Monthly Archives: April 2026

IMPRESSIONS AND OBSESSIONS 

  The old `Players’ Theatre has a good eye of oddball new musicals, cheap enough to sample before anyone’s train home. And here off-Broadway’s Carmel Owen has made, with palpable love,  a romantic and indeed at times borderline soupy full-scale musical in tribute to Claude Monet.   In atmosphere , setting and the better performances  Christian Durham’s direction and LibbyTodd’s design  certainly do what they out to do:   convey a fascinated impression of Impressionists . 

      Especially Monet himself, though there are many scenes of his comradeship with Renoir, Manet and Frédéric Bazille,  all struggling with the rigidities of the French Salon and the Royal Academy.  This means  it is sometimes frustrating not to see more of all their loves and personalities, since Monet himself is a one-track obsessive.    Though I did cherish Sam Peggs’ Renoir,  panicking when his friend Monet’s wife Camille asks if he knows any midwives to abort her dangerous pregnancy.  

          But Monet is the writer-composer’s magnet, his life and frustrations the engine of the simple plot.  Jeff Shankley  addresses us first as the painter in old age, around 1926,   blocked and frustrated and taking it out on his devoted stepdaughter Blanche (Meg Matthews at my matinee, standing in for Natalie Day).   She was of course herself a considerable artist within the school: more of her would also be interesting.    Old Monet stares at us in the opening moments, demanding we be his mirror: he stands on an excellent painterly set of screens and doors and frames which will flower, singly and en-masse,  into projected paintings from sunsets and portraits of Camille to a great swirling mass of waterlilies.Then we meet DEan John-Wilson as the artist’s younger self, with a glorious low tenor voice and properly magnetic presence, and for most of the show he is leading a happily rebellious determination to kick the pompous studio conventions and  paint outdoors – “side and side, we will share light and air – en plein air!”  

       The songs are mostly likeable, none standout as memorable.    Brooke Bazarian’s Camille – who acts well and looks superb –  is  perhaps given too much overdone musical angst for my liking: all crises and no calm.    Some sharp pattering numbers beetwen the hostile critic Louis and the scornful gallery Marquis  are good:   I had forgotten that the term  “impressionist” started as an insult from this conventional cadre ,  Louis observing that they were  just impressions on canvas, not properly crafted artworks.  

       But Monet’s vigour and conviction holds the stage as rebel roles will:  in the swirl of images around his famous sunrise he cries “Our work had a splendour, a grandeur. The world was changing, and we were in touch!”.   But Camille and he had stormy separations: she hated their London exile to avoid the war draft,   while he became thrilled by painting British fog  and the Thames at Westminster.  It’s a portrait of artistic obsession; by  the end he is rejoicing in his paintings as if they were his only friends, comrades, his great love.  So old Monet furiously rebukes him . So does the ghost of Camille who, in a splendid rant, hands him a brush: the thing he loved more than her.   It’s a sharp moment. 

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk. to 9 may

rating 3

A SHUDDER FROM THE PAST

I came to this fresh from admiring two 76-year-olds , Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep, being painfully cool and haughty in a trailer plugging Devil Wears Prada 2.   I was also foot-weary from accidentally doing two sides of the vast and gruesome  Victorian Brompton Cemetery,  which always  leads to reflections on long-past lives and deaths.   This is a Rodney Ackland revival, well worth it,  the Finborough always does these forgotten-plays with great class. In it Catherine Cusack , Abigail Thaw and Julia Watson reminded us what it was like to be an Old Lady in 1935  (and what patronizing attitudes men, including playwrights, often  had towards them).  

      The play is based on a Hugh Walpole novel – never forget that it was he who Stella Gibbons sent up in Cold Comfort Farm.  Ackland’s version is less forgotten than some of his plays, having turned up in 1969  and again in 1994 with Miriam Karlin.  But it started out as an Edith Evans vehicle and strirred a lot of inter-war feeling.  The programme deliciously quotes one critic saying what lonely figures old women were: pathetic, because ‘at least “an old  man has his pipe” and the pub. 

       But yes, pre-welfare  old women of the gentry classes, living alone,  had it rough, with only the possibility of a “companion” job.  And yes – as the programme also says – loneliness still exists now,  with  “a lack of visibiliy on stage or screen” for older women.   Except, obvs, Streep & Wintour and Reid and Routledge and Dench , Berry, Leith, May, Beckett.. OK.

