Monthly Archives: October 2025

EVERYONE’S CALIFORNIAN NOW..

     When the Old Vic had Jonathan Spector’s play in 2022 it was the first time after lockdowns that I had the joy of beng in a space with a thousand others all helpless with laughter, barely a mask in sight. Magical.   So its  first regional premiere is an event.   Even more because of its theme:   absurd ,divisive  hostility shading into mad identity politics  in a community made mad by disinformation and conceit. We have all got even better  at this idiocy in the last few years:  note that Spector orgiinally wrote it to satirize his own locality in Berkeley, California,  before the global Woke outbreak started people telling each other  “educate yourself” .  In 2022 he expressed surprise that within those few years  – after Covid  – this infection of selfighteousness had spread so far.

       So the fact that Eureka Day primary school is in the US , with its decor of rainbows and sunbursts interspersed with a pious acknowledgment that it stands on the “unceded land” of Native Americans,  doesn’t matter.  Its people and   themeare  familiar to us now, that hair-trigger taking of offence about anything from  pronouns to vaccines.  We are on familiar turf when  the little governing board insists on full consensus over matters like whether  on application forms “transracial adoptee” is as valid as “Native American” or “Jewish.   We catch a familar echo of parental selfishness too, as Meiko resents her concerns about her “superbright” child while bridling at the word neurodivergent.    We also accept,  sighingly, the casually mentioned fact that the Eureka Day production of Peter Pan eventually had to be set in Outer Space to remove any possibility of colonialism.

       The steering group is nicely presented from the start: Jonathan Coy’s Don is an old hippie of an elder-statesman, prone to ending every meeting by reading a gnomically meaningless message from the Persiam mystic Rumi; Jenna Russel”s Suzanne is also an old-timer in this “community of intention”,  deploying a horribly recognizable combination of pious sweetness and lethality.  Matt Gavan is Eli, who we gradually learn is the super-rich one who keeps it all going :  patently a tech-bro because no other man would wear such terrible shorts or sprawl like that.  Adele James’ Carina is the newest member,  who gets accidentally presumed to be on supported fees – because she’s black  and Suzanne ,for all her piety,  can’t always tell black women apart  (James Grieve’s careful, credible casting is vital here) . And Kirsty RIder (again the Japanese heritage helps) is clever, gay,  and in a  relationship with Eli because they’re both so woke they have all “passed through monogamy”, though it seems his wife Rebecca rather  disagrees. Ah, those PTA tensions…

       Amusement rises to helpless hilarity after  an official letter about vaccinating for mumps (the once-controversial MMR) divides them and makes poor naive Don decide that a public discussion online must decide whether to make vaccination a  condition of attendance.  This requires a modern theatrical brilliance, as the anxious but conflicted group are seen both onstage and  projected onscreen above, while alongside the rest of the community type in WhatsApp-style comments on quarantine. They progress before our eyes from inconsequentiality to acrimony, doubts about  Big Pharma to snarls about “sending you a link”, flickering into the danger zone with self important beginnings like  “as a nurse” or “as a chiropractor”,  and before many minutes rising in choreographed pace to  “Fascist!” “Nazi!”and death threats.   Meanwhile in beautiful counterpoint the leadership group round the laptop fall into their own arguments  until the C-word online causes Don to splutter that he does not think this format is conducive to them all “bringing their best selves”. 

       I remembered all that with delight from 2022,  including the fact that they’re only ever get unified by either vague affirmations about  “honesty” or “flourishing”, or by approving of a local bakery run by a former mathematical genius who suffered a brain injury.  But I had forgotten how moving is the next section ,  revealing real family pain as Suzanne explains the history that drives her irrationalities about vaccine, and in a hospital corridor  Eli drops the attitude as his own small son is put in a medical coma.   

