Monthly Archives: November 2023

   I don’t usually record anything that’s two-nights-only, but this one I think will flower and fly, so watch out for it.  It’s already looking like turning up in March at TR Haymarket, and any venue with a functioning soul would do well to grab it.   Who in these dark days does not need a small, unpretending,  explosively joyous, sad ,energetic and topical mini-musical to remind us that art flowers in rough ground?

       . It’s devised by and for Golda Amirova, a Ukrainian-Jewish  singer and composer: a big figure in Odessa, once chosen to sing “Shema Yisrael” to the visiting Israeli president. She and her director Pavlo Bondarekno are both refugees here from Putin’s invasion.   Around them, to tell her true tale as a fable of disaster and redemption, they  gather musicians and dancers: Yevhenii the drummer from Mariupol , refugee in Berlin; Kourosh the Irish-Iranian guitarist, Greek Vasilis on saxophone, choice British jazzmen and dancers. 

      The music is wild: soulful  Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish jazz, where klezmer, wedding-songs, ballad and rock and memories of Weimar meld together, in Golda’s extraordinary pure voice and wild effortless energy.  You catch moments of scat, rock rhythms, Jewish anthems, a soaring ballad crashing suddenly into vivid jazz dance.  It’s hypnotic, never a boring note. 

          But the show’s point , with short words or translations flashed up where needed, is to tell a story very simply.  It opens on a glorious set of sofa, band instruments, lamps, racks of sparkly clothes and crazy stage hats.   Golda says  “I see a dream. My heart is flying back to my home” because we are in riotously happy  memory:  a party-cum-rehearsal is under way,  singer and players and random guests jumping and joking, then  following a power cut with an ironic mashup of Tiger Lillies “The crack of doom is coming soon”, cabaret-style.    Behind them a projection shows a great city’s graceful spreading streets.  A phone call from her grandmother demands Golda marries soon, and in rapid musical mimeshow she rejects both a millionaire and an Israeli who “talks only Torah” . Instead she dispatches the guests to pretend-busk the front rows for money for a takeout.  

      When it arrives her eyes meet the handsome pizza man’s , a great gentle love song rises  and suddenly there’s a wedding.  More wild dancing and celebration round a white cake,  guests pressing glasses on the front row. 

 Until the sirens, the bomb, flashing lights, destruction and darkness and quite another grey projection behind in the smoke.  Amirova’s, and Odessa’s,  own story. She’s only been here a little over a year. 

       In the second act the happy living-room is gone. In a black coat, once wild hair pinned severely flat, she is any East European refugee with a suitcase. A sinister short ballet in the gloom expresses panic, collapse, loss, grief, exhaustion. Then  Golda suddenly is in a club, working the full Kander and Ebb ‘Mein Herr” from Cabaret, a job.  But despondent in a cafe she hears a tune remembered from home;  the musicians gather, new friends, respectful, and a great torch-song moment leads to a shared defiance and cry of “L’Chaim!” To life!”.   

      In the finale, time has passed and she is a star again, introduced on a big stage in golden robes,  her song drawing together grief and memory and loss, echoing all the genres of the evening and interwoven strands of Europe’s soul.   As a show it’s simple, short, sophisticated; it’ll probably grow and refine.  But for two brief nights in a converted church in West London,  just  after London’s great march of solidarity ,  it’s  an event.  It reminds us  of the greatness of the continent, the tangled threads which hold us offshore people too,  and of the Jewishness pulsing through it all. It’s about the hope that springs in any room where songs and stories come alive.     L’Chaim!  

Information:    http://www.birdandcarrot.com

BEWARE OF GREEKS BRINGING GAGS

   Where does Kylie get her kebabs?  From Jason’s doner van!   If that makes you scuttle away in fright, you have not yet achieved the correct seasonal adaptation to Panto season.  Work on it.  Sometimes surrender is the only way. 

        I was a bit startled at first by this show – a ridiculous echo of classical Greece (as if we hadn’t just had one of those as a Prime Minister) . But that is because I had only seen Charles Court Opera in more musically serious, if light-hearted, shows.  But their annual pantos under John Savournin have a keen and hearty following, and judging by last night’s willingness to  laugh, clap in time, shout encouragement to Hermes the incompetent deliveryman and participate in a highly unusual gameshow,  no spoilers,  they’re growing more fans. .

        So pull up your Socrates, make no Apollogies, and after a long festive day struggling round your local shopping Centaur,   enjoy Stewart Charlesworth’s  marvellous multicoloured classical background and daft headgear.  Take your inner – or outer – kid and  wince-along happily to the adventures of Penelope and her faithful friend Trojan the horse as they set out – via the Cyclops –  to rescue Odysseus from  Circe without all being turned into pigs.   It’s as if Horrible Histories got drunk with the makers of South Park,   and enlisted a schoolboy Classic Set who wish there was more in the ancient Hellenic  canon about farting.  Then add songs happily based on anything from  American Pie to Stayin’ Alive and Rasputin.  

