Monthly Archives: May 2026

THE SAD SERIOUS COMEDY OF DEATH

     A Devon cottage kitchen, opening to a tangled spring garden: beyond this  idyll a semi- abstract tangle of branches around a great circle of sky:   a hole , perhaps a portal. For in a back room, unseen, an old man is nearing the end of his life’s journey.   In such times a kitchen can fill with family and visitors:  weary daughter Sarah is tired from nighttime calls, soon brother Jonathan is back from London,  tensely on the phone to an unseen girlfriend unlikely to turn up and share this death-watch. But an earlier, betrayed one, does. Wants to see old Edward one more time. 

      There’s a posse of official helpers. First on, doffing  her coat, middle-aged Karen bustles comfortably about, efficiently nurselike , chatting about  reading-glasses.  Others appear, talking of hoists and morphine and changes in the dying man’s breath,  doing a matter of fact job kindly, with years of experience.  THe siblings, joined by one ex-partner and one possibly-current one lack any such aid to emotional balance.  They are vulnerable to explosions of  pointless frustration: first  Jonathan, with a cursing shout  about strawberry yoghurt after an absurd and horribly recognizable, polite   domestic discussion about it.

        The helpers – especially Lizzie Hopley’s gloriously northern Linda – are calmer.  They’ve seen deaths before, are kind, midwives to this  strange, hard time.  Sometimes, in quiet moments of memory, the group of mourners  speak beautifully in memory: Mariam Haque’s troubled Nell remembers old Edward saying of the home he built with his family that when you arrive and click the garden gate shut, you feel   everything is all right.  More often there is comic absurdity tinged with metaphor: throughout the first half Paul Thornley’s Graham is uninvitedly trying to mend the toaster.  He keeps saying “All it is, is –  the release mechanism..”.  They are all waiting for the ultimate release mechanism. For old Edward

        Sometimes they are purely absurd,  helplessly, resentfully ridiculous in the way we all are over matters of dodgy bread-knives  and wrong orders of Chinese takeaway.   The playwright and director, after all, is John Morton, whose sharp observation of ordinary life’s expressions and disguises gave us joy on television in Twenty Twelve,  W1A and now Twenty Twenty Six. All three TV series were dealing with boards of management,  but before that he wrote groundbreaking People Like Us and the strength of his portraits of institutional-man is his understanding that he is just everyman in a business suit.    So this, his first stage play, is at moments very funny indeed.

      But its centre is compassion: the core characters wound tight with tension, bottled-up British.   As nurses, a doctor, milkman and postman come and go   the immensity of Edward’s unseen battle hangs over everything.  It takes professional Karen, near the end, to tell the civilians  “there’s nothing to be frightened of at all”. Everything will be all right. That last click on the old man’s gate of life will be soon. In the weary small hours it comes. So does dawn.

      Morton tells that he wrote this over many years after his own father’s last days, with visiting nurses and carers easing it.  It feels like a tribute to those professionals who deal daily with the immensity of death.  Parish’s tense Sarah, Rupert Penry-Jones’ conflicted, restless Jonathan, Haque’s nostalgic, regretful Nell are the amateurs “It’s your first time” one is told, gently.  

      I acquit Morton and Chichester of any topical calculation,  but this play – which feels, in a good way, more like a poem or a watercolour than hard drama – comes at an apt time. We have had  long months and bitter arguments around assisted dying,  always promoted with the idea of  “sparing” families the memory of watching these long, last struggles.  ECLIPSE has no agenda,  but feels in the end like a philosophical affirmation of the fact that, by proxy and at last in person, we all we all have a duty to face the reality of being mortal.  It is a serious  message.

Cft.org.uk to 10 June

Rating 4

A FUNNY SHOW HAPPENENED ON THE WAY TO THE COLISEUM

        Ancient Greece is suffering drought and near-famine, and on a small island (population 16 and a half) prayers to Dionysius (“Dionysus, end this crisis!”) are getting nowhere.  The Tyrant of Athens summons  scattered Greece to a prayer competition, meeeting little enthusiasm from the grumpy middle-aged elder Melampus,  her nervous servant Atlas and the preeningly military Adonis.  Young Thespis and his sister Poly offer to write the new prayer,  and he has a moment of inspiration.  Since they’re all fed up one way or another,  and sing about being trapped in their disappointing selves,  Thespis suggests they should understand each other better. Well,  obviously the way to do this is to “walk in their sandals” – impersonate someone  and get inside another’s character and feelings.  

