Monthly Archives: April 2025

MATHILDE AND THE BUILDER (can he fix it? Probably not)

         The set is glassand towering, city-chic backed by reeds and seashore; the figures before us NYC glamorous,  even when they wander out for a dip in the cold Atlantic in smart beachwear.  Ewan McGregor’s architect Henry is tousled, midlife handsome,  Kate Fleetwood  as his publisher  is girlboss-slinky; into their ambit come Elizabeth Debicki as Mathilde,  tall and pale as a lily in acres of wide-legged mattress-ticking-stripey trousers, and David Ajala as a rival architect Ragnar. He’s  unspeakably cool too,  with orange hair and a beach shirt.  Only Mirren Mack’s little Kaia the PA looks like anyone you might run into offstage, ever. Overall. as a pure upmarket-fantasy spectacle it makes The Devil Wears Prada up the road look positively drab.

          But concentrate:  this is an echo of Ibsen and a meditation on the problems of female empowerment.   Lila Raicek  is a seasoned screenwriter – Netflix,  Gossip Girl, all that – and it shows, sometimes in a good way.  For she keeps it clear and keeps it moving (Michael Grandage directs).  Her characters are drawn with a firm hand , her themes explicit.  There’s a sense of almost focus-group targeting about it:  Henry is an English star architect living in the Hamptons,  rebuilding a 19c Whalers’ chapel,  his wife Elena a successful publisher who fought through the glass ceiling, his rival Ragnar an “influencer architect”   fresh back from jetting betwen Nigeria and Norway while designing an eco-retreat made, possibly, out of seaweed (there are, early on, some good laughs).     The host couple – who we soon learn are l scarred by the loss of a child ten years earlier –  are about about to launch the pyramical glazed chapel at a party for financiers and opinion-formers,  so the audience, Netflix-style, is reassured that there will be strife and fireworks in the second half.

       Anyway, no sooner does Henry clap eyes on Mathilde than he is frozen in astonished memory of her as the student research-assistant with whom he had an inappropriately intense – though technically chaste – relationship just at the time he lost his son.  The play is described as a’conversation with” Ibsen’s Master Builder,  its themes of past sin t and metaphors of architecture updated to explore some more modern issues facing women.   And, less intensely, their baffled menfolk.

       The most interesting of these issues is Mathilde’s: as the old story comes out, it becomes clear that her adoration of her older “Master” has marked her life since, made her need  the wisdom of being “seen” and “owned” by an older man :  in her own words, it ruined her emotionally as well as ruining her education and reputation.   Ibsen at the time was whelmed in guilt about a younger woman: it’s quite clever of Raicek to move the focus off male neediness onto the feelings and powers of the females concerned.   For Elena has issues too:  hating middle age,  her grief unresolved, unable to bear more children,  feeling ignored by Henry , undervalued at work and in love with Ragnar but unaware that young Kaia is having an affair with him.  Henry has his problems too, not least that he believes that he has been frozen in unfeeling ever since the passage of intensity with Mathilde.   Actually, the funniest moment in the play is when Mathilde recites verbatim a letter he sent her at the end of their romance , about how she must come to find him in ten years’ time:   the poor bloke can’t remember any of it.  But in the end, amid an increasing flurry of architectural metaphors about space and light,  he announces that he’s decided to go for the kind of love that has more light than darkness in it. In other words, you could say, less guilt. 

           I enjoyed its cunning chinese-box structure, as within the Ibsenian idea of a past betrayal and connection another more dangerous echo is created:  Elena has read young Mathildes  unpublished novel about that intense master-student relationship long ago, and will publish it and openly shame Henry, provided the poor girl she had “slutshamed” outs herself, and admits it’s autobiographical for good PR.  Says more than one would like about modern publishing, that. 

    The play’s at its best at at its fieriest, some of the late rows between Henry and Elena reaching almost Who’s-afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf levels. Kate Fleetwood is fantastic, steals the show;  Elizabeth Debicki mournfully watchable,  Ajala’s Ragnar an amusing prat.  Ewan McGregor, though, looks oddly uncomfortable throughout, possibly because of the many pretentious lines he is given and the number of secrets that have to be clunked out.   But his final fatal climb through architectural glassware is a fine theatrical moment,  once every character has on some level or another betrayed the others.   Even little Kaia.  

