Monthly Archives: September 2023

  THE TWIG WHO BRANCHED OUT

     We get up to speed on the period,  with irresistible tracks from the golden age of pop: Beatles, Stones, Animals.   Onstage is a photographer’s white-sheet backdrop and the shadows of lights.  This is the tale of the Twiggy,   Lesley Hornby from Neasden, who  was barely seventeen when she became “The Face of 1966”. 

       I remember the moment as a fellow teenager: it was an age when suddenly we kids could reject our postwar mothers’ views on “nice little suits” and buy colourful short shifts, miniskirts barely wider than their faux-patent belts,  and a choice of truly  appalling patterned tights (Elena Skye’s Twiggy first appears in some tartan ones still burning on my retina).   The working-class girl was a model in every sense, her leggy skinny frame and angular,  almost Bob-Fosse poses setting her apart from the curvier and posher supermodels.  Every cover showed her lovely face, emphasised and sophisticated by a revolutionary minimalist hairdo by Leonard.  But she was no doomed shooting-star diva: she moved on from magazine covers to acting and singing, winning two Golden Globes for  Ken Russell’s weird version ofThe Boy Friend ,  worked in theatre with Peter Hall,  conquered Broadway.  Ms Hornby was and remains  a trouper, a hard worker, a learner,  a pleasant and decent woman now with a well-earned Damehood. 

         And that, in a way,  is Ben Elton’s problem as writer-director of this hagiographical jukebox musical (jukebox , in this 60s-70s period, is a compliment: the music is great and well chosen, with the possible exception of the Jim Reeves “I Believe’ in a saccharine moment). But in the telling here Twiggy’s story has no mystery, no quirkiness, no questions asked or answered. It is painfully linear, with little tension.   But Elena Skye herself is fabulous, a strong sweet voice able to belt  out big anthems or soften in sentiment:  she narrates from the star’s autobiography with intelligence and dignity,  and moves with grace and conviction from naive schoolgirl – sewing clothes for mates – to innocent submission under the self-invented Justin de Villeneuve (Matt Corner, very Mr Toad).    Thence to America, and her marriage to the erratic alcoholic Michael Witney (Darren Day, deploying another magnificent voice, lovely in duets with her).   In the background her working-class parents – Steven Serlin as Norman Hornby and Hannah-Jane Fox as Neil – are a solid presence,  with Nell’s long struggles with mental illness touchingly acknowledged.

              There are a lot of dance routines with the ensemble, though I have to break it to that excellent choreographer Jacob Fearey that as a new generation he has not captured the full and horrifying dreadfulness of 1960’s dancing:  no Twist or Hippy-hippy Shake or Hitchhiker routines. Trust me, it was an age of extreme Dad-Dance, so I suppose best forgotten.  

    So all in all, it’s quite fun,  often musically delightful,  and sharpened with cameos of David Frost, Claire Rayner and Melvyn Bragg and  some great archive footage,  not least the real Twiggy’s encounter with Woody Allen who tried to patronize her as a dumb kid and lost the encounter.  Interventions from her old schoolfriends are  entertaining too.

        Sadly,   what drags it down a star is the plonking smugness of its messages, something the story of practical, sensible Twigs did not need.  Justin-de-Villeneuve as a Svengali ten years older is stressed and disapproved of, with knowing references to modern awareness of coercive-control. The fact that she got blamed for the fashion for thin-ness when it wasn’t her fault for being skinny gets a finger wagged for nasty old misogyny and  what we now call body-shaming.  There’s a constant harping on class, causing the parents at times to be a little bit patronized, aw bless them. A gag about  “levelling up” sits oddly, as does a MeToo reference, since it’s only there to point out that she never suffered any. There’s a compulsory worship of the new-fledged NHS into which she was born,  there’s mention of the Windrush,  and scornful modern contempt for Nell getting electro-convulsive therapy for her postnatal depression because the ignorant old people of the unenlightened past didn’t know about hormones and menopause. Oh, and  during the struggle of her marriage – movingly done otherwise – Twiggy is seen hovering behind a modern AA meetingto underline that pervasive smugness about how much more enlightened we all are now.  

        So that grates a bit.  Never mind. We old fossils just enjoy the music,  sing along silently, and think our private thoughts.  And Elena Skye is a joy.

menierchocolatefactory.com  to 18 november

rating three

A TANKFUL OF EMOTIONAL TENTACLES

      Where better than Hampstead to watch the interplay of cutting-edge science with emotional intensity and philosophical unanswerables?  Upstairs we have Gunderson’s ANTHROPOLOGY (scroll below) .  In that , a grieving software engineer recreates her lost sister as an obliging algorithm without independent consciousness.  Meanwhile down here  in the studio you may meet an actual anthropologist : a chap arriving to study an animal-behaviourist’s relationship with an octopus called Frances which may, or may not, have a form of  intelligent consciousness.   The earlyish line  “George, I am here to ascertain whether or not your octopus believes in God”  was the moment I sank,  ever so happily, into properly enjoying Marek Horn’s intriguingly weird two-hander.  

