Icke, Robert (1986- )

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    ‘Player Kings’ Review: Ian McKellen’s Juicy Assignment as Falstaff

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    In Robert Icke’s adaptation of Parts 1 and 2 of “Henry IV,” the veteran stage actor’s performance belies his age.There are two shows for the price of one at “Player Kings,” in which the director Robert Icke has combined both of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” history plays into a self-contained whole.The production offers a compressed version of the royal accession story that, in this version, runs nearly four hours. It is an opportunity to experience Ian McKellen’s unbridled love of performance. At 84, the production’s leading man possesses an energy and vigor that belie his years.“Player Kings” — which runs at the Noël Coward Theater through June 22, before touring England — is the latest in a wave of recent high-profile Shakespeare productions in London. Uniquely among the other great British theater actors of his generation, McKellen still returns year after year to the stage, recently tackling Lear for a second time and playing an octogenarian Hamlet.Perhaps inevitably, there’s a feeling of the star vehicle to this production. In the “sweet creature of bombast” that is this play’s John Falstaff, McKellen has an especially juicy assignment — an outsized character whose appetite for life matches the actor’s own gusto. We’re told that the ample Falstaff hasn’t seen his own knees in years, and when he sits, it looks as if he may never stand up. His mouth, however, seems always in motion, as if chewing food for constant fuel.He’s also a necessary soul mate to the carousing, drug-using Prince Hal (the excellent Toheeb Jimoh, an Emmy nominee for “Ted Lasso”), whose coming-of-age story — becoming, as he puts it, “more myself” — connects these two “Henry IV” plays. But the roustabout Hal’s dawning maturity costs him the companion he once held dear.Clare Perkins as Mistress Quickly and Toheeb Jimoh as Prince Hal.Manuel HarlanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘The Doctor,’ a Rare Case of Physician, Harm Thyself

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      Robert Icke’s surgery on a 1912 play about the disease of antisemitism turns it into a riveting debate about identity. But at what cost to the patient?After attempting an abortion at home, a 14-year-old girl lies dying of sepsis at the Elizabeth Institute. No one questions her treatment there; by the time she was admitted, it was too late to save her. But when Ruth Wolff, the Institute’s head doctor, refuses to let a priest perform last rites because it would cause “an unpeaceful death,” ignorance amplified by social media turns a medical decision into a maelstrom. Soon the web is saying Wolff assaulted the priest and killed the girl.Yet it is not simply a question of tweets and misinformation. Wolff is a Jew.So far, the plot of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s adaptation of the 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” by Arthur Schnitzler, aligns closely with the original, except that Bernhardi is a Viennese man in 1900 and Wolff a British woman today. Yet ultimately the two works could not be more different. The production that opened on Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, directed by Icke and starring Juliet Stevenson, is less the exercise in Shavian moral argument that Schnitzler rather airily called a comedy than a tragic thought experiment about the failure of identity politics.The thought experiment runs like this: If everyone represents only the group they belong to, instead of an overarching humanity, and if those groups get sliced finer and finer, what hope can there be for a common language, let alone a common achievement? Wolff’s medical ethics are gibberish to a person of faith, as a politician’s equivocation is nonsense to her. When an online petition states that “Christian patients need Christian doctors” it comes close to suggesting a system in which no one can be a doctor at all — and indeed, soon enough, Wolff is forced to resign.That conundrum, honed to a sharp edge in the plotty first act, gets a satirical round table treatment in the second, when Icke puts Wolff before a panel of extreme antagonists on a portentous television program called “Take the Debate.” Faced with an anti-abortion lawyer, a “CreationVoice” activist, a post-colonial academic and a researcher of unconscious bias, Wolff, despite her excellence, gets eaten alive.Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut I have left out a fifth panelist: “a specialist in the study of Jewish culture.” He seems to feel that Wolff, a “cultural” Jew, is somehow not Jewish enough.I felt that way about “The Doctor.” Not because of Icke’s and Stevenson’s faith, whatever it may or may not be; as I don’t believe in matching Christian patients to Christian doctors (nor in a similar matching of critics to plays), I likewise don’t want to limit portrayals of a culture or religion only to its adherents. But it soon became clear to me that, unlike “Professor Bernhardi,” written by a Jew, “The Doctor” is not very serious about antisemitism. How could it be, when the sentimental attachment to identity of any sort is precisely its boogeyman?Icke develops the idea very cleverly. His casting across race and gender ensures that you will be forced to re-evaluate your reactions when you discover, quite belatedly in some cases, that the characters are not as they may look. Is the interaction between a Jewish doctor and a priest with a Scottish accent different when you assume the priest to be white (because the actor is) than when you later learn he is Black? Does it matter whether Wolff’s partner, named Charlie and dressed indeterminately, is a man or woman?Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation. Perhaps he goes too far in stacking the deck: Though some of Wolff’s antagonists, especially the girl’s yahoo of a father, make clearly antisemitic remarks, Wolff herself is almost worse. Not merely complacently sure of herself, like Bernhardi, she is, in Stevenson’s unflinching performance, a completely unsympathetic blowhard. However well done, the success of that interpretation backfires: As she howls, insults and snaps her fingers at underlings so relentlessly you begin to wonder whether her enemies are right, even if for the wrong reason.That’s in line with Icke’s generally over-caffeinated production, which includes a needlessly rotating turntable set (by Hildegard Bechtler), a scrape-your-nerves sound design (by Tom Gibbons) and a drum kit accompaniment from an aerie above the action (performed by Hannah Ledwidge) as if the breakneck story needed additional propulsion.Stevenson and Juliet Garricks, whose drama mainly unfolds offstage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt probably needs less. Its themes, constantly broadening, also thin out. Wolff’s transgender friend, Sami (Matilda Tucker), seems to exist only to be betrayed; the drama of Charlie (Juliet Garricks) occurs mostly offstage.And in the end, antisemitism gets dropped completely. A long final scene, lovely in itself, allows the priest who was at the center of the problem in the first place (John Mackay) to confess and be absolved. Not Wolff. She is asked to re-evaluate her hubris, examine her hidden bias and accept her fallen state with humility. The Jew-baiting of everyone else is, if not excused, forgotten, which is much the same thing.This has been a season of Jews blamed or blaming themselves for the emotional, physical and indeed genocidal violence against them. Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” seems to argue that the assimilated Jewry of Vienna (among whom Schnitzler was a star) should have seen the Holocaust coming and bought a ticket out. In the musical “Parade,” it is not enough that Leo Frank is lynched; to make him fully human he must be transfigured by love. (He’s dead either way.) And now “The Doctor” subjects its main character to antisemitic dog whistles but, in the end, sees her downfall as her own fault and an opportunity for growth.Well, that’s drama, and all three shows are riveting. No question they are also timely; Icke may even be warning us with that alarming drum kit that time is short. That might explain why his version of the Elizabeth Institute is not a general teaching hospital, as in the original, but a facility dedicated to the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Though it doesn’t make much medical sense for a girl with sepsis to be treated there, it does make sense for the play. Wolff describes Alzheimer’s as “a fire burning hot on the top” — scorching a path down through the brain from the newest to the earliest memories.You need only glance at the news to know what Icke means. As the memory of the unity and selflessness that once saved the world is all but burned through, how will we remember to never forget?The DoctorThrough Aug. 19 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Juliet Stevenson Returns to ‘The Doctor,’ and the New York Stage

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      The British actress is reprising her role as the Jewish physician at the center of an ethical drama. “It’s like a tailored suit,” the director Robert Icke said.At the start of Robert Icke’s “The Doctor,” the actress Juliet Stevenson stands alone in a spotlight onstage. “Am I sure? Yes. Yes!” she says crisply as if to an invisible interlocutor. “I’m crystal clear. I’m a doctor.”As the play’s title character, a grammatically exacting neurosurgeon named Ruth Wolff, Stevenson will repeat those last two phrases many times as events unfold and Ruth’s clarity and intellectual certainties erode. Eventually they will transmute into something far more inchoate as her life unravels, and self-doubt begins to permeate her conviction that being a doctor is all that matters.“The Doctor,” which opens Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, is a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 drama, “Professor Bernhardi,” about a Jewish physician who refuses entry to a Roman Catholic priest trying to administer last rites to a patient dying from sepsis after an abortion. In Icke’s version, the issues go beyond questions of medical ethics and religious affiliations to include identity politics and cancel culture.The play, and Stevenson, received rave reviews when “The Doctor” was first presented in 2019 at London’s Almeida Theater, where Icke was then the artistic director, and later after it transferred to the West End. “One of the peaks of the theatrical year,” Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, adding that “while Stevenson shows how integrity can turn into obduracy, she also beautifully portrays the human cost of making medicine one’s god.”During an interview, Stevenson, 66, said the piece “takes a lot of the preoccupations of our time and plays them out on a very large, Shakespearean scale. Nobody’s right. Nobody’s wrong. We can explore all the angles because it’s safe. We’re on a stage, it’s a play!”After a long rehearsal, she was enthusiastic and voluble during our conversation at the Bishopsgate Institute, a cultural center in East London. “I have always wanted to put myself at the service of great writing, share it with people in the dark,” she said. “Every culture has that ancient ritual.”In Britain, Stevenson is a familiar face who has taken on a variety of roles onstage and on-screen since graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1978. But to U.S. audiences, she is probably best known for the 1990 Anthony Minghella film, “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a romantic comedy about a woman mourning her dead lover, who returns as a ghost.“I don’t want to play King Lear any more. I want to tell women’s stories,” Juliet Stevenson said about the lack of roles for women over 40. An image of a wolf, her inspiration animal, is affixed to her dressing room mirror.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe never aspired, she said, to a Hollywood career. “I am not at ease in the industry and no good at all that glamour stuff,” she added. “I am not an actress because I felt this face has to be on a screen.”And despite playing lead roles in major West End productions that have moved to Broadway, including “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” her only previous appearance in New York was a 2003 City Opera production of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.”“I never wanted to leave my children for long stretches while filming or acting outside the U.K.,” Stevenson said. “But now my youngest is 22, and I am free!”She comes “with this relish,” she said for a first-time move from the West End to New York: “It’s amazing to have a first time at my age!”