Monthly Archives: October 2023

MEMORIES OF A MAVERICK

  It’s an immersive show, in that you buy a drink in the cramped saloon of the old pub on Greek Street, find a corner, and ideally fall into conversation with another lone stranger.  Then  as the crowd fills in and the bar clock shows 5 a.m,  Robert Bathurst as Jeffrey Bernard lurches in ,sleepy and grumpy, saying he fell  asleep drunk in the Gents and now is  locked in overnight.  For the next hour he wanders around,  trying to ring the famously grumpy host Norman Balon and recounting the long entertaining disgracefulness and comradeship of his life and Soho from the ’50s onward.  

     We’re paying tribute to the legendary journalist, wit, gambler, and alcoholic. There are layers of people who will be there: on any one night I suppose a very few may be survivors who actually knew him, and my following  generation has fond memories both of the pub and Norman Balon’s grumpy landlordhood (it is considered prestigious to have been personally insulted by him, I was!). But also we remember  the full-length version of this Keith Waterhouse play about Jeffrey Bernard. It ran at the Old Vic in 1989, a few years before the man himself died.  Peter O’Toole was cast, almost too appropriately, in the title role.  

      And now a  newer generation remember 2019 , when this adaptation of the play into a one-man, hour-long show ran in the Coach and Horses with Bathurst in the role, directed by James Hillier.  It actually included on some Saturdays a midnight show followed by a  traditional “lock in” till 5 a.m.. There’s a pleasing defiance in Defibrillator having brought it back now, on the far side of Covid and mid-inquiry. It helps to wash away those times when we lost all sociabilities for long sad months. Good to be back again in a crowded pub: laughing, huggermugger,  tipsily celebrating one chaotic, eventful, messy life and friendships, forging our own.

        We are also celebrating a lost idyll, irrecoverable as Lyonesse and possibly as mythical most of the time:   the gilded memory of old Soho. A place where, as Bernard puts  it, you could turn up young and drunk and alone with just a pound left, and find company and solace and a kind of poetry.  He talks of the figures around him : Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and No-Knickers Joyce, Muriel Fletcher at the Colony Club, poets and bookies and journalists and wasters and misfits,  the policemen who arrested him for soliciting unlicensed bets and then invited him to their Christmas party. He tells, illustrated with toy animals and audience assistance, of a friend who when racing was frozen off  staged cat races in his living room. At one point he rummages in his suitcase after being thrown out by yet another woman;  there are answerphone messages from those he disappointed or betrayed,  and a snatch of opera as he remembers his job as a scene- shifter at Covent Garden. Sadlym  very sadly, in this truncated version he does speak of how knowledgeable the stage crews were compared to Radio 3,  but doesn’t reproduce the moment from the original play when, as they hauled the flies together, one turned to him scornfully and said “I”ve shat better Rosenkavaliers”

But Bathurst does achieve – twice a night, three days a week, so honour him  –  the famous trick learnt from Waterhouse himself. The one involving a raw egg, a pint glass, a tin tray and a violent bash with a shoe.  You have to be drunk, he says, to do it. He managed it without disaster the night I went, and surely will again. 

      It makes a good hour, a breath from a less cautiously selfconscious boho-artistic-journalistic  era than our own (these days even the eccentrics have agents to polish their image).   He pauses, in one of his many hospitalizations , to talk about mortality, touchingly, for alcoholism loses its hilarity and glamour and it killed him.  But the essence of the evening is there in a birthday poem written by Elizabeth Smart, a friend, the famous author of “By Grand Central Station”.  

     “You’re never snide, and you never hurt, and you wouldn’t want to win on a doctored beast. And  anyhow the least of your pleasures resides in paltry measures. So guard, great joker God, please guard this great Bernard…Let him be known for the prince of men he is, a master at taking ,out of himself and us, the piss”.  

     Something that is always necessary. 

Box office.  Jeffreyplay.com   

Next performances    5/6/7  and 12/13/14  and 19/20/21 November 

Two performances each day at 8pm & 10pm 

WHILE THE REAL ONE RUNS….

With the Covid Inquiry surging along in a froth of accusations and curses and scandalous Whatsappery, it was hard to resist a hasty day-return to Harry Davies’ debut play at Chichester. It’s set around a judge-led inquiry into another health catastrophe: polluted water this time. And like the real one it is  rife with deleted digital mail, personality clashes, private behaviours  and vaulting ambition.   

