Robert Icke

Robert Icke, born in 1986 in Stockton-on-Tees, England, is a director, author, and theater manager. He became known for his radical reworkings of classical texts.
He studied English at Cambridge and then worked as an assistant director with, among others, Thea Sharrock, Michael Attenborough, and Trevor Nunn. From 2003 to 2007, he led the Arden Theatre Company, which he founded himself; from 2010 to 2013, he was Associate Director of the Headlong Theatre Company; and starting in 2013, Associate Director at the Almeida Theatre in London.
Icke has directed at the National Theatre London, Almeida Theatre, London’s West End, Broadway, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Staatstheater Stuttgart, and Burgtheater Vienna. For his work, Icke has received numerous awards, including the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award, the Evening Standard Theatre Award, the UK Theatre Award, and as the youngest recipient so far, the Laurence Olivier Award. For his German adaptation of the «Orestie» at Schauspiel Stuttgart, he received the Kurt-Hübner-Regiepreis in 2019.
Among his best-known works are adaptations of «Hamlet», «Maria Stuart», «Oedipus» (Toneelgroep Amsterdam), «1984» (co-written with Duncan Macmillan), Aeschylus’ «Orestie», as well as «Die Ärztin» (very freely based on «Professor Bernhardi» by Arthur Schnitzler). The Serbian director Miloš Lolić staged «Die Ärztin» in the 2024/2025 season for the Residenztheater.
In the 2025/2026 season, Robert Icke will come to the Residenztheater and direct his own adaptation of Sophocles’ «Ödipus».