       They all try this:  thrillingly, they have just invented Theatre!   And, naturally, modern cries of “I feel seen!”.  As the young caper and clamber around the elegantly distressed columns and pilasters and persuade Melampus, for all the cheerful nonsensical songs, I was oddly moved.  That, after all, is what this art is all about.And  I was already softened up by Claire-Marie Hall’s first number as careful, swotty Poly.  “A girl who knows everything and nothing at all”.  

       The idea of theatre throws old Melampus into a prophetic fit (MIa Jerome beautifully going into Caribbean every time she has a vision)  and she foresees much, including tales of “Kings and Queens and a play where everybody is a cat with no discernible plot”.   So Thespis leads them in some drama-school exercises and they set set off to Athens to see how this revolutionary idea of therapeutic impersonation goes down.   Obviously, it first gets them arrested for blasphemy, but since the rain arrives…

    Hats off to the Mercury,  whose homegrown premiere this is, and more comedy hats off to Mischief Theatre,  the goes-wrong troupe for branching out into their first musical , written by co-founder JOnathan SAyer with music and lyrics by Ed Zanders.   I was a bit doubtful – apart from anything else their glorious normal  ‘goes-wrong” trope can’t quite work in this genre, especially with a sstory (very necessary right now in the UK) of youth confidently and bravely looking for a future.  I also wondered how long any musical comedy in-joke about actors could last.  

        I was wrong.  Sayer and Zanders have avoided every pitfall.  It’s fast, its funny, and it has some absoslutely banging numbers which never, ever go on for too long.  Some are touching,  some rockingly absurd:  when the other islands attempt their new prayer there is wicked pastiche of rock, romance and rap.   In the second half Melampus has the most storming of all,  as she leads the ensemble as bearded old codgers in “Old Man Tango – where did my man go?” in search of her long-ago lost lover (the rhymes are good, no grim Tim-Ricery but a lot of cheek).  

         It was crafty to give us elders that glorious moment,  but exhilaratingly a lot of the show  feels very Gen-Z:  very open to delighting the young in the packed house last night.  Poly and Thespis  (a delightful James Spence) are brother and sister,  so the cautious romance is actually between him and Luke Latchman’s anxious, helpful  shy Atlas, who has a number about how he needs to play a part as someone less feeble in order to propose.    Mark PIckering as Adonis is consistently funny, the most OTT of them all.  There’s a satisfying plot development Thespis takes the familiar journey of becoming both a major star and a dickhead drunk on the success of his own “merch” and big contract,  but is redeemed by his cast-mates.  

       And hey, Sayer even offers us both a greek-tragedy ending moment and a beautiful joke at the end,  as Rhys Taylor the heavily bejewelled Tyrant realizes that in every theatre company there is room for someone like her, with money and power and ruthlessness.  A producer.  Of course. 

mercurytheatre.co.uk    is  selling out fast till 23 May

then touring – to July.   BATH · SWINDON · GUILDFORD – WEEK 1 · CHELTENHAM · CARDIFF · GUILDFORD – (twice)

mischiefcomedy.com 

THREE WOMEN AND  A DISTANT QUEEN 

 Ava Pickett’s  breathlessly exciting début play won, at the Almeida,  both a prestigious prize and mixed reviews.   As a first-timer, seeing its transfer to the West End,  I can say that it well deserves the move,  and that it keeps  all the unsettling intimacy and power that split the critics.    And it’s piquant to have a  more sobering reflection on Anne Boleyn running here:  seven minutes’ walk from the latest cast raving through the riotous SIX on the Strand. 

