Monthly Archives: September 2025

ANYTHING CAN WASH UP ON THE NORTH SEA COAST …

      Robin Brooks  and director Fiona McAlpine  mischievously  bill this eccentric, enlivening short play as “a shocking sordid seaside thriller”,  so I expected broad comedy larks. But  in the event it’s more like a version of Henry James’ Aspern Papers,  as if recreated under the influence of a cold salt swim and a bucket of heavily laced alcoholic cocoa . Very seaside, and actually remarkable and well-disguisedly intelligent fun. 

        An American academic  (played with particular aplomb by Charlotte Parry)  swishes into offeason Southwold in her Burberry, patronizingly adoring it for quaintness and writerly peace.  She is  determined to lodge in the house of an old, old lady who used to mix with the likes of E.M.Forster and Ben Britten. And who may have been the lover of a minor lesbian performance-poet of the last century:  a figure long obscure but suddenly fashionable in US academe’s quest for feminist diversity. 

        The daughter Violet (Lydia McNulty)  is prickly , and prone to deliver short depressing performance-poems herself. The apparent granddaughter Maud (Charlie Cameron) is naive and shy, but  between them they occasionally wheel out the grande dame – dark glasses, huge hat, blankets, croaking voice – to demand £1000 a week for the  basement flat. 

         So in two short and fascinating acts (whole thing is two hours including interval)   Parry stalks around, mainly in front of the curtains,  chats up shy Maud and goes sea-swimming with her. She is once or twice granted a snapped grunting audience with old Evelyn,  and becomes increasingly suspicious that she herself may be being fooled or haunted.  As many do,  she starts to feel that Southwold itself is actually a stage set  the bathing-huts as changing rooms, the sea a backdrop and  the people self-possessedly odd: the bewildered visitor is the sole and baffled audience.

        What she wants, of course, is a possible cache of letters and tapes of the fabled poet performing her own works.    Do they still exist? WHere is the old woman hiding them, can they be in the elaborate escritoire (the only set, suddenly revealed by the curtain)   and why won’t the old bat let Harvard or somewhere have them for yet another slightly tedious book to be written by our thwarted heroine?

      Suspicions rise,  until in the second half a lovely coup-de-theatre brings a proper gasp.  And not-quite-all is revealed.  It’s a hoot.  Only cavil would be sometimes for the two younger cast to be a touch more audible, especially as the short performance-poems spouted by Violet sound quite bad enough to provide  amusement (anyone who’s been to a poetry-slam in Aldeburgh knows what I mean) 

southwoldartscentre.co.uk   to Saturday.   Cheap as chips and just as much fun.  

rating 3 

RAIN, RAGE ,  REGRETS

    If you’re expecting  the original Ibsen tale of a bored wife wondering  whether to leave a dull husband and deciding not to, pause.   This is “after Ibsen”  written and directed by Simon Stone. We sit around or above  a big white shining rectangle, and it’s  2025:  topical enough for a line or two about Just Stop Oil arrests.  It’s Ullswater,  where in an (invisible)  lovely garden the neuroscientist Edward (Andrew LIncoln)  has given a terminal diagnosis to the unbearably handsome young Heath (Joe Alwyn).   The pair tiresomely exchange overeducated literary references. Theres a lake and pool in which the lady of the house Ellida  (Alicia Vikander, this is star-casting time) swims while always wishing for the sea, where she used to throw herself into deep currents.   Edward  lost his first wife to suicide,  mixes his own spices and rudely rejects the visiting Lyle’s gift of bottled sauces. He has two Tik-Tok-sassy teenage dauighters , initially insufferable but destined to be interesting towards the second half.   Asa (Gracie Oddie-James, a headlong performer)  is planning a PhD at Yale but meanwhile does OnlyFans soft porn; Hilda is becoming obsessed with the ripped glamour of young doomed Heath,  and romantically imaging  herself at his deathbed.  It’s quite boring in the Lake District if you’re seventeen, apparently. 

      For some time, I have to confess, the whole family simply annoyed me: too much  sitcom-streamer dialogue.  Nor were a third of the lines fully audible:  I have  checked this with people 10, 20 and 45 years younger and all agreed it is a  problem. Especially when the people at the far end of the stage from you are laughing because they were close enough to hear some muttered remark. And – retrospectively – it’s annoying because towards the end of the first half, and throughout the second, the characterization is better.    Vikander is the least audible – a TV-mutterer  in conversation and only clear in her late big speeches.   Andrew Lincoln is the only one properly audible throughout, and indeed magnificent, a proper star turn in his raging confusion at the play goes on.

