This is very good fun indeed. Who does not want an onstage dog called Crab, benignly upstaging a rarely seen Shakespeare clown? And a riotous rendering of Mambo Italiano at a Milanese f1 party by a hirsute drag queen who, wig removed, is the stately Duke himself? Who does not warm to daft young love, betrayal, remorse, and the sort of cameo detail that has the wayward Proteus’ Mum ordering him to Milan to improve himself while haughtily having her nails done? All that, plus outlaws disguised as bushes, a terrible soft-rock serenade with accordion , and – not least – immaculate RSC-standard respect for both verse and spirit of a rare classic.
This is a student production ,but rather than lectures and workshops this year’s Cameron Mackintosh visiting professor at st Catherines College opted to collaborate with student actors, producers and crew, and direct this short run at the Playhouse . For he is Sir Gregory Doran, recent and celebrated RSC chief, fresh from a project tracking down the first folio. And this early, little discussed work is the only Shakespeare play he had never before directed. It is full of premonitions of later themes – a girl disguised as a boy, flight through a forest, a dictatorial father planning marriages. Better still, it is very much about youth’s young friendships and loyalties, and the way falling in love can cause heartbreaking betrayals in tempestuous immaturity.Perfect.
And so it proved: joyfully funny, full of sharp clever touches (the teasing, rhyming banter of lovelorn Valentine by his servant (Jelanie Munroe, a Rhodes scholar) turns into a communal rap; Leah Aspden’s dry northern maid Lucetta has a beguiling scorn of sentiment.Valentine’s first sight of the Duke’s daughter Silvia finds her in f1 gear and helmet like any motor racing it-girl; Thurio her proposed suitable suitor is a bouffant pink-haired nightclub poser with shiny leggings, a manbag and a powder compact. And in that teenage clubbing world under the witchball , Proteus’ announcement in soliloquy that “I cannot now be constant to myself without some treachery used to Valentine”, feels like a perfect modern “it’s just me” flounce.
Indeed while both the men around whose friendship and betrayal the plot turnsare excellent, Rob Wolfreys’ Proteus is particularly remarkable: he is a first-year student ,but under this director and with immaculate line discipline , he creates a wholly credible creature of youthful fire and confusion: a good heart overcome in turn by desire and remorse.
This was not the press night, which is today. But it only runs until Saturday, so it feels worth recording now just how good it is (still some seats). And celebrating how robust a company they have become in these short months. Doran announced from the stage that illness tonight nearly meant cancellation, losing the vital character Julia (who follows her lover disguised as a boy and suffers Proteus’ treachery – prefiguring Viola in Twelfth Night). But late on, the assistant director Imogen Usherwood agred to take the role, script in hand. And blow me, she was immaculate: in manner, conviction and gesture (managing awkward props and tearing of letters even when the script was in her other hand.) She made Julia touching, as she should be, and dignified in the final confrontations. And the final moment Doran cleverly avoids the rather trite redemptive ending (Shakespeare was only starting out) by letting the reconciled lads go off happily together while the girls – perhaps wondering about the whole happy ever after idea – simply stare across the stage at one another.
Not my place to star-rate a first preview. But it’s terrific. Just wanted to tell you. Oh, and during the interval Jo Rich, who plays Launce, wanders round selling dog leads just like the one on Crab, for the RSPCA. It all left me so fond of the rising generation that I easily tolerated the caterwauling party kids on the late, late, late train back to London..
Oxford playhouse, to 18th. Five more shows to go, well worth it.
Not rating but here’s a director-mouse for visiting-professor Sir Greg Doran for making it happen
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Here, a mere meringue’s throw from Eton itself, is an imaginary Prime Minister of that ilk. Tidier in person and with a touch more integrity than the last one, but personally almost as insouciant, as resistant to reading red-box bumf , and as prodigal with tags from Aristotle and Virgil. It’s an unBoris.
This is a touring play from Michael McManus, a veteran if bruised political insider, centrist-sensible himself but fascinated by the mechanisms and personalities. I rather liked his “An Honourable Man” (https://theatrecat.com/tag/an-honourable-man/) which like this one was brooding on the possibility of a centre party, and like his quote from Mencken “for every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, clear and wrong”. Not to mention the deathless comparison of referendum-year Britain as “a cat which doesn’t know whether it wants to be in or out, so just sits around licking its balls”. He also had a small hit with Maggie And Ted just after the lockdowns.
