HEART AND HUMOUR, REALPOLITIK AND GOD
This is a wonderful play, all you could want: philosophy, history prefiguring the present moment, humour and character , stunning central performances, and confrontations which create a shiver of tension palpable through the audience. It is about about music and its inspiration , religious faith and angry denial: here’s JS Bach devout, searching for a language of God, feeling his age and losing his sight but kindled to fiery defiant mockery. It is 1747: he has been summoned before the scornfully atheist Emperor Frederick , a bullied son (his father famously a nightmare) who has become a shruggingly pragmatic wartime monarch. Yet Frederick is himself a flautist and composer , unable to resist the shabby, elderly near-blind cantor from Liepzig. But , like his sycophantic (very funny) troupe of court composers, he would prefer to bring the old genius down a bit: the courtiers also like to wind up his son, one of their lower-paid number. They challenge the old composer to improvise, in the moment, a near-impossible musical conundrum, a fugue based on twenty notes by the Emperor.
This central ordeal is brilliantly achieved, but sparks the immense political and moral confrontation about the savagery of war: electric.
I saw it on its short run in Bath in 2023: given the international news was sharply jolted by the confrontation between the resplendently silver-suited Frederick and the homely figure of Johann Sebastian telling him about the noisy licentious soldiery in his distant home, raping a blind local girl. “It was an honour to be part of your invasion!”. “Intervention!” snaps the younger man, with Enlightenment conviction about Europe’s need to be modernized by Prussians. He shrugs excuses, and like Putin claims “stolen land”. Topical shiver, again.
Oliver Cotton’s play was a long time in creation, but Trevor Nunn’s elegant production could hardly have fallen on a sharper moment for such a scene. At the time I thought it was not quite a perfect play, despite a superb cast and the marvellous, volcanic yet lovable central performance by Brian Cox and Stephen Hagan brilliantly giving Frederick what I can only call a defensively effete brutality. Well, something has happened to it. Or I was just wrong. It is one of the great plays of the decade. Just go. The small tender moments will stay with you too: Nicole Ansari-Cox as Bach’s wife, praying with him before the two-day journey’s danger, or – in a short scene later – defying the officer who demands billets in their little school’s attic . Having seen the extent of Prussian power in the court scenes, her victory over him got a sudden relieved bout of applause. And laughter too meets old Bach’s magnificent grumpiness : (“You Prussians can’t fall in a ditch without showing your bloody papers”) . And Voltaire, hanging around court as a philosophical atheist favoured for the moment by the Emperor, gives us a line to take away as, three hundred years on, our world too is shuddering. Music is, naturally, part of the answer. For if life is a shipwreck, “remember to sing in the lifeboats”.
Box office. trh.co.uk. to 26 April
rating 5
theatreCat 