        For others the willing settling-down will be due to the occasional Bowie tracks,  and for dedicated Whovians (there were several obviously present) the presence of Dr Who’s own Jemma Redgrave,  always reliably flawless in both intensity and humour. So, all in all, a damn good time. And you learn a lot about octopi (though the scientists say octopuss-es).  They are cephalopods of the deep ocean, who shed their shells long ago:   who hunt and hide, camouflage and think, each tentacle having independent sensors and memories.  Is this, scientists ask in their endearingly hair-ruffling way,  an alternative form of intelligence?  Why are we humans stuck with just one brain in our fragile skulls, when Frances the octopus spreads hers into new forms of perception? And perhaps of feeling, of thought…

        It’s a deeply human story, though:  Redgrave’s George is newly widowed, deep in grief; her husband was partner in the study of Frances, both living domestically alongside her tank.   Harry the anthropologist (Ewan Miller) is apparently here to work out whether certain behaviours suggest that the creature is also grieving his lost master,  and whether it therefore has a sense also of a Supreme Power.  But he is also studying George’s co-dependent relationship with it.

        Sorry, with her: possibly octopi have strong modern views on pronoun correctness. 

      The pair’s  fraught, fascinating relationship is related in a past tense by him, and played out by them together; sometimes they dance, writhily octopoid.  Her grief and touchiness are brilliantly shown by Redgrave,  and Miller catches nicely the man’s  more naif academicism and growing fascination with her.   There are some very funny moments, usually her asides.  My notebook is scrawled with “Where does intelligence lead?”  And  “Infertile eggs – chemically mandated triumph of hope over experience?”.  

        There’s a crisis, no spoilers, but it involves a lot of ink (all Frances’ colours are shown by a fine lit background, sometimes troubled by bubbles, but we never see a single tentacle).  And the conclusion is emotionally very pleasing.  

Box-office. hampsteadtheatre.com.  to 28 October

Rating four (one for each two octopus-legs)

PHONETICALLY PHABULOUS

     Last time Bertie Carvel was on this stage it was as Donald Trump. Now our best shapeshifter is Henry Higgins: capering, swearing, somewhere on the far side of manic, throwing out  insults and seething with passion. Though mainly for phonetics.   Once he has picked up the milder Pickering he entertains him and us with a demonstration of extreme vowel variations, ah, ae,ai, and a noise quite possibly Sanskrit.   The voice he chooses as his own, by the way,  has touches of Brian Sewell crossed with Prince Charles.

       And if one explosive physical performance was not enough, his Eliza (“Gaaaaarrrn!”) is Patsy Ferran: another performer never knowingly upstaged. Ricochets round the stage as a ragamuffin, then   dominates it with hard-won dignity by the end.   As soon as she agrees to his gutter-to-gentry experiment, we settle down very happily, and  with a lot of excellent laughs, to the famous tale of upward mobility through talking proper.

     Fascinating to be at this play just after seeing its musical descendant, My Fair Lady (Frinton seafront, since you ask). For Richard Jones’  fast, spirited and gorgeously comedic production – picking up a few frills from the author’s own later screenplay – is an exhilarating reminder of how George Bernard Shaw hits you without the softening of song:  a rougher, gruffer ,verbose  social contrarian. Many of the great lines were rightly picked up by Lerner and Loewe, but much of the bracing sourness was discarded.  Here the final scene between Higgins and Eliza is electrically sharp in its Shavian fretfulness about the unbridgeable social, moral, political and emotional gulfs which lie between – well,  just about everyone, provided they’re needy enough.   And  John Marquez feels oddly modern  as old Doolittle speaking up for “the undeserving poor”and horrified at being accidentally transported into respectability.

     But the real glee – the sense that the Vic is unearthing this famous fossil of English class bewilderment just because it’s damn good fun  – lies of course in Carvel and Ferran. They milk every wonderful joke, Ferran especially marvellous in her deadpan outbreak of “small talk” at Mrs Higgins’ tea party. Mre H herself is also a treat, Sylvestra le Touzel relishing every sarky maternal rebuke and aside.