Box office. wyndhamstheatre.co.uk. to. 12 July 

Rating 3.

WINNERS, WAGS AND WRONGS

Well, here’s a summer romp.    Hot on the heels of Tom Hiddleston  in a disco version up Drury Lane, here’s the RSC take on one of the sunniest  Shakespeare comedy melodramas: and its setting also picks up the rage for stage football in the reprise of Dear England at the NT.   For Shakespeare’s returning warriors are modern footballers.   It’s not soldiers from a war but Messina FC  team-mates,  ushered in by sounds of roaring crowds and manic chants,  who are plotting to create a love-match between the bickering  Beatrice and Benedick. And who themselves (especially big dim Claudio) are  easily fooled into suspecting and ‘cancelling’ Hero .  The villainous  Don John, credibly enough,  is stumping around in a surgical boot,  possibly embittered by too long on the subs’ bench.

       Michael Longhurst directs with energetic brio, though the first half goes on a bit too long due to a glut of  set-piece larking, masking, shrieking, chanting, a glimpsed blow-job   and various entertaining collapses into the onstage pool by gentleman  with and without their shorts on.  Freema Agyeman’s Beatrice is a sports broadcaster,  Peter Forbes’ Leonato the club owner, who delivers a memorable rendering of “My Way” in the party scene.   Benedick (emphasis on the last syllable at one point  from Beatrice) is a likeable Nick Blood: he’s one of several RSC debut castings and deserves to collar a good few of the coming physical-comedy leads: has lovely timing in the overhearing scenes and no fear of a pratfall.   

       They all put plenty of energy into it,  but there is a slight weirdness in translating a story of traduced honour , chastity and dignity into this particular modern world,  where for the first half  there is little clue that any of the characters are familiar with such words.  Except, perhaps, in one lovely chilling moment when Don Pedro,  the prince,  propositions Beatrice and she refuses , fears she has gone too far and turns it – hastily – to a joke against herself.  Agyeman does give Beatrice  dignity:  that shows more, later, in her bitter rage at Claudio after the. wedding.

          Indeed it is the second half that caught me up more than the first . (Which is not to deny  that the audience was having great fun all the way through, and I suspect the youngest will adore it).    As the plot darkens for Hero the  projection of innumerable tweets,  faux-sympathetic or bitchy, along the roof and gallery walls creates a real modern sense of reputational threat around her.  The late line after her ‘resurrection’ is met with “She died, my lord, but while her slander lived” and that feels very modern.   

       So, indeed, do the Watch,  security heavies whose scenes are run to just the right length,  and Antonio Magro’s magnificently offended Dogberry will stick in the mind for a good while.  And there was a more satisfying sense of the play’s completeness by the time the familiar plot has finally played out, with Beatrice and Benedick finding one another and Lenato’s crazed rage at his daughter tamped down by his wife Antonia.  Indeed Tanya Franks’ ferocious matriarchal dignity ,  like  Beatrice’s raging defence of her cousin,  do finally make the obviously intended point about the way women are  treated in the world of male professional football:  chattels  valued or despised with equal wrongness.   

       The use of video projection is clever  – it’s a telly world we’re in – and Jon Bausor’s designs and costumes are entertainingly spot-on,  from dopey Hero’s ridiculous bubble-dress and the wedding’s balloon-arch and tutus to all the insane beachwear round the pool, and Leonato’s camel coat slung over the shoulders.

         The only visual howler is , chaps, that if you are going to put Beatrice in a slinky party gown and then make her sit casually for a moment on the side of a pool latterly full of splashing footballers,  she should then not have to walk away and repeatedly show her back view with a great wet suspicious bum mark.  For minutes on end.  Women just don’t like that, chaps:  it’d  drive us straight out  to change,  possibly walking backwards in  mortification.    Moreover, there is no way that the crude young male  characters,  as drawn in this riotous party scene,  would not have rudely roasted her over it.   Either dry the poolside or reblock the scene. Seriously, do….this cool Beatrice deserves better.