       Actually, it was the songs which quite rapidly won me round; the cast of five are all highly competent  belters,  but Emily Cairns in particular has a beautiful voice,  and ther are one or two rather poignant moments.  And to Charybdis you over any doubt, I must say that Scylla is magnificent.  Short, noisy, fun.  But keep your Greek friends away from it or they’ll be confirmed in their view that Britain is too frivolous to hang on to those marbles.     

Box office jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 31 dec

rating: well, add a seasonal daft Panto-mouse for enhancement

DARK BEFORE THE DAWN

       To emerge with any redemptive sense from Joe Hill-Gibbins’  spare, scorching  rather brilliant production,  it helps to remember that Henrik Ibsen, after laying out the destructive hypocrisies of late 19c small-town Nordic world,  ends it as Mrs Alving sobs over her soon-dying son and a rising dawn,  a fine day,  with sun rising on the snowy peaks.  In Richard Eyre’s version a while back –   like this one stripped to a solid 90-minute intensity –   that dawn was expressed in a brilliant lighting moment:  there was a sense of a century’s end,  a chance  of dawn soon sweeping away those dark damaging moralities .  There was comfort there, and this time I almost prayed that in the fully candlelit Wanamaker there would be a sudden flinging open of shutters,  so desperate is the sense by then of the need for it.  A prophecy of the modern liberation suggested in the book  which Mrs Alving  shocks her pastor by owning.  

      But in winter SE1  such a flooding of consoling light  would hardly work.  So the director and players may simply take this reflection as a compliment to the depth of feeling they provoked.  They really did. 

        It  is important always to keep, in this play,  the strength and shock which got it banned by the Lord Chamberlain and excoriated as “deplorable and loathsome”  in its stripping back of all decorous veiling from the topics of hereditary syphilis,  euthanasia, potential incest and defiance of ‘any law, including God’s.”    It uses light and darkness as a running theme,  beautifully used here as we begin with Sarah Slimani’s Regine lighting one by one the candelabras which rise and descend (the whole backdrop is a big mirror, which is odd but does spread the light a little as well as spookily reflecting the players).  

          In the light she kindles  – the light that finally flame by flame will die at the despairing end  –  we see Greg Hicks as the girl’s  father – always a powerful, threatening actor – trying to get her to come and work at his proposed “sailors’ home”, ie. brothel, on the mainland.   We see then Hattie Morahan conversing with Paul Hilton’s Pastor Manders about the orphanage she has funded in her husband’s memory,  with a gradual exasperated revelation of what a libertine drunkard he was, her woman’s strength having held  it and his reputation together in bitter secrety.  Her son and only joy, Stuart Thompson’s Osvald joins them; his fondness for Regine gradually more appalling as we learn that she is is half-sister, begotten of rape by the dead Captain Alving.

    Layer upon layer of hypocrisy, lies, emotional cruelty and deceit and hidden, lethal  sins intensify;  Manders’ plea for “the older truths” ever more hollow,  with an actual guffaw, a frisson around me in the seats , at his attempt to belittle the rape of Regine’s mother with “I don’t condone it of course but he was playing with her…”.   Even Osvald’s own perception that  “love doesn’t always follow your rules” is soured by his brief, panicking conviction that his free life in Paris may have contributed as much to his decline as his father’s libertinism.   

    It’s all there: Ibsen’sscorching moral horror,  his brilliant outrage at the way women suffered, hid and excused for the sake of Manders’ “old truths” and social cohesion.  Morahan, Hicks and Hilton are all the more brilliantly effective for being so dimly seen; the  increasing physicality of Helene Alving’s despair and desperation for her son in the gloaming strikes the heart all the harder.  There is nothing restrained or polite or ‘period” about any of it.  It simply devastates.   

box office   shakespearesglobe.com  to  28 Jan

ANY TOIL AND TROUBLE WAS WELL WORTH IT

Everything a child could want is here:   the dark thrill of imagined orphanhood, a quest,  baddies , jeopardy and jokes, bouncy musical spectacle,  adults behaving ridiculously.   For the parent generation add some dry witty lines and throwaway touches (the awful spoilt child is called Bruno dePfeffel Jenkins – ha!).  Then add a magnificent song from the Grand High Witch about what a nuisance children actually are, “assholes!”, never giving you a quiet or private moment. 

        It also helps that Lucy Kirkwood’ lyrics quite frequently rise to Gilbert and Sullivan glory – even echoes them, as the initial chorus of witches posing as nice ladies in M&S cardies sing “smiling sweetly, walking neatly and petitely”…. 

      As theatrecat is late on the curve with this one (press night packed, I hope with many many kids) all I need  tell you is that all the five-star raves are justified, and that indeed after last year’s dismal HEX the National has a properly worked, long-developed serious Christmas hit which will last, and  transfer, and run for years and be celebrated.   Children will dream of playing gallant little Luke or the preening Bruno, a mini-diva who plays  up l to make adults say “isn’t he precious, isn’t he sweet!”.  Adult stars will queue up, in the show’s long future, for a chance at the Sally Ann Triplett part as the eccentric cigar-smoking Gran, or her nemesis, Katherine Kingsley as the Grand High Witch;  chaps will want the part of the strung -out Mr Stringer, manager of Hotel Magnificent, to which Daniel Rigby gives full wild comic rein. 