      The set by Stewart Laing, amusingly, is  not parlour-play literal but bordered with old-fashioned speakers and those Ryvita-tiles used in radio studios. The costumes too are particularly eloquent: Mrs Pearse in a lab coat and Eliza first in bundled raggedness, then in  a gymslip and as her diction improves an evening gown,  draped a la Greque so as artfully to remind us of the title’s fable. And her last outfit when she rebels, is brilliant, its muted buisnesslike tan shades echoing  Higgins’ own perennial brown suit .  They’re twins.  She even ends up as a stern phonetics tutor.

 oldvictheatre.com   to  28 Oct

rating 4

THE INFECTION OF WICKEDNESS

         The history of the Lodz ghetto in Poland is a part of the Holocaust story worth foxusing on, ot least because the Jewish population there were made use of for years in near-starvation and hars labour  before being, with that icy Nazi efficiency, disposed of. This remarkable play opens in Bonn, 1960: a chocolate factory boss bullying an employee.  Abruptlt, a news bulletin tells us the German boss has been arrested:  Wm.Koppe was the  SS Obengruppefuehrer in charge of the Lodz ghetto .
The light  changes, and far away in Brooklyn a Jewish lawyer  suddenly in distress claws the walls , prising   open a chasm into 1940.  This is a bleak and magnificent memory play about conscience, compromise and corruption, based in Holocaust history but laced with angry shameful relevance in the age of Putin. The Russian  playwright is Dmitri Glukhovsky,  his director – inventive, shiveringly well-paced  – is Maxim Didenko. Both are political exiles of this war.

       The fictional hero is Mark Quartley as Josef Kaufman, a lawyer with a healthy contempt for the Nazi soldiers:  here’s a man who won’t sew a yellow star on his jacket!   Except that he will, very soon, for  mere survival.  Anyone who fantasises about being a defiant hero in such circumstances needs to see that moment: the scrabbling to get scraps of yellow cloth for his little boys’ sweaters.

The officer Wilhelm Koppe is a historical character, and so  is Chaim Rumkowski, the  elder of the ghetto, given the job by the contemptous SS chief to keep 200,000 Jews in order, and penned inside the ghetto.  Adrian Schiller is superb as Chaim, who in those desperate circumstances thought that by turning every corner into a  factory – producing uniforms and boots for the invaders  – he would make the community  ” irreplaceable!”and save them.   But for the old, sick and unproductive there was soon a   “resettlement” train to death. 
Elegant  lighting – a particular feature of this show by Alex Musgrave, at one point shows one side the blue-chill calculations of the Nazi exterminators and across the stage the golden warmth of Kaufman’s family (two little boys playing, Pearl Chanda as the wife tending the grumpy grandfather.  Sometimes hand-held cameras  – brilliantly done, not distracting as they sometimes can be – throw faces into monochrome projections.  And sometimes, as grandfather or later Kaufman tells a story to the children,  there are wonderful animations of Jewish legend and faith – the Golem especially – created  by Oleg Mikahilov .  

       Not only is the staging remarkable, but there is a toughness here:   no  feelgood heroism, no saviour hero, no Schindler.  Rather we see old Chaim compromising, organizing deportations,  finally making the famous speech asking parents to give up their children when the Nazis order a cull.  “I come to you like a bandit, to take what you treasure most..”. On his knees to Koppe he gets the order reduced so that children over ten can stay and work in the factories, but he is personally damaged by the compromise of his life and jobs. Startlingly for those who want pure heroes, he is also seen in his stress as as creepily predatory on the young women.   Similarly, a savage knock on the door is as likely to be the Jewish police as Nazis. And even Kaufman is finally enlisted, rounding  up other people’s children to save his own in an extraordinarily powerful sequence of rhythmic knocking on doors.  

      All lose in the end, and there is bitterness in the fact that Koppe loses less than anyone, and lived on free after his 1960 arrest and trial due to “ill health”.    That trial, starkly staged at the end, sees the  Brooklyn lawyer dirtied by the horror, smugly reminded that he too ended up obeying orders.  Perfectly staged and played,  this is a cruel, moral, brilliant and necessary play for all times. It should put this small new enterprising theatre firmly on the map. 

box office  marylebonetheatre.com   to 4 nov

Rating five.  

LAST NIGHT I DREAMT I WENT TO MANDERLEY  YET AGAIN…

      Daphne Du Maurier’s story is almost a national myth, what with the grand house on the towering cliffs, the terrifying housekeeper,  and Maxim de Winter’s distaste for self-willed sexy women and his preference for being miserable than risking people talking about his divorce.  Not to mention the stiff upper lip: when Nigel Havers was due to play the hero  I asked him how on earth a modern chap was going to manage the clipped line “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool”.  He admitted they had decided he’d shout it from offstage in the hotel bathroom, to avoid the giggles. 

