theatreCat

HOME AND FAMILY, BEAUTY AND SADNESS

 Few days late to the party with this , poor old theatrecat having seemed to fall off the press list;  but very well worth the ticket (Old Vic pricing is exemplary).   It’s by Conor McPherson, whose 1930’s  musical play round Dylan songs,  “Girl from the North Country” will be more than welcome back this summer.  This –   with only odd musical fragments – has much of the same haunting and humane spirit, tuned to the poetry, absurdity, tragedy and beauty of hardscrabble  lives.   Echoes  of Uncle Vanya have been much pointed at – country farmhouse, richer townie relative calling, money- talk threatening a serene resigned dullness, and 1980s Ireland not so different to Russia a century earlier. 

  But for me it felt far closer to JERUSALEM in tone,  thought, and its  memorable soliloquies.  

      Both exist in the wildlands between rough-cast lives and the edges of eternity: folklore and spirituality,  bewildered needs and  half-glimpsed otherworlds. Two siblings scruffily share the rundown family farmhouse:  Brian Gleeson’ s weary resigned Stephen,  and Billy , played with extraordinary conviction by Rosie Sheehy as a sibling somewhere on the autistic spectrum. She’s clever,  but needs an eye kept on her, and is soothed by lists and categories (the play opens with her  encyclopaedic lost of line changes from Limerick Junction  to Varanasi) . She is  at risk always of either disoriented explosions or lethally tactless statements of truth. 

    Lydia (Hannah Morrish) is  married to the third sibling Dermot and , riven by his “wandering” and his new young woman, has left her children at home to make a special tea and cake at the old farmhouse for visit from Uncle Pierre, a retired, blind and not reputable old priest, and the housekeeper Elizabeth with whom he lives. Another sibling Dermot -who runs cafes – is driving him up:  Chris O’Dowd plays quite beautifully as the ultimate  prosperous eejit, absurdly  preening, excusing his marital wandering withlines like  “Its the 1980s! , free market out there!  Let’s deregulate that momma!”.  Accompanied by a young employee “assistant” Freya.   Dermot is disconcerted to find Lydia  laying out the sandwiches,  sad and needy for his love. She has asked Stephen to get her water from a magical bogland spring as a love potion.   Sean McGinley as ancient Pierre taps around with his white stick and repeatedly offers to say Mass. 

   His housekeeper Elizabeth was once an item with Stephen,  whose resigned coping defeatism she clearly sees.  Her life with the priest seems to be a relationship based on tin baths in the kitchen , tending a graphically nasty tumour or wound,  and, as Stephen drily points out, the arrival of regular letters of remonstrance from  the Vatican.  The priest been banned from his overkeen delivering of the Last Rites. 

       The first half sets these people up and makes us exasperatedly or anxiously fond of them (that’s McPherson’s forte).  The second heats and speeds up:   no spoilers,  but it may be that the ancient priest  is both  a spiritual and a financial menace,   and that Dermot’s terrible behaviour is needy more than predatory, as he cries  old adulterer’s “bigger than both of us” excuse  that there are two roads but one can take him all the way to the moon.  O’Dowd’s scene with Morrish is wrenching, outclassed only by Pierre’s visions and , when all is resolved about the farm, Billy’s great and moving prediction of how she and her brother will end. 

      Reading about it, I had quailed slighly at the fact that Billy is labelled as autistic, because I feared empty fashionabless. But no: dramatically the presence of a wild card, unclassifiable, eccentric but real , suddenly distressable,  free from  normal social responses and seeking comfort in lists and hard facts adds both comedy and poignancy to the interlocked family plot.   A womderful line from her  to Elizabeth, after the fox gets the family chickens in a thunderstorm, is  that a person can be either a fox or a prize heifer.    The heifer is tied to a stick,  so everyone can walk roumd and  prod and see all of her, no secrets,  from bum and nose to udders. Whereas a  fox rampages in the dark, unseen, not known.   Which is better? 

      And a good  irony is that it is Lydia and Stephen who are most used to her, easy with her strangeness, and it is they who are the most centred and sane . It is a remarkable play. Looking back, in the thoughtful mood it left me, it is odd to remember how many, many laughs there were in it. That’s an achievement that won the fifth mouse.

Oldvictheatre.com.  To 14 June

Rating 5

AFFLUENZA APOCALYPSE 

     As Aubrey de Mandeville puts it in the great Antrobus books, “God, here’s a strange lozenge-shaped affair!”   Buñuel meets Monty Python,  courtesy of the immortal Sondheim in his Assassins mood. Had to be seen.  Hard to forget. 

        Stephen Sondheim’s last work – lovingly finished after his death by his collaborator David Ives, and directed by Joe Mantello with fervent love –  is based partly on Bunuel’s surreal satire “The Discreet charm of the Bourgeoisie” , and his avenging-angel fantasy film about the super-rich.  But don’t  worry, most if it is  roaring good fun:   a vengeful parable in which the world’s insouciantly pampered rich  try to meet up for brunch,   say ridiculous things (Marinne is having her dog cloned because it’s such a faff moving it from Connecticut to Switzerland and the Maldives so she needs one in each home).   The group of five get thwarted  in comic sequence and,  tellingly, in ways more familiar to the world’s poorest, like wanting a simple drink of water and not getting it, or having a  meal interrupted  by the abrupt arrival of the military. 

          Our antiheroes are Leo the hedgefunder and his daffily optimistic  wife Marianne (Rory Kinnear and Jane Krakowski, who gets the loveliest tunes and wears a negligée throighout). Then there’s Paolo Szot as a Latino ambassador, Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a cosmetic surgeon snd his showbiz agent partner (Martha Plimpton), plus  Marianne’s angry teenage sister Fritz, who wants a Communist revolution or, preferably, the end of the world.

       The first half is pure fun: greeted at The Everything Cafe with a cooing “your enabler will be here momentarily” the five are offered a vast menu but immediately met with a magnificently operatic aria from the waiter about how everything is off tonight. He then shoots himself, and obviously they don’t care.    On to the Bistro a la mode (“French deconstructionist” cuisine)  where the same happens only in a higher register and with a corpse in tthe private-dining room.   Then to the Osteria where a Colonel from Homeland Security arrives, complete with a squaddie who falls for leftie Fritz.  Still no food , so on to the magnificently gilded Embassy with Ambassador Santicci,  where rhey encounter a bishop in full rig who’s gone off God  – what with all the famines  and suffering  – and wonders if any of them can give him a job (that’s funny, the super-rich are always surrounded by people wanting jobs).  There’s  a ponytailed English butler called Windsor, who I think may be Satan. Or not.   

      That’s all in  a remarkably grand set by David Zinn,   gilt curlicues,  leatherbound books and panelling.  In this our delighted guests finally eat and are seen disposed, as Act2 begins, for all the world like a 17c court painting. Oh yes, the references here here to be truffled-for by the cognoscenti while vastly amusing the masses. Good old Sondheim.  As for the songs,  which fade out early in the second half,  they’re just as we expected and desired of the master: hyperliterate blasts of rapid wit rising occasionally to an exhilarating shriek. 

        But the point is the rich people can’t get out. Repeatedly the fourth wall, like a force-field,  sees them starting to leave the sumptuous scene  and failing; they settle down for a sleepover , flopped around like teenagers;. There’s a fabulous dream sequence where a certain monster gives Krakowski the last big romatic moment of the show (she’s a treat all through, crooning “I like things to shine, I like things to glow” and fondling the velvet upholstery). And in the morning gradually the reality of the trap comes over all of them . A bit too gradually, tbh:   an hour or so later my straw poll of scuttlers in the Jubilee line jnderpass agreed that Sondheim himself, who rarely outstayed his welcome,  would have taken some sharp scissors to the second half. 

           But we all enjoyed  a hellscape of sound, flashing lights, uneasy choreography, and brief love passages between Fritz and the squaddie ; it keeps the action going as they drink out of the flower vase and make kindling of the furniture. And there may have been a moment of real profundity at one point between the bishop and Marianne.  Or possibly not.   Jean-Paul Sartre seeped to  into the creation too,   to keep Bunuel company: “hell is other people”,   Huis Clos,  all that.    And hell, we’ve all been in parties when we yearned to get out.  But I did enjoy Kinnear the hedge-funder’s rant at trust-fund young Fritz,   saying that her radicalism was just like her fabourite burgers, “pink around the edges” . 

nationaltheatre.org.uk   to  28 June 

rating 3 . Really wanted to say 4 because , dear Sondheim. But honestly…

 A MODERN CLASSIC DONE WITH VIGOUR

  Michael Frayn’s play-about-actors is always welcome: a comic masterpiece and loving study in theatre’s own absurdity. The first act shows a final limping rehearsal for a hackneyed trouser-dropping farce;  the second a view from backstage halfway through the tour as we hear the play continuing while watching the cast’s jealousies and inadequacies creating mimed fury, mutual sabotage , violence and desperation to keep the whisky bottle and the oldest veteran apart.  The third  act is back onstage for a last performance which dissolves into helpless confusion. 

        Its brilliance lies both in satirizing its own profession and in the remorseless rhythm of returning lines and rising hoplessness.  The challenge of turning round the set – twice – is especially fascinating in Douglas RIntoul’s  touring production: it’s  in partnership with Hornchurch, Theatre by the Lake and Théatres de la Ville de Luxembourgwhose Clio Van Aerde has created some clever movable sets:  without a curtain the audience very much enjoyed watching high-efficiency stagehands hauling it all around, twice. 

    Altogether it is considerable fun,   handling all the physical jokes beautifully – George Kemp’s tied-shoelace and downstairs tumble positively heroic – and Russell Richardson’s drunken old ham Selsden is a joy.  But they’re all absolutely on-point and fearless.   And goodness, in this play they have to be.  

newwolseytheatre.co.uk  to 24 may  

TOURING:

Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch from Wednesday 28 May – Saturday 7 June 

 Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg from Friday 13 – Sunday 15 June

 Theatre by the Lake from Wednesday 25 June – Saturday 26 July

      A SATIRICAL WARNING FROM OLD UKRAINE

      Not long ago a rompingly funny version of Gogol’s satire on official incompetence ran at Marylebone ( https://theatrecat.com/2024/05/09/the-government-inspector-marylebone-theatre-nw1/).    That version was by Patrick Myles, and semi-updated to  a Ruritanian-Dickensian mashup with names like Fopdoodle: good fun , a timeless lark about mistaken identity and the panicking and fawning of corrupt bureaucrats.   Interesting now to see what that most scholarly of directors, Greg Doran, would do with Phil Porter’s new version.  He tells  a great story about how the young  Ukrainian civil servant Gogol got to St Petersburg, hated his lowly work, asked the great Pushkin for a good idea for a comedy and was told about a chap once mistaken for a government inspector.   Bingo! Writes it in two weeks, knows the official censor is likely to ban  it but Tsar Nicholas speaks up for it.  But the theatre is disgusted to have a 26 year old’s debut foisted on it, and does it all wrong, so Gogol walks out furious. 

          A fantastic origin-story,  and Doran has deliberately set it in the right period, 1936, so Gogol’s ghost may turn up at Chichester and be happier. It’s fitting to take a bow to Ukraine’s old identity, separate from mere Russia: in the programme we learn that a letter from Professor Torkut about his cultural importance only just arrived in time here because she was running around between missile strikes, caring for her granddaughter… .  

     So how does it feel? Well,  beautiful to look at, with Francis o’Connor’s dollshouse evocation of old rural Ukraine and some delightfully barmy details,  both in costume and in a stage ringed with  boxes of chaotic administrative old documents, finely detailed.   Lloyd Hutchinson as the Mayor and his troop of corrupt, idle local bureaucrats set the scene vigorously (the two little Dobchinskys very funny),  and then an elegant garret slides onto the stage  so we can meet Khlestakov,  the feckless gambler who will  accidentally – and then purposely – con the community.  

        There’s some fine broad shouty comedy and an excellent collapsing skylight and bed,  but unease hit me in Khlestakov’s  bullying brutality to his servant Osip,  and accelerated through his long, crazy drunken bragging scene.    Tom Rosenthal (beloved as one of the fighting brothers in TV’s Friday Night Dinners) does this with such unrestrained, un-nuanced shoutiness that I started hating it.  But then reflected that maybe we need to wince at it: for this is not only 190 years ago but part of a Russian-Ukrainian comic culture,  closer to our own bear-baiting and prizefighting period than to modern comedy, or the dry British allusiveness we are used to.      So maybe it’s only right to play it so broad:  Khlestakov’s  a lout, not a Lib-Dem councillor,  and his bureaucrat victims deserve no better.    And you can’t hate for more than the odd minute, because the stage is intermittently enlivened –  as it was earlier as we settled down,  worth being early for this show –   by three live musicians in folk costume playing Ukrainian song tunes. 

      So I trusted, and in the second half the pattern resolved:  one by one the undeserving officials were rinsed of their roubles as “loans” to the supposed grandee,  but then in a sharper, darker sequence the local shopkeepers came to beg him to get them justice,  and two women, one showing stripes of a public flogging by the brutal Mayor, make their plea to the startled interloper.   The women,   Shereener Browne and Leigh Quinn,  are strikingly good, and set nicely against the overdressed Mayor’s daughter,  (Laurie Ogden) and her mother,   who is Sylvestra le Touzel:   unbeatable,  especially when she goes full Hyacinth Bouquet at the idea that they’ll all move to St Petersburg.

       THere’ is, a sudden coup de theatre as the faker  risks understanding the reality of the people’s suffering:  Rosenthal stiffens, the light seems to dim, as heads and pleading hands appear above and around the  wooden carved city behind him.  But he stiffens himself against compassion and  gets a magnificent laugh – there are far more by now – with his seducer’s indecision about the women: “What’s it to be – the frisky young foal or the randy old honey-badger?”.     The community congratulations at the fake engagement create a lovely ensemble tableau,  moving of course to the  final moment of discovery and humiliation and mutual blame ,    and the Mayor’s startling rant.   Gogol’s angry message breaks the fourth wall to tell us how the world is full of con-men and gulls,  us  out here included, with our glasses of theatre-bar wine and easy laughing acceptance.

