Icke, Robert (1986- )

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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

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      Review: In ‘Enemy of the People,’ Water and Democracy Are Poisoned

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      Ann Dowd stars in a contemporary rewrite of Ibsen’s play that forces a community, played by the audience, to make a series of fateful choices.Elections in Weston Springs are so simple. When a question comes before the townspeople, they confer in small groups, reach a consensus, press a button marked “X” or “O” and get the result, all within a minute. To a New Yorker, that sounds nice right about now.But alas, Weston Springs, with its world-famous hot-water baths and grass-roots democracy, isn’t real. It’s the invented setting for “Enemy of the People,” Robert Icke’s enjoyable if gimmicky rewrite of the 1882 Ibsen drama originally called “En Folkefiende.” That play, structured traditionally in five acts, had 11 speaking roles and heaps of extras; Icke’s 95-minute version, which opened Wednesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, is a shiny one-woman show starring the formidable Ann Dowd as everyone.Well, not quite everyone. For the occasion, the Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall has been set up as a kind of laboratory of democracy, with a map of Weston Springs painted on the floor and 45 tables, seating two to five citizens each, deployed at different “addresses.” My pod of four was at Table 16, otherwise known as 16 Waivers Way.So the audience plays the extras, each table getting one vote. As Dowd explains in a brief prologue, the results of the five “elections” that take place during the performance will affect the direction and even the content of the play, and help us answer its overriding question: “What does this community think?”I’m not sure that goal was ever achieved. True, we voted on issues raised by the plot, which involves a public health crisis that butts up against an economic one when Professor Joan Stockman, chief scientific officer of the Weston baths, discovers lead in the water at levels even higher than the levels found in Flint, Mich., in 2015. (In the Ibsen version, the pollutant was apparently salmonella, which caused typhoid.) Surely the thing to do, Joan assumes, is to shut down the joint until new pipes can be laid, regardless of cost.But the mayor — who, as it happens, is Joan’s older brother, Peter — doesn’t see it that way, or can’t afford to. The baths are not merely successful in themselves but have brought prosperity to the town as a whole. Since the complex was refurbished, tourism has increased ninefold, drawing people to its pools and potations while also creating an ancillary industry of high-end hotels and candle shops. When Peter learns that remediating the problem will take at least five years, and untold millions, he conveniently begins to suspect that the science is wrong.The formidable Ann Dowd plays all of the characters, including the two opposing siblings at the heart of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat both siblings are played by Dowd is a problem, and a plus. The plus is that Dowd is, as fans of “The Leftovers” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” know, an endlessly and effortlessly compelling actor, apparently unafraid of any extreme of human depravity. Her baseline naturalism — just looking at her face, taking in her posture, you believe that whomever she’s playing exists — allows for some terrifying flights into surreal psychology.That’s the problem, too. Ibsen already loaded the deck in creating the contrasting siblings: Thomas — as Joan was originally known — was candid but excitable and arrogant; Peter, devious but phlegmatic and cordial. Because Dowd is playing both, and because she is a tiny figure on Hildegard Bechtler’s giant catwalk of a stage as it branches out amid the tables, she must push both characterizations to extremes.So Peter, as projected live on jumbo screens, is no longer a worm but a snake, making arguments that (it seemed to me) were utterly transparent in their hypocrisy. And Joan, in return, is a mad fury instead of a mere idealist. As she bullies her brother, she undermines her positions by making them seem personal or even pathological. (She’s nasty to her husband, too, as Ibsen’s character never was to his wife.) Far from receiving the gratitude she expects for saving lives, she manages to make a mayor who is willing to sacrifice people for profit seem almost prudent and reasonable.I suppose that isn’t so extreme. We have only to look at Flint — or at Covid-19 or the building collapse in Surfside, Fla. — to see how often, in real life, the advice of experts may be perverted by political or even democratic means. (Condominium boards, no less than municipal officials, are elected.) Biologists, virologists and engineers are just some of the modern-day scientists who become “enemies of the people” by trying to save them.But neither Ibsen’s Thomas nor Icke’s Joan is able to stop at advancing a lifesaving crusade; both extend their arguments into weird, troubling territory. Enraged, Joan shouts that “molecules are not subject to majorities” and “facts are not a democracy” — viewpoints that soon merge into a profoundly elitist and even eugenicist worldview. In a properly organized society, she suggests, only experts would be allowed to vote. Or maybe only her.In writing Joan this way, Icke, the director of the acclaimed Andrew Scott “Hamlet” in London and the excessively brutal “1984” on Broadway, puts an even heavier thumb