Monthly Archives: July 2024

Duke Theseus offers instructions, Act 1 Scene 1.     “Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments,  Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth!”  

          You can trust Red Rose Chain, triumphant on its 25th year of outdoor summer productions ,  to stir up merriment.  It is well-supplied with nimble youth.  From the moment Lysander and Oberon in Charlie Chaplin trousers, usher you into the car park, a joyous esprit-de-corps fills the air, enlivening the picknickers as they trail towards the great trees above the theatre.   Even before the appearance of Caroline Bowman and Oli Simonon’s extraordinary  – and in two cases huge –  fairy puppets we are merry.  And after two hours of dashing, chasing, protesting,  conflicting, fighting, leaping, rolling action has taken us towards the resolution of all lovers,   we shall have our moment of  sunset sentiment too:  as Oberon and Titania reconcile it is with a startlingly beautiful choice of “You were always on my mind” ,  with quiet flute and guitar under the branches behind. 

             It is  a play which, in its youthful erotic confusions and fairy absurdities,  always benefits from being taken as just that: play.    Joanna Carrick’s troupe know how to do that: nobody hides in a dressing-room,   Bottom the weaver starts a circular argument about donkey-heads with a pair of enchanted seven-year-olds well before the start,  and  once it begins the  young cast’s doubling and trebling of parts – with bursts of ad-lib but always secure in their various characters –  draws the audience into that joking playfulness.  I still don’t know quite how Emily Jane Kerr’s  Hippolyta/Titania manages to become Snout of the Rude Mechanicals several times at speed (though  she’s spared being Wall:  he  is recruited from the front row of the audience for their final performance) . Nor do I see how  it is even possible in the time  for Ted Newborn’s Lysander to be got back into that harness for puppet-Cobweb’s last gigantic entrance. 

                It is woefully easy,  in grander theatre,  for newcomers to Shakespeare’s tale to lose the plot in a thicket of verse,  and forget which set of lovers is which and why,  but Carrick’s storytelling is immaculate and Katy Latham’s costume design – quick-change as it often is – holds clues neatly  in polka-dot and stripe.  No viewer will go astray, the small children got it without trouble.    All the cast  – only seven –  are adeptly, physically expressive and seem sharply to relish the contradictions of their doubled-and-trebled parts:   Ted Newborn’s poshly confident  Lysander turns into a Flute who overcomes his reluctance to being a drag Thisbe and then gets lunatically too keen on it;  Vincent Moisy, memorable as the terrifying Witchfinder-General in  Carrick’s The Ungodly (which comes to London this autumn) morphs between Bertie-Wooster arrogance as Demetrius and glorious confidence as Bottom.  Ailis Duff is a wonderful, gawkily despairing Helena , and Evangeline Dickson beautifully pertly furious in their teenage bitch-fight.   Jack Heydon  brings lordly dignity to Theseus / Oberon, plays the accordion and handles the enormous Mustardseed puppet with character (it does a rather touching sidelong look, very responsive to the scene).  Rei Mordue is a sharp swift Puck when she isn’t being aged Ageus on two sticks, hobbling with indignation . 

        It always fascinates me how the rigorous careful professionalism of Carrick’s theatremaking –  nurturing serious actors and serious work – intertwines with her Red Rose Chain’s consistent community work with amateurs, including the most vulnerable,  and with its net of volunteers.  But somehow it does that trick without denting the quality: there is  never anything indulgently am-dram about these plays, even at their larkiest, and the Forest productions now moved to Sutton Hoo have been remarkable.  Maybe it’s that esprit-de-corps that makes it all work:   worth noting in the programme that, for instance, the set was personally partially constructed by  Bottom/Demetrius/Mustardseed  and Theseus/Oberon/Mustardseed/Musical Director/ Starveling, that  Lysander/Flute/Cobweb manages the onground marketing,  Hermia/Snug/Moth is also movement director ,Puck leads the community work, etc. 

