Monthly Archives: July 2025

LA COMMEDIA E FINITA!  (oh no it’s not)

     The title is the first line, delivered by a furious Leoncavallo in 1893 Milan.  It is a time of wild flowering in opera , old Verdi’s grandeur and success inspiring  a host of lesser composers.   Alasdair Buchan’s anxious, keenly schoolboyish Leoncavallo, after his Pagliacci success,  is terrified of being a one-hit wonder like Ponchielli or poor old  Mascagni with Cavalliera. 

     His wife Berthe tries to calm and reassure him, but the poor chap  is enraged with the  very existence, and visible smugness, of the more suave Puccini.  The latter  wanders in, eavesdropping:   Sebastian Torkia a vision of horrid confidence, all velveteen  coat and shiny coiffure.   We soon discover why: over a cautiously collegiate coffee in the Galeria Puccini had asked his supposed friend and artistic colleague what his new opera will be about.  On learning that it is based on young Parisian bohemian lives in a book of short stories,  Puccini says that curiously,  he is doing the same in his La Boheme. 

       Leoncavallo doesn’t believe him, reckons he’s stolen the idea.   It’s an 1890’s Boheme-off, no mercy.   Puccini reckons he’ll win anyway if they both do it. So it’s a story about a story, and a rivalry,  and more importantly about art itself.    Which, in a likeable conclusion, even Puccini admits  shouldn’t be a competition.    It was the beauty of that truth at  last, in the second act of James Inverne’s play, that  made me properly enjoy it.     I had thought of it for a while  mainly as a nice quirky oddity for us opera-victims:  I can’t speak for experts but have had a lifetime of amohitheatrical emotional catharses in the cheapest seats I can find, and ridden the  great rolling rides of feeling conjured by Verdi and his contemporaries: heart-food. 

         Quirky it certainly is,  the three actors occasionally having to expand the personnel , going meta to  swop over (Lisa-Anne Wood as Berta at one stage irritably being made to take over the role of Gustav Mahler,  of whom both men appear to be in awe).  Torkia has most fun, his face expressing every degree of mischief;  Buchan draws most sympathy.   It’s demotic, slangily up to date, playful,  with occasional snatches of aria from Berta,  taking us fascinatingly through the way things developed.

       For they both wrote Bohemes;  first PUccini’s got bad reviews in Torino,  Leoncavallo,having cried “Sweet Jesus, it’s a flop!!) .  He  was thrilled to get his own  into La Fenice (where the chaise-longue briefly becomes  a gondola)  but Puccini then played his just down the road, undermining him.  More meta-switches,  as one becomes a ticket tout saying Puccini’s selling out.    Leoncavallo has a triumph, though,  and Mahler rudely says Puccini’s is “Hpllow, vulgar, disgusting”.  But it becomes clear whose will last.

       But there’s no triumph. They both know how much the sheer emotion  and humanity they strive to express in music is what counts – “I’ts got to be great or what’s the point?”   When Leoncavallo  lies depressed , refusing to work, it’s Torkia’s Puccini who arrives uninvited and goads him back to the piano, assisted by Berthe  (“when you’re an artist’s wife  you know how to pick him up when he’s knocked down. By a great artist”. he says)   Which is significant because  Puccini’s own wife, occasionally taken on in a fur stole by Lisa-Anne Wood,  is of not prone to consoling him or forgiving his womanizing.  So in a personal sense Leoncavallo has won.   But in the end neither triumph or defeat can matter. The music does.   

parktheatre.co.uk  to 9 Aug  

rating 4

A WILD YOUNG PRINCE OF DENMARK IN THE DUSK

        Easy to forget, after decades of prestige-casting and its torrent of ringing, over-quoted lines,  how much HAMLET is a play about being  young.   Here’s angry, grieving adolescent Hamlet and Horatio his sensible bestie;  here are  Ophelia and Laertes,  rolling their eyes at prosy old Polonius but suddenly devastated by his death;  here are students Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vainly  recruited by the King to entertain a sullen nephew-stepson;  here, even, is youth in the soldiers on the castle walls who flinch at both the ghost and the new regime. 

