Can Raoul Moat - who shot and wounded his ex-partner Samantha Stobbart, killed her boyfriend Chris Brown and blinded policeman David Rathband in Northumberland in 2010 days after leaving prison - tell us anything about modern masculinity or the human condition? That’s the kernel of writer/director Robert Icke’s tricky new play, an original script after a string of stunningly reworked classics.
It’s a tense and unnerving 100 minutes, driven by a frankly terrifying performance from a pumped-up, bullet-headed Samuel Edward-Cook as Moat. But where Icke brought phenomenal clarity to Aeschylus, Chekhov and Shakespeare, he makes the story here as muddy as possible. Was Moat failed by society, or was he a “callous murderer, full stop, end of story” as then-PM David Cameron put it? Neither? Both? Icke isn’t saying.