        I think all that would meet approval from the youthful Shakespeare,  whose Lord Chamberlain’s Men hit Ipswich  in  1594 to earn 40 shillings, and probably had to knock up their own stage too.  He would recognize the spirit.  It’s worth being part of:  I hope some of the crowds flooding East Suffolk for the commercial hype of Latitude down the road  have the wit to head  to Sutton Hoo as well, and be awoken to proper merriment. 

box office   redrosechain.com      to 24 August   

Forecast’s very good… go.

AS LONG AS WE NEED IT…

To do a timeworn musical, entangled in all- too -familiar earworms, you can either sharpen, challenge and update it   or lovingly polish the old machine.  If you sharpen and strip it you risk a certain dismay in the faithful ( as in the Fish and Fein  noirish Oklahoma)  but it might be a revelation.   Harder, in a way, to polish it with such loving respect that a half-forgotten gleam suddenly makes all its world new.   This takes the second route, and Oliver 2004 comes up shiny fresh.

    To achieve top polish of this Lionel Bart perennial,   you gotta pick a genius artist or two: this Chichester has done,  with Cameron Mackintosh’s loving re-production . Matthew Bourne directs and, importantly, choreographs, giving the ragamuffin boys and surging London crowds just the right level of joyful looseness, kicking and swirling and crowding and revolving.  Graham Hurman’s musical supervision  faultlessly finds its way between music-hall Oom-pah-pah and the ethereal beauty of the dawn street cries in Who Will Buy? Oliver –  Cian Eagle-Service on press night   – is confidently, heartbreakingly touching. And it all takes place within Lez Brotherston’s astonishing , vigorous, atmospheric and intricately detailed old-London set which  turns and grows, brilliantly exciting from any of the three sides of the auditorium: here’s : Sikes lurking on metal stairs, Oliver singing his aubade on a balcony, Fagin’s den shrouded in stolen silk handkerchiefs,  crowds whirling beneath.  

        Fagin, though!    Simon Lipkin is a revelation, free of both caricature and the merry familiar tributes to Ron Moody: he’s as  vigorous and teasing  as a standup,  giving the rogue an air constantly conflicted,  tremblingly scared of Sikes,  waving away the klezmer violin moments,  human and redeemable: his final appearance, arm in arm fatherly with the Artful Dodger, is unexpectedly moving.  Aaron Sidwell’s  Bill Sikes was unexpected too:   his assured menace explodes into sudden violence,   but more unsettling still is a curious edge of nasal camp in his voice.  Shanay Holmes’  Nancy is tarty and larky, decent and deluded: when she wanders round the stage singing  ” As long as he needs me” she seems to be searching , without much hope,  for someone to agree with her fatal loyalty. 

      Full confession: after 64 years of star-studded productions and school galas, and the movie, and endless muzakized tunes,   I was tired of Oliver.  Barely wanted to go.    Before last night, the  last pleasure I got of its existence was Alan Bennett’s wonderfully catty  remark about trying to cast The History Boys,  ans suffering theough auditions of prematurely aged child actors  – “The boys who’d been in Oliver:   Lionel Bart cut a swathe theough the youthof England like the Somme”. None of that here; even Bennett might smile at the natural, ebullient, Bourne ensemble. Bravo.  You got me back.

cft.org.uk   to  7 Sept

UP WHERE SHE BELONGS

Imelda Staunton is a marvel, from Mama Rose in Gypsy to HMQ in The Crown. There is no lady of the stage more worthy of being greeted at the top of a Grand Staircase   by an intermInable chorus of dancing waiters in velveteen  tailcoats , buttons hellishly a-gleam,  while a first-night audience of  2,280 go noisily bananas.  She’s earned it, albeit often more strikingly than in this grand old smoker of a 1960’s Jerry Herman spectacular.  Mind you, even  the arrival onstage of a fullsize locomotive in steam had previously had its own rapturous applause, and that was in the much slower first half.  

       The setting- up of half-millionaire Vandergelder’s feed store and the widowed Dolly Levi’s artful matchmaking in her own interest is fun (she and Andy Nyman strike nice Beatrice “n Benedick sparks when they’re together, and one wishes it was more frequent).   Harry Hepple as Cornelius the clerk seeking  adventure in the big city  is lovely, though his gift for physical comedy (Toby Parks of Spymonkey is credited) is underused:  as so often in this very traditional show it shades too fast into yet another huge and datedly overfaithful ensemble.    Imelda indeed  only briefly comes into her own as a spellbinder in  a couple of poignant solos, especially the one  about not wanting to let the parade pass by without her as she ages.   Otherwise – until the big title chorus – her gifts too feel underused: curbed by Dominic Cookes’s untypically vanilla traditionalism.    