        For it does warm up. First with a radio report on a past incident on an oil rig, sparking Elida”s unresolved memories of being an environmental activist at 15, in love with a man over twice her age, , accidentally  killing someone on an oil rig and promising to wait for him always as he goes to prison.     When the first half ends with the arrival of  Brendan Cowell as a big hearty bearded Aussie, we know who it’ll be.  

           My friend the Ibsen-purist came to a late preview and disliked it, saying  she’d rather people wrote their own plays not piggybacked on classics. And  there is a case for tiring of these updates, whether ancient Greek or Ibsen and Strindberg:  deprived of  the anger at social norms which fuelled them, they often flail  (remember in the Bridget Jones series how the endearingly silly  heroine is pretentiously working on what she calls “Chekhov’s Hedda Gabler” , re-set in 21c Hampstead. Top satirical spot there from Helen Fielding).  

        So in Stone’s version, while a second wife’s  past and a young man’s illness do reflect the cake Ibsen baked,   he anxiously crams in  through plot and character numerous fresher plums: from daddy ‘n  daughter-issues and suicide  to eco-activism, groupthink, underage sex, online porn, miscarriage-guilt and the social problems of rural racism seen through mixed race teenagers.   Add the irresistible ability of the Bridge to do blasts of lightning and soak half the second act in real  sluicing rain , which eventually fills a shallow  pool convenient for apocalyptic sex,  before  deepening to a lap- pool around  which an interminable reconciliation may or may not be completed. 

       So where it ought to build up to a climax it builds, drops away, builds a bit again, makes another oblique point,  suddenly takes the trouble to mention Love Actually which made Andrew Lincoln famous,  and finally ends with a plunge and a shriek after nearly 3 hours.

          But yes,  there are some excellent lines:   Lincoln is superb when given a chance to go spectacularly nuts,  Alwyn is peculiarly likeable and the teens – Oddie-James and Isobel Akuwudike – are terrific:   at first infuriating but finally the source of those devastating young wisdoms we all encounter in times of adult chaos.  As they clear the stage of garden furniture preparatory to the dramatic downpour,  one remarks to their endlessly conflicted and tormented stepmother “Y’know, you don’t have to do things just because you can. I learned that when I was twelve”. 

Bridgetheatre.co.uk to 8 nov

Rating  3

HOLLYWOOD AND HYPOCRISY

       It’s a brilliant moment for this sharp bit of work from the American Michael McKeever to land at the Elephant with a bracing thump.   We’ve got Trump at his UK banquet,  crowds flocking down Whitehall to condemn him , rows on every side about free speech, morality and identity.  Not to mention the devout religiosity of the late Charlie Kirk’s arguments , and the President’s recent purging of the Kennedy Centre for arts for hosting drag queens.  Freedom, coercion, rebellious queerness and power: it’s all here , under a mischievously battered HOLLYWOODLAND proscenium,  as if the West was in a twisted way echoing the 1934-1968’s moment when  the Hays Code restricted the film industry’s “moral standards’.  The moment  certainly gave the 90-minute show – set in 1950 – extra bite.

     It’s a drinks party in the coolly chic home of Billy Haines, once a major 1920’s star and now – after refusing to give up his gay lover and have a “lavender marriage” – working as a smart interior designer.  His friend Tallulah Bankhead is there,  lounging, smoking, drinking and reminiscing outrageously about her liaisons and the free old days when you could swing from a chandelier with no underwear and get applauded for it.  She is longing to get the part of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, if Warner Bros will agree. 

       Henry Willson, a sharp agent,  turns up with a young protegé he has rechristened for stardom as Chad Manford, (Willson is a real character, like the others, Chad an invention).  He rather maliciously lets drop the news that the role has gone to Gertrude Lawrence.  Explosion from Tallulah ,  about how the more respectable Lawrence should get back to Noel Coward roles where she belongs.  She’s still not over losing Scarlett in Gone with the Wind and reckons Vivien Leigh got that by sexual favours.  Not that Tallulah would use an expression as prim as that. 

