I am lucky enough to understudy several roles in these plays, and am honestly just a massive fan of these productions, so you should come see regardless of if I’m playing or not.
“These productions will play in repertory with each other for the first time, allowing audiences to experience the throughlines and connections in these classic dramas—depicting two epic family sagas written over 2,000 years apart—performed by the same cast.”
“For this is the glory of Robert Icke’s production…it is whole and entire of itself. ”
—Financial Times (London), ★★★★★
“Robert Icke is one of the most important forces in today’s theatre…Every moment of the text rings with significance.”
—The Guardian (UK), ★★★★★
“Robert Icke’s production of Hamlet remains extraordinarily, heartbreakingly beautiful.”
—Time Out London (UK), ★★★★★
Hailed as “one of the most important forces in today’s theatre” (The Observer, UK), Robert Icke has drawn acclaim from critics and audiences alike for his intelligent and accessible productions that bring fresh, new perspectives to classical texts. The Olivier Award–winning director unleashes his visionary creativity at the Armory with the North American premiere of a radical new staging of Shakespeare’s classic.
This highly charged staging transforms the traditional family drama into a psychological thriller, transporting the action to our current surveillance society in which rolling media news feeds provide juicy updates of a life lived on screen while blurring the lines between public and private life. Alex Lawther (The Imitation Game, The Last Duel, The French Dispatch, Black Mirror) portrays the obsessive prince consumed by grief, brilliantly embodying his mental decay to boldly examine the devastating effects his anguish has not only on his own psyche, but on his family and country.
“[Icke’s] exhilarating adaptation is in part a demolition…It dispenses with stage conventions. Yet this is not destruction, but revelation.…it is whole and entire of itself.”
—The Guardian (UK), ★★★★★
“Robert Icke’s extraordinary adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia makes it feel as if you have electrodes wired into your soul.”
—Time Out London, ★★★★
Aeschylus’ greatest and final play is a searing familial saga that examines the sins of a family over several decades and explores whether justice can ever really be done. Robert Icke‘s Olivier Award-winning adaptation of this moral dilemma comes to the Armory for its North American premiere following sold-out runs at the Almeida Theatre and on London’s West End.
Icke radically reimagines this Greek drama for the modern stage, condensing the tragic trilogy into a single performance that electrifies and devastates in equal measure with Olivier Award-nominated Anastasia Hille (The Effect, The Master Builder) in the role of Klytemnestra. This daring update allows audiences to investigate the justification of vengeance, the possibility of finding justice in retaliation, and the role of judicial democracy at work—themes that continue to resonate nearly two and a half millennia after the play was written.