Monthly Archives: October 2024

LOOK BACK IN COMPASSION

         The Rattigan renaissance of the last few years is more than welcome:  ever since Flare Path hit the West End fourteen years ago there seems to have been a rising consensus that he really was one of the greatest modern dramatists. And although social and attitude changes will date any contemporaneous play,  Terence Rattigan’s  humanity and deft, wistful honesty (a quieter Tennessee Williams) endure  better than the snarling ferocity of the John Osborne fashion that overtook him.   So it is apt and entertaining that director James Dacre brings together under a firm date – 1954 – two short Rattigan pieces. 

      The first , Table number 7, is the midpoint of the “Separate Tables” trilogy;  the second is the standalone The Browning Version.  Both are treats,  delicate as a filigree cakestand and as sharp as the lemon in the Lapsang.  

           Both are set in an elegant revolve by Mike Britton;  first a Bournemouth boarding-house where among the  settled ,mainly long-term,  residents  “The Major” (Nathaniel Parker) is a tolerated bore, full of military stories, affably harmless, striking a warm friendship only with Sybil (Alexandra Dowling),  the spirit-crushed daughter of the monstrous Mrs Railton-Bell.  Who is Sian Phillips,  matchless as usual, deploying sour-faced bullying majesty. She is  wolfish in her relish of virtuous disapproval, especially when she finds from the local paper that the supposed  “Major” is not only of that rank, but has just been arrested and bound over for “importuning”.  Her face  as she reads the story is a treat in itself.    

     The joy of this little story – and Rattigan knew how it was to be gay back then – is that while her indignation-meeting gets backing from the more cowed co-residents (even the reluctant Gladys,  a delicate performance from Pamela Miles), she can’t win them all. The young male lodger (Jeremy Newmark Jones)  refuses to join in, despite his young wife’s prim disgust.   Richenda Carey is a magnificently scornful Miss Meacham,  and Lolita Chakrabarti solidly tolerant as the landlady.   Parker is heartbreaking as the Major himself, at last opening  – perhaps this is improbable, but it’s dramatically tremendous –  to offer self-analysis, and to cement his fealty with poor scared young Sibyl,  He has  a hangdog-Tony-Hancock face which exactly suits the character: cheerfulness over deep pain, a weak spirit searching its way reluctantly towards courage . 

       For Rattigan’s ending – perhaps again improbably optimistic – is something fine:    a message across the ether from the cruel 1950’s,  promising that cold hard virtue is not where beauty dwells. Nor will it necessarily be the winner every time.  

        The Browning Version – the set now a schoolmaster’s house and purlieus –  is also finely, delicately done. This time Chakrabarti is Crocker-Harris’ awful wife Millie, more likeable than usual but shot through with bitter frustration.  Newmark Jones is her lover, the younger teacher who finally sees through both her, and his own young cynicism.  I was initially very unsure about Parker in this play; partly because his Major Pollock  remained so imprinted on memory throughout the interval,   but also partly because we usually see the old classics-master Crocker-Harris as a less likeable,  more clenched character, and a frailer figure than Parker. 

        But again, a fine performance.    And as Taplow  Bertie Hawes is excellent: catching  just that schoolboy uncertainty and gruff sensitivity the piece needs.    An evening to enjoy, if not a period of our cultural history  to feel nostalgic about.  I hope James Dacre, who did such fabulous things at Northampton,  does more work with Rattigan.  They’re well in tune. 

theatreroyal.org.uk  in Bath till 2 November

Then touring: 

• Malvern Festival Theatre. 5 November 2024 – 9 November 2024. …
• Cambridge Cambridge Arts Theatre. 12 November 2024 – 16 November 2024. …
• London Richmond Theatre. 27 January 2025 – 1 February 2025. …
• Cheltenham Everyman Theatre. 
• Oxford Playhouse Theatre.

THE GRANDEST OF GRIEFS 

Not Renaissance Mantua but New York a century past: smart bars and low dives, gangsters in fedoras. Why not ?  In any world might be a lonely jokester, missing his life’s love, protective of a daughter,  trapped forever by the  expectation that he will be both a jokester and the butt of jokes. There too might be a local duke, duking it out and bagging the best girls. It fits. Always did.  For now, five years after Jonathan Miller’s death,  and for the fourteenth time since 1982s the great director’s production of Rigoletto is back in town. 

    And not to be missed.    Its Like having Halleys Comet turning up again, a thing of perfection retooled with fresh artists, thrilling and thrillerish:  1950s Little Italy atmospheric in its dark street corners and bright-lit bars, the final storm by the murderous riverbank seeing rubbish blowing under the dim streetlamp. 

