PLAY REVIEW: Manhunt ★★

Created by Robert Icke, Manhunt is based on the true manhunt of Raoul Moat, a criminal man who murdered one person and injured two people, proceeding to go on the run in Northumbria in 2010. The play attempts to analyse what made Moat commit his actions and the toxic masculinity that led to these crimes.

‘Attempts’, is the key word here, as Icke’s script does not do much to analyse the topics it appears to aim to. The script remains surface level, with the exception of intriguing chopping back and forth between time. Moat is situated as an unreliable narrator, though the strangely comical and thin depictions of some of the characters around him test the audience’s ability to hold this view, however, with nothing much achieved by the end of the piece, Moat’s positioning changes and the final message is one of highly deplorable men’s rights that leaves an incredibly undesirable taste in the audience’s mouths, along with a circling back of the narrative that leaves the entirety of the drama as Moat’s proposition.

Icke’s direction lacks engagement, and the inclusion of a prolonged period of blackout to represent the blinded police officer’s perspective (with a voice that doesn’t resonate authentically through Tom Gibbons’ sound design) does not work dramaturgically, nor does it in the writing, as we have heard solely from Moat up to this point and the sudden inclusion of dialogue that speaks to wider issues in this segment has not been earnt from the production so far.

It is a highly intense central performance from Samuel Edward-Cook as Moat over the 1 hour, 35 minute, no interval, run time, putting in commendatory effort. A slight level of artifice exists, though, taking an edge off of the degree to which their character reaches the audience. The rest of the cast do as well as they can with the production, with Angela Lonsdale having some lovely moments towards the end of the play.