      But Walpole knew what he was writing about, especially in that inter-war period when too many “spare women” faced a lifetime alone or as dependents on wider family. However, despite three fabulous perfomances – totally immersed in that past sensibility of warding off both poverty and pity – there was something a touch creepy about the construction and presumptions in Ackland’s play.  There’s nice, churchgoing, kindly Lucy (Julia Watson) senior in the boarding-house or home: she has one cousin over the bridge dreams of the return of her wandering son,  who is trying to make good abroad or in “land property down south” .  She makes the best of life, though suffers a disappointment over a legacy.  Then there’s the newcomer Miss Beringer (Cusack deploying a finely-judged series of nervous collapses) who is grieving for her little dog and for a distant friend who gave her a cherished lump of amber.  She becomes rapidly terrified of Abigail Thaw’s Mrs Payne  (frankly, I was too: this stern gaunt figure in jet beads and funereal broderie  roosted mainly in a rocking-chair just in my eyeline and I didn’t dare take notes).  Mrs Payne spends the play keeping us guessing as to whether she is a bit “wanting” or actively malevolent.  

       She may have killed her husband for throwing her gypsy hat on the fire: the text is full of dark suggestions, never completely resolved, though she does produce one hell of a big hat with feathers and fruit all over it to go two doors down to the chemist for nougat.  But she wants the lump of amber, and claims this need as part of her natural passionate nature and unfulfilled desire.   Gradually the relationships get worse, right up to a slightly unbelievable ex-machina event at the end.     

       Agatha meanwhile delivers her  outspoken conviction that “we’re all old and dull and penniless …we’re not happy. We make no-one else happy”.And suddenly, from the depths of 1935,  I sense that patronizing critic at my shoulder, saying how much better it is to be a man, able to alleviate loneliness and draw on a pipe and knowing that “a half-pint if sipped carefully gets him an hour or so of lights and good fellowship at the local”.  

      So I emerged still loving the Finborough, revering all three fine actresses, but slightly disliking Ackland.  Though I did love Before the Party, and hope for a few more in this little powerhouse…

Finboroughtheatre.co.uk 

To 19 april

rating 4 for the performances

FRIENDSHIP, BRILLIANCE, DOUBT

       The universe as a bundle of unknowable of approximates:  Relativity and Complementarity, Uncertainty theory, quantum mechanics, particles hanging out in two places at the same time, Schroedinger’s Cat.  If you back away from such topics, take heart and return.  Michael Frayn’s extraordinary play is rooted in deep humanity and an understanding, both of far intellectual frontiers and the simplicity of friendship.  It has no answers.  In Michael Longhurst’s  production it is brilliantly set by Joanna Scotcher on a double revolve: an arena around infinite waters, with glass bubbles and sharp lanterns randomly reflecting away into infinity and a single pole lamp which – in a moment of frustrated expatiation – young Werner Heisenberg grabs to represent a travelling photon.

        Frayn’s imagination, set in an imagined reunion long after both their deaths, deals with the mystery of why in 1941 Heisenberg, a senior German nuclear scientist, visited his old mentor Niels Bohr  – “the first of us all, the father of us all”.  Bohr is in occupied Denmark: both men are under Gestapo surveillance, able only to talk freely by walking outside.  On warring sides, both have reason for suspicion: Bohr might fear the German is part of a programme to harness fission to the first nuclear bomb; Heisenberg might to fishing to find out if his old mentor has contact and knows what the Allies are up to on that fearful project.  But they are also old comrades on this barely-imaginable scientific frontier and Margrethe – Bohr’s wife – remembers young Heisenberg as almost a child when he first came, “shy and arrogant and anxious to be loved”. She is the vital third pillar of the play: not a physicist, but an observer of both men and their ways, a citizen under Nazi occupation who is understandably suspicious of Heisenberg turning up out of the blue.  Her presence dives into and punctures the human uncertainties of both. 

        Three times, with the younger man pacing the moving revolve, halting, entering the supposed home, arguing, once grasping the older man’s hands with real emotion,  the pair, with sardonic additions from Margrethe,  re-examine what happened  between them on that autumn day in Copenhagen, before the friendship’s final rift.  It draws us into the science but also the human pain: Bohr at one point has to accept that Heisenberg has witnessed savage allied bombings in his homeland, had his shoes burnt off by phosphorus, watched much death.  Heisenberg is at times half-defensive about his stance towards the Nazi leadership: he had earlier refused an invitation to emigrate to America to join other Jewish-German nuclear scientists there.  There’s at one point a curious suggestion that he maybe even deliberately miscalculated several zeros to suggest that a nuclear bomb couldn’t be made without ruinous resources.  To prevent Hitler commissioning one.   In their afterlife of course they both know that the Allies did build one: Heisenberg was to har about Hiroshima on the news, later on when he was interned at Farm Hall (worth remembering  this play too- https://theatrecat.com/2023/04/04/farm-hall-jermyn-st-theatre-wc1-then-bath/ ). 

