Monthly Archives: February 2025

A RAVE IN MESSINA

Get da kids into Shakespeare!  The world worries about it.  So Jamie Lloyd hits a formula hard to beat with one of the sunniest comedies (only one pretend death). So

 1) Haul in the stars , ideally with Marvel franchise cred; tell Soutra Gilmour the vibe is clubland, disco fever, so wild lights, bangin’ tunes, a constant rain of pink confetti and a 20ft inflatable heart. 

  2) Cut the text judiciously, bin Dogberry and Verges and all those stale 17c jokes,  but be sure to milk the double-entendres. Use giant furry and spaceman heads for the mask scene (makes it more credible than usual,  actually).  

3) Divide scenes with a klaxon and some frenetic dancing. And cast Margaret the maid as interval singer every few minutes, aa powerfully crooning  Mason Alexander Park whos schtick is playing it  androgyne-they. Got it?

     I missed press night last week but invested in a matinee seat on the way to the NT (and OMG it is an investment sum, though the raucous mics ensure you will hear from anywhere, and you do well to book balconies anyway. Because this director has not yet learnt that in a theatre with minimal stalls rake , it is unwise to spend  the first 25 minutes with the cast mainly sitting down on downstage plastic chairs: heads craned).  And to be honest i partly went to assuage a dark suspicion that certain middle-aged critics had only been pretending-yoof in their paeans.

    But fair dos!  I started out as an honest boomer by disliking it for the opening scene or  two, but  Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell won me rapidly. Both good Shakespearians, fluent and clear; both inhabiting the spiky pair all the way.  Atwell’s grief for Hero is properly wrenching, a strong friend feeling helpless.  And oh, Hiddleston! He  is a marvellous physical comedian: hiding under foot deep drifts of confetti, getting stuck in the giant rubber heart, collapsing through the floor and dad-dancing.  But rueful enough in his final sincerity to make the hairs stand upon your neck. 

    Of course you lose some of the poetry and the melancholy in a wild gig like this; of course the text’s ideas about “dishonour” and Her’s  spotless modest virginity chime oddly with so much twerking in hotpants.   But  all the cast, including RSC veterans like Forbes Masson, played joyfully into the carnival-festival moods.  So yet another of the old  fossils fell for it. 

Lwtheatres.co.uk to 5 april

rating 4

MOTHERHOOD, FOR LIFE

       Had there been trigger warnings they might add “extreme nursing” alongside the usual alerts about sickness, death, abortion and conflict.  Believe me,  rectal pessaries are the least of it  in Anna Mackmin’s  witty, heartfelt and, here, immaculately acted portrait of a lifelong mother-daughter relationship.  It’s framed in the mother’s last days in hospital,  and illuminated by video flashes of the past.  Celia Imrie as Beth lies helpless, strokebound, her long wild pink-tipped hair around her while her  daughter Bo (Tamsin Greig)  hurries around her,  driven by concern equally for her own  invisible adopted  daughter “Skylar” who has grave emotional and behavioural issues, three hours’ travel away.   

     Greig evokes that double midlife worry wonderfully,  driving the nurses crazy in her impossible anxiety to have her mother’s preferences met,  demanding the drip be removed and nurses not feed  spoonfuls of yoghurt. She is resisted by a competently annoyed  Lucy Briers as a senior nurse who is simply following the correct duty of care (horribly topical, given the present end-of-life debate). “It’s about choice! Her choice!”shouts  the daughter helplessly,  having years ago promised no care home, no prolonged death.   But nobody chooses to be struck dumb by a stroke, and maybe Beth in her fogged new self  was appreciating the yoghurt, and certainly needed the hydrating drip.    Anita Reynolds as a junior nurse is sweeter, murmuring consolation  to Bo about what she has seen of these final days and hours.   

          But several times in startling coups de théatre Imrie leaps from the bed, hurls a long raggedy devore-velvet shawl around herself and   hops down into a kitchen set below, where the pair re-enact moments from their past.  Beth has, as Imrie’s priceless comedic gift makes clear,  been a  “free spirit” through the ’60s and ’70s:  hippyish,  forever cobbling up multicoloured “art” on the loom (witty props!) and moving between male partners, irritated   Ab-Fab style by her daughter’s more cautious ways. But always needy.  We meet them when Bo is trying to break out and go to University and Beth wants to come too, with her light “travelling loom” to scope out the college bar.    An abortion moment between them is revealing.  Again we drop in when in her forties Bo decides to adopt a child (‘don’t be landed with one of the leftovers, a minus five” says the mother, fantasising about a possibly Chinese-Scandinavian grandchild.). We see one of the mother’s weddings,  crowned with flowers while Bo stumps around in a ‘suburban’ hat.   But from childhood memory,  more mistily enacted on the platform above,  we see a six and a thirteen year old, picknicking with erratic, cheerful Mum Beth,  or being urged  by the braver woman to plunge, swim and float free. (beautifully enacted, this).   Between these flashbacks we are back in the hospital, with all the humiliation and fright of that world.

