Monthly Archives: March 2025

BEYOND QATAR…    

       Two years ago this show  was a pleasure – (https://theatrecat.com/2023/06/21/dear-england-olivier-se1/)  , and now,  on the far side of more efforts and agonies for the England football team, and the departure of the admirable Gareth Southgate James Graham has slightly extended it.  It’s still a blast, and worth reflecting on what it is about James Graham’s work that, on any topic, stirs the heart.  He has a  remarkable ability without mawkishness to expose the emotional quality of a particular professional world, outsider though he is. In the political plays he did it with Labour activism,  and with the claustrophobic loyalties of parliamentary parties and a whip’s office;  in INK with the excitement and wilful self-hardening of tabloid journalism.    He draws you in because he is no satirist but an observant, humane empath:  not being a football follower , I  felt that rush of surprising identification even more in Dear England.    More even this time, on the far side of the final defeat in the World Cup and Southgate’s Dimbleby Lecture about the alienation of too many boys.  For emotional growth, as well as dazzling physical skill, was what this gentle, unusual man sought to bring to the often loutish world of professional football.

         This reprise is as spectacular as ever, under Rupert Goold’s direction , with Helen Kane and Hannes Langlolf’s  joyful movement and Es Devlin’s gloriously- involving great arena (not a bad seat in the house, and the ghost-white projctions of arenas,  Wembley towers and Moscow as thrilling as ever). Gwilym Lee takes over as Southgate,  Liz White as Pippa the team psychologist.  A few familiar faces from last time, but Jude Carmichael has an excellent debut as Rashford, and several other new faces enliven the marvellous surging ensemble.  

      The story extends, of course, beyond the defeat in Qatar, and for a while I thought this might drag it out too far. But in the end – with the lessons learned of resilience, affection  and the thought that hell, life will always give you more chances – it grew fresh power . By the time you’re cheering for the Lionesses’ victory moment – done with the appropriate brief irony – and singing Sweet Caroline with half the vast  Olivier you find  a tear in the eye.  AND it’s touring! 

nationaltheatre.org.uk to 24 May     then nationwide tour

rating 4 

POWER, MAJESTY AND JUSTICE    

     Very good to see this intense three-hander  by Ryan Calais Cameron (who gave us “For Black Boys..” ) migrating to Shaftesbury Avenue with increased vigour.  And, God bless it,  the same central star in Ivanno Jeremiah as Sidney Poitier,  early in his career a decade before his Oscar.  Jeremiah is, as I wrote before, a great treat. But his new co-stars are pretty ace, too. 

     The play fits the paranoid cancel-culture age by taking us back to the 1950’s : not just the McCarthy witch-hunt against communists but an America still wickedly ill-at ease about black skin.   The set is a movie lawyer’s office – pitch-perfect down to the movie posters and drinks cabinet – where nervous screenwriter Bobby (Oliver Johnstone) is telling the NBC lawyer that his new TV script needs to star his friend Sidney Poitier, who’s made a hit in The Blackboard Jungle.  “He’s black – not Belafonte black,  black, black” he says. Which causes the lawyer – Stanley Townsend a magnificent silver-haired monster – to greet the arriving Poitier with a lot of embarrassingly patronizing street-talk “what’s the tale nightingale, what’s buzzin, cousin?”  – and making it clear the cultured, intelligent Bahamian is in his view something from “the ghetto”, panhandling and open to bribery.   

       He pours a lot of drinks , which Poitier doesn’t want,   and carries on making both the others uncomfortable.  At one point leading a reluctant singsong of the Banana Boat Song.  Ouch.  Oh, and forcing Poitier to have a whisky he doesn’t want, given that it’s just past breakfast time,  and to loosen his tie in faux camaraderie.  Told you Townsend was doing the full-monster:  indeed he is horribly entertaining at it, little skips and poses of boss-man malice.   Jeremiah evokes the difficulty this very young, new actor is in :  dignified, wary, knowing there are traps being laid for him every minute.  