      It’s about youth,   trapped beneath powerful elders whose hypocrisies and dim moral compass they perceive with clear unforgiving eyes,the way we all did once.      Jo Carrick’s light-spirited production for Red Rose Chain catches this quality to a marvel:  her young cast leap, run and skip around the audience under a great spreading chestnut tree,  mock and joke as well as registering  griefs and shocks.  Vincent Moisy’s vigorous Hamlet spring up onto the high wooden tower and gateway and leaps off (one flinches for him, but his confidence is  unsurprising given that, in the spirit of this little company, he has done much of the set- building with his own hands,   just as he did for his role in The Ungodly both in Ipswich and New York) . 

          The other delight of this outdoor production is of course the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who is a 20ft tall puppet of magnificent design by Charlie Tymms, its head the Sutton Hoo helmet,  its immense mailed hands gesticulating, wrapping round terrified guards in an ultimate panto “behind you!” moment,   reaching out in the bedchamber scene to touch Gertrude, who cannot see it.  The puppetry is good, the great mask holds expression deeply:   its first appearance sends the guards, panicked squaddies,  scuttling around;  when Hamlet sees it his gasp of “…father!” as it bows its huge head towards him it is electric.   With three operators it paces through and behind the auditorium as we gasp, and reappears suddenly behind the castle to demand fealty: it is simultaneously funny and awe-inspiring.  Matt Pension speaks its voice from its great draped heart, doubling as Claudius; two others are its arms. 

     Actually, the curtain-call realization that this is only a cast of 8 reminds us that, without particular fuss,  doubling and tripling in this tight, versatile cast is everywhere, and part of its strength.   Carrick has reinstated several of Shakespeare’s comic, bantering scenes often cut by more earnest directors:  the guards are funny in their dismay, and as as for the pair transformed later into gravediggers – Emily Jane Kerr and Ailis Duff  – they are pure music-hall.  Though Kerr of course is also Queen Gertrude, and Duff a memorably funny Polonius,  who  roams the audience adding a few lines telling us off.  Rei Mordue and Seb Yates Cridland are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (the latter also Laertes, the former the Player King) .  They are nicely laddish (why not add a few “oy-oy!” and “Gett-in!” cries to the text: Shakespeare’s players would have.)   Georgie Redgrave’s Ophelia is at first a confident teenager, then a scared one when Hamlet turns rough,  and finally allows her distraught state to be more disturbing than conventionally pretty  (Redgrave, of course, doubles as both a guard and, later,  a comic Osric unskilled at fanfares).   

         In passing I should mention that though this is a big arena, with four great stands and a pit of folding chairs,  none of the players is amplified but all are audible everywhere:  that’s Carrick’s old-style insistence on proper projection.  Actors who move on from Red Rose Chain are unlikely to join the growing rank of screen-spoilt mumblers.  

       But Hamlet himself, you ask? And the tragedy, the darkness that has to lie beneath all youthful energy?   Vincent Moisy, within the production’s lively spirit, plays the prince of Denmark with vigour:  emotional, his mood turning on a sixpence, beautifully overdoing the pretended madness as a lad would,  mocking his  uncle, uneasy about his mother’s sexuality.    But he knows how to fall suddenly into the proper seriousness of the great speeches without losing what went before:  his “to be or not to be”  is not declaime but delivered with a roaming energy,  groping its way towards cloudy wisdom before declining  into the disturbing very rough hysteria of his attack on Ophelia. 