        Especially it was worth it to see  Deborah Findlay as the judge,  and John Heffernan as  the youngish Justice minister and Lord Chancellor, who used to be environment minister during the pollution crisis.  Moreover, his mentor-donor-fixer and career  ” fairy godmother”   is his old pupilmaster, in the irresistible form of Malcolm Sinclair as  Lord Patrick. He is a scene-stealingly tory-camp old silver fox  in pale pink socks, who has no conscience whatsoever when it comes to dirty tricks and artful leaks to hostile journalists. Though not, it  seems, to the friendlier-flirty profile writer, one of those girlish hair-flickers of the outer lobby. She – Shazia Nicholls giving it full faux-goofy-girly work as it is said some do  –  is the figure  we first see fishing for private life series of the “bafflingly single” minister with his eye on the leadership. 

   So it’s one for Westminster bubblewatchers and Thick of It fans, though it  aspires more in the direction of James Graham’s more humane portraits of the way real flawed people manoeuvre round procedures, policy debates, personalities and the sheer pressure of government.  And Joanna Bowman’s production does begin most enjoyably, with Heffernan amid his aides displaying a masterful ability to project a spitefully sneering expression right up to the top gallery, alternating with scenes of Findlay and her legal colleague (who later has  a bafflingly unnecessary scandal moment of his own).   Her humanity, half hidden beneath a long varnished judicial dignity, is well caught.

       But a structural problem is that  these alternating scenes run too long , and it would.be more engaging if each was shorter, almost filmically flipping between the camps. It finally hits real tension with the wickedly amoral Lord Patrick – whose client is the water  company –  -planning some very dirty tricks to ruin the Judge and distract poilice and media from the minister’s sneaky involvement with the said firm. At which point the  minister himself  is starting to quail a little, grow a conscience.

       So the second half is much better and faster,  and – no spoilers – culminates in a classic emotional Victorian melodrama of identity and coincidence. Which some have shaken their heads at, and which i did see coming three full minutes ahead, but which I actually applaud. Nothing wrong with a melodramatic revelation, respect to Mr Davies for daring it.  Trim this play down to a straight, hard-running 100 minutes-no-interval, and with this very fine cast it could tour,  go West End.  And, sadly,  and feel topical most years…

Cft.org.uk to 11 november

Three.

THE FIRST WITCHFINDER, NOT WITHOUT LESSONS FOR TODAY

        This is remarkable,  Joanna Carrick’s best and deepest play yet,   following her acclaimed Reformation trilogy. In its small Avenue theatre it is flawlessly staged and performed, a window into a past age and a lesson for all others about fanaticism and the terrible human need for human targets.    It seems simple: a broomstick and baskets , a workmanlike stack of wooden furniture under a guttering candelabra, daylight filtering through diamond panes,  old Suffolk.   A bonneted young woman cradles something fondly, then with a sad shake reveals it as an empty shawl. 

         It was a sister’s baby she cared for , and Susan resists the courtship of the young farmer Richard Edwards, fearing the griefs of motherhood.   Her half-brother  Matthew wanders through,  a nerdy, stammering, anxiously pious teenager.   Soon Susan and Richard are wed,  joyfully laying out the furniture, making a home, having a baby.   And Matthew is there again, a year or so older,  flinching from the living child as evidence of carnality,  and of womankind as “a way for the devil to get into a man’s soul”.   The couple laugh at him a little,  and side- references are made to local jealousies and resentments among the cottagers of Mistley. 

      Thus , deftly and compellingly, Joanna Carrick’s play lays out its tragic shape: a likeable early 1640s  farming couple, devout but sensible, and a fanatical youth gradually growing in Puritan confidence : the Matthew Hopkins who will become Witchfinder General.  It’s  a remote community and  fragile one, infant mortality inexplicably high , ruin beckoning if cattle fall.  In Cromwellian England,  easy to suspect the Devil at work, tempting make yourself important as a “purifier” of the land and lay the blame on old women whose mutterings might be curses, whose pet animals ‘familiars’.  