       Earnest liberal (“I’m the most black white guy”) Bobby has written a script in which Poitier is an overseer of white dock workers. The lawyer can’t cope with this,  and goes into an even more embarrassing encomium of how Hattie McDaniel (Best Supporting, 1952) had said it was better playing the maid in Gone with the Wind than BEING a maid, so..   Poitier though is sick of playing the ‘good little negro” and says so.  Bobby is torn between ambition to get his show on screen by placating the lawyer and a real liberal desire to push forward the social barriers (still, in the 50s, very strict and segregated in much of the US).   

    But of course it all gets nastier:  Parks the lawyer calls Bobby a slimey little beatnik trying to break all the rules, and berates Poitier (I cannot overstate the energetic, elegant dignity and power of Jeremiah) for turning down the part of a passive black janitor,  accusing him of being paid to reject it .  Moreover,  Parks wants him to sign a denunciation of Paul Robeson and Belafonte as commies.  Bobby struggles with his ‘allyship” but when Poitier holds firm and delivers a fantastic speech hot with his rage, his daily rage at  racism and contempt,  you see him visibly wither in a kind of confused shame.  

      Its 90 minutes straight, and at the Kiln I called it less than perfect, even claustrophobic (we’re stuck in a room with a bully, a weakling and a hero without faults, after all).  But this revival feels sharper, harder, tougher, and often funnier (thanks to Townsend’s monstrous Parks).  And Ivanno Jeremiah is terrific, catching a turning-point in the history of black American advance in dignity and achievement.   “We’re here. We’re coming. Get Ready”  says Poitier.   More than once the audience whoops approval.  It’s proper fire.  

Box office nimaxtheatres.com to 14 June 

Rating 4. 

THE 1660’s  AND ALL THAT:   THEATRE REBORN

       Oddly, for theatrecat it’s the second day running of enliveningly energetic female history. After six women told the story of Mary Wollstonecraft braving the French Revolution and sneering 18c intellectuals, back we go a century  to see five more depicting the moment when Cromwellian gloom was dispelled , Charles II had the theatres reopened and let women act onstage.   As we open, old Doll Common (an irresistible Doña Croll) reminisces about how the playhouse she works in used to be a bear-pit, the creatures exploited and whipped.  In some afterlife she is joined by Nell Gwyn, also remembering.   Then around them rises a whole world of women, backstage and onstage and aspiring,  each from a different direction. 

       Here’s teenage Nell from her oyster-stall:  Zoe Brough engagingly childlike with energetic ambition.  She’s  off to audition for the King’s Company but Elizabeth Farley (Nicole Saywerr)  gets there first , having, in playwright April de Angelis’ reimagination, started out as a Puritan divine’s orphaned daughter, her rhetoric decrying the filth and scandal of theatre.   They meet other real figures. Katherine Kingsley is Beck Marshall,  blonde and assertive and sweary,  and the magnificent Anna Chancellor is  Mrs Betterton: wife of the theatre’s owner, seasoned star,  offering magisterial advice to the younger ones (the angle of the head at ten to eleven has particular pathos, and ‘never underestimate the advantage of opening one’s mouth when speaking” ).  We never see Betterton himself, though she is once seen pleading with her husband and boss to let the actresses have shares, and profit, not be mere hirelings.  

        There’s a heady sense of a new profession, beyond service and street trades, for the young, poor, female and brave,  Nell talks her way in and, after missing a cue and ruining a scene, discovers that a wild capering dance with lots of leg can quiet the gale of hissing and bring applause and cheers.   We see scraps of the work – absurd melodramas with breasty maidenhood tethered to a property tree,  moments of Shakespeare,  some Restoration nonsense with Sir Fopling Flutter,  a wonderful pair of Amazon archers in Roman helmets crying “we have avenged thee!”.   THey are riding the new craze,  for “the town does not want to see fusty old men in squashed hats”, but lively young women, décolletée and sportive. 

