Monthly Archives: February 2026

THE MARY ANN WHO BECAME GEORGE ELIOT

     It’s 1842; Bird Grove is the handsome house near Coventry which Robert Evans bought in his retirement from managing a grand estate. With her brother  Isaac married, the devout, churchgoing Evans believed that the respectability of their new household (rather than a humble estate cottage) would help to find a husband for his daughter Mary Ann, unglamorous but clever, self-educated by wide reading. Her bluestocking passion makes him even more uneasy because she has befriended the Brays, freethinkers; as we first meet them this daringly radical pair are here for tea, accompanied by Monsieur Lafontaine, a touring mesmerist who is at this moment waving his hands over both reclining women.   

         Isaac has introduced a friend, Garfield,  who might, he hopes, marry Mary Ann.  The idiot attempts a proposal , is firmly rebuffed , huffs about freethinkers and foreigners, and is thrown out by the gruff father. We seem to be in a fine social comedy, Austenian perhaps (Jonnie Broadbent’s scene-stealing absurdity is pure Mr Collins: marriage would be “the confluence of my economic and romantic aspirations”). Elizabeth Dulau is perfect in her serious simplicity and flashes of sharp brilliant intelligence,  every response and line d line timed with quiet grace. Likewise Owen Teale’s kindly, fatherly grandeur , his solidity and honour apparent even before great emotion is asked of him.  

         And this comic opening is a brilliant way for Alexi Kaye Campbell to start his play about the young woman who later became George Eliot:  cerebral and humane genius , rebel against rigid religiosity and women’s subjugation, author of Middlemarch.  Because if ,like me, you had known only vaguely that she fell out with her father over churchgoing, and not read all the letters and memoirs that Kaye Campbell has carefully studied, you might dismiss Evans as another old patriarch.  But  Owen Teale’s decency and distaste for the clownish Garfield have won you over early;  it is clear that coming battle of ideas with his daughter will be a real one, painful and gripping.  

   And so it is.  He might have been fine with her unmarried, still turning up at church but bravely studying freethinkers and writing from a woman’s perspective to, “wrestle the pen from men’s hands”.   But her steady, brave opinion is that while honouring the magnificence and beauty of Jesus’ message  she would be a hypocrite to kneel and sing hymns and accept all Christian dogma. It is useful – in our times when very many churchgoers feel more or less that way and have no problem being there – to be reminded of earlier battles of feeling and belief.  They were real.

         The big confrontation is immense.   and the better for the father’s unsettlingly topical cry about the need for religion: “if we do not pray together, agree on what it is that makes life meaningful and good and precious, then what will become of us? We will be like a thousand scattered leaves…a madhouse full of madmen and madwomen tearing one another apart”.  Historically,  that too makes you understand the power of the storms which raged a few years later, around Charles Darwin. 

          This thoughtful, moving treatment of the great 19c novelist is apt for Hampstead, for she lies not far away in Highgate cemetery: rejection of dogma and living unmarried with a man barred her from a place in Westminster Abbey, among the men of privilege whose hands had held the un-wrestled pen for cenuries.    Anna Ledwich directs with measured pace  a traditionally made play, chronological and conversational, no party tricks or timeshifts. The only 21c point of style is Sarah Beaton’s elegant creation of four lightly furnished rooms and a lobby on a revolve, characters freezing during scenes where they don’t speak.   Its simplicities echo beautifully the spirit, restraint and honesty of ‘George Eliot’s own work: you feel you have lived through a novel in its two hour-long halves.

Every performance is finely judged,  the Brays  asTom Espiner and Rebecca Scroggs credible in their kindly, comfortable unbelief.  Small details – like Teale’s throwing down his napkin at breakfast when his daughter has gently spoken her piece about church, but we know a wilder anger is looming – give the other side of the battle utter reality.   Not everyone will get it, in an irreligious age, but I was with it every minute.  May go again.

hampsteadtheatre.com. to 21 March

Rating 5  

PEERLESS,  COMPLETE WITH PEERESSES

    Melodious romantic yearning and extreme nonsense, Victoriana sending itself up in rap-speed pattering rhyme and lovesick fairies invading the House of Lords:   all curated by Charles Court Opera and directed by John Savournin, whose works both vocal and directorial have rarely failed to spark joy . There’s even a full chamber ensemble this time alongside piano:,  flute, oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon and horn (the latter vital for”ta-ran-ta-ra, Bow down, ye lower middle classes’).  This group were wonderful enough with just a piano, but this takes us up and beyond. 