           The music, of course, is splendid,  big-scale. Some numbers – notably  Jenna Russell’s wistful song about ribbons down her back and hope for love – are genuinely touching.    But it feels of-its-period, the ’60s,   and not always in the best way.   It does energetic spectacle without ever being remotely surprising (though in the small part of Ernestina,  Jodie Jacobs goes for broke with her restaurant capers and Emily Lane’s Minnie is pleasingly over-the-top screwball).   But face it,   nobody goes to the Palladium on a big big starry musical night to be shocked.  It is not that sort of  auditorium,   and this is not that sort of play, even though much is made in the programme and comment of Dolly’s ‘agency’ and rejection of passive womanhood. 

         I thought director Dominic Cooke would offer us something less dogged, something a bit unexpected,  befitting a period when  we have seen  inventive, immersive freshening of old musicals like Hytner’s Guys and Dolls at the Bridge, or Daniel Fish’s  alarmingly dark Oklahoma at the Young Vic.   The staging is sumptuous but traditional – last time I saw that rolling stage used so much was when Dorothy was dragging a particularly reluctant Toto along it ten years ago.    The ensemble are top-of-the-range and throw themselves into the big numbers, but only the waiter sequence approaches that dangerous excitement a really good choreographer can produce.   It’ll be a summer highlight for visitors,  and most will love it to bits.  I really wanted to.  

box office  lwtheatres.co.uk   to 14 sept

rating 4  (i.e. 3 plus a musicals-mouse for traditionalism)

GRISLY GLEE 

If there is any aspect of 21c Western culture  sorely in need of being laughed at,   it s ithe morbid fascination with police-procedural telly,,  especially true-crime and its gruesome forensics.  Murder has fascinated people ever since Jack the Ripper,  but the digital age has made it more intensely. fictionalized and memorialized, screened and podcasted-about   all the way from the wild fringes to endless BBC Sounds trails (forgetting the Corporation’s old Quaecunque motto:  look it up) 

    So hurrah for John Brittain, Matthew Floyd Jones and Fabian Aloise, and  their joyful invention  of Kathy and Stella, from Beverley near Hull,   young adults consoling their failure-to- launch by running a halfbaked true crime podcast chat from  Kathy’s Mum’s garage. And,  gloriously, insisting on involving themselves in the matter of the Hull Decapitator,  to the irritation of the police DI Shaw (Elliotte Williams-N’Dure, who gets a lovely second-half number about the difficulty of these huge investigations and how sometimes theres “no justice –  just us”).   Their public appeals are wonderful – illustrated by an ensemble of the deluded fans dancing around them and lines like “If you know anyone with a history of arson and animal torture in the Beverley area…”

     Kathy, the brighter researcher of the pair, had dropped out of University in depression.   Stella is a sacked beautician. A touching set of flashbacks to their child  selves bonding over murder books rather than Sweet Valley High  gives us the story, and there is real heart in their relationship.   As Stella’s mother sings,  Kathy is “the only one who understands you, the  only one who can actually stand you”.   But it threatens to end when Kathy, in a hilariously bad taste morgue scene,  learns  that she could study forensics as a degree,  and move her real life on.   A thoughtful duet for our age  has them both relating to the wonders of the internet; Stella singing about the comfort of the  “approooooval of strangers, Kathy looking at university courses. 

        They’re a wonderful pair, Rebekah Hinds as Stella in fishnets, shorts and miniskirt, Bronté Barbé as  Kathy in droopy ethnic cotton.   Hannah Jane Fox does the full diva as “Felicia”, the true-crime writer who they admire and who gets murdered herself, her head in a bag posted to the podcasters by the mystery villain ( Stella knows she shouldn’t have taken a selfie with it…).  All the cast are full of glee; the songs  (Floyd Jones is musical director, composer and co-lyricist)  are sharp power ballads. 