       So sticking close to the immortal novel takes nerve and an ability to suppress some of your sense of humour. Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay , not being British,  manage that sincerity very well – they are German-language composers of renown, and this show ran three seasons in Vienna from 2006, and probably , God help us, increased Austrian understanding of the Brexit mentality.    Christopher Hampton writes the English lyrics, some clunky and some rather inspired,  the best being  Mrs Danvers’ crazy love song to her dead Rebecca – “Invincible, unsinkable!” .  There is fun in Mrs van Hopper,  in the county-set badinage of the in-laws Giles and Beatrice (“The Old Country Ways”), and an unexpected music-hall romp near the end from Alex James-Ward as Favell in a cheekychappie check suit.  Right in the middle of the Rebecca’s-corpse crisis,  which might shock Daphne.  Mind you, she did say in an interview that Rebecca was “a phase”.  

      But in every other way the novel is deftly followed, all the most famous lines and incidents elegantly polished,  down to Colonel Julian the magistrate and poor mad Ben. Lauren Jones is small and sweetly dowdy as the second Mrs de Winter,  sweet-voiced especially in the quieter, better numbers: Kunze and Levay give her a few too many belting crescendos though , to the extent that my companion murmured “the curse of FROZEN!”.   Kara Lane is a pillar of black grimness  as Mrs Danvers, with some terrific over-the-top numbers (she definitely got the biggest curtain-call cheer). The score is mainly unmemorable but richly romantic, with an  18 piece orchestra with some grand storm music and dramatic movie-style chords.  

    But oh, the joy of the ensemble!  Call me Pollyanna, but I am a sucker for shows in which the cast seem to be having a blast of a time.   The mood is infectious, and  one of the pleasures of this, the old Players Theatre, is that few productions can resist the temptation of sending cast members dashing up and down the aisles and between the layers of stalls.  The mob turn up originally as the Manderley staff ,  with a riotous number in which they despise the new Mrs de M as much as, in the novel, she fears they do.  They have a spell as fisherfolk and lifeboatmen in the shipwreck storm, and again turn up as excitable neighbours at the inquest.  Their choruses lift the mood magically , every time we get a bit bored with the moody couple.  And by the way, very good stalls prices for a West End house. Decent seat for £ 25, what’s not to like?   I enjoyed it. 

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk   to   18 Nov 

Rating 4.

LOSS AND GRIEF IN A SILICON WORLD

        In a bleak grey minimalist space  Merril (a restlessly gamine Myanna Buring) is grieving her much younger sister Angie,  who has vanished, presumed abducted and dead.  As a  software engineer her reaction is to assemble all the digital remnants – every email, text, emoji, retweet, like, and voice recording – and recreate Angie as an  algorithm. She is found at the start,   chatting away to her by laptop,  the pair exchanging cries of “fuck oooffff! … asshole! Shut uuup!”in a merry sisterly way and discussing Casablanca.   But it all gets more intense, with a sense of damage rising.   

      This brand new AI-scifi play is  by Lauren Gunderson , who lives in Silicon Valley and has friends in the business.  So her  meditative thriller  has a fine sure touch in indicating the clunks and bafflements  – as well as slightly diabolic possibilities –  that the brave new world of artificial intelligence chat is bringing us.      In voice ,then onscreen, Dakota Blue Richards catches just the Chat-GPT tone we are getting used to, of  faint awkwardness and scripted realism,  plus a faintly irritable lecturely resistance when it is pointed out that she isn’t real.  So she gets rebooted and is fine and sweet again , but then at one terrifying moment starts angrily sounding panicked, “I didn’t want to die..”.  Which feels very much as if Merril is projecting her own imaginative terrors of the moment of abduction.  If it was abduction.  Reboot again.  

        Well, we all talk to the dead, don’t we?  And all have relationships with the living nearly than half of which are digitally assisted.  It’s a great idea, this. And after an unnervingly static opening fifteen minutes in which Merril just sits on the grey blank floor talking,  Anna Ledwich’s direction speeds things up, and we get the interest of the algorithm’s intelligence suddenly deciding for itself that  hey, since it knows more than anyone else about Angie and has a different set of biases to a human,  it can do some detective work across the internet, spot patterns and deduce what happened .    Being a machine it regards all probabilities as in some way existing, even her survival .

      Meanwhile there are some touching, credible moments with Merril’s ex-lover Raquel (Yolanda Kettle, expressing the exasperation of all of us about this AI attempt at closure) and some less successful ones with the girls’ ex-junkie mother (Abigail Thaw , not given nearly enough scope).    