     Savournin opts  to drag the House of  peers into the new century,  so Matthew Kellett’s twinklingly vivid Lord Chancellor is accompanied by only one male – David Menezes as Tolloller – and  tweedily formidable female peers, notably Catrine Kirkman’s  Lady Mountararat,  playing it in a Lady Hale spider badge and an eerie ability to sing  at moments in Margaret Thatcher’s unmistakeably breath-heavy  tones and catchphrases. The sentry Lewis becomes a doddering House of Lords  librarian – taking on the front row with an accusing glare at the deathless information that every little boy and girl that’s born into this world alive is either a little liberal or else a little conserva-tive.  Matther Palmer of course doubles as Strephon the hybrid fairy-human, voice and leg-based comedy immaculate in both roles.  The Queen of the fairies – fabulous contralto line from Meriel Cunningham ,  it’s like being massaged  – updates her curse on Parliament by dooming them all to Clacton and a Reform vote. 

      Comedically, there is nothing not to love as one expects from the gentle mockery of Charles Court Opera in its G and S mode. But it does not neglect the actual musical beauty,  the yearning romantic tone which Gilbert and Sullivan were artful enough not to neglect. And which, face it,   in our brutally cynical age comes as balm to the spirit. Especially in Wilton’s, between the barley-sugar pillars.  Even the happy ending for Thatcher-Mountararat and Tololler moved the soul a bit.    And yes, you G and S purists, Kellett delivers the nightmare song with laser precision, before collapsing on a dispatch box, bum in air.  As you would.  Bravo to all. Quick, there are still a few tickets. And join the Friends,I am…

box office wiltons.org.uk  to  28 Feb

rating 5

GAGS BEFORE GRAVITAS

 They’re a national treasure:Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey,  inventions of Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay long before the age of Spads and WhatsApps.  The TV shows,  46 years on, still often hit   a disquieting parallel with today’s issues.  But  despite longstanding awed affection for the pair’s creation I found the  2010 stage version a bit cheesy, edged with dated  racism.  This one is much better: years have passed, and this is a final lap of honour for the pair as old codgers, facing what we all do in declining years and significance.

    It’s by the surviving Lynn, who co-directs with Michael Gyngell and gives us an aged Jim Hacker , dishevelled in saggy old trousers, lording it as master of Hacker College Oxford – which was  founded  after his years as PM with Russian oligarch money.  Griff Rhys Jones is grand casting, combining a baffled twinkle with Hacker’s familiar yearning for Churchillian grandeur and  legacy.   His college wants him out, due to some leaked but  pretty harmless remarks about ladies’ lingerie and the effect of Empire. So he invites Sir Humphrey, lately released from St Dymphna’s home for the elderly deranged, to advise him once more.

      It goes for gags rather than gravitas: many of the jokes about “wokery” and Brexit are a bit predictable, and the political jokes well-polished over many years (MPs joining the Lords means “leaving the animals to join the vegetables” is a classic, and good). Rhys Jones is reliably funny as ever. But what proper energy the play gets is from the other two: Stephanie Levi John as Sophie his care worker (a  former student with an Eng Lit First  and a quoting habit), and a wonderful, unexpectedly rounded and comically sharp portrayal of old Sir Humphrey by Clive Francis.

      Not only does Francis negotiate the deep sofa and stairlift with hilarious physicality,  but in his desperation for a lecturing job and misstep over inheritance tax and a demon daughter in law, he weirdly makes you hope for the happy ending (which we do at last  get, in a very British spirit: these figures are too precious to be tortured)

      The issues around which the two old men and the fearless care worker clash and banter are pretty predictable – women, race, empire, slavery, safe spaces ,zero tolerance, cancellation  and ” free speech”, that last meaning any old brexity bufferdom the men may spout. Levi John is wonderful, drily tolerant, a rising victorious generation but without malice. In one great moment Hacker says she could get a proper job (he despises carerdom) because “You’re young, you’re gay, you’re female and you’re black. Ticks all the boxes”.   She replies “I ddn’t realize I was so fortunate”.  

   Back of the net! But, somehow, kindly. It is indeed a kind show: these are old men, their day gone, Sophie has the future to build and will do. . We can laugh at Sir Humphrey’s entangled obscurantist loghorrea and Hacker’s clinging to the notion that he was a sort of Churchill, but pity them too.   And be grateful for all the bygone laughs at govenment: it was good to see. at the curtain call,  the cast all  salute a photograph of Eddington, Hawthorne and Fowlds. 