       There are, as any actor knows (and often dreads) a dozen different ways of being Hamlet.  Moisy’s is youthful , energetic and interesting:  I tend to judge a lot in any Hamlet on how it feels  at the moment before the final fight and whether I can  believe that he has grown to that acceptance :  “the readiness is all” .   I only just managed it by a whisker in Rupert Goold’s weird RSC version set on the Titanic this year.  But here I was happy with it.     And goodness, the final fight – directed by Ryan Penny – is another thing to remember about a summer dusk at the Anglo-Saxon burial ground, together in a breathless audience under a great chestnut tree.    It is violent,  cartoonishly brilliant (adding two extra corpses for luck)   and  takes your breath away.   Until all the dead rise for the last of Carrick’s original, harmonized songs about our common road to the grave.   Beautiful. 

redrosechain.com  to 23 August

rating 5

MUM-POLE OF THE BAILEY….?

     I paused overnight before writing this,  to see if a bout of two-star irritation might fade.   After all, lawyer-playwright  Suzie Miller gave us the astonishing monologue Prima Facie, when Jodie Comer kept audiences riveted to their seats as a barrister who defends rape cases  and then is a victim.   This one is still mainly a solo by Rosamund Pike, speaking her inner and outer thoughts with elegant division between the two under Justin Martin’s sure direction.   Again ,as in Prima Facie our heroine-narrator leaps on and off tables with engaging vigorous physicality,  but this time there are showy projections (a Buether design).  and significant  moments with Jamie Glover as the husband and an excellent Jasper Talbot as a teenage son (his younger selves also appear).

      Pike is Jessica,  married to a QC, herself newly a judge and pleased with the role. She talks  of bringing female intuition, nuanced listening and empathy to the job, unlike the despised old male dinosaurs on the bench.  But  ‘inter alia’  (meaning among-other-things) indicates that as a woman, wife and mother she struggles  to balance her domestic and emotional life with work, while adoring her only child, Harry and being careful not to upset her husband with her seniority.  

       Well, stop me if you’ve heard that complaint of successful women before: we all have. It’s fashionable.  That sense of deja-vu upper-middle fashionability  is where my above irritation began: Jessica is forever fretting about the shopping, dragging out the ironing-board for her son’s party shirt and adjourning a rape trial to answer his fretful texts about it.  So, generally cosplaying the oppressed hausfrau,  as if to tell us that a judge and a QC wouldn’t afford a bit of domestic help (none is mentioned). The other irritation – though it shows the interesting research among judges which Miller dutifully did –  is her rather bumptious self-satisfaction in the early court scenes. She’s very “My court my rules”, as one flashed projection puts it, and loves putting down male defence barristers.  Her best friend, unseen, is another female judge. They do karaoke together at one point , yowling ‘simply the best!”.  

      But none of that would matter – it’s quite good to dislike a character, it means they’re real, and Pike is terrific; she  is given a spontaneous sex interlude with Glover,  her response interrupted only briefly by her memory of a rape video in court (that does feel real: it must be hell).   But what got on my nerves, as a mother,  was the howling improbability of how dim she is about her son.   Her early terror is of paedophile kidnap, reasonable given the cases she sees,  but absurd is the remembered scene where on a beach walk she panics at little Harry’s liking for a male teaching-assistant.  Without a scrap of that boasted  ability to “listen”,  she trains him how to shout aloud “don’t touch my willy!’.   How to confuse a small child. Even more hopeless is when, rather than check  what he’s actually watching aged 14,  she assumes it’s hard porn rather than just a forbidden video game. So she starts going on and on about  penis and breast improbabilities, and how he needn’t worry .   When,  at last 18 but with no regular  girlfriend yet,  he goes to a ‘house party’ and returns appallingly  drunk saying  he’s had sex,  she giggles with a frisson of actual motherly pride.   Not a thought for the equally drunk girl;  when precious Harry is asked whether he texted Amy  next day he sneers “that’s so last century!”, and  it’s only her husband who murmurs that hey, a gentleman would have done so. In other words, neither of these muppets has ever had a conversation about how a decent person treats a fellow human being they have been that intimate with, even if it was fleeting.