“The Doctor” is Stevenson’s third collaboration with Icke, after playing Gertrude in his 2017 production of “Hamlet,” starring Andrew Scott, then alternating with Lia Williams in the roles of Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I in his update of Friedrich Schiller’s “Mary Stuart.”Stevenson first met Icke in 2010 at the Almeida Theater, where he was then an associate director. “We did a gala with a whole lot of famous actors doing Shakespeare, and I offered to run lines,” Icke recounted in a telephone interview from New York. “Juliet was the only person who wanted to rehearse and wanted notes. She was performing a very difficult bit of ‘As You Like It,’ and there was something about the rhythm and music of what she was doing that was amazing, and I stored it up.”They kept in touch, and, in 2015, when Stevenson congratulated Williams backstage, after watching her performance in Icke’s “Oresteia,” the director had a flash of inspiration. “I had been thinking about “Mary Stuart” for a long time, and looking at Lia and Juliet, I realized if I solved the problem of how to cast it by not solving it and doubling the roles, I had the key.”These parts in Icke’s productions have been important moments in her career, Stevenson said, adding that she would never have taken on Gertrude in “Hamlet” without his insistence. “I thought, ugh, these voiceless women in Shakespeare,” she said, “but he took that problem, that silence, and put it in the center.”But there have been many important moments, starting when she was around 10 and performed a W.H. Auden poem, “If I Could Tell You,” at school, she said. “It was the first time I felt a light bulb go on, felt I had to be a vessel for the poem to pass through me to an audience.”Jeremy Irons and Stevenson in New York City Opera’s 2003 production of the musical “A Little Night Music” at the New York State Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStevenson, the youngest of three children, lived abroad with her family as her father’s job with the British Army’s Royal Engineers took them to Germany, Australia and Malta. At 9, she encountered “an amazing drama teacher, Bess Jones,” at a boarding school just outside London, and started to go to the theater in her teens. When she saw “King Lear,” she immediately wanted to play the title role. “I was just possessed by it, the size of his anger, passions, love, regret, grief,” she said. “I stomped around being Lear for months; of course he is just like a badly behaved adolescent!”She successfully auditioned for the Royal Academy — “a culture shock” — where she felt lost and insecure until a teacher harshly criticized her performance of a speech from “Antony and Cleopatra.” “My anger found its way into the words, and I could feel the temperature of the room change,” she said. “I thought, OK, this is what acting is.”After graduating, she found ensemble work (“Shape No. 2, Sea Nymph No. 2 and Hellhound No. 3”) in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “The Tempest,” and stayed for eight years playing lead roles in Shakespeare productions and new plays, and working with directors like Peter Brook, Trevor Nunn and Howard Davies.She had also started working in film, appearing in Peter Greenaway’s “Drowning by Numbers” and “a couple of forgettable movies” before working on “Truly, Madly.” Also in 1990, she performed in “Death and the Maiden,” winning the best actress Olivier Award in 1992, and met her future husband, Hugh Brody, an anthropologist. Over the next two decades she had two children and played a dizzying number of roles onscreen (“Emma,” “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Departure”) and onstage (“The Duchess of Malfi,” “Private Lives,” “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” “Duet for One”).“Juliet pours her life and love and soul into everything,” said the theater director Natalie Abrahami, who worked with Stevenson in Beckett’s “Happy Days” and “Wings,” by Arthur Kopit. “She is always pushing, really good at asking instinctive, actor-led questions: ‘Why would the character act this way? What memory is triggered here?’ She is always making the map of a character’s life as three-dimensional as possible.”In “The Doctor,” Stevenson “climbs an extraordinarily difficult mountain with Ruth,” said Naomi Wirthner, who plays Ruth’s antagonist, the surgeon Roger Hardiman. “It’s a rock face that she climbs every night, every rehearsal, and just when you think she is at peak Ruth, she will find a deeper, stronger layer.”While writing “The Doctor,” Icke said, he was thinking about “the genius archetype, cancel culture and how society deals with the exceptionally abled. The examples are usually men, like Picasso, but I was interested in the interaction of genius and femaleness.”He knew, he added, that he wanted to write “a virtuosic, lead-actor play, like ‘Jerusalem’ with Mark Rylance. There is something about watching a great actor shoulder a big boulder and drag it up the hill. This was very specifically written for Juliet. It’s like a tailored suit; there isn’t a line of Ruth Wolff that is innocent of the knowledge that it will be spoken by her.”When he sent Stevenson the script, it spoke to a long-harbored frustration. “I had got really fed up with the lack of roles for women over 40,” she said. “And I don’t want to play King Lear any more. These are men’s stories, and I want to tell women’s stories.”She added that coming back to “The Doctor” after a break “was like holding up a mirror to so many cultural tensions: the demonizing of otherness, George Floyd, antisemitism, the agonizing history of abortion in the U.S.” The play also responds through its eclectic casting, she said, to the policing of which actors can play which characters. “When you see a white actor and discover the character is Black, it forces you to think, would I have reacted differently to that situation had I known that?”Warming to the theme, she continued.“My job description as an actor is to tell other’s stories, to imagine myself into other people’s lives,” she said. “Let’s not lose our richness. Let’s throw all these subjects up in the air and let them catch the light as they fall.” More

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      A Rebound for a Summer Pairing of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Oresteia’ at the Armory