Apollotheatre.co.uk to 9 May

Rating four 

WICKED ECHOES FROM ANOTHER DEPRESSION  

       Well, here’s something oddly familiar!  A legendary international financier with charm, vast wealth, grubby fingers in many pies and a charitable foundation to distract attention and draw influence. He’s an alpha-male predator, likes being on the cutting edge of  tech, and prudently  keeps a proud “dossier” about the weaknesses of numberless people of significance . His name gets the phone answered by every head of state in Europe and the US (“With Stalin I can do business. With Ramsay Macdonald, no”.)   And critically ,  not only is he a gleeful pirate of finance and cracks  deals with Mussolini and Goering and that ‘nasty little guttersnipe Hitler)  but he has absolutely no scruples at all where sex and its uses are concerned. 

          Perfect, after days of Epsteinery: plays take time to programme ,cast and rehearse  so there’s somethiing exhilarating when by serendipity launch night comes slap-bang in the middle of an overheated news cycle.  Especially piquant if it happens to be a revival of a little-known late Terence  Rattigan play from 1963, set in the Depression of 1934. 

     So here we are, being darkly delighted by Ben Daniels playing Gregor Antonescu as a human volcano of charm, aggression, danger and dominance.   Daniels is breathtaking, almost crazedly, physical:  Anthony Lau’s violent direction in Georgia `Lowe’s starkly simple set has him – and several others – leaping on and off tables, confronting and looming ,  sometimes using his whole long angular body and battered, brutal face to express, fascinate, dominate. When he isn’t practising his powers on other characters they tellingly often remain onstage, frozen or prone.  He is everything.   Until, as his alienated son screams at him on understanding his amoral emptiness “you are nothing!” 

        It’s that son, Laurie Kynaston as Vassily – now calling himself Basil Anthony – who we meet first. He’s in a Greenwich village basement eking a living playing bar piano and in love with an aspiring actress Carol. We learn that five years ago he walked out on his father in socialist disgust and personal contempt, involving a gunshot.  Though as the father scornfully points out , “a bullet in the chandelier six feet over my head” isn’t much of a parricide attempt.

             Amtonescu is the fabulous focus of this energetic, noir play:  a  Hungarian-born tycoon whose empire is about to collapse and crash international finance, because accountants in a potential merger spotted that his real liquidity absolutely does not justify his overweening confidence (he delivers a lovely brief lecture on those two essentials of speculative capitalism). His shares are tumbling. So – for a wickedly dark reason scholars of Rattigan know but I will not spoil (we gasped) –  he decided to use his son’s basement digs for a last-chance meeting with Herries, chairman of the potential merger,  and his accountant.  They too are wonderful casting and subtle performances: Malcolm Sinclair senatorial, respectable and in control until Antonescu neatly suborns him,  and Leo Wan gloriously offended as the accountant, brandishing all the facts of the financier’s con-trick on six metres of rolled out paper , but gradually losing the battle.   As the first half ends and Daniels does all but dance a fandango on the table, it looks like another Antonescu miracle escape. For as he often says “ in finance man makes his own miracles”. 

         That first half is wonderful wicked entertainment, though it then becomes true Rattigan in its undertow of real sad, odd, wistful emotional truth: Vassily  is his father’s opposite, still the “little boy who  was scared of horses and wouldn’t learn how to swim”.But the magnetism of his father draws him back as the old monster’s fortunes abruptly crack.  And we are drawn too, despite the truly appalling thing we just watched Antonescu do in the first half.  He is after all a tragedy: he had his chances to love and be loved – Isabella Laughland as his second wife appears swathed in leopardskin  in the second half – but has not been able to bear the danger of such emotions.Not from her, not from his boy.  Brilliant corruption made him hollow. 

        But goodness, you can’t take your eyes off  Ben Daniels.  The final scene – still no spoilers – is wonderful,  disgracefully funny, a last deal struck  between the financier and his efficient henchman Sven ( that’s another great performance, Nick Fletcher as a grey suit with a steel core of self-preservation).  

          It’s good to have Rattigan valued again, with many revivals of classics from his heyday like The Deep Blue Sea and Flare Path.  But even better to see this – from the period  in his fifties when his star had faded and the angry-young-men thought him  dated.  It’s a treat.