    It’s been at the fringe in 2022 and Manchester last year.  And it is heartening to happen upon it in the little Ambassadors, proper West End.  Because something good is happening  when a young group, outside the established and celebrated mainstream,   get together and make a show on the fringes,  daring to be different,  facing the perils of launching it it down the slipway to fill the stalls with surprised glee.   Especially when the product is  fresh but also disciplined, worked-up with a meticulous affection sometimes missing from weary lollipop revivals.   A decade ago it was Mischief Theatre with the Goes-Wrong plays. In 2017 it was SIX,  two years later Operarion Mincemeat.    Both are now  mainstream must-sees.  This could be heading that way.   

 box office   atgtickets.com  to 14 Sept

rating 4 

AN OVEN-READY MUSICAL, NEVER MUFFIN A MOMENT 

   As summer heats the merciless city,  good to know that five minutes’ south of London Bridge station is La France Profonde,  a village square below faded shutters and 1930’s posters, where men in berets play petanque and concertina, Claude le patron in his big apron greets the front row as they settle down,  and  Denise sings about her village day.   Not that the Provençal village is always happy: the old baker died and they’ve been weeks without bread,  which aggravates the usual short-tempered quarrels  – Curé, Mayor, Teacher, quarrelsome boules-players – as illustrated in a spirited ensemble. The arrival of M. Aimable Castangniet the new baker is met with delight and a Bread chorus;   the presence of his gorgeous  new wife some twenty years younger arouses curiosity.  Baguettes, Croissants, Tartes aux Pommes and sexual tension:  vive la France!  But if she is tempted away by a local lad and the despairing baker can’t bake,  a village emergency will be declared.   The trolley which first was laden with glorious bakery suddenly appears equally brilliantly laden with exploded dough, split flour and cremated loaves (Paul Farnsworth, take a bow for design: stage crew for prop-bread management 8 shows a week). 

        Joseph Stein’s book is inspired by a 1938 film,  Stephen Schwartz wrote music and lyrics.  The show never made Broadway , but is one of those small unsung musicals the Menier does better than anyone and sometimes exports back to its native land.  Maybe it just felt too good-hearted, too Clochemerle-whimsical for some;  for others actually rather shocking:  Genevieve does run off to a seedy hotel with Dominique the errand-boy,  and there’s a bed involved,  but after a lovely number when she reflects that with him it’s all fire and no warmth,  she returns to minimal condemnation (only old Therese gets stern, the priest too keen on forgiveness and reliable bread).  In a cheerful chorus the ladies of the village (except Therese)  agree that you can either be “a virgin, or a realist” about these matters.  

         Its strength – apart from some good numbers – is that the  process of Genevieve’s escape and return is as solid in its truthfulness as Stein’s more famous Fiddler on the Roof.  The final scene with the couple is stunning.   Clive Rowe as the baker is tremendous: moving from naive delight in his new wife and home to stunned  shock at her flight, leading a drunken chorus as he tries not to care. Then he’s poignantly alone,  but a proper gent as he gallantly hands over his savings to the Mayor to compensate for the fugitives have nicked his Peugeot.   Vocally and emotionally it’s a five-star performance.  Lucie Jones’ Genevieve is fine too, girlishly grateful, tempted, resisting then succumbing; she tackles with belting energy Schwartz’s really difficult big numbers , each one an emotional journey.  The rascally Dominique, Joaquin Pedro Valdes, is a fine voice and good fun, but then conveys beautifully a seducer’s yawning boredom.

          But essential to its tare-aux-fraises charm is an ensemble warmly  immersed in their various identities, however jokily sketched at first sight. And this Gordon Greenberg achieves in his cast:   never a reaction, grimace or glance amiss, the group choreographed with some wonderful scuttling unities and chaotic confusions.   Some are pure fun: Michael Matus’ mayor  smoothly Leslie-Phillips with a  trio of dubious nieces , and Matthew Seadon-Young’s M le Curé properly indignant at the insouciantly sinful attitudes of his flock.  Josefina Gabrielle  as Denise, butt of her  husband’s jokes, has the voice of a lark and a valiant workaday hopefulness, and Finty Williams, bullied wife, is sweetly wistful:   kindly and nervous.  Her eventual desertion, leaving a baffled husband circling partnerless roumd the final dance, offers a lemon zest of reality after the touching central reunion .   Altogether well worth it:  crisply baked,  stuffed with feeling and iced with a ten-piece band. Not a bad seat in the house,  tickets hovering round fifty quid.  Why go up West for a musical? 

menierchocolatefactory.com. to 14 Sept.   

