Monthly Archives: October 2026

A WILD DECEPTION

  Solemnly, a great dark chime summons a ring of black-cloaked figures, pleading forgiveness, singing of disgrace,  circling round a stack of peasant props – tables, stools, brooms, hayforks.   The cloaks are flung off,  garlands thrown, penitence turns to a wedding celebration. If you’re in  a late-booked £34 stage stall, threateningly close,  the sense of passionate village primitivisim is overwhelming.

    It continues so for 95 tense minutes, with all the wild-sung passion that its creators Claude-Michel Schonnberg and Alain Boublil brought to Les Miserables.   It is the story, supposedly true,  of a young man married against his will to Bertrande, unable to consummate it and so blamed  for bringing Satan’s curse of drought on the town.  He runs away,  is (we think) killed in battle – suddenly banners in the dim light and flying –   but  an army friend returns seven years on, claiming Martin Guerre’s identity and having children by Bertrande  (it’s raining by now: beautiful choreography of relief and gratitude).   But will the deceit endure,  as ‘Martin’s status and property increase?

  Some have found this half-forgotten, often-revised, now cleverly tightened  musical both absurd and overwrought.  But I – since this is my antepenultimate review on theatrecat –  was more than ready to be overwrung.

    I had nipped in out of sheer faith in Matthew Warchus , whose swansong as AD of the Old Vic this is,  and my faith was well rewarded.   The semi-staged,  in-the-round lighting and Lizzie Gee’s fabulously primitive, emotional mass choreography evoking mob rule  do some of the work, the ferocious music still more.   Only occasionally does it fall into lovely lyricism , Fantine-style,  with songs like Someday :   Shane O”Riordan is passionately strong as the second Martin,  Liv Andrusier  deeply touching as Bertrande, the real victim in all this, treated as cursed for seven years and then suddenly a beloved wife and mother, provided she believes it’s him.   Colin Ryan as the village simpleton carries a weird turnip-doll puppet, adding still more unease and cruel hope and confusion;    the stern local priest and the judge who presides over a breathtaking trial scene complete a picture of community, melodrama, passion and desperate humanity hard to resist.

  And very French. Somehow, after watching the  double De Gaulle films and the riots across France on the news,  quite a lot of my French convent early-childhood washed over me afresh, cowering happily in my stage-stall.  This reaction may,  compared to others’ more judicial verdicts, be extreme.  But I loved every minute, and thank you Mr Warchus, again…]

Oldvic.com to oct 31

rating  5 mice , because mice too like an emotional hit.

THE TURBULENT PRIEST REMEMBERED

  Sharp of AD Tom Littler,  during the renovation of his theatre opposite, to direct (with Francesca Ellis) this gloriously set,  candle-rich production in the already spectacular Victorian-Gothic church of St John the Divine,  just opposite the theatre itself.  Quite brave, too, as well as darkly topical,  to stage T.S.Eliot’s dense, intense and frankly overwritten verse-drama about the 1170 assassination in Canterbury Cathedral of  Henry II’s “turbulent priest” Thomas a Becket.  It is Grecian in style, a great chorus of Women of Canterbury throughout, drifting,moving together in pale shabby robes ,sometimes speaking in chorus, sometimes singing (Orlando Gough writes a new score).  They express from the start the huge unease of the sacreligious murder to come,  mourning the seven years of their beloved Bishop’s exile:

“There is no safety in the cathedral. Some  presage of an act which our eyes are compelled to witness, has forced our feet towards the cathedral. We are forced to bear witness..”

      They talk of the seasons, the farms, labour and mud and quiet firesides; carry candles up and down the long steel-grey  aisle between us lined with low blue lights.  After after the killing they mourn and scrub, scrub away the blood, seeking some sense in the horror.  It is a beautiful chorus in movement, music and expressive gestures: its people as women symbols of the helpless of all ages who can only wait  for the next horror.   But, if I must be frank.  their sections could do with a bit of cutting.