       Tracie Bennett is wonderful in the part: appearing first in elegant profile,  sometimes pausing the action to comment on what’s going on, addressing us through the fourth wall with teasing aplomb.  At first I thought her slinking, posing, head-tossing diva sinuosity might be overdone,  but after a few moments saw that Bennett was utterly into the reality of a woman who had flourished that way,   set herself in the role , enjoyed it and used it for devastating humour at the expense of hypocritical Hollywood.  Later, in the extreme crisis of the show,  she gives us a Tallulah more than able to be still, concentrated, tensely watchful as a cat .  It’s masterful.

       But the story is about the men, and the prim cruelties of Hays-Code Hollywood. Nick Blakeley is the chilly,  coercive agent Henry,  in a moment alone with Billy solicits a favour:  young Chad has a housemate, an artist who is probably a gay partner:  could Henry remove the danger by giving the housemate a studio design job?  Chad, naively,  hears of this and says no, they were in the army together, supported each other, and the deal was that once his acting career took off,  his partner would be a fulltime painter .

       Henry slams that down hard, physically and explicitly condemning his gayness.    “The person that you think you are does not exist, he died on the battlefields of Normandy. You are just an idea in my mind. A story”.   

       When Billy sees what is happening he backs Chad.  He and Tallulah tell the astonished kid how it has always worked since the new morality, shocking him no end with the names.  “Cary Grant is GAY?”cries poor Chad  . They cite him, Valentino, Navarro,  other men who unlike Billy agreed to play safe and hetero but in doing so  forfeited their real happiness in life.     Henry sneers that it’s necessary,  because  “simple, unassuming people” in middle America need safe league-of-decency approved chaps and plots, “Disney and Gene Kelly”.    In a properly horrifing sequence he forces Chad to ring his partner at home and – dictating the words in a low hiss behind him – to tell him that with his new starring ambitions it’s over. 

       Tallulah and Billy are left, reflecting.  McKeever’s script rather overuses the now too-fashionable word and idea of “authenticity”:   being your total real self all the time,  rather than merely demanding tolerance of private life and a lack of prurient stigma.    But it strikes home in the dramatic setting; these men did suffer, were coerced.  And there is a bracing healthiness in the Tallulah style of exuberant bisexual disgracefulness and support of gay friends.    It’s a great evening, anyway: all four of the players – not least young Solomon Davy as handsome, ambitious, manipulated Chad – are spot-on. And you’ll remember Tracie Bennett’s wild serpentine Tallulah for a good while…

southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. to 11 oct

Rating 4

THE BEST OF TASTELESSNESS

 It’s always special  when the small Menier’s latest  musical proves so perfect, so original in interpretation but faithful to its classic core that it can triumphantly explode into a big West End house.  It’s happened again with Patrick Marber’s glorious rendering of the Mel Brooks classic:   ensemble nearly doubled,  players the same, Scott Pask’s ingeniously flexible  set and Lorin Latarro’s  revamped choreography filling the space with glee.  Even with a few new visual jokes.   At least, I think they were new:  so artfully detailed is Patrick Marber’s production,  so fresh and fast-moving with never an awkward transition that you’re lucky if you catch them all.

      It is, as ever, a hymn to the human  necessity for benevolent, mocking  outrage and cheeky offence, with heart.   In this time of ugly ignorant antisemitism on the streets,  I  particularly responded to l the expanded wild glee of the  opening number “King of Broadway”,  as Andy Nyman’s Bialystock capers to klezmer sounds in a crowd of exuberant Jews,  a tribute to old Broadway’s triumphs and disasters and recoveries born of that community.   That warmed the heart. 

       Then on it roared,  joyful, headlong and full-hearted.  What was firmly grasped by the great  Mel Brooks (with Thomas Meehan for the musical) is that for all their horror Nazis ARE funny :   all that preening pomposity ,blind hero worship, ersatz folksiness.   Rich thwarted old ladies in leopardprint and endlessly willing Swedish divas are funny too.  So is over-camp gay culture and  the desperate ambition and bitter disappointments of Broadway show-people . Accountants are  also funny.  And – loud gasps from the be-kind mafia –  so is poor Leo’s anxiety disorder.    It doesn’t mean all these things are not also deserving of the usual  gloomy respect they get in other plays.   It just means that if you don’t sometimes laugh at them,  and at yourself,   you’re barely human.  So rejoice at the cleansing mirth of this legendary musical,  just as lovely as before in this bigger space, with almost double the ensemble giving it additional pizazz.