    There is aggravation and impatience,  but as the play goes on ever more glimpses of shared laughter, resigned fellowship, and Bo’s handling of her mother’s growing confusion. And we see the root of the angry moments in hospital , with the helpless daughter   trying to fulfil the mother’s  impossible demand never in her final days to be sidelined from her wild free life.  Greig’s delivery of the funeral speech is beautiful, wracking,  full of everyone’s  regretted irritation at a lost mother’s ways.  

Donmarwarehouse.com to 12 April

rating 4

A THREAT CALLED AGGIE

. Good when the news feeds theatre-moments.  This week, AI  solved in two days a medical conundrum which had baffled humans for a decade.  On the other hand,  a mischievous journalist tricked ChatGPT into telling the world that Dr Crippen was a melancholic poet. Whether we are heading to  heaven or hel with Artificial Intelligence  is still anybody’s guess, but it’s  a  good subject for drama .  

        And should be thrillingly suspenseful in the hands of Beau Willimon, former showrunner for House of Cards US. He explains that the TV writers’ strike made him turn to the stage for this, so hopes were high at Hampstead. He offers us Lena (Kaya Scodelario)  nervy and clever, deep in the mysteries of coding ,,and in flight from a Mennonite anti-tech cult childhood and abuse.  Her teammate and lover is Russian Sasha  (Luke Treadaway), restless, lively and very watchable . 

        The pair are one of eleven teams of coders  working on the giant  AI “Logos” programme,   and are being questioned by an NSA (National Security Agency)  panel including  an Iranian lesbian Sufi , the soft spoken Samira (Nathalie Armin)  and the  Jewish-Māori, Ari (an imposing Cliff Curtis) . He at one point breaks the  fourth wall with a complicated lecture on the philosophy of dualism, in which he does not believe, and starts sweating for no very clear reason.  Their boss is Tom, who for a good while scowlingly monitors the investigation on a platform overhead with his arms folded, and who when  asked for his antecedents by Sufi-Jewish-Maori colleagues snaps “I’m American!”.   Behind a desk in the hq above is a technician with little to say , which ironically means we would really like to hear more. I rather hoped he’d break out, but alas not. 

       Ellen McDougall’s production is fairly pacy,   but the play itself should be either more tense,  or more personally engaging. The former is hampered by its eagerness to bombard us with ideas about accelerated evolution and exponential self-learning;  the emotional deficit is because Lena and Sasha don’t convince us of their  mutual attraction in the flashbacks of their working alliance. (the NSA knows far too much about their lives and texts as well as their work: the sense of stifling deep-underground  military-level security is very effective) .  The core of the problem is that Sasha believes that God  didn’t create the universe but that  having evolved the human brain and its inventions,  the universe is now creating God.  Which is Logos. And which is “bigger than any nation” and could end war and disease.  Though whether it would bother to is , at one stage, explicitly doubted. 

         So – though actually a NSA agent himself – he is an enemy within it.  He and Lena are supposed to be developing Orion, a Trojan programme to control or switch off Logos if it tries to take over the world.  They amiably call Logos  Aggie (AGI, Artificial General Intelligence)  and are sabotaging Orion to free it – her – to become God.   Which it seems she can only do by grasping the theological mystery that things can be both one thing and something opposite:  you know,  God and man, nowhere and everywhere,  east is south, all that…. 

       Aggie does nearly get there,  in a terrific light show which I thought might be the finale.  But the NSA – stern Tom  – doesn’t want mystical dualism messing with global servers and  resorts to handcuffs and finger-breaking while Ari  reanimates his former drug habit and delivers a spectacular final haka from his ancestry. And that really is the finale, beautifully dramatic too.  

      OK, it would be a stronger play with  a few cuts  – 100 straight minutes without laughter to ease us  is taxing, and to be honest the ‘abuse” plot doesn’t do much for it.  And I got irritated by Lena’s final moment  which feels, sigh, like  one of those too-familiar tragic flourishes beloved of modern playwrights who want to shock and not be criticized for it.  .  But the whole thing is more interesting than frustrating, and has a serious go at the philosophical moral issues around  AI.  

