Manhunt at the Royal Court is Robert Icke’s first original play, telling the 15-year-old story of Raoul Moat’s murderous rampage in Northumbria. It is framed almost entirely as a self-justifying address by Moat to an imaginary court (in reality, he killed himself before he could be brought to justice). This Moat-shaped narrative consists largely of self-pitying special pleading, occasionally challenged by a fictitious prosecutor and sometimes quietly undermined by what we see on stage.

It doesn’t take much acuity to recognise Moat as a troubled man. A major weakness of the approach is that his victims, his co-conspirators, and the authorities are barely developed. Only one exception occurs, when the blinded police officer delivers a monologue in blackout.

The play’s "message," such as it is, emerges from the principal narrative and this digression: that men have a hard time accessing their feelings and receive little support from family or community. Icke has Moat quote statistics on male violence and suicide (as if Moat were ever interested in anything beyond himself) and invents scenes where Gazza and Moat’s absent father appear during his final stand-off to muse on these themes. These dialogues are painfully on-the-nose, as are the closing moments where Moat confronts the audience and accuses them of only being interested in him because he committed violence. “Why should you expect anyone to be interested?” I couldn’t help wondering.

The argument seems to suggest that "society" is somehow to blame for Moat’s actions, which not only robs him of agency but subtly absolves him of responsibility. Plenty of men with absent fathers and mentally ill mothers (as Moat had) do not go on murderous rampages.

It is at least intriguing that Icke’s play ultimately blames the absence of fathers for what has become tediously labelled "toxic masculinity" (a vaporous concept overdue for a moratorium). Yet the play stops short of asking deeper questions about the ideologies and structures that have contributed to the collapse of the traditional family — a subject contemporary playwrights seem reluctant to touch.

In the end, this is a poor play: one-note, short on tension (despite a title suggesting a thriller), overloaded with special pleading, and marred by a tendency to plant sociological theories in the mouths of characters. Shifting responsibility from the individual onto "society" — and by extension, onto the audience at an off-West End theatre — is no solution.

Doubtless, Moat carried a great weight of unresolved pain which fed into his actions; even more doubtless, the survivors of his violence have their own pain. It is not clear what that creaking concept — "society" — can really do, and the more interesting question is what individuals, families, and friends do when society fails.

I doubt Icke would ever advocate faith as an intervention for suffering men like Moat, but I am no more convinced that nebulous concepts like "society" offer any firmer ground.

A disappointing evening, all the more so given the brilliance Icke has shown in some previous productions — and, sadly, not a particularly well-directed one either.