But a tsunami of mad politics has rolled over us now, and it’s a brave thing to turn Uk politics into improbable farce, given that it does it so well without assistance . And an awkward thing too, when real wars and savage partisanship split us nastily for real. All this McManus acknowledged in a brief q and a the night I went. But hey, sometimes you gotta laugh just so you dont cry. And maybe audiences normally uninterested in Westminster have thoughts prompted by jokey drama: it doesn’t have to be James Graham or indeed the immortal House of Cards that make people think.
And in that enterprise you need an affable comic presence like Matthew Cottle ((deathlessly funny as Primce Edward in The Windsors). He is John, leader (to his own surprise) of the new One Nation party, which after the 2026 implosion of both Labour and Conservative parties, has landed a hung parliament full of brand new , massively inexperienced MPs barely under the control of a camp tarantula-wielding chief whip, with a tough Northern Labour matriarch as deputy PM and an angry SNP redusing to be bought off without another referendum.
The meat of the situation, though, and the main driver of its drama, is the presence of Ryan Early as the Spad, Seth , the Cummings/ Campbell adviser. He is horrifying: manic, never still, knows he is right, angry when challenged , unelected but dictatorial, he twists and jerks and poses and shouts and points: the very inverse of the smiling, insouciant, punning, jokily unworried PM. The PPS and deputy PM and others detest Seth, and his instinct to break things, court trouble, stir up anarchic events and mess about with the very constitution appals them. What the PM jokingly calls his “Fannymesto” – good gag – is ultra Brexit neocon brutality disguised as centrism. He bas brought in an AI asistant which crunches data and operates only within his framework: it’s called MediaAnnie and is quite funny quite often. Meanwhile all the old jokes get an airing – about fake sincerity etc – and there are some nice passages as staff try to keep the PM on message and he breaks away and charms the electorate again. Two crises occur, a poisonous volcano cloud which might cause lockdown, and an incident with the King’s car hitting a protester.
There were more laughs at the old too-familiar jokes than I expected, from a pretty full Windsor audience . And I would like McManus to write more political plays. But ironically, I don’t want them to be comedies. I think he has things to say – this became very obvious in a tremendous rant near the end when Seth the Spad has been disposed of. But daft farce dilutes it. Even delivered by the divine Cottle..
I fell for the solid, paternal, irascible Walter “Pops” Washington immediately over his whiskey breakfast, as he listens half-patiently to the unreliably recovering addict Oswaldo prating about his latest health kick. He knows that won’t last – though not how personally dangerous it could get, lodging random lowlifes rent-free. But he gives Oswaldo a chance, alongside his own petty-criminal son Junior and fiancee; the latter wandering through their kitchen in short shorts and bending at the fridge as the old man expostulates “Full moon rising! Lulu, mind your hindquarters!” . He and Oswaldo think she’s a bit “retarded”, Junior insists she is an accountancy student. Walter doubts this, given that her lips move when she read the horoscopes.
We are meant to fall for the old boy, benign widowed patriarch in a salty working-class New York, as he later puts it “A feeble old patiotic, tax-paying, African American ex cop war hero senior citizen” . And Danny Sapani makes it easy to love Walter as a good ol’ boy, before his complications and the driving force of the play become clear. This is an actor who can make his creations both endear and infuriate, able both to simmer and explode, sometimes briefly terrify. Remember his recent Lear..
It’s all going to happen, because eventually (the playwright Stephen Adly Guargis likes to take it slow and gradually, drawing us into the family) we will learn what it is he and Junior (a strong Martins Imhangbe) were briefly bickering about alongside the normal family irritation at one’s son stashing stolen goods in the bedroom. For old Walter is eight years into a lawsuit which, Junior says, “ everyone knows you shoulda settled no fault with the city years ago”. A longtime cop with all the bruises and conflicts of a hard city (“everyone hates cops. Cops hate cops”) he was shot, in a lowlife club off duty, by a rookie white cop. Who called him “N——r” with a bullet for every letter. And he won’t settle. Nor will City Hall.
The play predates the seismic cultural changes of BLM, and one suspects that today the NYPD would be more likely to come down hard on the white cop: anything to avoid the long attrition of decent old Walter’s claim. And it may be that Walter, being where he was and acting however he did (we never quite know) bears some responsibility for things heating up. There are electrically charged confrontations with Daniel Lapaine as a white younger Lieutenant trying to get him to settle, and Judith Roddy as a young white detective who worked long ago alongside Walter and loves him. But he is adamant, stubborn on his honour, to the point of derangement.