      In a tense, beautifully staged two hours we live alongside Susan and Richard as they grieve for their first baby, then others,  praying beside an empty cradle with wrenching power.  Carrick,  after her Reformation plays,   has the advantage that she can, as it were,  speak fluent Puritan:  the religious and domestic language of the time feels natural, everyday, in the dialogue (more, indeed, than in the RSC’s recent Hamnet).   Their affectionate arguments and shared griefs have powerful reality:   Christopher Ashman’s manly Richard is likeable, solidly humorous and decent, and Nadia Jackson’s Susan,  in a live stage debut,  is simply astonishing in her gravity and simple-hearted sensitivity.  

        The pair movingly  grow and develop through the play, edging from pragmatism and goodwill through repeated griefs into guilt (their first child was conceived before marriage) . A terrible ability grows in them slowly,   to believe what the real devil, Matthew Hopkins,  drips into them.  Though wonderfully they start at one point to laugh at his announcement that the local witch’s pets are devils, airy spirits made of “condensed and thickened air”  given that they have names like the dog Vinegar Joe . And “Colin”.    It is also subtly conveyed that while they fell in with Hopkins and gave evidence,  others in the Mistley community did not.  

         Vincent Moisy as the Witchfinder is subtle too:   a geeky teenager, then an unwilling tavern host repelled by the earthiness of those around him (‘drunkards and hedge-breakers”).  Increasingly he is confident in repeating and enlarging the pieties fed to him by  Cromwellian “Lecturers”.   Obvious to make modern parallels, but his relish in the Bible-bashing line “you shall not suffer a witch to live”  can’t help but make you think that today the lad would slap on lipstick and a wig and shout “Punch a Terf!” to a cheering crowd.   It is also chilling to be reminded how young he was: Hopkins’  reign of terror ran between his 25th year and his death at 27.   

        As for the interrogation of Rei Mordue’s cowering REbecca, the young girl forced to repeat evidence against her mother and admit that playing with a kitten while praying proves it’s a demon, you shudder at his Soviet tactics: “Watching her closely, depriving her of rest and food, has driven the truth out of her”.  

       The play’s strength is in being a simple four-hander,  despite the sense of community,  and the subtlety and humanity of the three main characters.  When Susan asks “WIll they hang?  All?   and Matthew replies “They must!” we see him beyond hope,  her not quite.   Yet when after the hangings the more doubtful Richard wants to walk with her to their babies’ graves and see the blue cornflowers growing,  Susan raves angrily at his wincing pity until humanity floods visibly, back into her with a terrible doubt.   “I wanted the deaths to ease my heart, my rage,  but I’m more angry now than I was then…”  Her final line will knock you out.  Silence . gasps.     

       A note: great drama grows from strong roots. Since 2019 Red Rose Chain has been exploring this darkest piece of local history: the three-year terror from 1640-1647 when more ordinary women were hanged for witchcraft than in the previous 160 years,  despite the religious persecutions of the Reformation.  Alongside Carrick’s researches in parish records, which  fascinatingly discovered the close links between Matthew Hopkins and the Edwardses, early “victims” and witnesses to witchcraft,  the group’s interest flowered. Its  youth theatre created one play, its community group for people with disabilities another, and residents of HMP Warren Hill –  in that grim cell isolation time and by communicating by letter – wrote two radio plays which were then performed by professionals and sent on CDs. Everyone did a lot of thinking about this play, and it shows.  

box office redrosechain.com  to 11 october

rating 5 

A MOTHER’S LIFE, A SON’S PERSPECTIVE

Sometimes it is almost useful to be a day late (sorry,  tied up yesterday) because it gives a chance to read other people’s take on the play you saw.  Especially if they liked it more than you: look back at notes and memory, and consider what you missed.

    I was oddly resistant to Alexander Zeldin’s evocation of his mother’s life – hers and her generation’s, taken from close interviews not only with her but with peers.  It’s almost my generation, though the mother is a decade years older:  it spans Australia 1943 to London 2021. Obviously I really wanted to like it,  since growing up with postwar parental attitudes and living through the hippie 60s and 70s was part of my own life.   Zeldin’s empathy and tenderness is much admired, and this play is on tour around Europe in co-production.