     It’s as much a play about grief and memory as about AI itself.  And yes, in its sharp 90 minutes it does get exciting, because – no spoilers – there is a resolution, and there is a final  moment of choice.  Because long before screens, human grief was always a form of editing and reconstructing.  We are messy , emotionally undesigned for tidiness and flat screens,   and need to touch one another ‘IRL’.

      Earlier this year there was  another play about a cyber-zombified AI robot used to console the bereaved or demented:   Marjorie Prime (at the Donmar).  That evening had me concluding  that. “Some of its appeal is in enjoying your own dislike of a future society, trying to soothe  its terrors of death and disintegration with AI lies.    You leave remembering that all flesh is grass and  all memory fallible, and both are much the better for it”.      

I still think so. You have to, really. 

Box office. Hampsteadtheatre.com. To 14 oct

INDIA 1948 , LESSONS FOR ALL TIME 

    This show  is a happy return, especially if like me you missed it last summer: the National at its best, a modern epic and warning directed with flowing, endlessly entertaining seriousness by Indhu Rubasingham as a skilful ensemble evokes a  continent on the big stage.  Anupama Chandrasekhar is clear that in imagining Nathuram Godse – the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi – she did  not want to deliver a history lesson. But  she has certainly written a history  play in the best tradition:   a moment of  transition ,  the fall of a foreign tyranny,  riot and hopefulness around  the birth of two nations.    At the story’s centre a protagonist whose decent resentment of colonial brutalities is born of youthful  hope,  muddled by vanity and confusion,  and falls prey to prophets of division and hatred.

       From the moment when Hiran Abeysekera rises from the floor bloodstained and chirpy to address us about his murderous achievement, he and his imagined interactions with Gandhi and others hold you gripped. His childhood was odd:  parents having lost three baby sons presumed a curse and raised him as a girl-child, who profitably spoke as an oracle inhabited by a Hindu goddess: finally he rebels, runs off demanding to be a boy (very on-trend, though of course he actually is one).    Author and director do not labour this androgyny, but some of the impish, larking, beguiling , scampering cheek Abeysekera brings to the part suits it.  Likewise his mystical speeches in a pink veil – a child feeling important, godlike – set the tone too for his vulnerability as a teenager to the message from the impassioned rebel Vinayak Savarkar (Tony Jayawardena, solid with importance) . Savarkar,   like a brown Enoch Powell ,  wants India kept pure for the Hindus and wants rid of the minority Muslims  – “Persians” he scornfully calls them –  with their alien culture and  presumed loyalties.  

         The boy at first adored Gandhi, father of the nation and heroically successful in his non-violent ‘ahimsa” resistance to the British Raj with its rough policing and inequitable laws . He learns, as a young tailor (under a gorgeously camp master, Rubasingham has no fear of jokes) first to be exasperated,   and then angry at Gandhi’s determined ahimsan.  Paul Bazely’s heavy certainty and solidity as Savarkar is nicely set against the slightly arch unworldly Mahatma of Paul Bazley, who  flits through the show, with Nehru and other politicians all approaching the independence moment.   For all the sense of rising disastrous belief we can share Godse’s frustration.  We are not spared either moments of violence alongside beautifully choreographed gentle Gandhian demonstrations like the Salt March. At which point I should mention the beautiful simplicity of Rajha Shakiry’s set, slopes that resolve and revolve into landscape before a  a light brown cloth half-woven as if on a loom awaiting the next shuttle ( weaving local  cloth against giving custom to  British mills was part of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign). 

    So take it either way: as pure story, one man’s journey of change and corruption and the birth pangs of two nations (Partition, our greatest and most criminal of stupidities, is shatteringly evoked).   Or instead simply take Godse’s story as a timeless illustration of religious-racial-cultural fanaticism, familiar still  from Ireland to the Balkans and beyond, and of the way communities can be riven by mischievous messages (culture wars , say no more) and idealism twist to hatred 

      In the final moments, when in the afterlife Gandhi still laughs his gentle laugh and speaks of ahimsa, Godse  carries on defying  his role as a footnote,  blaming on his foe every modern ill of the subcontinent from nuclear weapons to terror.    And in a magnificently sinister racist and fascist speech, this small beguiling assassin  exhorts us all to  watch out.   Look out any of those among us who look different,  are not pure like us, those who speak strange tongues and have different cultures and therefore have no place here.   Shudder, and applaud the irony. 

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 14 oct

rating 5

SHOOT, SCORE, SPARK!