It’s a constantly, evolvingly gripping evening, Michael Longhurst’s direction never letting it flag for a moment. There are perhaps a few almost surreal improbabilities, especially a very funny (and it turns out, pivotal) encounter with Ayesha Antoine as a dodgy ‘church lady” with a sexual ’n voodoo edge. The satisfaction of the play is the way it hovers on the edge of tragedy, creeps closer then steps back with an unexpected laugh. It won a Pulitzer, quite right too.
I see from the notebook that at one point late on I anxiously scrawled “sign the deal, Walter!”in pure empathy. It’s good to get drawn that deep into a play. It’s why we go.
It helps if you fall in love with the set; even more if the set helps tell the story. For this tale of a louche, tender, disreputably memorable weekend in Edinburgh, Libby Todd has built a dolls-house mashup of the Old Town: tenement and mansion, cathedral, bridges and archways. These will open and shut , be lit by sudden projected messages and scrambled over for two hours of swooping, darting adventures; a glorious backdrop to David Greig’s louchely beautiful rom-com where drifting midlife disappointments come together and solidify into love.
Lawyer Helena (Karen Young) is let down by her married lover and scared to do a pregnancy test; trying to be “all perfume and control” she despairingly picks up Bob (Ross Carswell) in a bar. He’s an aspiring storyteller-singer who reads Dostoievsky and dreams of busking through Europe, but meanwhile works for a bullying car-thief gangster called Big Tiny Tim.
Gordon McIntyre’s songs drive their tale along with dry rock-ballad lyrics: “Love will break your heart, sometimes you want it to” and “Gimme darkness, gimme pain, and take it all away!”; the songs are performed by two wry narrators and the lovers themselves, all four nimbly snatching up guitar, flute, saxophone or fiddle as the story unfolds. The pair are both 35, lost disappointed souls, and the night they meet think the answer is to get drunk and hook up .
Expect the funniest, truest, most excruciatingly recognizable sex scene of the year, followed by a unique moment in which Bob, alone and still drunk, is given a severe talking-to by his own willy (played with deadpan irritability by the narrator Will Arundell , popping up beside him in a rubber hat). The disapproving appendage says it’s tired of stupid , pointless adventures and strange partners and wants stability.
The pair meet again, she in a ridiculous bridesmaid dress with sick on it after accidentally sabotaging her respectable sister’s wedding, he nervously clutching £ 15,000 of his boss’s money in a plastic Tesco carrier bag with the bank closed. Suffice to say that stumbling and talking and finding more dodgy company in the granite mazes of the old city, they find one another. Greig’s writing, as they gradually discover one another’s disappointed selves , has a tender delicacy – he is quite a prose poet, no syllable wasted – but through that rainy day and disorderly night he meanwhile leading them, and the troublesome Tesco bag, between cafés, benches and bridge arches, from Oddbins to a Japanese fetish nightclub and an IKEA car park. The narrators intersperse moments like miniature Ted talks on human development and the nature of decision-making. And beautifully, as the sun at last breaks through the foggy Edinburgh haar, love makes sense. A good last show for the AD , Ryan McBride, as he leaves this lovely theatre for the freelance world, after five very good years.
There is a very tense moment late on in the second half when Jacob Dunne, only just holding himself together, finally sits down in person opposite the parents of the young man he killed two years earlier with a single punch outside a Nottingham pub. The victim’s father David explicitly will not forgive; the mother, Joan, is set on somehow doing so but in this moment suddenly begins talking, urgently, unstoppably, about her son James and her loving memories of his life. Dunne sits rigid, every effort in listening , looking making himself take in her grief.
We know the outcome: James Graham’s play is based, co-operatively, with Dunne’s book RIGHT FROM WRONG, a remarkable chronicle of successful “restorative justice” and personal redemption after his prison sentence . But the strength of the drama, and notablly of young David Shields’ performance, is in that moment of real dread. We know it will be OK, more than OK, beautifully so. But it might not have been. That meeting might have been a disaster. ALmost the most useful thing about Graham’s flawless pace and storytelling, and director Adam Penford’s willingness to hold these moments, is that it doesn’t make restorative justice easy or cuddly. It is a tough business, and this is a tough play.