It is always the most dramatically breathtaking of Verdi operas, lowlife and seduction, loneliness and mockery, yearning and revenge and final youthful sacrifice. The setting gives it immediacy:   the great tides of musical emotion carry the tale remorselessly onward in both passion and reflection, never a note wasted.   It is of all productions the one which – when seeing a few empty seats and the signs reminding us that under 21s easily get in free –  makes me long to dash out into St Martin’s Lane to  corral a few idlng, unaware half-term teenagers and drag them in to have their lives changed. 

        Richard Farnes conducts the great orchestra; Weston Hurt  – first UK outing – is a magnificent, wounded Rigoletto, the barman everyone thinks they know and can laugh at, tender in his marvellous duets with Robyn Allegra Parton’s Gilda, a consummate physical actor, showing the outcast’s uneasy restraint and slumping, poleaxed, as he learns of his daughter’s betrayal.   Both are first time at the Coliseum, and I hope they love its audience as much as we loved them.  Unusually arresting too is Yongzhao Yu, another newcomer here are fresh from the Met, as the Duke,  smug in a grey suit in the smart bar of Act 1,  lounging in jeans as the “student’ seducing Gilda, throwing out Donna e Mobile (albeit in English, as ever at ENO) as if he’d made it up himself that moment.  

   And through it all wash the great tides of music, tracking every mood and pain and hope,  Verdi never wasting a note;  the chorus moments thrill,  shaking the great gilded room.  Unforgettable. ENO tickets begin at a tenner, which is another sort of miracle.  

eno.org.    to 21 Nov.    Seven more performances.  Selling fast, as well it might. Get in!!!

Rating 5

A short catch-up on one of the season’s greats (was away..)

Mark Strong is made to play great tragedy: a long powerful body,  controlled bleak intelligent  features.A figure from any age or culture, fit to express hope and power and belief , and to wrestle before our eyes with conscience and fate. 

    You don’t necessarily get that on screen, but it took me days to get over his Eddie Carbone at the Young Vic: his stage name is no understatement. It is also a fact – accepted now by this occasional Icke-sceptic – that Robert Icke is born to bring Greek tragedyi to the 21c.  After the irritating and pretentious Zeldin attempt on Antigone (https://theatrecat.com/2024/10/09/the-other-place-) last month at the NT, his adaptation and direction here is the real thing.

      Icke sets it on election night , as an idealistic newcomer is on the edge of victory. Lesley Manville is his wife Jocasta, relict of the former PM: confident, mature, content in his success and their children.  Into the campaign  room bursts a scruffy, tattooed man talking of seeing the future (perfect modernisation of Tiresias: he’s be peddling crystals these days).  Meanwhile the hero’s old Mum in a raincoat wants a word, and keeps being put off by his officials. And so, off it goes.     It’s  a slow burn for a while but worth it. 

     We know that two harsh revelations await Oedipus, and before long see how they might hit him. The first, Laius’ death and his involvement, stirs deep enough.   but the second – well, I suppose some very few people may turn up and not know what it is .

 Its arfully made credible in a wrenchingly brilliant speech by Manville, but when the real hit comes the final minutes – between June Watson’s Merope and the central pair – rise to a bomb-blast of terror and pity, as Sophocles intended.  All the more powerful for being set in a world of real power and conscience, unlike the selfpitying Zeldin last month.  Greek Tragedy done properly: respect!  

Delfontmackintosh.co.uk to 4 jan 

“…HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB”

       That was the subtitle, when exactly sixty years ago a shower of Oscars fell on Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly tasteless, seriously necessary comedy about nuclear war: a crazed US General Ripper has unilaterally orders B52 bombers to devastate Russia and won’t reveal the secret recall code.   Peter Sellers played three parts:  a crisp RAF Captain Mandrake who tries to reason with Ripper;  the beleaguered president Muffley in the War Room,  and an aged ex-Nazi scientific adviser in a wheelchair.  Lunacy, hierarchy, confusion and incompetence make it one of the great comic films of all time.  I was a cold war teenager, and not allowed to see it at the time. 

         So on the eve of an American election not entirely devoid of lunatic speeches, in a world once again riven with dangerous wars and nuclear capability,  London theatre storms in,  to wake that remarkable film’s ghost and set it on stage. And – eat your heart out, ghost of Sellers – Steve Coogan plays not only Mandrake, Muffley and the Doctor but  Major Kong, the even nuttier B52 pilot who ignores the recall and finally straddles his bomb in a cowboy hat, yee haa!. 

          The tale is the same, tweaked beautifully to rouse sharp modern echoes by Armando Ianucci, king of intelligent political comedy,  and his director Sean Foley.  It’s swift-moving, shockingly funny,  and staged with flawless style:   Hildegard Bechtler’s set becomes the crazed Ripper’s office under fire as the President tries to get back control,  the vast War Room at the Pentagon full of uneasy-colleague generals, and the cockpit of a B52 swooping – actually quite frighteningly – over snowy peaks while its crew josh about women and beer.   

