Category Archives: Theatre

UNDER AN ALIEN TREE

   The suffering and the pity of Gaza affects us all:  bitter division on the streets,  hysterical demonstrations feeding a violently rising antisemitism. And all across the Anglosphere a cultural undertow of competitive personal victimhood. 

       So how is it to be young and barely adult,  and Jewish, in London now? Sam Grabiner’s intense rackety play, driven along for nearly two unbroken hours by James MacDonald with a terrific cast, offers some insight.   Elliott – the matchlessly patriarchal grump Nigel Lindsay – is visiting his son and daughter and some of their ten housemates in one of those “guardianship” semi-squats,  an old industrial building with a noisy overhead heater blowing off at intervals. the Northern Line rumbling underneath and a wonderfully evocative description of how to find the lavatory, upstairs along metal corridors, through confusing doors and finally “ducking under a gantry.”

       It’s Christmas Day,  and it is Elliott who opens alone,  with scornful glaring suspicion of the lit Christmas tree (“it’s weird”) and telling a long story about a Cossack guard , a rabbi’s wisdom and a massacre.  This is interrupted by young Noah’s arrival, then his sister Tamara’s, as he comes to terms with their Gen-Z explanations of the company expected.  Like Jack, who they’ve known for years but who “goes by Aaron now”.

       “Is that” asks the older man suspciously “a gender thing? Sounds like a pronoun thing to me”.  Brilliant.    But no, we shortly discover that “Aaron” is back from time in Tel Aviv, and all for Israel in a cool, modern secular pride “I stand physically taller there”.

     This,  Tamara doesn’t go along with.  She has formed her own ideas about Jewishness in natural distress at the Gaza conflict  (several of the young start sentences with “did you see the news,?”).    In a tremendous ranting performance by Bel Powley  -over the group’s candlelit table loaded with Chinese takeaways,  she explains a mystical, almost Platonic-shadows idea that Judaism used to be spatially rooted but now in the diaspora is rooted in time, like Shabat observation , as God disperses himself in shards of light.   This theory morphs quite rapidly into questioning the right of Israel, and accusing it of  “importing Nazi ideology..WE ARE THE BAD GUYS NOW! . This in turn enrages Aaron, while her brother Noah and his quiet girlfriend Maud look on nervously,  and a random housemate Wren wanders through looking for drugs. At last Elliott suddenly rises from lying exasperated on the floor after too much Chinese food, and roars  “IT’S OURS! OURS! They [Palestinians] had their chance, what about Oslo, it’s OURS now!” 

     Tamara by the way is also culturally furious that they’re having Chinese on Christmas Day because that is what non-Jewish people always assume Jews do, “we’re Jew-minstrels!”    Noah at last goes into his own worries about who he is, or should be.  “Do you think the Covenant is real? We have lost God and replaced him with Woody Allen..Tottenham…anxiety… I sort of miss the pogroms”.   He is by this time not uninfluenced by some magic-mushroom liquor brought in Aaron’s luggage.

       It’s quite fast (though some of a n almost surreal later section could be dispensed with for a more thoughtful end).  Grabiner mostly writes sharply with a lot of wit,  and all the cast draw you into their characters and make you care.  But if you are not Jewish, believe me it will help to do as I luckily did .  Go with someone who not only is Jewish but has lived  steeped in recent experience of that particular North-London generation and its very young people’s angsts. Two generations away from the Holocaust, often actually prosperous and full of chances,  but haunted by that heritage,  tormented by the news, conflicted over Israel, and never quite confident in where they belong (but who is, at twenty?).    Well, my companion absolutely recognized the play’s truths and conversations,  and I certainly recognized and remembered that questing immaturity. 

     And don’t worry about the usual absurd list of trigger warnings: the nudity is very brief, as is the blood, dead fox, sexual behaviour and vomit.  As for the discussion of antisemitism, Islamophobia, drugs, abuse and bereavement that’s all stuff we need to talk about.   Not least the drugs, kids: magic-mushrooms and ketamine don’t  make it easier to think clearly about history, morality or human brotherhood,  do they?

Almeida.co.uk to 8 jan

Rating 3

DRINK DEEP OF GLORIUMPTIOUS FROBSCOTTLE

         The RSC holiday season show offers a rising generation  some proper theatrical wonder, away from banal screen CGI and avatar gaming – though it does use a modest share of projections from time to time. Children  love home-made miracles and here are plenty: puppetry both vast and tiny,  flying dreams made of light and blown into sleepers from a great horn, spectacular moments forcing you to see-yet-not-see the puppeteers.  It’s Roald Dahl’s gentlest and least resentful story, about  a girl’s friendship with a 25-ft giant.  The Big Friendly Giant – BFG –  means no harm but builds lovely dreams in his laboratory.  He is routinely bullied by bigger, 50ft giants,   with names like Bloodbottler, who prey on orphans. When he nervously kidnaps the firm-willed 8 year old  Sophie by accident, he is  persuaded to join her plot to give the Queen a nightmare which alerts her to use her power against the monsters.  

           It takes taste,  tact and heart to put it on stage,  and Tom Wells’ adaptation (directed by Daniel Evans and supreme puppetmeister/designer Toby Olie) achieves it. There is some slightly odd plotting in the first half when the Queen is suddenly introduced, delightfully surrounded by colourful footmen, without any warning mention of why; something which might baffle  newcomers to the book who just  want to know how Sophie is getting on.    But never mind; it becomes clear.  

       And importantly, John Leader is glorious.  He somehow has the perfect face for a simple-hearted giant, who trips over his words and invents grand new ones like wondercrump and gobblefunking; a chap often bullied, a bit nervous of being captured and put in a zoo, and who has never really had a friend.   The immense puppet-head is beautifully like him, and elegant transitions from scale to scale mean we sometimes see the real John Leader with a tiny puppet Sophie,  sometimes the towering puppet carrying or arguing with  the real Sophie.  The bad giants tower even higher,  so of course there are moments in the later jeopardy  when one of them,  played real-actor-size by Richard Riddell (nicely thuggish),   overshadows a puppet BFG as well as even smaller minipuppet humans.  Anyway, it all works beautifully.  The puppet operators are, rightly, given their full credits in the programme.

        Sophie  – on press night Ellemie Shivers – is a splendid part for a child RSC debut, being  bespectacled, firmly prosaic, scornful of adult inadequacies and always determined (facing death, she shrugs “I”m eight, I’ve had a good innings” and later when the Queen’s fraught soldiers catch her “I’m not scared. It’s not my first kidnapping”.)   She sees straight away that Leader’s sweet natured BFG with his uncertain, benign gestures and wobbling language is no problem but a chap who needs managing, so she does so.  She is equally exasperated, as we are entertainingly forced to be,  by the two khaki-clad military chiefs with asymmetric moustaches (providing a good ongoing joke) because they are obsessed with thinking  everything (even a cake) is a dangerous international assassin in disguise. They panic when the thumping giant footsteps are heard and shut the Queen up against her will “It’s a panic room, ma’am” “Well, it’s working!”she snaps.    

    What was oddly and peculiarly touching was the handling of this Queen (played by Helena Lymbery with great spirit).  She of course is the late Elizabeth II of Dahl’s 1975, in robust grey-permed middle age, a bit impatient with the butler and more so with the military.   It had to be her, for the story;  and watching Lymbery responding  to the girl and her giant , bored with flummery and and staring down the bossy soldiers,  I could only reflect that of course they couldn’t have moved the plot on to Charles and Camilla.  `Elizabeth II may be gone but  is still in our heads and instincts,  a personality, a necessity,  a reassurance. The Queen. 

       As it all resolves in happiness and a big breakfast (the BFG’s table is a billiard-table balanced on four grandfather clocks), there is the Dahl-invented outbreak of whizzpopper farting for all,  and one rather sly joke. The thuggish giants are imprisoned on a diet of foul snozzcumbers,  and told by HM   “it’s not a forever home, just a hole in the ground while we work something out”.  I know who that made me think about.

Rsc.org.uk. To. 7 feb

Rating 4 

I

CINDERELLA AND THE MATZO BALL.          JW3. , Finchley Rd

L’CHAIM !  TO LIFE,  AND PANTOMIME JOKES

    It’s not often that you get to hiss and boo Prince Charming,  but Nick Cassenbaum’s third magnificent foray into his  brand-new genre of Jewish panto reimagines him  as formerly Charminski:  Ronan Quiniou playing the hipswivelling and  petulant lord of a bankrupt kosher kingdom. His  mistake is to assume there’s money coming from hardworking Cinderella of the Breadzinsky bakery (Talia Pick, who beautifully sings along with various puppet-mouthed loaves). But as many have observed ever since Diana, the poor girl would always have done better with honest Buttons, oy vey!  . Another good joke on the old tale has Michael Cowan  as Charminski’s aide disgustedly  grumbling at being given a job “schlepping round the kingdom , touching FEET!”

        But these  are no spoilers, as I haven’t revealed anything about an unexpected identical twin, a giant menacing prawn, or how many of the massed school parties at the matinee clocked the artful circumcision joke (not many, they were small. Come evening there will be big laughs).  There’s a greatpleasure is in these school parties and the big family sense of it all.  Some are  orthodox in tiny hi-vis jerkins and small kippahs, some more secular.    My real Jewish companion – it helps to take one for explanations if you’re a baffled goy – was greatly amused by the way that when the very funny Ugly Sisters (Libby Liburd and Rosie Yadid)  decided to run off to the Land of Traif to be secular , only the most orthodox school booed her.    

       Another  joy of these JW3 pantos  is the merry willingness to include in the family-joke of it all a few quite cheeky refeences to the sacred, in a way Christian panto  doesnt much, and one suspects Islam , even if it did a panto,  wouldn’t at all. Like the character claiming to be a piece of bread but not at Pesach, because being unleavened would make her “terribly flat”. Or even better the slinky arrival at the Matzo palace ball of “Yolanda Yom- kippur, hoping to do something tonight she can atone for later”.  

        The music is terrific as ever,  led by Josh Middleton on accordion and trumpet (sometimes simultaneously, which is a good trick) , with Oliver Presman on tuba and trumpet and Migdalia Van Der Hoven on drums.  They draw entirely on Jewish  composers and legendary performers, with fanfares and snatches from Fiddler, Oliver and Cabaret , and at one point The King and I. A favourite  moment for me was Middleton with his accordion crooning “Fools rush in”. in basso Elvis style during the Prince’s wooing,  where a chat-up line as she flees for Shabbos midnight is “shall we  for a walk, study some Torah?”.  That made the adults behind me giggle a lot.

        It is all grand fun, and for all the sly oy-vey and pehpehpeh family jokes,  has all the panto essentials anyone could ask for: glass slippers, a magic punchbowl that punches you, Debbie Chazen on video as the fairy godmother making abominable bakery puns,  and added star-power in various  Jews at Ten bulletins crisply voiced by the real Emma Barnett:   aka Emma High Barnet / Friern Barnet / Barnet Bypass.  A big family show,  ready to laugh and scold.  I was for a while a bit worried that this latest JW3 panto had no bossy Jewish Mother to sort everyone out,  but then near the end there are three:  the misbehaving Prince haunted by terrifying ghosts of mother  and aunties threatening to pinch his cheeks. Perfect. The small children hooted at that. Mazel tov, all! 

Jw3.org.uk.        To 4 Jan

Rating five

JUST FOR KIDS? CONTRARIWISE!  WE ARE ALL ALICE

     In a fleeting moment of meta-theatre when the monstrous crow (well, umbrella) had the house shouting “Behind you!”,  Tweedleee grumpily cried “house lights! Everyone!  This is a serious adaptation of a classic , it’s not  a pantomime!”.  To which of course came the cry “Oh yes it is!”. 

       But actually, he was right, for all the panto merriment in it.   Joanna Carrick’s lively four-hander is just as Lewis Carroll would have liked it,  down to Georgia Redgrave’s perfect characterisation of Alice, a  keen-eyed polite yet argumentativeVictorian child confronted with an adult world of absurd, illogical, bossy yet easily-offended individuals. 

       For in all the best adaptations of both the Alice books, the fact that people happen to be caterpillars, rabbits, playing-cards and an egg  can never disguise their identity as grown-ups through a child’s lens.  Probably, given Dodgson’s reality, eccentrially Oxford grown-ups.   The chidlren around me – from teens down to a 7-month old baby thrilled throughout at the colours and music – clearly saw that  easily: Emily Jane Kerr’s irritable Humpty Dumpty is everyone’s pedantic pompous teacher, Alec Murray’s Hatter the entertaining but unreliable uncle prone to lead a chorus of “Where did you get that hat?”,  Joseph Russell’s Dormouse, emerging blearily from a giant teapot with a long mad story about the treacle-well,  is any of us attempting an impromptu bedtime story with an uncooperatively questioning child. As for Jabberwocky, the frumious bandersnatch is every scary football in human life…

        Kerru, Murray and Russell of course are all the other characters too, starting out as a rabbit jazz-cabaret and morphing elegantly into the rest with the assistance of Katy Latham and Betty Read’s designs, against a charmingly furnished nursery) .  Indeed one joy of such productions is that while being good fun for us adults,  when you see them as a child  their obvious ingenuities encourage the conviction that yeah,  you can go home and put on a show yourself, with tablecloths,  upside-down chairs and  home-made cardboard hats! Anyone can!    That this revelation  is a boon in the age of the children enslaved to the screen and smartphone cannot be overstressed.

     So the two hours including interval pass with joy all round, some very good jokes (no wonder the poor Cheshire cat gets a hairball trying to describe the March Hare) and some cracking new songs – not least the chorus in which all rapidly joined of the flamenco Red-Queen going it large with a lyric of  “Paella, FAjita, enchilada!” while throwing around her red skirts.  But we’re in Victoriana: tradition matters, so there’s where-did-you-get-that-hat reprised,  and Bumps a Daisy and other fine snatches from our common ancestry.  

    Moreover – and some would have wantd to start with this original element, but literary enthusiasm overtook me:   Redgrave’s Alice is also a gymnast and aerialist. She  quite frequently upside down in a hoop overhead or doing a somersault or handstand with aplomb.  As a lively child would wish. Bravo! 

www.redrosechain.com   to 4 Jan 

HELLO AGAIN SAILORS

    This is one of ENO’s beloved triumphs,  the one which got some of us through the latter Covid years in frivolous merriment.  For back in gloryIn 2021 I saw Cal Mc Crystal’s larky, spectacular production  twice, with Les Dennis bravely – and triumphantly – taking the singing role as the First Lord. This time the celebrity bolt-on is Mel Giedroyc, with only one sung line but a lot of sub-panto larking around , both as the cabin boy and as a rogue amid the sisters-and-the-cousins-and-the aunts.  But the merriment of the production is the same,  under the exuberant conduction of Matthew Kofi Waldren.  Moreover, Henna Mun, from the lastest crop of ENO Harewood Artists, is a lovely Josephine: fine voice, naturally, but also a good physical wit.  And the booming Neal Davis is the FIrst Lord, with a bass bounce  to savour afterwards.   

     And , to my particular delight , once again John Savournin is Captain Corcoran:  he capers on like a nimble blue spider and leads his horpipe  tap with an irresistible air of mournful responsibility.   Thomas Atkins is an irresisble Ralph Rackstraw too, especially when caught escaping  and forced to listen to the tremendous “To be an Englishman!” chorus in a huge crinolin with his hair in bunches,  while a  giant Union flag falls from overhead and a figure of  Boris Johnson flies past on a zip-wire. 

     Indeed there are all McCrystal’s borderline- silly physical jokes – which do get slightly frowned upon by G and S purists like my companion, though she got over it when Savournin did his hornpipe.   There’s  the magnificent revolving ship appearing to confuse the captain and cause a third unexpected chorus;  there’s Buttercup falling over the rail,   Dick Deadeye interfering with the love duet by shooting down an albatross in the background,  and various other reasons to keep a sharp eye on whatever the tars might be up to above and behind the more romantic scenes.  McCrystal has done wonders for us new-converts to Gilbert & Sullivan,  just as Sasha Regan did , in a smaller-scale but equally disruptive spirit witht the chaps.  This, by the way, is a link to my carefully versified moment of truth about the genre, back in 2014..

   But meanwhile, off to ENO for a Christmas treat… 

www.londoncoliseum.org         to 7 ‘feb

A GHOSTLESS DICKENS TREAT FOR CHRISTMAS 

This is wonderful: a three-hander adaptation by Abigail  Pickard Price, with the Guildford  Shakespeare Company. They’re well up to the new-vaudeville  style of the 1980’s  Reduced Shakespeare, only with better costumes.  Three deft, fast-moving actors play everybody, with instant hat-swopping and the hurling on and off of gowns and frock-coats. Surprisingly elaborate ones: I still don’t quite see how Luke Barton’s Peggoty becomes Ham becomes Micawber and becomes Ham again so fast, what with Mr Dick to handle meanwhile. Though Mrs Steerforth’s outfit is so vast it looks as if Barton was able to step into it from behind in a second.  Nor do I know for sure  – only Louise Beresford can – whether Uriah Heep’s dark clerical trouserings were there all the time under poor doomed Emily’s wafting seablue gowns.  When things are really hectic,  a character’s brief appearance can be as a hat, and Murdstone is a coathanger, though his jacket’s arm can suddenly throttle David.  But the quick-change of personality and gender is, as always, enlivening.  And adaptor-director PIckard Price has at her side Amy Lawrence the  as movement director: it shows. 

      But what is particularly fine about  this production, what makes it in the end as engrossingly moving as Dickens would wish, is that of the three only one – Eddy Payne – is required to do a wholly sincere,  consistently credible emotional performance, while Beresford and Barton dart round him in spurts of brilliant character-acting.   Payne  grows from the scared, naive, wondering young  David  to a confident young man, a gentle appreciator of Mr Dick (one of the nicest portrayals of mental incapacity in literature). Then he is lovesick , becoming an affectionate but impatiently struggling husband  to the terrible “childwife” Dora, and finally a weary, responsible figure at the heart of the legal-circus-chaos of Micawber and Spenlow and Wickfield and Heep and the ruined Miss Trotwood. I swear that during this latter process, a bravura final quarter of the show,  the once-boyish Mr Payne actually grew a grey hair or two. 

    So his solo David anchors the story – the text is Dickens treated with Ming-vase care – while the drama surges around him. It has the same feel as Ianucci’s brilliant recent film of the book: a whole England flows around it, vivid and perilous and absurd .  Barton’s big Micawber speech, delivered over the top and far down the other side, is a great delight.  So was remembering bits I had forgotten over the years since reading it:   – the demise of Mr Spenlow (startlingly evoked in two seconds, theyre very deft with props) and the existence of old Mrs Steerforth and her confrontation with Emily. Splendid. Memorable. It really ought, given where David Copperfield was born and Peggoty lived,  to come to Suffolk and `Norfolk very soon..Meanwhile, just go. 

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 20 December.

Then Theatre royal Windsor , then  Holy Trinity Church, Guildford

rating 5 (and a costume-design mouse for Neil Irish, because that quick change stuff doesnt come easy….