on the scales than Ibsen, never a light touch, did. Clearly the attempt is to balance the arguments, or at least to balance our antipathy toward them. The voting likewise forces our hands, as the ballot issues are worded tendentiously. The last of them — “Who is the enemy of the people?” — requires you to choose between Peter and Joan, as if that were how democracy worked or was even, at least at Table 16, a question.In Robert Icke’s version of the Ibsen classic, the audience is forced to consider whether democracy is the same as consensus, and their votes determine the direction of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe voting concept is further trivialized by the doomy “quiz” music that plays as you deliberate, and, more fatally, by the outcome’s barely altering the experience of the play. Apparently, Dowd performs different scenes at two points, depending on the tally; on Wednesday, we met a local physician and the mayor’s public relations chief, whereas other audiences may spend time with Joan’s husband and a newspaper editor. But any one audience can only know the one sequence it sees, so the dramatic value of the gimmick is moot.Which is not to say that “Enemy of the People” is too. Though it has stripped away most of the detail that Ibsen uses to dramatize the way civic crises arise from (and filter back down to) domestic ones, it offers a compensatory challenge. Icke asks us to dramatize these issues for ourselves, at our own tables. Communally, we are forced to consider: Is democracy the same as consensus? Is the ballot the best guarantor of good policy?I ask because the four residents of 16 Waivers Way, split 2-2 on a key issue and unable to decide how to decide, ran out of time without hitting “X” or “O.” Ranked voting, anyone?Enemy of the PeopleThrough Aug. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; 212-933-5812, armoryonpark.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      A Complicated Collaboration for a New ‘Enemy of the People’

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      Without seeing a script, Ann Dowd jumped at the chance to work with Robert Icke on his solo adaptation of the Ibsen classic. Then the debates began.You are an established stage and screen actress, an Emmy winner with pivotal roles in two of the most critically acclaimed series of the past decade. One day, a young theatermaker rings with an offer you should refuse: a drastic remix of the Henrik Ibsen play “An Enemy of the People” as a solo show in which you would play all the parts. Oh, and he hasn’t written it yet.Ann Dowd (the cult leader Patti Levin in “The Leftovers” and the brutal enforcer Aunt Lydia in “The Handmaid’s Tale”) did not hesitate. “I knew on that first call that I would trust him completely,” she said.That bond was evident during a recent chat with Dowd, 65, and her new collaborator, the British writer and director Robert Icke, 34, at the Park Avenue Armory, which commissioned and is presenting their show from June 22 through Aug. 8. Sitting on an overstuffed maroon couch upstairs at the Armory, the pair batted around ideas, arguing affectionately but spiritedly, and dryly teasing each other.In the original play, Dr. Thomas Stockmann discovers that the waters feeding his town’s popular spa baths are contaminated. For the sake of public health, he wants to disclose his findings and close the baths; this pits him against his own brother, Peter, who happens to be the mayor and fears a fatal blow to the local economy.Icke (pronounced Ike) kept that mainframe, which feels prescient in the light of debates surrounding Covid-19, then changed … a lot. For starters, Thomas is now Professor Joan Stockman, the town has become Weston Springs and there are references to pizza delivery and TV. More importantly, the audience gets to influence the outcome by voting at key points of the story.“Rob rewrites classics to bring them closer to us,” said Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director. “Not by trivializing them, but by going straight to the complexity of why they are great plays. He’s categorical about being able to understand why a play needs to be done, why it’s a story we want to tell now.”Icke’s only other New York credit, “1984,” received mixed reviews when it ran on Broadway in 2017 but in his native Britain he is celebrated for daring, bracing productions that strip the rust and barnacles off familiar material. Dowd — whose stage career includes a 2008 Broadway production of “The Seagull” opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and Peter Sarsgaard — is not shy about disagreeing about some of Icke’s aesthetic choices. But these differences appear to fuel their artistic collaboration, not hamper it. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was your starting point when you decided to rethink Ibsen’s play?ROBERT ICKE All I really had was the notion that it was interesting but maybe there was a different route through the story that might make a social-distanced environment feel natural rather than pragmatic. And it relied on me finding somebody I felt 100 percent confident I could write for.ANN DOWD Were you sure it would be a woman?ICKE Yes.DOWD How come?ICKE Good question. I don’t know. There’s just something about this show with a man that is completely uninteresting to me.Dowd in rehearsal with her director Robert Icke. They are fond collaborators — except when it comes to their respective takes on Chekhov.