Monthly Archives: September 2026

MOLIERE WOULD HAVE LOVED IT

   Much to celebrate here, and not only the return of that maverick angel Mark Rylance: once again treading a London stage,  adorned with a clerical collar and at one point (actually, two points) hopping in fruitless pursuit of a very reluctant hostess with his trousers round his ankles, Rix-style. Excellent. 

     Even without that,  celebrate the first production on his scale in a mainstream theatre by Darren Raymond’s “Intermission Youth” charity, long supported by Rylance  and his late wife Clare van Kampen in its mission to reach and develop young people of few advantages.  Crew and creatives involve both Intermission’s young members and its seasoned graduates; all spot-on, artists flowering through hard times and a good few hard beginnings.  You’ll rarely seen a more joyful curtain-call:  Rylance capering in Yoruba dance with a dozen Intermissioners ,   hailing two professional debuts in traditional manner,  and hauling up Raymond himself – adaptor and director – for an extra hurrah.

        Forgive the overenthusiasm, but I have followed Darren Raymond ever since he first encountered Shakespeare in Bruce Wall’s astonishing prison sessions with the London Shakespeare Workout, and over two decades watched his steady, inventive leadership of the group, his encouragement of kids who never knew this world existed,  and his inventive remixes of the great plays, for a while  based in a church behind Harrods.  Saw his RSC cameo as a boatswain in The Tempest, too. 

      Here, he has taken Moliere’s 1664 play about a hypocritical cleric who invades and deceives a patriarch while his family try to damp this mad enthusiasm. It’s transplanted to the London household of Oga Afolabi ,  stern head of a Nigerian clan and father of cool rapping D-Miz  (whose coolness alarms him) and the beautiful Adanna. She is to be married into a more Caribbean family:  Delroy’s shy son Sinclair.  But Oga (in Moliere it was Orghon) is dazzled by Pastor Blake,  Rylance making  the most of the creepy-vicar business with head-tilts, bowed humility over a  clutched prayerbook, as with vast toothy smiles and artful faux-humility he undermines the marriage.   So Oga decides the Pastor shall be the groom. His wife Elmire is appalled, as is everyone else except his mother-in-law (Suzette Llewellyn) who is conned by the pastor’s investment-offer to hand over  her  informally Caribbean “pardner” savings.   Elmire, as in Moliere, sets up a situation where her daft husband will see the impostor trying to seduce her (hence Rylance’s trouser incidents). 

       And so the mayhem ensues,  with a series of broad comic scenes underpinned, as they should be, by real personalities and potential  pain.  Nakeba Buchanan as Elmire is terrific,  as is her daft husband : Usifu Jalloh’s Oga is ,  forever climbing into tremendous traditional raiments.  Actually, Rylance briefly drops the clerical collar to be  equally clothed in a purple robe and turban. He looks like a small but pious Smurf.    Ultz designs, with Maybelle Laye: it’s spectacularly colourful.  

          Raymond’s adaptation is in verse,  rhyming couplets, as in the original,  sharp and fluid and witty.  And listening to them is a reminder of what a long-term Shakespearian this writer is,  easy with the iambics which are, for English-speakers, the most naturally expressive.  It works, incidentally,  far, far better than Bartlett’s similar attempt at faux-shakespeare in King Charles III. Which just goes to show that there’s nothing like being  thunderstruck by your first meeting with Shakespeare and daily, emotionally, fascinatedly being close to his texts over decades.   

        All the cast are at home with it,  easy-flowing;  Ivandro Da Cruz Leite as Sinclair has a grand  attempt to out-preach the interloper and breaks the lines down just as he fails,   Morenike Onajobi’s cynical best-pal Kemi is wonderful to listen to,  and both the battling grannies are sharp as a tack on finely timed half-lines. 

        Almost best of all, Moliere (who concluded by having the King himself step in)  would be pleased that Raymond offers three sharp possible endings,  some violent and sudden after the huge con-trick is exposed,  and settles in the end for the good old Metropolitan Police.  A very good time was had by all. 

marylebonetheatre.com   to 24 October    

rating 5      

cos there’s nothing like it, and its better than the NT gave us this week…

HOBO ,  GENIUS,  AMERICA’S SOUL 

 “Everybody might be just one big soul, so everywhere you look in the day or night, that’s where I’m gonna be” . That’s Woody Guthrie, in his last years, knowing his body was succumbing to the cruel speechless paralysis of Huntingdon’s Chorea.  That link to universal human soulhood was hard-earned, through decades of hard work, wandering,  poverty in the dustbowl years and political persecution under Senator McCarthy. Because all the time he was picking up songs and writing them in answer, in tune with the campfire laments, work-songs, jokes and grievances of the ordinary poor.   Like many here I had been aware of songs like “This land is your land” – written in defiance of the schmalz of God Bless America – and the Plane Crash at Los Gatos,  the lament for working deportees made famous by Joan Baez . The latter has been  added to this remarkable, moving likeable and thoughtful 90-minute show as a gesture against the present ICE raids under President Trump. 