LADIES WHO LURCH

The Lord Chamberlain took a bit of handling to let this play’s louche  presumptions of extramarital liaisons be flaunted onstage: and one public morality campaigner shouted from the box at its premiere when he did let its suggestion of female sex-before-marriage creep pas them .  It shows us two wives of ten settled years’ standing, their dull safe amiable husbands off playing golf in Chichester, being stirred to romantic panic by the impending visit of  a Frenchman  – Maurice! – who had flings with each of them before their marriages.  Fred and Bill once briskly dispatched to the golf, the women spend the day and evening agonizing over whether to run away from temptation, or confront their old lover with virtuous assurances that they love their husbands even though the grand passion has settled to “happiness and tranquillity devoid of all violent emotions outside golf”   

    As memory unrolls and faint half-acknowledged rivalries surface –  there’s Pisa, Venice, and a deeply regretted row over a salami sandwich –  they move between maudlin and yearning nervousness, and at one stage Coward gives us a tour de force of pas-devant the servants non-sequiturs while  the maid (we’ll come to her, oh yes)  serves a four course dinner at which they plan to be elegantly surprised by the man’s arrival:  a performative “sistahs before mistahs” assurance to him that they’re well over him, oh yes.  .This   bonding, quarreling, and reckless drinking lasts through the bravura first half – Janie Dee and Alexandra Gilbreath well up to it –  with not a man in sight.  Then in the brief second  half all three baffled or artful males are on stage to hear  a number of truths, accusations and lies, and each more or less say their piece.  

        Grand holiday fare for stressed couples, it comes in under two hours with interval, a squib which isn’t, admittedly, one of Noel Coward’s greatest or most-revived plays (though the two Hermiones did it in 1949…!)    It is, on the other hand, rich in his trademark scenes in which overwrought  people in 1930s polite-society  get furiously impolite to each other over classy silverware and crystal and- as a bonus – are effortlessly outclassed by their servants.  The maid Saunders – Sarah Twomey – at first seems a bit wooden but then shows how much of it is a deliberate front: she has worked in grander places than this, knows more about golf than the master plays the piano far better than the mistress, and delivers a lovely balletic interlude while tidying-up, courtesy of her time “With the Ballet Russe”. Twomey also deploys a most pleasing talent for a straight face, not easy round the rising chaos of alcohol, anxiety and rising animosity once Galbreath kicks her shoes off…

     It’s a squib all right, but in Christopher Luscombe’s fine production  it has Janie Dee,  and Dee never fails to enhance one’s evening.  She is Julia,  the more self-contained and intelligent of the pair, and deploys in her face every level of Confident hauteur, bafflement, desire for an even keel through life alongside an instinct to capsize it.  Gilbreath’s Jane is a perfect foil, more immediately emotional about the possibility of Maurice re-entering their lives with his moustache and big eyes and shining teeth and the way he kissed your hand while looking up adoringly.

      The comedy of the picture of they paint of this superb cicisbeo  is enhanced by our earlier glimpse of both balding husbands in fairisle jumpers, long socks and golfing knickers. When they reappear for the conclusiom, Christopher Hollis and Richard Teverson nobly mask any natural erotic fascination they own in magnificent layers of unerotic husbandliness, rising only briefly to outrage about how wives should be repentant. And to the agreement, when he finally and fleetingly appears, that Duclos seems a good chap.  He is Graham Vick, worth it for the accent and moustache alone .

menierchocolatefactory.com  to 21 feb 

rating 4

  A BEAR WHO DESERVES HIS STATION

    This could have been awful ,  a desecration of the children’s favourite which became a national icon of reassurance when he sat down to tea with the late Queen.  But Jessica Swale’s book, tweaked from the originals and the first film, full of self-referential jokes,  and larded with Christmas jokes (“I’m a taxi driver not a taxidermist!” , is teamed with songs by Tom Fletcher of McFly. And the whole is held as firmly as any beloved old teddy by Luke Sheppard’s fast, mischievous direction.  He is not known for musicals, except Starlight Express at Wembley, but knows absolutely what to do: keep it moving, keep it singing and larking around  with dance and slapdash on a stage massed with objects (Mr Gruber’s curio shop) and zap us with spectacular projections by Tom Pye of Totoro fame.  Make you think it might go wrong, but never let it…

        But you want to know about the bear?  It is beyond brilliant. I suspended all disbelief.  Of course a 3 ft 6 bear can talk and sing. He is in fact Arti Shah (or an alternate Abbie Purvis) in a bear-suit,  deploying – this is real skill -wonderfully expressive body-language from mischief to hard stare to worried pathos.  But his head and jaws are being operated by remote puppetry from offstage by the singer, James Hameed (or Ali Sarebani)  who at first appears just behind the bear,  as a baffled scruffy arrival at Paddington:  it is, after all, a refugee tale.   The result of performance and puppetry is complete suspension of doubt.  You love him and believe him. Seriously.  The puppetry is immaculate.   

       As to the songs, they rock along: the Don’t Touch That is masterful slapstick as the bear wrecks half the house and the set dangles a bathtub through the ceiling and Adrian der Gregorian as Mr Brown panics;  Victoria Hamilton-Barritt deploys fabulous contralto evil as the predatory taxidermist with her “pretty little dead things” (is this going to put children off the Natural History Museum?)  and in the second half the Marmalade song is a wonder of singalong enthusiasm. 

       Plenty of laughs:  Bonnie Langford in her seventies is a perfect sassy old  Mrs Bird, splits and cartwheel and all,  and Tom Edden as a repentant Mr Curry handles drop-dead ironic lines like  “to make Paddington into a tourist attraction? Who would DO that?”   Perfect.   The only flaw in the whole thing is perhaps the “Geographers’ Guild” idea and numbers, with a shrilly woke passage decrying museum collections – “leave things where they ought to be”.  Which is a bit rich when you’re celebrating putting a wild Peruvian bear in a blue duffle-coat….

     But that’s the only culpable silliness which knocks off a fifth star.  It’s a blast.  

thesavoytheatre.com   to end of 2026 and probably almost forever…

GRIEF, GUILT, CONSCIENCE

     A great bright disc of moon overhangs the old tree in the storm, as it falls in the tumult of sound that could be war.   It’s 1948:  Arthur Miller’s America scarred by the losses of war.    Sometimes the big will be the sun over the Kellers’ morning garden where bluff old Joe teases the neighbour’s kid , joshes with his son Chris, and winces at the flakey neighbour . The latter is doing a “horoscope” requested by Joe’s wife to see whether the day their pilot son Larry disappeared off the China coast was a “fortunate” one: she believes he will reappear.  Because she says “certain things can never happen. Things cannot be”.   As Chris observes, her unresolved limbo of grief strands the family,  “like a railroad station waiting for a train that never comes in.  It matters, because he has invited Annie,   his brother’s old girlfriend, and wants to marry her   It also matters that Annie’s father, former partner in Joe’s engineering business, is still in prison for supplying cylinder-heads, faulty but disguised,  to the USAF  and 21 pilots died.  Joe was exonerated, and over them all hangs the possibility that he shouldn’t have been. 

            It’s a fierce play, straightforwardly devastating, the situation in it  based on true events.  The  gradual steps to its conclusion subtly written, its message immense: about conscience and commerce, grief and responsibility and the human capacity to varnish over terrible truths and see them emerge worse.   Chris, himself a soldier, speaks for the total sacrifice of responsbility to fellows – guys who “killed themselves for each other.”  That his father fell short of that sober duty to all humanity,  boasting that Larry never flew one of the afflicted P40 jets,  is an unease he feels even as, sweetly, he and Annie declare themselves.   How much the wife, KAte Keller, knows we cannot be too simply told.

    I had some fears about the production, having been properly moved to tears six years ago by Jeremy Herrin’s production,  because Ivo Van Hove, as a director, either gives you something wonderful or something downright annoying, and I feared trusting him with Miller’s fierce moral straightness.  But his View from the Bridge was brilliant, and here he plays it straight,  only two brief visual coups-de-theatre, the first of which – the entry of Annie’s brother George  – knocks you sideways.    Bryan Cranston is wonderful casting as Joe : the joshing, amiable leading-citizen,  boss at the big plant,  still doing well with washing-machine bits, self-persuaded in his guiltlessness about the day poor nervous Steve sent off the lethal faulty parts. Yet in Miller’s diabolically brilliant text, he also emits such a man’s ability to project guilt on another: pure politician.   His final disintegration is horrifying;  but no more so than the rage of Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Kate when she learns the full truth about Larry,   or the explosion of Paapa Essiedu’s Chris – a remarkable performance throughout  –  with the line that howls down all the decades.  the great cry that we should all be “Be Better!”.  

     There were some silent, unsteady steps among the audience as we left.  This play can do it, and Van Hove treated it with the respect it should have for all time. 

delfontmackintosh.co.uk   to 7 march

ABSURD, TRANSCENDENT, JOYFUL

       Forget Ancient Greece and the films inspired by the suitors of royal Parthenope, this is Handel in comic-opera mood (one can’t always be writing Zadok or Messiah). He hurled himself cheerfully into the absurd, and Christopher Alden’s  joyfully barking-mad  production from 2008 throws itself further still.  Right into 1920s Paris absurdism, the world of Dali and Picasso and the photosurrealist Man Ray.: the latter wanders on before anyone, with camera and light and   sunglasses peering gloomily through a rectangular sheet of paper stuck to his face. He shortly becomes Emilio, the invader-suitor.  

     It starts in, on or under a great sweeping white staircase, suitably Deco and just right for the countertenor Jake Ingbar as Armindo   to fall  down, rolling slo-mo, and to hang off the banisters by one leg  while lamenting the torments of Cupid and the  fierce embers of thwarted passion, while of course never missing a note.   His rival Arsace – a nicely gloomy Hugh Cutting –  is having more luck with the queen, though constantly reproved by Prince Eurimine, who is actually his betrayed loved Rosmina in disguise (Katie Bray) ; and by Nardus Williams’ magnificent, slinky Parthenope herself:   the kind of 1920s queen who prays to the god Apollo while lying half on a poker-table .  To   complicate the artsy bohemian atmosphere laced with crossed love- stories, William Thomas’ bass Ormonte in an unforgivable beard at one point thunders out a martial air while peeling a banana and – skilful timing here – getting a couple of bites of it down him during  a few bars rest.

        Emilio arrives with his camera, adds a slightly rude triangle to the scrawled Picasso lines done on the wall by a despairing suitor a few minutes before,  and lays them all out corpselike  in the floor,being sure to rearrange Armindo’s  leg as a good surrealist photographer would.  As he departs, the felled quartet deliver a musical squabble from this position, before Rosmina sings a hunting song while the curtain blows wildly and Armindo has more trouble with the stairs.

        Roll your eyes if you must, at both the glorious prodigality of opera itself and at 1730’s broad notion of Cupid’s arrows : every cry of despair,  adoration or rage is a thing of poetic wonder:  soaring and sweeping , every melodious trill and slide and Handelian swoop sung with apparent birdlike ease over music rising warm from the pit.  The cast are musical athletes every one,  showpiece after showpiece sparkling with feeling and a bright, precise Enlightenment orderliness transcending the absurdities of story and action.  

        By the second act all are in top hats and tails, giving way to nightwear as their confusion increases.  Even when Emilio (Ru Charlesworth) is trying to escape from a lavatory through the fanlight while singing of the despair of the vanquished;  even when Arsace taking refuge in the same facility festoons himself in bog-roll and Man Ray Emilio carries on with his giant photomontage;  even when Rosmina is down to her sock-suspenders,  the music throws its unrelenting serious enchantment at us.  

    As for the third act, hardly had I scribbled the line “operatic vaudevillians” and reflected that all it needed now was a tap-dance break, when Armindo obliged with one,  melodiously assured as ever, and departed on a cartwheel.  Oh, and Ormonte had a brief blast on a kazoo before emerging as duel-master in crinoline and spiked helmet.  The  famous denouement brings  two contradictory morals – that contentment can only be found in calm,  but that life is boring without Cupid’s pains and joys.

         It’s a riot, a great treat,  three and a half hours long, and I would not have missed a minute.   Honour to the conductor Christian Curnyn, who stormed through the first act before being unwell and replaced at short notice for the rest by the equally storming,  hugely applauded William Cole.   None of the nonsense, I swear, took any of the dignity from the music.  And sprinting towards the late bus,  I kept reflecting that it is , if you think about it,   among the best qualities of humanity to find beauty in the ridiculous, and consoling peace  and orderly reflection in sorrow and confusion.  See? Both philosophical satisfaction and a counter-tenor rolling downstairs mid-aria.  What the hell more do you want?

eno.org.    five more performances before 6 December.  

   A VERY CIVIL CRIME

Meet Robert, a retired barrister, working in a charity shop as we meet him, cautiously sniffing trousers and appreciating candelabras.  Nothing unusual there in a rural Suffolk town. Nor is it unusual for such a chap to reminisce about his life, work, schooldays enemy Pilkington, small love affairs and Judy, the girl he brought home who wasnt “good enough for the house” or for him.  So he married dull golf ‘n yachting Elizabeth, for a bit, and two offspring

  . . Only as it turns out, what Robert really wants to tell us is that he is a criminal. He did a serious crime. 

   And so, tantalizingly we see Michael Fenton Stevens as Robert cheerfully recounting the twists and turns in an irreproachable  upper-middle  life. We learn the significance of Uncle Geoffrey, an unspiritual view on yoga, and why a plastic  dustpan can alert a man to the need for stern action.  And to a court appearance,  involving legal disagreement over whether some crimes are more excusable if they involve a detached house. 

  Jon Canter’s elegant little play takes us all the way to the preposterous yet alrmingly probable . And to sympathy with Robert because we all know several Roberts…

   A delicate little gem of observation, mockingly affectionate and beautifully performed. Enjoy! 

Thecut.org.uk. On sat 22 nov

AN INNOCENCE OF WITCHES 

        A brand-new musical always stirs hope, especially when we’re promised  voices like Gabrielle Brooks (magnetically magnificent as Rita in Get Up Stand Up).   This storming woman-power show by Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute  has been selling out hard for weeks: its triumphantly rackety “You burn our bodies, but we’ll burn down your society” keeps popping up online(though believe me, until you see a chorus of condemned witches hurling it at you through a sheet of flame you haven’t trembled half enough, Mr Patriarchy). 

         Miranda Cromwell directs with ferocious pace, one number after another never overlong , each one pushing ahead with relentless storytelling energy.   Brewer and Chute seem to scorn the idea of getting pegged down in a musical genre,  and move between wild bluesy laments, a couple of touchingly folky songs with big dark drumbeats about the 17c commoners whose livelihood was stolen by enclosures,  and one purely riotous music-hall number. That latter one expresses envious male dread of penis-snatching witches who,  with pettish resentment,  the men feel “would rather fuck the devil than go to bed with you!” .  

        It’s about the 17th century Witch-hunts , which is right on trend, unsurprisingly considering our fresh-born tendency to harass one another about anything from Gaza to gende: cancelling is the modern curse  and  trolling our stake or gallows.    Apart from regular revivals of THE CRUCIBLE we have this year had the tense, personal, intimately brilliant THE UNGODLY (which travelled from Ipswich and Southwark to Brits-on-Broadway). and the more diffuse  A TRYAL OF WITCHES at Bury st Edmunds. Both were based on the East Anglian 17c trials. Now   it’s Lincolnshire for the famous Pendle witch-trials,   and like the others is well researched ,  imagining  victims  drawn from individual records.   At its its heart is  the authors’ discovery that in 1633  one Jenet (or Janet) Device was accused of witchcraft by a boy of eleven. Child witnesses were often used to point the finger at rural women who were poor, old, odd or simply adept at herbal medicine.  But then they found the same name, Janet Device, recorded 21 years earlier in 1612,  as a child witness whose testimony hanged her mother and sister.

        So they imagine, terrifyingly, the adult Jenet thrown into prison, meeting a group of fellow-victims, trying to believe that her child self told the truth,  struggling to declare her pious, religious innocence .  She learns their stories:  a midwife, a healer, a pregnant victim of a landowner, whose own wife had a stillbirth and was accused of bewitching the baby .  The language is modern (at one point the corrupt warder swings out with “Laters, you dirty old slags”) and at first that feels a bit Cell Block H predictable.  But deftly the stories and situations develop: Martha (an impressive Penny Layden) has signed her confession and is off to the gallows, hoping her pregnant daughter Rose (Lauryn Redding) can thus be freed.   Frances (Shiloh Coke with an immense, passionate, almost terrifying bluesy-belter voice) delivers a memorably enormous rage. At the core of it is Gabrielle Brooks as Jenet, who is superb,  but all the cast are very fine: some  becoming ensemble onstage musicians,  all radiating energy to power a city.   Not least when they suddenly become judges, lawyers or bearded clerics studying Malleus Malefictorum, the witchfinding manual, and opining that “when a woman thinks, alone, she thinks evil!”.   Rosalind Ford even neatly transforms for a few quick lines into  King James himself,  the chief enthusiast for witchfinding. As I say, director Cromwell keeps things moving. 

        The second half takes us  out of the prison and into the past,  as Jenet meets and watches a very good puppet of herself as a small child. She is in a poor common-farming family – the sense of healthy earthiness is lovely – but  is  being creepily groomed into giving her nonsensical evidence .  Puppetry direction is by Laura Cubitt (whose work I last saw making a 20ft-tall Hamlet’s Father convincing for Red Rose Chain).  The idea of this flashback, suitably hippie-witchy, is that the healer-midwife in the prison group has put Jenet into a trance so she can relive, and forgive, the terrible thing she did in denouncing her family.  It could be cheesy  but isn’t; we are by that time gripped,  men in the audience as spellbound as anyone, finally cheering manically at the great chorus.  The resolution of the women’s stories – grim for most, as it was in real life – is well handled: there’s defiance and hope and even humour.   There are good reasons this show is selling so fast.

www.kilntheatre.com   to 17 Jan.   

Rating 4

NOT AT ALL A DRAG…

Candy-coloured prettiness frames a 1890s world,  of bored girls in flounces longing for escape from guardians,  lovesick young men not averse to heiresses, and a powerful but problematical lady of mature years .No, not Oscar Wilde’s evergreen Earnest: this is the broader and once beloved contemporaneous comedy by Brandon Thomas.  Being a bit lower down the class scale – a city clerk –  he had even more reason to laugh at the idle rich.  So, desperate for a chaperone in order further their suits, in his original the lads get a male friend Fancourt Babberley to play Charley’s aunt from Brazil…

    Being in the vicinity and always up for the inventive Watermill, I was curious to see whether in our jntemperate age of gender-police, MtF drag  – bloke in a frock – could still be funny for its own sake.    Late to the party, as I ws away, but a week left of performances,  so felt it worth mentioning to anyone who can get to the Watermill and has a taste for not only half-forgotten cultural oddities but for reflection  – without the endemic hostilities and tantrums – on the notion of “queer theory” and its social history. 