           Coogan is extraordinary (so are his fast-moving costume and wig crew, who deserve a documentary of their own).   He is sometimes, almost, in the same room as his other self.   But each part works remarkably and none of them are even remotely Partridgeous.   As Strangelove he is  necessarily a vigorous caricature,  as  Major Kong another,  but he brings real heart to the anxious, professional, baffled Mandrake in his RAF uniform,  trying civilly to deal with John Hopkins’ huge, magnificent, cigar-chomping lunatic Ripper.   His President Muffley has moments of reality too.  And of topicality:  when he mutters that he almost wishes he’d lost the election , a colleague points out tht the other guy thinks he did,…

         The bullseye topicalities for today are part of the dark pleasure of this glorious production.  Ripper’s conviction that communists are poisoning the pure bodily fluids of Americans with fluoride is pure anti-vaxx conspiracy;  his worry about devilishly clever Russian fake voices pretending to be him, or the President, or Mandrake prefigures deepfake tech paranoia today.  The  Soviet Ambassador is terrified of his unseen President and expects, accurately , to be poisoned any minute.  The satire on suspicious all-American values also rings familiar as Colonel Bat Guano is convinced RAF Mandrake is a “prevert’ , and the gung-ho General Turgidson (Giles Terera running wild and stormy) urges the President to “pretaliate” by attacking Russia to stop them retaliating for the mistaken attack.  His leading of a prayer at the critical moment is unmissable.  And I haven’t even mentioned the Vera Lynn moment.  Some may jib at yet another play made from an immortally famous film. I don’t. It felt worth it, and of the moment.

noelcowardtheatre.co.uk    to 25 jan 

A HARD AND ICY WORLD

    A 1970’s Hull folksong chorus: “Next time you see a trawlerman on Hessle Road half tight – remember, o remember, the perils of that night”.  It was a tribute to three distant-waters boats and crews lost in one storm: it made the national news. But many more were lost, barely reported,  in an industry more dangerous than any other of the time:  single deaths from drowning or machinery,  whole boats lost  beyond the Arctic Circle in the Cod War years before Iceland’s 200-mile limit (a late twist in Richard Bean’s play). 

         Bean wrote Under the Whaleback about the lives of such  fishermen,  rich with conversations and empathy.   It is not hard to shudder at the casualness with which big money treats the lives and deaths of a casual workforce. Maxine Peake wrote a striking  play about Lillian Billocca, the ‘headscarf revolutionary” who in 1968 campaigned to force better safety standards.  

     But in this new play Bean widens the story in a way that – at its best – sends ripples of understanding that there could be the human cost on both sides of capitalism.  In the first act we find John Hollingworth as Donald, heir of  family shipowners, taking down figures by radio about catches and returns,  bickering with his old father who hasn’t quite given up control, and confronting the fact that the loss of 15 men in a sinking means that tomorrow he must do “the walk” to condole with the widows and mothers (the tough old man offers salty advice about accepting tea and not looking at the children).  He is also sacking a skipper, back from another 6000-mile run with too little catch , who also sinned by admitting by radio that he’d found fish.  Donald roars that Grimsby boats would  thus steal `“My cod and my haddock..yes they fucking are mine,  if you were using my ten thousand pound Marconi Marine Fishgraph 2 fucking fish finder! Do you not understand capitalism?”

          But he is not a monster:  one of the wives (Laura Ellsworthy) rolls in, boots and headscarf, fresh from the filleting-shed. He treats her decently and responds to her fears for a son and to her (slightly shocking) admission that she’d rather her rough husband – one of the five survivors in this latest loss –  was not coming home for his three-day break between three-week journeys.  It’s an intriguing encounter, his softening foreseeing what happens in the second act.

          For – and this Bean bases on a real shipowner – Donald suddenly decides to go to Reykjavik , meet the survivors and fly them home rather than the utilitarian norm of putting them on the next boat.  So we are in a small hotel, with three men rescued, the body of a fourth and  some very entertaining laddish bickering,  plus dark violent fury from Jack (Mattthew Durkan) about his injured finger.  Eventually a fifth arrives  – Paul Hickey as Quayle. He had got taken off two days earlier with a premonition, faking illness.  He’s the storyteller,  rich in horrid tales and superstitions lyrically delivered.  Quiet Baggie and dopey Snacker (ogling the manageress, Einhildur) complete the group, until to their shock the boss,  Donald himself, walks in .   Jack muses on whether they should kill him. He’s not serious.  Yet. But as  the long, strange act rolls on a knife appears, and the surreal midnight scene thickens into weirdness.   Sometimes the act slows too much, as such a night might well do.   But Sophie Cox as Einhildur, the one woman among them, adds weight :  both with short-tempered commonsense and an Icelandic oddity in a fable she tells about love, death, ice and a ghost. 