Tough but not dour. As it opens, we meet Jacob in the toxic flower of uncontrolled young manhood, running wild pub to pub with his mandem, his gang, coked-up, looking forward to an evening’s fight. Once or twice in a brilliant pivot he becomes the older, wiser, sadder man of today, the campaigner and youth worker, to explain what is going on. He offers memories of the better bits of his childhood in Nottingham’s “Meadows”, a failed social experiment turned ASBOland. But we see him and the others run and scramble and vault round Anna Fleischle’s set, a great metalled curve above a concrete subway, expressing both kinds of confinement (the ensemble of five owners move nimbly between parts).
After the fight – a random stupid punch for no reason – we see the news reaching James’ parents, the horror of James’ Mum, the panicked moment when the “M….r word is spoken (reduced to manslaughter later, as the fall caused the death more than the punch). Jacob, burning his clothes in fear, suddenly hears church bells and remembers his Confirmation and his childhood fishing for stickleback in the river. The playwright deftly picks up such moments from the real Jacob’s book, without sentimentalizing, moves on, holds us in the reality of the lost scared boy within the dread oaf, the s “one-punch hard man” his idiot friends applaud.
Shields holds the part remarkably, but towering through the play even more is Julie Hesmondhaldgh, her round ripe Lancashire voice holding a profound humanity even in the deepest shock and grief. She it is who looks at the first awkwardly written – slightly dyslexic – response to their questions through the restorative-justice (“RJ”) scheme when Jacob has done his sentence, and sees that he cannot just be a police mugshot: “it’s a person!”. Against her husband’s reluctance (Tony Hirst still , powerful, broken) she decides that to honour her paramedic son she must, like him, be “the best I can be. What do we do with this? What is the sense of wasting another life?” In a wonderful moment of workaday levity she tries to remember the RJ told them it the tone shouldn’t be punitive. “WHat\s the word? I keep saying..Pontefract?”
It’s a history play, this, and an important one. Nottingham Trent university sponsors it, the theatre has set up a talking-circle by the Forgiveness Project alongside it, James’ parents and others involved have been close to the process, including the Remedi charity whose sysrems are carefully explained in the text. And there are two mentions of things which saved Jacob and now are dust: since this all happened, Probation services have been incompetently privatized and the proposed rebuilding of the Meadows estate cancelled in Austerity. Also mentioned in passing is the pivot of the East Midlands from proud manufacturing to logistics and warehousing, and the contrast between the wisdom of fixing potholes early and the national failure to fix wild kids like Jacob early.
All of that could make some people swerve away, fearing educational-campaigning worthiness. It shouldn’t. Great drama feeds off truth. And this is a James Graham play: craftsmanlike, careful, agile, gripping, thoughtful and humane.
The local governor and councillors are posing for a photograph, more than satisfied with themselves and their genteelly corrupt side-hustles. But a letter announces an imminent government inspection. But the schoolchildren are underfed, the hospital a disgrace,the judge corrupt, the townspeople discontented . Funds have been cavalierly “redirected” to councillors’ interests. News of a lordly stranger calling for good wine at the local inn throws them into flat panic. One councillor gets topical 2024 laughs with the panicked line “I hereby call an independent Inquiry” and another even more with “We can’t blame it all on the plague, like we did last time!”
A grand one for local election week, because Nikolai Gogol’s famous satirical farce from 1836 is essentially about localism: petty bureaucratic tyranny and corruption. In its day it was considered so offensive that Tsar Nicholas I personally intervened in its favour and had it put on, saying it is not sinister “only a cheerful mockery of bad provincial officials”.
The stranger is not, of course, an Inspector at all: he’s a sacked low level copying clerk and gambler , summoned home in disgrace. He’s all swagger and irresponsible fantasy, held only in check from time to time by his faithful valet. But governor and council – the latter always scuttling brilliantly in and out together in close formation – welcome him with flattery and bribes. He accepts happily.
Patrick Myles’ merrily updated, fast-moving two hour version is sets to great effect in a sort of Ruritanian mixed-up period: the names are a bit 18c-comedy (the stranger is Fopdoodle, the Governor Swashprattle, and the two inseparable Ivans and Brabble and Grubble). Theres a horn gramphone and Fopdoodle boasts of writing Wilde’s plays and collaborating with his friend Dickens, but also writing Jane Austen’s novels, and when he imitaties his friend the prime minister, it is Churchill; but his uniform is all Napoleonic gold froggings, sword and breeches. All of this absolutely works. So do the jokes, not least physical: all the cast are fearless clowns with a gift for slapstick pratfalls, including Chaya Gupta as the Governor’s lovelorn daughter.