    For Rob Madge – who wrote the engaging show My Son’s a Queer But  What Can You Do – has tweaked this Victorian joke with modern glee, changing the emphasis to make the girls the plotters , and Babberley their uncle’s butler.  In an estimable spirit of just having good fun, the adaptor offers plenty of other twists and gags, adds  exuberant 21c swearing, gen-Z fist bumps and jargon,  and knowing jokes on Victorians themselves. The four young people and their elders dart around with gleeful absurdity, and Max Gill  as Babbs plays it with a dragqueen dryness  which wars with the real feelings of a chap who only blossoms in costume and the mystery of gender-switch. Indeed the play ends with more than a nod to the i-am-what-I-am motto of La Cage Aux Folles, and sharp clear reference to what would really have awaited Babbs and the sex-adjusted paramour he finds in the denouement.

    But the point is that it’s fun, full of fine silliness alongside the undercurrent of lgbtq+ anger. They’re all exuberantly in it though a special mention to Yasemin Özdemir”s Kitty for top eyebrow ‘n ankle work.

      Looking up the play’s history I feel I should share with you that Charley’s Aunt was made in the Soviet Union in 1975,  in China in 2015, and that Indian versions like Moruchi Mavshi have been performed ever since 1947.  I would give quite a lot to see any of them , and work out how much queer-theory they relate it to…

watermill.org.uk  to 15 Nov

INNOCENCE, WICKEDNESS , RAGE

    Ti Green’s set is ,at first, a gilded wonder of dignified curves and arches, palatially spectacular when filled with the red robes of the Duke and senators.  But – as a pleasing surprise once the Cyprus war  begins – those  very curves and arches will shift , fly and veer to create a vigorous ballet of uncertainty and collapse against a stormy background. Their dignity gone: maybe a metaphor for what will happen to the Moor himself. 

       He of course is David Harewood, all man and all soldier. We meet him smart and assured,  hands behind his back and head  cocked intelligently as if at a military briefing ,  wholly confident during his arraignment by the senate and old Brabantio (the latter  amusingly emerges furious from a high box stage- left when Roderigo, puppet-run by Iago, wakes him with news of Desdemona’s elopement).    Harewood’s Othello is grippingly impressive,fluently passionate in his tale of how Desdemona had listened to his dangers and sufferings “and I loved her that she did pity them.”    He is laughing in his luck at winning her,  and Caitlin Fitzgerald, willowy and aristocratic , laughs with him in perfect accord like any happy girlfriend, young and naive and proudly thrilled to follow the drum. 

        It all feels fresh:  director Tom Morris has deliberately sets a tone of lightness and youth from the start, and the staging of the hard-partying soldiery – brawl and all – is brilliantly episodic as Iago orchestrates Cassio’s drunkenness with elegant deftness.   Luke Treadaway’s Cassio, healthily young and blithe,  is perfect to prefigure the later furious line from Iago about “the daily beauty in his life”. But the real wonder of this prdocution is Toby Jones’  Iago.   Shorter, stumpier than the leader he hates so much, the aggrieved lieutenant is a classical specimen of the guy who for all his efficiency has never been seen as star or leadership material,  and bitterly resents it.  We’ve all encountered him at work. But beneath that normality is an unsettlingly everyday evil:  his conspiratorial grins and asides to the audience beguile and repel at once. The process of his manoeuvres has an artful metronome accuracy, skilfully pushing every button on Othello’s insecurity: sexual ,racial, the need to be liked, his foreign-born sense of ‘otherness’ aggravated when Iago hints that Venetian women have a different attitude to fidelity.    And through all this first half of the play,   this awful process gets a remarkable number of audience laughs:   shocked ones perhaps, but fascinated by a masterclass in manipulation.

        That entertaining, deftly moving lightness makes the abrupt darkening of Othello, Harewood with small moves and tics expressing a fragility hidden before.  His seizure and the wild slap of his bride are properly unnerving.  Meanwhile Jones’ Iago assuredly roams the stage, his suggestiveness ever dirtier:  I had never quite appreciated how subtly Shakespeare does this,   prim moments early on coarsening to filth.     Harewood throws himself into Garrickian high-volume rant and rage, but his initial  individuality inevitably gets lost in the perennial and universal dreadfulness of violent male rage.  Maybe this is why the final murderous scenes are suddenly set beneath great lighting-rigs , as if to remind us of the dreadful familiarity of these irrational femicide  crime scenes .

       But Morris allows grace and room to the women in the play’s late wistful gentleness,  fragments of the willow song speaking for all victims of this familiar madness.   Fitzgerald gives heartrending incredulity to Desdemona’s final  bewilderment, hope,  and terror and Vinette Robinson is a superb Emilia:   spittingly magnificent in Shakespeare’s greatest expression of female defiance.   It stays with you for hours,  Iago haunting your dreams. As he should.

Trh.co.uk to 17 jan

rating 4

EVERYONE’S CALIFORNIAN NOW..

     When the Old Vic had Jonathan Spector’s play in 2022 it was the first time after lockdowns that I had the joy of beng in a space with a thousand others all helpless with laughter, barely a mask in sight. Magical.   So its  first regional premiere is an event.   Even more because of its theme:   absurd ,divisive  hostility shading into mad identity politics  in a community made mad by disinformation and conceit. We have all got even better  at this idiocy in the last few years:  note that Spector orgiinally wrote it to satirize his own locality in Berkeley, California,  before the global Woke outbreak started people telling each other  “educate yourself” .  In 2022 he expressed surprise that within those few years  – after Covid  – this infection of selfighteousness had spread so far.

       So the fact that Eureka Day primary school is in the US , with its decor of rainbows and sunbursts interspersed with a pious acknowledgment that it stands on the “unceded land” of Native Americans,  doesn’t matter.  Its people and   themeare  familiar to us now, that hair-trigger taking of offence about anything from  pronouns to vaccines.  We are on familiar turf when  the little governing board insists on full consensus over matters like whether  on application forms “transracial adoptee” is as valid as “Native American” or “Jewish.   We catch a familar echo of parental selfishness too, as Meiko resents her concerns about her “superbright” child while bridling at the word neurodivergent.    We also accept,  sighingly, the casually mentioned fact that the Eureka Day production of Peter Pan eventually had to be set in Outer Space to remove any possibility of colonialism.

       The steering group is nicely presented from the start: Jonathan Coy’s Don is an old hippie of an elder-statesman, prone to ending every meeting by reading a gnomically meaningless message from the Persiam mystic Rumi; Jenna Russel”s Suzanne is also an old-timer in this “community of intention”,  deploying a horribly recognizable combination of pious sweetness and lethality.  Matt Gavan is Eli, who we gradually learn is the super-rich one who keeps it all going :  patently a tech-bro because no other man would wear such terrible shorts or sprawl like that.  Adele James’ Carina is the newest member,  who gets accidentally presumed to be on supported fees – because she’s black  and Suzanne ,for all her piety,  can’t always tell black women apart  (James Grieve’s careful, credible casting is vital here) . And Kirsty RIder (again the Japanese heritage helps) is clever, gay,  and in a  relationship with Eli because they’re both so woke they have all “passed through monogamy”, though it seems his wife Rebecca rather  disagrees. Ah, those PTA tensions…

       Amusement rises to helpless hilarity after  an official letter about vaccinating for mumps (the once-controversial MMR) divides them and makes poor naive Don decide that a public discussion online must decide whether to make vaccination a  condition of attendance.  This requires a modern theatrical brilliance, as the anxious but conflicted group are seen both onstage and  projected onscreen above, while alongside the rest of the community type in WhatsApp-style comments on quarantine. They progress before our eyes from inconsequentiality to acrimony, doubts about  Big Pharma to snarls about “sending you a link”, flickering into the danger zone with self important beginnings like  “as a nurse” or “as a chiropractor”,  and before many minutes rising in choreographed pace to  “Fascist!” “Nazi!”and death threats.   Meanwhile in beautiful counterpoint the leadership group round the laptop fall into their own arguments  until the C-word online causes Don to splutter that he does not think this format is conducive to them all “bringing their best selves”. 

       I remembered all that with delight from 2022,  including the fact that they’re only ever get unified by either vague affirmations about  “honesty” or “flourishing”, or by approving of a local bakery run by a former mathematical genius who suffered a brain injury.  But I had forgotten how moving is the next section ,  revealing real family pain as Suzanne explains the history that drives her irrationalities about vaccine, and in a hospital corridor  Eli drops the attitude as his own small son is put in a medical coma.   

     Then the angry pace picks up again,  as the committee reunites to reopen the school. There’s a  wonderful display of aggressive silent knitting from Meiko and more barbed passive-aggression from Suzanne and the scornfully factual Carina.  It is remarkably refreshing to be reminded that some people can simultaneously think that “science” and its people are  incontrovertibly  wise about the climate crisis, yet become downright evil plotters when they invent vaccines. And antibiotics. And plastics. 

    Altogether , a grand choice for Nottingham to follow its success with PUNCH and the Mary Whitehouse play.  The trigger warnings alone should send anyone who can hastening to Nottingham:  strong language, sexual and bereavement references and to substance misuse, plenty of stuff which  “some audiences may find sensitive”.  Excellent.  

Nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk to 15 Nov

Rating four 

EDWARDIANA FOR A FEMINIST AGE 

   It looks wonderful. Designer Colin Richmond has been set loose, with Oliver Fenwick’s lighting, to create both the the raftered, big-windowed Edwardiana of the Darling’s house and the flickering Neverland splendour with its great fantastical tree, crazy-inventor furnishings and one of the great pirate ships of the genre. The latter has  skeletal paws and teeth, and , vitally, plenty of scope for high level pirate athleticism. The sword fights are excellent too, with top ambidextrous work from Ami Tredrea’s  Tiger Lily.  The flying is ace, graceful and wild whether solo or in elegant groups,  and the frock-coated crocodile – doubling as the family doctor with his loud-ticking watch – is a lovely touch.  Actually more frightening in his slither than most panto-style crocs we have seen.

      I begin all that with because you are going to take your (over 7) child or your inner child to the RSC’s pre-Christmas show, Ella Hickson’s “retelling” of JM Barrie’s beloved tale.  Both will enjoy.  My  reservations are entirely adult ones:  there is something  wearingly deliberate  in Hickson’s  message, too much instruction into how to think – about girls’ place, about family, about grief.  Her story is a darkened  reframing of  Barrie’s whimsy (though God knows Barrie himself was writing out of grief, personal and empathetic to bereaved child friends). Wendy is reframed too, as a bright girl unwilling to be “mother” to the Lost Boys or a scared, admiring “damsel”‘for them to rescue. She wants to be a fighter, and  forms her own army out of Tiger Lily and Charlotte Mills’ entertainingly  stroppy Cockney Tinkerbell.

      The theme of grief is strong:  we hear sung the haunting opening of Yeats’ “Come away o human child, to the water and the wild”,  and Peter Pan’s first appearance, a year before Wendy and her brothers fly off with him, is basically as the angel of death. He appears by the bed of a third brother , Tom, who is dying of a fever. So Wendy has to look for him in Neverland, with precious little interest or assistance from Pan, Slightly, Curly and  Tootles.   Who are at times funny , but to an adult eye at times  their capers and toddlerish  remarks,  played by young adult men,  seem to teeter uncomfortably on a border between lovably inconsequential larking and diagnosable  mental illness.  Daniel Krikler’s vivid , yobbish Peter is not the least unsettling in his wriggling irresponsibility: he generally looks as if he’s on the way to graffiti a railway bridge.  But that  mood is all there in Barrie,  who was fonder of boy-children than of boring mumsy old Wendy, so fair enough.

       All this bothered me a bit in the first half, but the second is pacier, and Toby Stephens’  Hook is fabulous,  a real treat. Not least because his withering sarcasm and envy of the leaping, larking young  is so  refreshingly adult.  Scott Karim’s Smee,  extreme camp, offering colour-swatches for the cottage with Hook he dreams of,  is properly funny. 

Rsc.org.uk. To 22 nov.   

Rating 4

A FAMILY SAGA , A MEMORABLE AUNT

      Bit early for an onstage Christmas-tree,  but this comedy-drama by Richard Greenberg ran months on Broadway twelve years ago, and it suits a current run of plays about NY-Jewish family conflicts lit by domestic wit.  It certainly has his trademark devastating lines, and in the age of Trump there is a wistful sense in it’s being set in two ‘elections of change”: Reagan in 1980 and the hanging-chad-chaos of 2000. 

      The political reflections, though, are slight.  Ben and Julie do rather hope their son will be President one day, and magnificent Aunt Faye (Tracy-Ann Oberman, who steals every scene with scornful élan) is fond of saying that she is non-political while excoriating Reagan’s acting and delivering lines like“Republican Jews, what IS that? Like saying skinny fat people”.  But lounging teenage Scott would rather be a teacher, likes kids and books and stuff, and the family is more preoccupied with its own matters. Like the impending death of Ben’s unseen old mother, who doesn’t appreciate any of them (“the sense of neglect is the last to go” observes Faye).  Or the sullen refusal of cousin Shelley to communicate with anyone, least of all her mother Faye. 

   So on it goes,  an elegant revolve evoking the startling vastness of an upper-west-side apartment,  always larded with banging lines. Jennifer Westfeldt’s Julie is gushingly domestic, with an edge of slightly mad despair at it all,  and first seen preparing an elaborate Christmas while Scott’s more sensible college friend Jeff  helps chop things.  Jeff, the outsider ,  is gloriously played by Sam Marks: a virtuoso one-sided phone call to his distant mother (humbler ‘first generation diaspora’ fussing about him showing himself up).  Conversations between in-laws reveal the messy complexities of two marriages and the invisible old mother beyond: Oberman sparks fine laughs every few minutes with her splendid scorn, Westfeld’s Julie playing against her with seemingly naive contentment in a life where, as her sister in law tartly observes, you “never seen to have done anything on purpose”.  There’s some plot-alert conversation about a ruby necklace. Which, as the first act ends, we begin devoutly to hope will cause some actual drama in the year-2000 section to come.

        For it tends to feel too like a good sitcom or slow-moving soap – great lines, clear likeable characters , but little impetus.  The strength of the characters, notably Jeff, Julie and Faye, has to hold us where storytelling doesn’t.  The second half produces more memorable lines and a sense of weary years between.  Scott has died, and his little brother Timmy is 24   (Alexander Marks entertainingly depicts the daffy college-dropout Timmy who really doesn’t want Christmas with Mum).  Julie is widowed; Jeff, decent and prosperous,  has remained an outsider-supporter of the family.    Oberman’s terrific Faye is twenty years sharper, so depressed by Bush that she is “nostalgic for his father..whaddaway to start a century!”. She reminisces about the saltier politics of her older siblings fifty years earlier, who couldn’t even bear to pass a chicken plate across the Friday table if one was a Marxist and the other a Trotskyist.  Her relationship with sullen daughter Shelley,  now only featured shrieking anger on speakerphone, reaches a zenith at the sound of Shelley’s Latino partner with a moment of  magnificent self-analysis:  “I am not a prejudiced woman,  but sometimes racial slurs come handy  at moments of high emotion”.  

    See? It’s only the lines you remember, and a general sense of warmth in the muddle of family life.  The plot does thicken financially towards the end,  and there’s  a warm emotional Christmas revelation to leave us feeling happy, no spoilers.  So yes, it’s a quality piece, very Hampstead Theatre,  and would be an irresistible novel.  And Tracy-Ann Oberman is a national treasure    But it is only just a play.  

 hampsteadtheatre.com.  to 22 nov

Rating 3 

OLD FAITH IN A MODERN CITY

      Anna Ziegler’s play was an off-Broadway sellout,  glimmering with insights into Jewish-American family conflicts,  traditions and rebellions.  It’s a natural for Marylebone Theatre  after its brilliant presentation of WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK, so hopes ran high, and Ziegler’s intelligent, sensitive remarks about its creation are interesting.  The massive snag is that in a fine cast of five the most central protagonist is woefully hard to like.

    This is  Abe, a young literary star who aspires to be Philip Roth, certainly mentions him enough.  He is married to Sophie (Paksie Vernon), a likeable mixed-race Black/Jewish woman: who refreshingly insists that “slavery and the Holocaust don’t define me, I grew up in Albany” .   Her only novel didn’t meet success, so she is shunted into the background of motherhood and supporing Abe’s ambition in the excruciatingly precious self-regarding world of NY literati (everyone in this play is annoyingly anxious to be “seen”.  Reminded me of a very good gag in a Jon Cantor play – “finding yourself? Just as well, nobody else is looking for you”.)  

           Their life difficulties are theatrically scrawled in chapters  – Marriage, Parenthood, Boredom – on the set’s advanced glass walls  and are pretty hackneyed, but the interest lies in the fact that Abe is a defector from a strict Hasidic community.    Often onstage in their own marriage are his bygone parents, Schmuli and Esther.  We see them first being shy, awkward together as arranged newlyweds: she asks him what he saw when he first glimpsed his bride and it was only her shoes.  Esther’s  long wedding veil is a prop and symbol all through, creatively used under Igor Golyak’s direction,  wrapping or disguising or comforting all the charaters.     Glimpses of the careful, devout traditional family life shimmer in the background of Abe and Sophie’s 21c laicism:   Katerina Tannenbaum, a very welcome newcomer to the professional stage,  is a beautiful, luminous presence as Esther. This is a woman whose intelligence battles with obedience, who would like to step out into the world more,  own a computer. She has read books about sex and birth and what to expect.  Schmuli knows nothing about all that,  but looms helpfully over her after each daughter has been is born, citing seventy prayers for the seventy stages of labour in the Torah.  And, of course, praying for a son to come at last.  

              That son, of course, is Abe, who is in the foreground leading a life centuries beyond theirs,   and saying artist-privilege things like “it’s a valid choice to be selfish” .  He is,  in his writerly vanity and husbandly boredom,  engaged in a long, flirtatious email correspondence with a famous actress, Julia  who once liked his reading at an event (we get a taste of it, plonking stuff which quivers with unwanted symbolism).   This obsession grows: Anna Poppelwell’s gorgeous Julia flits around, her virtual presence felt as real by Abe, she every bit as wrapped up in him as he requires a woman to be and few real wives actually are.  

       It is only in the far more engaging second half that we find out why Abe hardly knew his father, though old Schmuli haunts his dreams;  we see dimly behind the glass one of those terrible fundamentalist moments as Esther, bravely and “ sinfully” declares that she does not want yet more childbirths after Abe. Whereon the leader of the community has her  banned from seeing her young daughters lest she corrupt them with that dreadful awareness that contraception exists. 

     Here the drama catches fire at last, and then rises to a really sharp revelation with the aggravated wife Sophie, which I shall not spoil.  There are more moments with the infinitely more likeable, if religiously imprisoned, parents .  Schmuli explains that he might be able to “forgive” Esther, who has run away to  the wide NY world with their son .  She,  as incredulous of this attitude as we are, nonetheless expresses a beautiful nostalgia for their earlier lives in the community.   It’s as moving in its tribute to Jewish community warmth as the dance at the end of the Anne Frank play.  “The Fridays, the Fridays, the birthdays and the holidays . And the way that nobody is forgotten..a song that will never end”.  

