Robert Icke: Works One

Oresteia; Uncle Vanya; Mary Stuart; The Wild Duck; The Doctor

Robert Icke

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786829085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

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-awardwinning 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.

THE WILD DUCK

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

Peter Brook, The Empty Space

Each partner strives to find in the other, or induces the other to become, the very embodiment of the other whose co-operation is required as a complement of the particular identity he feels compelled to sustain.

R.D. Laing, The Self and Others

Acknowledgements

My greatest debt is to the actors and creative team of the original production, whose ideas, instincts and input quite literally make the show, and to all of whom I am genuinely grateful.

This sort of work would scarcely be possible without the support and backing of its originating theatre – on multiple levels, I’m thankful to my whole team at the Almeida, who, five years in, are really my Almeida family – and on this one, as on so many before, I owe big thanks to Rupert Goold, Lucy Pattison, Denise Wood, Emma Pritchard, Rebecca Frecknall and Stephanie Bain.

And on top of that, thanks to everyone else who read the play or watched a performance and gave suggestions or support – significantly: Rachel Taylor, Helena Clark, Stephen Grosz, David Hare, Helen Lewis, Josh Higgott, Jon Sedmak, Laura Marling, Andrew Scott, Ben Naylor, Ilinca Radulian, Denzel Westley-Sanderson and Zara Tempest-Walters.

RI, October 2018

This adaptation was commissed by and originally produced at the Almeida, where it had its first performance on 15th October, 2018.

Cast (in alphabetical order)
Charles Woods	Nicholas Day
Hedwig Ekdal	Grace Doherty
Francis Ekdal	Nicholas Farrell
Anna Sowerby	Andrea Hall
Gregory Woods	Kevin Harvey
James Ekdal	Edward Hogg
Gina Ekdal	Lyndsey Marshal
Hedwig Ekdal	Clara Read
John Relling	Rick Warden

Creative Team
Direction	Robert Icke
Design	Bunny Christie
Light	Elliot Griggs
Sound	Tom Gibbons
Casting	Julia Horan CDG
Costume Supervision	Claire Wardroper
Fight Direction	Kevin McCurdy
Assistant Direction	Denzel Westley-Sanderson
Design Assistant	Verity Sadler
Photography	Manuel Harlan
Company Stage Manager	Claire Sibley
Deputy Stage Manager	Adam Cox
Assistant Stage Manager	Beth Cotton

Characters

GREGORY WOODS

CHARLES WOODS, father of GREGORY

GINA EKDAL

HEDWIG EKDAL, her daughter, nearly 13

JAMES EKDAL, husband of GINA

FRANCIS EKDAL, father of JAMES

ANNA SOWERBY

JOHN RELLING

A note on the text

A forward slash ( / ) marks the point of interruption of overlapping dialogue.

A comma on a separate line ( , ) indicates a pause, a rest, a silence, an upbeat or a lift. Length and intensity are context d...