           So there are the opposite poles of capitalism – big money taking money  risks (“I lose three thousand a day staying in port”) and vulnerable, zero-hours employees taking the real risks in the ice, while as Quayle says “the women are left with the eternal glory of their widowhood”.    Donald knows it all in his heart: constantly plays back the last words on the radio of a dying skipper (these are real, from the period) “Going over – going over –  love and crew’s love to the wives and families” . Quayle knows it too. The word “dignity” about the corpse enrages him. “Three weeks sharing a focsle the size of a prison cell with eight other fools, sucking in their farts, their ciggy smoke, pissing on yer hands five times a day to convince the blood of life that it’s still worth the flow – the day he went fishing was the day he lost his dignity”.  

      And another darkly interesting detail in Donald’s earlier brief conversation with a new vicar about a memorial service . The hymn   “For those in peril on the sea” will, says the shipowner patiently, see half the congregation walk out. Too naval and romantic . “Makes dying at sea seem something noble and patriotic” rather than having died for half a fish and chip supper.  

      But in the final moments in the Reykjavik bar, the men sing their own song. Humans can’t lose all dignity. 

hampsteadtheatre.com to 23 nov

BROTHER,  CHRISTIAN,  WITCHFINDER

 I reviewed this play about the Witchfinder General  Matthew Hopkins last year, in Ipswich:  I write only to add thoughts,  now that it has deservedly reached the capital and is set for an off-Broadway run next year . America needs it just as we do in times of bigotry and fanaticism: .  just as in the McCarthy era it needed The Crucible.

    Below  is a link to my original review  in Ipswich,  but here are some fresh thoughts.    See a new play several times and forgotten feelings rise. The terrible grandeur of fanatical and murderous madness into which Joanna Carrick’s brilliant evocation  of the 1640’s witch-trials had made me almost forget its opening scenes, and how fast one falls in love with the sweetness of the central pair –  Christopher Ashman and Nadia Jackson as Richard and Susan Edwards of Mistley.  His farmerly humour ,her womanly commonsense , their gradual love and marriage draw you into 17c rural Essex life:  we enter their griefs for lost infants and – atavistic as it seems – honour their Cromwellian-Puritan language about God’s will and the need to control base lusts.   Jackson – for whom a year ago this play was a first professional job – is particularly astonishing in her gravity, humour and simple-hearted sensitivity;  Ashman is bluff , straightforward,  in perfect tune with his young wife and , while they live, his babies.

    I had forgotten, too, how comfortably in the early scenes they, and we, laugh  at the teenage geekiness and stammering religiosity of their half-brother Matthew Hopkins with his ever-clutched Bible and uneasy distaste for their warm marital sexuality. That extends to all women,  doorways to the devil ever since Eve.  I had also forgotten how, even late on during the rising horror of interrogations and hangings, his superstitious absurdities make the couple,  and the audience,  suddenly laugh again .   

       But the play’s trajectory is the same, works even better :   its set of 16c furniture, nimbly movable props and tables, : a broomstick and baskets , a workmanlike stack of wooden furniture under a guttering candelabra.  Simplicity can hit harder than theatrical splendour, and that applies equally to its form: four players, one kitchen, the sense beyond it of marshland and farms, community quarrels and jealousies, cows suddenly dying,  a polecat’s scream on the river bank.    A place where “lecturers” on the evils of the body and of Popery can become local dictators, self-appointed purifiers of the land,  and lay the blame on old women whose mumblings might be curses, whose pet animals ‘familiars’ made of “condensed and thickened air” to hold demons. 

     Each of the three matures before our eyes for good or evil, growing in complication and subtle confusions.   Nadia Jackson’s open sensible face is creased by grief, recovers, then hardens as the witchfinder’s persuasion offers the relief of vengeful rage for her griefs, her lost babies. We watch Ashman’s farmerly confidence growning as landowner, then crumbling as the demonic illusion reaches him under Hopkins’ persuasion. At last we see him struggling to right himself.  Equally credible,  we watch Vincent Moisy’s evolution from stammering inadequate to devout missioner – using fanaticism as relief of private stress, a lot of it clearly about sex  – and thence to self-glorified power.   We realize in horror that he was only 27 when he died, after years in which more witches were hanged than in  over a century before.   His is a progress which strikes uncomfortable parallels with many current fanaticisms led by youth,   from jihadism to soup-flinging.  