     Abe, of course, is alone on stage for the last moments, as every self-absorbed NY litterateur would wish to be. But alas, I still couldn’t like him. It’s Schmuli and Esther who won the fourth mouse, just. 

www.marylebonetheatre.com.    To 29 Nov

Rating. 4

CHAOS IN FRAYING CHINTZ

Catching  up after a break away I nipped in to check whether after 60 years Joe Orton can still get people gasping with shock.   Peter McIntosh’s set alone is a dark treat : a chintzy circle of a lounge surrounded by a rubbish tip and overhung by dozens of furnishings:  cradle, bike, chairs, tables, brolly – all painted wicked drab black, as if an explosive curse had hit a household.  My neighbour, marking his 80th birthday with a matinee, reminisced happily with me (the Young Vic’s like that, people chat)  . We both remembered childhood and teenage years of just such grim weary postwar lodgings, every furnishing telling a story.   And perhaps in his case, there were landladies like Kath.

    Cast and costume equally catch that shabby worn-out downmarket England .and its pretensions and yearnings and cheapnesses: Tamzin Outhwaite’s brittle needy refinement and ever-ready negligée  for frighteningly determined flirtation; Christopher Fairbank’s worn out stroppy Dada,  and Daniel Cerquiera’s Eddy in three-piece tweed and tiepin, nursing his own dark needs and fraying pride.

       Of course it’s Sloan, the outsider, the Orton disruptor, who fixes horrified attention first: Jordan Stephens has a way of smiling, of threatening, of eating a ham sandwich in the dim walkway,  which bring on  an odd shudder. Even before he suddenly starts rocking in studded leather under strobe lights as the second half begins.   Maybe he is nowt but a lout …but maybe  (shiver). the monsters are elsewhere in this monstrous trap of a home. Certainly something is rousing our gradual unease at their predatory gentility and devastating choice of strangely formal words,   (Orton has the ear of a laughing demon for English vernacular, the way grimy sweepings lie under every carpeting word). 

   Anyway, the answer to my question  – do  Ortonian shocks still hit hard?  is Yes. They do.   Beautifully aggravated with a couple of bits of strobe-lit surrealism in the second half. Brutal.

     Another reflection, alongside my newly octogenarian  seat companion, was that the boringly self-indulgent stuff John Osborne served up in Look Back in Anger a few years earlier actually said far, far less about how postwar Britain needed to change and roll on through the ‘sixties,   than does this sharp cruel hilarity from poor young Joe Orton. He said it all: If only he had lived, even mellowed a bit, and had a chance to jeer at the seventies, eighties, nineties… What a loss.

   But Nadia Fall’s production does him proud.   Another couple of weeks to catch it, very good prices, generally rather good company in the cheap seats. 

Youngvic.org to 8 nov

Rating four

A BRILLIANT ECHO

     Shouldn’t be surprised that this is a cracking play:   Katherine Moar’s 90-minute debut FARM HALL , about 1940s nuclear scientists,  sparked cheers and a West End transfer for her deft, sensitive mastery of both history and human behaviour.  This – even brisker at 75 minutes – fictionally reflects another moment of history:  the brutal kidnapping of the heiress Patricia Hearst in 1978 by the radical-guerilla-left “Symbionese liberation army”,  and her conviction for bank robbery after she was – it seems – drawn into collaboration by “stockholm syndrome” and fell for her rapist.    

         Moar’s protagonist is called Holly;  the other character in the play, fictionalized as Robert,  was her famous defence lawyer  who, like Hearst’s,  failed to get her off a 35 year sentence.  As in the real case, she  was pardoned after two years by Clinton. 

       Both are seen at two ages, sometimes at the same moment and finally, thrillingly, arguing with their younger selves.  Katie Matsell plays Holly during the trial – young, socialite, arrogant, becoming emotionally dependent on her equally arrogant lawyer, and finally desperate in her horror at the sentence (Matsell here is breathtaking).  Abigail Cruttenden is her older self thirty-odd years on, assured, steeled by life.  But as the play opens she has been summoned by Robert,  who tried to forget about her for years as his only famous failure and now needs her. As a famous rape victim she might, he hopes,  speak for him regarding some dark MeToo accusation.  

     An electric meeting? Oh yes, right from the start. Moar’s dialogue, banteringly sharp with streaks of angry pain, roars along.  When their younger selves appear time slips in one startling box-cutter moment,  her old rage and his resentment at the failure coinciding.

  Nathanial Parker is perfect as the unwillingly-retired, unshaven lawyer on the edge of ruin;  Ben Lamb as his younger self revealed as unspeakably cocky,  in love with his star-defender fame,  giggling along with the Johnny Carson question “was Little Miss girl-scout really afraid for her life or just along for the ride?” . Meanwhile the scared young heiress, in a prison frock, is pleading for him to answer his phone.   There’s a fabulous moment when he demands she sign a waiver about his proposed book on the trial, guaranteeing not to write her own for five years. Why should I ? she asks. “It would a kind thing” he says, preposterously.  The same tone turns up in his older self, in “I am a fragile person”.   Oh, it’s a witty play all right, but there’s anger there. 

      Brittle echoes over half a century:  talk of the counterculture, youth disaffection,  “amoral apolitical spoilt rich kids, primed for radicalism” (I write this just as young Samuel from Tunbridge Wells is suspended from Oxford for chanting ‘put the Zios in the ground. Topical or what?).  There are also lines  on rape victims that hits home hard:   the young lawyer is angry that she didn’t cry enough in court,  and middle-aged Holly points out that the same tone pervades letters both from middle-aged Robert and the journalist who wants her to condemn him.   “Dear Holly,  as a woman who was raped you really should do this and say this and think this”. That pious imposition of supposed duty will be familiar to many a victim.

    In other words, Moar and the Jermyn  – and four fine actors, and nimble director Josh Seymour –  have done it again.  Get this little gem up West.

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk  to 15 november

rating 5  

this is a test post, sorry everyone

A DARK SERENISSIMA

    No pretty biscuit-tin Venice here, but rather its ancient darkness:  Jess Curtis’ artful set offers stark steps, corners, slotted openings into which half-glimpsed figures  come and go; reflections glimmer in the water-shiny floor and backcloth, sometimes there’s an indistinct vast face. A brooding soundscape at first gathers only round a small child, spotlit, peacefully drawing for five uneasy minutes before the thunderclap of loss.

         This is Nell Leyshon’s stylish, brooding  100-minute take on Daphne du Maurier’s creepiest, most absurd and almost most famous tale, the 1973 Nicholas Roeg film having burnt into many a susceptible brain the image of a lethal little figure in a red cloak. The adaptor  – and director Douglas Rintoul –  have the sense not to reproduce any of those images, and indeed Leyson tweaks the tale to focus more on the effect of parental grief.  John and Laura are a quintessential modern medium-to-uppermiddle class, down to Sophie Robinson’s  neat discreet alice-band never dislodging even during the bed scene. They are in Venice to recover from their five-year-old daughter’s death. Mark Jackson  is a confident, preppy John,  who has the more difficult task: moving  from prosaic husbandly firmness about Laura’s  fey credulity, through faints and visions to a state – by the end – of terrified hurtling towards doomwhile figures odd or headless-horrid half appear through the clever set’s openings.

     The two weird sisters they encounter are American tourists, Olivia Carruthers leading Alex Bulmer as the blind seer who exalts Laura with a message from the Beyond and infuriates John. Or should he have listened? The pair at first seem oddly wooden, but as the creepiness builds into the swirling darkness of a Venetian night, that works rsther well.  After all, surely  messages from the Beyond might come as well from Hooterville, Ohio as from Delphi.

        Their ordinariness, and the prosaic banter between the central couple as they  painfully struggle to connect their different pathways through grief, adds to  the brief but useful comic moments as they all give endless trouble to Venetians like the patient receptionist and  Alexander Makar in three roles  including  a nicely pissed-off waiter after John and Laura  flee their uneaten risotto.  Richard Emerson Gould also has unintrusive fun as the exasperated detective whose investigation into local murders they impede, and occasionally pops up playing  the accordion as one of the worrying half-seen figures.

        The whole ends with the famous  shock –  for which – pleasingly – my immediate Ipswich neighbour was wholly unprepared: old Du Maurier’s dark tale’s fame clearly has its limits.   But rather beautifully, Jessie Addinnall’s lighting design (which has done much heavy lifting all through) suddenly breaks into the  sepulchral bad-dream gloom to give us a fully golden Venetian shine. 

Rating 4

Thu 9 – Sat 25 Oct New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich

Then to the co-producing house:

Wed 29 Oct – Sat 15 Nov Main House, Salisbury Playhouse

Tickets from £12

 –

ANYTHING CAN WASH UP ON THE NORTH SEA COAST …

      Robin Brooks  and director Fiona McAlpine  mischievously  bill this eccentric, enlivening short play as “a shocking sordid seaside thriller”,  so I expected broad comedy larks. But  in the event it’s more like a version of Henry James’ Aspern Papers,  as if recreated under the influence of a cold salt swim and a bucket of heavily laced alcoholic cocoa . Very seaside, and actually remarkable and well-disguisedly intelligent fun. 

        An American academic  (played with particular aplomb by Charlotte Parry)  swishes into offeason Southwold in her Burberry, patronizingly adoring it for quaintness and writerly peace.  She is  determined to lodge in the house of an old, old lady who used to mix with the likes of E.M.Forster and Ben Britten. And who may have been the lover of a minor lesbian performance-poet of the last century:  a figure long obscure but suddenly fashionable in US academe’s quest for feminist diversity. 

        The daughter Violet (Lydia McNulty)  is prickly , and prone to deliver short depressing performance-poems herself. The apparent granddaughter Maud (Charlie Cameron) is naive and shy, but  between them they occasionally wheel out the grande dame – dark glasses, huge hat, blankets, croaking voice – to demand £1000 a week for the  basement flat. 

         So in two short and fascinating acts (whole thing is two hours including interval)   Parry stalks around, mainly in front of the curtains,  chats up shy Maud and goes sea-swimming with her. She is once or twice granted a snapped grunting audience with old Evelyn,  and becomes increasingly suspicious that she herself may be being fooled or haunted.  As many do,  she starts to feel that Southwold itself is actually a stage set  the bathing-huts as changing rooms, the sea a backdrop and  the people self-possessedly odd: the bewildered visitor is the sole and baffled audience.

        What she wants, of course, is a possible cache of letters and tapes of the fabled poet performing her own works.    Do they still exist? WHere is the old woman hiding them, can they be in the elaborate escritoire (the only set, suddenly revealed by the curtain)   and why won’t the old bat let Harvard or somewhere have them for yet another slightly tedious book to be written by our thwarted heroine?

      Suspicions rise,  until in the second half a lovely coup-de-theatre brings a proper gasp.  And not-quite-all is revealed.  It’s a hoot.  Only cavil would be sometimes for the two younger cast to be a touch more audible, especially as the short performance-poems spouted by Violet sound quite bad enough to provide  amusement (anyone who’s been to a poetry-slam in Aldeburgh knows what I mean) 

southwoldartscentre.co.uk   to Saturday.   Cheap as chips and just as much fun.  

rating 3 

RAIN, RAGE ,  REGRETS

    If you’re expecting  the original Ibsen tale of a bored wife wondering  whether to leave a dull husband and deciding not to, pause.   This is “after Ibsen”  written and directed by Simon Stone. We sit around or above  a big white shining rectangle, and it’s  2025:  topical enough for a line or two about Just Stop Oil arrests.  It’s Ullswater,  where in an (invisible)  lovely garden the neuroscientist Edward (Andrew LIncoln)  has given a terminal diagnosis to the unbearably handsome young Heath (Joe Alwyn).   The pair tiresomely exchange overeducated literary references. Theres a lake and pool in which the lady of the house Ellida  (Alicia Vikander, this is star-casting time) swims while always wishing for the sea, where she used to throw herself into deep currents.   Edward  lost his first wife to suicide,  mixes his own spices and rudely rejects the visiting Lyle’s gift of bottled sauces. He has two Tik-Tok-sassy teenage dauighters , initially insufferable but destined to be interesting towards the second half.   Asa (Gracie Oddie-James, a headlong performer)  is planning a PhD at Yale but meanwhile does OnlyFans soft porn; Hilda is becoming obsessed with the ripped glamour of young doomed Heath,  and romantically imaging  herself at his deathbed.  It’s quite boring in the Lake District if you’re seventeen, apparently. 

      For some time, I have to confess, the whole family simply annoyed me: too much  sitcom-streamer dialogue.  Nor were a third of the lines fully audible:  I have  checked this with people 10, 20 and 45 years younger and all agreed it is a  problem. Especially when the people at the far end of the stage from you are laughing because they were close enough to hear some muttered remark. And – retrospectively – it’s annoying because towards the end of the first half, and throughout the second, the characterization is better.    Vikander is the least audible – a TV-mutterer  in conversation and only clear in her late big speeches.   Andrew Lincoln is the only one properly audible throughout, and indeed magnificent, a proper star turn in his raging confusion at the play goes on.

        For it does warm up. First with a radio report on a past incident on an oil rig, sparking Elida”s unresolved memories of being an environmental activist at 15, in love with a man over twice her age, , accidentally  killing someone on an oil rig and promising to wait for him always as he goes to prison.     When the first half ends with the arrival of  Brendan Cowell as a big hearty bearded Aussie, we know who it’ll be.  

           My friend the Ibsen-purist came to a late preview and disliked it, saying  she’d rather people wrote their own plays not piggybacked on classics. And  there is a case for tiring of these updates, whether ancient Greek or Ibsen and Strindberg:  deprived of  the anger at social norms which fuelled them, they often flail  (remember in the Bridget Jones series how the endearingly silly  heroine is pretentiously working on what she calls “Chekhov’s Hedda Gabler” , re-set in 21c Hampstead. Top satirical spot there from Helen Fielding).  

        So in Stone’s version, while a second wife’s  past and a young man’s illness do reflect the cake Ibsen baked,   he anxiously crams in  through plot and character numerous fresher plums: from daddy ‘n  daughter-issues and suicide  to eco-activism, groupthink, underage sex, online porn, miscarriage-guilt and the social problems of rural racism seen through mixed race teenagers.   Add the irresistible ability of the Bridge to do blasts of lightning and soak half the second act in real  sluicing rain , which eventually fills a shallow  pool convenient for apocalyptic sex,  before  deepening to a lap- pool around  which an interminable reconciliation may or may not be completed. 

       So where it ought to build up to a climax it builds, drops away, builds a bit again, makes another oblique point,  suddenly takes the trouble to mention Love Actually which made Andrew Lincoln famous,  and finally ends with a plunge and a shriek after nearly 3 hours.

          But yes,  there are some excellent lines:   Lincoln is superb when given a chance to go spectacularly nuts,  Alwyn is peculiarly likeable and the teens – Oddie-James and Isobel Akuwudike – are terrific:   at first infuriating but finally the source of those devastating young wisdoms we all encounter in times of adult chaos.  As they clear the stage of garden furniture preparatory to the dramatic downpour,  one remarks to their endlessly conflicted and tormented stepmother “Y’know, you don’t have to do things just because you can. I learned that when I was twelve”. 

Bridgetheatre.co.uk to 8 nov

Rating  3

HOLLYWOOD AND HYPOCRISY

       It’s a brilliant moment for this sharp bit of work from the American Michael McKeever to land at the Elephant with a bracing thump.   We’ve got Trump at his UK banquet,  crowds flocking down Whitehall to condemn him , rows on every side about free speech, morality and identity.  Not to mention the devout religiosity of the late Charlie Kirk’s arguments , and the President’s recent purging of the Kennedy Centre for arts for hosting drag queens.  Freedom, coercion, rebellious queerness and power: it’s all here , under a mischievously battered HOLLYWOODLAND proscenium,  as if the West was in a twisted way echoing the 1934-1968’s moment when  the Hays Code restricted the film industry’s “moral standards’.  The moment  certainly gave the 90-minute show – set in 1950 – extra bite.

     It’s a drinks party in the coolly chic home of Billy Haines, once a major 1920’s star and now – after refusing to give up his gay lover and have a “lavender marriage” – working as a smart interior designer.  His friend Tallulah Bankhead is there,  lounging, smoking, drinking and reminiscing outrageously about her liaisons and the free old days when you could swing from a chandelier with no underwear and get applauded for it.  She is longing to get the part of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, if Warner Bros will agree. 

       Henry Willson, a sharp agent,  turns up with a young protegé he has rechristened for stardom as Chad Manford, (Willson is a real character, like the others, Chad an invention).  He rather maliciously lets drop the news that the role has gone to Gertrude Lawrence.  Explosion from Tallulah ,  about how the more respectable Lawrence should get back to Noel Coward roles where she belongs.  She’s still not over losing Scarlett in Gone with the Wind and reckons Vivien Leigh got that by sexual favours.  Not that Tallulah would use an expression as prim as that. 

       Tracie Bennett is wonderful in the part: appearing first in elegant profile,  sometimes pausing the action to comment on what’s going on, addressing us through the fourth wall with teasing aplomb.  At first I thought her slinking, posing, head-tossing diva sinuosity might be overdone,  but after a few moments saw that Bennett was utterly into the reality of a woman who had flourished that way,   set herself in the role , enjoyed it and used it for devastating humour at the expense of hypocritical Hollywood.  Later, in the extreme crisis of the show,  she gives us a Tallulah more than able to be still, concentrated, tensely watchful as a cat .  It’s masterful.

       But the story is about the men, and the prim cruelties of Hays-Code Hollywood. Nick Blakeley is the chilly,  coercive agent Henry,  in a moment alone with Billy solicits a favour:  young Chad has a housemate, an artist who is probably a gay partner:  could Henry remove the danger by giving the housemate a studio design job?  Chad, naively,  hears of this and says no, they were in the army together, supported each other, and the deal was that once his acting career took off,  his partner would be a fulltime painter .

       Henry slams that down hard, physically and explicitly condemning his gayness.    “The person that you think you are does not exist, he died on the battlefields of Normandy. You are just an idea in my mind. A story”.   

       When Billy sees what is happening he backs Chad.  He and Tallulah tell the astonished kid how it has always worked since the new morality, shocking him no end with the names.  “Cary Grant is GAY?”cries poor Chad  . They cite him, Valentino, Navarro,  other men who unlike Billy agreed to play safe and hetero but in doing so  forfeited their real happiness in life.     Henry sneers that it’s necessary,  because  “simple, unassuming people” in middle America need safe league-of-decency approved chaps and plots, “Disney and Gene Kelly”.    In a properly horrifing sequence he forces Chad to ring his partner at home and – dictating the words in a low hiss behind him – to tell him that with his new starring ambitions it’s over. 