      And when the real Government Inspector arrives,  a proper shock:  Doran keeps his cast frozen still as statues for over a minute in dead silence,  a living Rembrandt portrait,  to make us think.    Then blackout, curtain call and final enlivening folk- music from the trio.   At which moment  it felt as if  the early discomfort of the datedly broad early brutality had been deliberate,  to share with us across centuries and cultures the universal , recognizable, regrettable evidence of what fools we mortals be…

cft.org.uk  to 24 May

rating 4

MATHILDE AND THE BUILDER (can he fix it? Probably not)

         The set is glassand towering, city-chic backed by reeds and seashore; the figures before us NYC glamorous,  even when they wander out for a dip in the cold Atlantic in smart beachwear.  Ewan McGregor’s architect Henry is tousled, midlife handsome,  Kate Fleetwood  as his publisher  is girlboss-slinky; into their ambit come Elizabeth Debicki as Mathilde,  tall and pale as a lily in acres of wide-legged mattress-ticking-stripey trousers, and David Ajala as a rival architect Ragnar. He’s  unspeakably cool too,  with orange hair and a beach shirt.  Only Mirren Mack’s little Kaia the PA looks like anyone you might run into offstage, ever. Overall. as a pure upmarket-fantasy spectacle it makes The Devil Wears Prada up the road look positively drab.

          But concentrate:  this is an echo of Ibsen and a meditation on the problems of female empowerment.   Lila Raicek  is a seasoned screenwriter – Netflix,  Gossip Girl, all that – and it shows, sometimes in a good way.  For she keeps it clear and keeps it moving (Michael Grandage directs).  Her characters are drawn with a firm hand , her themes explicit.  There’s a sense of almost focus-group targeting about it:  Henry is an English star architect living in the Hamptons,  rebuilding a 19c Whalers’ chapel,  his wife Elena a successful publisher who fought through the glass ceiling, his rival Ragnar an “influencer architect”   fresh back from jetting betwen Nigeria and Norway while designing an eco-retreat made, possibly, out of seaweed (there are, early on, some good laughs).     The host couple – who we soon learn are l scarred by the loss of a child ten years earlier –  are about about to launch the pyramical glazed chapel at a party for financiers and opinion-formers,  so the audience, Netflix-style, is reassured that there will be strife and fireworks in the second half.

       Anyway, no sooner does Henry clap eyes on Mathilde than he is frozen in astonished memory of her as the student research-assistant with whom he had an inappropriately intense – though technically chaste – relationship just at the time he lost his son.  The play is described as a’conversation with” Ibsen’s Master Builder,  its themes of past sin t and metaphors of architecture updated to explore some more modern issues facing women.   And, less intensely, their baffled menfolk.

       The most interesting of these issues is Mathilde’s: as the old story comes out, it becomes clear that her adoration of her older “Master” has marked her life since, made her need  the wisdom of being “seen” and “owned” by an older man :  in her own words, it ruined her emotionally as well as ruining her education and reputation.   Ibsen at the time was whelmed in guilt about a younger woman: it’s quite clever of Raicek to move the focus off male neediness onto the feelings and powers of the females concerned.   For Elena has issues too:  hating middle age,  her grief unresolved, unable to bear more children,  feeling ignored by Henry , undervalued at work and in love with Ragnar but unaware that young Kaia is having an affair with him.  Henry has his problems too, not least that he believes that he has been frozen in unfeeling ever since the passage of intensity with Mathilde.   Actually, the funniest moment in the play is when Mathilde recites verbatim a letter he sent her at the end of their romance , about how she must come to find him in ten years’ time:   the poor bloke can’t remember any of it.  But in the end, amid an increasing flurry of architectural metaphors about space and light,  he announces that he’s decided to go for the kind of love that has more light than darkness in it. In other words, you could say, less guilt. 

           I enjoyed its cunning chinese-box structure, as within the Ibsenian idea of a past betrayal and connection another more dangerous echo is created:  Elena has read young Mathildes  unpublished novel about that intense master-student relationship long ago, and will publish it and openly shame Henry, provided the poor girl she had “slutshamed” outs herself, and admits it’s autobiographical for good PR.  Says more than one would like about modern publishing, that. 

    The play’s at its best at at its fieriest, some of the late rows between Henry and Elena reaching almost Who’s-afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf levels. Kate Fleetwood is fantastic, steals the show;  Elizabeth Debicki mournfully watchable,  Ajala’s Ragnar an amusing prat.  Ewan McGregor, though, looks oddly uncomfortable throughout, possibly because of the many pretentious lines he is given and the number of secrets that have to be clunked out.   But his final fatal climb through architectural glassware is a fine theatrical moment,  once every character has on some level or another betrayed the others.   Even little Kaia.  

Box office. wyndhamstheatre.co.uk. to. 12 July 

Rating 3.

WINNERS, WAGS AND WRONGS

Well, here’s a summer romp.    Hot on the heels of Tom Hiddleston  in a disco version up Drury Lane, here’s the RSC take on one of the sunniest  Shakespeare comedy melodramas: and its setting also picks up the rage for stage football in the reprise of Dear England at the NT.   For Shakespeare’s returning warriors are modern footballers.   It’s not soldiers from a war but Messina FC  team-mates,  ushered in by sounds of roaring crowds and manic chants,  who are plotting to create a love-match between the bickering  Beatrice and Benedick. And who themselves (especially big dim Claudio) are  easily fooled into suspecting and ‘cancelling’ Hero .  The villainous  Don John, credibly enough,  is stumping around in a surgical boot,  possibly embittered by too long on the subs’ bench.

       Michael Longhurst directs with energetic brio, though the first half goes on a bit too long due to a glut of  set-piece larking, masking, shrieking, chanting, a glimpsed blow-job   and various entertaining collapses into the onstage pool by gentleman  with and without their shorts on.  Freema Agyeman’s Beatrice is a sports broadcaster,  Peter Forbes’ Leonato the club owner, who delivers a memorable rendering of “My Way” in the party scene.   Benedick (emphasis on the last syllable at one point  from Beatrice) is a likeable Nick Blood: he’s one of several RSC debut castings and deserves to collar a good few of the coming physical-comedy leads: has lovely timing in the overhearing scenes and no fear of a pratfall.   

       They all put plenty of energy into it,  but there is a slight weirdness in translating a story of traduced honour , chastity and dignity into this particular modern world,  where for the first half  there is little clue that any of the characters are familiar with such words.  Except, perhaps, in one lovely chilling moment when Don Pedro,  the prince,  propositions Beatrice and she refuses , fears she has gone too far and turns it – hastily – to a joke against herself.  Agyeman does give Beatrice  dignity:  that shows more, later, in her bitter rage at Claudio after the. wedding.

          Indeed it is the second half that caught me up more than the first . (Which is not to deny  that the audience was having great fun all the way through, and I suspect the youngest will adore it).    As the plot darkens for Hero the  projection of innumerable tweets,  faux-sympathetic or bitchy, along the roof and gallery walls creates a real modern sense of reputational threat around her.  The late line after her ‘resurrection’ is met with “She died, my lord, but while her slander lived” and that feels very modern.   

       So, indeed, do the Watch,  security heavies whose scenes are run to just the right length,  and Antonio Magro’s magnificently offended Dogberry will stick in the mind for a good while.  And there was a more satisfying sense of the play’s completeness by the time the familiar plot has finally played out, with Beatrice and Benedick finding one another and Lenato’s crazed rage at his daughter tamped down by his wife Antonia.  Indeed Tanya Franks’ ferocious matriarchal dignity ,  like  Beatrice’s raging defence of her cousin,  do finally make the obviously intended point about the way women are  treated in the world of male professional football:  chattels  valued or despised with equal wrongness.   

       The use of video projection is clever  – it’s a telly world we’re in – and Jon Bausor’s designs and costumes are entertainingly spot-on,  from dopey Hero’s ridiculous bubble-dress and the wedding’s balloon-arch and tutus to all the insane beachwear round the pool, and Leonato’s camel coat slung over the shoulders.

         The only visual howler is , chaps, that if you are going to put Beatrice in a slinky party gown and then make her sit casually for a moment on the side of a pool latterly full of splashing footballers,  she should then not have to walk away and repeatedly show her back view with a great wet suspicious bum mark.  For minutes on end.  Women just don’t like that, chaps:  it’d  drive us straight out  to change,  possibly walking backwards in  mortification.    Moreover, there is no way that the crude young male  characters,  as drawn in this riotous party scene,  would not have rudely roasted her over it.   Either dry the poolside or reblock the scene. Seriously, do….this cool Beatrice deserves better.

Rsc.org.uk to 24 may

Rating. 3

TWO WOMEN, LONG YEARS ACROSS HALF A CONTINENT

      1935: below projected headlines about Communists executed in Shanghai and the war between Japan and Red China comes an audition call for A Doll’s House.   At the League of Left Wing Dramatists’ shabby theatre Lan Ping, suave and stylish,  is warming up for Nora with Ibsen’s revolutionary words “I must make up my mind who is right, the world or I!”.    Enter a dishevelled, scruffier black-clad teenager who hardly knows where she is, was sent there by the Party.  Lan Ping patronizes her, but is impressed by her ability to read the emotion below the lines like a director.  They become friends, flatmates.  Both are intense and fascinated by this new world :  theatre as,“a temple, where that other world of truth, beauty, justice is so close we can almost touch it”.  

         But a scene later, a couple of years have passed : they enthuse about Chekhov and Stanislavsky and dream like his three sisters of theatre’s capital, distant Moscow .  They light incense, bow, vow friendship.  But rivalry, and difference in character, divide them; the assured elder had a success as Nora but took on a Coca Cola ad for money;  the younger woman is having stage successes  and remains idealistic about it all.   Trouble  is aggravated by discovery that the younger – daughter of an executed Communist martyr – has been adopted by Zhou En Lai, later Mao’s premier.  But it is her older friend from that old audition who becomes Mao’s mistress:  as war and the creation of the new China gathers pace she’s excoriated as a slut, a vixen, distracting the Leader;  when she marries him, and becomes Jiang Qing, madame Mao,  she is forced to promise to do nothing political for thirty years.  Meanwhile young Sun Weishi, has also broken through the expectations of women and become  a nationally important director and theatremaker.  

        Amy Ng’s fascinating, fast-moving two-hander uses imagination and research to evoke their relationship’s early days;  but Jiang Qing did play Nora, and a period of uneasy rivalry is documented.  I had, to my shame, known only that as Mao’s wife – later tried –  once out of her thirty years as mere wife was the architect of the Cultural Revolution, sociopolitical determination to wipe out both ancient tradition and invasive capitalism, banishing intellectuals.   I did not know about the long link with Sun Weishi, idealistic director-artist.  In a telling moment Jiang instructs Sun “I am commissioning new works. Everything must be red, bright and shining. The heroes must be tall, mighty and wholesome. I shall ban everything else from our stages”.  Sun, of course, wants her play about women oil workers to cover suffering, doubt, cruelty and humanity.  

           Sun was finally arrested and tortured to death in 1968: Zhou unable or unwilling by then to protect her;  she herself would not denounce him as a spy and traitor.  Ng gives us a last conversation in prison between Jiang and the tormented, battered, near-dying Sun.  It’s  wrenching.  All the more because the fleet 80-minute journey of the play telescopes the three decades, and makes you remain aware of the light-spirited comradeship of their early meeting.

      All happens amid swivelling, simple walls and  in front of evocative designs and projections by Nicola T Chang and Akhila Krishnan : blue-black cloudscapes, great changing headlines. It transports you to another culture,  opens a half-understood history.   But at the heart of its power of course are the two players:  Gabby Wong tall, elegant, showy, determined as Jiang Qing,  hardening before our eyes into the older angrier Madam Mao;  and Millicent Wong, gentle-faced, sincere, trying to hold the comradeship long after it had soured.   They’re tremendous; as is the direction by Katie Posner. Another strike for the Kiln.  

Kilntheatre.com to 10 May

A HAMLET THAT STANDS ALONE

“is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice?”

     Not monstrous, just consummate acting in a brave, maverick performance as Mark Lockyer reprises his much-admired rendering of the whole of Hamlet in 95 minutes, alone, propless, emotionally invested to an almost frightening degree.

     It is not a best-of collection but has the full complex narrative seriousness of the play: I was struck from the start by his willingness to keep a lot of the scene on the battlements which often gets cut about  before Hamlet appears: here as elsewhere it gives proper weight to the politics, the Norway/Poland/Denmark sense of war and danger past and future. Many great full-set productions lean so heavily on the emotional-psychological story than its wider context.

     Indeed oddly, at the end of this performance I felt I had seen a more complete Hamlet than usual. Lockyer is deft at transforming into each character – his Ophelia girlish,  disintegrating into shocked pathos, his Claudius all jokily coercive pomp, his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern weasels of deference. His Player King gives it the full OTT Garrickry. The voice of the Ghost is genuinely unnerving, from some horrid depth. Only once or twice with Laertes might a newcomer briefly hesitate; mostly there is never a doubt when Hamlet himself is before us: wrung out or suddenly enraged, posing his madness orsuddenly doubting his reality. 

    It is, in short, magnificent. Not one to miss. Few more performances at Wilton’s, then a tour, whose details I will pass on when someone tells me them. 

Wiltons.org.uk to 12 April

Produced by regenerationtheatre.co.uk for more details of how to see afterwards

rating 5

RIEN TO REGRET!

  This is a terrific, impassioned production: not only does Kimberley Sykes’ direction  and Michele Meazza’ s movement work keep it watchably, startlingly vigorous,   but Sam Kenyon’s musical direction – exciting and witty orchestration, right down to effects of clashes and crashes  – uses a cast of nine actor-musicians as well as I’ve ever seen it done. They flow constantly round the stage from the first Parisian street scene onwards,  becoming the mass of characters around Edith Piaf’s life with seamless ease: Signe Larsson moves, tall and Nordic-stately,  from her double-bass to become Marlene Dietrich or Madeleine the assistant to an ageing star,  Tzarina-Nassor on a notable professional debut as Toine – but all of them are remarkable: versatile and sharp, committed in turn to each character they become.  

