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
theatreCat 