      I suspected Miller intends the play as a statement of indignation on behalf of successful modern clever upmarket mothers doing-it-all while struggling against the manosphere. But actually it works better as a lament for a whole generation of hip, cool  permissive parents who shrug “it’s the culture” at a Gen Z child who deserves to be taken more seriously,  and who shrug playfully at heavy drinking and casual sex.  It works also as a clever portrait of one individual, self-important nitwit.  Somewhere not far from the level of Diary of a Nobody. This is a woman who can selfrighteously sit on the Bench hearing about sex crimes against drunk girls day after day,   without it ever occurring to her to warn her strapping teenage son about how easily it happens, even to normally quite nice boys, when they drink too much and are urged on by loutish peers and are, face it, physically stronger than the girl.

      She finds the truth of that night hard to believe as the story develops, for all the vaunted “listening”.   When the inevitable accusations and defences happen , she turns on her husband, who she considers should have trained Harry better. And when the poor man gives way to his own distress about it all, she the supposed empath is astonished to find that he too is vulnerable.  Not that good at nuanced listening, then…

        The end, however,  redeemed it for me.  Because Miller, for all her empathy with top-class legal women,  bravely offers us the possibility  that the moral compass of a teenager might actually be more reliable than that of a proud bewigged judge. 

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 13 sept

Rating 4

In cinemas uk and Ireland from 18 sept, internationally from 25 sept

FAITH LOST, AND WAKENED

      This is a moody, cloudy production shot through with streaks of mad rage, deliberately unsettling.   Autolycus, spirit of Time the thief and occasional narrator,  roams cynically downstage in a pork pie hat,  lighting a fag. Then beneath a great pale moon Leontes’ court revolves, gathering  to  admire the boss’s sportive wrestling-match with Polixenes.   He laughingly tries to keep this childhood friend staying  longer, entreats the Queen to do likewise and she obeys, courtly style.  But in a stabbing moment the mist flares red (in Yael Farber’s production Tim Lutkin’s lighting plot is critical, chilling or mellowing through the story).   Leontes is suddenly, savagely crazy with suspicion of his innocent wife and friend, grabbing his little son and pushing him away, ranting, spilling his horrors at us, baffling his court. 

       It is one of the hardest parts in Shakespeare to interpret:  I never forget a truncated  prisoners’ production for the old London Shakespeare Workout when in discussion afterwards one starring inmate, perhaps familiar with private destructive madness from long ago,  sighed sadly  “Leontes, what a plonker! It’s stuff like that…”.  So every time, it  falls on actor and director to work out why this king’s  suspicion grows so fast, so mad and murderous.  When you can’t believe it the whole strange mythic play of loss and redemption can hang oddly, unreal.   

      So thank goodness that Bertie Carvel  – in his  first RSC role since  Miss Trunchbull fifteen years ago – is a marvel. He has in the interim played, among others,  Donald Trump and a young Rupert Murdoch: he draws on that headlong macho determination here,  but with a sadness under it, always visible, insecure.  Madeline  Appiah’s cheerful, confidently pregnant Hermione is more adult, safe in herself, than he can ever manage to be.  She is calm, slightly baffled;  he is  storming, eyes glittering, attempting sophisticated mockery but gripped by the “infection of the brain that hardens the brow”. It is  the howling anger of a child demanding love. Appalled, you believe him: honest Camillo is right : not being loved enough is  “fear that oft infects the wisest”.  

        In the background the softer, easier world of Hermione’s ladies and cheeky Mamillius  cannot fight such roaring male power. But  downstage comes the formidable and furious Paulina (it’s a very feminist play) in the form of another marvel of energy: Aicha Kossoko.  She’s   a proper barnstormer.  The male and female energies collide; Leontes tosses in rage under a sheet, rises, pulls on his socks, screams and curses the newborn infant,  demands she be thrown on the fire,  drops the red-swaddled bundle to the ground to be caught by the appalled womenfolk.  The costumes are informal and period-vague,  which makes the sudden formality of business-suits in the court scene all the more striking,  as Hermione on trial,  fresh from childbed in a slip, breasts leaking,   defends herself with vain dignity.   At last down comes the calm shrugging ruling from the Delphic Oracle, and for Leontes, unbearable disastrous guilt.  You can hardly look at Carvel here for angry pity.  