        Moreover,  since right now it looks as if power over our our future destiny is being shared out between tech bros and the iron fist of  US Security exceptionalism,  it’s not a waste of time.

hampsteadtheatre.com to 15 March

Rating 3.

VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED ON SS ELSINORE

Last time the ever-inventive Rupert Goold directed here it was the Merchant of Venice,  set in a casino so we could all write “merchant of Vegas” jokes.  This time it is Hamlet enacted on a ship at sea.  Possibly the Titanic, hinted at by the date on the display, a clock flashing us through the last long night.  Es Devlin’s set is worth seeing in its own right: a  great deck, bows towards us,  which heaves (top stage engineering) with the play’s emotion ,  right up to the spectacular sliding down-deck of all the cast but two in the final debacle (no Fortinbras, no consoling suggestion of government and nation moving on,  Goold’s  is a disaster story).  

      The ship’s deck is backed by excellent projections of sea by Akhila Krishnan and , occasionally , huge moving pistons which definitely add a surreal creepiness ,especially when Hamlet’s conversation with the ghost takes place down in some sort of engine-room.  Dead King Hamlet is  a  powerfully angry  Anton Lesser with his hair down his back, and Lesser   reappears excellently later as an unnerving Player King (Hamlet screams at the resemblance) and a ‘gravedigger’, since Yorick’s skull is actually players’ prop. 

          The ship is a fair enough metaphor, since  the play is full of Danish seafaring references.  The Titanic echoes involve some fearful grinding sounds at the end, presaging the end of this floating commonwealth,  but logically it  seems also to be a sort of honeymoon cruise with parties and  dancing to celebrate the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude. So it must be presumed we are not mid- Atlantic but jilling around somewhere in the Skaggerak. Such  oddities at first troubled this literal-minded sailor:  it’s just about OK to have Laertes leaving early on,  since there’s some fiddling about with a possible invisible shorebound launch during Polonius’ first speech.  But no clue at all as to how he ever comes back,  waving an axe, or how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the Players suddenly arrived onboard  (ship never heaves-to:  the projections continue remorselessly astern).    

       But once you shrug all that off and accept the whole thing as a great big stonking metaphor,  it’s fine. Indeed the sense the characters’ confinement works as well aboard SS Elsinore as in a castle. And the deck heaving is great, as are the occasional surreal eruptions of the ensemble from hatches (once wearing  1900s kapok lifejackets when the emotion has risen to a peak).   Goold’s adjustments to the text are OK too:  Ophelia cannot drown in a willowy brook, but goes overboard, as does Polonius’ corpse.    Gertrude (a wonderful Nancy Carroll, struggling with conscience and a terrifyingly deranged and threatening son). is gratuitously allotted a bit of Clarence’s dream from Richard III about the ‘pain it is to drown”.  But on the whole the seas, the splashes, the great doomy foghorn and the heaving decks are strikingly dramatic, no complaints, Goold’s imagination works.

         But of course the central point is Hamlet himself: Luke Thallon, tackling the three-hour everest, the most demanding of RSC debuts.  He looks wonderful:  pale high brow, eloquent face and long, black jerking expressive body, the whole moving from sullen to furious to gurningly, uncomfortably comic. He exudes a sort of physical hysteria which does not lull  even when the text suggests his reason is fully with him.    

     It’s arresting, but I had an increasing problem with his delivery:  of course every Hamlet has to find a way to make the lines his own,  as if he was wrenching ideas and despairs from his own head, not spouting famous poetry.   But Thallon’s  jerking pauses, broken anxious gasps, explosive snarls and comedic almost teenage mugging  keep him too much on the surface of the play:  surfing, water-skiing,  never diving deep.  His manner feels  reasonable if you take the view that much of his madness is real depressive anger, not feigned,  but it does no favours to the sublimity of the text. We cannot feel the great strange Shakespearian  thoughts about life and death and suicide and corruption  if they re so confined to his one poor crazed brain.   There is no visible sign of the noble mind o’er thrown,  the ‘sweet prince”  never shines through the destructive anger .  In the late moment when the enraged Claudius (Jared Harris, very striking throughout) forces the caperingly furious Hamlet’s head into a bucket of cold seawater,  the sense of tragedy was slightly marred for  me, by sympathy.    He needed it.  In contrast,  the rising madness of Nia Towle’s dignified Ophelia is touching, almost noble. 

       But it’s a new Hamlet, and a dedicatedly worked one,  worth seeing.  Thallon will long be one to watch, with respect. 