      And there is nothing to dislike in the performances –  Amelda Brown as the diffident old woman Alice, unsure whether anyone will be interested in her, strolling on before the curtain and – once – avenging a sexual assault on her younger self.   Eryn Jean Norvill is Alice through her life:   sweetly shy teenager wanting a life of art and writing but married to a domineering navy boyfriend,  escaping, finding a boho life with arty friends,  escaping again to Europe and finally the Uk where she finds real if unlikely love with an elderly Jewish-Austrian refugee  in a library,  telling him “I want your children!”  

         She is good,  and so are the supporting cast: Joe Bannister as two variously horrible men, Pamela Rabe as the mother she rejects,  and an awful early-Germaine-Greer period figure, a sweaty boozy man-hating man-eater in the hippie household.   Indeed come to think of it,   there is a kind of tribute in my impatient loathing of all those scenes of  pretentious, predatory ‘70s free-loving arty-academia  friends (“I feel a need to penetrate the earth…fuck the paintings..” .  It’s altogether too credible, if you were there.   Maybe that is what made me impatient, anhedonic, unconnected to the show. But that, as I say, is a sort of tribute: making loathsome people and cultures properly loathsome is a skill.

        But it might also have been the direction.  I liked the way the set folds, unfolds and vanishes around Alice,  the way  it does all around us as life’s scene-shifters move us on.  But within those shifting kitchen scenes the  dialogue is so hyper-real, almost like drama-school improv at times, and to be honest, not always audible.  Even in Row M.   And although it is only near the end that we see the male onlooker, the devoted son (avatar of Zeldin himself)  ,  it does not feel like the account of a life which a woman would have given herself.  Not a woman of spirit, as Alice clearly is.  There’s no sense of laughing acceptance, no grown wisdom. Rather there’s a kind of cloying pity in the play: Mum is there to be maltreated and undervalued by the culture but appreciated by her boy.  And in the final scene when the old woman remembers how pelican mothers tear at their own breasts to feed their young,   it feels like a son’s sentimentality about how much she loved him. 

         Especially that grates if your mind goes back to Alice’s cruel,  rejecting scorn when her own despised mother makes her a hat for her birthday and she throws it on the ground.   So there you are:  nicely made,  well-intentioned,  made with love, but  for me not a good evening.  But read the other critics –  it may well be a good one for you. 

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 4 november

three

GENIUS, REALPOLITIK, RELIGION

     In days  of horrifying conflict there was quite a jolt in a confrontation between Stephen Hagan’s  resplendently silver-suited Frederick the Great and the homely figure of Johann Sebastian Bach.  The pious elderly cantor from Leipzig, his home  peace shattered in the Silesian war , speaks of the noisy  licentious soldiery and the rape of a blind local girl by the king’s troops.   Sarcastically he remarks to the monarch “It was an honour to be part of your….invasion!”. 

        “Intervention!” snaps the younger man,  with Enlightenment conviction about Europe’s need to be modernized by Prussians.  He speaks excusingly of the overreactions of adrenalin-fuelled soldiery in wartimes, and of “stolen land”. 

 Who  in that audience did not shiver at the topicality of such a confrontation?  Oliver Cotton’s play has been a long time in creation, but Trevor Nunn’s elegant production could hardly have fallen on  a sharper moment for such a scene. 

        But it is of course chiefly about music and its inspiration: Bach devout, searching for a language of God,  Frederick scornfully atheist but himself a flautist and composer.    The two men are to meet again later, fictionally,  in a coda where the drama lies  in their philosophical and religious differences: flamboyant emperor versus a battered, half-blind genius,  unimpressed and unafraid in a cotton nightcap.

           This Bach, who we encounter first at home, is Brian Cox, beloved from Succession.  He is   an effortlessly immense stage presence from the start, grumbling to his wife (Nicole Ansari-Cox , his real spouse),  dreading the muddy journey to court even though he will see his nervous, anxious musician son Carl in employment there. The couple kneel to pray together for safety and for God’s will , and suddenly your heart moves.    This is not quite a perfect play, less polished than Nina Raine’s recent “Bach and Sons” ; it sometimes sags a little in the first half, and at times shows its historical research a bit clumsily.   But that moment ,and others,  shake the heart with the beauty of music and faith:  a maidservant (Dona Croll, quietly impressive) remembering the shock of devotion in the St Matthew Passion. And at its centre of course there is moment old Bach silences a court-full of scornful rivals and their  monarch by meeting a sly challenge with a complex elegance of fugue. 