         But of course at its centre has to be Piaf herself, and here is perfect casting: Audrey Brisson – whose stage AMELIE beat the film hollow, and also began right here  – is of course perfect for Piaf. She is tiny, vivid, honest wide  eyes shining beneath a wild mop of black hair,  her red-lipped mouth opening wide in wild naive passionate sincerity .  In one nice line, when she’s felt her American tour is not going well enough,  Dietrich says to her that you can’t have an orgasm every time you go onstage, to which the little firecracker snaps “I can!”. 

     She plays the crudeness, the sweary street-urchin aspect of our heroine but also the vulnerability, her whole face creasing into terrible despiar;  she makes  the change over years into a grande-dame carapace without losing any of the old childlike quality. And never, of course, the voice:  mouth wide, a shouting emotional tribute to womanhood, desire, loss, ambition and at times brazen contempt, a dirty laugh at the world.    Her scenes with Marlene  and her last lover, Theo, are touching;  her leap from the top of the piano into the arms of Djavan Van de Fliert’s buff boxing Marcel is breathtaking, her sprawl above the keyboard as he thumps out passionate chords intensely erotic.  

     Pam Gems’ often-reviewed play is episodic, deliberately sketchy, and sometimes ‘spoilers’ are essential: anyone approaching it does well to know the skeleton facts of Edith Piaf’s life. That she busked on the streets of Paris, first with her father a street acrobat then alone,  living among prostitutes;  that she was discovered by a club owner who promptly got murdered, putting her briefly under suspicion;  that she sang for German troops in the war but helped to free French prisoners;  that she had many lovers, married twice, promoted Charles Aznavour’s career, and after a bad accident became dependent on drink and drugs.  And that she became a legend, surrounded by myths, giving the world almost more than it deserved. Well, OK, I have been a devoted fan ever since I was eleven years old, a temporary French school-girl  ice-skating in 1960s Lille to the rhythms of “Je ne Regrette Rien!”, determined to live a life fit for such emotional grandeur.  Millions have felt that with me..

Box office watermill.org.uk. to. 17 May

Rating four

TRAGEDY WITHOUT A MORAL

    Raoul Moat used  steroids and bulking-powder to armour himself in muscle,  nourished a bottomless well of grievance and self-pity , and imposed his needy will on his girlfriend and any public authority who defied him .  Especially Northumbria Police,  though the local council met outrage too, for not letting him keep three dogs, as did the courts for giving him a short prison sentence for common assault on a child resulting in  supervised contact with his own for  a while .   So, once released,  he went on the run in 2010,  shot his girlfriend’s new lover dead,  critically wounded her and loosed off the shotgun in a traffic policeman’s face, blinding him. 

        The manhunt was big news.  Some treated him as a mythic hero.   Andrew Hankinson,  “frustrated by the constraints of British journalism” researched, studied Moat’s own messages and friends, and wrote a book.   Robert Icke , with all his extraordinary theatrical instinct and skills,  has made it into a 105-minute play.  The Royal Court,  predictably anxious to draw a left-political line, publicizes it by quoting with implicit scorn  David Cameron’s “Raoul Moat was a callous murderer. Full stop. End of story.”    In the programe David Byrne draws a thematic line in the theatre’s history,  from Jimmy Porter ranting at his girlfriend in Look Back in Anger 70 years ago, through the age of angry-young-men and , less probably, Enron and Jerusalem, to the present age of Putin and Tate and worries about fragile male rage.   

         So what’s the play like?   Well, gripping, not least because Samuel Edward-Cook,  shaven-headed and immense, addresses the audience with all the needy passion of Moat’s expression,  in moment  in between scattered scenes with others.  “I feel tired. Anxious. Isolated. Helpless. Angry” he says to us, as he fills a psych form, makes an appointment for help (ah, easier days then)  but for no reason  doesn’t keep it.   He explains that the police have been harassing him for years, ruined his business by arresting him;   that he enjoyed being a Dad and loves his girlfriend Sam.   In prison he wouldn’t stop calling her.  Sometimes  we get the calm annoying voices of women – a barrister, a social worker, Sam herself pointing out that she has the kids and his dogs to deal with . This enrages him so that he towers over them, threatens, and in Sam’s case  hits and throws her to the floor.  

       Edward-Cook is astonishing, real, brilliant in performance:  he throws furniture around,  paces like a magnificent caged animal, demands all our sympathy,  can’t bear ‘disrespect”.     It exposes the famous truth that “Men fear wwomen will laugh at them. Women fear men will kill them”.   

        We know the bulking-up is armour over a fragile ego, a lost child.  We are given scraps about his early life`: bipolar mother burnt his toys when he was seven,  no Dad,  raised chiefly by a kind granny , worked in hard physical jobs which satisfied his needy strength.  But for all his  presence, and the neatly written cameo moments with his Geordie friends,   it is not long before Moat, sadly,   becomes a bit of a bore.   Physically splendid,  he’s certainly fully human and quite a logical thinker,   but curdled with self-pity and resentment. 

        When Sam reasonably dumps him, he emerges from prison not to learn to do better but to commission a coward’s weapon, the “car with six wheels” which apparently is code for a sawn-off shotgun and six bullets.  He thinks they are mocking him, so shoots.  Then sees a cop in a car, traffic duty, and shoots him too.   In a ten-minute respite from Moat’s moaning a coup de theatre plunges us all into blackness where we hear an account in PC David Rathband’s voice  of the fear, pain, blinding and ruining of his life and marriage, up to his suicide two yars later.   

     And then there we are again with RAoul, hiding out in the countryside with his two friends – ‘hostages’ they tried to claim – saying he feels better,  that the cop was ‘not a person” , and that he always dreamed of living with Sam on a French farm (beautifully expressed, Sam and children silently appearing).    As police close in a  negotiator offers him a chance to be understood, to rebuild:  but Moat is stuck in his vacant fury.   The best bit of the play indeed is a speech delivered – imagined – by Paul Gascoigne, the footballer,  who in reality  turned up (drunk) but never spoke.   He says it for all men who are, deep inside, small  children and who shelter inside physical brilliance and hit  women becaues they’re scared of how much they need their Mums.  It is brilliantly done by Trevor Fox.   Moat moves towards suicide, taking care (for the Royal Court loyalists) to throw in a casual mention of “bears and squirrels”.  And for a trite moral,  up comes David Cameron’s “end of story” quote again.  

          I don’t regret seeing it, and  Edward-Cook gives a tremendous performance so do the others, notably Fox and Sally Messham as Samantha.   Icke is always more than worth it, his recent Oedipus showing a briliance in tragedy. . But Raoul Moat is not a great tragedy, nor even a valid symbol of a confused and difficult age of masculinity (PUNCH does far better, so does DEAR ENGLAND).   And this is not a great play.

royalcourttheatre.com   to 3 May

rating 3

THE DEPTHS BELOW THE WIT

    The plays,  ever revived, we know well;  the wit is often cited,  the old injustice of his downfall recreated in plays and films: most recently we’ve seen him played by Stephen Fry and (infinitely better) Rupert Everett.   Micheal MacLiammoir’s 1960 one-man show,  rich in Wilde’s own writings,  is not that often revived,  and is in many ways more serious about him,  reflecting  both his  lush, honeyed  romantic emotional  imagination and the way that far beneath the wit, irony and poses his thought on human life and relationships developed .  Alastair Whatley of Original Theatre is someone I have seen mostly as a director and driving force in his company, but this intense, two-hour rendering of the McLiammoir text (prefaced by a brief tribute)  feels like something deeply personal and deliberately enigmatic.

       Mike Fentiman, directing, underlines this in the programme but it’s perceivable in the downbeat, gripping seriousness of the performance.  “Diving into the wit, the mischief and the sorrow”,   he stands framed in a simple  circular neon light, which effectively reminds us all the time of the deep black darkness beyond.  There’s no showing off, no costuming, just a green carnation  – finally thrown aside – to remind us of his 1890 dandyish flowering,  wht age of “Fashion is what one wears oneself”,  of Lady Windermere and the foppish Goring,  and the yearning worship of The Picture of Dorian Gray .  His rendering of the account of the portrait’s decline is mesmerizing. staring into the round black dark behind him.   Coming to The IMportance of Being Earnest Whatley does of course deliver a splendid Lady Bracknell.    And then a harrumphing Queensberry and a judge pronouncing the immense absurdity of how very, very terrible was the sin of sodomy. 

     But the strong core of the show is something we hear far, far less of in memorials to him:  the long, long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Jail  titled De Profundis.   I have never heard this delivered at such length before;  after his line at the trial “May I say nothing?” its reflective outpouring is immense.

  So, even more intensely, is Whatley’s perfect delivery of the Ballad of Reading Jail, which Wilde wrote in Naples before his final end in Paris.   The simple, unromantic, straightforward and profound human pity of it shakes you down, as it has done generations, from the exercise yard to the pit of shame, the tragedy of love and death.  

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk   to 12 April

And STREAMING – at which Original Theatre is  a pioneer –  www.originaltheatre.com  

VENEZIANA !

     Buongiorno to Venice 1730,  a city stage topped with the golden winged lion of St Mark, arched and curtained and lit with candelabras .  Overhead a twelve-piece orchestra complete with harp is visible in the galleries.  Below,   our hero a determined young castrato  –  sold and gelded in childhood  – is cheeking the maestro Faustino who taught  him to sing high and girlish for the operatic stage,  not to mention taking other advantages in return.   Marco (Jack Chambers, boyish and vigorous)  is ambitious, but when he meets the beautiful and determined Giola – daughter of a black slave – he decides to back her career,  and defy racist and classist snobberies by taking her to the court of his patroness Assura.   Whose corrupt husband  Pietro and his accountant Luigi are, by the way,  embezzling her fortune in a hospital project while a camp stout cardinal giggles through her soirées. 

        It’s a musical – brand new,  lyrics and music by Matthew Wilder with a thumpingly Panto-melodrama book by Tim Luscombe – so they sing. And how they sing!  with killer determination.  Apart from a couple of gentler, magically period-pastiche numbers sung from behind a fine gold and feather mask by Jennie Jacobs (as Marco, it’s a neat doubling)  the numbers  are full-on aggressive and divergent in style. . There’s rum-ti-tum retro Lionel-Bartish jollity,  some startling sub-Sondheim moments, and lots of plain musical-pop-LloydWebbery.  Fine: we can digest a bit of variety, but the problem is that in the first half especially too many numbers are just plain overwrought:  lurching from climax to climax with no nuance between.   Marco is ambitous and hopeful, Giola determined, Faustino insanely jealous, Azzura predatorily nymphomaniacal,  Pietro bossy, and they all underline it by too rapidly rising to a serious belting high money-note.  No nuance.

         At one point you think ooh, perhaps this is offering a bravely transfriendly-fetishist theme,  as Marco in his gilt diva cloak pronounces that castrati are actually better than women ,  because they have both female grace and male strength.  Seen that online several times, sigh..  But  no, that’s countered by his backing of Giola and willingness to be seduced by Assura (not all castrati are impotent).  It really isn’t a very deeply thought-through book.   But things improve terrifically as the first act ends, because if you’re going to do some cheery hokum like this, it’s best to go over the top as soon as possible.  So Faustino bursts into Giola’s proposed performance for the nobles and causes so much chaos that the Cardinal ends up stabbed and the young people arrested. 

        Even better, the second half begins with a delightful row between a drunken Pietro with his wig off and Luigi who is sitting mournfully at a harpsichord, thinking accountancy-thoughts.   And there’s a fine quarrelsome duet between Assura and Pietro,  a dramatic poison suicide elsewhere and a better number from Faustino,  but Luigi gets the first real hooting stamping applause of the show,   as Sam Barrett in the role does the full heroic-opera self reproach and regrets his collaboration with Pietro.  There’s a trial scene, a threatening noose,  a revelation, and a last-minute (rather touching) miracle for a sad elective-mute Nicolo, who we had hitherto forgotten existed but who is necessary for justice to be achieved.

        Under the arches, the old Players theatre has a taste for staging small, often brand-new musicals at under half the seat-price of the big West End just up the road,  and I have long had rather a weakness for the place.  Sometimes there’s a treasure – TITANIC the musical started there, with twice the history and ten times the heart of that awful film. Sometimes it’s a fascinating  imported oddity, like GeorgeTakei’s ALLEGIANCE.   This one is only definable as a sort of melodrama-pantomime mini-opera, and not an actual treasure.  But it’s beautifully set by Ceci Calf and dressed by Anna Kelsey,   and if it has rather more soggy heart than hard genius it does maintain enough self-awareness to stick to about two hours including interval. And provide us with a happy ending and a big joyful ensemble curtain-call.  People left smiling. So did I. 

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk to 14th June. 

rating 3

DARK FANGTASY IN A SCAFFOLDING CITY

    For this compact and creepy little atmospheric treat, John Donnelly turns to vampires. That’s not a spoiler: the programme is full of learned stuff about the cultural history of bloodsucking immortals, and the soundscape alone should alert even the dullest to the imminent supernatural shenanigans.   Anyway, its 100-minute span (that includes interval, it’s pretty bijou) has plenty of good shocks along the way.  Even once you’ve worked out that there’s something fishy about Laura Whitmore’s smiling, chilly but ever-helpful Ana, the primary school teacher who is so devoted to Mia’s son Alfie and his gift for drawing characters with knives for teeth.  Frankly, even Ana’s red lipstick gives you pause.

      Not least becaue Mia herself (Sophie Melville)  is unmade-up, tousled, sleepily exhausted with a newborn and a nice normie  husband (Bryan Dick) who keeps long hours in some sort of IT surveillance decrypting psychopathic gamer chatrooms with – guess! – vampiric fantasies, after some headless bodies turned up in the Thames.  Mia is nervy, forever jiggling her crying bundle, and unnerved by Alfie, who saunters in and out in a horror mask that “Miss” made him. And points a lot.  We’ve all known kids like that. 