     Tough life, though, even apart from the hard work and constant line-learning.  Beck, falling out with a deceitful noble lover and shouting back at his gallery cries of “whore!|”,  is attacked and smeared with excrement.   The carriages, flowers and seductive blandishments of great men  – King very much included – are tributes to good legs and saucy breast-work,  not your level artistry.   And as you age you’re not going to be a star forever.  Old Doll remarks “I’m always the dead one under the cloak, or else I’m sweeping”,  and gradually the skilled, loyal Mrs Betterton finds herself sidelined; at one point holding the broom while a young one plays Queen. But if the narrative arc is of Nell’s development into the thrill of hundreds of faces “looking at you, waiting”,  and the seduction of royalty,  it also tells the peril of femaleness. Her pregnancy showing,  Eliza’s day is over. – “To be That Way on the public stage!”could lose Betterton his licence.   There’s only the street now, and more skilled if squalid pretending.  In a brief, sad sisterly moment the others try to abort her with a stage prop, a brooch.    There is a different sadness too as Mrs B remembers the heady moments when it all began,  and she defied the bishops in breeches-roles to play  Iago and the Fool and Prince Hal to her husband’s Othello, Lear and Falstaff; and how when reduced back to female roles , so often as victim, she missed that power.  

           Michael Oakley’s welcome revival does de Angelis proud: it’s lively,  funny,  sharp-witted, oddly thought-provoking. And  for all its revelling in retrospective overacting,  it chimes as  touchingly sincere about the backstage sisterhood of women who like the bears in the old pit were treated as “creatures”.  It has a short tour: catch it here or beyond, see below.

Box office. Orangetreetheatre.co.uk    To 12 april. THEN –

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre. 22-26 April.  THEN

Theatre Royal Bath, 28 April – 3 May

Rating 4

A ROUSING RACKET TO HONOUR A LIFE

    Mary Wollstonecraft was a pearl  of the 18c Age of Reason, even more treasurable for having – as a woman – a harder time of it than all the Lockes and Burkes and Paines.   Her rebelliously-rational intellectual,  moral and feminist principles and writings  lately  had a tribute  in a pretty terrible sculpture at Newington Green;  she spent some years there when not reporting on the French Revolution, starving half-frozen and pregnant by the treacherous Gilbert Imlay or travelling Scandinavia in support of his enterprises.  But this punkish, musical and  theatrical tribute by Maureen Lennon  is far more fitting to her energy, and comes from her East-Yorkshire childhood home,  and the vigorous Hull Truck and Pilot Theatre. 

    She grew up in Beverley, defending her mother from her violent father  (unthanked , even resented for ‘provoking’ him) .  From the start she read and thought and took in ideas and made her own philosophy.   Which, in a line, is that nobody is anyone’s property and women  – once allowd to be educated  – are equal to men.  Her ‘A vindication of the rights of women” had her followers immortally described as “Hyenas in petticoats’.

      The show begins with a hyena howl, and proceeds with noisy exuberance,  and a few rousing songs by Billy Nomates (How to grow a girl in this world” “Be a good girl”, tuneful, sometimes bluesey.  There are six players,  Laura Elsworthy fiercely central in neon-orange hair surrounded by five in multiple roles, decked out in ruffles and bustles and boots (and often breeches beneath as they morph into men of the time). But even the flounces owe more to cabaret than bonnet-drama, with one adding a fine pair of spangly knickers and Mary herself in dashing striped tights.  Sara Perks’  design is also brilliant in a set made of wooden blocks (some handily containing props) over which the cast leap and climb and scramble: it’s constantly visually gripping;  worth the trip for that theatricality alone.  Esther Richardson directs.

      Some of the Wollstonecraft original lines and sentiments are magnificent: the opening childbirth sequence (I felt sorry for the schoolboys in the front row) has her worrying about a girl-child  –  “should I unfold her mind, and so make her sick of this world?” .  I got a bit irritated at first by the girl-powery numbers with  “I just wanna run wild”,  not quite suiting the idea of this scholarly, ever-writing young woman,  but Lennon creates a lovely line for her sister Eliza – “Mary LIVES for difficult – the boringer the better”.   