GEORGIANS IN THE PINK,  AND SOMEWHAT PUNK 

       Sheridan’s social satire from the 1770s  hits the age of fake news, viral reputation-trashing and post-imperial embarrassment.   There are knowing readjusted gags,  witty cringes of embarrassment whenever anyone’s East Indies wealth is mentioned,  artfully adapted doggerel pre & post-ludes and some fine Dad-dance choreography to drum-synth rhythms to update the  harpsichord.   But no modernization was not going to deprive us of 18c spectacle,  no sir!   We are reassured about that  from the first moment,   when the cast rise from the floor led by Siubhan Harrison as Lady Sneerwell in a towering  Mr-Whippy wig and pannier skirts so wide that – to general applause – all her entrances and exits along the walkways have to be done scuttling sideways.

       Alex Lowde’s designs are indeed a riot:  if – as I recommend –  you book in with a gang of mates or family or, God help us, a hen night,  it might be fun for everyone to dress in violent pink, with edges of black and champagne.   The two worst villains –  sinuous Snake the letter-forger and hypocritical Joseph Surface- are both in black,  but everyone else male and female is mostly pretty riotous and frankly camp. Rarely will you see a more preposterous display of hip-popping hetero-camp than in John Leader’s dissipated hero Charles, though Patrick Walshe McBride plays him close as the simpering poet Benjamin Backbite. As for Mrs Candour’s outfit, words fail me. 

         They never, of course, fail her.  Sheridan is a magnificently, rattlingly wordly playwright and director Tinuke Craig’s cast give the rhetoric, expostulation and rapidfire dialogue a crackling energy .   The plot is familiar down the centuries:  hypocrisy, plots to expose it, lies both malicious and absurd,  decency triumphant at last,  but the Brinsley Sheridan way to handle it is with the lightness of pink meringue.  Craig responds to this spirit by treating the whole thing more as a lark than angry satire:  there is little real darkness.   The famous set-pieces are terrific:  I enjoyed the scornful auction of Charles’ ancestral portraits (sharp  for the period, or indeed any time in our time-lag, class-aware monarchy).  There’s a fine screen scene with the hidden Lady Teazle,  formerly a contemptuous shopaholic party-girl, suddenly understanding the devoted decency of her older husband.  Tara Tijani does both moments beautifully.  

        The fun rollicks on, pleasingly ridiculous and spectacular, and the physicality is a delight. The servants whip around in strange pajama suits, making themselves felt in the narration;  Stefan Adegbola illustrates Joseph’s pious hypocrisy in nice period style  by constantly falling into Garrick-y poses to deliver his moral precepts.    Leader’s Charles drops the camp wriggling when he needs to,  and shades it into a mere overspill of  teenage energy;  Geoffrey Streatfeild is a properly touching Peter Teazle and  Wil Johnson overdoes it just enough as his stately colonial millionaire Sir Oliver masquerades in turn as a moneylender and a needy relative.   

      It’s fun, sportingly silly,   and gets good old Sheridan’s moral point home though without with all the painless feathery swish of the ostrich plumes  which tower over the ladies’ heads.   A special mention for whoever got Walshe McBride to wear his hair like that.   

 Rsc.org. To 6 september 

rating  4 

ON THE EVE OF THE ELECTION….

      …I emerged onto the Cut in a grey afternoon blinking tears, unable to process having been made to cry by  James Corden. He’s been for me   a figure hardly more than a mild  chat-show irritant ever since he vanished from theatre after One Man Two Guvnors.   But on this  return,  under  Matthew Warchus in Joe Penhall’s tense, powerful 90 minute state-of-Britain play we sceptics are reminded that if you plug him in in to a good script and director Corden is the real thing.  He walks the walk, travels the terrain, enrages and entertains and threatens and – in final dissolution – shatters you.  