        I wondered how, after the darkness of the first half, Farber would handle the pastoral revels of sixteen years on,  with the lost infant Perdita grown up far beyond the sea and in love (fully entangled from the start) with her lover, Polixenes’ son Florizel.  Most directors revel in this lightening of mood, as the tragedy turns into a rom-com and moves towards the final redemption of all (except poor lost Mamillius, nobody ever thinks of him).   But this production swerves deliberatley away from the traditional rustic comedy (though there’s a classy pickpocket manoeuvre from Trevor Fox’s Autolycus).  Farber accentuates rather  the mythic, mystical side: wild Isadora-Duncan dancing to a great drumbeat round a  leaping flame and orange smoke,  Perdita almost a priestess.   After the anger and arrogant  misery of the first act this is a hippie paradise.  Drawing the play’s themes hastily  together, Polixenes’ rage (a mere shadow of Leontes’) sends the young couple fleeing.  

          I had reservations about the Bohemian interlude, though it is never dull and often spectacular.  But in this play you’re always waiting, wanting to move on to the  final redemptive scene around the statue.  Autolycus’ hurried narrative fits that need,  and at last there it is: brilliantly set, notably lit, ready for the  removal of all fear and mistrust.  Lanterns glimmer  all around as the court gathers and Paulina – truly priestesslike – delivers the key demand: “It is required you do awake your faith”.  And we do, as the playwright asks down the centuries. That’s all you can ask. 

Rsc.org.uk to 30 August

Rating 4 

WESTMINSTER , A WILL, A WICKED WRANGLE  

     This excellent play is the first by Shaan Sahota, a doctor by profession:  but goodness, she (and the NT Studio, and director Daniel Raggett) know how to do it . A family explosion, a sorrowful unfolding of self-knowledge, dry cynical wisdom and laughs and fights, even a spectacular moment turning the audience into a party conference crowd (we are all trained since Truss to flinch in apprehension at the sight of a lectern).  And there’s even  a devastatingly memorable  final line from an unforgettable hero.   Or , you might decide,  sudden antihero.  Bravo. 

     The play  is also absolute catnip to anyone who has watched the last few years  of Westminster politics, rife with insider privilege and old Oxbridge acquaintance yet including our first Indian Premier.   The Estate is  bound to follow the journey of the Donmar’s last new play, “Till the stars come down”,  and hit the West End.  Will eat my hat if it doesn’t.

    At its heart is a stunning performance by Adeel Akhtar as  Angad, a BRitish Punjabi Sikh  shadow minister in opposition. He’s small, intense, nervously round-shouldered , asthmatic, idealistic . We meet him in his office just as his party leader is resigning over a scandal (“at least she’s 18”, they all keep saying, it’s a very funny play at this stage).    His cynically ambitions , Oxford-posh communications spad Petra (Helena Wilson,  note- perfect down to the clacking stilettos and swishing hair) hopes that party and nation will love to  see a baggage-handler’s son reaching the top. Though we soon learn that the father rose fast in business , a tough possibly slum landlord.  Petra’s underling  Isaac (Fade Simbo) is fresh off the Diversity Access scheme,  and a bit cowed by it all. But even so it’s always Angad himself who makes the coffee. 

        In strides chief whip Humphry Ker as Ralph (joyful casting: he’s a clear 18 inches taller than the shadow minister, looms). A vape and a thousand years  of confident privilege  hanging from his lanyard, Humphrey orders Angad to back a rival for the leadership.   Again, it’s a wickedly funny scene: we hardly need he playful programme biogs to tell us that Ralph was captain of rowing and star batsman at Harrow when the shy asthmatic Indian boy arrived, and that the power hasn’t yet shifted.  Then the bombshell:  Angad’s father has suddenly died. 