Rsc.org.uk to 24 may

Rating. 3

TWO WOMEN, LONG YEARS ACROSS HALF A CONTINENT

      1935: below projected headlines about Communists executed in Shanghai and the war between Japan and Red China comes an audition call for A Doll’s House.   At the League of Left Wing Dramatists’ shabby theatre Lan Ping, suave and stylish,  is warming up for Nora with Ibsen’s revolutionary words “I must make up my mind who is right, the world or I!”.    Enter a dishevelled, scruffier black-clad teenager who hardly knows where she is, was sent there by the Party.  Lan Ping patronizes her, but is impressed by her ability to read the emotion below the lines like a director.  They become friends, flatmates.  Both are intense and fascinated by this new world :  theatre as,“a temple, where that other world of truth, beauty, justice is so close we can almost touch it”.  

         But a scene later, a couple of years have passed : they enthuse about Chekhov and Stanislavsky and dream like his three sisters of theatre’s capital, distant Moscow .  They light incense, bow, vow friendship.  But rivalry, and difference in character, divide them; the assured elder had a success as Nora but took on a Coca Cola ad for money;  the younger woman is having stage successes  and remains idealistic about it all.   Trouble  is aggravated by discovery that the younger – daughter of an executed Communist martyr – has been adopted by Zhou En Lai, later Mao’s premier.  But it is her older friend from that old audition who becomes Mao’s mistress:  as war and the creation of the new China gathers pace she’s excoriated as a slut, a vixen, distracting the Leader;  when she marries him, and becomes Jiang Qing, madame Mao,  she is forced to promise to do nothing political for thirty years.  Meanwhile young Sun Weishi, has also broken through the expectations of women and become  a nationally important director and theatremaker.  

        Amy Ng’s fascinating, fast-moving two-hander uses imagination and research to evoke their relationship’s early days;  but Jiang Qing did play Nora, and a period of uneasy rivalry is documented.  I had, to my shame, known only that as Mao’s wife – later tried –  once out of her thirty years as mere wife was the architect of the Cultural Revolution, sociopolitical determination to wipe out both ancient tradition and invasive capitalism, banishing intellectuals.   I did not know about the long link with Sun Weishi, idealistic director-artist.  In a telling moment Jiang instructs Sun “I am commissioning new works. Everything must be red, bright and shining. The heroes must be tall, mighty and wholesome. I shall ban everything else from our stages”.  Sun, of course, wants her play about women oil workers to cover suffering, doubt, cruelty and humanity.  

           Sun was finally arrested and tortured to death in 1968: Zhou unable or unwilling by then to protect her;  she herself would not denounce him as a spy and traitor.  Ng gives us a last conversation in prison between Jiang and the tormented, battered, near-dying Sun.  It’s  wrenching.  All the more because the fleet 80-minute journey of the play telescopes the three decades, and makes you remain aware of the light-spirited comradeship of their early meeting.

      All happens amid swivelling, simple walls and  in front of evocative designs and projections by Nicola T Chang and Akhila Krishnan : blue-black cloudscapes, great changing headlines. It transports you to another culture,  opens a half-understood history.   But at the heart of its power of course are the two players:  Gabby Wong tall, elegant, showy, determined as Jiang Qing,  hardening before our eyes into the older angrier Madam Mao;  and Millicent Wong, gentle-faced, sincere, trying to hold the comradeship long after it had soured.   They’re tremendous; as is the direction by Katie Posner. Another strike for the Kiln.  

Kilntheatre.com to 10 May

A HAMLET THAT STANDS ALONE

“is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice?”

     Not monstrous, just consummate acting in a brave, maverick performance as Mark Lockyer reprises his much-admired rendering of the whole of Hamlet in 95 minutes, alone, propless, emotionally invested to an almost frightening degree.

     It is not a best-of collection but has the full complex narrative seriousness of the play: I was struck from the start by his willingness to keep a lot of the scene on the battlements which often gets cut about  before Hamlet appears: here as elsewhere it gives proper weight to the politics, the Norway/Poland/Denmark sense of war and danger past and future. Many great full-set productions lean so heavily on the emotional-psychological story than its wider context.

     Indeed oddly, at the end of this performance I felt I had seen a more complete Hamlet than usual. Lockyer is deft at transforming into each character – his Ophelia girlish,  disintegrating into shocked pathos, his Claudius all jokily coercive pomp, his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern weasels of deference. His Player King gives it the full OTT Garrickry. The voice of the Ghost is genuinely unnerving, from some horrid depth. Only once or twice with Laertes might a newcomer briefly hesitate; mostly there is never a doubt when Hamlet himself is before us: wrung out or suddenly enraged, posing his madness orsuddenly doubting his reality. 