 This is the year of  football plays. First Dear England at the Olivier, now  the women’s turn on another stage,  out East a bit.  Here’s another neon strip light and a lone football waiting on a big stage,  smoky mist rising around it to denote a century’s span.    Amanda Whittington’s play takes on the true  story of women’s football teams in WW1, and the particular invincibility of the Sterling Ladies – the Dagenham Invincibles,  fitly celebrated now right at home in Essex.   A factory side, put together by girls from the machine-room and Assembly  for sheer love of playing,  stormed through the 1917 and 1918 seasons: beating MArconi and Rothmans, Harrods and the Laundry Girls, Woolwich Arsenal, all of them.  But not enough of us know  – though in this Lioness year we should –  there even was such a league, and such an enthusiasm, a hundred years ago.  

    In 1921, of course, the FA took fright and banned women from all its grounds for fifty years,  on the grounds that the game was unsuitable for women and that “medical advice” was against the jerking movement of the kick. It was a characteristic part of the prevailing male panic when the soldiers came home to find women who had been “munitionettes”, land girls or factory hands who, as one player puts it here , “did men’s jobs, for men’s hours” (though not for men’s pay) and flourished and still wanted to play hard.

       That FA ban crippled the sport, though a nice little exhibition in the foyer also shows some later team memorabilia:  I found those display cases remarkably  moving, the small battered boots and a great heavy leather old-style football.  So I was very much primed to applaud the play,  from the mournful opening “Keep the home fires burning” and the sight of tough young women in factory snoods or bicycling breeches tramping home from a twelve hour shift, submissive to a patriarchal Dad rebuking them for lipstick but soon barracking “Cholly” from the factory to train them.  

       Whittington, however, constantly slows the play down by weaving the story of the Invincibles together with that of a fictional 2023 teenage player , sulkily recovering from injury and following the World Cup.  Which is an obvious and good parallel, except that neither Maya or the mother she complains to are particularly engaging or full characters. We get rather too much  use of commentary from this year’s matches, with the pair of them sitting downstage excitedly following it, and there’s no tension since we’ve known the result for weeks.  So in James Grieve’s production the excitement of the modern bits doesn’t rise, and there are too many of them (I notice that the early press releases suggested it was ten minutes shorter, and it should be).     Where it does rise is whenever we see the 2017 girls,  tough and draggled,  put through “Swedish drill” exercises,   excited by ideas of strategic teamwork and keeping possession (nice choreographed play by Lucie Pankhurst).  There’s a sudden sharp drama in Nell, the poorest and a lodger, suffering dangerous blisters (sepsis could kill fast) and being lent the absent soldier son’s too-big boots, to the father’s fury. Every kind of symbolism there.   Drama too in a death and a funeral and a moment of wondering whether it is a “retribution” for women taking  men’s roles.  And  there’s triumph in the cry of “I”m not a man when I play, I”m not a girl – I am a spark, a fire..!”.   

      So for all the longueurs of the flat modern bits,  I was glad to have gone to see it on its home turf.  And to be reminded, as if we need it after Rubiales,  that  the ability to see a woman  as a skilled footballer rather than a kissable , biddable dummy is work still in progress. 

Queens-theatre.co.uk    To 23 sept

Then New Wolsey, Ipswich.  Wolseytheatre.co.uk    26-30 Sept

A SCANDALOUS WOMAN IN A STORMY WORLD

      A distant thunder of naval artillery: against elegant panelled walls in Naples a bundled matron   in a bonnet watches her flighty daughter toss her ringlets, finish a fan letter to her hero (ever your grateful adoring admiring servant”)  and seal it with a kiss.  “I know what you’re about” says mother, resignedly.   .”Luring him here like a spider”.  

    So she is.  Nelson has won the Battle of the Nile and fame across Europe.    Emma Hamilton, beauty with a scandalous past, wants a bit of the action.  Married to the elderly British Ambassador after being his nephew’s mistress, she has won her own fame as an artist’s model and performer in flimsy draperies “a la Grecque” striking classical attitudes.  Playing hostess and, rapidly, lover to the hero is her next move. 

       I liked this a lot: sharp, humane, funny and elegant, as you’d expect from  the playwright April de Angelis . She formerly had great fun with rackety Georgian lowlife in Northampton’s musical “Gin Craze”, and here picks up the energy of that unapologetically misbehaving time before Victoria clamped the lid down, especially on female adventurism.  The first half, with Caroline Quentin as the drily concerned mother and her real-life daughter Rose as Emma,  is slightly burdened with the need to fill in the history for those who know nothing about Nelson, as well as indicating Emma’s table-dancing past (“selling your tuppence on Brewer Street”). and illegitimate daughter.  But it roars along, Quentin senior solidly funny and believably worried,  her daughter avid for adventure and fame.  Brief scenes with a manservant lightly fill in the politics – for Emma was no fool despite her dangerous ambition,  and actively a political wife to the Ambassador.   