        And the fourth player – Rei Mordue as the cowering, sometimes defiant Rebecca who is forced under Stalinist questioning to repeat evidence against her mother and the other old women – is remarkable too:  grown since a year ago, heartbreaking. 

Here is my original review, includes notes about the remarkable author and company:

THE UNGODLY Red Rose Chain, Ipswich

southwarkplayhouse.co.uk.  to 16 nov.   (it’s the Borough branch!)

Rating five   

LEHMANS REVISITED

The first time I saw Sam Mendes’ production at the NT,  I exclaimed that the evening had no right to be so much fun: three hours, three chaps in black frock coats, no song and dance stuff, a mainly monochrome cyclorama of Alabama fields and New York skylines. And it’s all about money, the progress of a financial dynasty from 1844 to the final collapse – after the last Lehman died – of the legendary Lehman Brothers.   Immigrant struggles, a few decorous marriages,  lads dragooned into the family business, and disaster.

    But it is in fact wonderful. I say it again, after the third time viewing, second in this big theatre. Here are my first two reviews – to explain what happens: 

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY Lyttelton, SE1

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY. Gillian Lynne Theatre WC2

The first one in the period saw Trump visiting the UK,  the second was post-Trussonomics.  Both had echoes then.  Now the age of Reeves and the invisible huge Black Hole  made it a great one to see again, and reflect on the way humanity treats money and the way money treats  people.   

But this time  – with a terrific new AngloAmerican cast   – it is just as fine.  Aaron Krohn and Howard. W Overshown were tremendous, fast and physically witty (especially Krohn) and flexible;   on the night I was there Henry, the first brother to land at Ellis Island and begin the narration, should have been John Heffernan.  He was unwell, though, and we got the particular, very theatrical, pleasure of seeing his understudy – Leighton Pugh – doing a note-perfect, witty, confident job of that huge role.  It is always good to know that a production is careful enough to have that quality of understudies.

     But as I have linked to my old reviews, got once as a veteran audience member I thought I would reflect on extra ways it is so brilliant.  There is the  way the men need to be shape-shifters, clowns, yet always themselves – always Henry, Meyer and Emanuel,  so that even when oddities in the family crop up, the old resemblance haunts you.  They are sometimes their own sons,  or wives, or customers; sometimes their own ghosts requires flexibility and wit in all three performers (Russell Beale was the original Henry).   

   There is the  use of metaphor:  sometimes obvious, as in the sense of confident gambling in the tale of  wire-walker Samuel Paprinsky,  who crossed Wall Street for years before falling,  but sometimes gentler:  each of the three,  when they seize a marker pen to draw shop names on the glass wall, does it subtly differently.  

    But above all, more of a warning every year,   there is the play’s sense of wild, stormy, exuberantly adventurous drift away from the solid and into the magical-realism of 21c finance.  You begin with overall cloth in bales,  switch to lending seed for a return in cotton;  link with those who make the cotton into cloth… and as you encounter the bigger, biggest big-time of the New York world move gradually into expansion into other materials, from coffee to railroads,  until you see that you need none of these real and solid things, only numbers on a screen… 

       It’s a wonderful production,  humane and sorrowful and adventurous and wild, all done in frock-coats.  Defy you not to love it.

Thelehmantrilogy.com.   To 5 jan

Still 5, obviously.

CHOSEN PEOPLE, CHOSEN LIVES 

   The saying goes “two Jews, three opinions”, though some say that’s an underestimate. Here  are five people and innumerable opinions: two couples,  plus a teenage son pouring scorn on both. The  flashpoints are culture, religion, rules of modesty and marriage,  parenting, politics, and of course Israel’s very existence and current self-defence.

        Hot stuff, veering skilfully between serious pain and a sharptoothed hilarity reminiscent of  Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage.   Given the moment and  the topics it is not surprising  that Co-writer and director Patrick Marber found a big West End theatre nervous of it .    But Marylebone does well to lay it out with panache and sincerity, because we need it.  I can only write as a gentile, buy such plays (like Joshua Harman’s  Bad Jews) are a window into the complexities of owning that remarkable heritage,  and navigating the conflicts and gradations within it.  The dense, talkative, witty, thoughtful play crams plenty into two hours, gets verbally and briefly physically violent and grows to an unexpectedly moving end.  If it does nothing else, it will stop anyone ever saying “they’re all the same, Jews..”

 .    Phil, a lawyer,  and Debbie are affluent sophisticates in Florida: to the disgust of Joshua MAlina’s Phil, wandering around in pink beach bermudas, Debbie has laid out kosher snacks for a visit from her former college friend,  who has shed modernity to become ultra-Orthodox  and lead a Hasidic lifestyle in Israel with her black-hatted traditional husband. They’ve changed their names to Shoshana and Yerucham, and observe  the prescribed married-woman’s wig,  a thing of such hellish brightness and curl that it fascinates Phil and leads to a strangely creepy moment once they start smoking pot in the second half.   