      So I liked it a lot:  beautifully set amid reedy grass and stunted trees in the Essex countryside , three young women meet, gossip, and express their daily concerns and fears . Gradually  the news comes in about the arrest of Queen Anne Boleyn and  her imprisonment, trial and death.  The passage of days, sunsets and a terrible distant bonfire of celebration is achieved with Jack Knowles’ remarkably fine lighting;  Lyndsey Turner’s direction keeps it moving, and the characters are firmly distinct, recognizable to anyone who has been a girl,  without being caricatures. 

       SIena Kelly’s Anna is sexy, triumphant in her power of attraction and first seen vigorously at it against a tree,  but she is clearly in love as well as lust.   Liv Hill’s cautious, rulebound Jane is scornful of Anna’s ways and her faster wit – “all you do is kiss , all you do is tell”  . But she herself is engaged for family and community reasons to the very man – Richard – who is Anna’s lover.   Mariella – Tanya Reynolds – is almost the most interesting: rather unwillingly inherits a trade  as a midwife (a dangerous one, as it proves, easily blamed for the many perinatal tragedies of the period).  She has had her own love with a local grandee, William, whose wife’s baby she now must deliver.   Like Anna, she is of a perceptibly lower social scale than Jane. But Jane is scared of her affianced Richard, who does not love her.  After their wedding night all he can say of his bride, wandering lustfully back to Anna,   is “all she does is eat, pray and tremble”.    

           Pickett’s sharp, modern-spoken dialogue draws us easily into  the ordinary rural 16c world of girls no different from us in heart but confined in a harsher society.  The play was criticized as ‘yet another’ one about patriarchy, but come on!  This stuff happened. Ask any beheaded queen, burnt adulteress or obedient skivvy.  The reports about the imprisoned queen feel distant and grand to the girls  (“Kings don’t kill their wives!” “A lot of things kings don’t do, he’s done!”) . But they’re also familiar: a scornful phrase about “not the kind of woman who needs to be forced” ‘ occurs both about Boleyn and, much later, about Anna.   

        In one sharp moment, hearing that Boleyn  is still in the tower, the three react in turn :  “She must be terrified” “She must be furious” “She must be starving”.   They are all haunted by her, and see what her fate symbolizes in their own female helplessness.  Anna in particular,  bucking and cussing against the way the world is,  resents the ease with which rumours about a distant queen’s  misdeeds are accepted,  not least by Jane:   the distant woman’s treason and adultery are something for the men to enjoy talking about . Her death  – in a horrifying late moment – has them keeping the distant pubs open to celebrate, bonfires staibning the innocent Essex sky.  

       But Pickett’s courage lies equally in showing how,  when the worst happens, there is no guaranteed sisterhood or revolt.   Terrified women can turn on one another to save themselves.  She also allows a touch generosity towards the two men, as their dominance  and rage is in moments diluted by an ability to be weakened – if not saved – by the need for women’s love.  It’s a play to unsettle and annoy, but also to admire and love.  As I did. 

Atgtickets.com to 1 August

rating  5 

     FREAK ALONG WITH ANCIENT GREEKS

        The Greek gods, with their  legends , family rifts and seduction of hapless mortals,   are irresistible to all who love dramatic retellings.  It might be a heartbreaking Antigone at the National,  a sombrely tragic Oedipus wowing Broadway,  Hadestown up West or a ballet of Leda being ravished by Zeus as a swan. They’re beloved by  jokers, too: Spymonkey did Oedipussy and the Frogs with great energy.  So when a  determined band of former Plymouth students – LE NAVET BÊTE,  founded  in 2008  – had knocked about Dracula and Treasure Island (https://theatrecat.com/2025/06/13/treasure-island-new-wolsey-ipswich-touring/)  it was natural for director-writer John Nicholson of Peepolykus, their regular co-creator,   to turn to the ancient heavens. 