       Tallulah and Billy are left, reflecting.  McKeever’s script rather overuses the now too-fashionable word and idea of “authenticity”:   being your total real self all the time,  rather than merely demanding tolerance of private life and a lack of prurient stigma.    But it strikes home in the dramatic setting; these men did suffer, were coerced.  And there is a bracing healthiness in the Tallulah style of exuberant bisexual disgracefulness and support of gay friends.    It’s a great evening, anyway: all four of the players – not least young Solomon Davy as handsome, ambitious, manipulated Chad – are spot-on. And you’ll remember Tracie Bennett’s wild serpentine Tallulah for a good while…

southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. to 11 oct

Rating 4

THE BEST OF TASTELESSNESS

 It’s always special  when the small Menier’s latest  musical proves so perfect, so original in interpretation but faithful to its classic core that it can triumphantly explode into a big West End house.  It’s happened again with Patrick Marber’s glorious rendering of the Mel Brooks classic:   ensemble nearly doubled,  players the same, Scott Pask’s ingeniously flexible  set and Lorin Latarro’s  revamped choreography filling the space with glee.  Even with a few new visual jokes.   At least, I think they were new:  so artfully detailed is Patrick Marber’s production,  so fresh and fast-moving with never an awkward transition that you’re lucky if you catch them all.

      It is, as ever, a hymn to the human  necessity for benevolent, mocking  outrage and cheeky offence, with heart.   In this time of ugly ignorant antisemitism on the streets,  I  particularly responded to l the expanded wild glee of the  opening number “King of Broadway”,  as Andy Nyman’s Bialystock capers to klezmer sounds in a crowd of exuberant Jews,  a tribute to old Broadway’s triumphs and disasters and recoveries born of that community.   That warmed the heart. 

       Then on it roared,  joyful, headlong and full-hearted.  What was firmly grasped by the great  Mel Brooks (with Thomas Meehan for the musical) is that for all their horror Nazis ARE funny :   all that preening pomposity ,blind hero worship, ersatz folksiness.   Rich thwarted old ladies in leopardprint and endlessly willing Swedish divas are funny too.  So is over-camp gay culture and  the desperate ambition and bitter disappointments of Broadway show-people . Accountants are  also funny.  And – loud gasps from the be-kind mafia –  so is poor Leo’s anxiety disorder.    It doesn’t mean all these things are not also deserving of the usual  gloomy respect they get in other plays.   It just means that if you don’t sometimes laugh at them,  and at yourself,   you’re barely human.  So rejoice at the cleansing mirth of this legendary musical,  just as lovely as before in this bigger space, with almost double the ensemble giving it additional pizazz.

         Andy Nyman is an amiable manic Bialystock,  and Marc Antolin  adorable,  clutching the blue-blanket of reassurance as a Leo who grows up beautifully to his final moment of heroism in the courtroom, and earns his hat.   As Marber has observed, it’s a bit of a love story between the two men, never mind Ulla.   Harry Morrison’s Liebkind  is if possible even more ridiculous than before:   you may dream all night about his leather-shorts and chorus of pigeons. The  camp frolics of  Trevor Ashley as Roger de Bris – and especially his teamful of theatrical joke staff, dig that choreographer  – are an extra pleasure after the earnest RSC gay-porn muscle-flexing playing up the road at Born with Teeth.  Joanna Woodward’s Ulla is a rose amid these troublesome thorns,  deadpan comic  and a hell of a belter: her  intermission rearranging of Bialystock’s dingy office gets a shock a laugh of its own.    Latarro’s adaptation of the old Stroman choreography is witty all the way.  And goodness, it moves fast, never a gaping seam or moment of ennui. 

          Once again,  as at the Menier, five mice plus a dancing one as a tribute to the ensemble and swing whose lightning costume-changes never miss a beat….

garricktheatre   to 21 January

rating 5 plus dancemouse 

FAME, FRAUD AND FAMILY 

       Long after it opened, a massive hit both sides of the Atlantic, and finally closed ,  the enterprising Finborough hauls out a 1921  A.A.Milne play for the first time in a hundred years.   It has absolutely nothing in common with Christopher Robin or Pooh:  more like a more comedic Arthur Miller or Priestley tale  in its merciless dissection of family politics, money and reputation.  But the fun in doing it now lies also in what it tells us about celebrity a hundred years ago:  less techno than today but every bit as corrosive.

      Old Oliver Blayds is to be toasted by his family on his 90th birthday,  with the addition of a literary critic,  A.L. Royce,  presenting a festschrift address from younger, admiring poets.  He is,  says Royce “a very great poet, a very great philosopher, and a very great man,.simple as Wordsworth, sensuous as Tennyson, passionate as Swinburne”.  His portrait hangs over head, but the old man himself (played by the 88-year-old veteran William Gaunt ) only gets wheeled in  –  a beautifully retro chair, the Finborough is always careful –   towards the end of the first long act.  But we have by then learned that his devoted daughter Isobel (Catherine Cusack) has been his nurse and companion for 18 years, having turned down a proposal from Royce to dedicate herself to the ancient genius. 

       His son-in-law and secretary William Blayds-Conway (a beautifully pompous Oliver Beamish) is there too, with his dim wife Marion (Karen Archer a comedy turn of anxious entitlement) and grandchildren Oliver and Septima.  They all (except George Rowlands as the cheeky young Oliver)  respect the 70-year career, quoting poems like “A child’s thoughts on waking”,  a shuddery title which neatly identifies him as, to quote the critic, “the last Victorian”.  

         Gaunt gives us a lovely, vaguish, amiably delightful old man when he arrives, reminiscing about what Browning or Whistler said to him alongside properly worrying flashes of temper and confusion, soothed by Isobel.  The trouble is that , as he begins to confess as the scene ends, he never wrote any of the great poems at all.  Only the unsuccessful 1863 volume which nobody liked.   He stole the rest , from a dying, Keats-like roommate called Jenkins,   and eked them out over 70 years of fame and worship. 

         Wonderful. So in the next act,  meeting again after the funeral,  Isobel comes clean and the family has to work out morally and practically what to do.  Isobel has a conscience, and managed to prevent him being buried in Poet’s Corner in the Abbey by saying he forbade it.  She wants the Jenkins heirs, if any, found and paid and the poor dead boy genius made immortal instead of her father.  

        William and Marion are horrified, and when the grandchildren realize there’s money to be lost, so are they.  Milne takes us mercilessly through layers of shocked disbelief, resentment,  desperate self-delusion and mutual contempt. At one point the Blayds-Conways work out that he did at least get the stuff published, so is owed 10 per cent.   At another,  young Oliver (who is starting out in politics) persuades them it might all have been a senile hallucination.

     David Gilmore, directing,  respects the 1921 theatrical pace,  and it goes on to a third act  though I would have been mischievously tempted to tweak and speed up  the end to suit modern tastes.    But what I took away from it is how the family and the critic under the great looming Victorian portrait talk of Blayds’ greatness in phrases like “He looked like the great man he was”  and “He talked so well about poetry”.  He looked the part, talked the part, developed a magnificent beard and a gift for seeming amiably modest yet wise.    These days, he’d have been a national treasure on TV,  though the poems probably far less read.   So whether he wrote any of the stuff all by himself would hardly matter… 

finboroughtheatre.co.uk to 4 October

rating four 

NORDIC , NOIR, NEUROTIC

      In a hotel room, sea  uneasy beyond and faint wind howling, dishevelled Adolf with his crutch listens to his smooth, confident new friend Gustaf. He   shows him the tiny naked sculpture he has made of his absent wife Tekla, the woman he nurtured and encouraged after the brutality of her first husband.  He thanks amiable Gustav for encouraging him to turn from his own decline as a painter to the new age of three-dimentional sculpture (it’s 1880).   Gustaf saw Tekla on the ferry, chatting to young men and laughing that her husband thought her too old to flirt. 

        It is not a benign conversation. Four centuries after Iago,  and nearly half a century before Freud ushered in the age of controlling therapists with a line in sexual excavation,  this is August Strindberg (adapted by Howard Brenton). demonstrating how to mess with another  man’s head. Especially if he’s  an underemployed older husband with a fashionably gloomy Swedish scepticism about God.  It’s dazzling talk, with Charles Dance as Gustaf in full control and Nicholas Farrell superbly confused as Adolf,  gradually persuaded that he is owed credit as mentor for all his wife’s success as a writer. Easy enough, since he’s envious of her success as well as jealous . 

       Bad Gustaf also persuades him that his neurotic, lonely unwellness is due to “sexual excess” caused as so often by “women’s vicious appetites” and that it will give him epilepsy unless he gives it up.   Remarried widows, he explains, are always voracious that way,  which is why they burn them in India.   Adolf obediently develops some of the symptoms, so that when Gustaf nips next door and  his cheerful wife (Geraldine James, very glamorous) breezes in from her work meetings he immediately starts on her.   Echoes all the Gustaf-stuff about how much she owes him for his support,  and how the effort has sucked him dry. 

     “Are you saying you write my books.?”  she asks with sudden flat lucidity, but  he chunters on. Then, affectionately motherly, she sends him out for some fresh air. Whereon, of course, Gustaf reappears and – no spoilers, even in such famous Strindbergiana- you’ll never guess who he turns out to be….

      Like Ibsen,  his contemporary on the Nordic peninsula, Strindberg is an acknowledged vital influence on the development of emotionally intense 20c  naturalistic drama, even if his characters are woefully hard to warm to (Tennessee Williams, a follower, can make your heart bleed even for the worst behaved characters, but Strindberg’s  just make your brain ache and despair rise.).  

     But in this production – Tom Littler directing –  Brenton keeps it short and crisp at 85 minutes, and Dance and Farrell are flawless, sometimes mercifully funny. A 21c audience is, after all,  bound to get some laughs at lines like “a wife is the husband’s child” and at the concept that women are just incomplete males.  Geraldine James also mercifully gives Tekla some proper relatable humanity: confident ,outgoing and affectionate but prone  (a fatal female trait)  to receive unreasonable reproaches by getting crestfallen, accepting guilt and wanting to make things better.  These are three bravura performances,  and it’s a fascinating short evening for students of the changes in drama and social ideas as the 20th century struggled to dawn.  But you do need a stiff drink when you get out.  

orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 11 October

Rating. 3. 

AWKWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIER

     The curtain is a marvel to start with: its plasticky-floral cosiness taking you straight to a 1970s kitchenette and the heyday of Mrs W’s mission to gather followers and stamp out the permissive society. And Maxine Peake appropriately does the Eric Morecambe peep-round that curtain, before emerging to tell us that people may want rid of her  but she’s going nowhere.  

        It’s a canny opening for Caroline Bird’s mischievous but well researched and ultimately thoughtful play, deftly directed by Sarah Frankcom.  Those of us who lived through the Whitehouse years (and interviewed her) can confirm that this aspiring  moral-rearmer of a fast-  changing post-60s nation was indeed, pure showbiz:  happiest on a revivalist platform leading her Viewers And Listeners Association ,  as well as  being a ferocious letter writer and scourge of the BBC. Even  the Daleks were suspect, as was Dimbleby’s concentration camp report, and just about every  play for today. Oh, and especially  homosexuals, however mild and friendly. As the show begins, it deals first with  that Whitehouse  focus: the death threats she received, the demonstrations outside her house , the fury around her court battle when she defeated and broke Gay News. 

         I have to admit that the first half hour made me uneasily feel that Peake was channelling a British Edna Everage, or Patricia Routledge as Victoria Wood’s Kitty: any cartoonish middle-aged woman whose mouth turns down and purses, ending every condemnation with a self-satisfied little smile. Which at times is of course comedy gold: turning up at the Gay News trial in a pink chiffon scarf she preens “the gays were not expecting that!”. She certainly milks the horrified facial,expressions when the “blasphemous libel” poem is read out (a centurion having sex with the dead Christ). And  of course the driest  audience laugh comes when – absolutely factually – she praises her prosecuting barrister John Smyth for devotedly running Christian youth camps. Yes, that John Smyth:the abuser and flogger whose exposure two years ago finished off Justin Welby’s Archbishopric. 

       My qualms abated, though, in Peake’s several brilliantly executed onstage transformations (top wig work by Helen Keane). Whitehouse  becomes her young self again, child of a broken marriage who fell for a married man, renounced him and joined a strict fringe evangelical movement to become a “soul surgeon” and convert others, especially gays, to recognizing and banishing  their supposed innate depravity.  Here Peake ceases the caricature,  and at last inhabits a relatable reality: thereafter, as she matures or ages again all the way to a care home chair, she becomes more rounded : her faith and overweening confidence becomes something credible even if not  shareable. As is the usefulness of her work on child pornography, sex shop displays  and video horrors. And, now that identity politics has raged out of control, there’s a nice topical echo when Mary decries “this modern obsession with self, this “who I am””.

      But  my resistance evaporated even more because of the really remarkable, memorable performance of Samuel Barnett as her foil: he plays “everybody else”.   He is various gay men , challenging her or being soul-surgeoned by her (one heartrending scene has him singing Bridge over Troubled Water, softening her momentarily  before she briskly sends him home to pray forgiveness for his wickedness).  He is also several barristers, the gay youth counsellor she calls a “virus”, and finally the nurse at her side in her last days. But he is also a nervous housewife with a gay daughter  and very memorably  Mrs Thatcher (at  whom Mrs W  indignantly  brandishes dildos while the PM winces and points out that sex shops are legitimate small businesses) .  Best of all,he becomes

Jill Tweedie,  the Guardian feminist writer of the 1980s. 

      It is with these two conversations,  notably the second, that the author explores the enraging , still relevant fact that some of what Mary fought – the extreme and ever more bestial  porn, the sexualizing of children, the collapse of families – did need fighting.  But – here’s the kicker – she forever framed it in the most inhumane, formulaic and cold- hearted of Christian regulation, and in an utter rejection of any artistic freedom, evocation and exploration.   And became impossibly tightly overfocused on  same-sex love, however truly loving and wholly  humanly benign.   

     So because of that,  it became impossible for others over decades since to speak against the very worst, the very  nastiest and  most destructive pornographies without being tarred with the Whitehouse brush,  and dismissed as philistine  prudes. She still casts a shadow. Which is why the play was worth doing. And Barnett, throughout, admirably represents the rest of us…

Nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk.  to 27 sep 

Rating 4

EMPYREAN ENTERTAINMENT; CLUTCH IT TO YOUR FAINTING BOSOM NOW!

   It should be on prescription,   so healing of life’s frustrations is this  Charles Court Opera revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s silliest show.  John Savournin’s production is lyrically and melodically rendered by nine fabulous classical voices, each of them attached – in truly rare providence – to a matchless physical wit.   A dogged audience for the Wiltons’ first night braved strikebound London (not to bad with 453 and 205 buses and Shadwell on the overground) and  were richly rewarded.

         Who wouldn’t  rejoice in Matthew Kellett’s Bunthorne,  leaping around like an emotionally incontinent meerkat?  Or  Catrine Kirman’s fed-up Lady Jane calculating her declining looks while nicking a packet of crisps and stamping on a fashion magazine, Lady Angela impersonating “a poisoned hawk”,  or  the painfully earnest transformation of three hapless “fleshly” grenadiers into lipsticked and befrilled aesthetes?  Every scene is a fresh joy, the music of course quite  lovely and  the patter irresistible (“by no endeavour can a magnet ever attract a silver churn”: we’ve all been that magnet once). 

     But Patience’s other USP is its reckless, relentless antiromantic satire on every yearningly overcomplicated feelings-junkie , and every fashionable idolatry of preening poseurs and loghorreic pretenders. G&S were guying the rival aestheticisms of exotic Wilde and  Swinburne and folksy William Morris, with Bunthorne’s agonized pallid  “Hollow hollow hollow” exoticism in red lipstick, and Matthew Siveter’s cod-folksong “Hey willow waley O” .   But as each man contemplates the burden of his  own irresistible beauty and genius,  it fits nicely into  to the age of Russell Brand, Justin Bieber, Will Self, David Tennant… name your own. 

And Savournin pops in some nice up-to-date Gilbertisms for the cultured Bunthorne  (Sartre/Sinatra,  WSG would appreciate that ) and modernizes the determined simplicity of Grosvenor renouncing his poetic crown with lines about Adidas and SportsDirect.  

    It’s all a joy,  just immaculately done both artistically and comedically,  properly  high powered on its tiny scale.  David Eaton makes the lone piano as expressive as any orchestra;  properly beautiful is Catriona Hewitson’s marvellous, birdlike song and baffled emotions as buxom put-upon Patience. The Grenadiers are magnificently manly, the lovelorn ladies pinnacles of elegant ridiculousness.  No joke is lost , none milked too long, no gesture wasted.  Simon Bejer’s jolly saloon-bar set frames it smartly.  It’s a beauty.  Six more performances, one a matinee. Enjoy.

Wiltons.org.uk to 13 sept

rating 5

AMBRIDGE OVER SLIGHTLY TROUBLED WATER

  Tim Stimpson is a long-serving modern writer on Radio 4’s  The Archers, and loves it:   so his play is about the dawning, 75 years ago,   of this “continuing drama” or – previously “everyday story of country folk” (it hates being called a soap).    It’s a good idea:   an origin-story of a project that met with doubt and suspicion but caught the national imagination by reflecting  a span of unremarkable characters living, loving, and growing older  in workaday lives (a bit like Coronation Street, actually,  though they don’t like that comparison either). 

        Hearing about it and heading curiously to the Barn I thought it might simply be set, firmly and lovingly, in the hungry1950s:   when postwar rationing still applied and  farming need to be persuaded  to take in new ideas,  replacing heavy horses with tractors and old ways with agrochemicals.  That was when Godfrey. Baseley came up with the idea of “a farming Dick Barton” to popularize the new ideas by getting  female listeners (presumed to like gossipy stories) to tell their conservative farmer husbands about them.  It was a tentative pilot series, rather resented by the suburban-set Mrs Dales Diary (the first radio soap) but it  took off at warp speed,  soon making its pretty-unknown middling actors into national celebrities. They got  invited (until it was stopped)  to get into rustic costume and pretend to be the real characters at Conservative fetes.  

         This tale is told,  and worth hearing,   but in search of meta-theatre fun Stimpson and director Joseph O”Malley decide  present it as if a 2025 director called Jonty (James Mack) was – self-funded and passionate – trying to make a play about Baseley in the hope of getting the job of Archers editor ( It is unclear quite how, since there is not as yet much of a business in selling complete radio dramas to Radio 4, their only home).   So he dramatizes Baseley’s arguments with Controllers,   and depicts the first cast’s recruitment, relationships, and pay demands  (though we don’t get Gwen “Doris” Berryman constnatly resigning, as she did).   

