Monthly Archives: August 2025

A MODERN CHEKHOVIAN PLAY, BEAUTIFUL

    The first thoughts that steuck me on leaving Andrew Keatley’s well-made, slightly old fashioned family drama were that a lesser playwright would have ended it with at least one corpse; and that a lesser director than the careful, restrained Adrian Noble would have ramped up the sound tomake us hink there might be one.

     But, magnificently, its account of a patriarch’s birthday eve and death ends with candles on a cake, and a messily credible erosion of old resentments.  But it isn’t sentimental schlock: closer,  really to Priestley or Chekhov and performed with the  skilled conviction it deserved. 

       Jonathan Hyde’s waistcoated , tactlessly autocratic lawyer William, for whose birthday they have gathered, is exasperated by his sons . There’s Giles the doctor who was never “man enough” for his heroic WW2 tastes, and Samuel who is seriously autistic, half-savant but prone to meltdown when overloaded with the difficulty of people’s and life’s disorganization. Giles has been his brother’s protector and kindly playmate – both halves begin  with schoolboy flashbacks –   but this devotion has clearly taken its toll on his unsatisfied and rsther bootfaced wife Sophie.  The third sibling, Alice, was disowned by William 17 years earlier for being pregnant by a black Cameroonian: the birthday gathering is her first open return home, with the teenage Aurelia. Who to some extent makes common cause with the other grandchildren , Giles’ and Sophie’s teens.

     It is carefully set in 1987: the eve of New Labour. Early enough for them all to remember Samuel being called a “retard”, and  for Alice and baby to be slung out by William, a phenomenon considered weird by Giles’ children.    And early enough too for William’s stiff war-and-duty attitudes (and an ancient moral guilt)   to have been formed by a brother’s  death at Gallipoli.   

        What distinguishes it from the last century’s classics, though, is Keatley’s willingness to present the serious neurodiversity of Samuel not as a difficulty – though heaven knows it is, he has outbreaks and irationalities – but as an idiosyncrasy, a brother and son familiar and  loved.  Richard Stirling is extraordinary: expressing the innocence, the affection, the clever brain without harness, and the agonized tension of struggling  to make sense of sudden mental overload.  Giles  – given a wonderfully rounded, decent and underrated portrait by Chris Larkin – cries in frustrated defensiveness about his brother  “He TRIES!”   There is one moment when Giles , overcome by his wife’s dislike and father’s contempt,  gets a sudden confused consolation from his weaker brother. Your heart turns over. 

        Unlike Samuel the patriarch William, on the front edge of vascular dementia after a couple of strokes,  does not usually try. His feelings,rigid beliefs and demands for organisation to run  his way are visited on the family, not least Olivia Vinall’s luminous, tired-eyed prodigal Alice.   Much happens between them all, and the movement and change of mood and understanding  is utterly engrossing. Hot and tired that day,   I was drawn in and lived among them. 

park theatre.co.uk  to 20 sept

rating  5

BACK TO THE LAND

        Birdsong, a grassy bank. At a rough rustic table sits a rough rustic:  bearded, silent, rolling fags and contemplating a broken tractor part.   Into this Thomas-Hardy idyll prance two young moderns;  Milly (Nadia Parkes) in full influencer makeup and bare tummy,  and Femi (Terique Jarrett) springing around happily in beach-shorts.  They bum a spliff off the older man, who stumps off silently with his lump of metal to a shrill cry of “Rude!” From Milly.  

         Mike Bartlett,  who was last delighting us up West with a revived UNICORN,  has a gift for creating almost cartoonishly awful middle-class modern characters,   in sparky dialogue you want to jot down.  In the opening scenes of this odd new play he first displays it bravissimo in the whining rants of Milly,   complaining that the lush Ultz-set grass might contain bugs, and  then doing the full gen Z rant about how Lip – Sam Troughton’s solidly taciturn urbanit returning to his dead father’s farm –  t –   has no right to go “goblining around” looking the way he does , because “self care”’is a moral imperative.  And  anyway she hates her ex-stepmum Ruth who is living with him and paying the bills while they try to turn the arable farm into an organic mixed enterprise with darling pigs fed on scraps and all their own vegetables.