At its centre of course is the fraud himself: Kiell Smith-Bynoe’s Fopdoodle, particularly impressive in the long crazy ever-drunker bragging scene at the end of the first half. But his plan to seduce both wife and daughter moves just over the edge of prank into proper predatory nastiness, as does the moment when Dan Skinner’s Governor initially panicks and cries “It’s all in the wife’s name, take her!”
Indeed Gogol’s proper anger strikes through as it should in sharp moments between the jokes (which are excellent). At last when the fraud is uncovered, the trickster gone and the angry crowd throwing cabbages in through the French windows, Skinner becomes properly horrifying . It’s a theatrically famous breaking of the fourth wall when he leaps down to roar at us “What are you laughing at?” and utters a really Satanic lamenting boast that he, the con-man who cons con-men, the thief who robs thieves, has come to this. The council then turn on one another in a crazy final brawl, for all the world like the 2024 Tory party.
Owing to the infernal train strike I had to sneak up to the antepenultimate review, on the bank holiday and with the company having two days left to polish it up. No need to make allowances: already the cast were roaring through a riot of high-speed accurate farce acting, doing Gogol proud.
Years ago I came out of a dullish production in Yorkshire of Chekhov’s last play, set very traditionally with samovar, parasols and big hats. A reluctant chap behind me observed to his wife as they left “Eh, it was about time they had that Revolution!” . Of course the playwright got there first: the slow-burn ineffectiveness of Ranevskaya’s family and disaffected domestics, all facing the end of an era and of a great estate, is already skewered halfway through by the passionate social politics of Pyotr the eternal student. He rants to good effect against the selfishness, the social gulf, the idle aristocracy running out of money in the big house while serfs toil and beggar children go hungry. At this point Benedict Andrews’ verbally very free modern-dress adaptation drops in references to Austerity and to the exploitation of immigrants seeking a better life.
It’s a play about a society whose old top layers are crumbling broke while a middle class rises – personnified by the wealth and business sense of the kulak peasant’s son Lopakhin. And straightaway let me say that one of the best things in this eccentric, rather overlong production is that for once Lopakhin is not satirized as a grabby city chap: Adeel Akhtar has charm, a beguiling presence always, and is credibly decent in his hopelessness when he tries to persuade Nina Hoss’ airhead Ranevskaya and her chattery brother Leonid to sell the orchard and pay the debts.
But all the family are in various states of depression and disaffection: Marli Siu’s Varya tying not to fall in love, Sadie Soverall’s Anya sweetly protective. Michael Gould as Leonid is often funny: Andrews, who also directs, keeps bright lights up on us all (which is quite distracting) and has cast members leap up from the front benches. When on the vast empty stage (the back wall too is made of carpet ) Leonid decides to deliver the famous romantic speech to a hundred-year-old bookcase, he just hauls up a random audience member to play the piece of furniture. For there is no furniture, just a waste of patterned carpet, continued on the back wall. So only by wandering around in the interval might you find candles and a Russian icon-corner just offstage. No samovar ’n parasol picturesquery tolerated here.
One problem, despite the excellent cast (Daniel Monks as Pyotr particularly magnetic once he gets going) is that modern dress – oafish manservant Yasha very much the Hoxton hipster – creates a credibility gap. Hard to believe they ever were aristocrats. Their workless uselessness and mournful fatalist idleness loses the period romance which usually (whatever past period the director chooses) offers a distanced softening and empathy. This lot in their T-shirts can, whisper it apologetically, become just downright annoying. The best moments are from June Watson as the ancient retainer Fir, deploying some truly masterly doddering and an air of wise contempt for the lot of them.
The second half gets a bit Saltburn, as a drum kit, mic, amps and smoke machine come out for a prolonged drunken party scene complete with conga and a rendering of the Turbines song “don’t waste your pearls on me I’m only a pig”. (Dan Balfour’s sound design and May Kershaw’s music are very much front-and-centre). During the rave Leonid is off at the auction, and only the most deluded believe that a distant aunt is going to stump up and save the orchard. His return does energize the drama, something for which we are hungry by then. But the long drawn out final farewell to the old house, cast ripping up the carpet into disorderly heaps, would be more properly poignant and Chekhovian were it the end of a more heartfelt human saga. Didn’t quite get there for me: recollections may vary, though . And there is beauty in Hoss’ last collapse and speech, and in her daughter’s lovely consolation.