       So yes, it’s a runner, a winner.  When Tim Minchin gave us Matilda thirteen years ago he showed that given the big-musical treatment with its naturally breezy brio, the sour-hearted edge of Roald Dahl’s imagination can  be transformed into something which even we Dahl-doubters could love.  Later, Charlie and the Chcolate factory was enjoyable, but dependent on big West End machinery and star casting, with little warmth even with Doug Hodge.   But here Lucy Kirkwood’s transformation of Dahl’s The Witches , directed by Lyndsey Turner, is glorious all the way.  Dave Malloy’s music is catchy, with mischievous pastiches from Lloyd-Webber to Sondheim, and a couple of really beautiful quiet songs as well as the fun:   I’d listen to a cast album in the car, especially with children.   Stephen Mear’s choreography is bliss, from tap to clog to a magnificent soup dance in the hotel kitchen .  

     And to add to the adult joy, the Witches’ “RSPCC” conference at the hotel, fifteen ladies in sensible middle-aged clothes, has some of the wickedest sendups of such gatherings you will ever see. Note the prissy defiance of one facing up to the lady chair:   “I”ll say it – she needs to know”,  which ends with an  incendiary trapdoor put-down.  Literal, in this case, but most of us have seen that done…

book and lyrics by Lucy Kirkwood, music and lyrics by Dave Malloy

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 27 jan

GOLDSMITH BEATEN LIGHT AS AIR

     Nice symmetry in Tom Littler’s decision to set Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy in the Wodehousian Jazz Age:  the Georgians, with their boozy monarchs and coffe-house sarcasms,   were mischievous spirits before Queen Victoria and Dickens arrived to demand decorum.  So here’s a  curmudgeonly husband with a bossy and flighty wife,  planning matches for their young with mixed results. Here’s an elopement, a minxy rebel, and a callow  Woosterish  public schoolboy who can’t relate to his own class of girl but only to barmaids , so a clever girl must pose as one to net him.   And  that’s before you get to the purloined jewel box forever falling into the wrong hands: a clear forerunner of Wodehouse’s stolen silver cow-creamer.

      It fits beautifully in the cosy panelled and galleried  theatre,  swagged with Christmas decorations as we gather intimately around and above the living room , the inn and the living room mistaken for an inn.  (If ever Littler decides to programme a play set in a desert or spaceship his designers will have a more troublesome job than Neil Irish and Anett Black did with this one).  

     But the pleasures of this rumbustious production go deeper. David Horovitch and Greta Scacchi are as fine as you’d expect, magnificently explosive at times;   Tanya Reynolds is an engaging Kate, serious when needed  and a complete mistress of the classic drop-hanky-bend-and-snap as recomended centuries later in Legally Blonde.   Sabrina Bartlett is a girlish Constance with a fire-engine shriek;  Guy Hughes’ Tony Lumpkin is an unusually likeable padded-weskit of a rustic, as the young squire who rightly prefers Bet Bouncer’s “cheeks as red as a pulpit cushion” down the pub,   to the threat of marrying his more polished  cousin. He  sings to his ukelele in the Two Pigeons public bar , pleasingly peopled with a community chorus of eight or nine revellers.  And Richard Derrington  makes he very, very most of Diggory the dishevelled manservant, doddering for England with every move provoking ripples of delight. 

   But two important things shine. One is that all the cast are utterly at home with the complex 18c prose and its meaning: it trips off their tongues as natural as breathing. And that can be harder than speaking Shakespeare: more rat-a-tat rhythms, no restful iambics.  If this show wasn’t almost sold out I would urge all Eng Lit teachers to bring recalcitrant  pupils who whine for recognizability to show them  just how comfortable 250- year- old expressions can feel. 

      The other important merit is is in the physical comedy and  “business”.  Julia Cave is credited for movement direction, and I cannot speak highly enough of Scacchi’s Martini-and-olive play, the rebel niece’s mastery of a riding-crop, Horovitch’s finely judged throwing of a stilton cheese,  Kate’s very suggestive polishing of the gramophone horn,  a superb  grape-catch from Freddie Fox, and Diggory’s triple brolly-muff-and-handbag hurl. Or of all the perfectly judged table-leaping, sofa flopping, suitcase-dragging work and moments of manic panic and baffled stasis,  as when Freddie Fox is stuck on a chair clutching, for no willing reason, a tiny 1920s jewelled handbag.

     Indeed all the laddish exchanges , banterings and irritations between the young men – Fox and Robert Mountford – are pulsing with life.  And I have never seen  Fox before in such  broad comedy, and long for him to do more:   before: his helpless bespectacled shyness round Kate,  his 180 degree turn to leering-down to the supposed barmaid,  his puppyish overconfidence and humiliated horror  are all spot-on:  exaggerated just to the point where comedy shades into wincing affectionate sympathy.