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      Two Robert Icke productions have endured illnesses and last-minute casting changes. Now they have finally settled into a repertory groove.Perhaps more than any other production of this post-shutdown season, the Park Avenue Armory’s summer stagings of “Hamlet” and “Oresteia” — with their last-minute replacements and cast illnesses — have faced the most hurdles on their way to opening night.The productions, already delayed from their intended 2020 U.S. premieres, were dealt another blow this spring when, two days into tech rehearsals, Lia Williams (“The Crown”) tore her Achilles’ tendon. She was double booked to play Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, and the husband-killing matriarch Klytemnestra in “Oresteia,” but recovery, though guaranteed, would not be quick. She was forced to drop out. Jennifer Ehle and Anastasia Hille quickly stepped in, with Ehle having only 10 days to settle into the role of Gertrude before the first “Hamlet” preview.“I had no idea what I was getting into, and I really didn’t care,” Ehle said during a recent video call. “It was one of those moments where you get a call on a Sunday morning, somebody asks if you want to take a challenge, and you have no choice but to take the leap and start planning in midair.”The plays, helmed by the English writer-director Robert Icke, are now being performed in repertory at the Armory, where they will run through mid-August. “Hamlet” opened in late June to mostly positive reviews. (Maya Phillips, in her review for The Times, wrote that Icke “brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension.”) “Oresteia” began previews July 10, and is set to open Tuesday. Once it does, this ambitious pairing of classics of the Western canon will conclude a nearly seven-year journey of starts and stops.“Everybody knew where they were going to stand and I had to upload that as quickly as possible,” Ehle (with Lawther) said of joining the cast of “Hamlet” during tech rehearsals.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow It All StartedThe plays had momentous premieres (“Oresteia” in 2015 and “Hamlet” in 2017) at London’s Almeida Theater, where Icke had been associate director, and successful West End runs followed. Writing from London in 2015, Ben Brantley said Icke’s “theatrical chutzpah pays dividends” in his drastically reimagined “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ revenge-filled trilogy.That ancient Greek work and the surveillance-heavy “Hamlet,” with the actor Andrew Scott in the title role, cemented Icke’s status as an incisive editor and renovator of classics. Not that editing here means trimming down — each production clocks in at just under four hours — but Icke’s revisions bring the centuries-old plays’ essences to stark, ultramodern light.As planning began for the Shakespeare adaptation, he and Hildegard Bechtler, the set and costume designer, decided to reuse a frosted glass they had used in “Oresteia,” allowing them to achieve something like a cinematic jump cut. It’s what first led him to think of the two pieces as similar.“There was an acknowledgment that these two plays, though separated by many centuries, are in conversation with each other,” Icke explained during a recent video call, quarantining after testing positive for the coronavirus. “Those central questions about family and vengeance, and the obligations children have to their parents, and what it means if a family and a country are intertwined with each other, always felt like they were reflecting and refracting each other in really interesting ways.”Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director and founder of the Almeida, suggested bringing a repertory pairing of the two works to Manhattan back in 2018. Having met the Armory team while in town in 2017 for the Broadway premiere of his and Duncan Macmillan’s “1984” adaptation, Icke said it felt like it could be “a fruitful collaboration,” and the productions were announced for 2020.Williams, who had played Klytemnestra to great acclaim in “Oresteia,” would reprise that role, and play opposite Alex Lawther in “Hamlet,” who was cast after Scott was unable to commit to the transfer. But then the pandemic shut down live theater in 2020 and many planned productions were canceled, though everyone wanted to keep these two afloat. (In the meantime, Icke collaborated with the actress Ann Dowd on a socially distanced adaptation of “Enemy of the People” at the Armory last summer.)Angus Wright, seated at the table and projected onto the screen, in “Oresteia” at the Armory. In the foreground, from left, are Wesley Holloway, Anastasia Hille and Elyana Faith Randolph.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Pairing With ‘Poetic Logic’In April 2022, the company finally reunited and began rehearsals. Because of the plays’ length and density, the focus on each alternated on a weekly basis. Lawther said he enjoyed the repertory setting and “the luxury of watching this amazing company switch and suddenly do this Greek tragedy.”“They speak to one another in incredibly moving and mysterious ways,” Lawther said on a video call. “Although ‘Oresteia’ is much older, Rob’s adaptation is full of modern language, and feels like a contemporary family drama, whereas this ‘Hamlet’ uses the original text, and feels of a different time. There’s a poetic logic that exists in putting these two together.”While the productions share a set and much of the same acting troupe, Icke said he did not go out of his way to heighten the two works’ similarities.“The attempt is not to direct them to point back to each other,” he said, “but almost to hang the two paintings next to each other in a gallery, so that if audiences choose to, they can move back and forth and think about the ways in which the two might relate.”Written nearly 2,000 years apart, the works deal with chaos unfolding in the private homes of high-powered political families. Almost entirely stripped of period or royal specificity, the modern-dress productions allow Icke to focus on contemporary parallels. With “Hamlet,” it’s the British royal family.“This time, we talked about Prince Philip’s death and what it’s like for an old guard to die,” he said. “But I’ve always felt like Hamlet and Princess Diana have got something in common. You’re told again and again that he is adored by the people, and that one of the reasons [the king] does not have him packed off to prison immediately is because of how much the people love him. That sense of somebody struggling to make sense of themselves, and what’s happening to them, while under constant observation always took my mind to Diana.”For “Oresteia,” he said the story’s setup, with Agamemnon coming back from war with a new woman, would have meant for ancient Greek audiences what the Kennedy and Clinton families might signify to contemporary viewers.“Audiences then would’ve known their Homer back-to-front, so it was probably similar to telling audiences back then that the Monica Lewinsky scandal has just broken,” Icke continued. “Here’s Hillary, and Bill is about to walk through the front door. A modern American audience feels that. In another thousand years, to tell the Clinton story, you probably will have to go back and fill in the Lewinsky part of the story to get it across.”Luke Treadaway as Orestes, Klytemnestra and Agamemnon’s traumatized son, in “Oresteia.