Monthly Archives: March 2024

CAMPUS RITES AND WRONGS

Sometimes, I do like a stage set you could cosily move right into.  Paul Farnsworth’s is a nice  evocation of a Harvard professor’s study: shelves and panelling and framed certificates,  and a leather chair redolent of five generations of chin-stroking academe and Democrat politics.   Oh, and there’s a model yacht: things will happen to that.

         The latter matters,  because the witty poster for Paul Grellong’s play, written in 2019  and suddenly even more topical on its European premiere,  has that same pointed sail with two black roundels added, making a Ku Klux Klan hood.  We learn in moments that Professor Charlie (Julian Ovenden) is running a symposium on extremism, and  has rashly invited some chap called Carver who is a white-supremacist Klansman of evil repute.  It’s all in the good cause of “taking his pants down” and exposing the monster’s absurdity in fearless debate.  Just as liberal academics always feel they can. 

       The students are in full no-platforming rage,  and the Dean (Tanya Franks) is furious with Charlie.  He argues back,  saying that “we need to face this threat, let light in” ,  and that you can’t give in to a “tribunal of triggered children”.  His old friend Baxter (Giles Terera, the last NT Othello)  now has a cool TV presence which Charlie rather resents, and turns up to   join in the protest at giving Carver a platform

      His ex-student Lucas , a PhD,  rolls in on his side though on his side,  though  quipping  “I hate hatred”,  and being a bit fed up and not getting tenure where he wanted it because of diversity.    Meanwhile a student,, Maggie, invites Charlie  to an “SSM”, a Safe Space Meeting,  with the protesters. She snarls “I don’t sit down with white supremacists” when it transpires Charlie has not only agreed a pre-meet with Carver at his gated compound in the woods, but is going to include cocktails and dinner with him, the fool.  Lucas agrees to go along too.   The professor murmurs “perhaps I need a disguise!’.  “Try a hood” says someone.   

     It’s a funny start:  sharp witty lines running through the familiar de-platform arguments ,  and you feel for a while that maybe you’re in a talky-talky Stoppardy philsophical piece.  But no:  just as the set itself intriguingly swivels and re-forms  to be a station platform, a favourite bar, later on the Dean’s home,  the story swivels too. And darkens.  And after the offstage catastrophe at its centre it offers a couple of flashback scenes which make  a lot of things clearer.    

        One occurs in the panelled study;  the other final one,  more alarming still, in a bar-room exchange of horrid emotional truths between Baxter and Michael Benz’s chillingly clever  Lucas (Michael Benz holds Lucas’ dual nature beautifully in balance : believed in him all the way).    So we see unveiled not only a certain hidden motive , but  the revelation that at least one white-skinned,  coastal-academic liberal with irreproachable modern views is no such thing. 

             There are domestic and professional undercurrents,  a brick through the window finishing off the sacred model yacht,  and offstage as usual the proof that words can prove lethal.     Maybe some of the plotting is a bit too pat,  but you leave with your preconceptions adjusted a bit,  and an uneasy sense that in the world of academia  nobody is ever quite  as sincere about anything as they smoothly seem.  

menierchocolatefactory.com    to 12 may

rating four

HOMAGE TO THE FIRST CELEBRITY DIVA  

     Last time theatre’s pre-Victorian glory days  – silk breeches, rowdy audiences and Garrickian hamming  – were celebrated on this stage was in 2015: in Mr Foote’s Other Leg by Sam Kelly, with a rumbustious Russell Beale. This time it’s a decade or so later: the century has turned with the final King George, and  actresses were becoming  respectable and idolized .  So we meet our heroine  Sarah Siddons  at her peak of female celebrity, recreated.  by April de Angelis and director Anna Mackmin from careful research and a wickedly sharp sense of our own time having seen an elephantine growth of that phenomenon. “How wretched is she” cries Mrs Siddons, as any celebrity might,   “who depends on the instability of public favour!”    Few could inhabit that personality better than Rachael Stirling: she gives with humour and reality a diva in a woman-thwarting society,  emotional and defiant and romantic and sharply funny,  a performer able to move between Shakespeare and melodramatic schlock with enough truth to carry it,  and tough enough to play grieving mothers while actually being one herself (two infant deaths, two lost daughters).   She had us from the very first moment before the curtains,  delivering that East-Lynne style line at a husband’s feet:   “Forget an adulterous wretch who will never  forget you” , swooning, and being  carried deadweight  to a chaise longue by her irritated co- star, manager and brother John Kemble.

        The play is a peculiar but constantly entertaining mixture of pastiche, theatrical in-jokes, feminist irony, mischief, absurdity and heartfelt reflections on the alchemy of dragging up yout real pain to transmit universal  emotional truths, audibly, across footlights to a paying public.  De Angelis uses the recorded facts of Siddons’ long career – by the time we meet her she is famous, painted by Lawrence, but afflicted with a spendthrift husband and no power,  operating in a scratchy  professional relationship with her  brother  Kemble who as actor-manager  of Drury Lane is perennially anxious about takings  – “I have to muddy my talent with business!”  He is also unwillingly aware that  she is not only the greater draw but the better actor. Dominic Rowan as Kemble gives it – in his “onstage” moments beyond the great swooping curtain – enough extreme volume and exaggerated hamming to shake the set’s  halftimbered roof .  His fancy leg-work is a treat, too: proper pre-Victorian dandyism.   It is important to him to be master, but at the same time he is jealous of the female star who always gets to do  all the suffering and win sympathy.

        But in Angelis’ flight of fancy – based in fact on a real woman playwright Siddons favoured but never got onstage – , along comes Joanna Baillie,  who has  creatied a sensitively suffering hero for him to howl through.  But she actually makes the hero’s sister the real power, to Siddons’ delight, for “what man has a notion of writing a woman with an aged above five and twenty or as a rational being?”

        It gets taken off on the second night.   Later, after doing a she-Hamlet in Ireland with some spirited swordplay, Siddons demands Joanna write her a female equivalent of Hamlet complete with “madness, grief, wit, love and fencing’.   Joanna concurs, promising that the heroine “goes mad, but not conveniently and quietly with herbs”.  It’s  a take on Ophelia I shall treasure forever as the male Hamlets rave on.  But meanwhile  there is  a real  abused young woman driven by marital cruelty to Bedlam – well,  never mind, it’s a sprawly plot. 

         But excellent fun, taking its element of bonnet-drama lightly, with brief narrative bits of  of selfdescription by  Siddons, in the third person as per stage directions,  and a few diva cries to keep us amused – “Tour??? I don’t like dressing-rooms with buckets or anywhere north of Birmingham” had the first night whooping. 

     The ensemble is fabulous, Anushka Chakravarti bustling around as a put-upon maid doing the job to avoid marriage to a missionary, and three others doubling and trebling beautifully as the rest of the anxious, labouring, maverick world of  theatre. Eva Feiler does some splendid gender shape-shifting from  scuttling anxious playwright to fugitive madwoman and various  chaps; Sadie Shimmin moves between lady censor in a terrifying black feather hat and a raunchy wench-comedy turn,   and Gareth Snook is among other things the oiliest drama critic of any century. 