       The Israelis are over to visit his father, a holocaust survivor in a palm beach retirement home where – we unnervingly learn – he sees on another old man’s arm a tattoo number which is three digits lower than his, but does not form a sentimental bond as Yerucham hopes but grunts  “Just means he got in the queue ahead of me”.   Yes, the Holocaust haunts the piece, as well it might:  Debbie is tearfully obsessed by any mention of it,  and certain that all Jews everywhere should be permanently  afraid that “they” will be back.  Her  son Trevor refers irritably to the horror as her “happy place”, and Yerucham is well up to making staggeringly tasteless puns about it,  musing that it may have happened because Jews got too far from God prayer.  The Floridians gasp. 

        All  the best comedies have flashpoint differences between couples: not hard to guess how many there are here.  Phil is smugly against what he sees as performative and dangerous Zionism;  to him the future is America. Debbie, neatly drawn by Caroline Catz, slightly envies her friend;s  emotionally  wholehearted conversion-back to the music,  rhythms and tribal rules  of her friend’s  life in Israel (Dorothea Myer-Bennett plays her at first as witty and  confident,  praising Israel’s freedoms as a democratic  beacon in th middle east:  Simon Yadoo as Yerucham  has a pompous patriarchal strength which riles Phil no  end, especially when they get to the sexual insults.  Good lines zing between them all,  many so sharp that only on a stage would they not get a visit from the hate-police.

     Its based  on Nathan Englander’s short novel, woth sharp collaboration by Marber and updating to acknowledge  the current terrible conflict. And the way the West now is:  when the book was published there was a sense that outside extremists or dumb bigots, real  antisemitism was quite rare in the civilized west, or confined to acknowledged fools and bigots.   Given the London streets lately, not much like that now.  So it is all great fuel for both conflict and comedy: conflict because argument is at the heart of Jewish thought – Talmudic, indeed  – and comedy because, come on, Jewishness is brilliant at it: clever, ironic, self-deprecating  or hitting down hard universal human truths.  And hard human bigotries: quite lightly the Hasidic couple admit they don’t think you’re a proper Jew at all unless you live in Israel. But they have  a private grief, which slowly emerges, and brings out the shock of ultra-orthodoxy: they “sat shiva” for a week and declared the death of a daughter who dared fall in love outside Judaism.  

        For all the pain it’s a bracingly funny, moving and well-contructed play:  the first half ends in a bravura rant by Gabriel Howell’s brilliantly teenage  Trevor (who rejects both parental capitalism and the visitors’ orthodoxy with all the scorn of a “pastafarian” environmentalist).  The second concludes with an uncomfortable but suddenly  moving truth-exercise, one  apparently not unfamiliar in some Jewish childhoods since the Holocaust:  who would have risked death to hide Anne? Who would save me?   After a surprising move from Phil softens the rocky terrain of the evening,  Yaweh himself gets a line, a startling one.

     I’d go again,to  think further about many things they discuss.

Marylebonetheatre.com. To 23 nov 

rating 4.

Sent from my iPad

ZELDIN AGAIN

I sometimes feel real sympathy (possibly unwanted) for actors who, trained and motivated to channel and express extreme and painful emotions, do their absolute and skilful best but find themselves having to do it in a mediocre play.  Even if it is preceded by long rehearsal analysis of their character, and garlanded with learned programme notes about Sophocles and essays about how we don’t do grief properly any more.  And even if it is written and directed by the famous Alexander Zeldin, chevalier des arts et lettres and darling of the NT (his tribute to his mother, The Confessions, was the last one her, an evening weirdly depressing to any actual live mother).  

       Here, in a modern kitchen set with patio doors (much discussed in a mumbly sort of way)  we have a family gathering headed by the excellent Tobias Menzies as Uncle Chris. This fine actor will be required in turn to be sensible , a bit controlling and normal, then shouty, and borderline deranged by the end. There’s also sterling work by Emma d’Arcy as his niece, returning to join her siblings in the remodelled family house where Chris and they live. She’s back after spending some considerable time stumping around with a huge rucksack,  full of her late Dad’s shirts, a tent,  and some seething, grieving rage.   Both performances are good. So are the others (though Alison Oliver too-often delivers a TV-naturalistic performance only barely audible by row G).

  But for all the skill and effort, and the insistence that it’s based on Sophocles’ Antigone,  it doesn’t fly however hard they all pedal, however surreally rackety the occasional soundscape,  however mysterious the huge white reversible screen overhead (design by Rosanna Vize, music Yannis Phillippakis). 

