"This is my sixth year out in freedom.”

It’s hard to believe that the person on the other end of the phone was, not so long ago, in the same position as me: a Cambridge undergraduate with grand ambitions. Robert Icke may only have graduated in 2008 from reading English at King’s, but in those six years he has achieved some incredible feats. From 2010 to 2013 he was Associate Director of Headlong, and is now the Associate Director of the Almeida Theatre, alongside Artistic Director, Rupert Goold. His already critically acclaimed production of George Orwell’s 1984 is now on a UK tour, coming to the Cambridge Arts Theatre from the 21st to 25th October.

I ask him if it feels strange to bring a professional project back to his old university town. “It feels like coming home… Cambridge doesn’t really change very much.”

Icke admits that, like many theatre-keen undergraduates, the initial draw of a Cambridge degree lay in the reputation of the student drama scene, and its notable alumni. However, unlike many a seasoned ADC-dweller, for Icke, the reality of the Cambridge drama scene left him disappointed.

“I thought there was a lot of cliquey-ness, and I thought the work was rubbish. I think my expectations, perhaps completely unrealistically, were that I would get in Cambridge and the theatre world would be so brilliant that I’d learn loads and loads and loads and come out of it a fully formed director...and actually, for me, I’d already kind of done the directing before I got to Cambridge – I’d done it at home.”

Talking of home, we find common ground over both growing up in the North East – with Icke alleging that his own Stockton-On-Tees trumps my Newcastle in the ‘who can be the least posh?’ stakes. In a move to enhance his local youth theatre scene, before coming to Cambridge, Icke set up the Arden Theatre Company, presiding as Artistic Director from 2002 to 2008. He tackled his disillusionment with Cambridge theatre in a similar manner, setting up his own Swan Theatre Company, producing work at the ADC and the Arts Theatre. He confesses that as his Cambridge directing expectations dampened, he found himself on the edge of dropping out.

“But then the work got really interesting. Cambridge English is really good preparation for being a director – you’re given the confidence to read texts in your own way and to have a relationship to texts that is potentially iconoclastic and disrespectful. You’re able to say, ‘You know what? Everything else that everybody thinks about this text is all wrong.’” This academic stimulus in Icke’s creative work continues into the present: “What I really got out of Cambridge theatre was not so much the theatre scene itself, but rather the privilege of interacting with hugely smart people who really know what they’re on about”.

Icke is certainly now one of the people who knows what they are on about, but he still turns to former mentors for guidance. “At the moment I’m preparing a Greek tragedy for next year. One of the things I did was to get back in touch with Simon Goldhill, who taught me at King’s, who is obviously just a genius on all things Greek and Classical. If you can get closer to understanding great writers, what their aims and their structures are, then you’re closer to being able to replicate that in your own practice.”

I mention the talk from the out-going Artistic Director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, at the Cambridge Union last term; in particular his observation that directors fresh out of university often begin by “putting an essay on to the stage” before they accumulate more credits and practical experience. Icke refutes this immediately.

“The assumption underneath that statement is that the ‘essay’ is only part of a play: the play is the cake and what you’re doing is cutting a slice out of it. I’ve always been interested in trying to do the whole play — I’m interested in the whole structure. What I’m not interested in are the lazy assumptions that theatre history has made about that play for the last hundred years.

“You have to believe fundamentally that there is a reason that makes it worth spending the money on doing this play right now, and that you have something to say. If you think it only says one thing — like, ‘Isn’t totalitarianism bad?’ — then why don’t you just write a leaflet, and hand it out?”

So what does his production of 1984 have to say that’s new? Icke concedes that there has been a lot of “lazy thinking” around Orwell’s best-known book. “You know, ‘It’s really bleak, it’s dystopian, it’s fundamentally anti-fascism, or whatever.’ Actually, when we worked on it, one of the things we found was this appendix that completes it. It quietly reframes the whole of the novel.”

“One of the themes of the novel is that you can’t trust language... It makes you question, ‘What is this thing I’m holding in my hands, and what do I know about its reality?’ It performs a brilliant mind-fuck: a circular dance that leaves you feeling like you’ve just been punched in the stomach... Simple productions with blue prison overalls and ‘Oh, isn’t it all really bleak?’ are missing the point.”

I ask if directing a play that he himself has co-adapted has changed his perception of the rehearsal process. Is it productive to contain writer and director in one room, in one person?

“One of the things that is happening more in theatre now is that the idea of just being a writer, or a director with a capital D, is sort of eroding. It goes back to the practice of Shakespeare, or of the Greeks: they didn’t have split roles.” With years of directing experience already under his belt, it’s no surprise that Icke is preparing to take on new mantles.