      Larks, sharp ideas and a sense of considerable fun being had by all.  For,  as one of the silk-breeched cast in Kemble’s company wisely observes,  “The best way to survive in this business is to adore everything you’re in”.

      Having lately watched the superb Sheridan Smith’s brave online interviews praising   Ivo van Hove’s  production of Opening Night , that rang out as one of the perennial and useful truths of the trade.  

Box office. Hampsteadtheatre.com.  To 27 April 

Rating four

HOW TO WASTE A STELLAR CAST

      Sheridan Smith is not only a box-office draw  but a rare and genuine talent:  two decades a star  on screen and stage, musicals and drama:  phenomenally  hardworking (she flew off to make a TV series in Greece, complete with toddler, the day after her last curtain call in her sellout solo Shirley Valentine).   In 2016,  her father’s terminal illness during the run of Funny Girl (as usual, selling out) drove her into what she calls a  “meltdown”. She ran away briefly, got a number of tattoos, wanted to hide, thought she’d never get work again.  People talk about that a lot, though tending to forget that actually, she was rapidly back onstage and, moreover, did the whole national tour.   A trouper.

          This is relevant, because her one bad “moment”  is not unconnected to director Ivo Van Hove’s casting of her in this new musical by Rufus Wainwright,  based quite loosely by the director himself  on a film by John Cassavetes .  For it is  about a female star having a mental collapse on the eve of a big Broadway-bound opening, causing chaos, breaking the fourth wall, ad-libbing, drinking.   As Smith  blithely said to me in December,  “It’s about an actress having a crisis.   And that’s really facing, head-on, my past. You know?  Hopefully that’s what I can bring to it.”   As she does,  every time,  digging recklessly deep and bringing herself to a part 100%, whether as  Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic or Mrs Biggs on telly.  

        I have to say, sadly,  that Mr van Hove does not deserve his luck, either in his star or in the creepy frisson of people’s interest in her past.   The play, a platinum-plated example of  theatre vanishing  admiringly up its own backside, is a bit of a mess.  It claims in publicity to be an insight into the labour,  agony, tension and sturm-und-drang of making a big musical:  we are backstage and front,   watching a dressing-room mirror, in the wings and occasionally back in the director’s digs. EVeryone is surrounded by creeping cameras,  faces blasted up onto a huge overhead screen in case we miss some rictus of pain (this fashionable tech does, of course, also magnify the brow microphones:   something screen-crazed directors cannot admit to themselves). 

          In story Myrtle, the star, sees a  young girl fan killed on the road.  The distress of this unhinges her,  the ghostly kid appearing alongside her sometimes as support or a younger self,  sometimes as a malevolent haunting.  Sheridan Smith as ever throws herself into the pain (all the famous tattoos are  on show for once, which must be a relief since she has talked amusingly of the bore of covering them).  She manages to give the character an edge of ironic humour too, in soite of the lines. In one good song she says that in a theatre you  “make magic outta tragic”, which is amost lovely .  Anyway,   Myrtle is hyper,  and nervy.  This is not surprising,  given the  intensity of her director  (Hadley Fraser as Manny) who is neglecting his own wife (Amy Lennox)  in his obsession with the show.,  and the attitude of Maurice,  her leading man and former lover .    He is supposed to hit her,  and in a horrible sequence  she flinches away at every rehearsed attempt,  despite being gruffly told it’s “just fingers”.   The director furiously shouts “It is necessary to my  staging that you’re hit” .   The misogyny, and the director’s contempt for her “need to be loved..she is like all women, she seeks immortality” starts to grate more and more.

          Things are not helped by the fact that Myrtle, sensibly, doesn’t think much of the script,   feeling many lines hopelessly unlikely to be spoken by any woman. The playwright is  stroppy  Sarah (a wicked waste of Nicola Hughes)  who thinks she’s Ibsen reincarnated and must not be challenged, and  is always in the wings looking miserable and irritated (great singer, though).  Her obsession, like the men’s, seems to be to hammer home the idea that this is a menopausal woman who hates growing older, as women obviously do, being vain and vapid compared to heroic males.   More gold-plated woman-on-woman misogyny there,   and snarls from Sarah of “there must be some reason you cannot say my lines”.   The producer (played by John Marquez)  is a more kindly soul, but  to emphasise how very, very difficult and important musical-theatre is, compared to normal life and work,  he yowls “Underneath the pit of hell is a little heaven – why else do we do this, fly into darkness?”   

        Through all this Sheridan Smith is flawless, expressing every required frustration right up to the edge of a manically fighting-mad breakdown in leopardprint ,  involving  a curious battle with her now malign ghost Nancy and a standard lamp . And then, as in the original film,  there’s a sort of happy ending in which love pours out on both sides of the fourth wall and it doesn’t matter that the play has been changed by the diva.       It is a terrific cast, of course.  All of them sing wonderfully, though few of Wainwright’s numbers are memorable.  All of them efficiently do as the director’s curiously sadistic vision requires.   But it’s a pretty awful play.   And it would be good if one day, someone firmly  took away van Hove’s tech toybox and asked him to try just telling us a story. One that we’d believe and be moved by, ideally without benefit of onstage cameras and screens.  He did it in 2014 with a brilliant, starkly set  A View from the Bridge, after all.

gielgudtheatre.co.uk  to 27 July

rating two.

MAGIC . ALWAYS BETTER WHEN DISASTROUS.  

       God bless Mischief Theatre.  Eleven years ago this coming May I saw THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG in the tiny downstairs space at Trafalgar Studios (upstairs, a dour Macbeth was giving way to Pinter).    It was  fresh in from the Old Red Lion,  where its creators,  Henry Shields , Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer began their fringe career.     I am happy to say that my Times review drew producer Kenny Wax to drop in,  and notice that their anarchic student-revue wit was , a rare thing, balanced by exceptional and perfectionist discipline. 

        That set in motion a decade of success and awards,  up West and on tour (the original is still at the Duchess,  Peter Pan Goes Wrong touring the land after Broadway).  They have brought much joy.  It’s the theatrical immediacy that does it: interestingly, their TV versions don’t quite do it, polished as they are. This is life done live and dangerous, as it should be, and as an early-adopter Mischievite I am proud.

       Now – after their Magic-goes-Wrong collaboration with veterans Penn & Teller,  here’s Henry Lewis centre stage in the role of a wannabe Derren Brown, a big bearded figure of genial ambition  fresh out of divorce, having an ill-advised crack at being heir to the great music-hall magic acts,  and getting it wrong, Tommy-Cooper style.   Spooky announcements precede him, audiences put secret words in glass bowls, and overhead is a multiply locked secure safe  (“suspended till further notice, as I am from the Magic Circle”). 