    It is, in short, magnificent. Not one to miss. Few more performances at Wilton’s, then a tour, whose details I will pass on when someone tells me them. 

Wiltons.org.uk to 12 April

Produced by regenerationtheatre.co.uk for more details of how to see afterwards

rating 5

RIEN TO REGRET!

  This is a terrific, impassioned production: not only does Kimberley Sykes’ direction  and Michele Meazza’ s movement work keep it watchably, startlingly vigorous,   but Sam Kenyon’s musical direction – exciting and witty orchestration, right down to effects of clashes and crashes  – uses a cast of nine actor-musicians as well as I’ve ever seen it done. They flow constantly round the stage from the first Parisian street scene onwards,  becoming the mass of characters around Edith Piaf’s life with seamless ease: Signe Larsson moves, tall and Nordic-stately,  from her double-bass to become Marlene Dietrich or Madeleine the assistant to an ageing star,  Tzarina-Nassor on a notable professional debut as Toine – but all of them are remarkable: versatile and sharp, committed in turn to each character they become.  

         But of course at its centre has to be Piaf herself, and here is perfect casting: Audrey Brisson – whose stage AMELIE beat the film hollow, and also began right here  – is of course perfect for Piaf. She is tiny, vivid, honest wide  eyes shining beneath a wild mop of black hair,  her red-lipped mouth opening wide in wild naive passionate sincerity .  In one nice line, when she’s felt her American tour is not going well enough,  Dietrich says to her that you can’t have an orgasm every time you go onstage, to which the little firecracker snaps “I can!”. 

     She plays the crudeness, the sweary street-urchin aspect of our heroine but also the vulnerability, her whole face creasing into terrible despiar;  she makes  the change over years into a grande-dame carapace without losing any of the old childlike quality. And never, of course, the voice:  mouth wide, a shouting emotional tribute to womanhood, desire, loss, ambition and at times brazen contempt, a dirty laugh at the world.    Her scenes with Marlene  and her last lover, Theo, are touching;  her leap from the top of the piano into the arms of Djavan Van de Fliert’s buff boxing Marcel is breathtaking, her sprawl above the keyboard as he thumps out passionate chords intensely erotic.  

     Pam Gems’ often-reviewed play is episodic, deliberately sketchy, and sometimes ‘spoilers’ are essential: anyone approaching it does well to know the skeleton facts of Edith Piaf’s life. That she busked on the streets of Paris, first with her father a street acrobat then alone,  living among prostitutes;  that she was discovered by a club owner who promptly got murdered, putting her briefly under suspicion;  that she sang for German troops in the war but helped to free French prisoners;  that she had many lovers, married twice, promoted Charles Aznavour’s career, and after a bad accident became dependent on drink and drugs.  And that she became a legend, surrounded by myths, giving the world almost more than it deserved. Well, OK, I have been a devoted fan ever since I was eleven years old, a temporary French school-girl  ice-skating in 1960s Lille to the rhythms of “Je ne Regrette Rien!”, determined to live a life fit for such emotional grandeur.  Millions have felt that with me..

Box office watermill.org.uk. to. 17 May

Rating four

TRAGEDY WITHOUT A MORAL

    Raoul Moat used  steroids and bulking-powder to armour himself in muscle,  nourished a bottomless well of grievance and self-pity , and imposed his needy will on his girlfriend and any public authority who defied him .  Especially Northumbria Police,  though the local council met outrage too, for not letting him keep three dogs, as did the courts for giving him a short prison sentence for common assault on a child resulting in  supervised contact with his own for  a while .   So, once released,  he went on the run in 2010,  shot his girlfriend’s new lover dead,  critically wounded her and loosed off the shotgun in a traffic policeman’s face, blinding him. 

        The manhunt was big news.  Some treated him as a mythic hero.   Andrew Hankinson,  “frustrated by the constraints of British journalism” researched, studied Moat’s own messages and friends, and wrote a book.   Robert Icke , with all his extraordinary theatrical instinct and skills,  has made it into a 105-minute play.  The Royal Court,  predictably anxious to draw a left-political line, publicizes it by quoting with implicit scorn  David Cameron’s “Raoul Moat was a callous murderer. Full stop. End of story.”    In the programe David Byrne draws a thematic line in the theatre’s history,  from Jimmy Porter ranting at his girlfriend in Look Back in Anger 70 years ago, through the age of angry-young-men and , less probably, Enron and Jerusalem, to the present age of Putin and Tate and worries about fragile male rage.   