        I write this on the evening of election day, and dedicate this (late) review to the memory of  the late Jo Cox and David Amess, and to all constituency MPs, especially in the hardest areas,  who genuinely want to represent and help lives.  Of course there are idlers, and monsters, and chancers among any 650 people,  but cynicism has no place on a day like this. There is hope.  Many are heroic in service.  And Penhall’s heroine,  played by Anna Maxwell Martin,  represents them all.  Corden, opposite her in the constituency office where most of this 90 minute drama takes place,  represents the immense, intractable, infuriating, demanding people who turn them.  We meet him first as an ex-serviceman installing her panic button and CCTV;  enjoy the banter about how  he went to the same primary school,  and see him, step by step,  becoming every MPs private nightmare.  His wife has left him,  moved in a new man, gives trouble over the children,  there’s a court action,  an inflammatory blog he writes,  and an irrational belief that the MP can and should change the law.

        The play between them is excellent:  as fans of MOTHERLAND know,  Anna Maxwell Martin can deploy a wonderful resting-bitch-face,  and in her mannish suit and family-woman weariness her MP has  – and needs – a hard professional toughness.  But her face lights up, pleased about the primary-school link, anxious to help, never despairing.  Every bit of sensible advice, however, bounces off the determined, geezerish,  clearly troubled  hard-man veneer of the persistent constituent.

  He becomes angry at not succeeding in his impossible demands for what he thinks is justice:  she takes police advice.   At first this  the DC – wonderfully played by Zachary Hart – offers comic relief as he stonewalls about the importance of avoiding eye contact, empathy and any sign at all of humanity, while Maxwell Martin protests – while on an exercise bike, on Zoom – that her job needs both.   There’s a  shock and a twist – the MP appears in a sling and bandages, but he hasn’t attacked – and still truculent, Corden holds his own until ,  in a ludicrously inept “restorative justice” attempt,  the policeman’s toxic maleness emerges in turn.  It’s electric.  You feel the edge, in this moment of  divided anger,  of a kind of despair. And then,  in a last quiet scene  when time has passed,  a gleam of redemption.  Corden’s last appearance is – well, it finished me off.  

oldvictheatre.com to 10 August

rating five

TEENAGE DREAMS, AND FAME AS NIGHTMARE

Got to love the dedication of the Southwark: to mark its smaller-space production of Samantha Hurley’s New York play about a demented teenage fan, it lined the cubicles in the lavatory with posters of the sulky baby-face of Maguire, and Spiderman fanzine covers. Once you enter The square three-sided space a further explosion of Tobeyiana hits you, with fairylights. On the floor big woolly rugs, on the shelves toys playing a hand-puppet fantasy of a Mermaid King and a princess.  It’s a teenage basement den , a prison of longing and unattainable desire. 

     It will remind anyone of being 14, though fandom seems to have turned wilder since my friend Katy and I fantasised about stowing away in Paul McCartney’s trunk on his American tour (such was our innocence we had no idea what we expected on emerging).    In this case Shelby – played with terrifying ferocity by Tessa Albertson – has read KIDNAPPING FOR DUMMIES and successfully captured Maguire – Anders Hayward – and handcuffed him to a pipe.  There are references to the dark thriller MISERY, and when Shelby appears in tatty bridewear at full shriek,  mouth Munch-open, the terror is so extreme that for a while I reckoned this was a nightmare of the victim’s.  Not so. He thinks at first it is a delusion while recovering from dental anaesthesia and drugs in his system, then that it’s a prank of his manager or agent’s.  Shelby on the other hand is just hellbent on owning him,  as self-defined president of his fan club. It takes a laser shock to make him say “I do”,  and none of his resistance dents her determination.