      Lewis is immediately funny,  noisily cheerful , portraying a man attempting authority with an undertow of desperation. He boasts of a coming Vegas tour under his manager “Bob Kojak” (of whom we learn more later) and claims membership of an important online chatroom for “high profile men on low incomes”.    The two-hour riot of a show is partly very gifted standup – there’s brilliant audience manipulation without humiliation ,  everyone delighted to be drawn in –  and partly proper theatricality, exaggerated projections and tricks,  and a running joke of his inability to get the sound-effects right.  The joy of it though is that sometimes the mind-reading is brilliantly lucky and sometimes the deft tricks work – he can do the old newspaper ripping one, though all the headlines in it are about how terrible his act is.  But often they don’t.  There’s a very British satisfaction in that.    

     He plays with obviousness.   His “guess what colour I am thinking of”  is backed by a bright orange screen and the first audience member to come up is in fact Jonathan Sayer, a slight, geeky figure unwisely clad in a T shirt saying AUDIENCE MEMBER, later ANOTHER AUDENCE MEMBER.   Everyone by now is giggling helplessly (it hardly needs the sudden giant squirrel).   He moves on to parodic versions of every old chestnut:  the secret word revealed,  the ’30s style scientific woo-woo of brains in jars playing chess, a couple of quickfire alleged miracles,  a ’20’s style ouija-board session with Sayers,  and some Uri Geller attempted spoon-bending – now that DOES become proper theatre . There’s even a radio mind-reading device pleasingly insulting the audience as we appear on the big screen. 

         We just kept on laughing, my millennial companion and I and some 700 hundred others, just as I did nearly eleven years ago when Mischief first flowered.   That’s valuable, more than ever after the Covid years.  MIschief  have done the state some service,  and we know it.   Here’s to them. 

box office    theapollotheatre.co.uk to 28th April      from 22.50

rating four

KIDS WITH A KICK IN THEM

       There’s been an interlockof themes in theatre lately: DEAR ENGLAND at the NT displaying Gareth Southgate’s work in fostering the openness and emotional expression of  topflight footballers (43% of whom are of black heritage and most of working class).  Meanwhile we had FOR BLACK BOYS brilliantly educating the rest of us in what it’s like to be a lad of African heritage in a white majority culture ,    and how annoyingly you are seen,  your nice warm hoodie constantly identified with villainy.    

     And now, after selling out at the Bush, the newest glitzy in-the-round theatre welcomes Tyrrell Williams’ short and lively three-hander about the teenage seedcorn of top football:   three lads kicking around on a Pitch near the Elephant in Southwark while it – and every bit of their familiar ‘endz’ – is under the shadow of  destructions ,rehousings and urban renewal.   And like Dear England and For Black Boys, it is less about the intricacies and triumphs of football – or even society – than about male teenage masculinity.  It’s about  vigour and banter and ambition and the hidden tenderness of boys,  and the precious fragility of friendship.

       Daniel Bailey’s direction – and his cast – are vigorous, skilled and constantly exciting.    Pitchside, we watch Omz and Bilal and Joey before the start wandering in foe kickabouts, header teicks and keepy-uppy to the sound of deafening rap.     Under way we watch them bantering, teasing (especially Joey ), showing off magnificently and growing  increasingly on edge about the coming trials fot the QPR under-18s.      The three characters are delicately delineated:   Kedar Williams-Stirling is Bilal,  a thoughtful ironic tease,   FRancis Lovehall is Omz, who looks after his Grandad (anxious phone call about something wrong with the boiler switch)  and Emeka Sesay is tall, strong, sweet-natured Joey who always gets put in goal on their practice sessions on the beloved Red Pitch. 

          Occasional surreal sequences of lights and roaring  crowd sounds emphasise their individual dreams – Joey’s save in goal memorable, the others shooting snd scoring in glorious dreams.  Edges of concern emerge about the ‘Endz” , the neighbourhood,  a favourite chicken shop closing snd others boarded up, threats of family moves (“where IS Kent?” an at one point a horrified reaction to the idea of ending up far away near Liverpool St statin – “YOu’ll come back? To red pitch?”) . 

    It’s a chimera, the football fortune-seeking.   Joey at one point lectures them all about  having a plan B if they don’t become Premiership players:  he’s doing business studies, Bilal is a maths whiz,  Omz into art and design.  But when you’re barely seventeen you don’t think that way .  

        Its spectacular to watch often, choreographed with reckless balletic vigour – we often gasp – and the three are immensely likeable.  There are plenty of laughs, though the argot is strong and anyone who doesn’t hang out with south-London estate teens much will miss some lines.   The drama itself is slow to build, but does so,  to a terrifyingly graphic collision and fight (I am glad to see there are two understudies, this 90-minute performance as stressful as a match).  We await the result of the trials alongside them,  share moments of remorse (“Shouldna gone to that party” “You’re SUPPOSED to have fun when you’re young!”) .   

          When Joey turns up for a farewell game and says to the others,  who weren’t selected,  “If it wasn’t for you, man, I wouldn”t have got in”.   No dishonest machismo:  formally untrained, he had told the surprised selectors “I kicked ball with my boys”.  Lump in the throat.  \

sohoplace.org   to 10 May

rating 4 

HOPE, HEART, HARDSHIP

   Brian Friel’s 1979 remarkable play stands on its own, offering a kind of depressive beauty: beneath the story of one ramshackle troubled couple it is a meditation on many universal human  griefs and glories, losses and absurdities.  The shape is dramatically brave (it wasn’t by any means instantly applauded)  because it consists of four monologues by three characters,  the first and last from the eponymous hero himself.  Thus, the writing being Friel-brilliant,  it needs to be held up by three remarkable performances.  It’s almost tightrope-walking.

          And that is no bad image, because Frank Hardy,  who wanders onto the bare stage  beneath a tattered and much-travelled banner , offers a form of showbiz performance along the Celtic fringes of Scotland, Wales and his native Ireland as a healer.  As we meet him he is murmuring a string of names “Aberader,  Aberayron,. Llangranog, Llangurig,. Abergorlech, Abergynolwyn ,Aberporth…”  an incantation of rootless travel which he has used to calm himself. All three of the characters at times fall into this, a kind of lonely chorus.  Before him in poor village halls have come the crippled and the deaf, the maimed and the barren and the blind. His manager Teddy, he tells us,  always plays “The Way You Look Tonight”, to soothe or confuse them.  Sometimes, though, his healing works:  autosuggestion or miracle, he does not know,  but when it does work a great contentment moves through him, displacing his unease and guilt.  He speaks of his mistress and companion Grace  “from Scarborough” and of his parents’ deaths and his emotions, and at last retailing  a “restless and ritual” wild Irish pub night when he came home to Ballybeg.    And there is something that happened at remote Kinlochbervie in Sutherland. 