      So in an elegant scene-change it becomes a family matter, still entangled with politics since  half the shadow cabinet turn up at the Gurdwara funeral and Angad’s elder sisters Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and wellmarried socialite Malicka (Shelley Conn)  come round to supper. His pregnant wife wisely nips early to bed while they look at the will: Dad has left his entire portfolio to his only son. The  daughters nowhere: being modern,  they expect Angad to go thirds with them . Sure the old patriarchal Indian ways are gone, though the Punjab’s posters still advertise amnio and  abortion for girl-babies,   and Dad spent all the private-education money on him while they had to cook, pray for and cherish the precious boy. 

        Will he be more modern? If not , will the furious siblings sabotage his hopes? Who , past and present, is most wrong?  Was it even,  perhaps, actually tougher to be the bullied, driven, precious son of a demanding father  than the sidelined womenfolk? Tangled arguments of feminism, sibling feeling, deservings and resentments coil into poisonous fury.   One of Sahota’s many, many killer lines is Angad’s “the first rule of being brown  is , never tell white people how shit we treat each other”. 

     Let me spoil nothing, but it goes in getting better. And more physical, not least in the fights but in the way that Akhtar , his meltdowns shading at last in to rage, shows that the broken boy may be a good and modern man but  is also  the heir of ruthless, angry paternal  genes. By the end Angad is transformed:  stands physically taller, breathes easy with no inhaler in sight, even faces down the immense Humphrey.    But there’s dismay in that , too… And Akhtar deserves an Olivier.

NATIONALTHEATRE.ORG.UK TO 23 AUG rating 5

MEDIEVAL MODERNITY

There’s a nice irony in opening, this week, a tale of an aristocratically  bred heiress, seized first by evangelical Christian faith and then by a charismatic man,  rejecting it all to live in extreme poverty rejecting society. Irony anyway in a time of Gen Z idealistic disgust with the way the world runs. Though the 13c St Clare of Assisi, friend of St Francis and foundress of the barefoot Poor Clares order of nuns, turned neither to criminality  nor to politics, Chiara Atik’s play feels timely in its sense of reckless youthful determination. And in the final scene, touching is her kneeling, nunly plea never to be blinded to poverty and to find a way to “be good”.

   Atik’s lively text and Blanche McIntyre’s direction offer us – in medieval costume but teenage American language and slang and refernces to everything from goFundme to lip-salve , even as they discuss friend Guido “back from the crusades” as if it was a gap yah, which I suppose it sometimes was.
Its a deliberate double vision, and Arsema Thomas from Netflix offers a terrific stage debut as Clare, lively and rebellious, larking with her sister, arguing with her Mum, gradually intrigued by Freddie Carter’s earnest Francis who tells her that to be rich is “to be complicit in inequality”, and challenges her to confront the deep poverty of families under the Pontevecchio bridge. Her understanding grows, alongside revulsion at the wedding gifts and dress prepared for her. The extremity of her rejection becomes almost startling: after toying with the argument her sister favours that there has to be a middle way, beyond the hair shirt and sleeping on the floor because thousands have to. “Thousands” says the reasonable Beatrice “do not sleep on the floor alongside a bed”.  

