TRAGEDY WITHOUT A MORAL
Raoul Moat used steroids and bulking-powder to armour himself in muscle, nourished a bottomless well of grievance and self-pity , and imposed his needy will on his girlfriend and any public authority who defied him . Especially Northumbria Police, though the local council met outrage too, for not letting him keep three dogs, as did the courts for giving him a short prison sentence for common assault on a child resulting in supervised contact with his own for a while . So, once released, he went on the run in 2010, shot his girlfriend’s new lover dead, critically wounded her and loosed off the shotgun in a traffic policeman’s face, blinding him.
The manhunt was big news. Some treated him as a mythic hero. Andrew Hankinson, “frustrated by the constraints of British journalism” researched, studied Moat’s own messages and friends, and wrote a book. Robert Icke , with all his extraordinary theatrical instinct and skills, has made it into a 105-minute play. The Royal Court, predictably anxious to draw a left-political line, publicizes it by quoting with implicit scorn David Cameron’s “Raoul Moat was a callous murderer. Full stop. End of story.” In the programe David Byrne draws a thematic line in the theatre’s history, from Jimmy Porter ranting at his girlfriend in Look Back in Anger 70 years ago, through the age of angry-young-men and , less probably, Enron and Jerusalem, to the present age of Putin and Tate and worries about fragile male rage.
So what’s the play like? Well, gripping, not least because Samuel Edward-Cook, shaven-headed and immense, addresses the audience with all the needy passion of Moat’s expression, in moment in between scattered scenes with others. “I feel tired. Anxious. Isolated. Helpless. Angry” he says to us, as he fills a psych form, makes an appointment for help (ah, easier days then) but for no reason doesn’t keep it. He explains that the police have been harassing him for years, ruined his business by arresting him; that he enjoyed being a Dad and loves his girlfriend Sam. In prison he wouldn’t stop calling her. Sometimes we get the calm annoying voices of women – a barrister, a social worker, Sam herself pointing out that she has the kids and his dogs to deal with . This enrages him so that he towers over them, threatens, and in Sam’s case hits and throws her to the floor.
Edward-Cook is astonishing, real, brilliant in performance: he throws furniture around, paces like a magnificent caged animal, demands all our sympathy, can’t bear ‘disrespect”. It exposes the famous truth that “Men fear wwomen will laugh at them. Women fear men will kill them”.
We know the bulking-up is armour over a fragile ego, a lost child. We are given scraps about his early life`: bipolar mother burnt his toys when he was seven, no Dad, raised chiefly by a kind granny , worked in hard physical jobs which satisfied his needy strength. But for all his presence, and the neatly written cameo moments with his Geordie friends, it is not long before Moat, sadly, becomes a bit of a bore. Physically splendid, he’s certainly fully human and quite a logical thinker, but curdled with self-pity and resentment.
When Sam reasonably dumps him, he emerges from prison not to learn to do better but to commission a coward’s weapon, the “car with six wheels” which apparently is code for a sawn-off shotgun and six bullets. He thinks they are mocking him, so shoots. Then sees a cop in a car, traffic duty, and shoots him too. In a ten-minute respite from Moat’s moaning a coup de theatre plunges us all into blackness where we hear an account in PC David Rathband’s voice of the fear, pain, blinding and ruining of his life and marriage, up to his suicide two yars later.
And then there we are again with RAoul, hiding out in the countryside with his two friends – ‘hostages’ they tried to claim – saying he feels better, that the cop was ‘not a person” , and that he always dreamed of living with Sam on a French farm (beautifully expressed, Sam and children silently appearing). As police close in a negotiator offers him a chance to be understood, to rebuild: but Moat is stuck in his vacant fury. The best bit of the play indeed is a speech delivered – imagined – by Paul Gascoigne, the footballer, who in reality turned up (drunk) but never spoke. He says it for all men who are, deep inside, small children and who shelter inside physical brilliance and hit women becaues they’re scared of how much they need their Mums. It is brilliantly done by Trevor Fox. Moat moves towards suicide, taking care (for the Royal Court loyalists) to throw in a casual mention of “bears and squirrels”. And for a trite moral, up comes David Cameron’s “end of story” quote again.
I don’t regret seeing it, and Edward-Cook gives a tremendous performance so do the others, notably Fox and Sally Messham as Samantha. Icke is always more than worth it, his recent Oedipus showing a briliance in tragedy. . But Raoul Moat is not a great tragedy, nor even a valid symbol of a confused and difficult age of masculinity (PUNCH does far better, so does DEAR ENGLAND). And this is not a great play.
royalcourttheatre.com to 3 May
rating 3
theatreCat 