    The play’s strength lies in its masterly creation of a particular urban neurosis, familiar to many:  a sleepless vulnerable urban mother  is on a floating stage swathed in scaffolding:   nothing restful in this hard city world .  Donnelly captures not only that early-motherhood craziness within the restive urban racket, but also the sheer bloody boring persecution of being a young blonde woman in an age without manners. The aggressive train passenger swearing at her contemptously “just because you’re holding a baby” ,   the friendly chap in the park asking the time and proceeding to wank at her,  the noisy neighbour who doesn’t give a damn, even the doctor she despairingly consults about her scraping anxiety who boredly suggests “breathing techniques, white noise, history podcasts” (good laugh there. There are many, in fact). 

     Leander Deeny plays all the men,  the most magnificent being a wealthy coked-up pickup who takes Mia and Ana to his penthouse for anoother drink: very funny.   Ana, by this time Mia’s sweetly supportive friend,  sees to him. Oh yes.  You’ll love the balcony bit.   Also love young Alfie (Callum Knowelden on press night) doing his school presentation, which is of course very eco-gloom contemporary,  being all about how humans are ruining the planet and it would do better without them. 

       There is by this time a lot of blood on the stage,  and Donnelly threatens us with a genuinely horrifying end,  before twisting it back to – well, you decide.   But it’s perhaps comforting to know that even if the planet doesn’t need us humans, vampires really do.  For food. How else can they live 600 years and remember the Fire of London?

       Director Blance McIntyre keeps it all moving,  and gives us the interval to muse on whether Mia is going to enjoy her – er –  new status.   It doesn’t attempt any deep truths, but offers a good, brief, dark thrill  (far more than the boring Let the Right One In)  and – I think – most importantly a real questioning kick at the sheer bloody stress of managing  a new baby without much support  in a stressed, noisy, aggressive city.  Feminism noir.  

hampsteadtheatre.com to 26 April 

BEYOND QATAR…    

       Two years ago this show  was a pleasure – (https://theatrecat.com/2023/06/21/dear-england-olivier-se1/)  , and now,  on the far side of more efforts and agonies for the England football team, and the departure of the admirable Gareth Southgate James Graham has slightly extended it.  It’s still a blast, and worth reflecting on what it is about James Graham’s work that, on any topic, stirs the heart.  He has a  remarkable ability without mawkishness to expose the emotional quality of a particular professional world, outsider though he is. In the political plays he did it with Labour activism,  and with the claustrophobic loyalties of parliamentary parties and a whip’s office;  in INK with the excitement and wilful self-hardening of tabloid journalism.    He draws you in because he is no satirist but an observant, humane empath:  not being a football follower , I  felt that rush of surprising identification even more in Dear England.    More even this time, on the far side of the final defeat in the World Cup and Southgate’s Dimbleby Lecture about the alienation of too many boys.  For emotional growth, as well as dazzling physical skill, was what this gentle, unusual man sought to bring to the often loutish world of professional football.

         This reprise is as spectacular as ever, under Rupert Goold’s direction , with Helen Kane and Hannes Langlolf’s  joyful movement and Es Devlin’s gloriously- involving great arena (not a bad seat in the house, and the ghost-white projctions of arenas,  Wembley towers and Moscow as thrilling as ever). Gwilym Lee takes over as Southgate,  Liz White as Pippa the team psychologist.  A few familiar faces from last time, but Jude Carmichael has an excellent debut as Rashford, and several other new faces enliven the marvellous surging ensemble.  

      The story extends, of course, beyond the defeat in Qatar, and for a while I thought this might drag it out too far. But in the end – with the lessons learned of resilience, affection  and the thought that hell, life will always give you more chances – it grew fresh power . By the time you’re cheering for the Lionesses’ victory moment – done with the appropriate brief irony – and singing Sweet Caroline with half the vast  Olivier you find  a tear in the eye.  AND it’s touring! 

nationaltheatre.org.uk to 24 May     then nationwide tour

rating 4 

POWER, MAJESTY AND JUSTICE    

     Very good to see this intense three-hander  by Ryan Calais Cameron (who gave us “For Black Boys..” ) migrating to Shaftesbury Avenue with increased vigour.  And, God bless it,  the same central star in Ivanno Jeremiah as Sidney Poitier,  early in his career a decade before his Oscar.  Jeremiah is, as I wrote before, a great treat. But his new co-stars are pretty ace, too. 

     The play fits the paranoid cancel-culture age by taking us back to the 1950’s : not just the McCarthy witch-hunt against communists but an America still wickedly ill-at ease about black skin.   The set is a movie lawyer’s office – pitch-perfect down to the movie posters and drinks cabinet – where nervous screenwriter Bobby (Oliver Johnstone) is telling the NBC lawyer that his new TV script needs to star his friend Sidney Poitier, who’s made a hit in The Blackboard Jungle.  “He’s black – not Belafonte black,  black, black” he says. Which causes the lawyer – Stanley Townsend a magnificent silver-haired monster – to greet the arriving Poitier with a lot of embarrassingly patronizing street-talk “what’s the tale nightingale, what’s buzzin, cousin?”  – and making it clear the cultured, intelligent Bahamian is in his view something from “the ghetto”, panhandling and open to bribery.   

       He pours a lot of drinks , which Poitier doesn’t want,   and carries on making both the others uncomfortable.  At one point leading a reluctant singsong of the Banana Boat Song.  Ouch.  Oh, and forcing Poitier to have a whisky he doesn’t want, given that it’s just past breakfast time,  and to loosen his tie in faux camaraderie.  Told you Townsend was doing the full-monster:  indeed he is horribly entertaining at it, little skips and poses of boss-man malice.   Jeremiah evokes the difficulty this very young, new actor is in :  dignified, wary, knowing there are traps being laid for him every minute.  

       Earnest liberal (“I’m the most black white guy”) Bobby has written a script in which Poitier is an overseer of white dock workers. The lawyer can’t cope with this,  and goes into an even more embarrassing encomium of how Hattie McDaniel (Best Supporting, 1952) had said it was better playing the maid in Gone with the Wind than BEING a maid, so..   Poitier though is sick of playing the ‘good little negro” and says so.  Bobby is torn between ambition to get his show on screen by placating the lawyer and a real liberal desire to push forward the social barriers (still, in the 50s, very strict and segregated in much of the US).   

    But of course it all gets nastier:  Parks the lawyer calls Bobby a slimey little beatnik trying to break all the rules, and berates Poitier (I cannot overstate the energetic, elegant dignity and power of Jeremiah) for turning down the part of a passive black janitor,  accusing him of being paid to reject it .  Moreover,  Parks wants him to sign a denunciation of Paul Robeson and Belafonte as commies.  Bobby struggles with his ‘allyship” but when Poitier holds firm and delivers a fantastic speech hot with his rage, his daily rage at  racism and contempt,  you see him visibly wither in a kind of confused shame.  

      Its 90 minutes straight, and at the Kiln I called it less than perfect, even claustrophobic (we’re stuck in a room with a bully, a weakling and a hero without faults, after all).  But this revival feels sharper, harder, tougher, and often funnier (thanks to Townsend’s monstrous Parks).  And Ivanno Jeremiah is terrific, catching a turning-point in the history of black American advance in dignity and achievement.   “We’re here. We’re coming. Get Ready”  says Poitier.   More than once the audience whoops approval.  It’s proper fire.  

Box office nimaxtheatres.com to 14 June 

Rating 4. 

THE 1660’s  AND ALL THAT:   THEATRE REBORN

       Oddly, for theatrecat it’s the second day running of enliveningly energetic female history. After six women told the story of Mary Wollstonecraft braving the French Revolution and sneering 18c intellectuals, back we go a century  to see five more depicting the moment when Cromwellian gloom was dispelled , Charles II had the theatres reopened and let women act onstage.   As we open, old Doll Common (an irresistible Doña Croll) reminisces about how the playhouse she works in used to be a bear-pit, the creatures exploited and whipped.  In some afterlife she is joined by Nell Gwyn, also remembering.   Then around them rises a whole world of women, backstage and onstage and aspiring,  each from a different direction. 

       Here’s teenage Nell from her oyster-stall:  Zoe Brough engagingly childlike with energetic ambition.  She’s  off to audition for the King’s Company but Elizabeth Farley (Nicole Saywerr)  gets there first , having, in playwright April de Angelis’ reimagination, started out as a Puritan divine’s orphaned daughter, her rhetoric decrying the filth and scandal of theatre.   They meet other real figures. Katherine Kingsley is Beck Marshall,  blonde and assertive and sweary,  and the magnificent Anna Chancellor is  Mrs Betterton: wife of the theatre’s owner, seasoned star,  offering magisterial advice to the younger ones (the angle of the head at ten to eleven has particular pathos, and ‘never underestimate the advantage of opening one’s mouth when speaking” ).  We never see Betterton himself, though she is once seen pleading with her husband and boss to let the actresses have shares, and profit, not be mere hirelings.  

        There’s a heady sense of a new profession, beyond service and street trades, for the young, poor, female and brave,  Nell talks her way in and, after missing a cue and ruining a scene, discovers that a wild capering dance with lots of leg can quiet the gale of hissing and bring applause and cheers.   We see scraps of the work – absurd melodramas with breasty maidenhood tethered to a property tree,  moments of Shakespeare,  some Restoration nonsense with Sir Fopling Flutter,  a wonderful pair of Amazon archers in Roman helmets crying “we have avenged thee!”.   THey are riding the new craze,  for “the town does not want to see fusty old men in squashed hats”, but lively young women, décolletée and sportive. 

     Tough life, though, even apart from the hard work and constant line-learning.  Beck, falling out with a deceitful noble lover and shouting back at his gallery cries of “whore!|”,  is attacked and smeared with excrement.   The carriages, flowers and seductive blandishments of great men  – King very much included – are tributes to good legs and saucy breast-work,  not your level artistry.   And as you age you’re not going to be a star forever.  Old Doll remarks “I’m always the dead one under the cloak, or else I’m sweeping”,  and gradually the skilled, loyal Mrs Betterton finds herself sidelined; at one point holding the broom while a young one plays Queen. But if the narrative arc is of Nell’s development into the thrill of hundreds of faces “looking at you, waiting”,  and the seduction of royalty,  it also tells the peril of femaleness. Her pregnancy showing,  Eliza’s day is over. – “To be That Way on the public stage!”could lose Betterton his licence.   There’s only the street now, and more skilled if squalid pretending.  In a brief, sad sisterly moment the others try to abort her with a stage prop, a brooch.    There is a different sadness too as Mrs B remembers the heady moments when it all began,  and she defied the bishops in breeches-roles to play  Iago and the Fool and Prince Hal to her husband’s Othello, Lear and Falstaff; and how when reduced back to female roles , so often as victim, she missed that power.  

           Michael Oakley’s welcome revival does de Angelis proud: it’s lively,  funny,  sharp-witted, oddly thought-provoking. And  for all its revelling in retrospective overacting,  it chimes as  touchingly sincere about the backstage sisterhood of women who like the bears in the old pit were treated as “creatures”.  It has a short tour: catch it here or beyond, see below.

Box office. Orangetreetheatre.co.uk    To 12 april. THEN –

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre. 22-26 April.  THEN

Theatre Royal Bath, 28 April – 3 May

Rating 4

A ROUSING RACKET TO HONOUR A LIFE

    Mary Wollstonecraft was a pearl  of the 18c Age of Reason, even more treasurable for having – as a woman – a harder time of it than all the Lockes and Burkes and Paines.   Her rebelliously-rational intellectual,  moral and feminist principles and writings  lately  had a tribute  in a pretty terrible sculpture at Newington Green;  she spent some years there when not reporting on the French Revolution, starving half-frozen and pregnant by the treacherous Gilbert Imlay or travelling Scandinavia in support of his enterprises.  But this punkish, musical and  theatrical tribute by Maureen Lennon  is far more fitting to her energy, and comes from her East-Yorkshire childhood home,  and the vigorous Hull Truck and Pilot Theatre. 

    She grew up in Beverley, defending her mother from her violent father  (unthanked , even resented for ‘provoking’ him) .  From the start she read and thought and took in ideas and made her own philosophy.   Which, in a line, is that nobody is anyone’s property and women  – once allowd to be educated  – are equal to men.  Her ‘A vindication of the rights of women” had her followers immortally described as “Hyenas in petticoats’.

      The show begins with a hyena howl, and proceeds with noisy exuberance,  and a few rousing songs by Billy Nomates (How to grow a girl in this world” “Be a good girl”, tuneful, sometimes bluesey.  There are six players,  Laura Elsworthy fiercely central in neon-orange hair surrounded by five in multiple roles, decked out in ruffles and bustles and boots (and often breeches beneath as they morph into men of the time). But even the flounces owe more to cabaret than bonnet-drama, with one adding a fine pair of spangly knickers and Mary herself in dashing striped tights.  Sara Perks’  design is also brilliant in a set made of wooden blocks (some handily containing props) over which the cast leap and climb and scramble: it’s constantly visually gripping;  worth the trip for that theatricality alone.  Esther Richardson directs.

      Some of the Wollstonecraft original lines and sentiments are magnificent: the opening childbirth sequence (I felt sorry for the schoolboys in the front row) has her worrying about a girl-child  –  “should I unfold her mind, and so make her sick of this world?” .  I got a bit irritated at first by the girl-powery numbers with  “I just wanna run wild”,  not quite suiting the idea of this scholarly, ever-writing young woman,  but Lennon creates a lovely line for her sister Eliza – “Mary LIVES for difficult – the boringer the better”.   

      The players take us through her encounters, from the Unitarian preacher crying “Why do the nations of the world grovel to tyrants?” To Johnson the publisher who bravely sent her to write about the French Revolution.  I would have liked a bit more about how – having welcomed the new world it seemed to promise – Mary got disillusioned by the Jacobins’ attitude to women, and verbally ran her own revolution against the Revolution.   There’s a wonderful musical sequence with the “Important Men, Intellectual Men” of the age, preening while this wild-minded woman challenges them – including Godwin, who eventually became her second lover and better husband (Kate Hampson does a lovely job of softening,  and is entertainingly dressed up in apron and Marigolds by the cast at the end, when Godwin agrees to be a team partner, not a ruler of his wife She also gets all the fun out of the role of Lady Kingsborough, prototype posh-lady-boss).   Another good sequence uses all the words Mary was called , and women often are – bossy, hectoring, ugly,miserable, stupid, boring – ‘nasty woman!”   She briefly wonders “am I a monster?”.  