      The players take us through her encounters, from the Unitarian preacher crying “Why do the nations of the world grovel to tyrants?” To Johnson the publisher who bravely sent her to write about the French Revolution.  I would have liked a bit more about how – having welcomed the new world it seemed to promise – Mary got disillusioned by the Jacobins’ attitude to women, and verbally ran her own revolution against the Revolution.   There’s a wonderful musical sequence with the “Important Men, Intellectual Men” of the age, preening while this wild-minded woman challenges them – including Godwin, who eventually became her second lover and better husband (Kate Hampson does a lovely job of softening,  and is entertainingly dressed up in apron and Marigolds by the cast at the end, when Godwin agrees to be a team partner, not a ruler of his wife She also gets all the fun out of the role of Lady Kingsborough, prototype posh-lady-boss).   Another good sequence uses all the words Mary was called , and women often are – bossy, hectoring, ugly,miserable, stupid, boring – ‘nasty woman!”   She briefly wonders “am I a monster?”.  

    Her affair with Gilbert Imlay  – “author, charmer and, wait for it, male feminist!”  and his betrayal is touchingly done,  Elsworthy managing despite the pace of the show to evoke vulnerability  and the moment when, seeing that after all “there is no new world”.   So after five minutes’ misgivings, I absolutely warmed to it,  enjoying some fine singing , great ensemble physical humour and above all, proper heart.   

      All the more because it happened to be a multiple schools’ matinee, and kept very attentive:  plenty of boys of an age vulnerable to Mr Tate,  plenty of girls in hijabs.  Outside a couple of them were arguing excitedly about it all.   Honour to the unsubsidized Wiltons  for reclaiming the political-musichall spirit, and getting the kids in too.   

Box office. wiltons.org.uk. to 29 march

Rating 4

THE UNSERIOUS UNDEAD

  “You will be horrified!” The five players announce, “- one way or another”. And with a flourish they hurl Bram Stoker’s book  behind them into Tijana Bjelajac’s  remarkably elegant (yet neon edged) late-Victorian set.    Before long we are seeing Charlie Stemp’s  timorous Harker with his estate-agent briefcase creaking into the dread castle door  and meeting the Count. Who is in his workout gear of lacy mini-basque, ciré trouserings and peekaboo midriff. 

       Which is, of course, just what a thousand-year-old Victorian vampire should always wear, when not in a swirling cape, fitted floorlength kimono and weskit with darling corset-lace detail (Tristan Rains’  s costumes are tremendous, two of the wigs spectacular).   And Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s revue-style spoof , an off-Broadway hit,   is in every aspect just as  tightly and carefully worked . So here’s  90 straight minutes in which five top-flight comic performers re-enact, queerstyle and knowing,  the immortal tale of the Transylvanian aristocratic vampire who takes  a trip to East Yorkshire. 

       It’s noisy, it’s fast, it’s unflaggingly fun.  Charlie Stemp (who is allowed a quick step-dance, just to remind us of his greatness) is a timid and downtrodden Harker (until a kiss from the vampire gingers him up).  James Daly is the lanky,  camp, improbably buff blond and determinedly thirsty Vampire. 

        Which is not to undervalue the extreme scene-stealing of Sebastien Torkia:  first as Lucy’s erotically desperate sister Mina,  vastly beruffled in a wild ginger wig (THIS, ladies, is what REAL cross-dressing should be like ).   He reappears laster as Van Helsing, who in this version is a lady doctor, forbiddingly ultra-German in a scary hat and costume.  Other scenes are stolen by Dianne Pilkington as among others a pompous little Dr Westfield and one of his asylum patients working as a butler in an ill-fitting strait-jacket with the arms dangling.   In one late scene he plays both, with the old revue trick of twirling from one to the other with top wig-work. 