         So what’s the play like?   Well, gripping, not least because Samuel Edward-Cook,  shaven-headed and immense, addresses the audience with all the needy passion of Moat’s expression,  in moment  in between scattered scenes with others.  “I feel tired. Anxious. Isolated. Helpless. Angry” he says to us, as he fills a psych form, makes an appointment for help (ah, easier days then)  but for no reason  doesn’t keep it.   He explains that the police have been harassing him for years, ruined his business by arresting him;   that he enjoyed being a Dad and loves his girlfriend Sam.   In prison he wouldn’t stop calling her.  Sometimes  we get the calm annoying voices of women – a barrister, a social worker, Sam herself pointing out that she has the kids and his dogs to deal with . This enrages him so that he towers over them, threatens, and in Sam’s case  hits and throws her to the floor.  

       Edward-Cook is astonishing, real, brilliant in performance:  he throws furniture around,  paces like a magnificent caged animal, demands all our sympathy,  can’t bear ‘disrespect”.     It exposes the famous truth that “Men fear wwomen will laugh at them. Women fear men will kill them”.   

        We know the bulking-up is armour over a fragile ego, a lost child.  We are given scraps about his early life`: bipolar mother burnt his toys when he was seven,  no Dad,  raised chiefly by a kind granny , worked in hard physical jobs which satisfied his needy strength.  But for all his  presence, and the neatly written cameo moments with his Geordie friends,   it is not long before Moat, sadly,   becomes a bit of a bore.   Physically splendid,  he’s certainly fully human and quite a logical thinker,   but curdled with self-pity and resentment. 

        When Sam reasonably dumps him, he emerges from prison not to learn to do better but to commission a coward’s weapon, the “car with six wheels” which apparently is code for a sawn-off shotgun and six bullets.  He thinks they are mocking him, so shoots.  Then sees a cop in a car, traffic duty, and shoots him too.   In a ten-minute respite from Moat’s moaning a coup de theatre plunges us all into blackness where we hear an account in PC David Rathband’s voice  of the fear, pain, blinding and ruining of his life and marriage, up to his suicide two yars later.   

     And then there we are again with RAoul, hiding out in the countryside with his two friends – ‘hostages’ they tried to claim – saying he feels better,  that the cop was ‘not a person” , and that he always dreamed of living with Sam on a French farm (beautifully expressed, Sam and children silently appearing).    As police close in a  negotiator offers him a chance to be understood, to rebuild:  but Moat is stuck in his vacant fury.   The best bit of the play indeed is a speech delivered – imagined – by Paul Gascoigne, the footballer,  who in reality  turned up (drunk) but never spoke.   He says it for all men who are, deep inside, small  children and who shelter inside physical brilliance and hit  women becaues they’re scared of how much they need their Mums.  It is brilliantly done by Trevor Fox.   Moat moves towards suicide, taking care (for the Royal Court loyalists) to throw in a casual mention of “bears and squirrels”.  And for a trite moral,  up comes David Cameron’s “end of story” quote again.  

          I don’t regret seeing it, and  Edward-Cook gives a tremendous performance so do the others, notably Fox and Sally Messham as Samantha.   Icke is always more than worth it, his recent Oedipus showing a briliance in tragedy. . But Raoul Moat is not a great tragedy, nor even a valid symbol of a confused and difficult age of masculinity (PUNCH does far better, so does DEAR ENGLAND).   And this is not a great play.

royalcourttheatre.com   to 3 May

rating 3

THE DEPTHS BELOW THE WIT

    The plays,  ever revived, we know well;  the wit is often cited,  the old injustice of his downfall recreated in plays and films: most recently we’ve seen him played by Stephen Fry and (infinitely better) Rupert Everett.   Micheal MacLiammoir’s 1960 one-man show,  rich in Wilde’s own writings,  is not that often revived,  and is in many ways more serious about him,  reflecting  both his  lush, honeyed  romantic emotional  imagination and the way that far beneath the wit, irony and poses his thought on human life and relationships developed .  Alastair Whatley of Original Theatre is someone I have seen mostly as a director and driving force in his company, but this intense, two-hour rendering of the McLiammoir text (prefaced by a brief tribute)  feels like something deeply personal and deliberately enigmatic.

