Robert Icke’s new play examines one of the least appetising characters in British criminal history. Raoul Moat went on a shooting spree in July 2010 that left his wife injured, a cop blinded and an innocent man dead. This superb piece of reportage offers us a glimpse into the mind of a damaged brute. Moat had a rough childhood, like a lot of kids. His dad was absent, his mother was mentally unstable and when he was seven, she set fire to all his toys. Very traumatic, no doubt, but kids have survived worse.
He grew into a 17st bully who felt cheated by the system and blamed everyone else for his woes. Part of the tragedy is that he had talent. He was energetic and ambitious. He worked as a bouncer, as a scrap-metal dealer, and as a tree surgeon with the tradename ‘Mr Trimmit’. What he needed was a powerful male voice to stop him acting like a cry baby and treating every setback as a terminal disaster. He never got the chance.
Samuel Edward-Cook delivers an impressive portrait of a frenzied, damaged thug. He doesn’t sanitise or glamourise his subject but makes him watchable and horribly intriguing. In the opening scene, Moat tells his solicitor that he won’t plead guilty to striking his child five times because he’s innocent. His bizarre argument is that no child could survive five blows from his fists so the accusation must be groundless. The solicitor is momentarily tempted to see Moat as a harmless and misunderstood pacifist. Then Moat picks up a table and hurls it across the room, which sends the solicitor sprawling. The show continues on this grisly downward spiral. The violence is unrelenting.
Icke’s script finds space for the supplementary tragedy of PC David Rathband, whom Moat blasted in the eyes with a shot-gun. Two years later, blinded, jobless and divorced, PC Rathband took his own life. The curious Gazza episode features, too. Washed-up footy legend Paul Gascoigne tried to get involved in the armed stand-off between Moat and the cops. He was rebuffed. On stage, this becomes a dream sequence in which Gazza, wisely and perceptively, diagnoses Moat’s real problem as steroid abuse.
Visually, the show is utterly repellent to look at. Nasty interview rooms, steel doors that crash and bang, reinforced walls that Moat tries to demolish with kung fu lunges. When he escapes into the countryside, the stage briefly erupts into fake greenery with shrubs and grass verges made of Astroturf. Hats off to the designer Hildegard Bechtler who bravely meets the challenges of this depressing show. The only fault is the noisy and unhelpful soundtrack. Edward-Cook spends 105 minutes on stage, roaring like a speared ox for most of the time, and he has to compete with recorded music as well. His voice may not last.
Apex Predator is a London drama about a knackered couple, Mia and Joe, who can barely cope with family life. Their new baby cries nonstop and their elder boy, aged ten, refuses to remove his scary monster mask. Joe is a cop who works long shifts at a remote office somewhere. Mia is a talentless crosspatch who feels that she’s failed at everything. She may be right about that. She befriends Ana, a weird Irish nanny, who enjoys breastfeeding strangers’ babies. Ana claims that this is a tradition in her family. But surely she’s fibbing.
The script, by John Donnelly, refuses to play fair with the audience. Dream-like scenes keep cropping up. Mia is twice assaulted by strangers but she reports neither crime to the authorities. Is she imagining things? Prompted by Joe, she makes an appointment to see a doctor who arrives in the family kitchen. But doctors scrapped home visits years ago. Her imagination is working overtime again. And she makes the audience suspect that Joe may be responsible for a spate of murders in London.
Then the show goes completely bananas. Ana turns out to be a vampire. She bites people’s necks and sucks out their blood. She does this to a man at a party and then she has a nibble at Mia, too. Oddly enough, the vampire element adds a bit of clarity to the narrative. Vampires, we can be sure, belong in the realm of fantasy whereas everything else in the play seems to hover between fiction and reality.
By the end of the show, the corpses are mounting up and so are the suspects. At the curtain call everyone on stage, including the masked ten-year-old boy, is a potential killer. The action comes to a halt before the perpetrator can be identified. Or perhaps not. This may be a macabre comedy dressed up as a vampire yarn. It’s hard to say. If anyone at Hampstead Theatre knows what this show is about, could they contact the Critics’ Circle? All help gratefully received.
Comments