Monthly Archives: June 2026

BEAUTIFUL

     This, to me unexpectedly, was the most beautiful single hour in a  theatre yet.   Visually, musically, and in its majesty and depth of speech impossible to fault, it’s a little piece of perfection.  I came to hear Simon Russell Beale narrate,  from a chair , this long, wild, erotic and romantic poem about the goddess Venus and her pursuit of the mortal Adonis. I came too for the pleasure of seeing him directed with Greg Doran’s invariably thoughtful judgement of Shakespeare’s  clarity, pace and meaning.  I had vaguely heard that there was also  an elegant set and some puppets,  and Nick Lee with atmospheric guitar  for mood and period.  

         But I did not expect the power and small-scale grandeur of Robert Jones’ design – an intricate gilded and draped theatre frame, with shadow-puppetry and tiny figures deep behind drawing you into the mythical dream  as the first doves pull  Venus’ flying carriage through the blue distance.   And I certainly  had not appreciated in advance  the brilliance of five dark-costumed puppetteers,  who bringing startlingly downstage  and vivid the three-quarters lifesize puppets. Importunate goddess,  upright warrior, great stallion and reluctant mare, and ultimately the massive terror of the boar with bloodstained tusks.  Name the puppetteers, for this is a great and  strenuous art:   Steve Tiplady directs Bartolomeo Bartlini, Edie Edmundson, Rachel Leonard, Lee Maeda and Sarah Wright, 

       Russell Beale, of course, speaks the verse with gentle beauty and finely calculated wit – it is lovely to hear amid its stateliness odd phrases which feel almost modern, especially from Venus.    No line is wasted, no gesture missing or overdone.  Hard to say which moments thrilled most: sometimes amusingly, with the goddess’ brutal cougar-pouncing ,  twerking or lounging and  all too clear what she wants beyond mere kisses.  Relish  Adonis’ prim attempts to get upright again, every small move of head or arm evoking his overwhelmed reluctance .  

       Sometimes the thrill is the great stamping  galloping horses, equally expressive.  Sometimes verse and movement together create  real  psychological changes as striking as any human actor could express,  as Venus’  adoration becomes  frustration, victory  and beyond that  – as she begs him not to go boar-hunting –  the  timeless wifely terror. Once  a long deliberate pause, a tense moment before a new dawn, rises into  excitement and fear as the hounds bark. There is  an extraordinary coup de théatre as the whole proscenium becomes giant Death himself, clawed hands reaching out to alarm, and then weirdly and terrifyingly to excite the goddess.   You feel the audience around you draw breath, together. 

       Poetry, puppetry, and beyond it all the deep, deep timeless pity that love, in the end, often means conflict and always final grief.  “Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend… all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe”

        And so with the picking of the flower and the sad goddness’ dove-drawn chariot fleeing into darkness, a  last few notes resound and it’s over. One hour, flat, and  a lifetime worth living.   The Barbican, as I write, is sold out because it’s in the intimate little Pit.  You can still get in to the Oxford Playhouse.  It’ll be worth it.

Oxfordplayhouse.com. To Saturday. 

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WORTH SINGING ALONG TO?

     Ask ourselves in all honesty: did we  all schlepp out to Richmond  for press night because national-treasure Dame Maureen Lipman, at 80,   is doing eight show a week on tour before the West End, as doughty as any McKellen?  Or because it is good to see her onstage again  and in something lighter  after the haunting,  profound solo performance she gave us in  ROSE, as a Jewish woman sitting shiva for all the lost, including an Arab child killed “by my own blood”?   Or is it furious  solidarity,  after those dim antisemitic idiot protesters demonstrated against her very existence until she has to  hire security? 

          All very good reasons to hail this  undauntable , recklessly comedy-legged empress. Moreover,  this is a new play by Peter Quilter, who also wrote her the role of Florence Foster-Jenkins in GLORIOUS and promises to give her some dodgy-but-infections singing moments, only more in tune.  So yes, it was a bit of all that.  And Quilter’s a good name: his  End of the Rainbow is just being revived after its storming 2010 performance with Tracie Bennett (though this time, naturally, it’s a drag queen as Judy Garland).

        But in the end, I do not see how Quilter  deserved Maureen Lipman.  It is in some ways a great role for her:  an elderly eccentric with a spring of personal joy and irresponsible merriment,  loving bright colours,  prone to bursting into song anywhere she likes. At any hour. And volume. 