          The casting is fine: Richard Schiff very much the old mentor Bohr, likeable, slightly melancholic,  Damien Molony an energetic, pacing, argumentative younger man,  Alex Kingston brilliantly evoking Margarethe’s impatient wisdom and anger at an oppressive occupation.   The two Nobel winners’ conversations dazzle, sometimes frankly baffle in my case, but the underlying humanity is always visible. It is there both in their questing enthusiasm to know about the infinitesimal atomic world, and in their awareness of how this unprecdented knowledge can be used both for peaceful power and for unspeakable destruction and murder. 

        Only in imagination and an afterlife can any sort of clarity about such moments be created.  Probably only Frayn – philosopher, artist, great and questioning spirit, humble before uncertainty –  could have attempted it.

hampsteadtheatre.com to 2 May

Rating 5.    And by the way, on more frivolous matters,  do not miss the extraordinary  new radio play about a hoax surrounding the original premiere of this play – it’s on Radio 4, two parts, also co-written by Frayn himself: CELIA’S SECRET. 

 

A HOUSE OF ANCIENT SHAME

        What terrible secrets lie in an impressive yet spooky mansion,  with artful descending ceilings and a trapdoor designed by Jon Bausor ?  Well, gven that its is a mid-18c house imagined by playwright Winsome Pinnock, its fearful non-secret is, of course, bygone  slavery.  Like  the virtuous Sir Thomas in  Mansfield Park,    Henry Harford made his money on Jamaican plantations. 

        Now his distant descendant Fen bustles about to keep the crumbling house  going  (loud noises reveal its popularity as a set for TV bonnet-dramas and rock videos).  She has just found a set of the first Henry’s diaries from Jamaica, which now  need “authenticating” .  The visiting scholars – rather improbably put up as guests in the house for weeks – include a young PhD student Marva, whose Jamaican Grandad used to bring her on trips here and talk of family traditions,  having long ago got his surname, as many slaves did, from the master.   Her supervisor and mentor is Abi (Rakie Ayloa)  who aspires to professorship and a keen mentor and – we learn with equally convenient probability – used to jam away in rock bands at Oxford and get ignored by posh Fen.  

        One masterstroke in Miranda Cromwell’s production  is casting Sylvestra le Touzel as Fen: Aryan-blonde and breezy she skilfully deploys a pleasingly inbred quirkiness from the start.  She groans,  as such writers assume all callous white people do,   at the boringness of Henry’s endless lists.  These of course immediately grip young Marva  (Cherelle Skeete)  the moment she glances down –  “Inventory – Livestock – people, alongside pigs and cows!” she cries with improbable shock. 

          Oh come on: the hideous history of  Caribbean and US  chattel-slavery is widely known by now and many such ledgers survive: one in our local museum shocks every eye with the page headed  “Children gang” .  It jars that Marva, supposedly entrusted with authentication,  should rear back in shock.      So does the way that in all the first scenes she is played as a cartoonishly silly black-teen babe,   forever taking selfies,  screaming for the rock band filming noisily above,  and ignoring the historic house tour by putting on a prop helmet and sword to run around shrieking  “Sooo fucking cool”.Any young black woman academic in the audience must have cringed.  

            Gradually, the relationship between the three does develop, and Ayola as Abi is more interesting, half-uneasy in her routine confrontations with Fen, who likes showing them round the house from cellar to royal bedroms.   She finally deploys the outright demand “Give up your power and privilege!”.   An interesting factor,  though, and in this particular cause a rare one,  is that Abi is not of Caribbean slave descent.  And has to acknowledge in her own  family history that her own African forebears were keen slavers or enablers.  At one point she expostulates that this  was quite different from the chattel-slavery of white-owned plantations, much less toxic because in Africa the slaves mingled socially with masters. 

       But there’s a supposed missing “ghost page” revealed by indentations in one diary after “Black Sarah” is mentioned as delinquent,  and hugger-mugger the researchers (notably Marva) break all the rules of academe and create both a personal story and a scandal with tentacles into the present day.  There are several drunk scenes and a possible imprisonment of which nothing comes,  but le Touzel holds it gloriously together by going madder and madder, with excellent work on her drunkenly tousled hairdo. 