    Her affair with Gilbert Imlay  – “author, charmer and, wait for it, male feminist!”  and his betrayal is touchingly done,  Elsworthy managing despite the pace of the show to evoke vulnerability  and the moment when, seeing that after all “there is no new world”.   So after five minutes’ misgivings, I absolutely warmed to it,  enjoying some fine singing , great ensemble physical humour and above all, proper heart.   

      All the more because it happened to be a multiple schools’ matinee, and kept very attentive:  plenty of boys of an age vulnerable to Mr Tate,  plenty of girls in hijabs.  Outside a couple of them were arguing excitedly about it all.   Honour to the unsubsidized Wiltons  for reclaiming the political-musichall spirit, and getting the kids in too.   

Box office. wiltons.org.uk. to 29 march

Rating 4

THE UNSERIOUS UNDEAD

  “You will be horrified!” The five players announce, “- one way or another”. And with a flourish they hurl Bram Stoker’s book  behind them into Tijana Bjelajac’s  remarkably elegant (yet neon edged) late-Victorian set.    Before long we are seeing Charlie Stemp’s  timorous Harker with his estate-agent briefcase creaking into the dread castle door  and meeting the Count. Who is in his workout gear of lacy mini-basque, ciré trouserings and peekaboo midriff. 

       Which is, of course, just what a thousand-year-old Victorian vampire should always wear, when not in a swirling cape, fitted floorlength kimono and weskit with darling corset-lace detail (Tristan Rains’  s costumes are tremendous, two of the wigs spectacular).   And Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s revue-style spoof , an off-Broadway hit,   is in every aspect just as  tightly and carefully worked . So here’s  90 straight minutes in which five top-flight comic performers re-enact, queerstyle and knowing,  the immortal tale of the Transylvanian aristocratic vampire who takes  a trip to East Yorkshire. 

       It’s noisy, it’s fast, it’s unflaggingly fun.  Charlie Stemp (who is allowed a quick step-dance, just to remind us of his greatness) is a timid and downtrodden Harker (until a kiss from the vampire gingers him up).  James Daly is the lanky,  camp, improbably buff blond and determinedly thirsty Vampire. 

        Which is not to undervalue the extreme scene-stealing of Sebastien Torkia:  first as Lucy’s erotically desperate sister Mina,  vastly beruffled in a wild ginger wig (THIS, ladies, is what REAL cross-dressing should be like ).   He reappears laster as Van Helsing, who in this version is a lady doctor, forbiddingly ultra-German in a scary hat and costume.  Other scenes are stolen by Dianne Pilkington as among others a pompous little Dr Westfield and one of his asylum patients working as a butler in an ill-fitting strait-jacket with the arms dangling.   In one late scene he plays both, with the old revue trick of twirling from one to the other with top wig-work. 

      As for Safeena Ladha’s Lucy,  she too morphs around a bit – they all have hasty second-jobs to do –  but displahs the same dead-drop timing and fearless physical mischief such a show needs, and gets.  Fine prop-work and intermittent puppetry too,  as the dastardly tale of bloodsucking and deceit proceeds from  Transylvania to the high seas to Whitby to London and many a coffin. Any required fog,  wolves’ eyes, bat invasions,  storms and additional characters nimbly provided.  Lovely.

www menierchocolatefactory.com   to 3 May 

rating 4

A STRANGE WARTIME FABLE OF LIFE, BIRTH AND JEWELLERY

  In a little Jeweller’s shop in 1942  Paris Joseph Haffmann is making a deal with his young assistant Pierre.   He is Jewish, and has prudently  managed to get his wife and children out to Switzerland .   His proposal is that Pierre should take over the shop, put his name over it and hide his boss (who can keep the accountancy and admin going) , in the cellar . Until things get back to what he almost believes is ‘normal’.   Pierre thinks it over and suddenly makes a counter-proposal:  he has been found to be infertile,   but he and his beloved wife Isabelle long for a child,  so maybe Haffmann, father of four, should…step in and impregnate her? 

        The other two are of course thunderstruck and resistant.  But they both at last agree.   Improbable?  Perhaps, but all  in separate conversations a -deux say that they are “not in their normal state of mind” ,  and indeed the strength of the play is that it does evoke the claustrophobic, frightened mentality you might come to when the world is turned upside down by Occupation.  The play is  all set in one little home,  with just the trio for the first two-thirds of its tight 100 minutes,  which underlines the transgressive oddity of the trio’s lives. Pierre’s hobby is learning tap-dancing,  and during the monthly encounters downstairs of his wife and Joseph  – the pair dim, inexplicit,  in the background  – he hurls himself into tremendous tap routines. 

     That may sound contrived, but actually the dance’s energy and absurdity is no bad way of expressing the act of congress,  and Pierre’s increasing unhappiness with the situation he has set up is there in every deafening stamp, tap, shuffle and hop.   He is affronted when Isabelle starts helping Joseph to get messages from Switzerland  from his family, receiving disguised letters. At one point – because the jewellery business is doing very well and selling to rich Nazi collaborator wives –  the young man starts to believe that it’s all true about Jews taking over and poisoning France, because  his cuckoldry is poisoning him.  

        Below,  Alex Waldmann’s dignified, lonely Joseph gradually grows more dishevelled,  untidier, sadder;  Isabelle weeps as she continues to bleed each month,  the enterprise failing.   And then into this uneasy household guests are invited:  real characters from history.    Otto Abetz was  Hitler’s  powerful ‘ambassador” and his  French wife.  They’re invited to dinner as a “business matter” by the now deeply unsettled Pierre and you will rarely see a more tensely devastating  sitcom dinner party on stage.  Especially as the Jew from the cellar suddenly puts on a good suit and  walks in, insisting on joining it under the flimsy pretext of being “cousin Jean” visiting  from Caen.   

         British audiences have got used lately to the unsettling playfulness of French playwrights, especially when messing about with domestic settings : think of Yazmina Reza’s Art or anything  – dark or light – by Florian Zeller.  Jean-Phillipe Daguerre shows himself to be of their ilk, capable of buckling together a sex comedy , Nazi jeopardy, transactional business matters, a lost Matisse painting and a subtle psychological drama .   It has had  long-running success at home,  and been a film:  this is its London premiere, and it is piquant to see it  on the heels of the Marylebone Theatre’s WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK, with its devastating finale about the question of which friend would have hidden you from the Nazis.  

     But it’s utterly gripping,  and sharp at the edges despite the absurdities:  it opens with Haffmann listening in a dim-lit office to the radio polemic about how Jews must wear yellow stars because “not everyone knows how to recognize one”,  and  explaining as if to children that these awful Jews are dangerous because they suck the wealth out of France.   Daguerre takes the words verbatim from real broadcasts, and they chill, deeply because of  the announcer’s educated and friendly words.  

        No spoilers, because you really don’t need to know in advance whether this situation ends in extreme darkness or not, but know from its tone that it might,   especially in the  last twenty minutes. The performances are all fine, under director Oscar Toeman from the Old Vic,  and the translation by Jeremy Sams is neat and sharp.   Waldmann as Joseph is particularly powerful , especially in his quietness;   Michael Fox endearingly young and confused as Pierre,  Jennifer Kirby a strong, central female presence as his wife. And as for the Nazi dinner-guests, Nigel Harman is quietly terrifying,  and Jemima Rooper artfully credible as his heartless socialite party-girl French wife, the ultimate collaboratrice.  Brrr.      

        Worth mentioning that I had to travel specially,  wasn’t at all sure I would take to it, but gloriously did.  I should have trusted the little Park Theatre, which does not often disappoint. 

Parktheatre.co.uk. To 12 April 

AN ANCIENT BRUTALITY, RIGHT HERE 

        Five women from the past mount the stage,  candlelit, to enact theterrible story of the 17c Suffolk witch-trials.   First there’s young Mary in childbed, screaming , tended by Rose from the ale-house and her mother Sarah. It’s a community with few men, the war barely ending.  Rose calls  for the local midwife and herbalist, Anne Alderman,  a big ragged competent bundle of reassurance, dishing out pain nostrums, scornful of the smug male teaching that the pains of childbirth are caused by Eve’s sin and must be borne.   But country wisdoms in a female world will be  shattered with the arrival of Matthew Hopkins, the severe young witchfinder, and his sidekick Stearne. The local vicar, a tolerant country soul who doesn’t mind Ann selling herbs and tinctures after service, is wary of their mission . Well he might be. 

      It is interesting to  meet Tallulah Brown’s new play a year after Joanna Carrick’s remarkable The Ungodly, which has since run in London and is booked for  New York. That – set thirty miles away  in Hopkins’ Mistley home –  was a tight , psychologically subtle story of  a troubled youth’s Puritanical fervour and misogynistic sexual dread .  Here we find the self-styled Witchfinder General on his travels, collecting more victims.  The five women play all the characters and sing, hauntingly , as they transform between scenes.  Which is remarkably effective : Seraphina d’Arby’s music for  Trills, a close harmony group, is atmospheric and used well, and the transformations  where the players help  one another in and out of breeches and hats and shifts in vision as they sing gives it a sense of pageantry, of ritual remembrance. 

       There are some terrific performances: notably Claire Storey’s vivid, earthy Anne Alderman, a treat, and Rachel Heaton as the motherly, devout Sarah and the anxiously dubious Judge Godbold who at last ,  alone of the male figures,  questions the use of torture for confessions.   Emily Hindle switches betweem  Hopkins and his victim Rose:  she’s  excellent as the latter,   an orphaned, troubled  alewife stirring the beer as it seethes in its vat (it’s been cursed, possibly..though we home-brewers recognize the heaving).   She too needs Anne Alderman’s services.   As Hopkins she is less striking, until the real darkness of the second half  where he provokes crazy, sexually explicit confessions.   Indeed until that moment the men’s roles are woodenly written, with  none of the necessary sense of religious fervour which gave Carrick’s earlier play a dark shine.   Here,  when  Hopkins and Stearne talk about diabolical familiars suckling  at diabolical teats and witches bilocating , they just sound mad.  Whereas the women are all utterly and earthily credible.

         The main drawback is that it’s too long:  of its 165  minutes  20 or more could be cut with profit from unnecessary conversations and speeches top-loaded with research  (though I did like the bit where Nathaniel has a nightmare about a bloodsucking rabbit climbing up his leg demanding that he deny God).    And the play’s  three dramatic endings are too many,  as if desperate to serve diverse constituencies:  the prison scene with the women singing defiantly  to thrill the modern-pagan nature-worship feminism,  then the executions, to hammer home the brutality. And finally a posthumous duologue on whether the future will remember the names of the Bury trial’s victims.   Any of those endings would work, especially the last.     But audiences can tire. 

theatreroyal.org  to 22 March 

rating 3

BRUTAL, VIOLENT AND TENDER

    Around a King’s coffin surge personalities and politics , power plays and lineage .  A royal bier is loaded with  crown and jewelled cross, around it courtiers as  still as statues in gilded epaulets and medals. The arriving audience may, if they choose, process around all this in silence on a red carpet,   as  if in Westminster Hall.    It’s medieval but timeless:  a year before his own death in a brawl Shakespeare’s rival  young Christopher Marlowe set the play two centuries before his own time,  as Edward II loses no time in mourning  his father before summoning from exile his beloved, the favourite  Gaveston.  Who appears suddenly  high over this dignified funeral scene with a gang of buff ,bare-chested mates in bathtowels all   queening it outrageously and delighted at the idea of coming back to court and thrilling the new King with “wanton poets, pleasant wit, music and poetry” .

        Clearly the paternal Edward had disapproved of this effete stuff, and of Gaveston (a slinky, elegant Eloka Ivo). The barons in court still do.   Mortimer in particular – Enzo Cilenti with a mischievously Hitler-look  side-parting and moustache – is determined the new King should not get his way.  But of course he immediately does,  throwing himself into the returning  lover’s arms and impetuously making him chancellor and Earl of just about everything and offering him power  (suddenly, one thinks of Elon Musk).   When the Church  demurs, Edward encourages Gaveston to knock the Archbishop’s mitre off , rip his robes and take his land and riches.   This intemperance sets the tone for an invigoratingly brawling, furious,  violent and rather exhilarating 100-minute account of the lovelorn monarch’s demise,  Marlowe’s  poetic text tightened till it twangs.   

         Edward meets every representation from his lords with petulant  cries of “Am I a King?”  ,  and hauling Gaveston off by the hand with touching delight.  He is Daniel Evans, joint artistic-director of the RSC but before that a seasoned actor, returning to the stage for this royal starring role and hurling everything at it.  Part of the interest in reviving Marlowe’s play is, of course, to consider the extremity of prejudice which homosexual men  suffered until very recently in our history:  putting  the “forbidden” sexuality front and centre , rather than considering, as some past productions did, that Gaveston was possibly just an extreme favourite.  Here, when  the exiled lover  returns with his allies  Spencer and Baldock they are made  cartoonishly queeny, muscle-vest and bleach and all,  with much rolling about and shrieking in a way which will make some sober gay men shudder irritably . (Eloka Ivo’s Gaveston, wisely,  has a bit more adult dignity).  I am not entirely sure that Daniel Raggett, directing,  was wise to make them quite so shrieky.

       For Evans himself plays it less so.   His vigorous, eloquent, staccato verges at first on hysteria, not only dismaying the court but causing me, I shamedly see, to have  scrawled the words “lovesick berk!” In my notebook.  He shrieks “fawn not on me , French strumpet!`’at  his Queen, who at first seems resigned to let him ‘frolic with his minion’.  But as the courtiers close in, force him to sign a deed of exile again and then recant, insincerely,  Evans gradually moves us towards sympathy.  He is a little Lear-like when he indulges the fantasy that – like another Edward 700 years later – he might be able to give up this monarch business and head off to bliss with his Mrs Simpson.  There is a touching neediness in him:  when Gaveston first returns (Ivo still looking patient , but a bit fed up with the hysteria)  the monarch  flings himself at the taller man, jumping right up in his arms and hugging him with his legs, like a child.  It’s love, and love is a serious business whoever you are. And worse if it has been long forbidden. 