     Then the angry pace picks up again,  as the committee reunites to reopen the school. There’s a  wonderful display of aggressive silent knitting from Meiko and more barbed passive-aggression from Suzanne and the scornfully factual Carina.  It is remarkably refreshing to be reminded that some people can simultaneously think that “science” and its people are  incontrovertibly  wise about the climate crisis, yet become downright evil plotters when they invent vaccines. And antibiotics. And plastics. 

    Altogether , a grand choice for Nottingham to follow its success with PUNCH and the Mary Whitehouse play.  The trigger warnings alone should send anyone who can hastening to Nottingham:  strong language, sexual and bereavement references and to substance misuse, plenty of stuff which  “some audiences may find sensitive”.  Excellent.  

Nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk to 15 Nov

Rating four 

EDWARDIANA FOR A FEMINIST AGE 

   It looks wonderful. Designer Colin Richmond has been set loose, with Oliver Fenwick’s lighting, to create both the the raftered, big-windowed Edwardiana of the Darling’s house and the flickering Neverland splendour with its great fantastical tree, crazy-inventor furnishings and one of the great pirate ships of the genre. The latter has  skeletal paws and teeth, and , vitally, plenty of scope for high level pirate athleticism. The sword fights are excellent too, with top ambidextrous work from Ami Tredrea’s  Tiger Lily.  The flying is ace, graceful and wild whether solo or in elegant groups,  and the frock-coated crocodile – doubling as the family doctor with his loud-ticking watch – is a lovely touch.  Actually more frightening in his slither than most panto-style crocs we have seen.

      I begin all that with because you are going to take your (over 7) child or your inner child to the RSC’s pre-Christmas show, Ella Hickson’s “retelling” of JM Barrie’s beloved tale.  Both will enjoy.  My  reservations are entirely adult ones:  there is something  wearingly deliberate  in Hickson’s  message, too much instruction into how to think – about girls’ place, about family, about grief.  Her story is a darkened  reframing of  Barrie’s whimsy (though God knows Barrie himself was writing out of grief, personal and empathetic to bereaved child friends). Wendy is reframed too, as a bright girl unwilling to be “mother” to the Lost Boys or a scared, admiring “damsel”‘for them to rescue. She wants to be a fighter, and  forms her own army out of Tiger Lily and Charlotte Mills’ entertainingly  stroppy Cockney Tinkerbell.

      The theme of grief is strong:  we hear sung the haunting opening of Yeats’ “Come away o human child, to the water and the wild”,  and Peter Pan’s first appearance, a year before Wendy and her brothers fly off with him, is basically as the angel of death. He appears by the bed of a third brother , Tom, who is dying of a fever. So Wendy has to look for him in Neverland, with precious little interest or assistance from Pan, Slightly, Curly and  Tootles.   Who are at times funny , but to an adult eye at times  their capers and toddlerish  remarks,  played by young adult men,  seem to teeter uncomfortably on a border between lovably inconsequential larking and diagnosable  mental illness.  Daniel Krikler’s vivid , yobbish Peter is not the least unsettling in his wriggling irresponsibility: he generally looks as if he’s on the way to graffiti a railway bridge.  But that  mood is all there in Barrie,  who was fonder of boy-children than of boring mumsy old Wendy, so fair enough.

       All this bothered me a bit in the first half, but the second is pacier, and Toby Stephens’  Hook is fabulous,  a real treat. Not least because his withering sarcasm and envy of the leaping, larking young  is so  refreshingly adult.  Scott Karim’s Smee,  extreme camp, offering colour-swatches for the cottage with Hook he dreams of,  is properly funny. 

Rsc.org.uk. To 22 nov.   

Rating 4

A FAMILY SAGA , A MEMORABLE AUNT

      Bit early for an onstage Christmas-tree,  but this comedy-drama by Richard Greenberg ran months on Broadway twelve years ago, and it suits a current run of plays about NY-Jewish family conflicts lit by domestic wit.  It certainly has his trademark devastating lines, and in the age of Trump there is a wistful sense in it’s being set in two ‘elections of change”: Reagan in 1980 and the hanging-chad-chaos of 2000. 