       For after the brief domestic opening, the scene turns elegantly to the palatial splendours of Potsdam with the old man cursing the fussiness en route (“You Prussians can’t fall  in a ditch without showing your bloody papers”)  A comically ambitious trio of rival composers alternately flatter and mock the Bachs father and son, and King Frederick  – who has written a complicated little tune in his head in bed – has uttered a  challenge is to make it into a three-part fugue, following the current laws of harmony and counterpoint.  

       Only old Johann Sebastian can do it, knocking it out unseen at the  harpsichord while onlookers and monarch step forward as if hypnotized.  Gruffly he accepts  a lunch invitation compleete with Voltaire (Peter de Jersey making the most of philosophical cynicism).  He reiterates his solid faith,  which leads to the Frenchman reading him a passage from Hamlet.   Not historically proven, such moments, but as the French put  it,  all very “bien-imaginé”.   There’s a point when you suspect a move to some fairytale ending with the humble triumphing,   but doubt vanishes as the play ends with the two men’s second meeting,  under the crucifix in humble Leipzig. And Cotton offers us, uncynically,   a reiteration of deep seriousness about music, creation and God.  For ‘if the world is a shipwreck, sing in the lifeboats”.

theatre royal bath  to 8 November 

rating 4

PROPERTY RAGE FROM ANOTHER AGE

Here’s a curiosity from 1972;  an early , rarely-seen Caryl Churchill play revived  with dashing elegance under the Jermyn’s Artistic director Stella Powell-Jones.   Nicely topical, given the present disastrous capital housing market, since it is about homes and those who buy , sell and rent them.  It is framed in front of a beautiful assembly of front doors of various degrees of gentrification,  and the black comedy centres on a horrifyingly unsympathetic  North London property developer – Marion.  Who at one point says “Why shouldn’t I be Genghis Khan? Empires were made by killing”.    

      The E-word of course makes it a  doubly fashionable choice for 2023 sensibilities (for what is the property business but colonialization of private life?).   For the sake of proportion, by the way, it is useful to check up the inflation calculator: just multiply by 16 all the sums involved, like house prices and the unscrupulous developer’s bribe to get sitting-tenants out.

It’s performed with great  elan,  Laura Doddington  as Marion splendidly flinty in pursuit of money and an ex-boyfriend tenant she is busy detaching from his home, children and wife.  Her husband Clegg, a closing-down butcher whose professional ambitions she scorned,  plans every day how he will eventually murder her (again, Mark Huckett brings Clegg alarmingly to life, managing to be both appalling and strangely likeable, not least in his use of sexual imagery in the craft of butchery ).

   Her underling Worsely (Tom Morley, again unpleasantly funny, this time with a dash of real pathos) keeps failing to kill himself due to being “overly safety-conscious”,  and by the end sports a neck brace, plaster, limp and sling to go with his bandaged wrists.   His job is dislodging the sitting tenants, gloomily depressed Alec and pregnant Lisa.  Between them all Churchill and the cast do create many fine laughs,  as the victims circle around the hellish Marion coping with their various inadequacies and victimhoods. In one magnificent moment our antiheroine exasperatedly refuses to join their world.  “I can’t be a failure ,just to help”.  She knows she should be socially guilty about her business and personal behaviour but “guilt is essential to progress- that gritty lump is the pearl”.   Owning things is her thing: up to and including poor Lisa’s newborn baby.  

So it’s a reasonably entertaining couple of hours, with a few interesting philosophical speeches from Alec, but my mind kept swerving to the word “dated”.  Not because of the 1972 setting – the mental multiplication sorted that out,  and much 2023 property development still dwellson the far edges of moral decency. The problem was simply the tone.  Its a black-absurdist ’70s atmosphere which owes a lot to Joe Orton, who had his heyday a few years before,  and also, in its brutal relish one discerns a fair bit of debt to Harold Pinter (only without the pauses).  The result places it absolutely in its period: a sort of sour, faintly sadistic feelbad comedy, palpably different from even today’s noir. It’s not so much satirical or angry as irritably nihilistic.  