       Mike Fentiman, directing, underlines this in the programme but it’s perceivable in the downbeat, gripping seriousness of the performance.  “Diving into the wit, the mischief and the sorrow”,   he stands framed in a simple  circular neon light, which effectively reminds us all the time of the deep black darkness beyond.  There’s no showing off, no costuming, just a green carnation  – finally thrown aside – to remind us of his 1890 dandyish flowering,  wht age of “Fashion is what one wears oneself”,  of Lady Windermere and the foppish Goring,  and the yearning worship of The Picture of Dorian Gray .  His rendering of the account of the portrait’s decline is mesmerizing. staring into the round black dark behind him.   Coming to The IMportance of Being Earnest Whatley does of course deliver a splendid Lady Bracknell.    And then a harrumphing Queensberry and a judge pronouncing the immense absurdity of how very, very terrible was the sin of sodomy. 

     But the strong core of the show is something we hear far, far less of in memorials to him:  the long, long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Jail  titled De Profundis.   I have never heard this delivered at such length before;  after his line at the trial “May I say nothing?” its reflective outpouring is immense.

  So, even more intensely, is Whatley’s perfect delivery of the Ballad of Reading Jail, which Wilde wrote in Naples before his final end in Paris.   The simple, unromantic, straightforward and profound human pity of it shakes you down, as it has done generations, from the exercise yard to the pit of shame, the tragedy of love and death.  

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk   to 12 April

And STREAMING – at which Original Theatre is  a pioneer –  www.originaltheatre.com  

 

VENEZIANA !

     Buongiorno to Venice 1730,  a city stage topped with the golden winged lion of St Mark, arched and curtained and lit with candelabras .  Overhead a twelve-piece orchestra complete with harp is visible in the galleries.  Below,   our hero a determined young castrato  –  sold and gelded in childhood  – is cheeking the maestro Faustino who taught  him to sing high and girlish for the operatic stage,  not to mention taking other advantages in return.   Marco (Jack Chambers, boyish and vigorous)  is ambitious, but when he meets the beautiful and determined Giola – daughter of a black slave – he decides to back her career,  and defy racist and classist snobberies by taking her to the court of his patroness Assura.   Whose corrupt husband  Pietro and his accountant Luigi are, by the way,  embezzling her fortune in a hospital project while a camp stout cardinal giggles through her soirées. 

        It’s a musical – brand new,  lyrics and music by Matthew Wilder with a thumpingly Panto-melodrama book by Tim Luscombe – so they sing. And how they sing!  with killer determination.  Apart from a couple of gentler, magically period-pastiche numbers sung from behind a fine gold and feather mask by Jennie Jacobs (as Marco, it’s a neat doubling)  the numbers  are full-on aggressive and divergent in style. . There’s rum-ti-tum retro Lionel-Bartish jollity,  some startling sub-Sondheim moments, and lots of plain musical-pop-LloydWebbery.  Fine: we can digest a bit of variety, but the problem is that in the first half especially too many numbers are just plain overwrought:  lurching from climax to climax with no nuance between.   Marco is ambitous and hopeful, Giola determined, Faustino insanely jealous, Azzura predatorily nymphomaniacal,  Pietro bossy, and they all underline it by too rapidly rising to a serious belting high money-note.  No nuance.

         At one point you think ooh, perhaps this is offering a bravely transfriendly-fetishist theme,  as Marco in his gilt diva cloak pronounces that castrati are actually better than women ,  because they have both female grace and male strength.  Seen that online several times, sigh..  But  no, that’s countered by his backing of Giola and willingness to be seduced by Assura (not all castrati are impotent).  It really isn’t a very deeply thought-through book.   But things improve terrifically as the first act ends, because if you’re going to do some cheery hokum like this, it’s best to go over the top as soon as possible.  So Faustino bursts into Giola’s proposed performance for the nobles and causes so much chaos that the Cardinal ends up stabbed and the young people arrested. 