      The result is commendably full of good physical jokes about how to do spot effects with bicycles pumps , ironing boards and yoghurt for the squelchy delivery of lambs,  and I can see why all the  meta-theatre-play-about-makig-a-play  stuff was useful in getting in lots of voguish jokes about influencers, Strictly,  social media etc.  But it constantly risks being confusing and overdemanding of the actors as they move rather fast between three character-voices.    Thus  Olivia Bernstone plays a 2025 celeb with one regional accent,  the  1950s actress Ysanne Churchman with another, and Christine Archer with a slightly posher accent as the wealthy-farmer’s daugher who marries Phil.  He, meanwhile,  is in 2025 mode  a keen tyro actor,   in 1950 an aspiring writer called Norman Painting turned into an actor by Baseley, and in character then of course, Phil.   Kieran Brown gets off more easily,  playing  a 2025 screamingly-camp actor and turning into the anxious, driven middle-Britain bureaucrat Baseley . Though he also gets a quick cameo in the Goons, which came second to the ARchers as best-entertainment in the 1953  radio awards.  And Rosanna Miles is her modern self as Fiona, then June Spencer as Peggy and –  well, Peggy. 

        OK, you’re confused. Trust me, you will be.  They all make a very good fist of switching characters and periods,  but cutting through the onion-skins (or russian-doll layers) requires more clarity.  The upside, though,  and the reason we left happyish,  is the director’s device of going dark as the cast play  certain classic scenes. Not least the death of Grace Archer on the night of ITV’s launch, which we hear on radio, as the nation did, the curtain closed on the speakers.

  On Alfie Heywood’s atmospheric radio-studio set that does offer the frisson of audio-drama wonder. It’s  the moment – as Jonty says- when “millions of people make an act of collective imagination”.  

barntheatre.org.uk  to 11 oct

rating 3

POETIC PASSIONS IN A TUDOR POLICE STATE

    Here’s a lively aquib from the RSC, a bravura 85 minute two-hander about Christopher Marlowe –  dead at 29 in a Deptford tavern brawl – and young Will Shakespeare, thought to have collaborated with him on the least loved of the history plays, the Henry VI trilogy.   Set in one room – bare, with glaring lines of bulbs facing us – it storms along from 1591-3 in several meetings, burning with  homoerotic machismo which can , to be honest, get a bit tedious despite Ncuti Gatwa’s  ripped torso frequently displayed as Marlowe rips off his floppy blouson.   

    But it grows,  albeit a bit late, into a touching imaginative insight into why Shakespeare stands alone, miraculous  and eternally strange. The American Liz Duffy Adams was gripped by the precariousness of post-Reformation England under Elizabeth:  an effective police state after a decade of  religious persecutions both ways. Into this comes the idea that Marlowe, explosive roistering author of Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus, also operated as a political spy for Robert Cecil and Raleigh against the Earl of Essex.   And that he might, in a fierce collaborative friendship, have tried to enrol young Will, a more careful soul with a distant wife in Stratford and a child or two.   He might also, it’s suggested,  to some extent have used his pull with Cecil  protected Shakespeare  from the danger of having Catholic parentage.

    It’sa great idea, and the RSC’s Daniel Evans palpably relishes the idea of white-hot artistic partnership laced with fascination (from Edward Bluemel’s   country-boy Will) ) and predatory desire from Gatwa’s  Kit Marlowe. Adams neatly  lays out her own stall early,  as Kit chucks aside his collaborator’s copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles and his  “it’s a history play” with a dismissive “all the more reason to use our imagination”. 

        There are passages of working  debate – often funny as starry Kit brandishes and fondles his 3ft quill while Will scratches away with a lesser one.  Nice fragments of the plays emerge, Will always riveted by the villains.  It’s  interesting as they differ over Joan of Arc, la Pucelle:   Will sees her nobility as the stake approaches,   Kit snarls “she’s not a hero, she’s fucking French” and prefers her death as black comedy.  When Will tries to express his idea of God,   Kit responds “Ineffable? There’s nothing I can’t F–!”.  At one point they read together the  parting of Suffolk and Margaret of Anjou, ending in a hot embrace. Not their first.

       As I say, there are longueurs in the  personal interplay between Bluemel’s  rather sweet Shakespeare and  Gatwa’s  outrageous, camply macho, hip- swinging predatory leather-queen.  But by the 1593 scene it sobers:  savage monochrome flashes of agonizing interrogation fill the curtain  as they did before  the start.   Life is very dangerous.   Kit has gone  too far in his edgy espionage,   and  Will has risen to prosperity but will never feel quite safe. There are edges  of mutual treachery,  and a properly moving, ambiguous final separation and farewell which haul in the third mouse.

rating 3

A MODERN CHEKHOVIAN PLAY, BEAUTIFUL

    The first thoughts that steuck me on leaving Andrew Keatley’s well-made, slightly old fashioned family drama were that a lesser playwright would have ended it with at least one corpse; and that a lesser director than the careful, restrained Adrian Noble would have ramped up the sound tomake us hink there might be one.

     But, magnificently, its account of a patriarch’s birthday eve and death ends with candles on a cake, and a messily credible erosion of old resentments.  But it isn’t sentimental schlock: closer,  really to Priestley or Chekhov and performed with the  skilled conviction it deserved. 

       Jonathan Hyde’s waistcoated , tactlessly autocratic lawyer William, for whose birthday they have gathered, is exasperated by his sons . There’s Giles the doctor who was never “man enough” for his heroic WW2 tastes, and Samuel who is seriously autistic, half-savant but prone to meltdown when overloaded with the difficulty of people’s and life’s disorganization. Giles has been his brother’s protector and kindly playmate – both halves begin  with schoolboy flashbacks –   but this devotion has clearly taken its toll on his unsatisfied and rsther bootfaced wife Sophie.  The third sibling, Alice, was disowned by William 17 years earlier for being pregnant by a black Cameroonian: the birthday gathering is her first open return home, with the teenage Aurelia. Who to some extent makes common cause with the other grandchildren , Giles’ and Sophie’s teens.

     It is carefully set in 1987: the eve of New Labour. Early enough for them all to remember Samuel being called a “retard”, and  for Alice and baby to be slung out by William, a phenomenon considered weird by Giles’ children.    And early enough too for William’s stiff war-and-duty attitudes (and an ancient moral guilt)   to have been formed by a brother’s  death at Gallipoli.   

        What distinguishes it from the last century’s classics, though, is Keatley’s willingness to present the serious neurodiversity of Samuel not as a difficulty – though heaven knows it is, he has outbreaks and irationalities – but as an idiosyncrasy, a brother and son familiar and  loved.  Richard Stirling is extraordinary: expressing the innocence, the affection, the clever brain without harness, and the agonized tension of struggling  to make sense of sudden mental overload.  Giles  – given a wonderfully rounded, decent and underrated portrait by Chris Larkin – cries in frustrated defensiveness about his brother  “He TRIES!”   There is one moment when Giles , overcome by his wife’s dislike and father’s contempt,  gets a sudden confused consolation from his weaker brother. Your heart turns over. 

        Unlike Samuel the patriarch William, on the front edge of vascular dementia after a couple of strokes,  does not usually try. His feelings,rigid beliefs and demands for organisation to run  his way are visited on the family, not least Olivia Vinall’s luminous, tired-eyed prodigal Alice.   Much happens between them all, and the movement and change of mood and understanding  is utterly engrossing. Hot and tired that day,   I was drawn in and lived among them. 

park theatre.co.uk  to 20 sept

rating  5

BACK TO THE LAND

        Birdsong, a grassy bank. At a rough rustic table sits a rough rustic:  bearded, silent, rolling fags and contemplating a broken tractor part.   Into this Thomas-Hardy idyll prance two young moderns;  Milly (Nadia Parkes) in full influencer makeup and bare tummy,  and Femi (Terique Jarrett) springing around happily in beach-shorts.  They bum a spliff off the older man, who stumps off silently with his lump of metal to a shrill cry of “Rude!” From Milly.  

         Mike Bartlett,  who was last delighting us up West with a revived UNICORN,  has a gift for creating almost cartoonishly awful middle-class modern characters,   in sparky dialogue you want to jot down.  In the opening scenes of this odd new play he first displays it bravissimo in the whining rants of Milly,   complaining that the lush Ultz-set grass might contain bugs, and  then doing the full gen Z rant about how Lip – Sam Troughton’s solidly taciturn urbanit returning to his dead father’s farm –  t –   has no right to go “goblining around” looking the way he does , because “self care”’is a moral imperative.  And  anyway she hates her ex-stepmum Ruth who is living with him and paying the bills while they try to turn the arable farm into an organic mixed enterprise with darling pigs fed on scraps and all their own vegetables.

       Ruth – the splendid Hattie Morahan –  turns up all white-shirt, jeans, designer-boots and shining hair with trays of food, laying   out a Markle-style tablescape with bits of lavender.    Enter widowed Tony from the next farm ( Jonathan Slinger) all agri-biz scorn for their ‘hobby farm’ dreams but fancying Ruth no end.   Young Femi, it turns out, is starting an Oxford course on rural sustainability and  knows enough already for some youthful mansplaining to the others.   Emotions rise until Lip violently  throws a shovelful of earth onto the supper table,  to demonstrate how few worms there are these days.  Milly defiantly fossicks in it shouting “well, here’s one! oh no, it’s pasta”.  

       The theme, hammered at in three directions for the best part of three-hours-two-intervals,  is what is right for us:  big agribiz for profit and feeding the masses reasonably cheaply,  or aiming for minimal chemicals and kindly pasture-beast manure and horticulture. Or  – Lip suddenly veers this way –  we should go prehistoric,  return the Cotswolds to temperate rainforest and roving wolves, smash phones and live in a hut on vegetables.  Oh, and avoid modern science,  including medicine,  because we all ought to die sooner and feed  the biocycle.  The problem here is that Ruth is expecting a baby and has strong views about keeping it alive.

          Full disclosure: we farmed for a decade organically before it was fashionable, and I too can bore for England about soil aeration, rotation and agrochemical  damage. As indeed can most Archers listeners these days: it has all been talked about for twenty-five years.   In the middle act – where sadly the magnificent Milly has vanished – Bartlett fleshes out the emotional issues : Tony’s loneliness and his genuine respect for Ruth’s intentions (Slinger is terrific, both funny and moving in the reality of his widowhood).   Lip’s increasing battiness rises.   They all talk and talk and talk. Then talk some more,  none of them doing any actual farming, though Tony clearly has chaps out there doing it for him.  Then they talk and talk some more.  During the men’s long speeches Hattie Morahan brilliantly deploys her gift for appalled facial expressions of horror, resignation, helplessness and stony determination not to let the dingbat Lip draw her back. 

           During the second interval some five or six years elapse, stagehands deftly rip up the stage and produce some saplings and an old motor-tyre,  and Femi has finished his PhD and got some clothes on.      But Milly is still there,  having become Lip’s sidekick and gone  grunge-rural and a convert to  his sustainable rewilded hovel-life.  The others return one by one.  And talk.  And talk.     Modern life , we learn from Lip and Milly, is but a wretched serfdom to global tyrants like Tesla , Meta and Netflix. From Femi comes an explanation of how post-Thatcher (oh, here we go!) globalized capitalism clashes with our deep Neolithic needs and confuses the middle-boomer generation. . But he knows better:  capitalism is still humanity’s best chance,  owing to AI. 

       They all recriminate and TED-talk at one another some more (except Tony, who just gently reminds his old friend Lip that he’s always had crazes , for months once experimenting with an eight day week).     Oh, and Ruth wants her investment in the farm back. As you would.   Lip  sits, all silent glittering eyes and bristle.   There are sound effects which may suggest that Ruth’s chaps are already busy flattening Lip’s fledgling rainforest.   Maybe someone will die,  no spoilers.  But by then, sadly,  you hardly care.  It is not Bartlett’s best play. 

donmarwarehouse.com  to 4 October

Rating 3

A FAMILY BUSINESS AT SIXES AND 007s

This little theatre has given us some strong meat lately – themes of Nazi crimes, Jewishness, Russianness – but this time it hosts the Barn theatre’s sparky, short and cheeky take by Jordan Waller on the James Bond franchise,  directed by Derek Bond, no relation..  It comes  just at a lovely topical moment since – as per the play itself – the new Bond hovers unnamed  in the near future.    It is a fine romp, coming in under two hours including interval,  invites us to have a few thoughts about toxic masculinity, race and ingenerational misunderstanding. 

      It is fuelled by a manically enjoyable performance by Tanya Franks as the imagined heiress of the Bond francise, a responsibility she holds jointly with her cousin Malcolm (Phlip Bretherton),  white-haired and cautious. She also fancies raising her son the intern  to producer level,  and presentis him with the vintage Rolex Submariner worn by Connery in the first film.   But Quinn (Harry Goodson-Bevan) is more interested in making a film in Sierra LEone with his hip boyfriend.  So as far as human relations go (which is nowhere very  deep)  it is about a powerful woman’s conflicted feelings for both her father and her son, all tangled up with everyone’s feelings for James Bond.

       It’s all punctuated by odd blasts of Bond music and once even some smoke, and is  at its best when joyfully cartoonish: Deborah on the phone snapping at scriptwriters  “We love the schooldchilrenm we love the monks, but needs a twist”, discussing the blowing up of a giant Buddha and emphasising that it’s for the boys “for god’s sake,  he’s a MAN they need a MAN to make sense of the world we live in”.  And as for a costume detail “He’s not wearing high-vis! He’s James Bond, not a f–ing bin lady!”.   

       They have 24 hours before the announcement of the new Bond, but of course as Malcolm and Quinn nip in and out it becomes clear that “David” won’t do . Phone messages. To girls. Young girls. Kaput!.  They agonize over audition tapes,  one being blandly Bondish and obvious “Caucasian male six foot, dark hair”   but Quinn says his friend, a resting-actor barman, sent oene in and they all look. And it’s Theo (Obioma Ugoala)  and he’s good.  But he’s also brown.  Dare they?   Might this open the door to more frighteningly diverse Bonds, identifying all over the place with “mental health and feelings…  Angela Merkel in an avocado suit..”) .  Deborah at one point roars “TOxic men.  Of cours’e he’s toxic, he’s a f—ing bastard and thats what makes him a MAN! 

     Well, of course they dare. A bit.  But then THeo turns out to be vegetarian as well, and that’s not all. There’s more.  He may not even be happy with exploding the Buddha, and nor is Gen-Z Quinn.   Panic rises.  A small betrayal looms.  More pastiche music and hysteria.  A snap ending.  Well, the journey has been fun , but it hasn’t quite led anywhere .  Still, there’s a place for that, in August.  

marylebonetheatre.com  to 30 Aug

RATING 3

A TRUE-CRIME RICARDIAN ROMCOM

Here’s a wonderfully  1950s retro play,  not just in style and simplicity but in the willowy vintage-Harrods outfits of Rachel Pickup as the willowy Marta Hallard, visiting Inspector Grant in he bleak hospital  room where all the action takes place – barring a couple of Shakespearean ranting moments for contrast, and two neat cocktail bar scenes stage right. 

    It’s adapted from the most famous novel by Josephine Tey, who stands alongside Christie in the golden age of crime fiction, a write artful and readable though with an enthusiasm for a particular strict Englishness (laced with Balmoralish Scottishness)  that can jar the modern  ear. Inspector Grant is her hero, and in this unusual tale is  stuck in hospital with a broken leg, bored and restive with nothing to detect.

     His actress pal Marta gives him – as a judge of interesting faces – a postcard portrait  of Richard III. He sees the face of Shakespeare’s notorious villain as “more like a judge or soldier”, strong and honest. He then  finds what all passionate Ricardians will tell you: that Shakespeare drew on st Thomas More, who was barely seven at Bosworth, and that  the story of Richard’s  crimes was, basically, cooked up by the Tudor victors after they’d stripped the last Plantagenet’s corpse and chucked him under a future car park in Leicester.

    The book is a classic, the  detective assisted by a young historian at the BL, Marta and his sergeant wafting in and out amid occasional exasperated nurses.     Adapting it, M.Kilburg Reedy has been pretty faithful to the track of archival discovery , and has added two rather wonderful nurses, Janna Fox as the one who is sceptical and prefers Richard the Lionheart, and Halsa Abbasi who is stagestruck,  and thrilled  that the nefarious Shakespeare play is running up West and starring Marta’s fiance’.  

     Who is also the playwright’s invention: , because a rom-com situation is bolted on to the basic story, with a very un-Tey unspoken “chemistry” between the cop and the diva, mirrored by the love life of young Brent the researcher.  Who like Grant risks romantic happiness for detective preoccupation…

    It’s a bit too long at 2 hrs 45, slow burn at the start but turns out unexpectedly rewarding: a lot of the good sharp lines are Tey’s own, and Rob Pomfret has sufficient commanding presence to hold us happy despite being static in a hospital  bed in striped pajamas for the whole of the first half.  Moreover, Harrison Sharpe as Brent the earnest researcher is a glorious comic : puppyish, forever hauling crumpled notes out of his jacket, trousers and shoes, excitedly emotional (at one point to the extreme of a somersault). And the nurses are terrific foils to Grant, especially when he and Brent run out of tintacks for their Plantagenet-Woodville storyboard and steal syringe needles instead.     

     So it’s a great deal of fun, decently low-priced, gives old Richard his due in dignity ,and the romcom additions stay just this side of annoying. Oh, and here’s a gracious deed: the CX theatre obligingly puts Richard III and Anne Nevill’s 4-generation family tree on the back of its free panto flyer, so even those who didnt buy  programmes can follow it..

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk  to  13 sept

Rating 4

LA COMMEDIA E FINITA!  (oh no it’s not)

     The title is the first line, delivered by a furious Leoncavallo in 1893 Milan.  It is a time of wild flowering in opera , old Verdi’s grandeur and success inspiring  a host of lesser composers.   Alasdair Buchan’s anxious, keenly schoolboyish Leoncavallo, after his Pagliacci success,  is terrified of being a one-hit wonder like Ponchielli or poor old  Mascagni with Cavalliera. 

     His wife Berthe tries to calm and reassure him, but the poor chap  is enraged with the  very existence, and visible smugness, of the more suave Puccini.  The latter  wanders in, eavesdropping:   Sebastian Torkia a vision of horrid confidence, all velveteen  coat and shiny coiffure.   We soon discover why: over a cautiously collegiate coffee in the Galeria Puccini had asked his supposed friend and artistic colleague what his new opera will be about.  On learning that it is based on young Parisian bohemian lives in a book of short stories,  Puccini says that curiously,  he is doing the same in his La Boheme. 

       Leoncavallo doesn’t believe him, reckons he’s stolen the idea.   It’s an 1890’s Boheme-off, no mercy.   Puccini reckons he’ll win anyway if they both do it. So it’s a story about a story, and a rivalry,  and more importantly about art itself.    Which, in a likeable conclusion, even Puccini admits  shouldn’t be a competition.    It was the beauty of that truth at  last, in the second act of James Inverne’s play, that  made me properly enjoy it.     I had thought of it for a while  mainly as a nice quirky oddity for us opera-victims:  I can’t speak for experts but have had a lifetime of amohitheatrical emotional catharses in the cheapest seats I can find, and ridden the  great rolling rides of feeling conjured by Verdi and his contemporaries: heart-food. 