      But before the interval we see Grace, a woman in recovery from traumas which increasingly become clear. “I am getting stronger..” is her desperate refrain.   Nothing about her life and losses is simple: she describes a doctor’s brisk advice to use her knowledge and sophistication – she was once a solicitor – to control her feelings. “He meant so well. It is so simple for him”.  What is also clear is how much of Frank’s account has been lies, fantastic self-serving adjustments of truth;  she is not even from Scarborough, but Irish like him.  Why would he lie so much?  We learn how hard her life has been since in the words of her estranged father the Judge, “she ran off with a mountebank”.   We gather Frank is now dead and learn more of that last pub night but also of the quality she saw sometimes in Frank : something she calls “magnificence”.

     At this point let me say that Justine Mitchell’s performance is extraordinary, electric, unforgettable;  starting on a chair with a drink until she rises, her vast emotion filling the house, taking our breath.  This is when the evening catches light, because Conlon’s opening –  skilled and subtle as it was –  felt distractingly like a screen performance:   muttered asides for some unseen camera,  oddly unprojected.  That wouldn’t work  if you hadn’t known the play’s text:  the only flaw in Rachel O”Riordan’s production. 

      After the interval Nick Holder storms through the third version of their travelling lives:  he is magnificent as Teddy the manager, a big cockney getting through bottle after bottle of beer,  shaking his head at the stupidity and immensity of talents down the years from Olivier to Houdini,   rousing laughs with his performing-dog stories and the long ago stardom of his client Miss Mulato and Her 120 Pigeons,  aka Bridget O’Donnell.   But he was there through the tragedy,  the birth, loss and field-edge burial of her baby at Kinlochbervie.  And about the ending of the pub night. As his bonhomie fades into sorrow and love and exasperation, and the last of the bottles clatter into the bin in desolation,   Holder too rises to unforgettable levels.  Then we are back, in the final monologue,  with Frank himself,  and a dying fall.  

        The play is  remarkable,  saying much about performance, charisma, self-deception and helpless anger. Its birth in the worst of Ireland’s ‘troubles’ years is always spoken of as important in Friel’s history and thought.  But like Shakespeare he always throws out many different tendrils of understanding. So seeing it now, it seemed to me to speak more powerfully though of women: of  the painful disaster of loving female tolerance.  Justine Mitchell is remarkable, as is Nick Holder; Conlon may be so yet, growing more powerfully present as the season goes on. 

        One other point:  the sound design by Anna Clock is also remarkable: you’re hardly aware of it but it is affecting you, every minute. As it should do.  

 Lyric.co.uk to 13 April

Rating 4 

RO$$INI BONANZA!  Guest reviewer Dean Thompson finds much in a small space…

Opera lovers or new to opera will love this!  So, get on your horse and gallop over to see Charles Court Opera’s cowboy without a dime, but a goldmine for a voice! Over the years I have seen countless productions that have played it safe in terms of setting, costumes and characters.  Rossini’s comedic musical genius makes it so easy to get laughs, so why mend what isn’t broken?  So in this production, director John Sauvournin takes a risk in setting this production in the Wild West, and strikes gold over and over again with extra laughs thanks to the sparklingly brilliant translation by Musical Director David Eaton, who is also the tour de force saloon bar pianist (complete with cowboy hat) doing the job of what would normally be a whole orchestra.  If Champagne (or perhaps rotgut whisky) could sing, this is what it would sound like.  

One of the many reasons I think this flawless production works so well is because of its excellent cast of singers; every word is sung so precisely and clearly that the meaning is never lost.  The narrative flows beautifully from one wild, perfectly timed caper to another, laugh after laugh, ‘everybody in motion – madness,’ as I heard one audience member behind me comment during the interval on the Act I finale. 

Rossini was a bel canto composer, the style of early 19th century Italy characterised by beautiful, long flowing melodic lines as singers glide effortlessly up and down the musical scale.  It is difficult to do well, requires a god-given voice with years of dedicated training, flawless technique and endless hours of practice for evenness of tone and phrasing.

The performers have a wonderful rapport with the audience.  The stage is set with a Wild West saloon bar entrance complete with swinging doors.  Lower down, almost in the audience is a table where outlaws and cowboys can get down to some heavy drinking and gambling, or in this case flirting and plotting.

The production features fantastic comedic overacting with brilliant facial expression, and because there are no bad seats in the theatre, we clearly see all the action and subtle stolen flirtatious smile between Almaviva and Rosina, and sarcastic, mocking grin in the direction of her foolish guardian, Bartolo and his accomplice, Don Basilio.

The supremely confident title character Figaro, ubiquitous barber and matchmaker, performed by New Zealand baritone Jonathan Eyers,, sings his fast paced and energetic arias with manly voice with precision and great acting skill.

Handsome young aristocrat Count Almaviva, played by Anglo-Irish tenor Joseph Doody, will never be single for long once he sings ; it certainly worked on Rosina, hilariously acted with beautiful flowing tones and knowing facial expressions by British mezzo-soprano, Meriel Cunningham.

Ellie Laugharne as Berta is like a fusion of the late Dame Edna Everage and Dolly Parton, ribbing the front row of the audience about the trials and tribulations of searching for love at a certain age but with cowgirl panache.

Box office www.wiltons.org.uk to 23^rd March

Tickets from £12.50 (£10 with concessions)

Rating 5

A CELLULOID INVASION

  This  was at first a startling choice:  Eastern Angles’ tradition is generally, as it heroically tours night-by-night across the eastern counties,   to programme plays about our region, past or present.    But here’s its new CEO Jake Smith picking up this quirky little modern classic by Marie Jones,  set a long way west.  In it  two players evoke a moment when a major film company is shooting in rural County Kerry.     But why not?   our own rural counties have had their fair share of similar unsettling, thrilling invasions (the last Curtis one round Gorleston way) ,  so it has enough to say to us as well. And nice to launch it in Oscars week..

         At its centre are two local lads,  enrolled in a big gang of turf-cutting extras at a very welcome £ 40 a day,  willing for that to put on special “dispossessed” faces or gaze in awe at the hero on his horse,  as represented by the floor manager holding up a hand at the correct eyeline.     Charlie (Lorcan Strain) is  recovering from his video-shop’s business failure, and clutching his own film script treatment which he vainly hopes to thrust on the visiting director. .   Jake (Cathal Ryan)   is back from trying for a better life in America. 

         Between them, in front of some beautiful simply evoked projections sketching interiors or distant Blasket Islands by Amy Watts,     the pair neatly move between other characters –  director,  bossy floor manager, other villagers,  the poutingly glamorous female star . They adjust  the odd hat or garment, switching often almost within a sentence.  

        Ryan from Tipperary most memorably becomes bent old Mickey,  keen on the drink and anxious everyone should remember he’s a seasoned extra, the last surviving one from “The Quiet Man”, (John Wayne once spoke to him, he insists) .  Strain , a seasoned drag artist from Donegal,  evokes the gormless optimist Charlie splendidly but has most fun in his moments as Caroline di Giovanni,  the star. She picks up Jake in the pub and has,  the crew murmur,  “a habit of going..er..ethnic” in her relationships.    At one stage Jake is summoned to her Winnebago to find her standing yogically on her head.   Both performers are good comedians and mostly the demanding character-switches are fast and clear:  this was the start of the tour and they will only become even more so.   They also perform a startlingly spirited Irish dance at one point.   