    It is a quite sharp 105 straight minutes, though we are too aware from early on that there can be only one ending, and the arguments of course are perennial. What’s missing though, despite talk of Pope, interfering bishop, etc is God. Francis and Clare in real history spoke not as if driven not by purely modern liberal socialism , but by an idea of God and his world and work. There is little wonder in this Francis: no greeting of brother wind and brother sun and the beasts around. He sets up his creche with real straw – historically he is the father of all Christmas crib scenes – but it’s the poverty that fascinates him about it, not the incarnate godhead. So it could almost be an honest modern left-leaning fiction, for all the ladies’ gowns and maids (Liz Kettle and Jacoba Williams,  nicely drawn).  Fine, but given the real figures and real gowns, it could have played on more notes…

orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 9 aug

rating 3

SMOOTH AS VELVET, SHOT WITH GILT AND GUILT

Ahhh I do  love a well-made play from the 1920s (remember The Deep Blue Sea , just lately!).  This one too deals with adultery and hidden pain among the well-to-do,  but Somerset Maugham offers a less wrenching take than Rattigan,   going in more for dry wit, adult resignation, and an entertaining faux-cynicism overlying a surprising degree of humane tolerance.    Laura Wade, fresh from adapting Jilly Cooper for the telly, has made a few artful twitches and timeshifts in Maugham’s 1926 play, but it retains the ‘well-made’ civility of making the characters’ relationships and the inciting incident crystal  clear from the start.  

         Constance’s mother and her practical, less-chic sister Martha both know that our heroine’s husband John is sleeping with her best friend Marie-Louise.  At one point there’s a circular conversation in which four of five in the elegant sitting- room know  this damning fact, two of them with guilt,  and believe that the betrayed wife doesn’t know a thing.   Only of course she actually does.   So  on goes the dance ,  literally  a couple of times as   Tarmara Harvey’s lively production indicates the time-shifts  – to the past moment of revelation and back  – with low-lit moments and a Jamie Cullum jazz score. Characters move surreally in patterns and  the set goes a bit poltergeist . Tthere’s a great wallpaper gag, don’t miss it.      

        It’s swooningly attractive to look at, and has filled the RSC shop with many a jazz age butterfly brooch and silken scarf  .  Every woman in the building, ushers included, seem to want Constance’s stage wardrobe, especially the gilt black velvet theatre-cloak in which she prepares to go off to the West End to see a play (called The Constant Wife, natch) with her old friend and suitor Bernard . He is Raj Bajaj, a masterclass in baffled innocence.  Maugham’s wit is sharp too,  though Wade has added a couple of sub-Jilly double-entendres he wouldn’t have liked much.   But full advantage is taken of Constance’s Mum (Kate Burton) and her  drily cynical views on things it is best a wife decides  simply not to know.  

       Somerset Maugham, being bisexual, was one of the best male writers about female frustration, temptation and self-assertion, and Constance’s moment of shocked pain is as sharp as her realization of her fragile position – “What is a wife, among well-to-do people?”  she asks,  when the house is run so much by servants and she contributes little and might end up discarded in “two rooms over a flower shop”.  She sees that her single sister with an interiors shop  is right, and that “the only independence worth having is financial independence”. 

      So she joins the firm, advising less wise hausfraus on which hideous fringed lamp to buy, just as Waugham’s wife Syrie did. And meanwhile  she works out the best approach to conserve what she wants of her marriage, in a brilliantly sly but likeable way.  Endearingly, the only person  to whom she fully confides her pain and bafflement  is Bentley the butler (Mark Meadows, beautifully understated)  who in return confides that the sick mother he keeps visiting is, in fact, a male lover. “Must be very difficut” she says kindly. 

        It flows merrily along,  but an equal buzz on Wednesday made me glad to have missed the press night due holiday. Because an understudy show can be a thrill: Rose Leslie was off and her understudy, Jess Nesling,  proved absolutely stunning: every expression, every move, every sad-resigned grownup emotion about the inevitable cooling of marital love given to perfection in the intimate Swan. Can’t take your eyes off her.   The others are fun too,  Amy Morgan a magnificent feminist Martha with one barnstorming speech after the interval,  and though Luke Norris’ John  was a bit too much of a cartoon lounge-lizard in the first half , he came good when near the end his comeuppance is complete.

        A highly enjoyable evening.  Expect an outbreak of extreme velvet evening-shrugs and hand-painted stoles this autumn.  