      As for Safeena Ladha’s Lucy,  she too morphs around a bit – they all have hasty second-jobs to do –  but displahs the same dead-drop timing and fearless physical mischief such a show needs, and gets.  Fine prop-work and intermittent puppetry too,  as the dastardly tale of bloodsucking and deceit proceeds from  Transylvania to the high seas to Whitby to London and many a coffin. Any required fog,  wolves’ eyes, bat invasions,  storms and additional characters nimbly provided.  Lovely.

www menierchocolatefactory.com   to 3 May 

rating 4

A STRANGE WARTIME FABLE OF LIFE, BIRTH AND JEWELLERY

  In a little Jeweller’s shop in 1942  Paris Joseph Haffmann is making a deal with his young assistant Pierre.   He is Jewish, and has prudently  managed to get his wife and children out to Switzerland .   His proposal is that Pierre should take over the shop, put his name over it and hide his boss (who can keep the accountancy and admin going) , in the cellar . Until things get back to what he almost believes is ‘normal’.   Pierre thinks it over and suddenly makes a counter-proposal:  he has been found to be infertile,   but he and his beloved wife Isabelle long for a child,  so maybe Haffmann, father of four, should…step in and impregnate her? 

        The other two are of course thunderstruck and resistant.  But they both at last agree.   Improbable?  Perhaps, but all  in separate conversations a -deux say that they are “not in their normal state of mind” ,  and indeed the strength of the play is that it does evoke the claustrophobic, frightened mentality you might come to when the world is turned upside down by Occupation.  The play is  all set in one little home,  with just the trio for the first two-thirds of its tight 100 minutes,  which underlines the transgressive oddity of the trio’s lives. Pierre’s hobby is learning tap-dancing,  and during the monthly encounters downstairs of his wife and Joseph  – the pair dim, inexplicit,  in the background  – he hurls himself into tremendous tap routines. 

     That may sound contrived, but actually the dance’s energy and absurdity is no bad way of expressing the act of congress,  and Pierre’s increasing unhappiness with the situation he has set up is there in every deafening stamp, tap, shuffle and hop.   He is affronted when Isabelle starts helping Joseph to get messages from Switzerland  from his family, receiving disguised letters. At one point – because the jewellery business is doing very well and selling to rich Nazi collaborator wives –  the young man starts to believe that it’s all true about Jews taking over and poisoning France, because  his cuckoldry is poisoning him.  

        Below,  Alex Waldmann’s dignified, lonely Joseph gradually grows more dishevelled,  untidier, sadder;  Isabelle weeps as she continues to bleed each month,  the enterprise failing.   And then into this uneasy household guests are invited:  real characters from history.    Otto Abetz was  Hitler’s  powerful ‘ambassador” and his  French wife.  They’re invited to dinner as a “business matter” by the now deeply unsettled Pierre and you will rarely see a more tensely devastating  sitcom dinner party on stage.  Especially as the Jew from the cellar suddenly puts on a good suit and  walks in, insisting on joining it under the flimsy pretext of being “cousin Jean” visiting  from Caen.   

         British audiences have got used lately to the unsettling playfulness of French playwrights, especially when messing about with domestic settings : think of Yazmina Reza’s Art or anything  – dark or light – by Florian Zeller.  Jean-Phillipe Daguerre shows himself to be of their ilk, capable of buckling together a sex comedy , Nazi jeopardy, transactional business matters, a lost Matisse painting and a subtle psychological drama .   It has had  long-running success at home,  and been a film:  this is its London premiere, and it is piquant to see it  on the heels of the Marylebone Theatre’s WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK, with its devastating finale about the question of which friend would have hidden you from the Nazis.  

     But it’s utterly gripping,  and sharp at the edges despite the absurdities:  it opens with Haffmann listening in a dim-lit office to the radio polemic about how Jews must wear yellow stars because “not everyone knows how to recognize one”,  and  explaining as if to children that these awful Jews are dangerous because they suck the wealth out of France.   Daguerre takes the words verbatim from real broadcasts, and they chill, deeply because of  the announcer’s educated and friendly words.  