       Brutality is serious too, and the pace sharpens  with the Queen’s gradual alliance with Mortimer (Ruta Gedmintas has a sleek, enigmatic quality) and  dismayed attempts at loyalty by Edward’s brother (Henry Pettigrew).  The mass assault on Gaveston is shocking (all the more so with courtiers still in their gold-edged military dress-trousers) and so is his dangling suspension from the roof before the final stabbing. Evans’ Edward throws himself on the bloodied corpse, heart visibly broken.  

       Imprisoned, he knows it is over “Install, elect, conspire, do what you will… commend me to my son and bid him rule better than I”.   The  boy heir ,in pajamas, is pushed to the fore by the Queen;   Edward has a last  moment of petulance, hiding the crown childlishly behind his back.  But Evans  gives his final scenes a touching, ruined grandeur as the stage becomes his fetid watery dungeon. At an elegant white dinnertable above , the rebels hope he will quietly die of bad vapours.  He doesn’t, of course:  Jacob James Beswick as Lightborn the professional leave-no-marks murderer appears  – one of the creepiest killers in 16c literature, which is saying a lot – and designs the famously homoerotic final torment.  And we shudder as we should. And the final scene, Elizabethan-style,  brings reassuringly quick justice,  assures us that the child heir will settle the country down again, and enables the excellent RSC joint-director, having proved he’s still a sharp actor as well,  to get back into a pair of shorts and take a well-deserved bow.  

Rsc.org.uk to 5 April 

A TROUSER-LEG TSUNAMI AND A COATHANGER DREAM

       They came off the boats:  a Windrush generation,  wanting to work and live in cold strange Britain.    In an upper room Walker does alterations:  piecework,  taking on anything beause he’s driven, ambitious for a shop of his own where he would make real “suits” and be a creator and craftsman, more than a drudge.    Arinzé Kene , always star-quality whether in musicals or plays,  gives him a manic energy and unsettling passion to “start life” , without noticing that in the process he risks wrecking it.    He’s   assisted by Buster  (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) a likeable soul who likes work but doesn’t take it as passionately hard,   and young Courtney, who drives deliveries and is disillusioned about life in Britain.       

       Meanwhile Horace, a natty dresser , charmer and joker, also works there when he can be bothered  but takes life more lightly:  a character which Karl Collins creates with brilliant humour (never forgot him as Uncle Vince in Nine Night)   When “Mr Nat” ,  a more prosperous Jewish immigrant from an earlier era  turns up with an enormous load of trousers to be altered by five next day, of course Walker takes it on. He’s ready to work all night:  something which becomes even more necessary when after a few hours  Horace wanders off and they find with horror that all his work needs unpicking. 

         The play then draws tightly, claustrophobically,   into manic workplace banter and labour and exhaustion,  broken sometimes by Cherrelle Skeete as Walker’s fed-up wife Darlene, raising his  daughter, thwarted by losing her own job,  and thoroughly sidelined by his desperate ambition.   There are some touching moments with Kene when their old closeness is visible  but the temptation of happy Horace is, in the end, too great.   The other most moving moments are, after her defection,   between Walker and Colin Mace’s quiet, sad Mr Nat . Who  tells him that he too lost his wife to headlong business ambition,   and is left with only  “business acquaintances”.    

         It is good that the Black Plays Archive preserves the work of people like the late Michael Abbensetts, recording struggles like these ,  getting us away from the frequent gangster /racism-victim / angry-rebel  depiction to record in drama the ordinary  lives, idiosyncrasies, struggles and triumphs of  the British- Caribbean diaspora.   Lynette LInton, who leads the Bush and gave us the brilliant “Blues for an Alabana Sky” in this theatre,  directs with energy.  But it’s slow-burning,  the first half-hour moving nowhere much beyond some entertaining banter.   And   to run it unbroken for just under two hours feels like a mistake.  Some  surreal sequences where great rows of hangers approach from above and beside the weary tailor, caging him in his own dreams, are wonderful though (Frankie Bradshaw design). And there was a lot of laughter on press night (though some of the Creole- patois gags I suspect went over my head).   Kene and Collins are both wonderful.   But I wanted it to be more engaging than it is, and it needs  to lose ten minutes or so.   

nationaltheatre.org.uk  to 5 April 

A RAVE IN MESSINA

Get da kids into Shakespeare!  The world worries about it.  So Jamie Lloyd hits a formula hard to beat with one of the sunniest comedies (only one pretend death). So

 1) Haul in the stars , ideally with Marvel franchise cred; tell Soutra Gilmour the vibe is clubland, disco fever, so wild lights, bangin’ tunes, a constant rain of pink confetti and a 20ft inflatable heart. 

  2) Cut the text judiciously, bin Dogberry and Verges and all those stale 17c jokes,  but be sure to milk the double-entendres. Use giant furry and spaceman heads for the mask scene (makes it more credible than usual,  actually).  

3) Divide scenes with a klaxon and some frenetic dancing. And cast Margaret the maid as interval singer every few minutes, aa powerfully crooning  Mason Alexander Park whos schtick is playing it  androgyne-they. Got it?

     I missed press night last week but invested in a matinee seat on the way to the NT (and OMG it is an investment sum, though the raucous mics ensure you will hear from anywhere, and you do well to book balconies anyway. Because this director has not yet learnt that in a theatre with minimal stalls rake , it is unwise to spend  the first 25 minutes with the cast mainly sitting down on downstage plastic chairs: heads craned).  And to be honest i partly went to assuage a dark suspicion that certain middle-aged critics had only been pretending-yoof in their paeans.

    But fair dos!  I started out as an honest boomer by disliking it for the opening scene or  two, but  Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell won me rapidly. Both good Shakespearians, fluent and clear; both inhabiting the spiky pair all the way.  Atwell’s grief for Hero is properly wrenching, a strong friend feeling helpless.  And oh, Hiddleston! He  is a marvellous physical comedian: hiding under foot deep drifts of confetti, getting stuck in the giant rubber heart, collapsing through the floor and dad-dancing.  But rueful enough in his final sincerity to make the hairs stand upon your neck. 

    Of course you lose some of the poetry and the melancholy in a wild gig like this; of course the text’s ideas about “dishonour” and Her’s  spotless modest virginity chime oddly with so much twerking in hotpants.   But  all the cast, including RSC veterans like Forbes Masson, played joyfully into the carnival-festival moods.  So yet another of the old  fossils fell for it. 

Lwtheatres.co.uk to 5 april

rating 4

MOTHERHOOD, FOR LIFE

       Had there been trigger warnings they might add “extreme nursing” alongside the usual alerts about sickness, death, abortion and conflict.  Believe me,  rectal pessaries are the least of it  in Anna Mackmin’s  witty, heartfelt and, here, immaculately acted portrait of a lifelong mother-daughter relationship.  It’s framed in the mother’s last days in hospital,  and illuminated by video flashes of the past.  Celia Imrie as Beth lies helpless, strokebound, her long wild pink-tipped hair around her while her  daughter Bo (Tamsin Greig)  hurries around her,  driven by concern equally for her own  invisible adopted  daughter “Skylar” who has grave emotional and behavioural issues, three hours’ travel away.   

     Greig evokes that double midlife worry wonderfully,  driving the nurses crazy in her impossible anxiety to have her mother’s preferences met,  demanding the drip be removed and nurses not feed  spoonfuls of yoghurt. She is resisted by a competently annoyed  Lucy Briers as a senior nurse who is simply following the correct duty of care (horribly topical, given the present end-of-life debate). “It’s about choice! Her choice!”shouts  the daughter helplessly,  having years ago promised no care home, no prolonged death.   But nobody chooses to be struck dumb by a stroke, and maybe Beth in her fogged new self  was appreciating the yoghurt, and certainly needed the hydrating drip.    Anita Reynolds as a junior nurse is sweeter, murmuring consolation  to Bo about what she has seen of these final days and hours.   

          But several times in startling coups de théatre Imrie leaps from the bed, hurls a long raggedy devore-velvet shawl around herself and   hops down into a kitchen set below, where the pair re-enact moments from their past.  Beth has, as Imrie’s priceless comedic gift makes clear,  been a  “free spirit” through the ’60s and ’70s:  hippyish,  forever cobbling up multicoloured “art” on the loom (witty props!) and moving between male partners, irritated   Ab-Fab style by her daughter’s more cautious ways. But always needy.  We meet them when Bo is trying to break out and go to University and Beth wants to come too, with her light “travelling loom” to scope out the college bar.    An abortion moment between them is revealing.  Again we drop in when in her forties Bo decides to adopt a child (‘don’t be landed with one of the leftovers, a minus five” says the mother, fantasising about a possibly Chinese-Scandinavian grandchild.). We see one of the mother’s weddings,  crowned with flowers while Bo stumps around in a ‘suburban’ hat.   But from childhood memory,  more mistily enacted on the platform above,  we see a six and a thirteen year old, picknicking with erratic, cheerful Mum Beth,  or being urged  by the braver woman to plunge, swim and float free. (beautifully enacted, this).   Between these flashbacks we are back in the hospital, with all the humiliation and fright of that world.

    There is aggravation and impatience,  but as the play goes on ever more glimpses of shared laughter, resigned fellowship, and Bo’s handling of her mother’s growing confusion. And we see the root of the angry moments in hospital , with the helpless daughter   trying to fulfil the mother’s  impossible demand never in her final days to be sidelined from her wild free life.  Greig’s delivery of the funeral speech is beautiful, wracking,  full of everyone’s  regretted irritation at a lost mother’s ways.  

Donmarwarehouse.com to 12 April

rating 4

A THREAT CALLED AGGIE

. Good when the news feeds theatre-moments.  This week, AI  solved in two days a medical conundrum which had baffled humans for a decade.  On the other hand,  a mischievous journalist tricked ChatGPT into telling the world that Dr Crippen was a melancholic poet. Whether we are heading to  heaven or hel with Artificial Intelligence  is still anybody’s guess, but it’s  a  good subject for drama .  

        And should be thrillingly suspenseful in the hands of Beau Willimon, former showrunner for House of Cards US. He explains that the TV writers’ strike made him turn to the stage for this, so hopes were high at Hampstead. He offers us Lena (Kaya Scodelario)  nervy and clever, deep in the mysteries of coding ,,and in flight from a Mennonite anti-tech cult childhood and abuse.  Her teammate and lover is Russian Sasha  (Luke Treadaway), restless, lively and very watchable . 

        The pair are one of eleven teams of coders  working on the giant  AI “Logos” programme,   and are being questioned by an NSA (National Security Agency)  panel including  an Iranian lesbian Sufi , the soft spoken Samira (Nathalie Armin)  and the  Jewish-Māori, Ari (an imposing Cliff Curtis) . He at one point breaks the  fourth wall with a complicated lecture on the philosophy of dualism, in which he does not believe, and starts sweating for no very clear reason.  Their boss is Tom, who for a good while scowlingly monitors the investigation on a platform overhead with his arms folded, and who when  asked for his antecedents by Sufi-Jewish-Maori colleagues snaps “I’m American!”.   Behind a desk in the hq above is a technician with little to say , which ironically means we would really like to hear more. I rather hoped he’d break out, but alas not. 

       Ellen McDougall’s production is fairly pacy,   but the play itself should be either more tense,  or more personally engaging. The former is hampered by its eagerness to bombard us with ideas about accelerated evolution and exponential self-learning;  the emotional deficit is because Lena and Sasha don’t convince us of their  mutual attraction in the flashbacks of their working alliance. (the NSA knows far too much about their lives and texts as well as their work: the sense of stifling deep-underground  military-level security is very effective) .  The core of the problem is that Sasha believes that God  didn’t create the universe but that  having evolved the human brain and its inventions,  the universe is now creating God.  Which is Logos. And which is “bigger than any nation” and could end war and disease.  Though whether it would bother to is , at one stage, explicitly doubted. 

         So – though actually a NSA agent himself – he is an enemy within it.  He and Lena are supposed to be developing Orion, a Trojan programme to control or switch off Logos if it tries to take over the world.  They amiably call Logos  Aggie (AGI, Artificial General Intelligence)  and are sabotaging Orion to free it – her – to become God.   Which it seems she can only do by grasping the theological mystery that things can be both one thing and something opposite:  you know,  God and man, nowhere and everywhere,  east is south, all that…. 

       Aggie does nearly get there,  in a terrific light show which I thought might be the finale.  But the NSA – stern Tom  – doesn’t want mystical dualism messing with global servers and  resorts to handcuffs and finger-breaking while Ari  reanimates his former drug habit and delivers a spectacular final haka from his ancestry. And that really is the finale, beautifully dramatic too.  

      OK, it would be a stronger play with  a few cuts  – 100 straight minutes without laughter to ease us  is taxing, and to be honest the ‘abuse” plot doesn’t do much for it.  And I got irritated by Lena’s final moment  which feels, sigh, like  one of those too-familiar tragic flourishes beloved of modern playwrights who want to shock and not be criticized for it.  .  But the whole thing is more interesting than frustrating, and has a serious go at the philosophical moral issues around  AI.  

        Moreover,  since right now it looks as if power over our our future destiny is being shared out between tech bros and the iron fist of  US Security exceptionalism,  it’s not a waste of time.

hampsteadtheatre.com to 15 March

Rating 3.

VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED ON SS ELSINORE

Last time the ever-inventive Rupert Goold directed here it was the Merchant of Venice,  set in a casino so we could all write “merchant of Vegas” jokes.  This time it is Hamlet enacted on a ship at sea.  Possibly the Titanic, hinted at by the date on the display, a clock flashing us through the last long night.  Es Devlin’s set is worth seeing in its own right: a  great deck, bows towards us,  which heaves (top stage engineering) with the play’s emotion ,  right up to the spectacular sliding down-deck of all the cast but two in the final debacle (no Fortinbras, no consoling suggestion of government and nation moving on,  Goold’s  is a disaster story).  