           But it is when the tragedy inside the comedy flowers that the play properly grips. A younger lad, Sean (briefly evoked, drunk and angry) tries to get an extra part and is not only turned down but snubbed and removed from the pub for “bothering” the star.  “Kicked outta the pub in his own town”.   He is it who after this reportedly fills his pockets with stones and walks into the lake.  Briefly the  film crew, anxious about light and timing and costs,  even try to stop the extras from going to the funeral.  The sense of outrageously unbalanced, invasive power is harsh.  And when Charlie and Jake start wondering how this real story could and should be told,  there’s a redemptive heart to the play’s ending.Though as the haughty director observes,  turning down Charlie’s earlier script,    “People don’t go to the movies to get depressed. That’s what the theatre’s for”. 

      One of those ironic  in-jokes every audience of this play  enjoys.  Every time.  We certainly did. 

TOURING: halls to 18th May:  4 nights in Ipswich Sir John Mills in early May, but a good spread across the region. 

DATES –  see easternangles.co.uk    As ever, the Angles are awarded a touring mouse alongside raw .. it’s tough going, the one-night village hall circuit, the regime Shakespeare trained on, and few theatre companies achieve it..

rating. 4

BOARDROOM BEASTS

    This may break all records for the smartest costumes ever at the Southwark’s smallest space: six irreproachable business suits, including two sets of tweed-chic female tailoring on Natalie Lauren . She is the only woman in this over-declamatory boardroom drama by Farine Clarke. It  met approval on the pub theatre circuit and does, in a tiny way, after  the end of Succession fill the liberal aesthete’s innate need to watch horrible   very highly paid corporate directors ripping each others’ guts out.

     . Though this time its without the family element: the giant UKNNG  newspaper company is trying to acquire a surprisingly successful and even profitable smaller paper,   in order  (in the villains’ plan) to asset-strip it , sack much editorial staff, and ruin its  integrity for a profit.   Arabella admires it and wanted the merger; she says “Editors used to rule here too, fight like hell for editorial independence”.  Christian shudders at the very idea.  He also makes it clear that her concern for staff morale in a time of mass redundancy is `”an HR driven girly approach” and sneers at Charlie  the finance director for being “a girl” before taking him to an all-male club to seduce his loyalty. 

     The play is a bit weakened by being set around the millennium, so the characters  are looking ahead nervously to the age of “everything migrating to the web” including ad revenue.    Now they would be crunching through podcast, paywall , TV  and Times Radio statistics.

            Also, when Arabella is admired for knowing about this new subliterate Japanese thing calles emojis – “like learning to read in reverse” it dates it a bit too hard.   And that’s a shame, because Clarke  is – though often far  too discursively as the characters engage – offering some nice sharp takes on both complex racism and the misogyny that hires women as tokens and doesnt listen to them across the table. 

       Simon Furness’ nicely depicted Charlie the bean-counter  is essentially decent,  but constantly forced by the shouty American chairman to produce a better lot of figures by sharp practice and sackings.   Salem the rising Asian on the board  – a brooding Anirban Roy – is a creepy piece of work, briefly seen as proud  of his rise to the  British  polo-playing establishment from an Indian childhood,  but openly racist in  contempt for the African-heritage black and principled owner of the targeted newspaper – Odimegwu Okoye. Christian (Harris Vaughan) , the nastiest of them all, is baffled by this difference since he reckons Salem is “halfway there himself”.  We dont  often get portraits of inter-BAME racism, so it’s interesting.  So is Christian’s cod-psychological speech about successful women having broken childhoods (though I suppose that scene is there to push Arabella over the edge) .

       The title by the way comes from Regents Park in London. Here as in any boardroom there is  a wide outer circle and ain inner one: the question arises of where rhe mosque is , and where “the zoo with the monkeys”. A properly amusing metaphor.      But the distinction between goodies and baddies is too sharply simplistic, and the surprise black-comedy resolution in the very short second act more startling than satisfying.    I suspect it would be a better play if the author was not also director:  it needs sharp trimming, some show-dont-tell in the characters’ various flaws.  But it was topical on a day when two 2024 news groups were rumoured to be bidding for the Telegraph in the UAE takeover threat.  The rating below doesn’t  mean its not worth doing, and Clarke aims at some good targets. . But it misses a lot of chances.

southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. to 30 March

A FRESH CAST, ONE YEAR ON 

Can it really be a whole year since, with theatre still gallantly recovering from Covid, Nicholas Hytner rolled the dice and opted to offer us some razzle dazzle?  This glorious revival of the classic Loesser-Swerling-Burrows musical of Damon Runyan roguery turned his playhouse into an escape hatch into 1940’s New York.  Hordes of promenaders have been shepherded night after night between rising and falling scenes and streets by amiable stage crew dressed as cops,   while trilbied lowlifes and furred and spangled women capered between and overhead,   and the missioners’ drum marched through them exhorting the gamblers to sin no more.  

        Above it all those of us in the galleries have watched with equal if less strenous joy and a good few come back again and again, noticing something new in Bunny Christie’s remarkable set every time:  an artfully unnoticeable arrival of new street furniture,  the suddenness of the switch to Cuba.  Or  it might be just a fresh gasp at the close ensemble drilling and sheer night-vision determination which enables the setting up and populating of a whole missionhall full of neatly arrnaged and occupied chairs , achieved during a blackout too brief to notice as a chord from the band fades. 

       Nobody has been surprised at its run extending:  the show is  a treasure, a blast, a night of crazy funny musical romance with defiant transgressiveness and real heart in two sets of wayward lovers.   Nobody has been the least surprised that it ran on and on.  It’s deserved it:  the production nimble to the edge of acrobatic, fast-moving, witty  and full of nerve and fun. 

          This week saw the formal launch of the latest new cast, and it is good to see that heart intact, and the important chemistry still there.   As Sarah the missionary Celinde Schoemaker  is glorious: quite apart from the lyrical beauty of her voice she proves to be a fearless and agile comedienne, swercing from righteousness into bacchanal revelry and a breatakingly choreograohed brawl  after she discovers Bacardi in Havana.   Timmika Ramsay’s Miss Adelaide is an equal joy, pneumatically irresistible in her big numbers and enchantingly plaintive as she pores over her new psychology book about frustrated singleness.    The new Nathan Detroit is Owain Arthur,  making it is own as a solid, hapless semi-competent  wheele-dealer:  George Ioannides as Sky Masterson is the smoothest lounge lizard to be found under any hat, but cracks into reformed virtue with boyish conviction.     And speak with reverence of Harry the Horse – Dashaun Vegas – hitting his big Siddown number like a runaway truck. 

         It matters that the principals are again excellent and well cast, but what matters more  a year on is that it is such a gloriously achieved ensemble show (and that includes the stage crew).  You don’t need to be a theatre economist to suspect that its warm  brilliance and deliberate joy , culminating in a party  atmosphere between promenaders and cast at the final curtain,  must have gone far to save this still-new theatre from the chilly financial wind. 