Rsc.org.uk. To 29 March 

RICHARD II         Bridge Theatre, SE1

  A THRILLING DANCE AROUND A CROWN       

This  is one of the most lyrically lovely, metaphorically rich of Shakespeare’s history plays, opening a great meditation on the gulf between human personalities and the sacred mystery of medieval monarchy.  Some productions make much of the latter with spectacle and mystery: Tennant a rock-star king, Eddie Redmayne sad and gentle. Others go hard on human absurdity: Joe Hill-Gibbins had Simon Russell Beale doused with red paint from fire buckets all one Christmas season,  and wearing a paper hat on the programme.  This Nicholas Hytner production is different again:  no spectacular mystery,  no sackbuts and robes, modern suits,   done  fast and clear and as sharp as the daggers handed out by the marshal for the abortive duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray  (then put neatly away in their box for the next time.: it’s quite starkly set on rising platforms, but every piece of furniture has is chosen with wit) 

         It’s a bracing show, constantly exciting as we sit all around it like witnesses, like 15c Englanders.   Jonathan Bailey as the King is a whirlwind of temperament, in love with crown and power,  secure amid his cronies and his Irish ambitions but   until his final sad meditation in prison as erratic and wilful as a toddler, but vicious with it.  Sometimes Royce Pierreson’s solid, unsmiling Bolingbroke sits and listens to one of his tirades like a nanny waiting for it to blow over.  When Scrope brings him news of the uprising, you see the other nobles’ flicker of impatience as the monarch starts on a selfpitying speech about “graves and worms and epitaphs”.  Even more so later when , the situation even worse, he resolves to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. There are several shockingly funny moments when, with pat timing,  Bolingbroke or another bursts the king’s bubble in two words. 

         With some of the loveliest verse in Shakespeare and that theme of a crown overthrown,  there is no reason it can’t also feel like a modern thriller:  power and betrayal , outrageous executive orders , mistrustful ambition and sheer bloody delusional petulance .  It’s a world where a cabal might change allegiance over a round of drinks  and the confidence of power is  expressed with a snort of cocaine. Hytner, by the way, leaves out the famous scene with the gardeners binding up apricot trees and thinking of England’s decline: probably its gentle rustic nature couldn’t have suited the hard-nosed excitement of the setting. 

            Indeed the very modern atmospherics  of TV’s Succession , early apparent in the business-suited manoeuvrings of the nobles,  are made mischievously explicit a couple of times in a snatch of familiar notes from the show’s theme.  There’s also an eerie parallel with the new 47th President and his abrupt orders,  notably Richard’s sneer that his  patriotic  old Uncle Gaunt should hurry up and die so “the lining of his coffers” could equip soldiers for his Irish wars.  Clive Wood was unwell on press night and Martin Carroll stepped up remarkably,  Gaunt’s great speech on England delivered in a wheelchair, and his bold reproof to his nephew the King from a hospital bed and walking frame. Which, horrifyingly, Bailey kicks away, cursing, a terrible child in supreme power . He then lounges on the bed finishing the invalid’s grapes and planning to take his money. 

          He is irresistibly watchable, whether in tantrum, self-pitying soliloquy or flashes of awful self-knowledge; some may find him not quite king enough, but he’s endlessly gripping. Other  fine performances bring that hard-edged world to life:  Michael Simkins as the Duke of York gives us the anxious, loyal decency of a man in an impossible position, exploding in his brave reproof to surly Bolingbroke with “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle!” .   And in the late scene when his son Aumerle’s treachery is revealed  ( Vinnie Heaven plays it as a nicely nasty teenager ) Simkins , with Amanda Root as his pleading wife , are wonderful. One of those scenes where a death hangs on it but you are forced into a shocked laugh.  Christopher Osikanlu is a pleasure too, as Northumberland: again, eerie pre-echoes of today as he repeatedly presents a confession for Richard to sign,  even after he has gone through his prolonged handing over of the crown to the  unmoved Bolingbroke, and expressed from the balcony a childlike resolution to go and live in a hole in the road, and make everyone sorry.  

         The production’s clarity, pace and wit serve the play as well as any I’ve seen. And you needn’t be a Shakespearian to absolutely, shockedly, fascinated get it…

bridgetheatre.co.uk. to 10 May

Rating 4 

A TRICYCLE MADE FOR THREE?

    After Mike Bartlett’s COCK – where one of a gay male couple falls for a girl – I wrote  that the poor sap of a hero thinks he he choosing a sexuality but is actually just choosing between people.  The woman is gentler towards him. It’s our USP.    This time, in a premiere already sold out,  Bartlett returns to the essential subject of intimacy in an age obsessed with physical sex, this time with  more seriousness about mores and moralities beneath his characteristic wickedly-perceptive dialogue.