   It is altogether the first of the Christmas treats, ended with a fine jazz dance curtain call, and for all these reasons its fifth mouse is the rarely deployed Christmouse, dancing on the cat’s party squeaker… 

orangetreetheatre.co.uk.  to 13 Jan

FLAT WHITE AND WOEFUL

       If you’re going to splash out on a visually arresting finale of assassination, a vivId fire destroying a Norman tower and a lyrical monologue about Lenin,  it is wisest to lead up to these excitements with a play that arrests attention.  And, ideally, makes some kind of sense.  This isn’t it.  

     Rory Mullarkey’s limp satire on the landowning, moneyed upper classes  pimping their ancient homes to Russian Oligarchs just feels a bit desperate, a series of random shots at fish in a barrel.   And the Royal Court shouldn’t do desperate: it is at its best with zippy writing , sharp attitude,  and a willingness to prod easy thinking and cliché attitudes. Not when rolling over, in a hopeful Christmas season,  to something billed as “uproarious” Wodehousian comedy, but which turns out dismally sub-sitcom . There are only rare flashes of inspired spite (the best one being about the Standard Theatre Awards, which is niche but nice).  

      It’s about an idle spendthrift young Viscount (with a communist housekeeper,, ho ho) whose mother is trying to sell the family castle to a Russian oligarch, while herself fleeing to South Korea with her female accountant who doubles as lesbian lover and badminton partner (I enjoyed the badminton at the start of Act 2 more than the rest of the show). 

          Of course the Viscount and his mates have a plot to derail the deal by dressing up as oligarchs and pretending they don’t want the castle: very sub-Wodehouse.    The idly blokey obviousness of  it is irritating:  communists are funny, lesbians are funny, Russian accents are funny,  Irish housekeepers called Hanratty are funny,  so bung ’em in and call it comedy. 

      I suppose that this play was seen as a successor to 2010’s POSH (which I hated then  for a cartoonish unfairness which at the time wasn’t totally deserved, though it has got more so since 2019).    But at least POSH was well structured and had a quite good story, and one or two fairly rounded characters.   It’s the flatness of these  – despite the efforts of Fenella Woolgar and George Foreacres in particular –  that makes the play basically so dull, despite a good cast.  

          The British love-hate fascination with the upper crust works best when – as in Wodehouse or Coward or Wilde or indeed Jilly Cooper –  you are able, despite your amused jeering,  to share some of their human feelings.   Here, you just don’t.  And they’re not that funny either.    It’s depressing, nd I respect  the Royal Court  – the writers’ theatre – too much not to say so.

box office  royalcourttheatre.com   to 16 Dec

ECHOES OF DARKNESS

    Jews gather, laughing and chattering, offering a toast as they run down the aisles to settle downstage for a Passover meal with candles, prayers and the ancient question “why is this night different from all other nights?”.  

    This time it is, for  a bad reason.  A noise outside: and over their heads in vast projected newsreels come  Mosley and the  British Union of Fascists at the battle of Cable  Street,  with bold black libellous posters about “negroid Jewish filth” and the octopus of Jewish finance.     

         A pilgrimage, this was,  and not by accident.  Because it plays this week in a resonant place : just off Cable Street , where Mosley’s marchers met a resistant crowd,  not only of the Jews they targeted  but of dockers, unionists and East Enders with a banner “They Shall Not Pass” . Honest people shared the disgust and brotherhood, seeing off the thugs.   On that autumn day Wilton’s music hall,  was a meeting place and first-aid post for the anti-fascists. 

       So to see this remarkable production here, setting Shakespeare’s play   in 1936 , is heartshaking . When Brigid Larmour”s show, with Tracy Ann Oberman provocatively cast as Shylock, began its long tour nobody could foresee that by now the London streets would again see antisemitic hatred on the march. Nor would there be such dangerous electricity in the play’s troublesome story of a demand for human flesh to suffer.  For we see not only a scornful cadre of contemptuous toffs – Gratiano  a real posh Bullingdon thug, wealthy Antonio coming to court in jackboots and red armband  – but of  a Jew exacting revenge through bloodshed. Because the hurt is so deep.  And we also see a Jewish neighbour running in fear from a thug, and walls daubed with daily hatred. 

     Oberman is brilliant, turning Shakespeare’s grotesque into a smartly dressed businesswoman, a mother appalled by her daughter’s defection, then a deeply hurt and lonely figure standing on her dignity and rights in court while her case is destroyed by the crossdressed Portia – who is seriously nasty by the end, merciless despite the famous speech. It forces you, as always, to think not only about the ancient curse of antisemitism but about law, its glory and its limitations. 

     Its a taut, and well cut,  two hours.  And in the final moments the defeated and ruined  Shylock, clutching her possessions, stands alone against the rom-com finale stuff with Bassanio’s ring,.   Bleak  – until  suddenly everything turns round. The hostile men throw off armbands,  Antonio dons the kippah, and all unfurl a sheet with They  Shall Not Pass . 

      And most of the audience here in old Wilton’s suddenly stand up,  in fellowship.  And  Oberman briefly tells us, as herself, that her grandmother was there at Cable Street, and that it still befits us all to stand together. 