      What is happening is that Chris wanted to get them all together to scatter his later brother’s ashes (in a surprisingly small vase, I’ve seen ashes and there are clearly some missing).  They are all grieving the long-absent Alan, who seems tohave killed himself in the garden beyond the patio doors.   Chris is very keen on cutting down some trees.  But when Annie arrives,  she insists the ashes must stay in the house forever, so she can “talk to them..he died here, he needs to stay here”. Thats the Antigone bit: uncle-defiance and views about human remains.

She steals some ashes, and Uncle Chris gets furious and wrestles her for them, and there’s a fair bit of decanting , wasting still more of the inadequate supply.  Their friend and project-manager Tez wanders in and out, once with a takeaway,  observing that “no-one takes any banter in the country these days”.  Night falls,  Annie decides to sleep in her tent in the garden, everyone is uneasy about everything and quite angry, except Issy , who seems almost sane about it all and occasionally tells Annie she loves her.   

       There’s a denouement  – of course there’s a Bad Secret in this family, and of course it’s sexual (we’re in 2024, audiences expect no less). Sophocles didn’t need to bother with all that stuff because  there were real wars and executions and , importantly, a concept of personal honour-unto-death rather than  the kind of wallowing emotional unwellness fashionable dramatists prefer today.  

So after the 80 minutes of intensely trying to care about these people I left the NT defeated. But Menzies and d’Arcy are both strikingly good, and give it all they’ve got. Respectful sympathies.

I am now quite upset that owing to theatrecat’s sadly necessary travel-rationing I missed the Dorfman show with Meera Syal the other night. That sounds better. 

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 9 Nov

Rating two  

POETRY AND PITY

   Tremendous swagged,  fringed, and roped retro curtains ,  the Gielgud looking much as it would  100 years ago when  Sean O’Casey’s most famous play reached London.  Before them hangs a single high crucifix, below it a simple stove. And when the drapes  flourish aside to reveal a Dublin tenement room,  its detail draws you right into a hardscrabble life,down to the frying pan and the battered tin box where young Mary keeps her precious hair-ribbons.  

       Matthew Warchus (with design by Rob Howell )does well to take care of the physical detail: there is always a special fascination in contemporaneous plays from past decades, by a writer who knew and lived in such exact rooms and conditions. Curiously, it is that period reality which wakens a wider pity for all conflicts which hard down on the humblest.    O’Casey sets this in 1922, the Irish civil war still raging, when in one family there could be former allies falling out, republican ‘diehards’ set against ‘free-staters’.  Juno and Jack Doyle’s family  has its own ordinary problems. He’s an idle drunk, she just about keeps them fed, this harder even than usual because daughter Mary is on strike and her brother Johnny  disabled, one-armed and lame from  his share in the fighting . He is a mournful occasional presence, bitterly uneasy – we will learn why – and afraid to leave the flat. He sees nightmare ghosts, unable to rest without a candle burning safely in front of the Virgin Mary’s statue in the unseen room behind the curtain.   They all live within a deeper violence,  and all through the first act come odd moments of shock:  Aisling Kearns’ Mary reading aloud the detail of exit-wounds on the latest young body found,   Jack and Joxer, tipsily carefree, suddenly soberly nervous at a rapping at the door below that sounds “like no-one that belongs to this house”. Llow distant street sounds make heads turn sharply.  

        In in the foreground, and this is what which has made O”Casey’s Irish play echo through many times and nations, there is the comedy of Jack Doyle himself : an almost music-hall turn in drunken, self-glorifying fantasy,  eloquent in inventive complaint about everything from the clergy to “pains in the legs” striking whenever a possible navvying job is mentioned, tipsily co-dependent with the sly parasitical Joxer.  There is laughter at the pair being cowed by Juno’s entirely reasonable furies of impatience at their lurching hopelessness and empty pride.  Mark Rylance is on irresistible form as Jack : a piercing tipsy stare beneath heavy black brows, his tiny moustache and striped pants sometimes seeming almost Charlie-Chaplin as he lurches around,  airing fantasy reminiscences  about global seafaring exploits (one passage on a collier to Liverpool).

       He’s a wonderful joke: the immemorial Mr Hopeless, comedy drunk right down to a mournful little ditty about a robin, sung over the stove. Rylance, as ever,  is a scene-stealer.  Even more  when, as the second act begins,  he has been told of a legacy and gone massively into debt for fancy furniture, cabinets of china and glass and a smart new suit (again, brilliantly evoked with loving detail).     An idle drunk who’s gone up in the world and thinks he’s posh is of course even funnier. 