         Andy Nyman is an amiable manic Bialystock,  and Marc Antolin  adorable,  clutching the blue-blanket of reassurance as a Leo who grows up beautifully to his final moment of heroism in the courtroom, and earns his hat.   As Marber has observed, it’s a bit of a love story between the two men, never mind Ulla.   Harry Morrison’s Liebkind  is if possible even more ridiculous than before:   you may dream all night about his leather-shorts and chorus of pigeons. The  camp frolics of  Trevor Ashley as Roger de Bris – and especially his teamful of theatrical joke staff, dig that choreographer  – are an extra pleasure after the earnest RSC gay-porn muscle-flexing playing up the road at Born with Teeth.  Joanna Woodward’s Ulla is a rose amid these troublesome thorns,  deadpan comic  and a hell of a belter: her  intermission rearranging of Bialystock’s dingy office gets a shock a laugh of its own.    Latarro’s adaptation of the old Stroman choreography is witty all the way.  And goodness, it moves fast, never a gaping seam or moment of ennui. 

          Once again,  as at the Menier, five mice plus a dancing one as a tribute to the ensemble and swing whose lightning costume-changes never miss a beat….

garricktheatre   to 21 January

rating 5 plus dancemouse 

FAME, FRAUD AND FAMILY 

       Long after it opened, a massive hit both sides of the Atlantic, and finally closed ,  the enterprising Finborough hauls out a 1921  A.A.Milne play for the first time in a hundred years.   It has absolutely nothing in common with Christopher Robin or Pooh:  more like a more comedic Arthur Miller or Priestley tale  in its merciless dissection of family politics, money and reputation.  But the fun in doing it now lies also in what it tells us about celebrity a hundred years ago:  less techno than today but every bit as corrosive.

      Old Oliver Blayds is to be toasted by his family on his 90th birthday,  with the addition of a literary critic,  A.L. Royce,  presenting a festschrift address from younger, admiring poets.  He is,  says Royce “a very great poet, a very great philosopher, and a very great man,.simple as Wordsworth, sensuous as Tennyson, passionate as Swinburne”.  His portrait hangs over head, but the old man himself (played by the 88-year-old veteran William Gaunt ) only gets wheeled in  –  a beautifully retro chair, the Finborough is always careful –   towards the end of the first long act.  But we have by then learned that his devoted daughter Isobel (Catherine Cusack) has been his nurse and companion for 18 years, having turned down a proposal from Royce to dedicate herself to the ancient genius. 

       His son-in-law and secretary William Blayds-Conway (a beautifully pompous Oliver Beamish) is there too, with his dim wife Marion (Karen Archer a comedy turn of anxious entitlement) and grandchildren Oliver and Septima.  They all (except George Rowlands as the cheeky young Oliver)  respect the 70-year career, quoting poems like “A child’s thoughts on waking”,  a shuddery title which neatly identifies him as, to quote the critic, “the last Victorian”.  

         Gaunt gives us a lovely, vaguish, amiably delightful old man when he arrives, reminiscing about what Browning or Whistler said to him alongside properly worrying flashes of temper and confusion, soothed by Isobel.  The trouble is that , as he begins to confess as the scene ends, he never wrote any of the great poems at all.  Only the unsuccessful 1863 volume which nobody liked.   He stole the rest , from a dying, Keats-like roommate called Jenkins,   and eked them out over 70 years of fame and worship. 

         Wonderful. So in the next act,  meeting again after the funeral,  Isobel comes clean and the family has to work out morally and practically what to do.  Isobel has a conscience, and managed to prevent him being buried in Poet’s Corner in the Abbey by saying he forbade it.  She wants the Jenkins heirs, if any, found and paid and the poor dead boy genius made immortal instead of her father.  

        William and Marion are horrified, and when the grandchildren realize there’s money to be lost, so are they.  Milne takes us mercilessly through layers of shocked disbelief, resentment,  desperate self-delusion and mutual contempt. At one point the Blayds-Conways work out that he did at least get the stuff published, so is owed 10 per cent.   At another,  young Oliver (who is starting out in politics) persuades them it might all have been a senile hallucination.