        I saw David Lutken’s show – with different backing musicians – twelve years ago in London. ( https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/england/london-travel/woody-sez-at-the-arts-theatre-london-wc2-2snkwv75j6g). And when I heard it was coming back, first to Edinburgh then to this short Soho run,  interviewed him (https://www.thetimes.com/culture/theatre-dance/article/woody-sez-edinburgh-david-lutken-interview-9dkd86bv7)

     So I went back, and found the old magic still there:  an elegantly compiled, fast moving tale of a man’s beginnings, experiences, and gradual reflections about politics, justice and war.  It starts with a moment of him happily disrupting a jngle-dotted radio show with mischievous streaks of leftism,  then runs from Guthrie’s childhood and the tragedy of his mother’s end in an asylum with the same disease that finally struck him.  His fellow musicians this time are Raquel Chavez,  Nyssa Grant and David Finch:   busker-virtuosi on guitars, fiddle, banjo, zither, double-bass, a sort of dulcimer (I think) and, with one fine outbreak from Finch,  the spoons.  They move with friendly ease and fellowship between moments of deeply-felt emotion and riotousness (“Union Girl” had a fair few joining in with ‘Can’t scare me, I’m stickin’ to the Union”).  Guthrie’s lament for the WW2 sinking of the Reuben James “tell me, what where their names?”  prefigures his anger at the way news shrugged at the Los Gatos deportees years later.  Unwarlike,  distressed at all pain and grief,  he himself servced in the merchant marine in that war after deciding  that  he had “learnt the differentce between wanting something to stop,  and wanting to do something to stop it”. 

    Lanky, dark and sardonic, looking a bit like his hero,  Lutken holds the show together in an atmosphere of ceilidh and storytelling: it’s deeply researched, deeply felt.  Each Thursday – the first is tonight – he invites any audience to bring along “whatever instrument they won’t let you play at home” and have a hootenanny after the show with the four of them.  But with or without that, I recommend it yet again.  Tickets start at £ 29 and don’t go much up;  indeed if you’ll stand,  the balcony is £15.      Just go.   We need to hear in this dark time the old  voice of the USA, how it felt and shared and struggled and reaches out far beyond the age of Trump and Musk.  We need to believe it. 

Tickets: via  www.woodysez.com or underbellyboulevard.com. to 19 September

rating 5

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE, OR HANG ON A MINUTE..

         Everyone (especially journalists) loves a drama about  newspapers.  Hot-tempered rackety bantering , stories urgently chased, rivalries and righteousness,  secrets and lies.  In Tracey Scott Wilson’s 2003 play, now updated (though without including social-media in its plot)  we are in a hot and  troubled American city. A young white man, heir to a Wall St fortune but working altruistically as a teacher in a rough black areas, has been shot dead when driving in the neighbourhood at night with his pregnant wife, wanting to show his parents a hip Brazilian restaurant, to prove that its not all scary black thugs.  In other words, a perfect focus for white outrage: a goodie.  His wife reports in a stark opening police scene that it was a big man, black, who shot him…

  Projections and clips on Fleischl’s stark basketball-court set show that over weeks many black men have been arrested, roughly, with no conviction yet; the story rolls on, the  wife harassed by media.   Meanwhile we are in and out of a respected newspaper office.  In a dept called Vanguard,  devoted to reporting and speaking for the black community,  tough old campaigner Pat (Lorraine Toussaint) and her colleague Neil ae  settling in the rookie Yvonne.  Who is black, but of another class:  college-educated,  sassy and ambitious and furious at the idea of being “a black reporter” rather than  – well, a star reporter with a Pulitzer. She rather despises being sent on community stories  (“my father” she says haughtily. ” never let us go to community centres”) .   Letitia Wright  plays Yvonne with almost cartoonishgly overdemanding gen-X arrogance,  and is naturally furious not to be on the big murder story.

        But at one of the despised community centres she finds a brilliant, multilingual, underrated social victim of her own generation. The girl Letitia  tells a harsh back-story,  and confides in her that with no other opportunities she’s in a violent girl-gang, who dress as men and may have shot the victim for a dare. Can Yvonne convince her boss Pat – who keeps whipping the adjectives out of her copy and demanding more professional facts   – and Neil. He  (in an understated, subtle performance by Ashley Thomas) never seems easy with her new story.  But there’s something there: enough to put Yvonne  in hospital at the rackety, shocking end of the first half.   

           Trevor Phillips, musing on this play, places it in a long tradition of American satire in which the cruel legacy of slavery makes white citizens too willing “to believe both the best and worst of our fellow countrymen” if they are black.  He also relates it to  the temptation to cultivate  a sense of reparation due,   exaggerating victimhood, diasadvantage and back-story brilliance and expecting  to be believed. So  this revival falls with dark, accidental aptness after the tragic end and unveiled deceptions of poor Jason Arday.  