        Even better, the second half begins with a delightful row between a drunken Pietro with his wig off and Luigi who is sitting mournfully at a harpsichord, thinking accountancy-thoughts.   And there’s a fine quarrelsome duet between Assura and Pietro,  a dramatic poison suicide elsewhere and a better number from Faustino,  but Luigi gets the first real hooting stamping applause of the show,   as Sam Barrett in the role does the full heroic-opera self reproach and regrets his collaboration with Pietro.  There’s a trial scene, a threatening noose,  a revelation, and a last-minute (rather touching) miracle for a sad elective-mute Nicolo, who we had hitherto forgotten existed but who is necessary for justice to be achieved.

        Under the arches, the old Players theatre has a taste for staging small, often brand-new musicals at under half the seat-price of the big West End just up the road,  and I have long had rather a weakness for the place.  Sometimes there’s a treasure – TITANIC the musical started there, with twice the history and ten times the heart of that awful film. Sometimes it’s a fascinating  imported oddity, like GeorgeTakei’s ALLEGIANCE.   This one is only definable as a sort of melodrama-pantomime mini-opera, and not an actual treasure.  But it’s beautifully set by Ceci Calf and dressed by Anna Kelsey,   and if it has rather more soggy heart than hard genius it does maintain enough self-awareness to stick to about two hours including interval. And provide us with a happy ending and a big joyful ensemble curtain-call.  People left smiling. So did I. 

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk to 14th June. 

rating 3

DARK FANGTASY IN A SCAFFOLDING CITY

    For this compact and creepy little atmospheric treat, John Donnelly turns to vampires. That’s not a spoiler: the programme is full of learned stuff about the cultural history of bloodsucking immortals, and the soundscape alone should alert even the dullest to the imminent supernatural shenanigans.   Anyway, its 100-minute span (that includes interval, it’s pretty bijou) has plenty of good shocks along the way.  Even once you’ve worked out that there’s something fishy about Laura Whitmore’s smiling, chilly but ever-helpful Ana, the primary school teacher who is so devoted to Mia’s son Alfie and his gift for drawing characters with knives for teeth.  Frankly, even Ana’s red lipstick gives you pause.

      Not least becaue Mia herself (Sophie Melville)  is unmade-up, tousled, sleepily exhausted with a newborn and a nice normie  husband (Bryan Dick) who keeps long hours in some sort of IT surveillance decrypting psychopathic gamer chatrooms with – guess! – vampiric fantasies, after some headless bodies turned up in the Thames.  Mia is nervy, forever jiggling her crying bundle, and unnerved by Alfie, who saunters in and out in a horror mask that “Miss” made him. And points a lot.  We’ve all known kids like that. 

    The play’s strength lies in its masterly creation of a particular urban neurosis, familiar to many:  a sleepless vulnerable urban mother  is on a floating stage swathed in scaffolding:   nothing restful in this hard city world .  Donnelly captures not only that early-motherhood craziness within the restive urban racket, but also the sheer bloody boring persecution of being a young blonde woman in an age without manners. The aggressive train passenger swearing at her contemptously “just because you’re holding a baby” ,   the friendly chap in the park asking the time and proceeding to wank at her,  the noisy neighbour who doesn’t give a damn, even the doctor she despairingly consults about her scraping anxiety who boredly suggests “breathing techniques, white noise, history podcasts” (good laugh there. There are many, in fact). 

     Leander Deeny plays all the men,  the most magnificent being a wealthy coked-up pickup who takes Mia and Ana to his penthouse for anoother drink: very funny.   Ana, by this time Mia’s sweetly supportive friend,  sees to him. Oh yes.  You’ll love the balcony bit.   Also love young Alfie (Callum Knowelden on press night) doing his school presentation, which is of course very eco-gloom contemporary,  being all about how humans are ruining the planet and it would do better without them. 

       There is by this time a lot of blood on the stage,  and Donnelly threatens us with a genuinely horrifying end,  before twisting it back to – well, you decide.   But it’s perhaps comforting to know that even if the planet doesn’t need us humans, vampires really do.  For food. How else can they live 600 years and remember the Fire of London?

       Director Blance McIntyre keeps it all moving,  and gives us the interval to muse on whether Mia is going to enjoy her – er –  new status.   It doesn’t attempt any deep truths, but offers a good, brief, dark thrill  (far more than the boring Let the Right One In)  and – I think – most importantly a real questioning kick at the sheer bloody stress of managing  a new baby without much support  in a stressed, noisy, aggressive city.  Feminism noir.  

hampsteadtheatre.com to 26 April