Interestingly, Churchill allows , in reported speech only, one piece of heroic human decency, just at the very end. As if she suddenly winced and thought better of the human race than was currently fashionable.  She moved on to better work,  especially Top Girls.  

Jermynstreettheatre.

GRIM AND PURE BY THE DOCKS, PITY AND POETRY

   The lawyer Alfieri, prowling in memory round Arthur Miller’s stark  tale of immigrant longshoremen on the 1940’s Brooklyn docks,  speaks for all audiences gripped by the misplaced passion and pride of Eddie Carbone.   In his final speech he admits that despite the man’s violent, sordid, pointless end “something perversely pure calls to me from his memory, and I mourn him”.  It is classic tragedy:  one bitter flaw destroying greatness.   Carbone’s unfitting possessiveness of the niece he   raised makes him borderline insane in his accusations of her young lover,   but his life in that hardscrabble community holds proper heroism.  Here was a man labouring, supporting, dreaming high hopes for young Catherine, giving space and, above all,  omerta to the two cousins from starving Sicily who illegally join the household.  In his unravelling he cries constantly for “respect” and “my name!”, and the anguish is the greater because he know it was he who betrayed that code.  

          Like the Ivo van Hove in 2014, the last big production, director Holly Rose Roughan leaves aside detailed realism and pares down the set to simple impression,  with a massive neon title,  sometimes fog or steam around the players,  chairs carried on like heavy longshoremen’s burdens,  a gallery overhead. It emphasises that it is a play for any century, and any land where poor immigrants arrive wanting only to work hard, send money home,  and swerve round the legalities of their position as long as they are protected by a tight community.   An early strength of this production is that Jonathan Slinger’s Eddie is initially less bleak and stern than he has often been: there is attractive humour and warmth in his fondness for Catherine and his enthusiasm for the wonderful smell of the hold in coffee-ships.   His mistrust and dislike of the blond young Rodolfo who likes to sing, cook and help with Catherine’s dressmaking is, before it gets seriously frightening, even quite funny.  

      Rachelle   Diedericks’ Catherine is nicely poised too,  her body and movements   changing from  affectionate childlike innocence to the joyful capering of courtship and then to black fear of the unspoken wrongness of her uncle’s state.  Luke Newberry grows too, as the insouciant Rodolfo stiffens into a resentment to answer Eddie’s:  the other illegal is his foil, Tommy Sim’aan a  grim, dignified Marco who quietly throws his heart and earnings across thousands of miles to his hungry children.   Kirsty Bushell is terrific in dignity and growing unease as the increasingly frustrated Beatrice.  She sees, more and more,  what is twisting in her Eddie’s mind and heart  – “When am I gonna be a wife again?”.  

       The private,  timeless tragedy unfolds with intense economy.   The only slight unease for me was the casting as Alfieri the lawyer of Nancy Crane, excellent though she is.   Her femaleness works touchingly, credibly when she is trying to head off Eddie’s disastrous intention to scupper Rodolfo and keep Catherine forever bound to him:  there, she is any sensible older women talking down a man.  But it is a memory play,  and Miller gives dark tolling poetic to this narrator, not only in that last tremendous tribute but in describing the darkening of Eddie “his eyes like tunnels..a passion entered his body like a stranger..”.  In a play about machismo,  always before in those lines I have found the heaviness of a male voice created an important shudder.   

       But in the car park I straw-polled a couple of people in the audience who hadn’t known the play before, and they had no such feeling.  It’s a powerful evening anyway, and Slinger’s  Eddie Cargone will stay with me for a long time.    Only 11 more performances (I am late with this one) some seats left,  and well worth booking.

Cft.org.uk to 28 oct

A LEARNED FRIEND REMEMBERED 

    Rumpole of the Bailey is occasional comfort-viewing in our house, thanks to Talkingpicturestv repeats. John Mortimer’s  portrait of the old barrister and the atmosphere of Chambers express more of a golden memory of his late eccentric father than of our modern RAAC-courthouse world, as the author himself admitted.  But it is a world of attitudes and assumptions  worth revisiting , even if only anthropologically.  And this memoir of the “voyage” we all take,  working our way  round a spectacular parent, is a marvel: a circuit from childhood awe, teenage scepticism, adult embarrassment and revolt and finally the moment of looking back. And finding that for all the exasperation, you are lonely without that presence.