       Ruth – the splendid Hattie Morahan –  turns up all white-shirt, jeans, designer-boots and shining hair with trays of food, laying   out a Markle-style tablescape with bits of lavender.    Enter widowed Tony from the next farm ( Jonathan Slinger) all agri-biz scorn for their ‘hobby farm’ dreams but fancying Ruth no end.   Young Femi, it turns out, is starting an Oxford course on rural sustainability and  knows enough already for some youthful mansplaining to the others.   Emotions rise until Lip violently  throws a shovelful of earth onto the supper table,  to demonstrate how few worms there are these days.  Milly defiantly fossicks in it shouting “well, here’s one! oh no, it’s pasta”.  

       The theme, hammered at in three directions for the best part of three-hours-two-intervals,  is what is right for us:  big agribiz for profit and feeding the masses reasonably cheaply,  or aiming for minimal chemicals and kindly pasture-beast manure and horticulture. Or  – Lip suddenly veers this way –  we should go prehistoric,  return the Cotswolds to temperate rainforest and roving wolves, smash phones and live in a hut on vegetables.  Oh, and avoid modern science,  including medicine,  because we all ought to die sooner and feed  the biocycle.  The problem here is that Ruth is expecting a baby and has strong views about keeping it alive.

          Full disclosure: we farmed for a decade organically before it was fashionable, and I too can bore for England about soil aeration, rotation and agrochemical  damage. As indeed can most Archers listeners these days: it has all been talked about for twenty-five years.   In the middle act – where sadly the magnificent Milly has vanished – Bartlett fleshes out the emotional issues : Tony’s loneliness and his genuine respect for Ruth’s intentions (Slinger is terrific, both funny and moving in the reality of his widowhood).   Lip’s increasing battiness rises.   They all talk and talk and talk. Then talk some more,  none of them doing any actual farming, though Tony clearly has chaps out there doing it for him.  Then they talk and talk some more.  During the men’s long speeches Hattie Morahan brilliantly deploys her gift for appalled facial expressions of horror, resignation, helplessness and stony determination not to let the dingbat Lip draw her back. 

           During the second interval some five or six years elapse, stagehands deftly rip up the stage and produce some saplings and an old motor-tyre,  and Femi has finished his PhD and got some clothes on.      But Milly is still there,  having become Lip’s sidekick and gone  grunge-rural and a convert to  his sustainable rewilded hovel-life.  The others return one by one.  And talk.  And talk.     Modern life , we learn from Lip and Milly, is but a wretched serfdom to global tyrants like Tesla , Meta and Netflix. From Femi comes an explanation of how post-Thatcher (oh, here we go!) globalized capitalism clashes with our deep Neolithic needs and confuses the middle-boomer generation. . But he knows better:  capitalism is still humanity’s best chance,  owing to AI. 

       They all recriminate and TED-talk at one another some more (except Tony, who just gently reminds his old friend Lip that he’s always had crazes , for months once experimenting with an eight day week).     Oh, and Ruth wants her investment in the farm back. As you would.   Lip  sits, all silent glittering eyes and bristle.   There are sound effects which may suggest that Ruth’s chaps are already busy flattening Lip’s fledgling rainforest.   Maybe someone will die,  no spoilers.  But by then, sadly,  you hardly care.  It is not Bartlett’s best play. 

donmarwarehouse.com  to 4 October

Rating 3

A FAMILY BUSINESS AT SIXES AND 007s

This little theatre has given us some strong meat lately – themes of Nazi crimes, Jewishness, Russianness – but this time it hosts the Barn theatre’s sparky, short and cheeky take by Jordan Waller on the James Bond franchise,  directed by Derek Bond, no relation..  It comes  just at a lovely topical moment since – as per the play itself – the new Bond hovers unnamed  in the near future.    It is a fine romp, coming in under two hours including interval,  invites us to have a few thoughts about toxic masculinity, race and ingenerational misunderstanding. 

      It is fuelled by a manically enjoyable performance by Tanya Franks as the imagined heiress of the Bond francise, a responsibility she holds jointly with her cousin Malcolm (Phlip Bretherton),  white-haired and cautious. She also fancies raising her son the intern  to producer level,  and presentis him with the vintage Rolex Submariner worn by Connery in the first film.   But Quinn (Harry Goodson-Bevan) is more interested in making a film in Sierra LEone with his hip boyfriend.  So as far as human relations go (which is nowhere very  deep)  it is about a powerful woman’s conflicted feelings for both her father and her son, all tangled up with everyone’s feelings for James Bond.

       It’s all punctuated by odd blasts of Bond music and once even some smoke, and is  at its best when joyfully cartoonish: Deborah on the phone snapping at scriptwriters  “We love the schooldchilrenm we love the monks, but needs a twist”, discussing the blowing up of a giant Buddha and emphasising that it’s for the boys “for god’s sake,  he’s a MAN they need a MAN to make sense of the world we live in”.  And as for a costume detail “He’s not wearing high-vis! He’s James Bond, not a f–ing bin lady!”.   