      The political reflections, though, are slight.  Ben and Julie do rather hope their son will be President one day, and magnificent Aunt Faye (Tracy-Ann Oberman, who steals every scene with scornful élan) is fond of saying that she is non-political while excoriating Reagan’s acting and delivering lines like“Republican Jews, what IS that? Like saying skinny fat people”.  But lounging teenage Scott would rather be a teacher, likes kids and books and stuff, and the family is more preoccupied with its own matters. Like the impending death of Ben’s unseen old mother, who doesn’t appreciate any of them (“the sense of neglect is the last to go” observes Faye).  Or the sullen refusal of cousin Shelley to communicate with anyone, least of all her mother Faye. 

   So on it goes,  an elegant revolve evoking the startling vastness of an upper-west-side apartment,  always larded with banging lines. Jennifer Westfeldt’s Julie is gushingly domestic, with an edge of slightly mad despair at it all,  and first seen preparing an elaborate Christmas while Scott’s more sensible college friend Jeff  helps chop things.  Jeff, the outsider ,  is gloriously played by Sam Marks: a virtuoso one-sided phone call to his distant mother (humbler ‘first generation diaspora’ fussing about him showing himself up).  Conversations between in-laws reveal the messy complexities of two marriages and the invisible old mother beyond: Oberman sparks fine laughs every few minutes with her splendid scorn, Westfeld’s Julie playing against her with seemingly naive contentment in a life where, as her sister in law tartly observes, you “never seen to have done anything on purpose”.  There’s some plot-alert conversation about a ruby necklace. Which, as the first act ends, we begin devoutly to hope will cause some actual drama in the year-2000 section to come.

        For it tends to feel too like a good sitcom or slow-moving soap – great lines, clear likeable characters , but little impetus.  The strength of the characters, notably Jeff, Julie and Faye, has to hold us where storytelling doesn’t.  The second half produces more memorable lines and a sense of weary years between.  Scott has died, and his little brother Timmy is 24   (Alexander Marks entertainingly depicts the daffy college-dropout Timmy who really doesn’t want Christmas with Mum).  Julie is widowed; Jeff, decent and prosperous,  has remained an outsider-supporter of the family.    Oberman’s terrific Faye is twenty years sharper, so depressed by Bush that she is “nostalgic for his father..whaddaway to start a century!”. She reminisces about the saltier politics of her older siblings fifty years earlier, who couldn’t even bear to pass a chicken plate across the Friday table if one was a Marxist and the other a Trotskyist.  Her relationship with sullen daughter Shelley,  now only featured shrieking anger on speakerphone, reaches a zenith at the sound of Shelley’s Latino partner with a moment of  magnificent self-analysis:  “I am not a prejudiced woman,  but sometimes racial slurs come handy  at moments of high emotion”.  

    See? It’s only the lines you remember, and a general sense of warmth in the muddle of family life.  The plot does thicken financially towards the end,  and there’s  a warm emotional Christmas revelation to leave us feeling happy, no spoilers.  So yes, it’s a quality piece, very Hampstead Theatre,  and would be an irresistible novel.  And Tracy-Ann Oberman is a national treasure    But it is only just a play.  

 hampsteadtheatre.com.  to 22 nov

Rating 3 

OLD FAITH IN A MODERN CITY

      Anna Ziegler’s play was an off-Broadway sellout,  glimmering with insights into Jewish-American family conflicts,  traditions and rebellions.  It’s a natural for Marylebone Theatre  after its brilliant presentation of WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK, so hopes ran high, and Ziegler’s intelligent, sensitive remarks about its creation are interesting.  The massive snag is that in a fine cast of five the most central protagonist is woefully hard to like.

    This is  Abe, a young literary star who aspires to be Philip Roth, certainly mentions him enough.  He is married to Sophie (Paksie Vernon), a likeable mixed-race Black/Jewish woman: who refreshingly insists that “slavery and the Holocaust don’t define me, I grew up in Albany” .   Her only novel didn’t meet success, so she is shunted into the background of motherhood and supporing Abe’s ambition in the excruciatingly precious self-regarding world of NY literati (everyone in this play is annoyingly anxious to be “seen”.  Reminded me of a very good gag in a Jon Cantor play – “finding yourself? Just as well, nobody else is looking for you”.)  