        But the genius of the play is that Jack Doyle is  a comic figure living  in the middle of a tragedy.  He didn’t cause it, but he doesn’t rise to it with any dignity or real human sweetness.  Juno, on the other hand,  is magnificent, and does.   J.Smith Cameron (Gerri from Succession on TV!) is compelling, unforcedly real:  worn out but full of hope that Jack will pull himself together,  tenderly anxious over the gaunt, haunted youth Johnny (Eimhin  Fitzgerald Doherty) and tolerant of the social activism of Mary and her lover Jerry (Leo Hannah).  She is everything that is decent and, sadly for them all, believes in hope and luck  when a stranger arrives with news of their inheritance (another kind of shock in his very appearance: so dapperly dressed,  such a fine overcoat, next to the women’s careful drab and the shambling Jack’s tragic trousers. 

      We care for them all, laughing or admiring;  with Anna Healy’s Mrs Madigan they celebrate and break into song (Irish songs, and odd musical moments, are brilliantly used). But no sooner have we laughed at Healey’s terrifying top C than a funeral passes and a broken mother is among them, speaking the famous prayer to the Virgin Mary  to “take away hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh”. But they laugh together again; someone has to. 

      That the play darkens deeply in its longer second half is famous, but no spoilers for those coming new to it.  Only to say that we have, by then, been drawn to affection and concern for the reality of the Boyles, the poetry and the pity of humanity.  But will be soured, too, by the reality of Jack Doyle,  patriarch and drunken fantasist.  I was uneasy for a while after Rylance’s magnetism in the glorious first scenes,  wondering how well even this great actor would serve O’Casey’s final  merciless dissection of a man’s egotistical worthlessness.  But in the moments of Jack’s continuing, reckless, cruel self-pity Rylance does this for us.  It is both brilliant and painful to watch.   

Delfontmackintosh.co.uk.   For 9 weeks only

Rating 5 

SHARP SCRATCH?

    Crossing the Edgware Rd yesterday a shouting vaccine denier with a loudspeaker informed us all, stomping past in some sort of hurry,   that vaccines were lies, inoculation an International conspiracy.  It reminded me first to book my autumn double at the local pharmacy but then – another evening plan being cancelled –  then that I really ought to nip up to Kilburn for Pins and Needles, the Kiln’s latest offbeat booking, opened last week.  Written by Rob Drummond , it is about vaccine , trustfulness,  disinformation and suspicion, and the nature of scientific method.    It’s very meta – keen to keep reminding you that the speaker – posing as the author, played by Gavi Singh Chera – is trying to make a play out of recorded interviews and that the supposed verbatim stuff might be “edited a bit”.  

     Thus, in an elegant set of neon strips , shapes and steps,  he talks first to Mary – Vivienne Acheampong – who was convinced by the now-debunked Andrew Wakefield researchthat MMR caused autism. Having one autistic son already, she deceived her husband, didn’t vaccinate the second; and of course he had an unusually bad bout of measles and was disastrously damaged. This all comes out gradually, skilfully interspersed with the other interviewee – Brian Vernel – who lost his mother from, he thinks a very rare reaction to the Pfizer vaccine and attempted to have her secretly exhumed to prove it.  His life is now devoted to antivax propaganda.   And near the end, the narrator “Rob” talks of a bereavement of his own, and more self-blame.

    It’s an interesting and well-acted examination of the emotions that surge around this aspect of medicine, but for a while suffers tendency towards glum, sad and flat (who the hell wants 80 minutes of glum Covid stories? We have our own!) .  What lifts it mercifully soon is the arrival of the 200-years-dead pioneer of smallpox vaccination,  Richard Cant as a cheerful, self-confident Edward Jenner,  thrilled to hear that the disease is now eradicated, and full of anecdotes – in between short trills on his flute – about how he did it.  18c medicine previously tried a terrible thing called ‘variolation’ to create immunity,  but his experiments with the milder cow-pox bore fruit, though experiments on young lads, only one of whom seems to have died from it. 

       But then, face it, scientific method  is king,  and as Jenner says,  “what happened to Samuel was a statistical likelihood”.  Just as the furious antivaxxer’s mother’s blood clot presumably was.  Always hard to take.  He also remarks that “the plural of anecdote is not evidence”, a motto I shall hold to my heart every time I read some overemotional press tale on a medical subject.  Jenner indeed has all the best lines, insisting that in medicine “you have to DO things, not just talk” and that open minds are vital with zealots on both sides, and that we should dwell in “the difficult and murky world of the honest exchange of ideas”.   Then, as the play ends, Drummond mentions how much of Jenner’s peacock-pioneer pride is not entirely justified.

     Short, interesting, incomplete, thoughtful: I liked it.  There will be bigger plays about vaccine –  maybe about Jenner himself – as there was about antisepsis in Dr Semmelweis. But this was a good sharp scratch at it… 

Kilntheatre.com to 26 october