        The play runs solid at 110 minutes,  and could well be trimmed:  but New York loved it, the players are remarkably good and Tyler Struble’s direction fluent and full of small surprises. The conversations, conflicts and doubts both sides are often very funny, but its merit is in allowing pathos and a rounded, stroppy sense of emerging character to Shelby : neglected fatherless child of a QVC-addicted mother, bullied at her school and its Prom. There’s subtlety too in a wonderful performance by Hayward as her captive.   Just as her half-grown Cosmopolitan-magazine mentality is often dented by saving streaks of realism,  his horror and disbelief is tempered by awareness that he had already been trapped by his fame, and by the thousand interviews and biographies which create him as a dream persona.  When she finds out some of the interviews were nonsense she shouts “You’re not MY Tobey Maguire!!”  And he has to agree.  “Fame is very sticky, it gets all over you”.

        The third figure, occasionally,  is Kyle Birch, large-scale and comedically rresistible, who appears in the wall as a kind of inner Tobey who doesn’t buy his stardom at all,   sometimes as an invisible shouting mother upstairs,  and finally as a very enjoyable nightmare grotesque :  a realtor come to measure and sell the house.  Meanwhile Tobey somehow escapes and reappears irritably trying to get out of his Spiderman suit.   A sharper, earlier ending would have made it a better play. But you can’t find fault with the cast. Especially Hayward, who I hadn’t seen on stage before, and much hope to see again. 

southwarkplayouse.co.uk to 10 August 

A THING OF WONDER 

    People who saw Mnemonic  at its origin 25 years ago  still talk about it. A few say it changed them. It was a collaborative, at first wholly unscripted , creation of Simon McBurney with his  Théåtre de Complicité. This reworked version, new-cast and directed by the man himself, opens with a tribute to those first makers, and an artfully faux-improv  speech on the nature of memory and how neuropsychology now understands it not as solid embedded facts and feelings,   but as an ever evolving set of memories-of-memory:  ever- sparking, chemical and electric connections between neurons. This neatly forms a parallel to this reimagining of the show.

      Then  on the bare stage, with only a chair,  the speaker tells us to put on provided eyemasks as the great house sinks into  a total blackout, and remember moments of our lives. And then feel a leaf (also provided),  while reflectng on the fact that if you go far far back, thousands and millions of years all humans are related. Then the lights come back ,  masks off ,  and the speaker is not the same we remember at all  but interrupted by  disembodied voices on a phone with him fussing  about someone called Alice, who is missing.

        Such metatheatrical gimmickry could be quite annoying to some, but no: bear with it, because two qualities always  mark McBurney – whose work I have  met with both joy and bafflement over the years (the latter being chiefly Beckett’s fault).   One is his undented, childlike sense of wonder and ability to kindle it;  the other his mischief. He fears neither self-parody nor profound awe and emotional greatness.    He can handle both, and there is no rabbit-hole of strangeness down which one should hesitate to follow him.

          The idea of recall,  ancestry and quest begins to develop,  staged with gauze mist, an occasional screen,  very deft movement and changes of role by the seven players,  and some sliding furniture and brilliant lighting and sound (Paul Anderson, Christopher Shutt) .  Stories interlock: it’s as confusing as a winding dream fed by uneasy half-memory, and as urgent as a sudden waking to one’s inner chaos.   

       At its core is the 1991 discovery of Øtzi:  the corpse of a man suddenly uncovered by freak weather in the Alpine ice, on what is now the modern  border of Austria and Italy.  At first he was thought to be a 20c mountaineer, but gradually archaeological and scientific inspection showed him as over 5000 years old. Early Bronze Age.   Preserved in the cold, amid traces of his clothing, food  and mountain man’s equipment  he is a unique figure: as one researcher says, a Neolithic person who “stepped to us straight out of his everyday life”.  With delicate brilliance the story grows, combining  deep, growing respect with the absurdity of a media sensation  and, later, a bickering scientific conference where each speaker has built a theory of who he was: hunter, shepherd, shaman, doctor, patriarch, refugee. To make us laugh so much at that stage of the solemn story is a noteworthy achievement: very McBurney.  