           Their life difficulties are theatrically scrawled in chapters  – Marriage, Parenthood, Boredom – on the set’s advanced glass walls  and are pretty hackneyed, but the interest lies in the fact that Abe is a defector from a strict Hasidic community.    Often onstage in their own marriage are his bygone parents, Schmuli and Esther.  We see them first being shy, awkward together as arranged newlyweds: she asks him what he saw when he first glimpsed his bride and it was only her shoes.  Esther’s  long wedding veil is a prop and symbol all through, creatively used under Igor Golyak’s direction,  wrapping or disguising or comforting all the charaters.     Glimpses of the careful, devout traditional family life shimmer in the background of Abe and Sophie’s 21c laicism:   Katerina Tannenbaum, a very welcome newcomer to the professional stage,  is a beautiful, luminous presence as Esther. This is a woman whose intelligence battles with obedience, who would like to step out into the world more,  own a computer. She has read books about sex and birth and what to expect.  Schmuli knows nothing about all that,  but looms helpfully over her after each daughter has been is born, citing seventy prayers for the seventy stages of labour in the Torah.  And, of course, praying for a son to come at last.  

              That son, of course, is Abe, who is in the foreground leading a life centuries beyond theirs,   and saying artist-privilege things like “it’s a valid choice to be selfish” .  He is,  in his writerly vanity and husbandly boredom,  engaged in a long, flirtatious email correspondence with a famous actress, Julia  who once liked his reading at an event (we get a taste of it, plonking stuff which quivers with unwanted symbolism).   This obsession grows: Anna Poppelwell’s gorgeous Julia flits around, her virtual presence felt as real by Abe, she every bit as wrapped up in him as he requires a woman to be and few real wives actually are.  

       It is only in the far more engaging second half that we find out why Abe hardly knew his father, though old Schmuli haunts his dreams;  we see dimly behind the glass one of those terrible fundamentalist moments as Esther, bravely and “ sinfully” declares that she does not want yet more childbirths after Abe. Whereon the leader of the community has her  banned from seeing her young daughters lest she corrupt them with that dreadful awareness that contraception exists. 

     Here the drama catches fire at last, and then rises to a really sharp revelation with the aggravated wife Sophie, which I shall not spoil.  There are more moments with the infinitely more likeable, if religiously imprisoned, parents .  Schmuli explains that he might be able to “forgive” Esther, who has run away to  the wide NY world with their son .  She,  as incredulous of this attitude as we are, nonetheless expresses a beautiful nostalgia for their earlier lives in the community.   It’s as moving in its tribute to Jewish community warmth as the dance at the end of the Anne Frank play.  “The Fridays, the Fridays, the birthdays and the holidays . And the way that nobody is forgotten..a song that will never end”.  

     Abe, of course, is alone on stage for the last moments, as every self-absorbed NY litterateur would wish to be. But alas, I still couldn’t like him. It’s Schmuli and Esther who won the fourth mouse, just. 

www.marylebonetheatre.com.    To 29 Nov

Rating. 4

CHAOS IN FRAYING CHINTZ

Catching  up after a break away I nipped in to check whether after 60 years Joe Orton can still get people gasping with shock.   Peter McIntosh’s set alone is a dark treat : a chintzy circle of a lounge surrounded by a rubbish tip and overhung by dozens of furnishings:  cradle, bike, chairs, tables, brolly – all painted wicked drab black, as if an explosive curse had hit a household.  My neighbour, marking his 80th birthday with a matinee, reminisced happily with me (the Young Vic’s like that, people chat)  . We both remembered childhood and teenage years of just such grim weary postwar lodgings, every furnishing telling a story.   And perhaps in his case, there were landladies like Kath.