Box office nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 14 March 

rating. 5

This is an adapted version of a piece I wrote for The Times on 19 January. Following Joanna Carrick’s funeral on Friday, it seems right to put it up here, because theatre pioneers and projects like this deserve remembering and honouring.

         A light has goneout in Ipswich.  The death of Joanna Carrick, at 58 after a short illness, threw sadness over Suffolk’s unassuming county town. Her little theatre stood dark;  the shock hit friends, professional colleagues,  her community companies and the Christmas audiences for a scholarly and hilarious Alice in Wonderland done with  aerialism and rabbit-jazz.////        

        The sudden loss of  the founder and creative director of Red Rose Chain is grievous, briefly blotting out for some of us the racket of international and domestic chaos.  The only healing reflection is that in a not-quite-broken Britain,  this unique professional-and-community company survived decades and launched several serious theatre careers while staying viscerally close to its town’s historic and modern identity.   Raised in theatre from childhood (her father Antony Carrick)  Joanna  was  a skilled playwright,  and as a director kept tight, high standards of work  whether with professional casts or her teenage, disabled or marginalized local companies.  That rigour showed,  and mattered.

          I came across it first ten years ago, when with Heritage Lottery money the Avenue studio theatre at the  Tudor Gyppeswyk Hall opened with her play PROGRESS.  It’s set during the 1561 visit of Elizabeth I to Ipswich, and despite  knowing that her  Anne Boleyn play had been performed at the Tower of London I expected a mere local diversion.  I was shamefully wrong: like Carrick’s other Reformation plays it is a fiercely humane  portrait of neighbours scarred by family memories of persecution and burnings,  knowing who recanted and who betrayed.   Impossible to watch without empathy for 21c global terrors;  impossible, too, not to feel how a local audience gains dignity when its history is given back so vividly.  The depth of Carrick’s research and Shakespearian background also had the advantage that she spoke, as it were, fluent Tudor:  in her period plays the dialogue never falls into awkwardly  effortful “prithee, my lord” language, but lives.      

           Maybe they also live more vividly because  of input from  the idiosyncratic nature of Red Rose Chain, whether portraying 17c  history or anything from a local Zeppelin crash in 1915 to the Victorian development of lawnmowers.  Experience with youth theatre inspired her to explore what might emerge,  personally and artistically,  from the contribution of people with lives far from comfortable middle-class artiness.  Alongside her young professional casts and sometimes graduating to perform alongside them,  three companies formed.   ACT is for adults with disabilities, addictions or other vulnerabilities:  she worked alongside victims of the notorious 2006 Ipswich murders of  sex-workers.   Then there are “Chainers” : inclusive without audition  from age 10 to late teens and beyond, and “Gold Chainers”, children with learning disabilities.   All studied and workshopped company  themes, from  17c witch-hunts to  wartime England  or the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf.   Some with  mental difficulties spoke for the first time.   And into this odd, fertile little community flowed other insights and lines from narrowed lives:  local prison inmates.  Some she mentored have, after release, worked alongside the company;   their writing was notably strong during lockdown  when Red Rose Chain continued online and assembled individual green-screen videos for a full Twelfth Night.    

        The words “inclusivity and diversity” can get cheapened into tick-boxery, but it was a revelation to watch Red Rose Chain’s ecology,  from the simplest Gold- Chainer shows to summer spectaculars.  I stood back all I could as a critic, despite a growing friendship with Joanna, her husband David Newborn, son Ted and the team.  It was fascinating to watch the symbiosis as even the most marginalized  fed into serious professional work: as if in  music  a hesitant piping was picked up and melted into full orchestra.   The atmosphere was uncombative:  the  name comes  from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis where the goddess foils a “direful god of war” by binding him in a chain of red roses.

         Sitting  by Joanna’s hospice bed with her husband and son, the sadness was a little dimmed by knowing that her last year was so triumphant. There was  a cracking Pinocchio, now sought by another theatre,   and a remarkable outdoor Hamlet at the Sutton Hoo ship-burial site,   young operators working a  20ft Ghost directed by international-quality puppetteers.  Earlier,  Carrick’s  latest play THE UNGODLY,  about the 17c Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins,  had a London run at the Southwark Playhouse and a short exhilarating New York season in  “Brits on Broadway”.   Her best moment was when a group of black women passionately connected it to their lives and  “Roe v Wade, women manipulated into worrying about men’s rights…it made me get into perspective why we actually do this job, which is to make people have emotions, think, and see the world differently. To feel that it communicated across the cultural divide was wonderful, just what we needed.”   