        For if you have a taste for determined  – and highly trained –  physical clowning and ridiculous plots,  the old gods provide a rich feast.  So here they are, starting a big tour:  Nick Bunt, Al Dunn and Matt Freeman,  between them playing over 30 roles with instant disguises , lightning quick-changes and an athletic tolerance for pratfalls, rolls, slithers and blows from a pool-noodle.   Britain needs some silliness between panto seasons,  solid basic  laughs  without reliance on the doomy overeducated whining of political satire.    There IS actually a tiny line in the programme suggesting Mr Nicholson’s dislike of Trumpian autocrats  – Zeus being king of the gods and prone to sudden thunderbolts and mood-swings, nd his wife Hera  in her sunglasses is modelled pretty closely on Meryl Streep as Anna Wintour. 

  But once the three Fates, a rock trio in black rags,  have cackled witchily about how everyone ends up dead, nonsense prevails.     The take on Zeus’ family problems is pretty broad, never missing an opportunity to do a silly voice, fall over, throw someone through the window, clap a wig and rubber lips on a fellow member or deploy the ancient time-honoured jokes  of fart or belch. The latter occurs , with magnificent soundscape, after the king of the gods has done the traditional thing and eaten up the mortal he just seduced,  lest she give birth to a child who challenges his supremacy (his own Dad Cronos did just that,  repeatedly, in the age of the Titans).  

        There is a plot:  Zeus doesn’t want his daughter Hebe to marry a mortal, Gregg the hotelier,  but her brother Ares god of war . He enlists both him and Poseidon (both in shiny budgie-smugglers and heavily armed with spear and trident) to kill Greg.    But then he changes his mind, and for complicated reasons involving walnuts tries to fake his own death, repeatedly, with little assistance from a waiter called Moussaka.  This at one point involves borrowing an audience member as a corpse: beware of the front row,  these people are good at interactions,  and though it’s not malicious you may end up in a conga. Mind you, sitting further back you may have fake droppings thrown at you by Nestor the elegantly trotting half-horse centaur (the props are excellent). 

         Anyway, Zeus  needs to go to the Underworld to save Gregg, and the second half is even more disgracefully funny than the first, and actually rather cleverer. There are classical jokes for those who know,  but you need not.  Charon the boatman of the river Styx prefers to be called Sharon , rides a big pedalo swan,  and finally resigns because his dream is to be a business strategy consultant called Steve. All within half a minute. 

          I applaud these guys: there must always be a place in British theatre for chaps who can ride a unicycle while disguised as a giant pot-plant,  and for designers like Fi Russell who decide that Cerberus, the three headed dog guarding the underworld, is best represented as a lavender pink fluffy poodle.  Who does not admire touring stage crews with the skills to manoeuvre on each few-days’ run  not only a three tier classical-cum-hotel set including a slide  but some really tight lighting and sound cues, all the kit for an underworld game of Umbrella Roulette,   and many, many  metres of inflatable hydra?  Who does not, from time to time, just need a good daft laugh in cheerful company?  We were bonding like mad in our Ipswich matinee,  and I trust that from Cornwall to the far North the same will happen.   

wolseytheatre.co.uk   to 9 may but NB,  tonight is adult-only, 18+ version 

  –   then see tour  – lenavetbete.com –   going to   Lichfield, Minack, York, Doncaster, Lowry, Salford, Poole, Hornchurch, Newcastle under Lyme and Exeter

SAD HEARTS AND SHOWBIZ

        The play begins in a pure music-hall moment:   below the stage a hammeringly jolly piano,  onto it a  capering  leg-show chorus and sparklers, ushering  in The Great Houdini.  Who is Hadley Fraser , debonair and showmanlike.  He must, of course, immediately be hung upside down by the ankles  in his vest, braces and NYPD handcuffs (the latter previously tested on an alarmed front- row lady) and swiftly wriggle out of them to wild drumbeats and applause.   

       Then we are backstage where the hero greets his own hero,  David Haig as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s a session of boxing-chat, sparring and mutual literary admiration while their wives (Claire Price and a drily comic Jenna Augen) look on resignedly.   After two acts of thrilling and revealing arguments,  director Lucy Bailey keeping the scenes changing with choreographed elegance,   the same pair will end on the same vaudevillian stage. But this time the trick will end with a moment of lonely  metaphor which  might leave you, like me,  more moved than you ever expected.   The handcuffs of mortality and grief are not so easily thrown off: some trick walls you can’t walk through.  