    Cast and costume equally catch that shabby worn-out downmarket England .and its pretensions and yearnings and cheapnesses: Tamzin Outhwaite’s brittle needy refinement and ever-ready negligée  for frighteningly determined flirtation; Christopher Fairbank’s worn out stroppy Dada,  and Daniel Cerquiera’s Eddy in three-piece tweed and tiepin, nursing his own dark needs and fraying pride.

       Of course it’s Sloan, the outsider, the Orton disruptor, who fixes horrified attention first: Jordan Stephens has a way of smiling, of threatening, of eating a ham sandwich in the dim walkway,  which bring on  an odd shudder. Even before he suddenly starts rocking in studded leather under strobe lights as the second half begins.   Maybe he is nowt but a lout …but maybe  (shiver). the monsters are elsewhere in this monstrous trap of a home. Certainly something is rousing our gradual unease at their predatory gentility and devastating choice of strangely formal words,   (Orton has the ear of a laughing demon for English vernacular, the way grimy sweepings lie under every carpeting word). 

   Anyway, the answer to my question  – do  Ortonian shocks still hit hard?  is Yes. They do.   Beautifully aggravated with a couple of bits of strobe-lit surrealism in the second half. Brutal.

     Another reflection, alongside my newly octogenarian  seat companion, was that the boringly self-indulgent stuff John Osborne served up in Look Back in Anger a few years earlier actually said far, far less about how postwar Britain needed to change and roll on through the ‘sixties,   than does this sharp cruel hilarity from poor young Joe Orton. He said it all: If only he had lived, even mellowed a bit, and had a chance to jeer at the seventies, eighties, nineties… What a loss.

   But Nadia Fall’s production does him proud.   Another couple of weeks to catch it, very good prices, generally rather good company in the cheap seats. 

Youngvic.org to 8 nov

Rating four

A BRILLIANT ECHO

     Shouldn’t be surprised that this is a cracking play:   Katherine Moar’s 90-minute debut FARM HALL , about 1940s nuclear scientists,  sparked cheers and a West End transfer for her deft, sensitive mastery of both history and human behaviour.  This – even brisker at 75 minutes – fictionally reflects another moment of history:  the brutal kidnapping of the heiress Patricia Hearst in 1978 by the radical-guerilla-left “Symbionese liberation army”,  and her conviction for bank robbery after she was – it seems – drawn into collaboration by “stockholm syndrome” and fell for her rapist.    

         Moar’s protagonist is called Holly;  the other character in the play, fictionalized as Robert,  was her famous defence lawyer  who, like Hearst’s,  failed to get her off a 35 year sentence.  As in the real case, she  was pardoned after two years by Clinton. 

       Both are seen at two ages, sometimes at the same moment and finally, thrillingly, arguing with their younger selves.  Katie Matsell plays Holly during the trial – young, socialite, arrogant, becoming emotionally dependent on her equally arrogant lawyer, and finally desperate in her horror at the sentence (Matsell here is breathtaking).  Abigail Cruttenden is her older self thirty-odd years on, assured, steeled by life.  But as the play opens she has been summoned by Robert,  who tried to forget about her for years as his only famous failure and now needs her. As a famous rape victim she might, he hopes,  speak for him regarding some dark MeToo accusation.  

     An electric meeting? Oh yes, right from the start. Moar’s dialogue, banteringly sharp with streaks of angry pain, roars along.  When their younger selves appear time slips in one startling box-cutter moment,  her old rage and his resentment at the failure coinciding.

  Nathanial Parker is perfect as the unwillingly-retired, unshaven lawyer on the edge of ruin;  Ben Lamb as his younger self revealed as unspeakably cocky,  in love with his star-defender fame,  giggling along with the Johnny Carson question “was Little Miss girl-scout really afraid for her life or just along for the ride?” . Meanwhile the scared young heiress, in a prison frock, is pleading for him to answer his phone.   There’s a fabulous moment when he demands she sign a waiver about his proposed book on the trial, guaranteeing not to write her own for five years. Why should I ? she asks. “It would a kind thing” he says, preposterously.  The same tone turns up in his older self, in “I am a fragile person”.   Oh, it’s a witty play all right, but there’s anger there. 