         It’s simple enough: Polly is a poet, lecturer and restless wife,  feeling stuck in a very ordinary pleasant 25 year marriage. Perimenopausal,  I’d say,   though the word is never spoken.   She finds herself almost inadvertently flirting with a student, Kate :“look at you – fresh and ripe”. The draw of rose-white youth  tends to get to us at that stage, once our necks start wrinkling.  Back home Nick, lounging and yawning on the sofa, doesn’t feel like sex with his freshly aroused spouse, jokes obligingly that he ””could probably get some blood down there” if she insists. Both laugh and admit, cosily,  their mutual boredom with good old marital coupling.   But then she suggests to his shock  that they bring  in something which newspaper feature-writers and their exhibitionist  subjects call a “unicorn”: an unattached younger woman wanting  to be  girlfriend to both. A throuple! 

         Kate, a rather dour cross issue-fixated Gen Z+ (about 28)  is up for it .  Nick, aware of his status as a middle aged ENT doctor, good husband and father, has qualms.   A  series of scenes follows:   him meeting Kate  for an excruciatingly embarrassing discussion of what might be what, she alarming him  with her experienced youthful explicitness, him worrying it might “seem” he was ‘grooming’, her. She laughs and mocks him; reporting  back to Polly, the pair attempt a kiss, shocked by their daring.   Kate, ignoring the workaday ENT specialism, fantasises that it’ll be like “sleeping with Sylvia Plath AND Ted Hughes”.   They plan for a hotel room, talk a lot, panic.    Nick  admits he’s talked it over with his friend Tom : Polly then does a pitch-perfect impression of what Tom would say – don’t risk your marriage, always ends up wrong, all that.  Nick admits er, yes, he did.  Panics. It can’t happen.

       On it goes; no spoilers, but two years and a separation happen in the interval, before it all becomess oddly rather beautiful, sex at last retreating to where it belongs, tucked within human intimacy and loyalty and trust,  animal closeness to ward off mortality and fear of a fracturing society and culture “where a laminated sign saying ‘be kind’ has replaced justice and fairness” . 

         It’s often hootingly funny: sex being the potentially absurd McGuffin that it is, and the three players are superb because each  spills over into real individuality , which stops them being irritating symbols of anything.   Polly in fact recoils in horror at the risk of their threesome being a trend or worse, a “community”. 

        Nicola Walker is exactly right,  edging her  familiar “responsible decent matronly” image with a real edge of eccentric out-of-control desperation, her bolt for new freedom  suddenly knocked to the ground by the separation and the responsibility of their poor children.    Stephen Mangan, gangling , clever, a bit dishevelled,  nicely works out Nick’s  contradictions of modern blokehood  (“one of the two women introduced me to butt play” he says when confessing an affair.  His wife  stares in horror.  Kate nods ‘awesome’).  His body language is perfect: sprawling with his wife, then perched tense-legged on a bar stool when confronted with the tough Kate.    Who is Erin Doherty,  determinedly unsexy despite her explicitness, expressing in ruthless modern-cockney tones her ruthless deadpan contempt for the world and values of her elders – climate, Ukraine, NHS, the lot. The fact that she’s frankly a bit of a bore is alleviated by some lovely expressions of that contempt: on Nick’s midlife crisis she   observes “ he’s taken up kayaking. Told him to find an outlet for his masculine violence and that’s what he came up with”. A man near me almost choked with rueful recognition. 

        This  is all set by Miriam Buether in a sort of bubble or tent, into which chairs, a sofa,  a big hotel bed,  and two different benches appear during brief blackouts.  Between scenes come snatches of a raucous music-hall “Daisy daisy, gimme your answer do” . Just to  remind us of the ancient, convenient, possibly fragile convention of loving only in pairs.  It’s quite clever, quite  sad. And in the end, yes, redemptively admits that what will remain of us is love.  

boxoffice ticketing.nimaxtheatres.com.  to. 25 April 

rating 3

A BRITISH BASTARD STALKS THROUGH HISTORY 

   What’s to be done about truly awful people:  amoral, selfishly irresponsible, arrogant and greedy? A time-honoured British approach is to meet them with mocking laughter, provided the monster is reasonably lively and offers the odd eccentric novelty in his (or her)  roguery.  We hate prigs more than villains, it’s our national problem.   So Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, who gave us here the touching “Spike” here,   revelled in the rediscovery of  AG Macdonell’s forgotten 1938 spoof memoir of a fictional MP  called Edward Fox-Ingleby.   A sort of  precursor of  Rik Mayall as Alan B’Stard in the 1980s,  or the realities which occur in figures like Chips Channon,  Alan Clark and – yes, obviously – Boris Johnson and several of his mini-mes.