     David Gilmore, directing,  respects the 1921 theatrical pace,  and it goes on to a third act  though I would have been mischievously tempted to tweak and speed up  the end to suit modern tastes.    But what I took away from it is how the family and the critic under the great looming Victorian portrait talk of Blayds’ greatness in phrases like “He looked like the great man he was”  and “He talked so well about poetry”.  He looked the part, talked the part, developed a magnificent beard and a gift for seeming amiably modest yet wise.    These days, he’d have been a national treasure on TV,  though the poems probably far less read.   So whether he wrote any of the stuff all by himself would hardly matter… 

finboroughtheatre.co.uk to 4 October

rating four 

NORDIC , NOIR, NEUROTIC

      In a hotel room, sea  uneasy beyond and faint wind howling, dishevelled Adolf with his crutch listens to his smooth, confident new friend Gustaf. He   shows him the tiny naked sculpture he has made of his absent wife Tekla, the woman he nurtured and encouraged after the brutality of her first husband.  He thanks amiable Gustav for encouraging him to turn from his own decline as a painter to the new age of three-dimentional sculpture (it’s 1880).   Gustaf saw Tekla on the ferry, chatting to young men and laughing that her husband thought her too old to flirt. 

        It is not a benign conversation. Four centuries after Iago,  and nearly half a century before Freud ushered in the age of controlling therapists with a line in sexual excavation,  this is August Strindberg (adapted by Howard Brenton). demonstrating how to mess with another  man’s head. Especially if he’s  an underemployed older husband with a fashionably gloomy Swedish scepticism about God.  It’s dazzling talk, with Charles Dance as Gustaf in full control and Nicholas Farrell superbly confused as Adolf,  gradually persuaded that he is owed credit as mentor for all his wife’s success as a writer. Easy enough, since he’s envious of her success as well as jealous . 

       Bad Gustaf also persuades him that his neurotic, lonely unwellness is due to “sexual excess” caused as so often by “women’s vicious appetites” and that it will give him epilepsy unless he gives it up.   Remarried widows, he explains, are always voracious that way,  which is why they burn them in India.   Adolf obediently develops some of the symptoms, so that when Gustaf nips next door and  his cheerful wife (Geraldine James, very glamorous) breezes in from her work meetings he immediately starts on her.   Echoes all the Gustaf-stuff about how much she owes him for his support,  and how the effort has sucked him dry. 

     “Are you saying you write my books.?”  she asks with sudden flat lucidity, but  he chunters on. Then, affectionately motherly, she sends him out for some fresh air. Whereon, of course, Gustaf reappears and – no spoilers, even in such famous Strindbergiana- you’ll never guess who he turns out to be….

      Like Ibsen,  his contemporary on the Nordic peninsula, Strindberg is an acknowledged vital influence on the development of emotionally intense 20c  naturalistic drama, even if his characters are woefully hard to warm to (Tennessee Williams, a follower, can make your heart bleed even for the worst behaved characters, but Strindberg’s  just make your brain ache and despair rise.).  

     But in this production – Tom Littler directing –  Brenton keeps it short and crisp at 85 minutes, and Dance and Farrell are flawless, sometimes mercifully funny. A 21c audience is, after all,  bound to get some laughs at lines like “a wife is the husband’s child” and at the concept that women are just incomplete males.  Geraldine James also mercifully gives Tekla some proper relatable humanity: confident ,outgoing and affectionate but prone  (a fatal female trait)  to receive unreasonable reproaches by getting crestfallen, accepting guilt and wanting to make things better.  These are three bravura performances,  and it’s a fascinating short evening for students of the changes in drama and social ideas as the 20th century struggled to dawn.  But you do need a stiff drink when you get out.  

orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 11 October

Rating. 3. 

AWKWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIER

     The curtain is a marvel to start with: its plasticky-floral cosiness taking you straight to a 1970s kitchenette and the heyday of Mrs W’s mission to gather followers and stamp out the permissive society. And Maxine Peake appropriately does the Eric Morecambe peep-round that curtain, before emerging to tell us that people may want rid of her  but she’s going nowhere.  