      Brittle echoes over half a century:  talk of the counterculture, youth disaffection,  “amoral apolitical spoilt rich kids, primed for radicalism” (I write this just as young Samuel from Tunbridge Wells is suspended from Oxford for chanting ‘put the Zios in the ground. Topical or what?).  There are also lines  on rape victims that hits home hard:   the young lawyer is angry that she didn’t cry enough in court,  and middle-aged Holly points out that the same tone pervades letters both from middle-aged Robert and the journalist who wants her to condemn him.   “Dear Holly,  as a woman who was raped you really should do this and say this and think this”. That pious imposition of supposed duty will be familiar to many a victim.

    In other words, Moar and the Jermyn  – and four fine actors, and nimble director Josh Seymour –  have done it again.  Get this little gem up West.

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk  to 15 november

rating 5  

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A DARK SERENISSIMA

    No pretty biscuit-tin Venice here, but rather its ancient darkness:  Jess Curtis’ artful set offers stark steps, corners, slotted openings into which half-glimpsed figures  come and go; reflections glimmer in the water-shiny floor and backcloth, sometimes there’s an indistinct vast face. A brooding soundscape at first gathers only round a small child, spotlit, peacefully drawing for five uneasy minutes before the thunderclap of loss.

         This is Nell Leyshon’s stylish, brooding  100-minute take on Daphne du Maurier’s creepiest, most absurd and almost most famous tale, the 1973 Nicholas Roeg film having burnt into many a susceptible brain the image of a lethal little figure in a red cloak. The adaptor  – and director Douglas Rintoul –  have the sense not to reproduce any of those images, and indeed Leyson tweaks the tale to focus more on the effect of parental grief.  John and Laura are a quintessential modern medium-to-uppermiddle class, down to Sophie Robinson’s  neat discreet alice-band never dislodging even during the bed scene. They are in Venice to recover from their five-year-old daughter’s death. Mark Jackson  is a confident, preppy John,  who has the more difficult task: moving  from prosaic husbandly firmness about Laura’s  fey credulity, through faints and visions to a state – by the end – of terrified hurtling towards doomwhile figures odd or headless-horrid half appear through the clever set’s openings.

     The two weird sisters they encounter are American tourists, Olivia Carruthers leading Alex Bulmer as the blind seer who exalts Laura with a message from the Beyond and infuriates John. Or should he have listened? The pair at first seem oddly wooden, but as the creepiness builds into the swirling darkness of a Venetian night, that works rsther well.  After all, surely  messages from the Beyond might come as well from Hooterville, Ohio as from Delphi.

        Their ordinariness, and the prosaic banter between the central couple as they  painfully struggle to connect their different pathways through grief, adds to  the brief but useful comic moments as they all give endless trouble to Venetians like the patient receptionist and  Alexander Makar in three roles  including  a nicely pissed-off waiter after John and Laura  flee their uneaten risotto.  Richard Emerson Gould also has unintrusive fun as the exasperated detective whose investigation into local murders they impede, and occasionally pops up playing  the accordion as one of the worrying half-seen figures.

        The whole ends with the famous  shock –  for which – pleasingly – my immediate Ipswich neighbour was wholly unprepared: old Du Maurier’s dark tale’s fame clearly has its limits.   But rather beautifully, Jessie Addinnall’s lighting design (which has done much heavy lifting all through) suddenly breaks into the  sepulchral bad-dream gloom to give us a fully golden Venetian shine. 

Rating 4

Thu 9 – Sat 25 Oct New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich

Then to the co-producing house:

Wed 29 Oct – Sat 15 Nov Main House, Salisbury Playhouse

Tickets from £12

https://www.wiltshirecreative.co.uk/events/dont-look-now

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