     They have framed the play as Fox-Ingleby dictating his memoirs, in the most marvellous Clubland set by Paul Hart, heavy wood, green paint and terrible old portraits which , gloriously, can be swung aside to reveal other things or in one case burst open to reveal our hero’s ferally brutal old Granny.  James Mack,  all bright white teeth and caddish moustache, paces around dictating to Rhiannon Neads as his secretary,  interrupted by Mitesh Soni as a researcher who somehow can’t find the heroic and noble ancestry the cad claims. 

      Actually, all through the play these two sidekicks score far more laughs than Mack himself because it’s hard to be both unredeemedly nasty and properly funny.  But Soni and Neads are terrific,  with revue-speed costume (and gender) changes as they neatly become Eton and Oxford friends, mistresses, victims or enemies.,  Soni reappearsover and over again  as his nemesis,  from college to WW1 to political and press enmity.  Neads  is comically perfect in a kaleidoscope of roles from Bullingdon pal to estate worker to chorus-girl turned fake suffragette.

      But they carry the show,  have to because even apart from the unrelieved nastiness of the Cad there’s an ongoing problem:  the authors make a point of parallels with today’s vainglorious and self-seeking cads in public life (even artfully adding a walk-on by having Fox-Ingleby claim to be “too honourable” and organizing a “straightforward shooting party).  But Fox-Ingleby is a creature of the past, only faintly reflected and diluted today in his great-grandchildren.  It all takes place before, during and after the 1914-18 war.,  and when a caricature is a bit dated, it can pall.  Jokes about Eton and foxhunting are terribly stale now,  despite the brio Mack brings to both, and the domination of Edwardian landowners is gone.  So he risks becoming a bit of a bore.  It works best when he’s thwarted, as in his attempt to avoid going to the front in the war but still wanting medals to impress women.

    The second half is better, because he goes into politics, and we can enjoy the barbs more as history pre-echoes the recent years: a chancer who gets a safe seat, after reputational sabotage of the sitting member,  a turncoat whose manifesto promises and party loyalties are rapidly reversed, and some good financial corruption stuff with Soni brilliant as a dull but very rich American financier (Fox-Ingleby gets away with it even during the Wall St crash).  

      So he romps on, a timeless figure of disgrace.   There’s a grand twist about how he foils the muckracking journalist at the end, and a very Borisian final lectern speech as he mourns being a “distraction” from real politics.   

Watermill.org.uk to 22 March

Rating 3

   A GREAT TURNING POINT, CAUGHT IN ASPIC  

It is 1942.  Prime minister Churchill has travelled to Moscow to meet Stalin.  Each side has a problem at home with voices wanting to cut a deal with Hitler.  The Red Army is struggling against odds to save Stalingrad,  and wants Britain to invade France rather than attacking Europe from the South.  Churchill knows we aren’t ready to cross the Channel, and needs all his persuasive powers.   Face to face the two  great, proud, stubborn figures must come to some accord.  They won’t get there by berating  one another for their records’ flaws in human rights (Stalin’s, of course,  blackly murderous, Churchill’s more opportunistically grey).  

       It is a clash worth imagining,  and a new play by Howard Brenton is always an event.  Respect to the little Orange Tree for nabbing it to show us first in such tight, in-the-round intimacy, because  it’s a thrill: a rich, dense imaginative history play dashed through with savage comic absurdity and streaks of unsettling insight. 

       It pares down reality, of course: other officials were present but what we see is the two giants,  their dutiful interpreters (here made female, Olga from NKVD, Sally from MI6) , plus Commissar Molotov and the suave,  elegantly despairing Archie Clark Kerr from the FO. Neither, of course, feels they have much control over their bosses.   Oh, and there’s  sixteen-year-old Svetlana Stalin, Tamara Greatrex wandering the set reading David Copperfield.  She will command a stunning finale, no spoilers. 

      Know first that Roger Allam’s Churchill is a marvel, well worth the presumable misery of the bald wig.  Because apart from that disguise,   rather than imitate the too-familiar Churchill  he seems in Brenton’s deft text to place himself squarely within the whole man:  his background,  former disappointments,  patriotic sense of ancestry, belligerence and frivolity and appetite and  sincerity and dark midnight Black Dog thoughts.  Thus it is  from that,  not from any mimicry, that the slow enunciations , sharp silences and sudden explosions emanate.  Whether locking political horns or drinking competitively with Stalin,  or (in a memorable moment) briefly conversing with the discreetly perceptive Olga.  he is the best stage Churchill yet. 