         But almost as importantly,  it has been in the capital – and among those who visit it – a powerful and reassuring affirmation of audience morale.  Nobody who has spun out happily onto the riverbank singing and laughing can maintain or endorse postCovid timidity about sharing delight , breathing together,  with crowds of strangers.  It’s a public service.  It’s still here. Till August, anyway.  Lucky London,  brave bright Bridge.

bridgetheatre.co.uk. to   24 August 

Rating … unchanged… all the fives there are.

PLANT FOOD PEOPLE FROM THE PAST

       I missed this first time round, due to the babysitting years, so it was grand to catch up. It’s a 1980’s  revival,  a spoof on  1960’s sci-fi horror movies,  with a lot of vigorous be-bop and early Motown.  And what could be more Britain 2024 than a skid-row set with roving drunks and dossers, and a chorus of three teenage girls bunking off school hanging around by the bins beside a small shop in the process of going bust?

         Inside the shop   Mr Mushnik  tells his staff it’s all over:  there’l be no job for orphan Seymour, and poor Audrey in her form-fitting leopardskin outfits is sporting a black eye from her loutish boyfriend (what dates this piece is that this, and her subsequent broken arm”from the handcuffs’ is treated as a bit of a joke).   Will she have  to go back to working the clubs in “cheap and nasty apparel”, and leave Seymout jobless?    But Seymour (a sweetly geeky Oliver Mawdsley)  has been tending a new kind of Venus flytrap, a flesh-eating plant. Perhaps if they put it in the window, people might come in?  They do. 

      Unfortunately,  the lad’s cut finger reveals that the only thing that makes it grow  – it leaps three sizes in the first half alone – is drops of human blood.  Before long he is  getting anaemic with the effort of keeping it going. But when you’ve got a really good  and very hyper villain – Matthew Ganley as Orin the sadistic leather-jacketed raving rockabilly dentist,  the plant’s first big snack is a no-brainer.  He falls to his  (nicely topical)  dangerous nitrous oxide sniffing habit and the plant becomes an instrument of natural justice , wiping out the dentist liberating Seymour to woo the golden-hearted Audrey.  

       By this time the plant is 8foot tall and a very messy eater:  credit to invisible puppetteer Matthew Heywood for good writhing , innards-sucking and flawless green lip-synch,  and a salute to the terrifying baritone of Anton Stephans (a man who has sung with both  Tina Turner  and Elton).  During the interval a set of screens goes up on the open stage, suggesting the happy certainty that the plant , named Audrey 2 by the besotted Seymour, may be even more enormous in the second half.  And so it befalls.

         The four co-producing theatres,  and director Lotte Wakeham,  do good honour to Howard Ashman’s gleefully ridiculous story, and even more to Alan Menken’s music.  I could, do be honest, have done without the doo-wop chorus of three girls, though  Chardai Shaw in particular is a grand belting voice. But Laura Jane Matthewson stops the show with Audrey’s plaintive dream about wanting a house and front garden “somewhere that’s green” . And her “Suddenly Seymour” duet with Mawdsley is actually properly moving,  though by this time the lad is becoming the Macbeth of horticulturalists,  seduced by agents and the promise of fame. It won’t end well for anyone.  Shrieks of glee meet every demise. And when in the last preview two stagehands had to nip on and sort out a  wobbly prop fridge,  the plant displayed showed a gift for meaningful upstaging gestures  which made us shriek even more.   Maybe not for under-7s, nervous horticulturalists or dentists who take offence easily. But otherwise a cheering night.

At New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich, to 23 March. 

Then TOURING, SEE BELOW

Rating 4 

TOURING

Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, 27 March–20 April; Octagon, Bolton, 24 April–18 May

 Hull Truck, 22 May–8 June.

A MAVERICK MINISTER  

      There’s another play to be written about Aneurin Bevan,  stubborn founder of the National Health Service: perhaps a more contentious one, or a fantasy in which the grit-hard, down-to-earth workaholic Welsh firebrand comes back as a ghost ,to confront the bureaucratic absurdities and clumsy scandals of the 21c giant.   But Tim Price’s play could never be that:  the NHS right now feels too precious, too fragile, and the only treatment of Bevan had to be affectionately hagiographic. Which means that we got an enjoyable play which asks and answers no questions beyond the fact  that as Bevan said, universal free healthcare was the most civilized idea a nation could have. 

      Michael Sheen was obvious casting – currently another of his hairy, furiously-Anglohobe- Welsh-hero roles is running on BBC1, entertainingly enraging the Daily Mail critic. Here he deploys his familiar magnetic watchability,  no small achievement when wearing a colourful pyjama suit throughout. For we meet “Nye” first in hospital, not yet knowing that he is dying, tended fondly by adoring nurses and his wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small is wonderful, and I next want a whole play about her spell as Arts minister).   Around him the hospital-green curtains of Vicki Mortimer’s clever design rise and fall, to be everything from childhood to the Commons and a coalmine.  We see him struggling in school against his stammer, falling on the device of changing words to avoid hard consonants;  thrilled by a free library,  rebuked for spending too litttle time with his own dying father, and earlier being taken down the mine to see the marvel of a seam (this is beautifully staged, mysterious, deeply respectful of that grim old trade). 

      We see him as a troublemaker in the wartime Parliament, roaring at the despised Winston Churchill, persuaded only with difficulty to join the “truce” with an Aye vote,  to get America in by displaying commie-free British unity.  The best moments are his interactions with Clement Attlee (Stephanie Jacob) whose elusive genius  is wittily shown as he glides around on a desk or suddenlly appears at the top of a pyramid. A wrestling-match with the reluctant  Herbert Morrison is fun too. And Mortimer and director Rufus Norris give us two wonderful coups de theatre with projection: once when `Nye sees and hears illimitable crowds of anxious patients reaching out,  then again when a phalanx of masked doctors defies him.  Thir resistance to becoming a state employee featured strongly in the recent The Human Body (scroll down for Donmar review).  It is well done here, albeit without the sympathy the earlier play briefly allowed it by reminding us that many – not all – of those doctors already ran highly philanthropic services for their local poor, and that it was state control that worried them. 

           Interestingly,  Price does not use two of Bevan’s most familiar quotes at all: “we stuffed their mouths with gold” about consultants,  or the one about Tories being lower than vermin. Having looked those two lines up to check, I notice that there are pages more of fantastic, rude, furious Bevan rhetoric he could also have used. Maybe another time.  Or give Sheen a one man show, in proper clothes,  to deliver them all.  I’d go. 

      But for now, it’s a workmanlike history play at a time of anxiety about the great service itself.  In the final moments the dying man is embraced and lifted by doctors and nurses towards his father’s miner’s lamp, and then statistics come up to remind us how fast mortality declined after the NHS was born.   

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 11 may. 

Then Wales Millenium Centre 18 May-1 June

Rating 3 

ONCE BRITTEN TWICE SHY?