        As this play goes on,  there are those who believe easily and guiltily – not least Wilf Scolding’s Jeff, senior on the newsdesk and adoring boyfriend of Yvonne – and those who devoutly want to.  No spoilers,  but as it unfolds – jerkily, often in a series of staccato, shouted one-liners from figures and projections at every corner of the stage, and some clear dream-moments  – expect some tremendous reckonings. And  some unreprintable,  now publicly unutterable, words from the lexicon of racial difference.  The audience gasps.  Toussaint’s Pat has a remarkable  speech about her former years of battle and campaigning,  and how the sisters like her were butts and victims of the angry bros but still marched for them next morning. When it comes to whether to let a big particular  truth out,  she feels that she’s owed the right not to… 

         It is not a perfect play,  the ending not entirely satisfying;  often the quest for authenticity blurs the narrative, (in the interval several were muttering in puzzlement).   But Toussaint is remarkable in her grand intensity,  and Wright manages to just about convince us of what Yvonne is hiding.  Both deserve more.

nationaltheatre.org.uk to 24 October

rating 3 

ABSURDITIES OF PASSION WIND UP A TORRID SUMMER

       This is by Turgenev,  revolutionary in his time (banned for a while),  now adapted  with mischief and appreciation by the late  Brian Friel and  directed – with even more mischief but a redeeming humanity –  by Lyndsey Turner.   Like the later Chekhov masterpieces it’s there to remind us that  a country estate household is both potential idyll and terrible trap:  Moscow, as ever,  mentioned in the background as both potential escape and source of emotionally troubling visitors.  Ah, we’ve all been there. 

      So Leslie Travers designs a great suspended cage of thick foliage, sometimes rising to reveal a garden or interior, sometimes falling balefully around them all. Before the start a woman’s face peers through the leaves at us,  hopeful or cautious. Its Sophie Okonedo, my favourite Cleopatra:  a strong -boned, defiantly handsome face, beauty past the prime but aristocracy unchallengeable, her moods and games dangerously expressive. This is Natalya, wife of Arkady and lady of the estate where he buffles around enthusing about weirs and winnowing machines.  It is her electrical personality  which will dominate the next two and a half wickedly enjoyable hours in old Russia. 

        She has her work cut out to dominate it , because for all Natalya’s Okonedo  magnetism this is a cast of twelve:  each  with distinct comedic chances and talents ,  each given at least one memorable two- or three-handed scene with the sort of strong-flavoured, never-wasted tragicomic intensity which makes you think “YES of course!  this is the way to write a play! Why doesn’t everybody?”     The very opening effortlessly shows us  Natalya’s boredom,  being read to by a family friend who adores her,  tje devoted Michel (Alister Petrie, memorably helpless, subtly drawn).   But behind them runs a card game evoking the whole big household and its frustrations:  her  bossy mother in law (Susan Brown, who should get a whole sitcom  to herself),  sullen companion Lizaveta fighting a  snuff habit, and Mark Hadfield as an outrageous comedy German professor forever afloat on malaprop mistranslations and rural outings  (“I go to apprehend fish”).  Add a simmering potential love affair between two servants,  and another between Dr Shpigelsky and the fed-up Lizaveta. Then feel for the  innocent foster-daughter Vera ( a very sweet, honestly played  Rachelle Diedericks) . And all the time be electrically  aware of  course the glamorous invader:  the unseen kid’s tutor, a boyishly Irish Aleksey (Patrick Gibson). 

      With him, naturally, Natalya falls in love,  deeply envious of his romping friendship with young Vera and therefore tempted by the embittered peasant-bred doctor to marry the kid off to Bolshitsov (another little comic masterpiece by Michael Hodgson, goodness they’re all having fun,  no boring walk-ons in this play).  

       Poor old Michel sees all this, being the least deluded of them all and knowing he’s stuck in friend-zone forever with Natalya.   Arkady sees hardly anything at all until late on, since the winnowing-machine is malfunctioning and takes up his attention.  Sometimes internal struggles are expressed by audible voices from within Natalya or Michel: filmically odd but effective. 

         It is all wickedly entertaining (sometimes verging on Jilly Cooper for social observation and inappropriate desires),  and played beautifully,  broad helpless audience laughs alternating with real sympathy (“Am I unhinged?” cries Okonedo more than once) . There’s a real kite.  And every shade of human love:  erotic or familial,  habitual and tolerant, dominating and manipulative,  irrational and gloriously   transformative,  discreditable, from the tutor starstruck bonkers.  And, from  the doctor to the snuff-sniffing spinster Lizaveta,  an excellent down-to-earth growl about sometimes just making the best of it all , settling for a “bitter angry crawling peasant” rather than a bossy madam.   Glorious. Get in! 

donmarwarehouse.com  to 4 October

rating 5