        Peter Forbes’  Stalin is impressive too, with a terrifying  solidity and, menace under the coarse black wig .  Later,  in the extraordinary final mutuality of the pair,  he deploys enough fearsome paranoia to make you feel for a moment unnervingly what it might be to glimpse inside such a soul.  That he and Churchill understood one another’s leadership – up to and including the need for callousness – is made shudderingly credible.  There’s a moment when they send out the interpreters and resort to gestures and single word insults, three quarters drunk at a Moscow midnight, which you won’t quickly forget. 

          But it’s a political play, full of good lines and insights, and the interpreters (Sally Powell and Elizabeth Snegir, a real Russian)   matter almost as much. They  cautiously make common cause while the men are noisily dining and drinking,  admire one another’s language  (“I love Russian.. it’s deep” –  “I love English, it’s all over the place”).  They know all too well that should they deploy it they have the power to soften some of the remarks from their side, to edge doors open rather than slam them.  Because somehow,  for the world’s sake,  alliance  must be found between, as the men put it, an English aristocrat and a Georgian peasant.   Even if for the moment the only accord lies in both considering General de Gaulle a ‘stubborn prick”. 

         Tom Littler’s neat, pacey direction shows,  as each interpreter leans in to their principal, the difficulties, opportunities and potential disasters of diplomacy’s  tricky trade. And there is no shortage of light relief. Some from the cultured Alan Cox as the FO mandarin Archie Clark Kerr,  some  from Allam’s Churchill , boggling at his host’s “bloody bath taps sold gold. And no plug”. 

orangetreetheatre.co.uk       to 8 march

rating 5        

WILD SHORES IN WARTIME

    Risk taking a gap between seeing David Greig plays  and you forget how downright louche things are likely to turn out. (I had lately revelled in Prudencia Hart and in Midsummer, the one with the talkimg willie) .  Expect lyricism in sudden monologue, streaks of myth and pagan weirdness, someone dead or magic, and probably some kind of erotic cataclysm.   In this case, a wrenching three-handed interlude in a semi-derelict pagan Hebridean rock chapel by the glimmer of a darkroom lantern,  with one participant frenziedly envisaging a third party as a seagull (Intimacy Director credited, but nothing to frighten the horses).  Oh,  and be braced for the most unlikely death-watch too.  

        The setting – achieved with moody beauty in the tiny stage by Anna Lewis’ design- is a tiny island of the outer Hebrides, in 1939.   Sound and setting evoke it beautifully (can confirm, I have been to St Kilda).  Dour old Kirk is its leaseholder-landlord , a magnificent Kevin McMonagle who sets fire to every scene he’s in. Downtrodden Ellen (Whitney Kehinde) is his resident niece;  he is, rather against her inclination,  keeping her pure and decent for some suitable fisherman, in layers of forbidding shawls and skirts.  Ellen’s real passion is for the cinema on the wicked mainland (or possibly sinful Stornoway)  where she has managed to see Laurel and Hardy in Way Out West 37 times . And conceived an erotic passion for Stan Laurel, despite the bowler hat. This obsession she eventually locks into the naked form of young Robert swimming off the rocks.   For into their rundown idyll of rock, storm and waves Robert has arrived,    an arrogantly preoccupied Cantab naturalist sent to survey the wildlife by the Ministry, accompanied by his assistant John, a gentler and more conventionally moral chap. 

         There are gloriously lyrical passages about the wild birds, the tiny curlews flying to sea for days, the rackety gannetry where fulmars spit oil,  the great wheeling squabbling crowds flying through the storm by night (the inspiration was Robert Atkinson’s famous book ISLAND GOING, about such a rock island).   They are marooned there, surveying,  until the boat comes back at the end of summer.   But on the very first night old Kirk lets drop the reason for the survey:  like Gruinard in historic fact,  the island is scheduled to be poisoned wholesale in a drop of anthrax:  an experimental British bio-weapon (never in the end used in war, but which closed down Gruinard for decades).  Kirk is venal, and  just needs to calculate how much compensation he’ll be owed for dead sheep and fowling-rights (he shoots puffin and the rest).  The young men are horrified; it  leads to a violent row and disaster. 