   The late David Hemmings, one of Britten’s mentored, worshipped boy sopranos, was unforgettable aged 12  as the original MIles in the composer’s  terrifying opera of corrupting ghosts and childhood innocence, THE TURN OF THE SCREW.  Hemmings  told me with a laugh, years later, that yes ,Ben was besotted and he stayed in the house and once in the bed but no, nothing untward happened, and never would have. Not least, said the adult drily, because Peter Pears kept a very tight eye on them. “He knew I was a naughty boy..curious”. He was generous about the whole glamorous and artistic experience, though it is public knowledge  that the composer blanked him when his voice broke and his star run ended.

      I was away for this King’s Head plays opening,  but its worth catching up to alert you in its final week. And after the RSC’ s BEN AND IMO (scroll down for review).  it wasirresistible. For the action of Kevin Kelly’s well-researched piece takes place a year or so after the other play and the fraught year of composing Gloriana, th deal with that difficult, creative obsession of Britten’s and the alarm of those around him – Pears, Holst, and Jonathan Clarkson as the director Basil.  At one point the composer screams that he and “Miles” will be together forever, conflating the boy with his hero and those sinister notes “Malo..Malo..”, and indentifying Pears with Peter Quint ,the ghostly villain who lures the innocent child.  At another there is a nightmare sequence when he dreams that a hanging judge is condemning him for the terrible sin , sodomy, “not to be spoken among Christians” as the terrible old law put it.   His partnership with Pears was still illegal, and men had reason for such terrors still.

       Yet it is a thoughtful, rather than sensationalist play. Gary Tushaw’s Britten catches the man’s  vulnerable petulance and anxious perfctionism, sliding into hysterical unreason in the heat of creativity. Even better, Simon Willmont’s brings Pears a solid decent dignity: the quality very  striking when the kid rounds on him, with jeers about Leicester Square lavatory pickups and dirty “homos”. Musical moments are integrated well, notably when poor Pears sings “the foggy dew” while  mentor and boy have gone night swimming alone.

    .  The whole is book-ended by first person narration by Liam Watson as Hemmings;  my only quibble being that he ends the show with a mawkish yearning back, long after Britten’s death,  wanting to be reassured that he did well. More interesting would be to acknowledge that his career as actor and director, and singer in his own right went on, and flourished for fifty more years. That Aldeburgh interlude was only a moment. But it was a remarkable one, and part of a troubled artistic and social history. Both shows are worth seeing, but hurry for this one..

Kingsheadtheatre.com to 10 march

THE WINDRUSH WARRIORS

      Moses’  crowded bedsit  is where the new ones turn up off the boat train, wanting to know how to do London;  he can tell them names like Clapham -“not Clap-farm!” and Notting Hill,  and make it clear that it is not paved with gold, “you had better mind yourself! Or this London City will eat you alive, swallow you up whole”. It’s a weary job,  putting them right,  especially when like “Galahad” they’re so clueless they didn’t even know to bring duty-free cigarettes and rum with them, and have no luggage – “no sense to load myself with a lot of things, when I start work I will buy things”.  The more experienced men shake their heads:  “City” is a ticket hustler,  Lewis hating his menial jobs and darkly suspicious of his wife, who is settling rather better.  

      Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel about his Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants to London is a modern classic:  easy to see why Roy Williams, clear-eyed chronicler of a later generation,  wanted to make a play of it.   But the book is a plotless collection of individual stories – sharp portraits,  honest chronicles of  struggle and rejection and confusion – and drama needs a plot, a rising tension to anchor it.  Ebenezer Bambgoye’s direction  does its best to make it theatrical, offering surreal, beautifully choreographed moments expressive of the men’s experience,  and brief yearning musical flashbacks to Moses’ decision back in Trinidad to leave his pregnant girlfriend.   But the most an audience gets – and to be fair,  it is not nothing – is immersion in their world: empathy.   On a side wall there are three props pinned – a gun, a knife, a hipflask, and any tension comes from wondering which of them will be driven to which  by bafflement, homesickness,  the crush of failure to find work or the temptation of felony?  All three are picked up one point; all three do go back.

      Gamba Cole is thoughtfully, gently likeable as Moses,  Gilbert Kyem Jnr gives us “City” as a towering but likeable fool,  Romario Simpson’S Galahad, the newcomer , suffers the most agonizing self hatred after a fight, staring furiously at his arms, raging against his body.  “Why the hell coldnt we be blue, or red, or gree, if we can’t be wrhite? Why did we have to be black? We have done nothing to upset these people..So black and innocent and yet its causing nothing but misery, this black!  I hate it!”.   He wants to go home.  

   Moments like that are full of life and reality:  what stands out strongly is how much it was a world of men. The women are more scarce, but here shown as doing rather better. Lewis’ wife  Agnes (an impressive Shannon Hayes) is carefully learning to sound more English with tongue=twisters,  recruiting Carol Moses as “Tanty`”,  her mother-in-law,  to the effort.  Tanty is a delight, explaining to a reporter that she dissuades others in Trinidad for coming to England “Over there it so cold, only white people do live there and demn rude. No offence”.  But she tells her son “This is your country now, if something dont fit, make changes!”    But after a wonderful scene upbraiding a greengrocer for trying to cheat her with old vegetables, the wife Agnes returns to report with pride that he ended up smiling at her,   and Lewis immediately falls into Othello-level rage – “What reason you give him to smile?”.  

    Indeed the most overwhelming effect of the play is to emphasise a cramped maleness – not unfamiliar in some of our new wave of immigrants today –  which brings with it a fiery anger,  a sex-starved itch of desire, aggression and contempt, and anequally male weight of shame at failure and poverty. Lewis, knowing he is disintegrating,  says “Its like I am a different person here!!”  Moses is jacked off at a prosperous Polish restaurateur of an earlier wave of immigrants  – “We are British subjects , he the foreigner!”.  His response, though, is a resigned withdrawal from his situation,alleviated by his weary care of the newcomers.

          So great moments.  But perhaps to compensate for the exigous plot , and the too-rare use of Sevon’s lyrical passages,  the effect is almost ceaselessly one-note shouty.  Culturally appropriate  perhaps (I lived in 1971 Notting Hill long before it was posh, and the male-voice decibel level was high),  but tiring  over 105-minutes.   It’s a tribute tohistory, and to a group of pioneering immigrants,   vital to remember and love.  But as drama  it is not the next Roy Williams triumph we were hoping for.  

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 6 April  

GUEST REVIEWER AND OPERABUFF DEAN THOMPSON LOVES ENO’S LATEST

Ingenious – Dazzling – Hilarious!

If you haven’t seen The Magic Flute before, then this is the one to see; if you have seen it a hundred times before, then you should still go and see it as this is such an ingenious production, it is like seeing a new opera.  It is a brilliantly funny, thought provoking interpretation using projection, live sound effects and orchestra participation in the action in Simon McBurney’s fabulous production under the direction of Revival Director Rachael Hewer.  It is performed by an all-star cast of home grown and international talent.  The elegant translation of Schikaneder’s libretto is by Stephen Jeffreys.