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rsc.org.uk  To 2 august

rating 4 

GRACE PERVADES        Theatre Royal Bath

    Theatre is fond of sending itself love letters, albeit – from Sheridan’s The Critic to Frayn’s  Noises Off – often prudently laced with affectionate mockery.   Here, kicking off a Ralph Fiennes season in the prettiest and most approriate of Victorian playhouses,  David Hare evokes two of the first ‘national treasure’ theatrical  figures:  the great Henry Irving, actor-manager of the Lyceum for two decades,  and his leading lady Ellen Terry. Plus,   as a side-helping of theatre history,  the children Edward and Edith Craig she bore as a single mother: he as an advanced theorist, she a tough-minded touring producer. 

       Miranda Raison as Ellen Terry is a delight: light and likeable, every feeling shining through her eyes, a woman who’s lived and lost and struggled to feed her kids by keeping chickens, but who keeps all angst and sorrow for the stage.   Fiennes of course is Irving, and deploys all his chiselled, Easter-Island anguish and  dignity,  even when pacing around in skinny black tights like cloak like a stork in mourning,  while  being gently told off by his leading lady for never looking fellow-actors in the eye.  Jeremy Herrin’s direction, Bob Crowley’s briliantly atmospheric design and Fotima Dimou’s amazing OTT Victorian – and then Edwardian  – costumes conjure a world where British theatre was first dragged up into respectability, stalled a little with Irving’s addiction for grand Shakespeare and  melodrama,  but was creeping into a new century with new ideas beyond.  Having a great-grandfather who actor-managed (strictlyprovincial) in the period, how could I resist driving seven hours to see it?    Especially when Fiennes’ anguished Irving explained the cost, the debt and struggles of an actor-manager, and how  hours before his Othello he was on his hands and knees mending a torn seat  in Row R.  

         The scenes with Irving and Terry, her recruitment and a growing, almost maternal,  care for the brilliant, shy, troubled man are fabulous. It’s like watching a carefree robin cheering up a moulting eagle.  He is anguished by critics (Bernard Shaw was very rude) and treats every entry, every show,  with anxious intensity.  She takes the banister down from her dressing room at the last minute and throws herself into the parallel world, glad to have her own life’s anxieties thrown aside for that moment.   We could watch them all evening.  

      But her children are part of the story too, sometimes narrating, and following their own diverse lines. Jordan Metcalfe , perfect right down to his blond cowlick and earnest glasses, creates with mischievous brilliance young Edward’s progressive pomposity (he thinks theatre should abolish both actors and words,  believes fervently in his own genius,  and prefers his girlfriend  Isadora Duncan’s wild flailings to the dreadful deadening discipline of ballet).  Hare gives us a glorious scene in which Irving, having hired him  as a nepo-baby of Ellen, points out that all the other spear-carriers hate Edward, and resent  his loudly expressed theories of Theat-ah.   All very Gen-Z.  The scene where the young genius into /Stanislavsky and puts on Hamlet in Moscow is wicked theatrical jokery. It stands oddly out in the play but hell, it’s entertaining.  Sister   Edith (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis)  is tougher, feminist, democratic, and just gets on with it. Perfect.  

       There are moments when bits of social history feel a bit shoe-horned in –  there is talk of suffragettes,  and one of Edith’s threesome household is in love with Vita Sackville West.  But it’s irresistible when the finally ageing Edward explains, in the South of France,  that one of his keen acolytes is a chap called Peter Brook.

   Overall, it is never dull, and the Irving-Terry relationship and conversations about the craft of acting are mesmeric: well, it’s Ralph Fiennes.  Always worth the trip.   He directs As You Like it later in the season – the play Ellen Terry wanted to star in as Rosalind,  but which was too light-hearted for Irving’s taste.  A nice link.   Fiennes himself turns up again in the new play A Small Hotel, in September.  

theatreroyal.org to 22 July

rating. 4.