          They surely did:  the small team  had hastily been scavenging faux-17c props and building the set on a shoestring. As director,  she walked in Central Park with Vincent Moisy – cast as the Witchfinder –  to work on his coming role as Hamlet,  but only after he had finished hammering together a 17c farm kitchen.    She eschewed hierarchy: everyone at times worked  front of house, bar or backstage.  If there was ever an exemplar of believing in drama as a gift of humanity,  it’s been this little outfit.

          Of course not all theatre can be like this; of course there is hierarchy and hard commercial pressure, and some community work is merely therapeutic or “let ’em come on as the chorus”,   without the electric charge of artistry and scholarship that Carrick gave her unregarded hometown.  But it happened.  People will remember and  its  spirit survive. The community work continued, and at her packed, extraordinary funeral service members professional and amateur sang the songs she wrote for her productions over the years.  Her husband, son, cast and team carry on: this summer, as usual, their major Shakespeare production will be outdoors at Sutton Hoo. It’ll be the Twelfth Night she directed.

SLY USEFUL OBSERVATION…MARRIAGE OF EQUALS

Noel Coward was a lad of 18 when he finished this very adult portrait of a marriage in trouble, invalided out of the army, nervous and tubercular.   But he had been a dangerously observant child actor since he was eleven:  perfectly placed , with childlike dispassion,  to portray a pair of writers whose romantic passion  and determination to be different for ordinary boring couples,  but whose nature and talent sours into married rivalry and rows.  Well, after all the  referee sees most of the game… 

     He thought the play  immature, but it’s none the worse for that: indeed for Troupe – after their magnificent  Forsyte Saga here which the RSC picked up – it is a clever choice.    I seem  to have scrawled in my notebook early on the words “adorably relatable”. Unlike some of his later more high-society plays, with guaranteed success and silk dressing-gowns,, it’s set amid absolute beginners. Sheila , an aspiring novelist and her flatmate Olive, a journalist,  we meet first on the eve of Sheila’s wedding to Keld – who is writing a first play.  Ewan Miller is a boyish, exuberant Keld, Lily Nichol’s Sheila more serious, rangy, thoughtful.   Theyre starry eyed but Olive (Gina Bramhill, briskly sophisticated) warns her that when two creative careers and intellects marry, one is going to have to give up a bit of personality to keep the peace.   Sheila of course denies this.  Relatable? They  could be any set of ambitious young media or theatre types right now. 

        And as they get going in the second act, it’s blissfully Coward (though Bill Rosenfield has “reimagined” it a bit, cutting down some exuberant overwriting).  The gasps and guffaws kept coming,  as all ages and both sexes recognized, as did the artful teenage Coward, where he pressure points would come. Keld is at his desk with the only typewriter, constantly enraged by the servant  –  Angela Sims a wonderfulky realized Burrage –   wants to know about the mutton for dinner. His sacred creative flame must not be disturbed. Except by the pink-flounced fur-tuppeted Ruby Raymond, his proposed star who is  keen to get out of musical comedy to the real stage.   Zoe Goriely performs the most poisonous starlet imaginable, harder-treated than anyone else in Coward . Well, he was young.  But of course when his wife Sheila nips in to borrow a pencil for her own writing, he’s enraged again by the disturbance,  and the whole thing erupts into a foreshadowing of the big row in Private Lives. Especially when she points out the flaws in his characteirzation of women. That’s glorious. 

    Totally in lovewith it by now,  I winced a bit at the third act, in which two successes later Keld’s confidence has somehow sapped all of Sheila’s, who gives up writing to be a supportive wife:  a wonderful sequence has her discussing laundry problems with Burrage while he reads out starry reviews of his brilliance feom the papers then loses his temper because the women aren’t listening.    Miller’s strength as Keld is persuading us that he is not, in fact, any kind of monster. Just young.   Of course worse is to come, as Olive reappears from a sparky career in showbiz and social gossip writing, and reveals somethig.   Not an entirely surprising twist;  but come to the short fourth act,  and we really are surprised. 

       No spoilers, but it’s a distinctly odd ending: , Coward himself said…”The last act is an inconclusive shambles” based on a  “sentimental and inaccurate assumption” about married couples.  Never mind, Noel.  It was a really fun evening.  Maybe even definitely one for a cautionary stag and  hen night….

parktheatre.co.uk  to 14 March

rating 4