Touring till Feb. York next, Manchester, Chichester, Stratford upon Avon

FAR MORE THAN A SNACK

    Caught this late, and it’s much reviewed and almost sold out. But it’s worth saying in a brief word here that if you buy a return as I did, you are in  luck. Lynn Nottage’s  play is a little gem, realized with love in a gorgeous creation of the scruffy back- kitchen of a Pennlylvania trucker’s diner.

. The staff are all fresh out of jail and near-hopeless lives before. The boss is another ex-con, an angry she-ball of hate and scorn, Clyde.  In a hundred minutes, the workers serve, chop,  bicker and bond and reveal odd sad edges of their grim shaming back stories.   But above all they discuss what might constitute the absolute sublime and ultimate in expression through the medium of sandwiches. 

       Lynette Linton’s cast are spot on.   Giles Terera is a sort of guru, philosopher of food and the beauty of flavour and artistry; Gbemisola Ikumelo and Sebastian Orozco are struggling lost souls needing to find one another, and Patrick Gibson the most moving of all:  covered in racist-gang tattoos, he moves in the hundred minutes from sullen hopeless anger to a sort of innocent generous humility, fed by the small everyday wonder of the job and the limitless possibilities of perfection. In sandwiches.

    Much of the commentary has been how funny it is, and sweary, and executed sometimes with surreal balletic moves. All true .  But I think it’s deep as they go, a wonderful evocation of human hope, endeavour and creativity. With relish.. And you might just find a ticket before the month’s out.

 BOx office donmarwarehouse.com    To 2 dec

A QUEEN WHO NEEDED QUEENS 

   The curtain rises on the Clarence House garden room in 1979,  where the Queen Mother held her eccentric little court.  Much gilding, unreasonably many oil paintings of roses, and a tail-coated Billy Tallon,  newly promoted as Page of the Backstairs and staff boss,  pointing military-style as he orders his colleagues where to deposit the morning’s vasefuls of real flowers.    “Rosewood. Occasional, Sideboard, Plinth, Plinth”.  Luke Evans’ Billy  is posher than posh as he informs little Gwdion, a newcomer,  of the duties and demeanour of a footman: always remain standing, be correct, never cross the grand rug but go round it.   Noses  pressed to the glass, we gaze into royal-world:  hardly was the curtain up when two corgis scampered across the stage, to be met with a rousing cheer and traditional British cries of awwwww! 

          In The Audience – the last major stage-royal imagining – there was only one live corgi moment, but director Michael Grandage hedges his bets and has three. The final one even involves HM – Penelope Wilton – in cuddling a rather reluctant and spirited dog on the sofa while possibly – no spoilers – deciding whether to sack her favourite after 27 years.   Billy deserves it, after  bringing a pick-up male prostitute (Eloka Ivo)  into the building with chaotically improper results of the sort it would be better that her daughter the Queen never heard of.   And the Queen Mother knows that getting rid of Tallon would delight her Private Secretary  (Ian Drysdale).  In a tricky moment of strikes and riots and a crashing economy pre-Thatcher, he wants to rein in the prodigal extravagance of the octogenarian mini-court. 

    It’s a promising theme Marcelo Dos Santos has in this new play, and often it’s full of fun:   in her years of widowhood HM  – despite keeping up a reasonable number of cheerful public appearances – was famously fond of a tipple and a dance (she was once found singing My Old Man’s a Dustman at the piano with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster).    We are given two scenes of her teatime entertaining, to great comic effect:  one mixes a dim actress from her favourite soap (Emily Barber) with a patriotically starstruck couple described by Billy as a “couple of Home Counties cadavers” (Michael Simkins and Nicola Sloane). The other has the same players as dopey aristocrats,  thrown by the reappearance of Eloka Ivo’s prostitute  masquerading as an African prince.  Wilton is a dream, handling the curious royal mixture of impertinence and optimistic charm in bizarre exchanges with these visitors;   the satire is less on royalty itself  than on the peculiar tongue-tied behaviour of British people dealing with it face to face. Especially back in the grander days of fifty years ago.  

         All good fun,  though with rather more Carry-on-Gay jokes than necessary, but there is a frustrating sense that inside this play there is a rather better one trying to get out.  That better play is not just a farce of mistaken-identity and sauciness with a two-minute dash of 1979 politics,  but a portrait of a real and necessary human relationship between mistress and servant.  It flashes into view sometimes amid the farcical daftness.   Luke Evans is a convincingly devoted Billy,   amusing HM with his camp flair, devotion and willingness to dance round the sofa with her, but he needs her as much as she needs him, and  he unravels satisfactorily when he gets himself into trouble.    In a flashbacks we meet his 15 year old self (Ilan Galkoff) who came to Ma’am’s service in her early widowhood.