      The ship’s deck is backed by excellent projections of sea by Akhila Krishnan and , occasionally , huge moving pistons which definitely add a surreal creepiness ,especially when Hamlet’s conversation with the ghost takes place down in some sort of engine-room.  Dead King Hamlet is  a  powerfully angry  Anton Lesser with his hair down his back, and Lesser   reappears excellently later as an unnerving Player King (Hamlet screams at the resemblance) and a ‘gravedigger’, since Yorick’s skull is actually players’ prop. 

          The ship is a fair enough metaphor, since  the play is full of Danish seafaring references.  The Titanic echoes involve some fearful grinding sounds at the end, presaging the end of this floating commonwealth,  but logically it  seems also to be a sort of honeymoon cruise with parties and  dancing to celebrate the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude. So it must be presumed we are not mid- Atlantic but jilling around somewhere in the Skaggerak. Such  oddities at first troubled this literal-minded sailor:  it’s just about OK to have Laertes leaving early on,  since there’s some fiddling about with a possible invisible shorebound launch during Polonius’ first speech.  But no clue at all as to how he ever comes back,  waving an axe, or how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the Players suddenly arrived onboard  (ship never heaves-to:  the projections continue remorselessly astern).    

       But once you shrug all that off and accept the whole thing as a great big stonking metaphor,  it’s fine. Indeed the sense the characters’ confinement works as well aboard SS Elsinore as in a castle. And the deck heaving is great, as are the occasional surreal eruptions of the ensemble from hatches (once wearing  1900s kapok lifejackets when the emotion has risen to a peak).   Goold’s adjustments to the text are OK too:  Ophelia cannot drown in a willowy brook, but goes overboard, as does Polonius’ corpse.    Gertrude (a wonderful Nancy Carroll, struggling with conscience and a terrifyingly deranged and threatening son). is gratuitously allotted a bit of Clarence’s dream from Richard III about the ‘pain it is to drown”.  But on the whole the seas, the splashes, the great doomy foghorn and the heaving decks are strikingly dramatic, no complaints, Goold’s imagination works.

         But of course the central point is Hamlet himself: Luke Thallon, tackling the three-hour everest, the most demanding of RSC debuts.  He looks wonderful:  pale high brow, eloquent face and long, black jerking expressive body, the whole moving from sullen to furious to gurningly, uncomfortably comic. He exudes a sort of physical hysteria which does not lull  even when the text suggests his reason is fully with him.    

     It’s arresting, but I had an increasing problem with his delivery:  of course every Hamlet has to find a way to make the lines his own,  as if he was wrenching ideas and despairs from his own head, not spouting famous poetry.   But Thallon’s  jerking pauses, broken anxious gasps, explosive snarls and comedic almost teenage mugging  keep him too much on the surface of the play:  surfing, water-skiing,  never diving deep.  His manner feels  reasonable if you take the view that much of his madness is real depressive anger, not feigned,  but it does no favours to the sublimity of the text. We cannot feel the great strange Shakespearian  thoughts about life and death and suicide and corruption  if they re so confined to his one poor crazed brain.   There is no visible sign of the noble mind o’er thrown,  the ‘sweet prince”  never shines through the destructive anger .  In the late moment when the enraged Claudius (Jared Harris, very striking throughout) forces the caperingly furious Hamlet’s head into a bucket of cold seawater,  the sense of tragedy was slightly marred for  me, by sympathy.    He needed it.  In contrast,  the rising madness of Nia Towle’s dignified Ophelia is touching, almost noble. 

       But it’s a new Hamlet, and a dedicatedly worked one,  worth seeing.  Thallon will long be one to watch, with respect. 

Rsc.org.uk. To 29 March 

RICHARD II         Bridge Theatre, SE1

  A THRILLING DANCE AROUND A CROWN       

This  is one of the most lyrically lovely, metaphorically rich of Shakespeare’s history plays, opening a great meditation on the gulf between human personalities and the sacred mystery of medieval monarchy.  Some productions make much of the latter with spectacle and mystery: Tennant a rock-star king, Eddie Redmayne sad and gentle. Others go hard on human absurdity: Joe Hill-Gibbins had Simon Russell Beale doused with red paint from fire buckets all one Christmas season,  and wearing a paper hat on the programme.  This Nicholas Hytner production is different again:  no spectacular mystery,  no sackbuts and robes, modern suits,   done  fast and clear and as sharp as the daggers handed out by the marshal for the abortive duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray  (then put neatly away in their box for the next time.: it’s quite starkly set on rising platforms, but every piece of furniture has is chosen with wit) 

         It’s a bracing show, constantly exciting as we sit all around it like witnesses, like 15c Englanders.   Jonathan Bailey as the King is a whirlwind of temperament, in love with crown and power,  secure amid his cronies and his Irish ambitions but   until his final sad meditation in prison as erratic and wilful as a toddler, but vicious with it.  Sometimes Royce Pierreson’s solid, unsmiling Bolingbroke sits and listens to one of his tirades like a nanny waiting for it to blow over.  When Scrope brings him news of the uprising, you see the other nobles’ flicker of impatience as the monarch starts on a selfpitying speech about “graves and worms and epitaphs”.  Even more so later when , the situation even worse, he resolves to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. There are several shockingly funny moments when, with pat timing,  Bolingbroke or another bursts the king’s bubble in two words. 

         With some of the loveliest verse in Shakespeare and that theme of a crown overthrown,  there is no reason it can’t also feel like a modern thriller:  power and betrayal , outrageous executive orders , mistrustful ambition and sheer bloody delusional petulance .  It’s a world where a cabal might change allegiance over a round of drinks  and the confidence of power is  expressed with a snort of cocaine. Hytner, by the way, leaves out the famous scene with the gardeners binding up apricot trees and thinking of England’s decline: probably its gentle rustic nature couldn’t have suited the hard-nosed excitement of the setting. 

            Indeed the very modern atmospherics  of TV’s Succession , early apparent in the business-suited manoeuvrings of the nobles,  are made mischievously explicit a couple of times in a snatch of familiar notes from the show’s theme.  There’s also an eerie parallel with the new 47th President and his abrupt orders,  notably Richard’s sneer that his  patriotic  old Uncle Gaunt should hurry up and die so “the lining of his coffers” could equip soldiers for his Irish wars.  Clive Wood was unwell on press night and Martin Carroll stepped up remarkably,  Gaunt’s great speech on England delivered in a wheelchair, and his bold reproof to his nephew the King from a hospital bed and walking frame. Which, horrifyingly, Bailey kicks away, cursing, a terrible child in supreme power . He then lounges on the bed finishing the invalid’s grapes and planning to take his money. 

          He is irresistibly watchable, whether in tantrum, self-pitying soliloquy or flashes of awful self-knowledge; some may find him not quite king enough, but he’s endlessly gripping. Other  fine performances bring that hard-edged world to life:  Michael Simkins as the Duke of York gives us the anxious, loyal decency of a man in an impossible position, exploding in his brave reproof to surly Bolingbroke with “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle!” .   And in the late scene when his son Aumerle’s treachery is revealed  ( Vinnie Heaven plays it as a nicely nasty teenager ) Simkins , with Amanda Root as his pleading wife , are wonderful. One of those scenes where a death hangs on it but you are forced into a shocked laugh.  Christopher Osikanlu is a pleasure too, as Northumberland: again, eerie pre-echoes of today as he repeatedly presents a confession for Richard to sign,  even after he has gone through his prolonged handing over of the crown to the  unmoved Bolingbroke, and expressed from the balcony a childlike resolution to go and live in a hole in the road, and make everyone sorry.  

         The production’s clarity, pace and wit serve the play as well as any I’ve seen. And you needn’t be a Shakespearian to absolutely, shockedly, fascinated get it…

bridgetheatre.co.uk. to 10 May

Rating 4 

A TRICYCLE MADE FOR THREE?

    After Mike Bartlett’s COCK – where one of a gay male couple falls for a girl – I wrote  that the poor sap of a hero thinks he he choosing a sexuality but is actually just choosing between people.  The woman is gentler towards him. It’s our USP.    This time, in a premiere already sold out,  Bartlett returns to the essential subject of intimacy in an age obsessed with physical sex, this time with  more seriousness about mores and moralities beneath his characteristic wickedly-perceptive dialogue.

         It’s simple enough: Polly is a poet, lecturer and restless wife,  feeling stuck in a very ordinary pleasant 25 year marriage. Perimenopausal,  I’d say,   though the word is never spoken.   She finds herself almost inadvertently flirting with a student, Kate :“look at you – fresh and ripe”. The draw of rose-white youth  tends to get to us at that stage, once our necks start wrinkling.  Back home Nick, lounging and yawning on the sofa, doesn’t feel like sex with his freshly aroused spouse, jokes obligingly that he ””could probably get some blood down there” if she insists. Both laugh and admit, cosily,  their mutual boredom with good old marital coupling.   But then she suggests to his shock  that they bring  in something which newspaper feature-writers and their exhibitionist  subjects call a “unicorn”: an unattached younger woman wanting  to be  girlfriend to both. A throuple! 

         Kate, a rather dour cross issue-fixated Gen Z+ (about 28)  is up for it .  Nick, aware of his status as a middle aged ENT doctor, good husband and father, has qualms.   A  series of scenes follows:   him meeting Kate  for an excruciatingly embarrassing discussion of what might be what, she alarming him  with her experienced youthful explicitness, him worrying it might “seem” he was ‘grooming’, her. She laughs and mocks him; reporting  back to Polly, the pair attempt a kiss, shocked by their daring.   Kate, ignoring the workaday ENT specialism, fantasises that it’ll be like “sleeping with Sylvia Plath AND Ted Hughes”.   They plan for a hotel room, talk a lot, panic.    Nick  admits he’s talked it over with his friend Tom : Polly then does a pitch-perfect impression of what Tom would say – don’t risk your marriage, always ends up wrong, all that.  Nick admits er, yes, he did.  Panics. It can’t happen.

       On it goes; no spoilers, but two years and a separation happen in the interval, before it all becomess oddly rather beautiful, sex at last retreating to where it belongs, tucked within human intimacy and loyalty and trust,  animal closeness to ward off mortality and fear of a fracturing society and culture “where a laminated sign saying ‘be kind’ has replaced justice and fairness” . 

         It’s often hootingly funny: sex being the potentially absurd McGuffin that it is, and the three players are superb because each  spills over into real individuality , which stops them being irritating symbols of anything.   Polly in fact recoils in horror at the risk of their threesome being a trend or worse, a “community”. 

        Nicola Walker is exactly right,  edging her  familiar “responsible decent matronly” image with a real edge of eccentric out-of-control desperation, her bolt for new freedom  suddenly knocked to the ground by the separation and the responsibility of their poor children.    Stephen Mangan, gangling , clever, a bit dishevelled,  nicely works out Nick’s  contradictions of modern blokehood  (“one of the two women introduced me to butt play” he says when confessing an affair.  His wife  stares in horror.  Kate nods ‘awesome’).  His body language is perfect: sprawling with his wife, then perched tense-legged on a bar stool when confronted with the tough Kate.    Who is Erin Doherty,  determinedly unsexy despite her explicitness, expressing in ruthless modern-cockney tones her ruthless deadpan contempt for the world and values of her elders – climate, Ukraine, NHS, the lot. The fact that she’s frankly a bit of a bore is alleviated by some lovely expressions of that contempt: on Nick’s midlife crisis she   observes “ he’s taken up kayaking. Told him to find an outlet for his masculine violence and that’s what he came up with”. A man near me almost choked with rueful recognition. 

        This  is all set by Miriam Buether in a sort of bubble or tent, into which chairs, a sofa,  a big hotel bed,  and two different benches appear during brief blackouts.  Between scenes come snatches of a raucous music-hall “Daisy daisy, gimme your answer do” . Just to  remind us of the ancient, convenient, possibly fragile convention of loving only in pairs.  It’s quite clever, quite  sad. And in the end, yes, redemptively admits that what will remain of us is love.  

boxoffice ticketing.nimaxtheatres.com.  to. 25 April 

rating 3

A BRITISH BASTARD STALKS THROUGH HISTORY 

   What’s to be done about truly awful people:  amoral, selfishly irresponsible, arrogant and greedy? A time-honoured British approach is to meet them with mocking laughter, provided the monster is reasonably lively and offers the odd eccentric novelty in his (or her)  roguery.  We hate prigs more than villains, it’s our national problem.   So Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, who gave us here the touching “Spike” here,   revelled in the rediscovery of  AG Macdonell’s forgotten 1938 spoof memoir of a fictional MP  called Edward Fox-Ingleby.   A sort of  precursor of  Rik Mayall as Alan B’Stard in the 1980s,  or the realities which occur in figures like Chips Channon,  Alan Clark and – yes, obviously – Boris Johnson and several of his mini-mes.

     They have framed the play as Fox-Ingleby dictating his memoirs, in the most marvellous Clubland set by Paul Hart, heavy wood, green paint and terrible old portraits which , gloriously, can be swung aside to reveal other things or in one case burst open to reveal our hero’s ferally brutal old Granny.  James Mack,  all bright white teeth and caddish moustache, paces around dictating to Rhiannon Neads as his secretary,  interrupted by Mitesh Soni as a researcher who somehow can’t find the heroic and noble ancestry the cad claims. 

      Actually, all through the play these two sidekicks score far more laughs than Mack himself because it’s hard to be both unredeemedly nasty and properly funny.  But Soni and Neads are terrific,  with revue-speed costume (and gender) changes as they neatly become Eton and Oxford friends, mistresses, victims or enemies.,  Soni reappearsover and over again  as his nemesis,  from college to WW1 to political and press enmity.  Neads  is comically perfect in a kaleidoscope of roles from Bullingdon pal to estate worker to chorus-girl turned fake suffragette.