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Necessary PivotAfter Williams’s injury, “Hamlet” performances were pushed back, giving Ehle a little over a week to learn the part of Queen Gertrude for the first time. But Hille, who is British, needed to secure a work visa, and that forced “Oresteia” to be delayed nearly a month.When she got the call, Ehle said, “I thought, if the Armory has brought this man here, with these people, to tell this story, it couldn’t be anything but interesting.”Ehle, a two-time Tony winner for her work in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia,” described the process of situating herself within the production as “less rehearsing and more orienteering.”“Everybody knew where they were going to stand and I had to upload that as quickly as possible, and jump on a moving train,” she recalled. “My seat was there waiting, but I had to figure out where to put my luggage.”Many hours of last-minute rehearsals were required — Lawther called it a “baptism by fire” — with Hille, who was preparing with Icke via Zoom while awaiting her visa, only arriving in New York on July 3, just days before the first previews of “Oresteia.” Around that time, Ehle tested positive for coronavirus, and had to briefly retreat from “Hamlet.”“It’s pretty much impossible to do anything without everyone in the room,” Icke said, referring to absences resulting from Covid. “But this has been much easier because the big-picture decisions and structures had already been in place. We were able to focus on the details of the performances, rather than our sound design or choice of music.”Luke Treadaway, the British actor who plays Laertes in “Hamlet” and Orestes, Klytemnestra’s son, in “Oresteia,” had been preparing for the roles since 2020 and noted the effects of the changes on the ensemble. “The cast changes had a huge emotional impact on us all, because rehearsals become a world that you create with the people you create it with,” he explained. “We’ve had many understudies come on, because of Covid. It made us realize that it’s not just 10 actors in a cast, or however many, but a squad of people getting these two massive stories onstage every night, in any form we can.”Icke also acknowledged the resiliency of actors. “Anyone who has done much theater is very aware that everything can change in a second, particularly in Covid times,” he said. “It’s remarkable how adaptable everybody is, saying, ‘Well, this isn’t what we thought it was going to be, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. We’re really glad to be here and delighted to be presented with two productions.’ It all sort of just recalibrates itself.” More

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      ‘Oresteia’ Review: A Mother’s Grief, Underestimated

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      Anastasia Hille is riveting as Klytemnestra in Robert Icke’s production of “Oresteia” at the Park Avenue Armory.Before the first domino of their tragedies falls, before murder begets murder begets murder, they are an enchanting family: the mother, Klytemnestra, warm and easy with her two little ones gathered close around her; the father, Agamemnon, suave in public but playful the instant he walks through the door at the end of the day.In their cozy contemporary sanctuary of a home, they seem so absolutely normal. These people love one another. The boy, Orestes, has never been a good sleeper, but when his bad dreams come, his parents are there to comfort him. And Iphigenia, his sister, is a darling in a citrus-orange dress. Though she is young enough that she totes her long-eared plush bunny everywhere, she is old enough, and smart enough, that she’s already a moral thinker. When the family has venison for dinner, she cannot bear the thought of eating a deer.“It’s a little dead body,” she says.Is this the deer whose killing so angered the goddess Artemis that she stilled the winds on which Agamemnon’s warships depend? Robert Icke’s fraught and gripping “Oresteia,” an emotionally harrowing retelling of Aeschylus’ trilogy at the Park Avenue Armory, doesn’t get bogged down in such background details of ancient mythology.What matters is the excruciating ransom that Agamemnon, a military commander and a great believer in prophecies, thinks he has to pay to get the winds blowing again so he can be victorious in war. He must murder Iphigenia, his curious, trusting, doted-on daughter who wants nothing to do with killing deer and has nothing to do with waging war.“By his hand alone,” the prophecy reads. “The child is the price. Fair winds.”Her innocent life, ended irrevocably, in exchange for maybe — if her father’s faith in the gods and the counsel of serious men is not misplaced — achieving his political objectives. Not, of course, that her mother has been consulted in this, let alone Iphigenia herself.“If she doesn’t feel pain,” Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, says, arguing in favor of snuffing out his niece, “and it is a civilized procedure, and it is the clear and greater good, then who are the victims?”What is the value of the life of a girl? What is the value of her mother’s clawing grief and bottomless rage at her child’s murder? And how, exactly, has Klytemnestra come off so badly through the ages for her revenge killing of Agamemnon — as if she were singularly evil and crazed while he was simply a decent guy in a difficult position, who’d made the tough call that his own daughter was expendable?Hille and Angus Wright in Robert Icke’s production, which originated at the Almeida Theater in London in 2015.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTold in four acts over three and a half hours, this “Oresteia” is about grief so deep it settles into the soul and metastasizes into a need for bloody vengeance, whose result in turn becomes a cause of more fresh grief. If you’d wondered what unites “Oresteia” thematically with “Hamlet,” Icke’s other thrilling production running in repertory at the Armory this summer, there it is — two plays in which murders leave survivors bereft and homicidal, and in which one generation of a family suffers the treachery of another. But whereas “Hamlet” centers the title character, this re-centered “Oresteia” is concerned principally not with Orestes, the son, but rather with Klytemnestra, his haunted mother.