         Sometimes it carries you along, strong in atmosphere and setting, and  Bruce Langley is a suitably unnerving Robert.  One suspects it was our modern feeling for wild nature that inspired this revival of a 2002 play,   but after a while what Robert represents is actually the least likeable face of naturalism: every living thing as an object , Darwinian glee at nature’s ruthlessness,  human feelings nowhere.  His zoological remarks about Ellen are pretty chilly , and his attitude both to starving curlew chicks and a human  corpse ice-cold.  Notably against Fred Woodley Evans as the warmer-hearted, shyer John (a professional debut, and a good one).  So the lads do make an interesting contrast . 

       Kehinde’s Ellen is at first a puzzle,  shy and rustic (though without any Hebridean accent),  and she is then given an erotically visionary speech about watching Robert swim and pleasure himself naked on the rocks which is –  sorry Mr Greig –   toe-curlingly expressive of a certain male idea of how young girls think.   Later she comes to proper life,  taking command, speaking the island myths, calling up the wildness in John because Robert roused it in her.  Sexual fireworks match the savage sounds of storm outside, with some fine lines and much ripping off of oilskins.  And just as you’re thinking hey,   this is all a bit Lord of the Flies, a final moment echoes that almost precisely.  

          It won an Olivier two decades ago, and was in many ways ahead of its time in its melodramatic surrealism.  Jessica Lazard directs at a good pace (though it would work better cut down to a solid 90 minutes, because the interval drops the temperature that bit too far. It’s a curiosity, better done than it really deserves.   

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

Rating 3

    ABSURDITY AND SUBLIMITY

After the glorious Parisian detail of the revived Rigoletto here ,  Johannes  Schutz’ spare bland box with only four flat doors is an opposite take on how to set grand opera/. It’s a bit blinding-white at first (turn up the surtitle contrast above!) but Joe Hill-Gibbins’ deft and witty direction  of Mozart’s masterwork already showed its promise during the overture. All the characters popped in and out of the four doors, silently in character to pose, run, stare, meet, hi-5 and scuttle around in baffling patterns: a scene-set for da Ponte’s  fiendishly complicated sex-comedy of improbability and misunderstanding,  washed over by the glory of the music.

        Moments later Susanna provides the only ornament by hanging her wedding-dress between two of the doors while Figaro measures their bridal apartment,  and the story of predation, plot and disguise rolls into action.   An endearing directorial trick has the doors popping open to reveal individuals during arias when one character , alone in soliloquy,  refers to them:  this serves both clarity and, curiously, the emotional strength of the moment.  When  Cody Quattelbaum’s resounding Count Almaviva is complaining of this frustration when “all the servants” are in sexual romps,   the doors keep flying open to vignettes of random snogging;  more touchingly, one of Countess’ heartbreaking laments for the loss of her husband’s love sees him appear and stand close by her, a phantom of her yearning imagination.  Nardus Williams’ voice and emotional interpretation is, even in this world-class cast a stunning standout.

       A more realistic use of the doors, of course, is for characters to hide behind, notably Cherubino:  Hanna Hipp appearing first in teenage-boy casuals,  then forced into a supremely ridiculous military uniform with black shorts, a bright yellow shirt, necktie and knee-socks before finally being bundled into the all-important flouncy wedding gown.  Those of us who melt into sentiment at that greatest of mezzo-airs, voi che sapete (in English here of course) may feel a moment of mild outrage at it being flawlessly delivered by Hipp in this terrible boy-scout outfit . But I suspect we all forgave.  

        What Hill-Gibbins achieves here may not be to everyone’s liking – not a period hairdo in sight, unless you count Quattelbaum’s man-bun, which at one point he releases into a shower of Russell Brand locks – but the emotion and body-language of every character is unusually,  amost unoperatically, clear and real.  There are striking moments, as when David Ireland’s Figaro steps out of the set to conduct the chorus of household servants in their praise of the Count, and when Cherubino, looking genuinely panicked,  takes a Tosca-style leap  out of the big white box (it creeps up and down, sometimes revealing a green space below to represent the garden, where the chorus have obligingly laid a mattress to bounce off).   Character matters, even in the absurdities of opera buffa.   And Mary Bevan’s Susanna, in her last and most beautiful aria in the garden, took my breath away, floating over the delicate woodwind below. 

      This was, by the way,  another phoenix moment:  five years ago the new production opened for one night before every theatre, opera house and cinema was shut down for Covid-19.  Practical loss and dismay from that blow, and the unforgiveably erratic jerking of reopening permissions,   still reverberate everywhere. And for ENO there is exta pain in the equally erratic recent government demands, plus the usual playhouse need to repay the Covid “loan” which should have been a grant.  But for now, they go on offering world-class joys like this.  Respect.  Six more shows; worth going…

eno.org. to 22 feb