        As for Penelope Wilton,  she is deeply touching:   we see her in a timeshift as a new widow in 1952, glad to chat to the  new little page (“fifteen? Are we resorting to kidnapping?”) . How can she make a new life without her Bertie, and her Palace home and job?   Then back in 1979 we see her suddenly as just a mother,  cut off from daily cosiness by her eldest daughter’s new job and grandeur and being stood up by a neglectful Margaret who asked herself to breakfast then didn’t turn up.   When that happens Wilton turns to the wall for a silent  moment of rage, while Billy stands sympathetically by. She then turns back to paste on a smile and a determination not to join in any feeling that is “dour and doomy”, but to have another drink and get on with whatever leisure-centre ribbon-cutting awaits her.  

     And in one other extraordinary moment when that other play struggles to get out,  she responds with wounded kindness  to a slightly demented contemporary who forgets that Bertie, the King her husband , has been dead for nearly thirty years.   “It makes no sense’ says mad old Lady Adeline.    “No sense at all” says HM, gently,  after a tense silent beat.  And Wilton at that moment is the great actress she is:  real, all there, grieving still, anxious not to hurt. 

Box office.   www.michaelgrandagecompany.com.  to. 27 Jan

NB MGC productions does work to offer cheap tickets:    £10 tickets available at every performance across the run. For further information, and to register for the initiative: www.michaelgrandagecompany.com.

rating. 4 but only JUST, and it was Wilton wot won it. And the reluctant sofa-corgi.

WHEN WE THAT ARE LEFT GROW OLD….

      Sometimes you have to rely on a team with multiple comedy awards to  hold a mirror to society and move your heart.  This is by Richard Bean (of the NT’s One Man Two Guv’nors and Jack Absolute), co-directed by Terry Johnson and Richard Wilson. So yes, it is very funny – some exchanges like vintage Alan Bennett but without the melancholy – but also merciless.  It challenges a generation to contemplate how working-class old age can lie  beached   when their children’s upward social mobility is all outward and distant,  in both geography and values.  It’s a beautifully unfashionable theme, personal and necessary.  

   We’re in a village in East Yorkshire:    Jack is 91, long-retired from the Humberside police;  Florence his wife of seventy years.   Their conversation is like well-dug fertile topsoil: long matured and rotted and often comically irritable.  She is losing her sight,  he is frail,  commuting from stairlift to chair,  threatening to go to Dignitas   though he’s never been abroad.   When you live long,  old friends vanish ; live in the 21c,   and restlessness and digitization edge you onto the sidelines.   The local bank branch has closed, everything’s online and they aren’t, and he can’t drive. Not after a run-in with a hedge on the Scarborough road.  

        They’re sharp,  though, each meeting the other’s maunderings  or their offspring’s alienness with dry Yorkshire wit: the kids are on a rare visit because they can only just look after themselves.   Pamela in her nurse’s uniform  drops in to help with bits of shopping,  as does the mountainous, cheerful Rhubarb Eddie. (“What’s the secret?” “Horseshit” “Do you force it?” “I have nothing to do with the horse”).   Both are met  with nervous contempt by the middle-aged youngsters:  Rob a successful detective novelist from Muswell Hill and Hollywood,  Tina a private healthcare capitalist.  They’re global villagers, “Anywheres” in David Goodhart’s famous definition –  and Jack and Florence are rooted:  Somewheres.    Pam guilt-trips Rob with “You can’t wipe his bum by Skype”,  and Tina’s business brain homes in suspiciously  on their trustful arrangement of giving Rhubarb Eddie the bank card and PIN to pick up cash every week from Driffield.  

       The joy of the play is in the humour, the absurdist exasperated familiarity of maunderings about mumps, Jim Reeves, and Sandie Shaw’s bare feet,  set against the competent shallowness of the siblings.   If this play lives on, and it absolutely should, and soon,   I pray that Alun Armstrong is forever Jack. He’s perfect,   cantankerous in company but reminiscently melancholy alone with his police memories,  which he won’t let his writer son record on his phone for material but has found a way to keep.   May Marion Bailey also long be Florence, and Adrian Hood play Rhubarb Eddie for many, many months.   Humour and heart  – and, late on, one tender moment and a final small moral heroism –  are finely balanced. Though judging by interval conversations, there’s much to wince at for a busy midlife generation watching their parents’ last years from far away.  

      It also features the best possible use of Jim Reeves’ mournfully romantic “Distant drums”. And if a play is partly judged by its ending, it scores.   It isn’t often that a battered Sony cassette recorder and a comic anecdote about a Cornish pastie make you find yourself scribbling  the closing lines of King Lear.   There is a fine generation leaving us, without fuss,   and attention should be paid. 

Box office. hampsteadtheatre.com to 25 November

DIANA AND THE DECEIVER

Jonathan Maitland did a superb play for this theatre about Thatcher and Howe, “Dead Sheep”, and one on Jimmy Savile which was far more telling and cathartic than the TV version. Now he turns his attention to another story: the Diana interview of 1995 and subsequent  late exposure of the manipulation and forgery by Martin Bashir, which achieved it for the BBCs Panorama in the teeth of sly bids from Oprah.  Barbara Walters and – well, just about everyone.  