         Quirky it certainly is,  the three actors occasionally having to expand the personnel , going meta to  swop over (Lisa-Anne Wood as Berta at one stage irritably being made to take over the role of Gustav Mahler,  of whom both men appear to be in awe).  Torkia has most fun, his face expressing every degree of mischief;  Buchan draws most sympathy.   It’s demotic, slangily up to date, playful,  with occasional snatches of aria from Berta,  taking us fascinatingly through the way things developed.

       For they both wrote Bohemes;  first PUccini’s got bad reviews in Torino,  Leoncavallo,having cried “Sweet Jesus, it’s a flop!!) .  He  was thrilled to get his own  into La Fenice (where the chaise-longue briefly becomes  a gondola)  but Puccini then played his just down the road, undermining him.  More meta-switches,  as one becomes a ticket tout saying Puccini’s selling out.    Leoncavallo has a triumph, though,  and Mahler rudely says Puccini’s is “Hpllow, vulgar, disgusting”.  But it becomes clear whose will last.

       But there’s no triumph. They both know how much the sheer emotion  and humanity they strive to express in music is what counts – “I’ts got to be great or what’s the point?”   When Leoncavallo  lies depressed , refusing to work, it’s Torkia’s Puccini who arrives uninvited and goads him back to the piano, assisted by Berthe  (“when you’re an artist’s wife  you know how to pick him up when he’s knocked down. By a great artist”. he says)   Which is significant because  Puccini’s own wife, occasionally taken on in a fur stole by Lisa-Anne Wood,  is of not prone to consoling him or forgiving his womanizing.  So in a personal sense Leoncavallo has won.   But in the end neither triumph or defeat can matter. The music does.   

parktheatre.co.uk  to 9 Aug  

rating 4

A WILD YOUNG PRINCE OF DENMARK IN THE DUSK

        Easy to forget, after decades of prestige-casting and its torrent of ringing, over-quoted lines,  how much HAMLET is a play about being  young.   Here’s angry, grieving adolescent Hamlet and Horatio his sensible bestie;  here are  Ophelia and Laertes,  rolling their eyes at prosy old Polonius but suddenly devastated by his death;  here are students Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vainly  recruited by the King to entertain a sullen nephew-stepson;  here, even, is youth in the soldiers on the castle walls who flinch at both the ghost and the new regime. 

      It’s about youth,   trapped beneath powerful elders whose hypocrisies and dim moral compass they perceive with clear unforgiving eyes,the way we all did once.      Jo Carrick’s light-spirited production for Red Rose Chain catches this quality to a marvel:  her young cast leap, run and skip around the audience under a great spreading chestnut tree,  mock and joke as well as registering  griefs and shocks.  Vincent Moisy’s vigorous Hamlet spring up onto the high wooden tower and gateway and leaps off (one flinches for him, but his confidence is  unsurprising given that, in the spirit of this little company, he has done much of the set- building with his own hands,   just as he did for his role in The Ungodly both in Ipswich and New York) . 

          The other delight of this outdoor production is of course the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who is a 20ft tall puppet of magnificent design by Charlie Tymms, its head the Sutton Hoo helmet,  its immense mailed hands gesticulating, wrapping round terrified guards in an ultimate panto “behind you!” moment,   reaching out in the bedchamber scene to touch Gertrude, who cannot see it.  The puppetry is good, the great mask holds expression deeply:   its first appearance sends the guards, panicked squaddies,  scuttling around;  when Hamlet sees it his gasp of “…father!” as it bows its huge head towards him it is electric.   With three operators it paces through and behind the auditorium as we gasp, and reappears suddenly behind the castle to demand fealty: it is simultaneously funny and awe-inspiring.  Matt Pension speaks its voice from its great draped heart, doubling as Claudius; two others are its arms. 

     Actually, the curtain-call realization that this is only a cast of 8 reminds us that, without particular fuss,  doubling and tripling in this tight, versatile cast is everywhere, and part of its strength.   Carrick has reinstated several of Shakespeare’s comic, bantering scenes often cut by more earnest directors:  the guards are funny in their dismay, and as as for the pair transformed later into gravediggers – Emily Jane Kerr and Ailis Duff  – they are pure music-hall.  Though Kerr of course is also Queen Gertrude, and Duff a memorably funny Polonius,  who  roams the audience adding a few lines telling us off.  Rei Mordue and Seb Yates Cridland are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (the latter also Laertes, the former the Player King) .  They are nicely laddish (why not add a few “oy-oy!” and “Gett-in!” cries to the text: Shakespeare’s players would have.)   Georgie Redgrave’s Ophelia is at first a confident teenager, then a scared one when Hamlet turns rough,  and finally allows her distraught state to be more disturbing than conventionally pretty  (Redgrave, of course, doubles as both a guard and, later,  a comic Osric unskilled at fanfares).   

         In passing I should mention that though this is a big arena, with four great stands and a pit of folding chairs,  none of the players is amplified but all are audible everywhere:  that’s Carrick’s old-style insistence on proper projection.  Actors who move on from Red Rose Chain are unlikely to join the growing rank of screen-spoilt mumblers.  

       But Hamlet himself, you ask? And the tragedy, the darkness that has to lie beneath all youthful energy?   Vincent Moisy, within the production’s lively spirit, plays the prince of Denmark with vigour:  emotional, his mood turning on a sixpence, beautifully overdoing the pretended madness as a lad would,  mocking his  uncle, uneasy about his mother’s sexuality.    But he knows how to fall suddenly into the proper seriousness of the great speeches without losing what went before:  his “to be or not to be”  is not declaime but delivered with a roaming energy,  groping its way towards cloudy wisdom before declining  into the disturbing very rough hysteria of his attack on Ophelia. 

       There are, as any actor knows (and often dreads) a dozen different ways of being Hamlet.  Moisy’s is youthful , energetic and interesting:  I tend to judge a lot in any Hamlet on how it feels  at the moment before the final fight and whether I can  believe that he has grown to that acceptance :  “the readiness is all” .   I only just managed it by a whisker in Rupert Goold’s weird RSC version set on the Titanic this year.  But here I was happy with it.     And goodness, the final fight – directed by Ryan Penny – is another thing to remember about a summer dusk at the Anglo-Saxon burial ground, together in a breathless audience under a great chestnut tree.    It is violent,  cartoonishly brilliant (adding two extra corpses for luck)   and  takes your breath away.   Until all the dead rise for the last of Carrick’s original, harmonized songs about our common road to the grave.   Beautiful. 

redrosechain.com  to 23 August

rating 5

MUM-POLE OF THE BAILEY….?

     I paused overnight before writing this,  to see if a bout of two-star irritation might fade.   After all, lawyer-playwright  Suzie Miller gave us the astonishing monologue Prima Facie, when Jodie Comer kept audiences riveted to their seats as a barrister who defends rape cases  and then is a victim.   This one is still mainly a solo by Rosamund Pike, speaking her inner and outer thoughts with elegant division between the two under Justin Martin’s sure direction.   Again ,as in Prima Facie our heroine-narrator leaps on and off tables with engaging vigorous physicality,  but this time there are showy projections (a Buether design).  and significant  moments with Jamie Glover as the husband and an excellent Jasper Talbot as a teenage son (his younger selves also appear).

      Pike is Jessica,  married to a QC, herself newly a judge and pleased with the role. She talks  of bringing female intuition, nuanced listening and empathy to the job, unlike the despised old male dinosaurs on the bench.  But  ‘inter alia’  (meaning among-other-things) indicates that as a woman, wife and mother she struggles  to balance her domestic and emotional life with work, while adoring her only child, Harry and being careful not to upset her husband with her seniority.  

       Well, stop me if you’ve heard that complaint of successful women before: we all have. It’s fashionable.  That sense of deja-vu upper-middle fashionability  is where my above irritation began: Jessica is forever fretting about the shopping, dragging out the ironing-board for her son’s party shirt and adjourning a rape trial to answer his fretful texts about it.  So, generally cosplaying the oppressed hausfrau,  as if to tell us that a judge and a QC wouldn’t afford a bit of domestic help (none is mentioned). The other irritation – though it shows the interesting research among judges which Miller dutifully did –  is her rather bumptious self-satisfaction in the early court scenes. She’s very “My court my rules”, as one flashed projection puts it, and loves putting down male defence barristers.  Her best friend, unseen, is another female judge. They do karaoke together at one point , yowling ‘simply the best!”.  

      But none of that would matter – it’s quite good to dislike a character, it means they’re real, and Pike is terrific; she  is given a spontaneous sex interlude with Glover,  her response interrupted only briefly by her memory of a rape video in court (that does feel real: it must be hell).   But what got on my nerves, as a mother,  was the howling improbability of how dim she is about her son.   Her early terror is of paedophile kidnap, reasonable given the cases she sees,  but absurd is the remembered scene where on a beach walk she panics at little Harry’s liking for a male teaching-assistant.  Without a scrap of that boasted  ability to “listen”,  she trains him how to shout aloud “don’t touch my willy!’.   How to confuse a small child. Even more hopeless is when, rather than check  what he’s actually watching aged 14,  she assumes it’s hard porn rather than just a forbidden video game. So she starts going on and on about  penis and breast improbabilities, and how he needn’t worry .   When,  at last 18 but with no regular  girlfriend yet,  he goes to a ‘house party’ and returns appallingly  drunk saying  he’s had sex,  she giggles with a frisson of actual motherly pride.   Not a thought for the equally drunk girl;  when precious Harry is asked whether he texted Amy  next day he sneers “that’s so last century!”, and  it’s only her husband who murmurs that hey, a gentleman would have done so. In other words, neither of these muppets has ever had a conversation about how a decent person treats a fellow human being they have been that intimate with, even if it was fleeting.

      I suspected Miller intends the play as a statement of indignation on behalf of successful modern clever upmarket mothers doing-it-all while struggling against the manosphere. But actually it works better as a lament for a whole generation of hip, cool  permissive parents who shrug “it’s the culture” at a Gen Z child who deserves to be taken more seriously,  and who shrug playfully at heavy drinking and casual sex.  It works also as a clever portrait of one individual, self-important nitwit.  Somewhere not far from the level of Diary of a Nobody. This is a woman who can selfrighteously sit on the Bench hearing about sex crimes against drunk girls day after day,   without it ever occurring to her to warn her strapping teenage son about how easily it happens, even to normally quite nice boys, when they drink too much and are urged on by loutish peers and are, face it, physically stronger than the girl.

      She finds the truth of that night hard to believe as the story develops, for all the vaunted “listening”.   When the inevitable accusations and defences happen , she turns on her husband, who she considers should have trained Harry better. And when the poor man gives way to his own distress about it all, she the supposed empath is astonished to find that he too is vulnerable.  Not that good at nuanced listening, then…

        The end, however,  redeemed it for me.  Because Miller, for all her empathy with top-class legal women,  bravely offers us the possibility  that the moral compass of a teenager might actually be more reliable than that of a proud bewigged judge. 

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 13 sept

Rating 4

In cinemas uk and Ireland from 18 sept, internationally from 25 sept

FAITH LOST, AND WAKENED

      This is a moody, cloudy production shot through with streaks of mad rage, deliberately unsettling.   Autolycus, spirit of Time the thief and occasional narrator,  roams cynically downstage in a pork pie hat,  lighting a fag. Then beneath a great pale moon Leontes’ court revolves, gathering  to  admire the boss’s sportive wrestling-match with Polixenes.   He laughingly tries to keep this childhood friend staying  longer, entreats the Queen to do likewise and she obeys, courtly style.  But in a stabbing moment the mist flares red (in Yael Farber’s production Tim Lutkin’s lighting plot is critical, chilling or mellowing through the story).   Leontes is suddenly, savagely crazy with suspicion of his innocent wife and friend, grabbing his little son and pushing him away, ranting, spilling his horrors at us, baffling his court. 

       It is one of the hardest parts in Shakespeare to interpret:  I never forget a truncated  prisoners’ production for the old London Shakespeare Workout when in discussion afterwards one starring inmate, perhaps familiar with private destructive madness from long ago,  sighed sadly  “Leontes, what a plonker! It’s stuff like that…”.  So every time, it  falls on actor and director to work out why this king’s  suspicion grows so fast, so mad and murderous.  When you can’t believe it the whole strange mythic play of loss and redemption can hang oddly, unreal.   

      So thank goodness that Bertie Carvel  – in his  first RSC role since  Miss Trunchbull fifteen years ago – is a marvel. He has in the interim played, among others,  Donald Trump and a young Rupert Murdoch: he draws on that headlong macho determination here,  but with a sadness under it, always visible, insecure.  Madeline  Appiah’s cheerful, confidently pregnant Hermione is more adult, safe in herself, than he can ever manage to be.  She is calm, slightly baffled;  he is  storming, eyes glittering, attempting sophisticated mockery but gripped by the “infection of the brain that hardens the brow”. It is  the howling anger of a child demanding love. Appalled, you believe him: honest Camillo is right : not being loved enough is  “fear that oft infects the wisest”.  

        In the background the softer, easier world of Hermione’s ladies and cheeky Mamillius  cannot fight such roaring male power. But  downstage comes the formidable and furious Paulina (it’s a very feminist play) in the form of another marvel of energy: Aicha Kossoko.  She’s   a proper barnstormer.  The male and female energies collide; Leontes tosses in rage under a sheet, rises, pulls on his socks, screams and curses the newborn infant,  demands she be thrown on the fire,  drops the red-swaddled bundle to the ground to be caught by the appalled womenfolk.  The costumes are informal and period-vague,  which makes the sudden formality of business-suits in the court scene all the more striking,  as Hermione on trial,  fresh from childbed in a slip, breasts leaking,   defends herself with vain dignity.   At last down comes the calm shrugging ruling from the Delphic Oracle, and for Leontes, unbearable disastrous guilt.  You can hardly look at Carvel here for angry pity.  

        I wondered how, after the darkness of the first half, Farber would handle the pastoral revels of sixteen years on,  with the lost infant Perdita grown up far beyond the sea and in love (fully entangled from the start) with her lover, Polixenes’ son Florizel.  Most directors revel in this lightening of mood, as the tragedy turns into a rom-com and moves towards the final redemption of all (except poor lost Mamillius, nobody ever thinks of him).   But this production swerves deliberatley away from the traditional rustic comedy (though there’s a classy pickpocket manoeuvre from Trevor Fox’s Autolycus).  Farber accentuates rather  the mythic, mystical side: wild Isadora-Duncan dancing to a great drumbeat round a  leaping flame and orange smoke,  Perdita almost a priestess.   After the anger and arrogant  misery of the first act this is a hippie paradise.  Drawing the play’s themes hastily  together, Polixenes’ rage (a mere shadow of Leontes’) sends the young couple fleeing.  

          I had reservations about the Bohemian interlude, though it is never dull and often spectacular.  But in this play you’re always waiting, wanting to move on to the  final redemptive scene around the statue.  Autolycus’ hurried narrative fits that need,  and at last there it is: brilliantly set, notably lit, ready for the  removal of all fear and mistrust.  Lanterns glimmer  all around as the court gathers and Paulina – truly priestesslike – delivers the key demand: “It is required you do awake your faith”.  And we do, as the playwright asks down the centuries. That’s all you can ask. 

Rsc.org.uk to 30 August

Rating 4 

WESTMINSTER , A WILL, A WICKED WRANGLE  

     This excellent play is the first by Shaan Sahota, a doctor by profession:  but goodness, she (and the NT Studio, and director Daniel Raggett) know how to do it . A family explosion, a sorrowful unfolding of self-knowledge, dry cynical wisdom and laughs and fights, even a spectacular moment turning the audience into a party conference crowd (we are all trained since Truss to flinch in apprehension at the sight of a lectern).  And there’s even  a devastatingly memorable  final line from an unforgettable hero.   Or , you might decide,  sudden antihero.  Bravo. 

     The play  is also absolute catnip to anyone who has watched the last few years  of Westminster politics, rife with insider privilege and old Oxbridge acquaintance yet including our first Indian Premier.   The Estate is  bound to follow the journey of the Donmar’s last new play, “Till the stars come down”,  and hit the West End.  Will eat my hat if it doesn’t.

    At its heart is a stunning performance by Adeel Akhtar as  Angad, a BRitish Punjabi Sikh  shadow minister in opposition. He’s small, intense, nervously round-shouldered , asthmatic, idealistic . We meet him in his office just as his party leader is resigning over a scandal (“at least she’s 18”, they all keep saying, it’s a very funny play at this stage).    His cynically ambitions , Oxford-posh communications spad Petra (Helena Wilson,  note- perfect down to the clacking stilettos and swishing hair) hopes that party and nation will love to  see a baggage-handler’s son reaching the top. Though we soon learn that the father rose fast in business , a tough possibly slum landlord.  Petra’s underling  Isaac (Fade Simbo) is fresh off the Diversity Access scheme,  and a bit cowed by it all. But even so it’s always Angad himself who makes the coffee. 

        In strides chief whip Humphry Ker as Ralph (joyful casting: he’s a clear 18 inches taller than the shadow minister, looms). A vape and a thousand years  of confident privilege  hanging from his lanyard, Humphrey orders Angad to back a rival for the leadership.   Again, it’s a wickedly funny scene: we hardly need he playful programme biogs to tell us that Ralph was captain of rowing and star batsman at Harrow when the shy asthmatic Indian boy arrived, and that the power hasn’t yet shifted.  Then the bombshell:  Angad’s father has suddenly died. 

      So in an elegant scene-change it becomes a family matter, still entangled with politics since  half the shadow cabinet turn up at the Gurdwara funeral and Angad’s elder sisters Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and wellmarried socialite Malicka (Shelley Conn)  come round to supper. His pregnant wife wisely nips early to bed while they look at the will: Dad has left his entire portfolio to his only son. The  daughters nowhere: being modern,  they expect Angad to go thirds with them . Sure the old patriarchal Indian ways are gone, though the Punjab’s posters still advertise amnio and  abortion for girl-babies,   and Dad spent all the private-education money on him while they had to cook, pray for and cherish the precious boy. 

        Will he be more modern? If not , will the furious siblings sabotage his hopes? Who , past and present, is most wrong?  Was it even,  perhaps, actually tougher to be the bullied, driven, precious son of a demanding father  than the sidelined womenfolk? Tangled arguments of feminism, sibling feeling, deservings and resentments coil into poisonous fury.   One of Sahota’s many, many killer lines is Angad’s “the first rule of being brown  is , never tell white people how shit we treat each other”. 

     Let me spoil nothing, but it goes in getting better. And more physical, not least in the fights but in the way that Akhtar , his meltdowns shading at last in to rage, shows that the broken boy may be a good and modern man but  is also  the heir of ruthless, angry paternal  genes. By the end Angad is transformed:  stands physically taller, breathes easy with no inhaler in sight, even faces down the immense Humphrey.    But there’s dismay in that , too… And Akhtar deserves an Olivier.

