Manhunt - Royal Court Theatre: A Blurred Narrative I’m Not Sure We Needed To Hear
⭑ ⭑ ⭑ - 46% • 6 minutes 7 second read time
There is a responsibility that comes with telling true stories - particularly ones involving real harm, real violence, and real survivors who are still living with the consequences. In Robert Icke’s Manhunt, that responsibility feels not just fumbled but, at times, disregarded. This is a play that asks us to sit with the story of Raoul Moat - his upbringing, his worldview, and ultimately, his descent into the horrifying events that ended with him taking one man’s life and nearly taking two more. But the biggest question it never convincingly answers is: why tell this story?
We are not short on works interrogating masculinity, violence, and male identity. Recent theatre and television has made enormous strides in exposing the cracks in male emotional development and the societal systems that prop it up. Shows like TV’s Adolescence, and Theatre’s Dear England, and Punch have examined these issues with care, clarity, and purpose. In comparison, Manhunt feels muddy and morally adrift. It enters a complex and emotionally fraught conversation, and instead of contributing anything meaningful, it risks recentering a violent man in a way that, intentionally or not, sidelines the very real people he harmed.
The play is told almost entirely from Moat’s perspective. He positions himself as the victim - failed by his mother, by school, by the system, by the police. Everyone else, in his view, is to blame. His actions are not framed as choices, but as inevitabilities - products of a world that neglected him. And while unreliable narrators are hardly new territory, there is a serious lack of clarity here about the narrative lens. Is this framing a deliberate attempt to critique Moat’s worldview? Or has the script simply not decided what it wants to say? I don’t know. And that uncertainty is fatal to the play’s impact. There isn’t even clarity on whether the lack of clarity is intentional.
This does not feel like an artistic and intentional ambiguity. This feels like confusion that undermines the weight of the subject. Theatre doesn’t need to moralise, but it does need a point of view. When you are dealing with real lives, real trauma, and a story that many would rather not see revisited at all, failing to take a stance that really justifies why you’ve decided to risk re-traumatising people, that becomes its own kind of violence. Without a clear narrative lens, what we’re left with feels dangerously close to a platform for a man whose name we arguably should not even remember.
There are glimmers of a more urgent play beneath the surface. One that says something about how men are socialised, how patriarchy damages everyone, how internalised shame and emotional repression become corrosive over time. At moments, it almost goes there - brushing up against the idea that men must be the ones to dismantle the systems harming them and everyone around them. But time and again, the play pulls back. Instead, we stay in Moat’s head, repeating his narrative, his pain, his perceived injustices, while the impact on those around him is left frustratingly under-explored.
The closest we come to examining that impact is in one of the only scenes not told from Moat’s point of view - a striking moment that shifts to the perspective of PC David Rathband, the police officer Moat shot and permanently blinded. In this brief but powerful deviation, we witness how Rathband too was trapped by a rigid, toxic model of masculinity. In the aftermath of his injury, he tried to cling to the stoic, provider identity expected of him, even as it slipped further out of reach. The people he believed he needed to protect and provide for weren’t asking him to perform that role - in fact, they were asking him not to. But the expectation was ingrained, the performance internalised, and as he began to rely on them to provide for him he could not handle it and his response was also to hurt the women he claimed to love, it cost him everything. For a moment again the production brushes up against an urgent idea: that men often place these burdens on themselves, then uphold the very systems that keep them there, repeating the cycle until it breaks them. But just as the conversation begins to take shape, the focus snaps back to Moat, and the moment is lost.
Where the show does undeniably shine is in its performances. Samuel Edward-Cook is captivating as Moat, delivering an intensely committed portrayal that is both emotionally raw and psychologically complex. But the performance does invite sympathy - and that is part of the problem. Whether this is a directorial choice or a consequence of being tethered so tightly to Moat’s inner world, the impact is the same: we are asked to feel for him before we are ever really asked to feel for those he harmed. Sally Messham, as Samantha Stobbart, Moat’s ex-girlfriend and one of his surviving victims, gives a quietly devastating performance. She brings strength and nuance to a role that, sadly, is afforded far too little space in the narrative. That imbalance reflects a larger issue with the production - that its empathy is unequally distributed.
The show’s final movements are among its most troubling. After showing us the damage Moat caused, the stage fills with a screen playing clips from social media - people expressing support for him, offering sympathy. This is intercut with David Cameron’s now-famous address to the House of Commons: “Raoul Moat was a callous murderer. Full stop. End of story. I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims and the havoc he wreaked in that community. There should be no sympathy for him.” The juxtaposition is stark, and in all honesty feels as though we are being asked to disagree with Cameron. Then Moat re-emerges, delivering a final monologue that I can only describe as a Men’s Rights version of America Ferrera’s speech in the Barbie movie. You have to be fighting fit but not too much. You have to be ready to fight a war but when you do, don’t cry because no one wants to see a man cry, etc etc. And at this point it feels like the framing is “women and society expect this of us men and then don’t care when it destroy’s us” which is so fundamentally detached from reality.
The last thing he says to us is this: “I’ve got you listening now. But that’s only because of the violence. Otherwise you wouldn’t even know my name.” It’s delivered like a mic-drop - a challenge to the audience, a provocation. A “Checkmate. Point proved. What option do we have, you are the problem, men have to be violent otherwise we aren’t heard.”
But let’s pick that mic back up. No, you didn’t catch us out. We are not complicit in your violence because we heard about it. We do not owe you attention, nor were you ignored. What you weren’t given was what you believed you were entitled to, a woman’s body, her love, her affection - and you responded with brutality. That’s not a failure of society to listen. That’s a refusal to condone coercion. We don’t know the names of millions of men, many of whom live with pain and hardship, who come from struggle. And yet because they chose therapy, sport, communication, or simply patience over violence in dealing with that, I never have to know who they are. That’s not society turning away. That’s decent men making a healthy choice.
Ultimately, Manhunt feels like a play that wants to raise questions without committing to answers. But when the subject is this real, this raw, and this recent, neutrality can be damaging. And this to me feels like it’s almost veering past neutrality into being a sympathy for the killer story. Without a clear authorial voice, without a deeper sense of purpose or care, its very existence begins to feel like an act of violence in itself. It’s not just what it says. It’s what it doesn’t. And who it forgets.
At times, it even feels like a defensive man’s response to a society that is finally starting to scrutinise masculinity - an attempt to reclaim space for male anger under the guise of analysis. But this isn’t a culture that ignores men’s struggles. It’s one that is asking how we can hold those struggles with empathy while also refusing to excuse the harm that’s done to others in the process. Manhunt doesn’t manage to walk that line. It barely acknowledges the line exists.
It earns three stars because the performances are exceptional and it has, undeniably, sparked conversation, which is what I suppose art should do. But it’s not a production I can in good conscience recommend. And it’s certainly not one I believe needed to be made.