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesAnn, how did the project reach you?DOWD My very wonderful agent and manager said, “You have an offer to do a one-person show based on ‘Enemy of the People’ with Rob Icke” — Robert Icke, I think they said. Block your ears — can’t compliment him, I mean, truly, don’t even try. I could tell from the sound of their voice that it was an extraordinary honor to be asked. I didn’t know Rob’s work — I don’t really know anything about a lot of things [stage whisper] you can just cut that part — but at any rate they educated me. Part of me was thinking, “Give me a reason to say no, please, let me avoid this walk up Everest.” I say “walk” because there’ll be no climbing. Then we spoke and I thought, “Who would ever turn this man down?”ICKE Oh, it’s happened.Were you familiar with his work?DOWD My sister is a casting director in London and said, “Rob Icke? Oh, my God, I saw his ‘Vanya,’ I was riveted and when it was finished it had been four hours.” [Actually, about three and a half.] I said, “Wait a minute — whaaaat?” She was just so in the story.ICKE Chekhov said he wants that play to feel like real life so sometimes it was just like, “I just want to watch you all live for a minute, so you just tune your guitar and you maybe look at your phone for a second and then you put it back.”DOWD Well, that irritates me: What is a phone doing in “Vanya”?ICKE We do differ about this. What is our experience of being in the country in the modern age? [He pretends to hold a cellphone up in the air.] “Have I got any bars?” So there’s that idea that wherever they are, there’s no phone signal, just a rusty landline somewhere in the house.DOWD My pushback was: “No, no, it’s called imagination.” Having played Sonya [in a 1986 production] and loving her — lo-ving her — I said, “I’ll trick you: I want to be in ‘Vanya’ and I’m going to play Sonya.” But he said he would never cast me in a role I’ve played before.ICKE But there would be something interesting in asking where Sonya is when she’s your age. Like, what happened?DOWD Yeah, write that play! But let me wear the damn clothes that I wore in Russia and don’t change my name. And don’t take out a cellphone!ICKE Unfortunately if you’re doing Chekhov with me, you’re wearing contemporary clothes. There will be no samovar, there will be no parasols.How did you approach the central character of Joan? She has become a distinct person, not just Thomas Stockmann in a dress. And she can be aggressively intransigent, bordering on zealotry.ICKE It’s both simple and incredibly complicated: the genius of this lady [pointing to Dowd] is that the characters are like real people. I came in one day with a rewrite of a section. She looked at me with a genuine hurt and said, “I just don’t think that’s fair on Joan.” Joan was now a real person who existed inside the actor.DOWD If you track her early years, I think she was probably shut down quite a bit: “Lower your voice, let your older brother” — mother taking you aside — “Joan, he’s the shy one, don’t bully him.” So just learning: “I’m not going to be listened to so might as well just yell it out. And [expletive] every one of you!” I imagine one or two women have experienced that in their lives.The play now introduces an interactive element with the audience votes: The majority’s decision has an impact on what happens in the town and in the play, and it might not be to everybody’s liking.ICKE I think the same thing is true of Trump because he was democratically elected: He won a fair and free election. Whether any of us like that or not, there’s a horrible dichotomy to wrestle with.DOWD How does that excuse —ICKE It doesn’t excuse anything. But that’s the big bind: the process that put him there is the process we all claim to like and the one we signed up to. The British equivalent of that is Brexit.Audience members at this “Enemy” will be asked to respond to plot points by voting from their seats.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesDOWD If Peter [the mayor] had said, “Look, we are going to have to close down the baths, we’re going to figure it out together. We will find a way to get help. You are not alone.” Real leadership.ICKE Isn’t real leadership to just get it done quietly: shut the baths, give a vague reason?DOWD No, people deserve to know the truth about their lives.ICKE But does it help us? Sometimes I wonder whether we’d all be happier if we knew a bit less. I sometimes think we’re all so flooded with information, it’s more than we can take in.DOWD This is slightly off topic, sorry, but you think about the people who knew what Trump knew [about Covid-19] and stayed quiet. What is that? Your job is more important than your integrity?Ann, how do you burrow into the heads of these tough characters? Of course Aunt Lydia comes to mind.DOWD I was a pre-med student for four years and the way you get through it is that you study to the point of insanity. Then I realized, You know what? Let’s go to acting school! But I applied those same rigorous studies to acting for a very long time. That’s misery because you’re not letting anything in around you. All the doors shut, except for the one you choose to go through.The other thing, and this is big: It’s playing. People ask, “How do you ever play Lydia?” I can’t get to her fast enough. It’s make believe — not to diminish the intensity — but if it wasn’t, emotionally, you’d go home, put a pillow over your head and end it all! Just chill a little bit: It’s a play, there is supposed to be fun in it.Have you reached the fun stage on this one yet?ICKE We had fun on Sunday, when you did all of it.DOWD I was in a state of shock!ICKE I’ve got the WhatsApps to prove it.DOWD [resigned] OK. The point is, that’s the goal. I’ll get there.Enemy of the PeoplePerformances June 22-Aug. 8; armoryonpark.org More