  Never mind.  At the heart of it, and magnificently,  is David Suchet as Becket. Noble, old, calm and – delightfully – a warm and pastoral bishop, bending close and reassuring to the crowd,  drier, wittier and more practical and determined than the three priests around him. He is deeply touching in the Christmas sermon entr’acte as the second, violent half begins, aware as he says that it may be his last sermon.     Before this we have seen him suffer four temptations,  figures gliding towards him from a darkness at the centre the bright gilded altar-space,  each with a great drumbeat (the drum is wonderful throughout). They offer   alternatives to his refusal defy secular power when it interferes in matters of faith:  there’s a fascinating essay in the programme by Rowan Williams about the 1935 setting and the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer under Hitler, by the way.   Eliot’s four temptations are perennially topical:  either leave well alone and knuckle under,  or become Chancellor again and have temporal power,  or else  join in the barons’  political rebellion.  Or, the fourth is the subtlest,    hold fast and seek a martyr’s crown for glory:   “doing the right thing for the wrong reason”. In the age of suicide-bomber glorification, that ought to sting hard, though God knows it’s hardly the Orange Tree’s demographic.   But the drama is strong, and Suchet’s reaction to these (quite long, wordy) tempter speeches is immaculately expressive.

  With the knights striding in, leather-coated, yobbish and vicious in the second half, the tension rises.  Dozens of candles flicker in the sacred dimness ,bright points along the aisle, crowded in the sanctuary under the great gold cross.   When Becket cries “Unbar the door!” at the end you gasp.  When he affirms “it is the just man who, like the lion, should be without fear”,  you see him tremble nonetheless,  a simple human body facing shining swords.

    But the most effective passage of all is to come:  suddenly in brighter light the four killers emerge, civil and besuited and utterly modern whether in 1935 or right now,  to explain in the format of a corporate press conference how hard it has been for them. That weren’t paid for it or anything,  and may for good reasons have to go abroad in exile while King Henry denies any involvement for good political reaons.  And how the complex politics and seditious populace made it, in fact , the proper and most responsible thing to do for the sake of the country. Even though Becket was, “after all, a great man” deserving of respect the problem was that his  “unsound mind”  making their killing of him, well,  virtually a suicide.  He did after all, unbar the door..

    It is so brilliantly topical that you gasp.  And it would have been magnificent if the chairman had dismissed us, as he does the women,  “disperse quietly to your homes, be careful not to loiter in groups  and do nothing that might provoke any public outbreak”.  That would have made it…a happening.

      But, faithfully, the production keeps the last section,  priests and chorus maudering about the enduring Church and its future (which include the crusades, with trips to lands of “blackamoors’ with “filthy rites”),.  More again too from the women-of-Canterbury,  praying and begging prayers for weakness and trespasses.  Authentic,  but I longed to go out thinking more, and savagely, about the wonderful political speeches and self-satisfied fascism of the four murderous knights.   It’s a night to remember for a long time, though.  Travelling on to Theatre Royal Bath it won’t have quite the church setting, but it’s worth the trip. And Suchet is a marvel.

orange tree theatre  to 7 November

then Theatre Royal Bath,  10-21  November

This is the marvellous production from the Bridge Theatre, and I append my oroginal review below. But it’s worth recording how wonderful a second viewing is, in the rowdier, sometimes newer to it, West End. The audience around us felr different, less faithfulky Sondheimite perhaps, and a lot wuite young.

So today I will just add things I maybe didn’t make enough of: how funny the two princes are, how important and centring the presence of Michael S Seigal as narrator, the adult who tells the story but needs to learn the lesson, and what a glorious presence, cheeky and fed-up and determined, is Gracie McGonigal’s Red Riding Hood. And how gleefully, happily ‘hefted’ the enormous cast feel. It is really beautiful. I shall go again…

Original review holds: five mice, obvs!

     “The woods are lovely, dark and deep…” –  They certainly  are when designed by Tom Scutt .  And Jordan Fein’s glorious new production will,  I think, convert many a Sondheim-sceptic to go deeper into his ironic brilliant darkness and depth, at least for this show.   Every scene is a visual treat, evoking remembered childhood illustrations or Breughel paintings:  all is carefully lit by Aideen Malone with real thought and sense of pace and changing mood to match Mark Aspinall’s propulsive, exciting 12-piece orchestra.      

        Scutt also peoples his wood with fairytale-medieval costumes, done with just the right ironic exaggeration whether princely gilding or humble peasantwear.  We sit rapt, like children being told a folk-tale story, but at the same time like adults as the tales cross and re-cross and exasperate one another,   accepting the mess and inconclusiveness of real life.   We revel in Lapine and Sondheim’s taste for the weird wonder of human desires  – the common thread of wishes, quests, dubious heroisms and all perilous private journeys away from the hearth and into the woods.   The old  folk-tales knew how to bring thrill  and dread together, especially in the darker versions Disney and modern parental squeamishness leave out.   When Red Riding Hood and Grandma stump out of the cottage after being inside the wolf, or Cinderella’s sisters cut their toes off, in this show we know about it. 