        It’s a canny opening for Caroline Bird’s mischievous but well researched and ultimately thoughtful play, deftly directed by Sarah Frankcom.  Those of us who lived through the Whitehouse years (and interviewed her) can confirm that this aspiring  moral-rearmer of a fast-  changing post-60s nation was indeed, pure showbiz:  happiest on a revivalist platform leading her Viewers And Listeners Association ,  as well as  being a ferocious letter writer and scourge of the BBC. Even  the Daleks were suspect, as was Dimbleby’s concentration camp report, and just about every  play for today. Oh, and especially  homosexuals, however mild and friendly. As the show begins, it deals first with  that Whitehouse  focus: the death threats she received, the demonstrations outside her house , the fury around her court battle when she defeated and broke Gay News. 

         I have to admit that the first half hour made me uneasily feel that Peake was channelling a British Edna Everage, or Patricia Routledge as Victoria Wood’s Kitty: any cartoonish middle-aged woman whose mouth turns down and purses, ending every condemnation with a self-satisfied little smile. Which at times is of course comedy gold: turning up at the Gay News trial in a pink chiffon scarf she preens “the gays were not expecting that!”. She certainly milks the horrified facial,expressions when the “blasphemous libel” poem is read out (a centurion having sex with the dead Christ). And  of course the driest  audience laugh comes when – absolutely factually – she praises her prosecuting barrister John Smyth for devotedly running Christian youth camps. Yes, that John Smyth:the abuser and flogger whose exposure two years ago finished off Justin Welby’s Archbishopric. 

       My qualms abated, though, in Peake’s several brilliantly executed onstage transformations (top wig work by Helen Keane). Whitehouse  becomes her young self again, child of a broken marriage who fell for a married man, renounced him and joined a strict fringe evangelical movement to become a “soul surgeon” and convert others, especially gays, to recognizing and banishing  their supposed innate depravity.  Here Peake ceases the caricature,  and at last inhabits a relatable reality: thereafter, as she matures or ages again all the way to a care home chair, she becomes more rounded : her faith and overweening confidence becomes something credible even if not  shareable. As is the usefulness of her work on child pornography, sex shop displays  and video horrors. And, now that identity politics has raged out of control, there’s a nice topical echo when Mary decries “this modern obsession with self, this “who I am””.

      But  my resistance evaporated even more because of the really remarkable, memorable performance of Samuel Barnett as her foil: he plays “everybody else”.   He is various gay men , challenging her or being soul-surgeoned by her (one heartrending scene has him singing Bridge over Troubled Water, softening her momentarily  before she briskly sends him home to pray forgiveness for his wickedness).  He is also several barristers, the gay youth counsellor she calls a “virus”, and finally the nurse at her side in her last days. But he is also a nervous housewife with a gay daughter  and very memorably  Mrs Thatcher (at  whom Mrs W  indignantly  brandishes dildos while the PM winces and points out that sex shops are legitimate small businesses) .  Best of all,he becomes

Jill Tweedie,  the Guardian feminist writer of the 1980s. 

      It is with these two conversations,  notably the second, that the author explores the enraging , still relevant fact that some of what Mary fought – the extreme and ever more bestial  porn, the sexualizing of children, the collapse of families – did need fighting.  But – here’s the kicker – she forever framed it in the most inhumane, formulaic and cold- hearted of Christian regulation, and in an utter rejection of any artistic freedom, evocation and exploration.   And became impossibly tightly overfocused on  same-sex love, however truly loving and wholly  humanly benign.   

     So because of that,  it became impossible for others over decades since to speak against the very worst, the very  nastiest and  most destructive pornographies without being tarred with the Whitehouse brush,  and dismissed as philistine  prudes. She still casts a shadow. Which is why the play was worth doing. And Barnett, throughout, admirably represents the rest of us…

Nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk.  to 27 sep 

Rating 4

EMPYREAN ENTERTAINMENT; CLUTCH IT TO YOUR FAINTING BOSOM NOW!

   It should be on prescription,   so healing of life’s frustrations is this  Charles Court Opera revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s silliest show.  John Savournin’s production is lyrically and melodically rendered by nine fabulous classical voices, each of them attached – in truly rare providence – to a matchless physical wit.   A dogged audience for the Wiltons’ first night braved strikebound London (not to bad with 453 and 205 buses and Shadwell on the overground) and  were richly rewarded.