But it is only when Fir , alone and forgotten by the family as the chainsaws start in the orchard, that the heart moves a bit. Come the revolution, at least give the old folk some respect…
Connor was 18 when he drowned in the bath with an epileptic seizure. It needn’t have happened. He was under slipshod care, away from the family who loved him, in an NHS “Assessment and Treatment Unit” where he was neither competently assessed nor treated with care. There have been scandals about such units for people with autism and learning disabilities, but this case was made famous by the protests and the persistence of his mother , Sara Ryan. She used social media: blogged, publicly accused and reviled the institution , grew a broad wide protest movement and fuelled a damning inquiry into the Slade centre (now closed). She finally got an Article 2 Inquest with jury, which despite the efforts of Southern Health and their lawyers returned unanimous verdicts: serious failings, poor systems, care , risk management, staff inadequately trained , failures of communication.
Her book, “Justice for Laughing Boy” detailed Connor’s life, quirks and problems, leading to his placing in Slade for the final 107 days of his life. The director Stephen Unwin is himself parent of a son with learning disabilities, and already a passionate campaigner (his chilling history play about Nazi attitudes was powerful here in2017 (https://theatrecat.com/2017/05/09/all-our-children-jermyn-st-theatre/). He followed her case, and made this adaptation .
So it’s a campaigning play about a campaign: with Janie Dee as Sara giving a remarkable performance at its centre. At every stage and level she shines with hard truth. In the playful opening of family life his quirks, difficulties, delights and obsession with buses are absorbed with humour by the mother, longtime partner Richard and four siblings. Alfie Friedman (himself autistic) expresses the endearing strangeness of Connor’s perception and the erratic behaviour his family came to understand and love. Friedman’s closeness with Dee is touchingly expressed, and after his death she has ‘conversations’ with him – the boy is always there, on stage as a presence, until the very end. Dee herself handles every nuance of Sara in her struggle for justice and recognition of how it happened : she moves between humour, shock, grief, indignation and ferocious mother-tiger persistence. And in the moment when at 18 suddenly Connor, six feet tall and powerful, has bursts of dangerous aggression and assaults even her, the sense of a family living with both love and fearful uncertainty is properly unnerving.
Alongside Dee, and Forbes Masson as Richard, the four surviving siblings help to tell the story; speaking as themselves or quoting the doctors, support workers, nurses, officials and finally lawyers on both sides at the inquest, plus a not very helpful health minister Jeremy Hunt. Good projections support the mood and story. The result, at 100 minutes straight, is always gripping and certainly informative: it expresses both the rewards and the difficulties that occur when an endearing child becomes a strong adult. The transition into NHS adult care of an individual still deeply childlike is something families rightly dread. We witness how commonsense can clash with a careful legal culture of adult rights . Connor, for instance, hated his epilepsy and therefore denied he had it: this meant the Unit, opting to believe him rather than his mother, did not properly supervise this young adult’s bathing. They later denied the epilepsy existed: horrid post-mortems had to prove it. The lad was also technically free to leave, not confined, which created a legal difference, but as Sara pointed out he wouldn’t have left the unit alone: she knew him, he did not go around alone. Issues also surrounded her relationship, increasingly hostile online an in person, with NHS and unit personnel. Certainly she deserves a plinth in the glorious pantheon of Difficult Women: she had to .
So you watch, learn, and reflect. But one thing which could have been avoided is that in the white heat of author’s and director’s fury, each of the unhelpful or obstructive official voices – played by the sibling group – conveys an exaggeratedly satirical tone: studiedly nasty, scornful voices. But the facts and words themselves are damning enough, and this cartoonish overload jars, gets in the way, even at times making you briefly want to hear the other side. Sara Ryan was right to want answers, exposed a lot of real neglect and institutional failure, and played with brilliant truthfulness by Janie Dee as she goes through grief, shock, outrage, weariness and dry appalled academic distaste for their excuses. Forbes Masson’s Richard has an angry decency. But at times the relentless tone of scorn makes you want a wider frame for the story: not least an illustration that how such disabilities can and sometimes are better helped . And that unease is a shame. Because, in every detail, Connor’s treatment was a downright disgrace.
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