The story begins as handsome and single Prince Tamino finds himself in a strange land being pursued by a deadly serpent.  Along stumbles bird catcher Papageno, who unable to save him stands by whilst the job is done by The Three Ladies, servants of The Queen of the Night, whom you might say has a few anger issues, justifiable some might say.  As soon as Tamino awakes from his trauma, the ladies show him a picture of the Queen’s daughter Pamina, with whom he instantly falls hopelessly in love. 

The music is precisely and beautifully conducted by German-born conductor Erina Yashima with the orchestra elevated to stage level which for me creates a friendly rapport, almost like being in the pub with them as they oblige fellow patrons with a tune.  To the left and right of the stage are two curious boxes which look almost as though they could be furnished with the contents of a man cave.  However, it soon becomes clear that these are all part of the ingenuity of the production.  On the left, video artist Ben Thompson’s box of tricks, with which he supports the narrative and gets laugh after laugh with projected text, sketches on a chalk tablet and images using various objects onto the stage.  On the right, Foley artist Ruth Sullivan creates live sound effects, performed with a cheeky smile as she interacts with the singers.  She even bashes out the introduction to Papageno’s Act II aria on wine bottles!

American tenor Norman Reinhardt as the almost too good to be true prince next door, captures everyone’s heart with his suave and unassuming demeanour as Prince Tamino and his gloriously heroic high notes and beautiful phrasing.

American soprano Rainelle Krause majestically delivers the Queen of the Night’s dazzling arias, mesmerising Tamino in the first act and terrifying her daughter in the second with her murderous rage, sending her on an errand to kill her adopted dad!  Krause’s performance is stunning, singing both arias with her powerful trademark laser precision, colouring her top notes with a beautifully rounded and perfectly controlled vibrato.

Pathos, joy and hope in the form of Pamina, the Queen’s daughter, is sung with serene beauty and gracefully acted by British soprano Sarah Tynan. 

Peter Hoare sings brilliantly as Monostatos, declaring his unwanted love for Pamina giving everyone a laugh with his comic dance routine to Papageno’s magical bells.

Beware ladies, of the outrageously flirtatious and somewhat desperate singleton bird catcher, Papageno, performed by British baritone David Stout who sings and acts hilariously with his stupendous rolling tones.  In Act II his desperation to find a wife leads him into the auditorium and shy he is not in his absolute determination.  He flirts with, by the look on her face (projected onto the stage) an unsuspecting lady, and then writes his mobile number on the projected chalkboard.  I wonder how their first date will go?  Well, Papageno’s impromptu flirtation does not put off his equally eager future bride, Papagena, Australian soprano Alexandra Oomens, who sings beautifully and acts (in the auditorium of course – where else?) with a crafty comic sparkle in her eye.

The whole show is grounded by the heavenly voice of Canadian bass John Relyea as the steady and wise Sarastro. 

Box office www.eno.org to 30^th March

Tickets from £10 (under 21s go free – see website for details)

Rating 5

CORONATION, COMMISSION, COLLABORATION

           You need not be a selfish pig to be an artist of genius,  but there’s no question that it often helps.  Occurs, anyway.  In Mark Ravenhill’s exhilarating two-hander  Benjamin Britten knows his own habit, one recognizable to many who worked with him (not least the young boy stars, mentored then dismissed) .   “I find a person, enchant the person. Pull the person in closer, until they’re in love with me. ..”I think often I’m in love with them back. Then one day suddenly I despise them. Their weakness in being easily enchanted. I try to push them away. they’re too deep in. So I draw on my cruelty..break them..”.

       “You won’t get me”says Imogen Holst lightly, arriving as his “musical assistant” for the absurdly short nine-month deadline in which he must write the opera “Gloriana” about Elizabeth I for Queen Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation.  But we know she will be “got” , for all her bravura and brilliance.  She is too generous, too respectful of the reality of his gift,  not to be made vulnerable.  Holst was a blithe and lovely figure in her own right,   who expertly supported her famous father Gustav for years and now in her forties had turned to educating amateurs, forming community choirs, collecting folksong,  spreading music.  But there was no room for another important figure  in the 39-year-old Britten’s universe: nervously ambitious,  tasked to do a national “duty” in this “new Elizabethan” age he was both flattered and terrified.

          The role of amanuensis as nanny, foil and innocent challenger is beautifully caught by Victoria Yeates as Imo:   breezy, brisk, tweedy, travelling light, living sparely but caught delightedly in moments of musical joy –  she dances like a fiend to inspire the galliard and morris of the court scenes.   Samuel Barnett as Britten deploys a chilly  light-tenor petulance covering his real fear of failure;  this  curdles at times to breathtakingly vicious spite, something  Ravenhill as a writer relishes no end. Barnett gives it full, full value: you cringe. The real Holst made veiled references later to things Britten said to her,  to terrible to repeat or bear to remember. The play brings that to life, fortissimo, in a crashing final scene:  no spoilers, but a final monosyllable from Holst had women in the audience hissing “Yessss!!!” 

         It’s a gripping couple of hours, watching them work in taut brief scenes; they quarrel, sometimes meet like real friends sharing ideas (though Britten will suddenly panic and refuse to admit that any were hers:  his proprietoral attitude  to the idea of a small boy dancing is frankly edgy).  Softened by drink  they laugh together: once he crashes on the piano keyboard  as “Wagner after six rums” while she capers  as Brunnhilde with a lampshade on her head.  She often picks him up from despair, but when his inspiration suddenly begins to flow freely he blocks her out.   Soutra Gilmour’s design gives grand dramatic effects to Erica Whyman’s production;  a low light sometimes throwing the piano as a great menacing battleship shadow on the bricks, the sound of the Aldeburgh seas crashing, Imogen’s wild morris-dance spinning her into darkness.  

              Behind it all is the artistically perilous absurdity of the whole project: Lord Harewood and Kenneth Clarke demanding an instant new-Elizabethan renaissance (shades of all those unspeakably ghastly “Cultural Olympiad” subsidised events in 2012).  Britten, though he knows finally that “Gloriana” will be an honourable failure,  buys into this but regrets it, hating every new arrangement or suggestion from above, especially if it involves some bete noire like poor Frederick Ashton.  There are moments when I think Ravenhill is mourning our current government philistinism and arts cuts,  but the the 1953 dream  is skewered in one of Barnett’s last speeches.  He predicts   “a new hunger for music, the government spending proper money on the arts, great buildings, enormous sensational national arts, huge great audiences of thousands upon  thousands  – brought together by their dullness. I don’t want any of it. Back to Aldeburgh, writing for my friends. With our little opera group every year looking glumly at its pocket book with figures written in red ink. Hand to mouth.  I’m not a national person, I’m a local person”. 

        He didn’t, of course, predict that sixty years on, cut upon cut would mean that even the great national companies are staring at red ink. 

Rsc.org.uk. To. 6 APril. 

Rating 4