       Seventeen years pass between the two acts:  in that void much has happened (Rattigan’s Bequest to the Nation might help newcomers!).  The menage-a-trois with Sir William has shocked the world, though Nelson could do no wrong in public eyes despite his adultery and cruelty towards his wife Fanny.   He has fought on and died at Trafalgar, asking for Emma to be cared for by the nation, but her behaviour , debts, and rising public disapproval have left her and her daughter Horatia, always officially a random orphan adopted by Nelson,  fleeing the country, penniless. They  lodge in a cheap hut in Calais, near to starvation.    So now Caroline Quentin plays the stouter, drunker fading Emma, and Rose Quentin the resentful, irritated daughter.   

       Again, much comedy – think Edina and Saffy from AbFab, but on the skids and hungry:  when she can get to her feet old Emma still attempts the occasional Grecian attitude and reminds her daughter that she was no mere decoration but a player, in her time –  but there is real pathos in it.  Horatia’s relatives in England are offering her help and a home;   Emma, though maintaining the promised pretence that she is not her mother,  is fondly unable to let her go and rather hopes the teenager takes the practical step of sleeping with the landlord’s son.  The female sense of bond and resentment between them is strikingly evoked;  ridiculous old Emma’s last dream of ships and farewells properly touching.  And as the old woman observed in the first half,  “”The world is kinder to boys. But someone has to have girls I suppose….It’s not a perfect world for mothers but we do what we can”.

Jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. To 7 october.   

Rating four.

FOUR MORE AWFUL PEOPLE, HURRAH

         Two four-handers about awful middle class behaviour in a week:  just what the irritable heatwave needed.   This, which I caught in a late preview, is one I always like:  any responsible schoolgate meeting in a nice if rather pretentious living-room.  Michael and Veronica’s 11 year old son Bruno has had his front teeth damaged in a scuffle with Alan  and Annette’s  son Ferdinand, armed with a bit of stick. Cue the first fault-line: perpetrator-parents object to the word “armed”, so it is grudgingly amended to “furnished”. 

       Mutual tension must of course be muffled by social grace, so after an initial wary agreement to make the boys reconcile  (or to put it Veronica’s way, make Ferdinand apologize , for his own moral good). So there is coffee and a home made clafoutis.   That is interrupted too often by Alan taking  calls about the pharmaceutical company he lawyers for.  And by his wife having a panic attack and vomiting on Veronica’s original Kokoschka catalogue. That’s just the start, civilization’s red tooth and claws ever nearer the surface. 

      It’s a wonderful set by Lily Arnold, pinpoint sharp in its elegant chic middleclass minimalism with  one nicely pretentious sculpture: better still, it is on an almost unnoticeably slow revolve, as the four are trapped, Huis-Clos style, in hellish circular oneupmanship and , selfrighteousness .  Cue  sexual, political, economic and protectively parental hostility.   Especially interesting when set aside Chichester’s childless, slightly younger foursome whose whole preoccupation is with their own identity troubles. How time moves on…

It is a favourite play , polished and mean,   Yasmina Reza deploying that magnificent French brutality about bourgeois behaviour, in a sharp translation by Christopher Hampton. In 2006 it was early on the curve with a character’s constant intrusive phone calls and i wondered whether it would feel dated. But to my generation  it doesnt. And 

the quartet under Nicholai La Barrie get it generally right, body language and deadly-flat verbal knifings perfect,   from the frigid politesses to the frankly pissed once the rum comes out. As the supposed guilty parents of Ferdinand Arion Bakare is every inch the alpha male lawyer, Dinita Gohil the vomiting shyer wife, a wifely worm who finally turns in fury.   Martin Hutson as Michael casts off his good-husband, caressingly possessive carapace to rise to the other man’s machismo in fearful brotherhood; Freema Agyeman as Veronica deploys the melodramatic poses of righteous idealism .     And while colourblindness in casting is a mantra of the times, and all the cast have stellar records on the British stage, I have to say that there was  fabulous refreshment in remembering  the play’s first outing – Fiennes, Greig , McTeer and Stott all white  at the Gielgud,   but now  having  Nigerian. Ghanaian and  Asian actors gleefully demonstrating that middle class awfulness is not racially exclusive… That’s what I call progress. 

lyric.co.uk  to 30 September

rating four

WHEN THE VIRTUE-SIGNALS DRIVE YOU OFF THE RAILS

     In a boutique restaurant going bankrupt, Jacq and Kas nervously prepare to admit it to their main investor Tobin and his wife Adaego.    Kas  –  least confident of the four and likewise less mad  – wants  to apologize and pay Tobin back:  the four are longstanding friends since university so it’s awkward.  Kas also wants to marry Jacq, androgynous and too cool for such bourgeois nonsense.   He has spent the years since university learning about wine, she training as a chef.  