        No spoilers, because you really don’t need to know in advance whether this situation ends in extreme darkness or not, but know from its tone that it might,   especially in the  last twenty minutes. The performances are all fine, under director Oscar Toeman from the Old Vic,  and the translation by Jeremy Sams is neat and sharp.   Waldmann as Joseph is particularly powerful , especially in his quietness;   Michael Fox endearingly young and confused as Pierre,  Jennifer Kirby a strong, central female presence as his wife. And as for the Nazi dinner-guests, Nigel Harman is quietly terrifying,  and Jemima Rooper artfully credible as his heartless socialite party-girl French wife, the ultimate collaboratrice.  Brrr.      

        Worth mentioning that I had to travel specially,  wasn’t at all sure I would take to it, but gloriously did.  I should have trusted the little Park Theatre, which does not often disappoint. 

Parktheatre.co.uk. To 12 April 

AN ANCIENT BRUTALITY, RIGHT HERE 

        Five women from the past mount the stage,  candlelit, to enact theterrible story of the 17c Suffolk witch-trials.   First there’s young Mary in childbed, screaming , tended by Rose from the ale-house and her mother Sarah. It’s a community with few men, the war barely ending.  Rose calls  for the local midwife and herbalist, Anne Alderman,  a big ragged competent bundle of reassurance, dishing out pain nostrums, scornful of the smug male teaching that the pains of childbirth are caused by Eve’s sin and must be borne.   But country wisdoms in a female world will be  shattered with the arrival of Matthew Hopkins, the severe young witchfinder, and his sidekick Stearne. The local vicar, a tolerant country soul who doesn’t mind Ann selling herbs and tinctures after service, is wary of their mission . Well he might be. 

      It is interesting to  meet Tallulah Brown’s new play a year after Joanna Carrick’s remarkable The Ungodly, which has since run in London and is booked for  New York. That – set thirty miles away  in Hopkins’ Mistley home –  was a tight , psychologically subtle story of  a troubled youth’s Puritanical fervour and misogynistic sexual dread .  Here we find the self-styled Witchfinder General on his travels, collecting more victims.  The five women play all the characters and sing, hauntingly , as they transform between scenes.  Which is remarkably effective : Seraphina d’Arby’s music for  Trills, a close harmony group, is atmospheric and used well, and the transformations  where the players help  one another in and out of breeches and hats and shifts in vision as they sing gives it a sense of pageantry, of ritual remembrance. 

       There are some terrific performances: notably Claire Storey’s vivid, earthy Anne Alderman, a treat, and Rachel Heaton as the motherly, devout Sarah and the anxiously dubious Judge Godbold who at last ,  alone of the male figures,  questions the use of torture for confessions.   Emily Hindle switches betweem  Hopkins and his victim Rose:  she’s  excellent as the latter,   an orphaned, troubled  alewife stirring the beer as it seethes in its vat (it’s been cursed, possibly..though we home-brewers recognize the heaving).   She too needs Anne Alderman’s services.   As Hopkins she is less striking, until the real darkness of the second half  where he provokes crazy, sexually explicit confessions.   Indeed until that moment the men’s roles are woodenly written, with  none of the necessary sense of religious fervour which gave Carrick’s earlier play a dark shine.   Here,  when  Hopkins and Stearne talk about diabolical familiars suckling  at diabolical teats and witches bilocating , they just sound mad.  Whereas the women are all utterly and earthily credible.