    Jack Bardoe narrates as young Mortimer , nimbly moving from early childhood and baffled prep-school to following the old man’s legal footsteps, marrying, moving on, finding his own different gift.   Rupert Everett, who somehow at 64 is hitting his glorious peak,  is the patriarch. Wonderful, he is: a moulting eagle,  capable of commanding a courtroom in towering contempt or dominating a stage from a basket-chair with sightless Samson eyes (his blinding, in an early coup de theatre, stunned a neighbour in my row, new to the story). 

         From him come the familiar Rumpolean diatribes, like the one against the perils of marriage causing your fees to be frittered away on “Vim and children’s vests”, and the one about the consolation of divorce cases being their rich content of comedy.  The son expresses the struggle to be different and the realisation that he never quite will be.  Eleanor David is a treat too, as that endangered, almost extinct creature  the affectionately resigned wife. In elegant balance every small gesture as she fusses around her husband tells a long ,long and not unhappy story. 

     One critic found Richard Eyre’s production too much softened – Olivier’s spikier rages are remembered in the role – but I didn’t.  Because  there is something  beautiful in Everett’s interpretation of a man of his generation , stoical and unimpressible.  This was my Dad’s generation: stuck between the waste and loss of the Great War,  living through the next one into the 50s: conservative but sceptical, uncomplaining but shudderingly satirical about cant and sentimentality (treasure Everett carolling “Polly Perkins” during an overblown Remembrance hymn).  It is a type, mood and attitude free from our sententious modern commentary or signalling.  The  Rumpolean court scene is a piece of glorious game-playing.  

       For my generation, half a century younger than Mortimer junior and a century after his father’s prime,   the melding of the male characters who were built in that early 20c period is fascinating, and touching. Julian Wadham as  the absurd prep school headmaster is better , funnier even than Bennett’s  imagining in Forty Years On.   The beaten gnarled old jockey advising the prep school boy is superb, as is the eccentric war damaged book-flinging geometry master.  It matters to understand and remember what the period did to men and boys:  post- Edwardian, pre 1960s.   They had strengths and disabling emotional bruises:  they were our grandfathers.

  It is also interesting to note that for all our anxious me-first individualism and exhibitionist instagram celebrity,  today’s Britain is far less good at appreciating  and absorbing real eccentrics than we used to be. 

I saw it at Richmond: but it’s   touring until 18 November. dates below

Cambridge Arts Theatre 17-21 Oct

Cardiff 24-28 Oct

• Then Malvern Festival Theatre, Chichester , and Nottingham Theatre Royal

ITS THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL? Not if Lloyd can help it.

It felt  strange to see this in the bowels of a gala-night Savoy, only a week or two after our local arts centre showed the  1950 film of this tale of lost fame, ageing delusion and murder : Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond , the has-been megastar in a decrepit Hollywood mansion with a dead pet chimp and Max the protectively adoring  butler,  battening on the disillusioned writer Joe to help with her comeback script.   The film’s a legend: Cecil B De Mille actually played himself. This Lloyd Webber musical (book and lyrics by Don Black and  Christopher Hampton) had an outing with Glenn Close at ENO a while back, and this is Jamie Lloyd’s ultra-moody, mixed-media monochrome take on it. 

     At its core (except on Mondays) is the weaponized diva  that is Nicole Scherzinger. Even without the considerable ingenuity of the director, the former Pussycat Doll is primed to blow anybody’s socks off. Indeed in a way the tricksy spareness and abrupt closeup face videos of Lloyd’s  setting provide the proper frame for this human volcano: black box, smoke, spotlights, occasional walking camera-operators projecting the cast’s 50ft high faces above. There’s no grand staircase, indeed no furniture at all until 35 minutes in the lugubrious Max provides the bewildered narrator-victim Joe with a single chair.  But the orchestra, of course, under Alan Williams is sumptuous , and the music agreeable. It’s LloydWebber halfway between the yearning romanticism of Phantom and the wild edge of School of Rock.