           Playwright-actor David Haig dealt poignantly with Kipling’s WW1 bereavement in “My Boy Jack” , and thrillingly with D-Day meteorological science in “`Pressure”.  He reads, thinks and empathises deeply with the changes,  hopes and delusions of a century ago.  So you couldn’t ask for a better sensitivity to deal, historically and emotionally,  with a peculiar 1920 moment of feuding friendship:  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle versus Harry Houdini, with spiritualism as the battlefield. 

      The creator of Sherlock Holmes had lost his son at the Somme and  been widowed. Remarrying Jean, an occult  “medium” , he plunged more deeply into his lifelong fascination with spiritualism.   With  a medical background,  he was excited by the new frontiers of science – electrical currents, molecules, radio transmission – and like many thinkers of the time he borrowed their language and mystery to feed  into a belief that the dead could speak to us through seances. There were so many dead after 1918; as he says “spiritualism brings solace to a tortured world”. 

     His friend Houdini the showman escapologist  – and the odd couple were tight friends for some years – was also mourning his Jewish-Hungarian mother. But equally he was a rigorous  sceptic: when his fame and fortune rose he poured money, research, and careful tests into debunking the hordes of opportunist mediums.  At times both men,  the celebrity British author and the lairy showman,  were on the transatlantic lecture circuit.  Houdini  would be decrying and mocking the credulous followers,   Doyle in the same cities preaching the believers’ gospel, his wife – quite darkly – warning Houdini about how many people , and his audiences,  were angry with him for his unbelief. Topical, eh?.  

      Early  in the friendship, in a chilling half-dark scene on a slow revolve,  Sir Arthur and his wife Jean host the American visitor to one of their daily séances.  The  medium   does a spectacular screaming trance,  Houdini writes in a notebook,  and late at night is found by his host having  crept downstairs to examine the light fittings and seance-table for trickery.  But the drama and humanity lies is in the way that the men try to stay friends.

         The play is elegantly, artfully gripping in its blend of sadness, anger, and personal pride (Haig beautifully evokes that blend: Fraser becomes gradually ever more stridently showmanlike).    Sir Arthur at one point is put “in touch “with his lost son Kingsley and utterly believes it, and  the  conflict  heats up when Jean Doyle plays medium and claims to  contact Houdini’s mother:  he, tight-lipped, tries for  a moment of hope but is too honest with himself.  False hope must die.  Of course it’s nonsense,   the “spirit”failed to speak Yiddish or call him by his real name, Eric.  So of course Conan Doyle accuses his friend of insulting his wife…

    There are wonderful ironies.  Houdini, who after each hysterical-emotional session just drily says “I observe trifles”,  mentions that this after all is what Sherlock Holmes does.  Whereon Sherlock’s creator strikes back with the fictional ‘tec’s famous line about how , if you eliminate every other  probability,  the impossible must be true . Conan Doyls also constantly tries to persuade the escapologist  that he really is summoning and using “a great force” of spirituality,  all magically tied up with waves and molecules,  so that’s how he does his miracles and escapes from trunks and cells and chains in the Hudson river., etc.    Houdini persistently says no he does NOT  have some weird occult force: it’s all technical trickery, practice, a lot of keys and a dislocatable shoulder.   

      This argument is given a lookingglass equivalent  after a cracking brawl when Houdini disrupts and exposes the medium Mina (Jade Williams). She just shouts insults at him as a “dirty Jew”,  but her partner-manager brings up the same argument that Doyle tried :  OK yes, sometimes there’s room for the use of trickery. But  only when the real manifestation can’t happen,  because people are getting in its way by doubting it.,,   

           Poor Conan Doyle can never accept the fakery of mediums, nor even the fact that his friend is a clever conjurer with no occult powers.  His grief won’t allow it.  When he pleadingly says “Six times I have  spoken with my son!”  Harry replies brutally “no, you haven’t!” The pain is real.  And yes, it moves the heart. 

Cft.org.uk. To 16 May

Rating 4