       They have 24 hours before the announcement of the new Bond, but of course as Malcolm and Quinn nip in and out it becomes clear that “David” won’t do . Phone messages. To girls. Young girls. Kaput!.  They agonize over audition tapes,  one being blandly Bondish and obvious “Caucasian male six foot, dark hair”   but Quinn says his friend, a resting-actor barman, sent oene in and they all look. And it’s Theo (Obioma Ugoala)  and he’s good.  But he’s also brown.  Dare they?   Might this open the door to more frighteningly diverse Bonds, identifying all over the place with “mental health and feelings…  Angela Merkel in an avocado suit..”) .  Deborah at one point roars “TOxic men.  Of cours’e he’s toxic, he’s a f—ing bastard and thats what makes him a MAN! 

     Well, of course they dare. A bit.  But then THeo turns out to be vegetarian as well, and that’s not all. There’s more.  He may not even be happy with exploding the Buddha, and nor is Gen-Z Quinn.   Panic rises.  A small betrayal looms.  More pastiche music and hysteria.  A snap ending.  Well, the journey has been fun , but it hasn’t quite led anywhere .  Still, there’s a place for that, in August.  

marylebonetheatre.com  to 30 Aug

RATING 3

A TRUE-CRIME RICARDIAN ROMCOM

Here’s a wonderfully  1950s retro play,  not just in style and simplicity but in the willowy vintage-Harrods outfits of Rachel Pickup as the willowy Marta Hallard, visiting Inspector Grant in he bleak hospital  room where all the action takes place – barring a couple of Shakespearean ranting moments for contrast, and two neat cocktail bar scenes stage right. 

    It’s adapted from the most famous novel by Josephine Tey, who stands alongside Christie in the golden age of crime fiction, a write artful and readable though with an enthusiasm for a particular strict Englishness (laced with Balmoralish Scottishness)  that can jar the modern  ear. Inspector Grant is her hero, and in this unusual tale is  stuck in hospital with a broken leg, bored and restive with nothing to detect.

     His actress pal Marta gives him – as a judge of interesting faces – a postcard portrait  of Richard III. He sees the face of Shakespeare’s notorious villain as “more like a judge or soldier”, strong and honest. He then  finds what all passionate Ricardians will tell you: that Shakespeare drew on st Thomas More, who was barely seven at Bosworth, and that  the story of Richard’s  crimes was, basically, cooked up by the Tudor victors after they’d stripped the last Plantagenet’s corpse and chucked him under a future car park in Leicester.

    The book is a classic, the  detective assisted by a young historian at the BL, Marta and his sergeant wafting in and out amid occasional exasperated nurses.     Adapting it, M.Kilburg Reedy has been pretty faithful to the track of archival discovery , and has added two rather wonderful nurses, Janna Fox as the one who is sceptical and prefers Richard the Lionheart, and Halsa Abbasi who is stagestruck,  and thrilled  that the nefarious Shakespeare play is running up West and starring Marta’s fiance’.  

     Who is also the playwright’s invention: , because a rom-com situation is bolted on to the basic story, with a very un-Tey unspoken “chemistry” between the cop and the diva, mirrored by the love life of young Brent the researcher.  Who like Grant risks romantic happiness for detective preoccupation…

    It’s a bit too long at 2 hrs 45, slow burn at the start but turns out unexpectedly rewarding: a lot of the good sharp lines are Tey’s own, and Rob Pomfret has sufficient commanding presence to hold us happy despite being static in a hospital  bed in striped pajamas for the whole of the first half.  Moreover, Harrison Sharpe as Brent the earnest researcher is a glorious comic : puppyish, forever hauling crumpled notes out of his jacket, trousers and shoes, excitedly emotional (at one point to the extreme of a somersault). And the nurses are terrific foils to Grant, especially when he and Brent run out of tintacks for their Plantagenet-Woodville storyboard and steal syringe needles instead.     

     So it’s a great deal of fun, decently low-priced, gives old Richard his due in dignity ,and the romcom additions stay just this side of annoying. Oh, and here’s a gracious deed: the CX theatre obligingly puts Richard III and Anne Nevill’s 4-generation family tree on the back of its free panto flyer, so even those who didnt buy  programmes can follow it..

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk  to  13 sept

Rating 4