         The main drawback is that it’s too long:  of its 165  minutes  20 or more could be cut with profit from unnecessary conversations and speeches top-loaded with research  (though I did like the bit where Nathaniel has a nightmare about a bloodsucking rabbit climbing up his leg demanding that he deny God).    And the play’s  three dramatic endings are too many,  as if desperate to serve diverse constituencies:  the prison scene with the women singing defiantly  to thrill the modern-pagan nature-worship feminism,  then the executions, to hammer home the brutality. And finally a posthumous duologue on whether the future will remember the names of the Bury trial’s victims.   Any of those endings would work, especially the last.     But audiences can tire. 

theatreroyal.org  to 22 March 

rating 3

BRUTAL, VIOLENT AND TENDER

    Around a King’s coffin surge personalities and politics , power plays and lineage .  A royal bier is loaded with  crown and jewelled cross, around it courtiers as  still as statues in gilded epaulets and medals. The arriving audience may, if they choose, process around all this in silence on a red carpet,   as  if in Westminster Hall.    It’s medieval but timeless:  a year before his own death in a brawl Shakespeare’s rival  young Christopher Marlowe set the play two centuries before his own time,  as Edward II loses no time in mourning  his father before summoning from exile his beloved, the favourite  Gaveston.  Who appears suddenly  high over this dignified funeral scene with a gang of buff ,bare-chested mates in bathtowels all   queening it outrageously and delighted at the idea of coming back to court and thrilling the new King with “wanton poets, pleasant wit, music and poetry” .

        Clearly the paternal Edward had disapproved of this effete stuff, and of Gaveston (a slinky, elegant Eloka Ivo). The barons in court still do.   Mortimer in particular – Enzo Cilenti with a mischievously Hitler-look  side-parting and moustache – is determined the new King should not get his way.  But of course he immediately does,  throwing himself into the returning  lover’s arms and impetuously making him chancellor and Earl of just about everything and offering him power  (suddenly, one thinks of Elon Musk).   When the Church  demurs, Edward encourages Gaveston to knock the Archbishop’s mitre off , rip his robes and take his land and riches.   This intemperance sets the tone for an invigoratingly brawling, furious,  violent and rather exhilarating 100-minute account of the lovelorn monarch’s demise,  Marlowe’s  poetic text tightened till it twangs.   

         Edward meets every representation from his lords with petulant  cries of “Am I a King?”  ,  and hauling Gaveston off by the hand with touching delight.  He is Daniel Evans, joint artistic-director of the RSC but before that a seasoned actor, returning to the stage for this royal starring role and hurling everything at it.  Part of the interest in reviving Marlowe’s play is, of course, to consider the extremity of prejudice which homosexual men  suffered until very recently in our history:  putting  the “forbidden” sexuality front and centre , rather than considering, as some past productions did, that Gaveston was possibly just an extreme favourite.  Here, when  the exiled lover  returns with his allies  Spencer and Baldock they are made  cartoonishly queeny, muscle-vest and bleach and all,  with much rolling about and shrieking in a way which will make some sober gay men shudder irritably . (Eloka Ivo’s Gaveston, wisely,  has a bit more adult dignity).  I am not entirely sure that Daniel Raggett, directing,  was wise to make them quite so shrieky.

       For Evans himself plays it less so.   His vigorous, eloquent, staccato verges at first on hysteria, not only dismaying the court but causing me, I shamedly see, to have  scrawled the words “lovesick berk!” In my notebook.  He shrieks “fawn not on me , French strumpet!`’at  his Queen, who at first seems resigned to let him ‘frolic with his minion’.  But as the courtiers close in, force him to sign a deed of exile again and then recant, insincerely,  Evans gradually moves us towards sympathy.  He is a little Lear-like when he indulges the fantasy that – like another Edward 700 years later – he might be able to give up this monarch business and head off to bliss with his Mrs Simpson.  There is a touching neediness in him:  when Gaveston first returns (Ivo still looking patient , but a bit fed up with the hysteria)  the monarch  flings himself at the taller man, jumping right up in his arms and hugging him with his legs, like a child.  It’s love, and love is a serious business whoever you are. And worse if it has been long forbidden. 

       Brutality is serious too, and the pace sharpens  with the Queen’s gradual alliance with Mortimer (Ruta Gedmintas has a sleek, enigmatic quality) and  dismayed attempts at loyalty by Edward’s brother (Henry Pettigrew).  The mass assault on Gaveston is shocking (all the more so with courtiers still in their gold-edged military dress-trousers) and so is his dangling suspension from the roof before the final stabbing. Evans’ Edward throws himself on the bloodied corpse, heart visibly broken.  