       It’s set in her cottage kitchen , where her brother Ronen (John Middleton), a sober solar-panel salesman,  tries to reorganize her and recruits a Czech housekeeper (Elizabeth Bower) to make sure she eats properly and tidies up.  Her preference is always to go out and about – though we never see this – because you meet “interesting people in restaurants who don’t always want to talk. So I waltz over merrily and chat away” .  She breaks into song often,   just because it’s in her head,   and is utterly uninhibited about time and place because “I want to try to spread joy”.   She is actually mentally sharp enough – the housekeeper’s mention of Brno has her talking Mozart,  and Lipman’s gift for  drop-dead irony, especially about her gloomy brother,  gets a good few solid laughs.  At one point, in an American football number, she succeeds in leading at least a third of the audience near me in a singalong.  Allegra has presence and she has nerve, and as she blithely says about her uncomfortable, shawl-draped chairs “style over substance, which is just as it should be”.  As for disruption  “We shouldn’t be scared of it.  Some do cocaine, I do cabaret”.  

          But the police come round  – Patrick Bailey as an improbably stolid rural cop who doesn’t mind sitting down for a cup of tea or bowl of Czech dumplings – but who eventually, after some 3 a.m. renderings of light opera have driven the neighbours craze,  hauls her off to the station; the final scene begins with a looming unseen basso-profundo judge condeming her to compulsory medication as prescribed.     But when it succeeds in flattening her even Ronen is dismayed , misses “all the chaos..you’re such a bright flame, that’s what everyone’s jealous of”.    

        It could have been interesting and convincing about dementia, socially unacceptable neurodiversity,  intolerance and overmedication and the way “unhappiness is the new normal” . It should have spoken more deftly on behalf of mavericks whose only concession to reproof is to “put on a very serious cardigan”.   And it really doesn’t .    Every decent line Allegra is given is nailed, spot-on, by Lipman – her timing as ever magnificent –  but there aren’t nearly enough of these sparks, and the other characters are oddly empty: light  sketches.  Some awful very old jokes around keeping a dead father’s ashes in cocoa-tins are dragged out for too long.  When Lipman does hit her moments,   physically dextrous in comedy as ever and  fearless in wild song,  the show rises up to meet her and make us  happy.  But in between these gaudy joyful tent-poles the structure sags dreadfully.  No show should need to hang on only by one performance.   Lipman deserves much, much better.  The woman can tiptoe through any number of tulips, but these are plastic.

allegraplay.com     to Saturday then touring Windsor, Glasgow, Bath, London to 8 Aug.

rating three

THE ELDERLY ENDGAME

      We are seated in a big arena, on three sides of a care-home sitting-room,  clearly secure – staff tap door keypads –  designed for the containment of dementia cases..  Two kindly careworkersare introducing Linda Bassett’s Joan, a well- spoken new resident dropped off by her anxious, nervy widowed daughter Lynn  (Rosie Cavaliero) with her teenage sons. The trouble is that Joan does now know, or will not believe, that she is staying. She thinks it’s convalescence after a fall, and is not pleased . 

       Gradually author-director Alexander Zeldin shows us her companions and how their mental planets are varied, changeable and sometimes eventful, especially that of physically fittest and youngest, the roaming Simone (Hayley Carmichael, evoking a damaged being , arrestingly out of control). She livens things up no end with sexual dives at the visiting teenage boys and reminiscnces about lovers but having  “no littluns, they all fell out”.  Agnes (Ann Mitchell) talks vaguely of an otter colony she values.  

      So we are ,for just over two unbroken hours,  in this company, watching Joan’s confusion and her gradual erosion into helplessness after  moments of appearing to be a more solid piece of articulate commonsense than the daughter who can’t look after her at home  (we get too little detail of why, which I suspect is to universalize the social-comment aims of the play. Certainly that is made sharply clear in a late moment,   when Joan has fallen out of bed and Lynn is kvetching about paying for  poor “service”. The senior nurse snaps that it’s her who is looking after Lynn’s mother…

      There are some excellent lines and moments, as when Joan, clutching  for memories and associations, says she feels like a dog under the table hoping to catch scraps.  Bassett  is excellent throughout, and there is a proper moment of emotional drama when one of the two male patients, John  (a magnificent Richard Durden)    moves her heart with  a sudden song and then, tearing his shirt off ,  hugs her as he remembers a long gone wife.  The days roll on; there are seceral deaths, in which characters – this is very effective – walk off to join us quietly in the audience.   There is a long, long, graphically harsh-breathing deathbed for Joan,   and then a coda with the family back home. And a small odd surprise,  calculatedly redemptive.    Though one’s sympathy by now lies entirely with the two  poor lads who consider their mother Lynn “just mental”.