“This whole thing,” she tells Iphigenia’s ghost as it flits through the house, “this whole thing is about you.”When this production by the Armory and the Almeida Theater was first announced, it was meant to star Lia Williams as Klytemnestra, reprising the role she had played in London, but an injury forced her to leave the show before previews began.Anastasia Hille is the Armory’s Klytemnestra, and she is magnificent in an incandescent, utterly sympathetic interpretation so riveting that you would do well to spend the entire first intermission watching Klytemnestra simply sit onstage, in a stupor of grief that ages her by the next act. Hille will win plenty of partisans over to Team Klytemnestra — even as the play would also like to draw its audience’s attention to the needless, cyclical horror of murder and revenge, and the self-righteous delusion that just one more death will even the score for good.In the terrifyingly real depiction of a loving marriage that’s destroyed before our eyes, Hille is matched every inch by Angus Wright as Agamemnon. After Klytemnestra realizes that he plans to murder Iphigenia (beautifully played at the performance I saw by Alexis Rae Forlenza, one of two young actors who share the role), the fight they have is so brutal and raw that you may recall its dynamics from the most damaging domestic argument you’ve ever had.“This is about a person who came from us, who would never have lived if we hadn’t loved each other,” Klytemnestra says, pleading her daughter’s case in the hope that her husband will hear reason. “What you are destroying is us, doing something that will overwhelm our history, a single action which if you bring it down on us will obliterate the whole story which precedes it.”Tia Bannon, foreground left, and Luke Treadaway, with, background from left: Elyana Faith Randolph, Angus Wright and Hille.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy the end of their fight, the current of intimacy that ran between them for years is shut off. They are for all intents and purposes exes, effective immediately, with any further emotional access denied. Which, in the bruised and intricate psychic honesty of this play, does not mean the love has entirely vanished.On a set by Hildegard Bechtler so chic it looks like what you’d get if Norman Foster and Richard Serra retrofitted an ancient castle, “Oresteia” seeks to implicate us in its patterns of needless destruction: Whenever the lights come up on the auditorium, we’re reflected in the set’s long glass wall.The show is peppered with tiny oddities and puzzlements that become clear, mostly, at the end. Slight spoiler: The reason that the grown-up Orestes (Luke Treadaway) watches much of the action from outside the periphery of the house is that he is immersed in a court proceeding, to determine his guilt in the murder of his mother. His memory is often uncertain. The woman questioning him (Kirsty Rider) doesn’t really buy that his other sister Electra (Tia Bannon), who conspired with him to kill Klytemnestra, even existed. The text hints that maybe she didn’t. There is a whiff of mystery about it all.But the tragedy of it is paramount — one set in motion by superstitious men who took it on faith that the life of a little girl didn’t matter, and who never stopped to think that her mother would counterattack.OresteiaThrough Aug. 13 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In a Powerful ‘Hamlet,’ a Fragile Prince Faces His Foes

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      Alex Lawther makes for an especially riveting hero in Robert Icke’s chic if imperfect modern-dress production at the Park Avenue Armory.Many Hamlets I’ve seen are wily. Some kooky. Narcissistic, aloof, even pretentious. Less common is a Hamlet who is tender and romantic and achingly vulnerable, like a petal falling from the head of a flower at the end of its bloom.When Alex Lawther’s fragile Danish prince drags himself onstage in Robert Icke’s modern-dress production of “Hamlet,” which opened Tuesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, he recalls the 19th-century poets Arthur Rimbaud and Percy Shelley, a brilliant yet dejected young man who seems resolved to his sorrow — and to a tragic end.In the last decade, Icke has gained prominence for his heightened and contemporary-inflected adaptations of classics. This “Hamlet” played in the West End in 2017, with the hot-priest-sized package of magnetizing charisma known as Andrew Scott in the lead. He was one of the best Hamlets I’ve ever seen — though, as in so many other takes, the focus fell on his brooding and banter more than his emotional depth.Lawther, best known for his role in “The End of the __ing World,” doesn’t have Scott’s starry flair, but he possesses his own demure kind of charisma; he draws you in even as he withdraws into himself. As a result, this rendition honors Hamlet as not just self-indulgently melancholy, but as grappling with legitimate, heartbreaking loss.We begin at a swanky wedding party. (Hildegard Bechtler did the stylish sets and costumes.) Beyond a wall of sliding glass panels, we see Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle), and her new husband, his uncle Claudius (Angus Wright), dancing amid balloons and strings of lights. Dressed in a black suit, Lawther slowly shuffles across the stage and sits close to, but removed from, the action. He roughly rubs his palms against his thighs, as though to rub the fabric off his body.Throughout the hefty 3-hour-and-45 minute production, Lawther fully embodies Hamlet’s despondency, shuffling like a wayward toddler, with knees slightly bent and a constant sway that makes him appear near collapse. Planning to enact his vengeance on his scheming uncle, he holds a gun off at an angle, as though his arm is being puppeted by someone else pulling the strings above the stage.And when he speaks, it’s in a slow, warbling singsong, at once contemplative and idiosyncratic, especially when he pauses in the middle of sentences as though his mind is hiccuping with existential thoughts.Though the peculiar line readings sometimes turn monotonous, he snaps out of it, erupting into a surprising fit of mania. And Lawther threads the famed “What a piece of work is man!” monologue with poetic resonance, moving from wonder to despair through slow articulation and emphatic rhythm.From left: Lawther, Michael Abubakar, Hara Yannas, Angus Wright (as Claudius),Gilbert Kyem Jnr and Tia Bannon in the modern-dress production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIcke, whose one-woman “Enemy of the People” played the Armory last year and whose “1984” had a brief Broadway run in 2017, brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension. In one clever bit of staging, Hamlet tarries in the forefront as the king and queen canoodle in back and guards race by mid-stage between them, fresh from sighting the former king’s ghost.At the same time, the director brings some curious adjustments to the characters, giving