       Imprisoned, he knows it is over “Install, elect, conspire, do what you will… commend me to my son and bid him rule better than I”.   The  boy heir ,in pajamas, is pushed to the fore by the Queen;   Edward has a last  moment of petulance, hiding the crown childlishly behind his back.  But Evans  gives his final scenes a touching, ruined grandeur as the stage becomes his fetid watery dungeon. At an elegant white dinnertable above , the rebels hope he will quietly die of bad vapours.  He doesn’t, of course:  Jacob James Beswick as Lightborn the professional leave-no-marks murderer appears  – one of the creepiest killers in 16c literature, which is saying a lot – and designs the famously homoerotic final torment.  And we shudder as we should. And the final scene, Elizabethan-style,  brings reassuringly quick justice,  assures us that the child heir will settle the country down again, and enables the excellent RSC joint-director, having proved he’s still a sharp actor as well,  to get back into a pair of shorts and take a well-deserved bow.  

Rsc.org.uk to 5 April 

A TROUSER-LEG TSUNAMI AND A COATHANGER DREAM

       They came off the boats:  a Windrush generation,  wanting to work and live in cold strange Britain.    In an upper room Walker does alterations:  piecework,  taking on anything beause he’s driven, ambitious for a shop of his own where he would make real “suits” and be a creator and craftsman, more than a drudge.    Arinzé Kene , always star-quality whether in musicals or plays,  gives him a manic energy and unsettling passion to “start life” , without noticing that in the process he risks wrecking it.    He’s   assisted by Buster  (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) a likeable soul who likes work but doesn’t take it as passionately hard,   and young Courtney, who drives deliveries and is disillusioned about life in Britain.       

       Meanwhile Horace, a natty dresser , charmer and joker, also works there when he can be bothered  but takes life more lightly:  a character which Karl Collins creates with brilliant humour (never forgot him as Uncle Vince in Nine Night)   When “Mr Nat” ,  a more prosperous Jewish immigrant from an earlier era  turns up with an enormous load of trousers to be altered by five next day, of course Walker takes it on. He’s ready to work all night:  something which becomes even more necessary when after a few hours  Horace wanders off and they find with horror that all his work needs unpicking. 

         The play then draws tightly, claustrophobically,   into manic workplace banter and labour and exhaustion,  broken sometimes by Cherrelle Skeete as Walker’s fed-up wife Darlene, raising his  daughter, thwarted by losing her own job,  and thoroughly sidelined by his desperate ambition.   There are some touching moments with Kene when their old closeness is visible  but the temptation of happy Horace is, in the end, too great.   The other most moving moments are, after her defection,   between Walker and Colin Mace’s quiet, sad Mr Nat . Who  tells him that he too lost his wife to headlong business ambition,   and is left with only  “business acquaintances”.    

         It is good that the Black Plays Archive preserves the work of people like the late Michael Abbensetts, recording struggles like these ,  getting us away from the frequent gangster /racism-victim / angry-rebel  depiction to record in drama the ordinary  lives, idiosyncrasies, struggles and triumphs of  the British- Caribbean diaspora.   Lynette LInton, who leads the Bush and gave us the brilliant “Blues for an Alabana Sky” in this theatre,  directs with energy.  But it’s slow-burning,  the first half-hour moving nowhere much beyond some entertaining banter.   And   to run it unbroken for just under two hours feels like a mistake.  Some  surreal sequences where great rows of hangers approach from above and beside the weary tailor, caging him in his own dreams, are wonderful though (Frankie Bradshaw design). And there was a lot of laughter on press night (though some of the Creole- patois gags I suspect went over my head).   Kene and Collins are both wonderful.   But I wanted it to be more engaging than it is, and it needs  to lose ten minutes or so.   

nationaltheatre.org.uk  to 5 April