         Who wouldn’t  rejoice in Matthew Kellett’s Bunthorne,  leaping around like an emotionally incontinent meerkat?  Or  Catrine Kirman’s fed-up Lady Jane calculating her declining looks while nicking a packet of crisps and stamping on a fashion magazine, Lady Angela impersonating “a poisoned hawk”,  or  the painfully earnest transformation of three hapless “fleshly” grenadiers into lipsticked and befrilled aesthetes?  Every scene is a fresh joy, the music of course quite  lovely and  the patter irresistible (“by no endeavour can a magnet ever attract a silver churn”: we’ve all been that magnet once). 

     But Patience’s other USP is its reckless, relentless antiromantic satire on every yearningly overcomplicated feelings-junkie , and every fashionable idolatry of preening poseurs and loghorreic pretenders. G&S were guying the rival aestheticisms of exotic Wilde and  Swinburne and folksy William Morris, with Bunthorne’s agonized pallid  “Hollow hollow hollow” exoticism in red lipstick, and Matthew Siveter’s cod-folksong “Hey willow waley O” .   But as each man contemplates the burden of his  own irresistible beauty and genius,  it fits nicely into  to the age of Russell Brand, Justin Bieber, Will Self, David Tennant… name your own. 

And Savournin pops in some nice up-to-date Gilbertisms for the cultured Bunthorne  (Sartre/Sinatra,  WSG would appreciate that ) and modernizes the determined simplicity of Grosvenor renouncing his poetic crown with lines about Adidas and SportsDirect.  

    It’s all a joy,  just immaculately done both artistically and comedically,  properly  high powered on its tiny scale.  David Eaton makes the lone piano as expressive as any orchestra;  properly beautiful is Catriona Hewitson’s marvellous, birdlike song and baffled emotions as buxom put-upon Patience. The Grenadiers are magnificently manly, the lovelorn ladies pinnacles of elegant ridiculousness.  No joke is lost , none milked too long, no gesture wasted.  Simon Bejer’s jolly saloon-bar set frames it smartly.  It’s a beauty.  Six more performances, one a matinee. Enjoy.

Wiltons.org.uk to 13 sept

rating 5

AMBRIDGE OVER SLIGHTLY TROUBLED WATER

  Tim Stimpson is a long-serving modern writer on Radio 4’s  The Archers, and loves it:   so his play is about the dawning, 75 years ago,   of this “continuing drama” or – previously “everyday story of country folk” (it hates being called a soap).    It’s a good idea:   an origin-story of a project that met with doubt and suspicion but caught the national imagination by reflecting  a span of unremarkable characters living, loving, and growing older  in workaday lives (a bit like Coronation Street, actually,  though they don’t like that comparison either). 

        Hearing about it and heading curiously to the Barn I thought it might simply be set, firmly and lovingly, in the hungry1950s:   when postwar rationing still applied and  farming need to be persuaded  to take in new ideas,  replacing heavy horses with tractors and old ways with agrochemicals.  That was when Godfrey. Baseley came up with the idea of “a farming Dick Barton” to popularize the new ideas by getting  female listeners (presumed to like gossipy stories) to tell their conservative farmer husbands about them.  It was a tentative pilot series, rather resented by the suburban-set Mrs Dales Diary (the first radio soap) but it  took off at warp speed,  soon making its pretty-unknown middling actors into national celebrities. They got  invited (until it was stopped)  to get into rustic costume and pretend to be the real characters at Conservative fetes.  

         This tale is told,  and worth hearing,   but in search of meta-theatre fun Stimpson and director Joseph O”Malley decide  present it as if a 2025 director called Jonty (James Mack) was – self-funded and passionate – trying to make a play about Baseley in the hope of getting the job of Archers editor ( It is unclear quite how, since there is not as yet much of a business in selling complete radio dramas to Radio 4, their only home).   So he dramatizes Baseley’s arguments with Controllers,   and depicts the first cast’s recruitment, relationships, and pay demands  (though we don’t get Gwen “Doris” Berryman constnatly resigning, as she did).   

