kept thinking it was a joke, that some of my mates had played a joke on me. And so even when I went, I remember going to the restaurant in Farrington and sort of priming myself that it might be. no one was going to turn up on my friends I think that was funny and no there was Peter and we had this incredible conversation you're told not to meet your heroes but I'm very glad I got to meet and get to know Peter and so then I used to go and see him in Paris where he lived Would he give you notes advice?

22:47Yeah he would and my memory of those conversations is because he was a very curious sort of searching kind of person he would want to know what I was working on and I used to try and get through that as quickly as possible so I could get him to talk to me about, you know, and you'd say, tell me about Mids of the Night's Dream, tell me about Olivier, tell me about Olivier and Gielgud, you know, tell me about... And, like, one of the biggest moments of my professional life was the day when Peter came to the Harold Pinter Theatre to see Hamlet. And I remember watching him take his seat in a bright pink shirt in the second row of the stalls, matinee performance, and thinking, if he hates this, I think I really might do something else.

23:24You know, that might be it. Give up theatre. Yeah, genuinely. because I thought, well, if he thinks this is garbage, it's going to be very difficult for me to not also think this is garbage. Yeah, he was a hugely important person. And actually, there's people who I have in my life now because Peter said, I think you'll enjoy talking to them. He was a great connector of people. What did Peter Brook think of your Hamlet, by the way? He was very nice about it. He was very nice about it. Where do you see the influence of Peter Brook in your work? Are there examples of scenes or specific approaches as to a piece which you regard as sort of, you know, Brookist.