            It’s taxing, well acted, sad.    Frustrating, too,  not least if you’re not in the raked seating : directors should remember that if their characters are mostly seated or wheelchair-bound that means you crane and shift  desperately in order to see much. Nor does Zeldin = acknowledge much need to be a storyteller, moving things on:  frankly he makes most Ibsen  plays look like seat-of-the-pants  thrillers.

        I had bought a late matinée ticket out of fascination for him and his many enthusiasts after being lukewarm about The Confessions and Love (both NT) .  I should have remembered the particular Zeldin rules:  a demand for patience, attention to every nuance and long, long silence, painful compassion towards humanity and never succumbing to exasperation, even when the fourth or fifth scene change involves a blackout and a loud portentously doomy  musical chord.    That’s just the rulebook  for the audience: his onstage  characters on the other hand  are allowed any amount of irrationality, temper, basic emotional  incompetence and self-pity.  Nothing is their fault, and if you dare mutter otherwise you’re a  kind of judgmental monster.  The kind who elsewhere might rudely consider the mother  in Inter Alia to be a bit of a div.

        In other words, Zeldin is a very modern writer.  . 

youngvic.org  to 11 July

rating 3

A SWELL PARTY, EVENTUALLY

 We “Call the Midwife” fans all suspected there was more pizazz to nurse Trixie than bicycling round Poplar in the 1950s,  and indeed Helen George always was a dead classy, RAM- trained musical-theatre professional. In the vast dour Barbican hall  she’s a golden breeze of a presence, as happy in showy absurdities as in the famous plaintive beauty of “True Love” . A number which, by the way,  she delivers not in a boat like Grace Kelly but sprawled with Julian Ovenden’s Dexter on the cold marble floor  of the oddly bleak mansion set.  But fair enough:  Helen George is more of a Marilyn Monroe than an ic-queen Kelly.  Her seductiveness is all warm mischief and rueful wit., her acting full of truth: after her magnificent drunken scene with Freddie Fox’s Mike she sings Porter’s fabulous lines about “wrong time, wrong place, wrong face” and  there’s a fine, sad stillness there alongside the nonsense. 

      This is, despite the wonderfulness of any Cole Porter musical, quite the silliest  show of musicals’  golden age: Arthur Kopit’s book a featherlight romcom about the Newport yachting rich.    Headstrong Tracy on her second wedding-day gradually develops the wit to ditch George the accountant and return to her yacht-obsessed ex Dex, the realization assisted by getting hammered and swimming naked with Mike the gatecrashing reporter.  Who, of course, is himself in absurd denial of his love for his photographer Liz (Carly Mercedes Dyer, the other rather fabulous diva of the night).    The show’s last big outing was Kevin Spacey’s last hurrah at the old Vic ten years ago under Maria Friedman, and I remember that as really being a swell party,  revelling in the screwball-comedy gags and hurling everything at the big numbers.

     So I was a bit worried in the first half at how primly straight this felt,  sometimes the characters looking dwarfed by the great looming mansion set and only sporadic moments of fine energy.  Notably Freddie and Liz doing Who Wants to be a Millionaire around the great gifts-table get things moving for a few minutes,   and, finally Nigel Lindsay’s Uncle Willie leads Now You Have Jazz with a proper big wild chorus moment.  Overall, though, the first half has a weird lack of atmosphere despite a fine cast,  somehow flattening even the best of the screwball-comedy gags (“women like that bore the pants off me” “So that’s how it’s done!”). 

             It brightens wonderfully in the second half,  from the moment Mike and Dexter let rip with “Did you Evah!” (Freddie Fox, physically witty and airily tuneful,  must do more musicals. Soon. Please!).   It picks up pace,  thundering and dancing through the Cole Porter songbook as they all get drunker,  giving the big Let’s Misbehave number a wilder, rougher energy and, vitally, letting Fox’s comic talent and Helen George’s subtle, mischievous, honest characterization shine through all the nonsense.   It’s as if the whole show suddenly got younger after feeling creakingly middle-aged for the first hour.  What a relief.  

