“Wunderkind”; “enfant terrible”; the “great hope of British theatre” … these are all labels that have quite reasonably been bestowed on Robert Icke, the Stockton-born writer and director who has stormed the UK theatre establishment over the past decade with a string of radically reworked versions of classic plays. It’s not just critics who love him: he’s a hit machine, rewiring dusty theatrical standards by everyone from Schiller to Schnitzler and hurling them unerringly at the heart of the West End.
He’s known for close working relationships with an inner circle of trusted actors; none more so than Joshua Higgott, who has starred professionally in five of Icke’s shows, and assistant directed two. In fact, their relationship goes back further: they first met in their early 20s, on a 2008 student production of Romeo & Juliet. “We were walking around the campus having a conversation about Shakespeare and he pulled a Complete Works out of his bag in order to illustrate a point,” says Higgott. “Apparently he just carried one around with him at all times. I remember him telling me that he would listen to recordings of Shakespeare plays on his iPod instead of music. I don’t know if he still does that!”