      The result is commendably full of good physical jokes about how to do spot effects with bicycles pumps , ironing boards and yoghurt for the squelchy delivery of lambs,  and I can see why all the  meta-theatre-play-about-makig-a-play  stuff was useful in getting in lots of voguish jokes about influencers, Strictly,  social media etc.  But it constantly risks being confusing and overdemanding of the actors as they move rather fast between three character-voices.    Thus  Olivia Bernstone plays a 2025 celeb with one regional accent,  the  1950s actress Ysanne Churchman with another, and Christine Archer with a slightly posher accent as the wealthy-farmer’s daugher who marries Phil.  He, meanwhile,  is in 2025 mode  a keen tyro actor,   in 1950 an aspiring writer called Norman Painting turned into an actor by Baseley, and in character then of course, Phil.   Kieran Brown gets off more easily,  playing  a 2025 screamingly-camp actor and turning into the anxious, driven middle-Britain bureaucrat Baseley . Though he also gets a quick cameo in the Goons, which came second to the ARchers as best-entertainment in the 1953  radio awards.  And Rosanna Miles is her modern self as Fiona, then June Spencer as Peggy and –  well, Peggy. 

        OK, you’re confused. Trust me, you will be.  They all make a very good fist of switching characters and periods,  but cutting through the onion-skins (or russian-doll layers) requires more clarity.  The upside, though,  and the reason we left happyish,  is the director’s device of going dark as the cast play  certain classic scenes. Not least the death of Grace Archer on the night of ITV’s launch, which we hear on radio, as the nation did, the curtain closed on the speakers.

  On Alfie Heywood’s atmospheric radio-studio set that does offer the frisson of audio-drama wonder. It’s  the moment – as Jonty says- when “millions of people make an act of collective imagination”.  

barntheatre.org.uk  to 11 oct

rating 3

POETIC PASSIONS IN A TUDOR POLICE STATE

    Here’s a lively aquib from the RSC, a bravura 85 minute two-hander about Christopher Marlowe –  dead at 29 in a Deptford tavern brawl – and young Will Shakespeare, thought to have collaborated with him on the least loved of the history plays, the Henry VI trilogy.   Set in one room – bare, with glaring lines of bulbs facing us – it storms along from 1591-3 in several meetings, burning with  homoerotic machismo which can , to be honest, get a bit tedious despite Ncuti Gatwa’s  ripped torso frequently displayed as Marlowe rips off his floppy blouson.   

    But it grows,  albeit a bit late, into a touching imaginative insight into why Shakespeare stands alone, miraculous  and eternally strange. The American Liz Duffy Adams was gripped by the precariousness of post-Reformation England under Elizabeth:  an effective police state after a decade of  religious persecutions both ways. Into this comes the idea that Marlowe, explosive roistering author of Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus, also operated as a political spy for Robert Cecil and Raleigh against the Earl of Essex.   And that he might, in a fierce collaborative friendship, have tried to enrol young Will, a more careful soul with a distant wife in Stratford and a child or two.   He might also, it’s suggested,  to some extent have used his pull with Cecil  protected Shakespeare  from the danger of having Catholic parentage.

    It’sa great idea, and the RSC’s Daniel Evans palpably relishes the idea of white-hot artistic partnership laced with fascination (from Edward Bluemel’s   country-boy Will) ) and predatory desire from Gatwa’s  Kit Marlowe. Adams neatly  lays out her own stall early,  as Kit chucks aside his collaborator’s copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles and his  “it’s a history play” with a dismissive “all the more reason to use our imagination”. 

        There are passages of working  debate – often funny as starry Kit brandishes and fondles his 3ft quill while Will scratches away with a lesser one.  Nice fragments of the plays emerge, Will always riveted by the villains.  It’s  interesting as they differ over Joan of Arc, la Pucelle:   Will sees her nobility as the stake approaches,   Kit snarls “she’s not a hero, she’s fucking French” and prefers her death as black comedy.  When Will tries to express his idea of God,   Kit responds “Ineffable? There’s nothing I can’t F–!”.  At one point they read together the  parting of Suffolk and Margaret of Anjou, ending in a hot embrace. Not their first.

       As I say, there are longueurs in the  personal interplay between Bluemel’s  rather sweet Shakespeare and  Gatwa’s  outrageous, camply macho, hip- swinging predatory leather-queen.  But by the 1593 scene it sobers:  savage monochrome flashes of agonizing interrogation fill the curtain  as they did before  the start.   Life is very dangerous.   Kit has gone  too far in his edgy espionage,   and  Will has risen to prosperity but will never feel quite safe. There are edges  of mutual treachery,  and a properly moving, ambiguous final separation and farewell which haul in the third mouse.

rating 3