   Winsome Pinnock’s last play in this space was three grim hours of pretentious grievance billed as “a swirling journey through black history” which I couldn’t even bear to review  (that’s the joy of having missed press night and bought your own ticket :  you’re not forced to the misery of kitten-drowning).   So I  was anxious to like this one more, hoping that a mere 90-minute squib with a single setting might do better.  And indeed it did pick up in the last quarter,  as the ‘secret’ finally emerges and le Touzel finds yet another way to come out on top. 

         But it feels oddly lazy for the NT:  as if  any play about the disgrace and misery of the slave trade gets a free pass,  exempt from any rigour in playbuilding , character and probability.    Finally the two academics, in emotional conversation about a dubious commemorative bust,  come to an oddly  dispiriting conclusion.  Even Abi appears to endorse the perilous but sometimes fashionable  idea that because slavery was a great evil until two centuries ago,   all  academic authenticity, method and history doesn’t matter  next to present-day emotional grievance. This may not be its intention, but is certainly an effect.   

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 9 May

ratign two 

RUPERT AND BRENDA

    Couldn’t miss this piece of 40th anniversary history by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky because I had a very small –  infinitestimal –  dog in this fight. I was freelancing for the Times in 1986  when Rupert Murdoch squared up to Brenda Dean of the SOGAT print union, secretly setting up the Wapping printworks for his four newspapers with modern direct-input machines.   I saw the picket lines and  had to find ways (before easy online access) to get my minor bits of copy to the paper.  It was a sharp turn towards today’s world in several ways: advancing mechanization,  corporate ruthlessness, and fierce industrial relations (Thatcher’s new laws restricting strikes had come in: the miners’ strikes were over).  So this sharp, well-researched new play of conversations and confrontations is gripping. And it feels true of the period and the people, especially when Claudia Jolly as the tough, idealistic Brenda Dean confronts Alan Cox’s vigorous Aussie Murdoch.  

            In brief, the old craft typesetters and printers with the hot-metal machinery were expert ,traditional and  protected by extremely hawkish shop-stewards and – even their supporters in the battle had to admit – they often got away with absurdly short hours, moonlighting and fake name check-ins : known as “Spanish practices”.  Walk around Fleet Street in those days and you knew the time of day because you heard the great rumble of the presses starting.  But printers  could hold owners to ransom daily by simply stopping the machines:  lose a day and owners lose money (a few years earlier the Times lost a year).  Technically the modernization, in which journalists type in their copy directly, was well developed .  But resisted by unions.

       So Murdoch, craftily, set up the new Wapping works announcing that he was going to produce a whole new paper ‘The London Post”.  Artfully, a line early on remembers a similar trick he played on his rival Maxwell over a sale.   When Wapping was ready, he  informed the staff of his four papers that they were moving there. Immediately. Without the unionized printers.  So the battle of Wapping began.   It was a brutally artful move,  and somehow the change had to happen: today of course, all the papers use direct-input , it’s how they survived. Those which most vigorously condemned the Murdoch tactics have, at some point, had to admit that. But it was brutal, and cost thousands of jobs, not only of printers. 

          It is a lively account on the little stage,  and much of the fascination is in the sparring and rivalry between print unions – Dean’s SOGAT, the rival NGA, plus the electricians’ union (which was of course key to the new scheme) and the TUC itself. The editors are there too – Andrew Neil a self-important Andrew Neil, Russell Bentley a puckish, dirty-mouthed Kelvin MacKenzie; both able to offer rises and BUPA to sweeten the pill to any staff journalists queasy about the business.  Dean’s union comes close to running out of money, and she has to take hard decisions: it’s a calmly passionate depiction by Claudia Jolly, and Cox’s   Murdoch is shown as, for all his rough determined edge, a man who could in other circumstances have liked, admired and hired her.   But she was a union woman all the way from childhood, honourably a believer in fair dealing but unfashionably also devoted to the idea of hard manual work,  the idea of old printerly craftsmanship passed on like jobs from father to son.  

      It’s sharp, funny at times (not only accidentally in the passing reference to Labour’s “man you can trust”, a certain Peter).  There’s some brief doubling of parts, neatly done with coats.  I would like to see it grow, in a bigger theatre which could evoke the miserable and dangerous picketing period beyond the conversations and rows.  Because it’s a story we should not forget.

Kingsheadtheatre.com to 3 May

Rating 4