Robert Icke

'Time turns, sets a backward course, starts for the start with speed: the fragile moments drop unravelling, reversing, unwound, back to the beginning.' Election night. The polls predict a landslide victory. Everything is about to change. Award-winning writer and director Robert Icke transforms Sophocles' epic tragedy into an essential and explosive political thriller. First performed in Dutch in 2018 at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam and the Edinburgh International Festival, this arresting version of Oedipus received its English-language premiere at Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End in 2024, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, and starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. The production won Icke the Best Director Award at the 2025 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards, as well as Best Actor and Best Actress for its leads. Robert Icke is one of the most visionary figures in theatre today, celebrated for his contemporary re-imaginings of classic texts by Shakespeare, Schiller, Chekhov, Aeschylus and Ibsen. 'Robert Icke is the great hope of British theatre' Time Out

Robert Icke’s thrilling and radical adaptations of some of the great texts of Western theatre have enthralled theatregoers in London, in New York and around the world. This is the first collection of his multi-award-winning work.Includes:Oresteia: Orestes' parents are at war. A family drama spanning several decades, a huge, moving, bloody saga, Aeschylus' greatest and final play asks whether justice can ever be done - and continues to resonate more than two millennia after it was written.Uncle Vanya: Chekhov's late masterpiece examines human behaviour in all of its beautiful, terrible, laughable contradiction.Mary Stuart: Schiller's political tragedy takes us behind the scenes of British history's famous rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots.The Wild Duck: A new version of Ibsen’s masterpiece about the nature of truth, in which a stranger intervenes to reveal the lies in the past of a family, with tragic consequences.The Doctor: Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke has written a gripping moral thriller that uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality.

First, do no harm. How do we defend the "truth" when no one agrees what it is and many have reason to undermine it?Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke's gripping moral thriller uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality.After a critically acclaimed run at London's Almeida Theatre, The Doctor transferred to the West End in September 2022. This revised and updated edition was published to coincide with the new production.

A new version of

Chekhov's late masterpiece examines human behaviour in all of its beautiful, terrible, laughable contradiction. Following his reimagining of Oresteia (Almeida / West End), Almeida Associate Director Robert Icke directs a new production of Chekhov's greatest play.Things your life could be:(1) a farce.(2) a tragedy.(3) pointless.(4) all of the above. Things you could do about it:(1) keep living.(2) stop living.(3) stop someone else living.(4) nothing.Even so, what has your life been worth?