Polonius a touch of dementia and depicting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a couple clearly at odds about how they should respond to the royal request to monitor Hamlet.The women, in particular, get short shrift. Gertrude is unreadable, despite Ehle’s punchy line readings, and Ophelia’s descent into madness occurs faster than you can say “something rotten” — doing a disservice to Kirsty Rider’s perfectly matched delicate companion to Lawther’s Hamlet.As Claudius, Wright has the self-consciously composed air of a politician but misses some of the menace, while Peter Wight leans too heavily on the bumbling as Polonius. Luke Treadaway, however, makes the most of Laertes’s transformation: from refined gentleman and doting brother to unhinged revenge seeker, wildly swinging a gun at the news of his father’s murder and sister’s suicide.There are actual gunshots, too — ghastly pops and flashes of light that make the audience jump to attention. This is nowhere as gratuitous as, say, the 2019 DruidShakespeare production of “Richard III,” or even the current Broadway staging of “Macbeth,” with its severed limbs and crotch wounds. Still, the sight and sound of a gun onstage today, given our country’s despicable relationship to firearms, is unsettling.What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and, by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.Clockwise, from lower right: Lawther (as Hamlet), Kirsty Rider (as Ophelia), Luke Treadaway (as her brother Laertes), Wright and Kyem.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective; soft overhead light halos Lawther as he seems to addresses theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.Tom Gibbons’s sound design envelops the proceedings in ominous atmospheric gloom:a distant howling wind; the cold, mechanical hum of static and feedback; and, finally, the thunderous exclamations of drums. Less fitting are the production’s folksy compositions (by Laura Marling) and use of Bob Dylan songs, which, even deployed ironically, are a bit too Midwest-porch-jam for this chic production.“Hamlet” is one of the Shakespeare plays that most suffers from diminishing returns — adaptations that try too hard to innovate, to render a classic modern and hip. Though Icke’s protracted production occasionally falls into that trap, ultimately the creative team’s visual and technical prowess — along with its provocative young lead — make this a tale of musing, mania and murder for our age.HamletThrough Aug. 13 at the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes. More

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      A Homecoming, of Sorts, for Viennese Plays

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      Two recent British dramas with Austrian roots made it to Vienna this season: “Leopoldstadt,” by Tom Stoppard, and Robert Icke’s “The Doctor.”VIENNA — Leopoldstadt is the name of a central Viennese district with a large Jewish population. It is also the title of Tom Stoppard’s 2020 Olivier Award-winning play, which opened on the West End shortly before the start of the pandemic.Two and a half years after its London premiere, “Leopoldstadt,” a multigenerational saga of an Austrian Jewish family’s triumphs and tragedies in the first half of the 20th century, has made it to Vienna, where it received its German-language premiere this spring at the Theater in der Josefstadt in a handsome and effectively traditional staging by Janusz Kica. (It will return to the repertoire in December. The London production will transfer in the fall to Broadway, where it will run at the Longacre Theater.)It is a fitting irony that none of “Leopoldstadt” actually takes place in Leopoldstadt, since many of its characters try — and fail — to escape the perceived stigma of being Jewish by reinventing themselves as Austrians.When I saw “Leopoldstadt” in London, I wondered how Viennese audiences would react to Stoppard’s fictional exploration of their history and culture. In particular, I was curious whether his re-creation of culturally oversaturated fin de siècle Vienna, a vanished world that continues to fascinate, would convince an audience more familiar with that glittering epoch. Especially in the first half, set around 1900, Stoppard wears his learning and erudition on his sleeve; at times, the amount of historical and cultural detail that peppers the dialogue threatens to derail the play, with its nearly 30 characters and unusually knotty structure.The closest thing Stoppard gives us to a conventional protagonist is Hermann Merz, an affluent textile manufacturer who has largely shed the traditions of his rag-peddling forebears and entered high society. The Merz clan is a motley bunch who celebrate Christmas and Passover with both relish and irreverence. Baptized and married to a Catholic woman, Hermann nonetheless boasts of the Jews’ colossal contribution to culture, without which “Austria would be the Patagonia of banking, science, the law, the arts, literature, journalism,” he says.Listening to Adrian Scarborough, who played Hermann in the London production, recite Hermann’s triumphalist speeches with bluster, I winced a little. Yet the lines sounded considerably less forced in the mouth of Herbert Föttinger, who played the character in Vienna, and in a faithful and fluid translation by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. It’s largely a question of temperament. Scarborough played Hermann as a nouveau riche climber who is both haughty and insecure, while Föttinger portrayed him as suave and self-possessed. We believe him when he observed approvingly that Vienna’s middle-class Jews “literally worship culture.” Föttinger’s elegance and poise at the start of the play helped make Hermann’s subsequent humiliations and his ultimate downfall all the more tragic. When an Austrian officer who had a fling with Hermann’s wife, Gretl, refused a duel with Hermann on the grounds that a Jew is born without honor and hence can’t demand satisfaction for an insult, we understood that this offense wounded Hermann more than his wife’s infidelity.Another ensemble scene in “Leopoldstadt,” which takes place in Vienna.Moritz Schell Hermann Metz epitomizes the worldview of a confident minority who had found acceptance and success in a culture that was an artistic, intellectual, scientific and political hotbed. (Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Arthur Schnitzler are all name-checked.) The way Stoppard conjures the milieu of assimilated Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire owes much to writers of the period, including Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, whose posthumously published memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” is perhaps the most evocative and nostalgia-drenched chronicle of the era.