NATIONALTHEATRE.ORG.UK TO 23 AUG rating 5

MEDIEVAL MODERNITY

There’s a nice irony in opening, this week, a tale of an aristocratically  bred heiress, seized first by evangelical Christian faith and then by a charismatic man,  rejecting it all to live in extreme poverty rejecting society. Irony anyway in a time of Gen Z idealistic disgust with the way the world runs. Though the 13c St Clare of Assisi, friend of St Francis and foundress of the barefoot Poor Clares order of nuns, turned neither to criminality  nor to politics, Chiara Atik’s play feels timely in its sense of reckless youthful determination. And in the final scene, touching is her kneeling, nunly plea never to be blinded to poverty and to find a way to “be good”.

   Atik’s lively text and Blanche McIntyre’s direction offer us – in medieval costume but teenage American language and slang and refernces to everything from goFundme to lip-salve , even as they discuss friend Guido “back from the crusades” as if it was a gap yah, which I suppose it sometimes was.
Its a deliberate double vision, and Arsema Thomas from Netflix offers a terrific stage debut as Clare, lively and rebellious, larking with her sister, arguing with her Mum, gradually intrigued by Freddie Carter’s earnest Francis who tells her that to be rich is “to be complicit in inequality”, and challenges her to confront the deep poverty of families under the Pontevecchio bridge. Her understanding grows, alongside revulsion at the wedding gifts and dress prepared for her. The extremity of her rejection becomes almost startling: after toying with the argument her sister favours that there has to be a middle way, beyond the hair shirt and sleeping on the floor because thousands have to. “Thousands” says the reasonable Beatrice “do not sleep on the floor alongside a bed”.  

    It is a quite sharp 105 straight minutes, though we are too aware from early on that there can be only one ending, and the arguments of course are perennial. What’s missing though, despite talk of Pope, interfering bishop, etc is God. Francis and Clare in real history spoke not as if driven not by purely modern liberal socialism , but by an idea of God and his world and work. There is little wonder in this Francis: no greeting of brother wind and brother sun and the beasts around. He sets up his creche with real straw – historically he is the father of all Christmas crib scenes – but it’s the poverty that fascinates him about it, not the incarnate godhead. So it could almost be an honest modern left-leaning fiction, for all the ladies’ gowns and maids (Liz Kettle and Jacoba Williams,  nicely drawn).  Fine, but given the real figures and real gowns, it could have played on more notes…

orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 9 aug

rating 3

SMOOTH AS VELVET, SHOT WITH GILT AND GUILT

Ahhh I do  love a well-made play from the 1920s (remember The Deep Blue Sea , just lately!).  This one too deals with adultery and hidden pain among the well-to-do,  but Somerset Maugham offers a less wrenching take than Rattigan,   going in more for dry wit, adult resignation, and an entertaining faux-cynicism overlying a surprising degree of humane tolerance.    Laura Wade, fresh from adapting Jilly Cooper for the telly, has made a few artful twitches and timeshifts in Maugham’s 1926 play, but it retains the ‘well-made’ civility of making the characters’ relationships and the inciting incident crystal  clear from the start.  

         Constance’s mother and her practical, less-chic sister Martha both know that our heroine’s husband John is sleeping with her best friend Marie-Louise.  At one point there’s a circular conversation in which four of five in the elegant sitting- room know  this damning fact, two of them with guilt,  and believe that the betrayed wife doesn’t know a thing.   Only of course she actually does.   So  on goes the dance ,  literally  a couple of times as   Tarmara Harvey’s lively production indicates the time-shifts  – to the past moment of revelation and back  – with low-lit moments and a Jamie Cullum jazz score. Characters move surreally in patterns and  the set goes a bit poltergeist . Tthere’s a great wallpaper gag, don’t miss it.      

        It’s swooningly attractive to look at, and has filled the RSC shop with many a jazz age butterfly brooch and silken scarf  .  Every woman in the building, ushers included, seem to want Constance’s stage wardrobe, especially the gilt black velvet theatre-cloak in which she prepares to go off to the West End to see a play (called The Constant Wife, natch) with her old friend and suitor Bernard . He is Raj Bajaj, a masterclass in baffled innocence.  Maugham’s wit is sharp too,  though Wade has added a couple of sub-Jilly double-entendres he wouldn’t have liked much.   But full advantage is taken of Constance’s Mum (Kate Burton) and her  drily cynical views on things it is best a wife decides  simply not to know.  

       Somerset Maugham, being bisexual, was one of the best male writers about female frustration, temptation and self-assertion, and Constance’s moment of shocked pain is as sharp as her realization of her fragile position – “What is a wife, among well-to-do people?”  she asks,  when the house is run so much by servants and she contributes little and might end up discarded in “two rooms over a flower shop”.  She sees that her single sister with an interiors shop  is right, and that “the only independence worth having is financial independence”. 

      So she joins the firm, advising less wise hausfraus on which hideous fringed lamp to buy, just as Waugham’s wife Syrie did. And meanwhile  she works out the best approach to conserve what she wants of her marriage, in a brilliantly sly but likeable way.  Endearingly, the only person  to whom she fully confides her pain and bafflement  is Bentley the butler (Mark Meadows, beautifully understated)  who in return confides that the sick mother he keeps visiting is, in fact, a male lover. “Must be very difficut” she says kindly. 

        It flows merrily along,  but an equal buzz on Wednesday made me glad to have missed the press night due holiday. Because an understudy show can be a thrill: Rose Leslie was off and her understudy, Jess Nesling,  proved absolutely stunning: every expression, every move, every sad-resigned grownup emotion about the inevitable cooling of marital love given to perfection in the intimate Swan. Can’t take your eyes off her.   The others are fun too,  Amy Morgan a magnificent feminist Martha with one barnstorming speech after the interval,  and though Luke Norris’ John  was a bit too much of a cartoon lounge-lizard in the first half , he came good when near the end his comeuppance is complete.

        A highly enjoyable evening.  Expect an outbreak of extreme velvet evening-shrugs and hand-painted stoles this autumn.  

. 

rsc.org.uk  To 2 august

rating 4 

GRACE PERVADES        Theatre Royal Bath

    Theatre is fond of sending itself love letters, albeit – from Sheridan’s The Critic to Frayn’s  Noises Off – often prudently laced with affectionate mockery.   Here, kicking off a Ralph Fiennes season in the prettiest and most approriate of Victorian playhouses,  David Hare evokes two of the first ‘national treasure’ theatrical  figures:  the great Henry Irving, actor-manager of the Lyceum for two decades,  and his leading lady Ellen Terry. Plus,   as a side-helping of theatre history,  the children Edward and Edith Craig she bore as a single mother: he as an advanced theorist, she a tough-minded touring producer. 

       Miranda Raison as Ellen Terry is a delight: light and likeable, every feeling shining through her eyes, a woman who’s lived and lost and struggled to feed her kids by keeping chickens, but who keeps all angst and sorrow for the stage.   Fiennes of course is Irving, and deploys all his chiselled, Easter-Island anguish and  dignity,  even when pacing around in skinny black tights like cloak like a stork in mourning,  while  being gently told off by his leading lady for never looking fellow-actors in the eye.  Jeremy Herrin’s direction, Bob Crowley’s briliantly atmospheric design and Fotima Dimou’s amazing OTT Victorian – and then Edwardian  – costumes conjure a world where British theatre was first dragged up into respectability, stalled a little with Irving’s addiction for grand Shakespeare and  melodrama,  but was creeping into a new century with new ideas beyond.  Having a great-grandfather who actor-managed (strictlyprovincial) in the period, how could I resist driving seven hours to see it?    Especially when Fiennes’ anguished Irving explained the cost, the debt and struggles of an actor-manager, and how  hours before his Othello he was on his hands and knees mending a torn seat  in Row R.  

         The scenes with Irving and Terry, her recruitment and a growing, almost maternal,  care for the brilliant, shy, troubled man are fabulous. It’s like watching a carefree robin cheering up a moulting eagle.  He is anguished by critics (Bernard Shaw was very rude) and treats every entry, every show,  with anxious intensity.  She takes the banister down from her dressing room at the last minute and throws herself into the parallel world, glad to have her own life’s anxieties thrown aside for that moment.   We could watch them all evening.  

      But her children are part of the story too, sometimes narrating, and following their own diverse lines. Jordan Metcalfe , perfect right down to his blond cowlick and earnest glasses, creates with mischievous brilliance young Edward’s progressive pomposity (he thinks theatre should abolish both actors and words,  believes fervently in his own genius,  and prefers his girlfriend  Isadora Duncan’s wild flailings to the dreadful deadening discipline of ballet).  Hare gives us a glorious scene in which Irving, having hired him  as a nepo-baby of Ellen, points out that all the other spear-carriers hate Edward, and resent  his loudly expressed theories of Theat-ah.   All very Gen-Z.  The scene where the young genius into /Stanislavsky and puts on Hamlet in Moscow is wicked theatrical jokery. It stands oddly out in the play but hell, it’s entertaining.  Sister   Edith (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis)  is tougher, feminist, democratic, and just gets on with it. Perfect.  

       There are moments when bits of social history feel a bit shoe-horned in –  there is talk of suffragettes,  and one of Edith’s threesome household is in love with Vita Sackville West.  But it’s irresistible when the finally ageing Edward explains, in the South of France,  that one of his keen acolytes is a chap called Peter Brook.

   Overall, it is never dull, and the Irving-Terry relationship and conversations about the craft of acting are mesmeric: well, it’s Ralph Fiennes.  Always worth the trip.   He directs As You Like it later in the season – the play Ellen Terry wanted to star in as Rosalind,  but which was too light-hearted for Irving’s taste.  A nice link.   Fiennes himself turns up again in the new play A Small Hotel, in September.  

theatreroyal.org to 22 July

rating. 4.

A WILD NIGHT WITH COUNT TOLSTOY

      Even those who haven’t read Tolstoy’s great novel  know about the train under which the despairing Anna will die.   So it  dominates from the start:   Philip Breen,  adaptor and director , threads the excitement, innovation and terror of Russia’s late-19c railway revolution through this show from the start:  some rather wonderful train-whistles blendwith screams, from the whole ensemble, and often poor little Seryozha is seen playing with a toy train often below the stage. Which is at the same time nursery, drawing-rooms, ballroom, country estate and station – its two rocking-horses becoming at one point even the racetrack,   where Vronsky flings himself on his damaged horse and Anna flings herself on him in turn. 

     There’s contrast between Max Jones’ set and Ruth Hall’s costumes  – wonderfully, gilded old-Russian bourgeois wealth – and the occasional rapid, disconcerning symbolic mass movement (by Ayse Tashiran) .  That’s rather engaging: from mazurka to mayhem in seconds,  a lonely light on mother and son,  or on Kitty collapsing at her snub by Vronsky,  or a sudden emptied space as Karenin and Anna speak their thoughts aside in the dying marriage.

        Staging such a dense, multi-character novel doesn’t, at that pace, offer much chance for character to build.  Natalie Dormer’s Anna is dignified, preoccupied, suddenly drawn to Seamus Dillane’s dashing soldierly Vronsky;  but oddly, it is Tomiwa Edun’s Karenin whose stiff unhappiness and confusion feel more real.   Angry Naomi Sheldon and Johnnie Broadbent (nicely reprehensible, laddish) feel more real than the central lovers ever do, and so does Shalisha JAmes-Davis’ kittenish Kitty.  David Oakes has the hardest job as Levin,  patron saint of anxious overthinkers and  the only one of them who, like Tolstoy himself, realizes that all this new technology is going to upset the Russian applecart for good.  

        By the break – it’s a chunky 3 hrs 10 with interval – my main feeling was that this was a great big Fabergé egg:  decorative ,  evocative,  complicated with sharp glittering  scene-changes and bursts of gripping Russian chant.  An interesting way to make a big novel fit the stage, but oddly unsatisfying (my companion, who claims her romantic weeping history owes it all to the book)  felt the same.  You can’t make an emotional human omelette out of a Fabergé egg: even Anna’s wild childbed hysteria, shouting for both her Alexeis, doesn’t move the heart. That’s to throw no shade on Dormer, who puts everything into it,    it’s just too abrupt. 

   The mood changes sharply in the second half when, among other things, electricity comes to Russia in the symbolic, surreal and confusing  form of a lot of neon tubes pointing down like cage bars.   This somehow sends all the couples into ferocious, distraught marital shouting,  as if inspired by foreseeing  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and, indeed, EastEnders.    Kitty rants at Levin,,    Anna at both Karenin and Vronsky  and, in quite my favourite scene,  Dolly vents her fury at  woman’s lot and being married to poor selfish Stiva,   and then carries on doing it alone aboard a cart (smallest rocking-horse recruited)  driven by old Petka. He is Les Dennis, what a gem  of casting and what a fine beard,  and hilariously maintains peasant stoicism as, in Breen’s ultra-free translation, Dolly screams about the “fucking fucking fuck fucking” fate of femaleness.   

      Tolstoy had a point there, for his time, though Anna herself emerges as always having been a disaster waiting to happen.     And altogether, combined with Kitty’s shrill unreasonableness and Anna’s needy demands for the “morphine” of  Vronsky’s  verbal devotion,   empathy disintegrates. The great shining curate’s Fabergé-egg breaks, and there’s nothing to treasure in its velvet heart.

       Well, maybe that’s the point.  But I can’t deny that Breen keeps our breathless attention all right,  for three hours plus,.   Even if at times one would have liked a breather,  to hang on to a new thought worth keeping. 

cft.org.uk  to 28 June

rating 3

PHYSICAL, PIRATICAL, PLAYFUL

      All aboard the Jolly Todger, where Long John Silver’s parrot Alexa (she comes from the Amazon, get it?) keeps accidentally  ordering unwanted Chinese lanterns.  But she comes into her own when she flies down and picks up the second treasure map on Skeleton Island.

        There’s something comfortingly British in Le Navet Bête’s four-man mixture of cleverness, sharp timing and clowning ridiculousness,  as it cavorts disrespectfully round a classic national treasure for two hours.  There’s enough of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original for the audience to spend the interval happily doing “Aharrrr Jim Lad!” at one another,  but it veers off  happily in many directions, teasing the front row panto-style and even at one point lurching into vaudeville crosstalk   about three sailors called Who, Why, and I-dont-know. 

     So we get the Admiral Benbow pub,  and see Blind Pew deliver the dread Black Spot  to Billy Bones,   but then hit a dockside version of Play Your Cards Right with Matt Freeman in tight lurex as the lovely assistant. Bald lanky Freeman’s taste for wriggling , pouting drag and camp  is proven further as a fabulously flapping mermaid who talks fluent whale,  a sailor in a cropped Gaultier T-shirt or – in the really shakingly funny second act –  an Australian version of marooned Ben Gunn, in one flip flop and one wellie while his tame gorilla puppeteers his imaginary wife made of coconut-shells and raffia.     

        The navêteers are an established troupe, often surfacing around Christmas and holiday times with anything from this to King Arthur or Dracula.   John Nicholson writes and directs,  Fi Riussell’s set and Matt Freeman’s costumes are lovingly detailed (the wigs alone are worth it, from Billly Bones’ alarming rat-tails to the candy-striped mermaid and whatever that is Ben Gunn has on his head).   There are enough self-aware fake-mistakes to rouse the audience to actual cheers – physical comedians must end up with a lot of bruises.   Al Dunn’s Long John Silver develops a nice line in weary sarcasm about it all.  And before the finale becomes a chorus from Cheers and a blast of “In the Navy!”  in tighty whitey shorts,  there is a  viciously funny joke  about “the journey” for our hippyish age.    They deserve all the hysteria they got.  

New Wolsey to 14 June

then touring to 5 Oct  –   Oxford, Wakefield, Exeter,Minack, Salisbury, Barnstaple 

rating 4

WHY RATTIGAN COUNTS

Quite a rare outing for this very late Terence Rattigan play, written after his star had fallen under the assault of mouthy Osborne, Amis and the  “angry young men” who dismissed him  as lightweight middleclass entertainment,  irrelevant to the horrors and rages of a troubled world. . Which was never really fair, and seems ever less so given this play’s striking last scenes in which a husband lays out, mercilessly, his horrified compassion at the experinces of his Estonian refugee wife.  Puts Jimmy Porter’s  misogynistic whining in its place.

      It begins as drawing-room domestic  comedy with a 1960’s  political edge: tetchy Sebastian the literary critic  (Dominic Rowan) is a fellow-traveller  Marxist leftie intellectual , grumbling  at his patient wife Lydia and badmouthing their friend Mark, a glitzy American bestselling novelist who holds a candle for her.   Equal contumely falls on any mention of their son Joey, a nicely vigorous Joe Edgar,   for joining the Liberal party – “vote splitters!”  cries his father.   But Joey has had a play bought for BBC2 , and tomorrow the four  must all watch together (ah, the dear dead days of appointment-to-view TV!).  

        There are  secrets unevenly shared, in a inspired  by the marriage of Rex Harrison who concealed his terror for a sick  wife under breezy grumpiness towards her. Lydia proudly shows Sebastian a reassuring report from her doctor, but confides the truth to Mark: thanks to her cunning wartime ability to read documents upside down in a hurry, she knows perfectly well that she is dying,  just doesnt want Sebastian to know or worry. She is even  artfully encouraging his affair with another woman, her probable replacement. Claire Price,  doing justice to  one of the most gruellingluy talkative of roles, gives Lydia an authentic steely edge: here’s  an determined, emotionally generous survivor realist, prattling, excoriating bad vodka, putting up with Sebastian’s fuss goodhumouredly,  but opening up safely to faithful Mark about love before ideas, people before “things”.   

        Her longing for her husband and son to become close is touching, reaching a peak later;  but the confident young adult enrages his Dad over politics every time they meet,  having shrewdly observed that there’s something very old-imperial Tory about his uncompromising send-in-the tanks Stalinism.  There are two significant chess games.

      Emotional melodrama erupts in the second half, as Sebastian misses the TV show  – we get a glimpse of its dour  political youth-anger on a nicely period b&w telly – and disaster befalls Lydia’s attempt to cover up his dereliction. But then,  as the two older men confront one another,  Rattigan’s play takes its powerful swerve.   We may have long suspected that Sebastian secretly knows about Lydia’s awful prognosis and is, in parallel,  trying to spare her . Because for all his clenched British reluctance to show emotion  he knows every detail of her story of being “untermensch”,  herded to mass graves by the Nazis and then traded sexually by the Russians.   Death had been too close too long and now, crazily misunderstanding her strength, he thinks he can hide the bad medical news from her.. 

        There’s a wonderful unspoken parallel between the general, timeless British avoidance of emotion – which Lydia had earlier decried – and the way that for decade, indeed during my childhood and teens,   despite awareness of the Jewish Holocause little of WW2’s other atrocity was ever spoken of .  It was, after all,  only fifteen years since the Allies sold out the Poles and Balts at Yalta. 

       But here’s good old Rattigan reminding a generation,  while all Jimmy Porter could manage is bullying his wife and throwing a permanent class-war tantrum

Orangetreetheatre.co.uk.   To 5 July

rating 4