  Maitland seems to be stirred by Prince William’s ruling , and the BBCs, that it shouldn’t ever be screened again: in the second half he  suggests this is a kind of further silencing and cancelling of the poor woman. Though the irony of this suggestion doesn’t strike him in staging it all for national appraisal. He uses her key lines plus, from good  sources, glimpses of lines which weren’t in the final edit.  We see editor Hewlett anxious, almost appalled, fearing she would give too much about her own lovers and worrying about how far Bashir is producing her.

   Maitland  is an interesting theatremaker and journalist, and with the flapdoodle which The Crown deals out, it is salutary to see this bare- stage serious portrayal of some of the oiliest , craftiest, most disastrous journalistic flattery ever executed, and the naive BBC vanity that swallowed the hook.

.       The first half is almost a radio play, unadorned talk: we hear a clip of Charles’ admission of adultery to Dimbleby and then watch Tibu Fortes’ eerily lookalike Bashir visiting ,repeatedly,  the bored, anxiously self -absorbed and paranoid Princess. The equally oily Pandarus  and narrator is Paul Burrell. Yolanda Kettle gives a convincing Diana, though without the vivacity, and will not heed her only sensible friend Luciana – a composite I think of several – even when, reluctantly accepting that secret recording is happening, the wise friend urges Diana to be forgiving and reconciliatory, not  vengeful. 

      Maitland knew and worked with Bashir,  has felt – he says – the flattering ways himself, and  picked up from various sources nuggets about Diana. Like her multiple physical discarding of mobile phones once someone who displeased her had the number. It is quite painful to listen to Bashir’s flattery and outrageous lines about how he – as an Asian at the BBC – is a parallel victim  to her being a “sweet kid from Norfolk”  adrift in the Royal family: two outsiders.  Her constant worry about whether people are a bit tired of her is aggravated by Bashir’s forgeries and his firm agreement that she is spied on even by loyal Patrick Jephson and that  “they” are out to silence or kill her. When she hesitates,  he is a pure Mephistophiles murmuring that yes, he too had doubted  but “you have taught me about moral courage”. 

     There are moments of BBC excitement and hesitation, including the disgraceful shedding of the poor graphic artist who innocently forged evidence of her supposed betrayers being paid by he press. It rises to a  sense of urgency as producers fear that Marmaduke Hussey the BBC chairman will find out, and his wife a lady-in-waiting report it to the Queen.  Most of us probably know all this now, but it does no harm for a new generation to learn it.

         Near the end it is mooted that  there is a greater truth in imaginings such as this, and maybe there is. The stage- Bashir defends himself in the second, , often spookily impressionistic act where figures of hard truth and of “narrative” argue over what is real, and create a deliberate sense that maybe this interview, followed by the internet age, has crippled our ability to trust anyone, government, doctors, scientists, documentsrists.  But maybe, he says – as with artists like Picasso, Gill,Michael Jackson or I suppose Gary Glitter – , we should be less preoccupied with the flawed behaviour , and concentrate on the art or interview rather than the disgrace. “Be allowed to taste the healthy fruit of the poisoned tree”.   

   And that’s a whole other play, and question.

 BOx office parktheatre.co.uk to 25 nov

SCIENCE FANTASY AND HONEST EMOTION

       I don’t normally indulge in first-night anecdotes,  but feel I should mention that in the big wedding scene Joanna Woodward tossed her bouquet traditionally backwards right into the lap of the rather startled – and single – Chair of the Critics’ Circle Drama Section, next to me in Row L.  Shot!   But actually, this brand-new musical of Audrey Niffenegger’s romantic/sci-fi bestseller doesn’t need to woo anyone.    It is, slightly to the surprise of this old grump who suspects musicals riding on famous-movies and HBO series , triumphantly charming and emotionally fascinating. It is also very easy on the ear  (the music by Joss Stone and Dave Stewart is pop-rock with real heart).

          As for the plot, you may know it,  but if not here goes:    Henry  suffers from a unique genetic condition which makes him suddenly and inconveniently  vanish and travel in time, back and forwards, meeting important women in his life  – mother, wife, daughter – at different stages of their existence.   There are glitches of logic to make physicists cringe,  and the fact that he always turns up naked has both comic and slightly creepy potential,  but it does enable a wide, exploratory  emotional pattern.  There are fashionable themes:  childhood dreams and childhood trauma, misunderstanding and maturing through early life,   and the romantic female tendency to think you are questing for The One,  a perfect man you dreamed of as a child and teenager ,  the stranger you will feel  you always knew.  

         Thus the small child Clare meets Henry more than once, aged ten or so in a meadow (see what I mean about the nudity being potentially creepy, though he does find a rug to wrap up in). Then the teenage Clare is defended by him when another boy assaults her.  Later they meet in a library, she being older than he,   and she’s able to inform the alarmed young man  they are married ‘in the future”. An opening which  you’d think is enough to make any bloke dematerialize in urgent  search of an injunction.   Then we see them the same sort of age and happily married, but with his condition still persisting: which does for a moment make one wonder whether the whole thing is an artful plea for women to understand that   there are times when a husband will keep vanishing without notice or explanation   and return in need of clothes.

