Manhunt (Royal Court, London)
Verdict: Born to run
Projected on to a screen is the figure of a man, pacing his cell like a caged bear, his shaved head a glistening ball – shiny as mercury, and just as impermeable.
Over the next intense, terrifying 95 minutes, playwright Robert Icke (fresh from scooping awards for his awesome Oedipus) imagines what is going on inside the muddled, messed-up mind of murderer Raoul Moat.
You may remember that famous manhunt in the summer of 2010.
Having wounded his ex-girlfriend, killed her partner and blinded a police officer, Moat took to the Northumbrian hills. Following a standoff with armed police, he blew his brains out.
Samuel Edward-Cook could not be more mesmerising as Newcastle-born Moat. He eyeballs us as he drips with sweat and tears.
Pumped-up, pulsating with anger, he is hugely intimidating. All the more so for his paranoia and self-pity.
Possessed by a profound sense of his own victimhood, he is chillingly articulate: ‘I feel nothing. A lump of meat without a soul in it.’
His words are mostly his own, lifted from interviews, trials and his inquest. No one heard them, until it was too late.
‘Nobody gave us a chance,’ he says. An abused, abandoned child whose bipolar mother burns the seven-year-old Raoul’s toys, he became a tree surgeon, then a bouncer, building himself a body to protect the little boy lost inside.
He claims his kids are ‘his greatest achievement’, but two were put into care and he was imprisoned for hitting the little girl he clearly adores.
He protests his innocence, but the frenzied force with which he hurls her mother, Sam (the superb Sally Messham), across a room suggests an uncontainable brutality. So is he a monster or a victim? Or both? Icke doesn’t commit.
Some sequences have a near hallucinogenic quality. In total darkness, the police officer, David Rathband, blinded by Moat’s shotgun attack, reveals that becoming a victim, first of Moat and then tabloid intrusion, pushed him off the rails.
In another, Moat imagines a stoned, empathetic Gazza (Trevor Fox, terrific) telling him that he, too, is a tiny boy in a brawny body wondering if anybody loves him and lashing out.
Both are absorbing episodes (and Gazza did turn up to ‘help’ at the standoff, though police turned him away).
But they blur the focus on Moat, making it less a play and more of a dramatised documentary about today’s big issue: toxic masculinity. Stunning nevertheless.
Until May 3.
Thanks For Having Me (Riverside Studios, London)
Verdict: It was my pleasure
Following a couple of sell-out runs in small theatres, Keelan Kember’s fast, funny dating drama looks a tad dwarfed in the barnlike Riverside Studios, as if it’s happening on the telly over there.
Which is actually where, sharply trimmed, this Men Behaving Badly-meets-Friends sitcom would work even more of a treat.
Talented Kember is hilarious as Cashel, almost 30, a posh, neurotic, hypochondriac (allergic to almost everything), egomaniac romantic.
Dumped by his girlfriend of forever, he is tutored in the ways of dating by his super-chilled, determinedly singleton best-mate, Honey, played by Sex Education’s Kedar Williams-Stirling.
The rules of the game are simple: sound interesting (musician better than accountant), talk holidays, get her back to your place, insist there’s no sex on a first date to set a challenge, play Amy Winehouse to prove you’re a sensitive soul.
Enjoy, then move swiftly on to the next one.
Piece of cake.
As Cashel discovers when Honey’s current squeeze, Maya (Adeyinka Akinrinade) introduces him to her up-for-it therapist friend, Eloise (Game of Thrones’ Nell Tiger Free).
Trouble is, Cashel falls instantly in love with the leggy blonde.
He wants an intense, exclusive, old-fashioned relationship — hopefully forever — with said cake.
But footloose, fancy-free Eloise wants to keep things casual: no kisses goodbye, no breakfast, just wham, bam, thanks for having me and see you around. In other words, she doesn’t want to be seen as a prize.
She wants to be as free as a man.
Needless to say, the lads switch emotional positions, and one thread of a romcom becomes a love story.
The men are considerably better-written and more amusing than the sketchily drawn women, but Kember skilfully charts that tricky emotional passage from no-strings to tentative connection to provisional attachment to tying the knot.
Light, bright date-night fun.
Until April 26.
The House Party (Touring)
Verdict: A contemporary classic
It’s the night of rich-kid Julie’s 18th birthday bash. Having already changed her outfit from a spray-on mini to a baggy T-shirt, she and her not-so-posh BFF Christine are Insta-ready, glugging shots in her dad’s swanky mansion.
The big cat is away and these mice are ready to get this party started.
Laura Lomas’s update of Strindberg’s 1887 classic about class, sex and power for goes further than previous adaptations and feels shockingly authentic.
Inadequate mothers have as much impact on their offspring as Strindberg’s flaky father; and social media plays a significant, scary part in breaking friendships and wrecking lives.
Synnove Karlsen (Miss Austen, Medici) is outstanding as flighty, entitled Julie. Her depressed mum killed herself, her dad is dating a 24-year-old, her boyfriend dumped her when he saw a naked picture of her online.
She’s in a bad place, made worse by tequila.
Moreover, she fancies Jon, son of the family’s old cleaner. He’s Christine’s boyfriend, but he has always been in Julie’s thrall.
It’s an unlovely, uneven triangle.
Julie is used to getting her own way and careless of collateral damage.
The more grounded Christine (Bridgerton’s Sesley Hope), who is a carer to her mentally fragile mother, has a chance to better herself if all goes well in her Cambridge university interview scheduled for the next day.
Jon (Gentleman Jack’s Tom Lewis, convincingly out of his depth) is going to drive her there. Then Julie makes Jon drink and dance and all hell breaks loose.
Holly Race Roughan’s slick production is tense, loud, fast and superbly performed, not least by the revellers raving on a kitchen island the size of dance-floor.
In an unexpected coda taking place ten years later, Lomas suggests alternative repercussions from that fateful night.
Christine’s tiny kitchen is perched on the island, proof that people can take possession of their own narrative and mothering can be a joy.
Not Strindberg, but a potent play for today.
At Bristol Old Vic until May 3, then the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry.