       The quest for Øtzi’s reality is entangled with a modern story: of the missing Alice, who went to a mother’s funeral , was never told about her father, and crosses Europe, distressed and baffled, with great train sounds and wind and jostling crowds and encounters and questions, from Paris to Berlin to the Balkans and Kyiv. The father’s reality is ironically elusive, compared to what we learn about the Iceman:  maybe  Jewish, a prayer shawl found in a mysterious box;  maybe Russian, Ukrainian, always to his daughter  half-imaginary,  existing in half-helpful answers by half-remembering strangers, and in a mother’s long silence.   There is a cab driver’s story too, picked up when she is on her way,  relating the tides of migration and struggle and strangeness in his own ancestry. 

     Grand themes  are of memory and death, the natural cycle and human rejection of it to create funerals;  of the honest pathos of nakedness too,  as on the dim stage the modern man Omar longing for his Alice sometimes becomes the frozen Iceman corpse, vividly done, a solemn beauty.         Stories and feelings immerse us for two hours:  is it real, who is dreaming,  why was Øtzi apparently fleeing, why did he lie down in the snow leaving his axe,  why would a father disappear? Above all, how can we contemplate and connect the immensity of time and the chaos and cruelty and yearnings of striving , misremembering humanity?

  Well, two hours in the Olivier offer one way.    I was glad to be there.  The final moments, small and intimate then vast and ancient, are overwhelming.  

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 10 August.   

A WARTIME SPRINGTIME 

     It’s not the reptile but the turtledove, as in the Song of Solomon “The time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land….Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”.  Our hero and heroine,  in John van Druten’s intimate 1943 play,  are both fond of quoting,  not pretentiously but with lonely yearning private  feeling. They are all the more likeable for it.  

         Philip Wilson’s careful, delicate production catches that human yearning,  and in this small space his revival expresses it brilliantly.   It could hardly be simpler in story (TV would be unable to cope with such workaday credibility).  Sally is an earnest, very young actress in New York,  a bit mousy at first sight and beautifully contrasted with her older, raunchier friend Olive,  who barrels in shrieking about the darling tiny apartment and wanting to know about Sally’s break-up with her married producer.  Sally is starting to wonder about these short affairs, and whether they count as being “promiscuous” as well as leaving you sadder than before.   Olive has no such moral worries or devotions.  She has invited Sgt. Bill,  a  fling she had in Detroit, to meet her at the flat, but when he turns up  she is summoned  to dinner by an even hotter fling , just back from the Navy (the men are in khaki: it’s 1943).  

        So she confects a lie about a husband, and Sally is left with Bill as he finishes his drink. They take to one another, slowly and awkwardly,  through his weekend leave.  The click of kinship comes, beautifully, when he asks about acting and she, a bit-part ingenue,  says how work at her art is a real need. He gets it – quotes Milton’s frustration about  “that one talent which is death to hide”.   They joke a little about theatre (he is tired of plays where “there’s always a prostitute and a clergyman. That’s what they call a cross section of society”  – a nice jibe, in a play about two ordinary young people).  They go out to dinner – she a little reluctant as Olive has so firmly snarled “he’s sweet and he’s mine!”   But he sleeps on the daybed, and they meet at breakfast,  and spend the day:  both adrift, having loved and lost. Their slow mutual discovery is all the story (except of course that Olive reappears, disgruntled, and very funny, near the end).

          It’s wonderfully done.  As Sally,  Imogen Elliott is a find:  fresh out of Guildhall in a first professional job.  She has an ability to display subtle, self-doubting humour, and her deep young qualms about  sex, and the risk of loving again,  are perfectly pitched.  Nathan Ives-Moiba as Bill was new to me (though ten years ago he flitted through Coronation Street as a dumped boyfriend of Todd) and he is also a revelation.  Bill is a decent, straightforward, sensitive but soldierly character ,  and in creating him Ives-Moiba disproves the old saying that “goodness writes white” and simple good characters are hard to play without being  dull.    Both he and Elliott hold us, anxious for their happiness,  all through the play: we live with them at home in Ruari Murchison’s perfectly styled 1940s flatlet (I applaud him for finding a period toaster). 

        As for Skye Hallam’s gushing, predatory, ultimately furious Olive,  she’s a treat in any show. And her return in the last scenes is a perfect, clever van Druten contrast to our sentimental audience anxiety about whether this springtime of young love will flower.  Another Jermyn gem.

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. to 20 July

Rating four