“Leopoldstadt” leaps from the early 1900s to the years after World War I and from there to Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that the Nazis orchestrated throughout the Third Reich on Nov. 9, 1938. The pinging around is meant to be disorienting as we visit characters we last saw decades earlier — as well as some new arrivals — in radically changed historical contexts. In its latter half, “Leopoldstadt” finds itself on unsure footing only once. In a scene set in 1924, the family members discuss the Great War, the carving up of Austria in its aftermath, and the messy politics and competing ideologies of the interwar period. In London, I felt that the scene merely struggled to dramatize its themes; here it felt more awkward, and even redundant, as if Stoppard were lecturing the Viennese about their own history.Stoppard’s masterful final scene, in which the three remaining members of the Merz family reunite in 1950s Vienna, was sensitively directed and acted, but many of its revelations were less persuasive in German than in English. One of the family members, Leo, has been raised in England and, crucially, has no memory of his early life in Vienna. (Thus it’s a strain to imagine that he would speak perfect German without an accent.) Now a young man, he is a writer of some renown. In a painful reunion with his cousins — a New York psychoanalyst and a mathematician who survived the Holocaust — long-suppressed memories are dredged up and the past superimposes itself on the present in unexpected and haunting ways.Remarkably, “Leopoldstadt” isn’t the only recent British play with Austrian roots that made it to Vienna this season. Earlier in the year, the Burgtheater mounted the German-language premiere of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s 2019 rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” which was first seen at the Almeida, the London playhouse that Icke used to run.Sophie von Kessel, seated at right, as the title character defending herself before a panel on television in “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” at the Burgtheater.Marcella Ruiz CruzSchnitzler’s play, first performed in 1912, is an indictment of the Austrian antisemitism that Hermann Merz naïvely takes to be a thing of the past. The most conspicuous change that Icke, who also directed the production, makes in his version is a gender switch central to his reimagining and updating of the piece.Like Schnitzler’s prickly male protagonist, “The Doctor’s” lead character, Dr. Ruth Wolff (Sophie von Kessel in a tour de force performance), finds herself under attack for refusing to let a priest administer last rights to a delirious patient who is unaware that her end is near. In the original, Professor Bernhardi becomes the target of an antisemitic media campaign. In Icke’s retelling, Dr. Wolff becomes the victim of virulent social media attacks that smack more of misogyny. She defends herself against the anonymous online mob by appearing on television to debate a sanctimoniously woke panel. All this gives Icke ample opportunity to skewer cancel culture, identity politics and political correctness, although the satirical and the sincere often coexist uneasily, especially when his supporting characters moralize tediously. At the same time, the colorblind and “gender blind” casting challenges the audience to look past race and sex and reflect on the play’s moral conundrums impartially.As with Stoppard and “Leopoldstadt,” “The Doctor” feels like something of a homecoming: a Viennese return for a contemporary play rooted in the world of yesterday.Leopoldstadt. Directed by Janusz Kica. Theater in der Josefstadt.Die Ärztin. Directed by Robert Icke. Burgtheater Wien, through June 13. More

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      Park Avenue Armory Announces Futuristic New Season

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      Highlights include the North American premieres of Michel van der Aa’s opera “Upload” and Robert Icke’s production of “Hamlet.”The Park Avenue Armory is taking a forward-looking approach in its 2022 season.“The current that runs through this season is technology and futuristic outlooks on the world,” Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president and executive producer, said in an interview on Tuesday.A highlight of the season, announced on Wednesday, is the North American premiere of the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s 80-minute opera “Upload,” about a man who uploads a digital version of his consciousness to achieve virtual immortality (March 22-30, 2022). In a review of the production at the Dutch National Opera, The New York Times’s Joshua Barone called the piece, which combines film, motion capture and live performance and stars the soprano Julia Bullock and the baritone Roderick Williams, “a sci-fi spin on a fundamentally human tale.”Next up, the British director Robert Icke presents a surveillance-focused staging of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which will make its North American premiere after sold-out runs at London’s Almeida Theater and the West End in 2017 (May 31-Aug. 13, 2022). Alex Lawther (“The Imitation Game”) will take on the titular role, which Andrew Scott played to critical acclaim in London.“Hamlet” will play in repertory with Icke’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” (June 9-Aug. 13, 2022) — for which he won the Olivier Award for best director in 2016. Originally a trilogy of Greek tragedies, the three plays have been condensed into a single family drama that follows a succession of brutal family murders and runs just over three and a half hours. Lia Williams, who was nominated for an Olivier for best actress in the 2015 production, is set to return in the role of Klytemnestra.Other highlights of the new season include “Assembly,” an exhibition featuring the second generation of Rashaad Newsome’s artificial-intelligence-powered creation “Being,” whose voice acts as the installation’s soundscape (Feb. 16-March 6, 2022); “Rothko Chapel,” a new commission by the composer and MacArthur fellow Tyshawn Sorey, based on Morton Feldman’s composition for the dedication of the chapel in 1971 and directed by Peter Sellars (Sept. 27-Oct. 8, 2022); and “Euphoria,” an immersive film installation by the German video and film artist Julian Rosefeldt that is a commentary on money, greed and consumption (Nov. 30, 2022-Jan. 1, 2023).A full season lineup is available at armoryonpark.org. More