       It’s an oddity of a plot, but skilfully told, even for newcomers to the novel and film:  Lauren Gunderson’s book makes sure of its comprehensibility, as does the director Bill Buckhurst.   Anna Fleischle’s revolving design of walls becoming screens  enables some very neat illusion exits for David Hunter’s Henry.  Indeed the opening of the second half is a real wow, with puppetised flying and terrific lighting and projection design byAndrzej Goulding  .  

      A lot of the show’s charm depends on Woodward, who is an appealing presence, open-faced and intelligent, singing like a lark.    As the production has made it a bit of a feminist  mission to build the show more round her, an artist (lovely paper sculptures).  than just around the chronologically disabled Henry’s adventures, her personal appeal helps a lot. 

       So does the music, with a sincere  pop-ballad openness of emotion it would be hard to dislike,  though only  occasionally is a number really memorable.   The bass ones  are the strongest,  with some lovely moments from the side character Gomez ( Tim Mahendron)  and a really tremendous number between Henry and his grieving Dad (Ross Dawes) which makes your hair stand on end as the father, envious of his son’s trips into the past to hear his long-dead mother singing again,  cries “I see her”.  But all through you notice lyrics that may migrate and last long:  when Clare is getting fed up with her constantly disappearing husband she has fine pop lines like  “Treat me like a lover should / If you could change I know you would..” and he, husbandly, mourns “I can’t always be where I wanna be”.   So there’s  an interesting emotional line all the way through. And at the end,  something rare in a rom-com,  it acknowledges with real maturity not only mortality but extreme old age.  It’s a surprisingly grown-up show, and will find a lot of love from all age groups. 

Boxoffice apollotheatre.co.uk.  To 30 March 2024

AGATHA STRIKES AGAIN

      This is Extreme Agatha Christie, her most preposterous (and bestselling) plot and one of the most murderously morbid (NB the final moments of the staging are not for the very young, squeamish or easily triggered. Noose alert).   On the other hand director  Lucy Bailey, whose Witness For The Prosecution still runs at County Hall after 8 years, plunges into it with glee , and takes every advantage of its period absurdities. Likewise Mike Britton’s  staging – gauze curtains, a sloping shore, a storm, a collapsed chandelier and an alarming bearskin – leaves nothing to be desired for aficionadi of the genre. And it is certainly better than the Mousetrap.

  For we have here a Devon island, cut off by weather, to which a mysterious A.N.Owen has invited a disparate group of Christie characters – a judge, a doctor, a General, a policeman, an army Captain, a Colonial, a religiously judgmental old lady, and hired a slinky secretary in a backless gown and a housekeeper and maid. But Owen never turns up. Instead, after dinner a record is played on the brass-horned gramophone, solemnly accusing each of them of a past murder,  or causing a death. They’re all affronted by this unusual houseparty incivility, especially the upper-middle ones  (as they harrumphed indignantly, I suddenly wondered whether JB Priestley pinched the  idea for An Inspector Calls six years later).  They’re all going to be wiped out, we learn, as the “ten little soldier boys” ornament on the table counts down, one by one being smashed.

    So what we get in the first half is some magnificent best-of British character acting, notably from Katy Stephens as the cross crone, an increasingly dishevelled Lucy Tregear as the housekeeper and  above all Jeffery Kissoon as the General: he arrestingly becomes a sort of chorus as the accusation rouses his guilt and dementia before he is wiped out. All the deaths are appropriate to the children’s rhyme (early Agatha loved doing that, as in Sing a Song of Sixpence).   So naturally the survivors gradually accept their histories and explain why it wasn’t their fault, aided by some nice moody  shadowplay behind the gauze curtain.  And there are treasurably shocking period lines about sexual morality from the old lady and, from the colonial chap, the theory that killing “natives” is ok because they dont mind it the way we do. Oh, and a harrumph about That Man Hitler and how he may invade Poland.

    Bodies fall one by one, spookily rising again to stare at us and exit.  The second half, with ever fewer cast, has to deploy more angst and mutual suspicion, is more psychologically intense and hence flawed (Christie is no Ibsen). But  there is some magnificent overacting to enjoy, the bearskin incident is splendid, and when they all go doolally after a particular shock,  they do it in full 1930s disco with a red lightwash. 

    So there you are. Northampton’s fine Royal and Derngate was cheated of its producing premiere by RAAC, all sympathies. But the show is  touring the land determinedly snf is an elegant tribute to its period, done with gusto (and a bit too much nasty relish in the last two minutes). I rather enjoyed it. My more intellectual non-Christie companion didn’t, very much. But I tried to cheer her up by claiming it was an artfully postmodern and painfully topical  commentary on 1930s morality and Auden’s “low dishonest decade”.

      Not sure that worked. But you know what you’re getting with our Agatha, it’s a cracking good cast, both veterans and debutants, and such touring shows are , next to Weat End, blissfully affordable. 

https://andthentherewerenoneplay.com    For tour dates nationwide: Sheffield next.

Richmond till 4th, then almost everywhere till 13th April 2024