     Tracy’s priceless “aren’t men great!”is a classic moment to take home, and so is a nice sour reprise of Millionaire by the weary domestic staff.    Felicity Kendall meanwhile deploys all her growly-pussycat national-treasuredom as she completes her marital reconciliation with a mournful, tuneful Malcolm Sinclair as Seth,.  And poor George – David Seadon Young bravely playing that patron saint of geeks – leaves the stage . With an authorly contempt which usefully reminds you how brutal those old golden-age musical conventions were: any modern romcom author would have chucked the poor sap  a consolation-prize romance with one of the housemaids.   

barbican.org.uk to 11 July

Rating 4

HOME AGAIN IN TRIUMPH

     Can it really be nearly twenty years since this show about WW1 galloped into world theatre history on this stage?   A maverick experiment with two life-size puppet horses (and let’s not forget the goose) it has been seen by nine million people in a dozen countries and several languages, including Mandarin.  Its star Joey met Queen Elizabeth more than once.  It released the long-neglected idea of puppetry back into the general idea of British theatre, from large shows like Life of Pi and The BFG to a new confidence in the skill which can suddenly make a scarf become a fox, or a doll a living child.    The story is often told (beautifully in Nicholas Hytner’s BALANCING ACTS)  of how the project began :  Tom Morris’ fascination with the Handspring company in South Africa , family stories, , a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo.   Hytner’s rare mischievous bravura and his – subsidised – ability to let it grow from actors-with-boxes on their heads to a full commission of puppets from Handspring.  Then came  meticulously sensitive choreography of the horses’ movemet,  and original direction by Morris and Marianne Elliott. 

          So much for history: how does this old show feel, now?  Is brilliant, skilled, extraordinary athletic and taxing puppetry by  three people inside each horse enough to move and overwhelm us in the age of AI and deepfake?  Turns out ,yes it is:  when Joey and Topthorne end the first half with a great leap over the terrible front line wire there was an immense shudder across the great room.    But has the production been diluted by time and fashion, gussied-up for a fretful new generation?  Absolutely not: Morris directs,  and it still credits Toby Sedgwick’s choreography, Christopher Shutt’s sound ,Adrian Sutton’s music and the brilliant Rae Smith set.  She frames the whole story in drawings, as if from a torn forgotten scrapbook, of Albert’s home village and then the fields and horrors of France. Animation complements but never overwhelms the solid reality of horses and people. 

    What I had forgotten, though, is the hugeness of spectacle: the moment when the foal Joey becomes adult,  the galloping duel between him and the army horse Topthorne, quickly ending in tolerant fraternity with a bitter irony when humans are taking  them into savage cold-steel warfare.  I forgot about that terrifying spring for the wire into blackout,  and the vast terror of the onstage (puppeteered) tank.  Even  the sketch-animation above becoming suddenly a vast troopship overwhelmed me for a momet=nt.  Only a ship:  but by this time we are so weirdly involved with the  innocent perceptions of the country-bred Joey that it unnerves us, as if we too were horses. 

       So all the equine and puppetry magic is there, undimmed in two decades: a national treasure and global theatrical pride.  As for the music – a wonderful, plain-truth Sally Swanson is the singer – Adrian Sutton’s blending of old songs , brass and woodwind and great harmonies from the immense ensemble is breathtaking.   The human cast of course are new: Tom Sturgess a touching Albert, especially in the bleak trench scenes,  and Stephen Beckett splendid as both his drunken, angry father and the furious German colonel.  But the curious thing about this remarkable show is that actually, the story itself (Morpurgo adapted by Nick Stafford) is where the humans are concerned the weakest bit of it.  It’s a children’s story version of WW1, and none the worse for it.    That Albert should seek and find his familiar horse in the bitter chaos of the Somme is frankly not believable;  the horsemanlike desertion of the German officer ((Manuel Klein) only a little more so. The point is that,  like the reality of the gauze-cane-aluminium horses,  it’s a dream we need to have.  One we need to share,   live in the big Olivier cavern, breathing together.   So yes, it’s still magnificent. 

nationaltheatre.org.uk.  to 30 July

Rating 5 . Of course it is.  But an extra design mouse, because I haven’t get got a specific puppetry-mouse.