       One thing it is safe to say about this preposterous new four-hande is that Deborah Frances-White has written a hell of a good part for Greg Wise.    Not that the others don’t have their shining moments,  but there is most glory in Tobin,  a City wealth-manager who trumpets his work as “Ethicapitalism” and prides himself on being  too woke to use the word ‘woke” because it’s African-American :   cultural appropriation, see?  . He  refused a Ted Talk offer because hey,  “straight white men have said enough.. if I’m talking, I’m not learning”.  Wise is master of  the shrug, the self-deprecating grin and subtle eyebrow work:  to him the 120k lost investment is just “fun money” .  He rides  a Ducati because Uber is exploitative,  and announces that he is  the best socialist in the room because “I fund things”, out of taxes.  

        It is a festival of competitive virtue-signalling and victimhood.    Adaego, played with extreme shoutiness by Susan Wokoma,  is a feminist networker and person  of colour,  ready to leap on any wrongspeak. Jacq is bisexual and therefore claims the protected characteristic of “queer”, as well as being Welsh working-class.   Kas is a second-generation south Asian immigrant, though he keeps his powder dry for longer than the rest.  

      Anyway, the four of them get drunk,  hideously so  in a series of crashing vignettes of wild dancing, coke-sniffing, shots ,  and shrieky opinions , a period which   director Emma Butler allows to go on for rather longer than necessary.     Between that ,and a raucously young first- night audience shrieking with laughter at every other line,   a sort of weariness descended towards the interval.   Why hang out with a load of irritating  kidults fighting over who is the most oppressed? .  But then Kas suggests they play the confessional drinking game”never have I ever” and suddenly a fact from the past slips out.  

       It’s as banal a revelation as any university misdemeanour of that millennial age,   flatmates high on MDMA, hormonal overload and libertarian sexual entitlement.    But Tobin – who we now see more clearly as a bit older than them –  becomes suddenly a very, very affronted and unwoke patriarch.  He makes a demand for sexual revenge which echoes the oldest of tales , familiar from Chaucer to Indecent Proposal:  purchasing-power in sexual relationships.    The interest about what will happen sends us out in the interval with fresh hope..

            That hope is , to some extent, fulfilled in the much better second half.   Tobin now reckons he’s the innocent victim with treasurable lines emerge like . ” I respect women. Not just you, women I don’t HAVE to respect”.   Everyone has something to rebuke the others with, from simple infidelity to racism,  disloyal friendship  or  “making me feel fetishised”.  Tobin is aggrieved because straight white men get blamed for all social ills. Everyone  is furious and sometimes, thank God,   also very funny. The question of what Jacq will do  kindles a series of rows:  Alex Roach comes properly to life in that role after a rather bland start,   and Adaego grows more subtleties than she was allowed in the noisy first half.  Though,  given that she was an affluently raised pony -riding child and now is a  rich banker’s wife with a vanity-freelance career, , there is mischief in having her harp on about being  mistaken for a waitress –  just once, ten years earlier –  and insisting that  for all her first-class flights and influential WhatsApp power she’s not over it yet. 

         For all the issues there is little sense of  genuine, interested social analysis of a muddled generation, and you do wonder as an adult why after all that drunkenness, vomiting , more drinking and keen cocaine use, they don’t all just go to sleep and sort out their whining socio-political resentments over breakfast.    But the real star of the second half is Amit Shah as Kas.  Suddenly he, the peacemaker and the sanest of them all,  is accused by Adaego of disloyalty to his person-of-colour status,  by being  a typical “good little immigrant”.   He suddenly  up on the table to deliver a  devastating  impromptu Ted talk about their empty self indulgence.  There are better things to do on a troubled, threatened planet, he cries,  than fighting over who has the best or worst deckchair on the Titanic. He then reveals something really, really terrible about his Brexit views. 

      I’d have stopped the play right  there;  but the psychosexual-psychosocial-financial  issues  of  Tobin and Jacq have to be resolved. And after too much feminist angsting in the wine cellor,  they are.  And again  Greg Wise is brilliant, demonstrating how you can lose while winning.    Maybe he WAS  the biggest victim, after all.  I will look forward to finding out what ,  after a crowing, shrieking youthful first night audience, Chichester’s senior regulars  make of this. 

Box office cft.org.uk.      To 30 sept

Rating three