   Tom Francis’ Joe is nicely dry, disillusioned, doubtful of the once great star but hypnotised by her deranged self-belief, and David Thaxton’s Max  is suitably threatening. Both are fine voices, and Francis in a mischievous post-interval film is seen roaming the theatre corridors and appearing from the Strand singing on film, only to finish the number live striding down the aisle.  The original was, remember, a black comedy in intention: it’s OK to laugh at poor Norma.  You could make a case for showbiz misogyny, but why bother?

The star debut of Grace Hodgett Young  as Betty, Joe’s true love and co-writer, is also remarkable: her melodic sweetness a nice foil to the crazy beautiful yowl of Scherzinger. The ensemble, storming around as wannabes and audition-fodder in rehearsal clothes  are choreographed as festive or sinister by turns.  

    But Scherzinger!.  An unruly diamond, a perilous untameable phenomenon, both vocally powerful and physically witty. It is quite  something to see her  dreaming her ambition to be Salome,  with wild rolling barelegged frenzy in a black silk slip and streaming black hair,   doing the upside-down splits and howling  like a  nymphomaniacal panther-goddess.  Yet sometimes she stands like a statue while the subplot of the young rolls around her, and there is an edge of pathos. For all the glorious numbers in which she and her erstwhile director Max claim the mission to “give the world new ways to dream”, her real need is for adoration from “all you wonderful people out there in the dark”.

     She certainly casts off for good the ghost of Gloria Swanson:  Lloyd has no intention of capitulating to retro romanticism and clapping his Norma in a turban and greying curls. And why would he? The text makes clear that despite talk of fading, the actual age of this outworn hag deserted by 30 million once devoted fans is…about forty. There was a faint gasp from the young Arts Ed students in front of us at the cruel line “nothing wrong with being forty unless you play twenty”.  So Schertzinger’s flowing mane and athletic flow are just fine.  

    And while I tend to roll my eyes a bit at Jamie Lloyd’s incurable directorial  instinct to show off more than his cast, by the time we got  to the  frenziedly confusing  final scenes of running, shouting,  swinging cameras, giant faces and general rage I was on the whole glad to have been out there in the dark for two and a half hours, being wonderful. Ticket prices btw are not too bad, given that the view is pretty good from anywhere.

Thesavoytheatre.com to 6 jan   

Rating four.

IT’S BACK, THROUGH THE NURSERY WINDOW, STILL FLYING

      Just to reassure you:  this offshoot from Mischief, the team who brought you the perennial  Play-goes-wrong, is still a lot of fun.  A fine choice for the Christmas outing for cheerful adults and perhaps especially for maturing children who are just starting to turn their noses up at panto.  

       I saw it first at the Pleasance in 2013,  then the touring version a year later – saying this about Adam Megiddo’s finely paced direction:

PETER PAN GOES WRONG Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford & touring

    Dropping in on the Richmond premiere because a friend was visiting who knows nothing of this team,  I found – with Simon Scullion’s wickedly entertaining, multi-revolving seesawing set – that it is leader, even more inventive than ever.  

     Authors Jonathan Sayer and Henries Shields and Lewis made a wise decision in sticking close to JM Barrie’s original text with its fey sincerity and faery whimsy, rather than attempting an ordinary  panto. Indeed a good running joke is that the “Director” who plays Hook is enraged whenever the audience, on nicely subtle prompts, shouts BEHIND YOU or O NO IT ISN’T. “It’s a traditional Christmas vignette! It’s not a panto” – “Oh yes it is!”

. The audition tapes played in error through the sound system at the most embarrassing moments are as fine as ever,  and indeed the running joke about poor electrical connections is framed while the audience is sitting down by making them unreel cables to unfeasible edges of the auditorium. 

    So there is still very skilled slapstick, terrifyingly haphazard upside-down flying, oddly gentle irony, satire on the trade of acting,  and a few jokes and moments milked just too long to sow a tiny discomfort.

   And the touring cast? Splendid. Especially Jamie Birkett, strangely queenlike through all the chaos, and Theo Toksvig-Stewart    as the hapless Max, bringing him out properly pathetic to many an “awwwww!” from the stalls.  So be reassured, the show hasn’t got tired ten years on.  

Touring to 14 apr with a west end session in the Lyric in November

Mischieftbeatre.com

TOUR MOUSE – but is as good as ever