       Fein also takes care to let each individual character flower (as he did in his memorable Fiddler on the Roof  which toured this year).  It is hard to pick out stars, because this ensemble is so well-knit,  and all of them achieve the peculiarly difficult trick of rattling through Sondheim’s rap-speed music as if they’d made it up on the spot in a fit of private passion, each inhabiting the character in full.  Kate Fleetwood is a memorable witch, Katie Brayben tough and touching as the Baker’s Wife alongside Jamie Parker as the anxious, scuttling, questing, gradually developing Baker.   As for the two princes – Oliver Savile and Rhys Whitfield – they are unspeakably funny in their delusional vulnerability in both halves. Chumisa Dornford-May’s wonderfully fed-up Cinderella  expresses her runaway doubts with glee.  Nice to see after the Jewish panto (scroll below) where Cinders also has her misgivings…   

      One can forget how funny many moments are in Sondheim’s  extraordinary piece,  because you leave thinking about the solemn messages of the final moments , of resolution and  the fact that  we need one another because frankly, it’s generally messy-ever-after and there’s always the Putin immensity of a Giant to face.  But Fein, always true to emotion,  never lets you forget that he’s in the entertainment business.   The encounter between Cinders’ prince and the Baker’s wife had gales of shockedly contented laughter all around me;  yet Rapunzel’s traumatized anger rings as uneasy as it should.    There are lessons here.  That  “We disappoint, we leave a mess”.   But children will listen, and adults learn…

     Well, I was a Sondheimite before,   but this beautiful production will make more converts.  

NOW at noel Coward Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, to 9 Jan

MAKING HAY

This had to be a short-run red hot sellout, didn’t it? Richard E Grant taking his air of wicked unreliable comedity back after 20 years tothe West End, while actually thrilling couch potatoes in Traitors. And it’s Hay Fever, the comedy of appalling boho-showbiz manners which Noel Coward pretended he wrote im tnree days but actually – as the great Soden biography reveals – was crafted and notebooked like a Swiss watch, every drop dead line and narcissistic fantasy worked with exasperated love.
Love not least of theatre : the thing to remember about Coward is that he was a child actor, a hard worker from a precarious background, no spoilt nepo but a longtime watcher and taker of notes about his theatrical confreres’ behaviour and relationships.
   So Judith Bliss, the diva matriarch, her wearily reclusive husband and their definitely spoilt young-adult kids have a reality beyond sitcom, all the funnier for his dry observation. And we all love watching people who are talented and successful but also ,frankly, a bit awful. And EmilyBurns’ cast is well fitted to express this . Chriatine Baranski, a Broadway Emmy star, was quite new to me: alongside the other almost aglow with glee at behaving the way hardworking actors rarely dare. It’s Baranski’s West end debut indeed. I rather took to her, admiring the definitely-older diva style and oldfashioned actressy RP accent. Some claim her vowels are too carefully-trained US but to me , with emories of 70 years, they actually felt retro: placing the play audibly as much as the sumptuous country house set places it, 1020s class nicely defined in the too- shiny brass and the Bliss family not having enough household staff or bathrooms. 
Baranski falls easily too into Judith Bliss’ melodramatic theatricality, w whether cooing in the “beautiful and kind” moment lampooned by her, joining the others in re enacting her  old parts or, in the diabolic second half, dragging the bewildered visitorsin. Coward achieves proper contemporary professional mockery too, in his relish of the imagined one where “you pretend to cheat at cards to save yourhusbands name”. Think Wilde and Bouciccault..
    Grant at first has little tomdo beyond stuming downstairs in a crumpled suit ccomplaining, but comes gloriously into his own as he is drawn into teasing the guests and the finaly furious row: glorious. And amid the other nicely cast and physicalllyand elegantly timed players here’s a bow to the matchless Charles Edwarda as the poor diplomat. The way his suit jacket it buttoned all the way ames your heart break for him when you realize heis fated to be alone with Judith in that lethal drawingroom. And who better than Nancy Carroll as Myra, the only guest who is up to them all?

Wyndhamstheatre.co.uk. to 12 dec