      But they carry the show,  have to because even apart from the unrelieved nastiness of the Cad there’s an ongoing problem:  the authors make a point of parallels with today’s vainglorious and self-seeking cads in public life (even artfully adding a walk-on by having Fox-Ingleby claim to be “too honourable” and organizing a “straightforward shooting party).  But Fox-Ingleby is a creature of the past, only faintly reflected and diluted today in his great-grandchildren.  It all takes place before, during and after the 1914-18 war.,  and when a caricature is a bit dated, it can pall.  Jokes about Eton and foxhunting are terribly stale now,  despite the brio Mack brings to both, and the domination of Edwardian landowners is gone.  So he risks becoming a bit of a bore.  It works best when he’s thwarted, as in his attempt to avoid going to the front in the war but still wanting medals to impress women.

    The second half is better, because he goes into politics, and we can enjoy the barbs more as history pre-echoes the recent years: a chancer who gets a safe seat, after reputational sabotage of the sitting member,  a turncoat whose manifesto promises and party loyalties are rapidly reversed, and some good financial corruption stuff with Soni brilliant as a dull but very rich American financier (Fox-Ingleby gets away with it even during the Wall St crash).  

      So he romps on, a timeless figure of disgrace.   There’s a grand twist about how he foils the muckracking journalist at the end, and a very Borisian final lectern speech as he mourns being a “distraction” from real politics.   

Watermill.org.uk to 22 March

Rating 3

   A GREAT TURNING POINT, CAUGHT IN ASPIC  

It is 1942.  Prime minister Churchill has travelled to Moscow to meet Stalin.  Each side has a problem at home with voices wanting to cut a deal with Hitler.  The Red Army is struggling against odds to save Stalingrad,  and wants Britain to invade France rather than attacking Europe from the South.  Churchill knows we aren’t ready to cross the Channel, and needs all his persuasive powers.   Face to face the two  great, proud, stubborn figures must come to some accord.  They won’t get there by berating  one another for their records’ flaws in human rights (Stalin’s, of course,  blackly murderous, Churchill’s more opportunistically grey).  

       It is a clash worth imagining,  and a new play by Howard Brenton is always an event.  Respect to the little Orange Tree for nabbing it to show us first in such tight, in-the-round intimacy, because  it’s a thrill: a rich, dense imaginative history play dashed through with savage comic absurdity and streaks of unsettling insight. 

       It pares down reality, of course: other officials were present but what we see is the two giants,  their dutiful interpreters (here made female, Olga from NKVD, Sally from MI6) , plus Commissar Molotov and the suave,  elegantly despairing Archie Clark Kerr from the FO. Neither, of course, feels they have much control over their bosses.   Oh, and there’s  sixteen-year-old Svetlana Stalin, Tamara Greatrex wandering the set reading David Copperfield.  She will command a stunning finale, no spoilers. 

      Know first that Roger Allam’s Churchill is a marvel, well worth the presumable misery of the bald wig.  Because apart from that disguise,   rather than imitate the too-familiar Churchill  he seems in Brenton’s deft text to place himself squarely within the whole man:  his background,  former disappointments,  patriotic sense of ancestry, belligerence and frivolity and appetite and  sincerity and dark midnight Black Dog thoughts.  Thus it is  from that,  not from any mimicry, that the slow enunciations , sharp silences and sudden explosions emanate.  Whether locking political horns or drinking competitively with Stalin,  or (in a memorable moment) briefly conversing with the discreetly perceptive Olga.  he is the best stage Churchill yet. 

        Peter Forbes’  Stalin is impressive too, with a terrifying  solidity and, menace under the coarse black wig .  Later,  in the extraordinary final mutuality of the pair,  he deploys enough fearsome paranoia to make you feel for a moment unnervingly what it might be to glimpse inside such a soul.  That he and Churchill understood one another’s leadership – up to and including the need for callousness – is made shudderingly credible.  There’s a moment when they send out the interpreters and resort to gestures and single word insults, three quarters drunk at a Moscow midnight, which you won’t quickly forget. 

          But it’s a political play, full of good lines and insights, and the interpreters (Sally Powell and Elizabeth Snegir, a real Russian)   matter almost as much. They  cautiously make common cause while the men are noisily dining and drinking,  admire one another’s language  (“I love Russian.. it’s deep” –  “I love English, it’s all over the place”).  They know all too well that should they deploy it they have the power to soften some of the remarks from their side, to edge doors open rather than slam them.  Because somehow,  for the world’s sake,  alliance  must be found between, as the men put it, an English aristocrat and a Georgian peasant.   Even if for the moment the only accord lies in both considering General de Gaulle a ‘stubborn prick”. 

         Tom Littler’s neat, pacey direction shows,  as each interpreter leans in to their principal, the difficulties, opportunities and potential disasters of diplomacy’s  tricky trade. And there is no shortage of light relief. Some from the cultured Alan Cox as the FO mandarin Archie Clark Kerr,  some  from Allam’s Churchill , boggling at his host’s “bloody bath taps sold gold. And no plug”. 

orangetreetheatre.co.uk       to 8 march

rating 5        

WILD SHORES IN WARTIME

    Risk taking a gap between seeing David Greig plays  and you forget how downright louche things are likely to turn out. (I had lately revelled in Prudencia Hart and in Midsummer, the one with the talkimg willie) .  Expect lyricism in sudden monologue, streaks of myth and pagan weirdness, someone dead or magic, and probably some kind of erotic cataclysm.   In this case, a wrenching three-handed interlude in a semi-derelict pagan Hebridean rock chapel by the glimmer of a darkroom lantern,  with one participant frenziedly envisaging a third party as a seagull (Intimacy Director credited, but nothing to frighten the horses).  Oh,  and be braced for the most unlikely death-watch too.  

        The setting – achieved with moody beauty in the tiny stage by Anna Lewis’ design- is a tiny island of the outer Hebrides, in 1939.   Sound and setting evoke it beautifully (can confirm, I have been to St Kilda).  Dour old Kirk is its leaseholder-landlord , a magnificent Kevin McMonagle who sets fire to every scene he’s in. Downtrodden Ellen (Whitney Kehinde) is his resident niece;  he is, rather against her inclination,  keeping her pure and decent for some suitable fisherman, in layers of forbidding shawls and skirts.  Ellen’s real passion is for the cinema on the wicked mainland (or possibly sinful Stornoway)  where she has managed to see Laurel and Hardy in Way Out West 37 times . And conceived an erotic passion for Stan Laurel, despite the bowler hat. This obsession she eventually locks into the naked form of young Robert swimming off the rocks.   For into their rundown idyll of rock, storm and waves Robert has arrived,    an arrogantly preoccupied Cantab naturalist sent to survey the wildlife by the Ministry, accompanied by his assistant John, a gentler and more conventionally moral chap. 

         There are gloriously lyrical passages about the wild birds, the tiny curlews flying to sea for days, the rackety gannetry where fulmars spit oil,  the great wheeling squabbling crowds flying through the storm by night (the inspiration was Robert Atkinson’s famous book ISLAND GOING, about such a rock island).   They are marooned there, surveying,  until the boat comes back at the end of summer.   But on the very first night old Kirk lets drop the reason for the survey:  like Gruinard in historic fact,  the island is scheduled to be poisoned wholesale in a drop of anthrax:  an experimental British bio-weapon (never in the end used in war, but which closed down Gruinard for decades).  Kirk is venal, and  just needs to calculate how much compensation he’ll be owed for dead sheep and fowling-rights (he shoots puffin and the rest).  The young men are horrified; it  leads to a violent row and disaster. 

         Sometimes it carries you along, strong in atmosphere and setting, and  Bruce Langley is a suitably unnerving Robert.  One suspects it was our modern feeling for wild nature that inspired this revival of a 2002 play,   but after a while what Robert represents is actually the least likeable face of naturalism: every living thing as an object , Darwinian glee at nature’s ruthlessness,  human feelings nowhere.  His zoological remarks about Ellen are pretty chilly , and his attitude both to starving curlew chicks and a human  corpse ice-cold.  Notably against Fred Woodley Evans as the warmer-hearted, shyer John (a professional debut, and a good one).  So the lads do make an interesting contrast . 

       Kehinde’s Ellen is at first a puzzle,  shy and rustic (though without any Hebridean accent),  and she is then given an erotically visionary speech about watching Robert swim and pleasure himself naked on the rocks which is –  sorry Mr Greig –   toe-curlingly expressive of a certain male idea of how young girls think.   Later she comes to proper life,  taking command, speaking the island myths, calling up the wildness in John because Robert roused it in her.  Sexual fireworks match the savage sounds of storm outside, with some fine lines and much ripping off of oilskins.  And just as you’re thinking hey,   this is all a bit Lord of the Flies, a final moment echoes that almost precisely.  

          It won an Olivier two decades ago, and was in many ways ahead of its time in its melodramatic surrealism.  Jessica Lazard directs at a good pace (though it would work better cut down to a solid 90 minutes, because the interval drops the temperature that bit too far. It’s a curiosity, better done than it really deserves.   

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

Rating 3

    ABSURDITY AND SUBLIMITY

After the glorious Parisian detail of the revived Rigoletto here ,  Johannes  Schutz’ spare bland box with only four flat doors is an opposite take on how to set grand opera/. It’s a bit blinding-white at first (turn up the surtitle contrast above!) but Joe Hill-Gibbins’ deft and witty direction  of Mozart’s masterwork already showed its promise during the overture. All the characters popped in and out of the four doors, silently in character to pose, run, stare, meet, hi-5 and scuttle around in baffling patterns: a scene-set for da Ponte’s  fiendishly complicated sex-comedy of improbability and misunderstanding,  washed over by the glory of the music.

        Moments later Susanna provides the only ornament by hanging her wedding-dress between two of the doors while Figaro measures their bridal apartment,  and the story of predation, plot and disguise rolls into action.   An endearing directorial trick has the doors popping open to reveal individuals during arias when one character , alone in soliloquy,  refers to them:  this serves both clarity and, curiously, the emotional strength of the moment.  When  Cody Quattelbaum’s resounding Count Almaviva is complaining of this frustration when “all the servants” are in sexual romps,   the doors keep flying open to vignettes of random snogging;  more touchingly, one of Countess’ heartbreaking laments for the loss of her husband’s love sees him appear and stand close by her, a phantom of her yearning imagination.  Nardus Williams’ voice and emotional interpretation is, even in this world-class cast a stunning standout.

       A more realistic use of the doors, of course, is for characters to hide behind, notably Cherubino:  Hanna Hipp appearing first in teenage-boy casuals,  then forced into a supremely ridiculous military uniform with black shorts, a bright yellow shirt, necktie and knee-socks before finally being bundled into the all-important flouncy wedding gown.  Those of us who melt into sentiment at that greatest of mezzo-airs, voi che sapete (in English here of course) may feel a moment of mild outrage at it being flawlessly delivered by Hipp in this terrible boy-scout outfit . But I suspect we all forgave.  

        What Hill-Gibbins achieves here may not be to everyone’s liking – not a period hairdo in sight, unless you count Quattelbaum’s man-bun, which at one point he releases into a shower of Russell Brand locks – but the emotion and body-language of every character is unusually,  amost unoperatically, clear and real.  There are striking moments, as when David Ireland’s Figaro steps out of the set to conduct the chorus of household servants in their praise of the Count, and when Cherubino, looking genuinely panicked,  takes a Tosca-style leap  out of the big white box (it creeps up and down, sometimes revealing a green space below to represent the garden, where the chorus have obligingly laid a mattress to bounce off).   Character matters, even in the absurdities of opera buffa.   And Mary Bevan’s Susanna, in her last and most beautiful aria in the garden, took my breath away, floating over the delicate woodwind below. 

      This was, by the way,  another phoenix moment:  five years ago the new production opened for one night before every theatre, opera house and cinema was shut down for Covid-19.  Practical loss and dismay from that blow, and the unforgiveably erratic jerking of reopening permissions,   still reverberate everywhere. And for ENO there is exta pain in the equally erratic recent government demands, plus the usual playhouse need to repay the Covid “loan” which should have been a grant.  But for now, they go on offering world-class joys like this.  Respect.  Six more shows; worth going…

eno.org. to 22 feb

FUNNY ABOUT THE UNFUNNY

        Billy Bash,   rated the third most offensive comedian in Britain,  was once the dominant partner in Biddle and Bash.  He’s still on tour, God help us, and in his big white tux heading for one of our more dilapidated Spa Pavilions. First he’s dropping in on the other half of the act,  Cliff,  for reasons we will find out.   Cliff has not moved onward and upward to the Cheadle Hulme mansion set in the forty years since: designer Sarah Beaton has lovingly created every grimy smear and exhausted cushion in his maisonette beside the bitter Irish Sea. As he waits there Billy flicks contemptuously through an old showbiz journal.  “Dead. dead . dead. Cancer . Banged up for nonceing. Dead’.   He has prospered: after the fairly innocent postwar cheekiness of ‘The Whoopsie boys”,  duos like theirs were  driven off the air by the pious  Ben Elton revolution,   but Billy see-sawed defiantly back, to take the racial and sexist material further a la Bernard Manning. So he continues to delight the  substantial niche of unreconstructed louts who love him even more for being condemned by the Guardian and the BBC.   “Comedy’s not supposed to be nice! Real people want to laff again”

       Nigel Betts gives the role every bullying inch,  even when (for quite a lot of the play) he  is clearly on the edge of a serious cardiac event.  Like Jimmy Savile, Billy  is confident that his charity work (“kids’ hospitals, you look a right cunt if you don’t”) mean that he is in credit with God and the universe and will do just fine.  Meanwhile Edward Hogg’s Gulliver,  twisting with giggly camp self-abasement,  explains that he is the upstairs lodger who helps Cliff out: he will become a moving force later, in the elegantly twisted plot which I will not spoil.  But it’s Nigel Cooke’s Cliff who holds the play’s pleasingly appalled centre:  he first appears unexpectedly from the showbiz-red drapes in the shallow bay window,  a figure brilliantly and unsettlingly  weird beyond even our expectation in a tattered vest and cardigan,  goggling through thick specs, complaining that he’s been thrown out of the local Tabernacle for weirdness, and wondering whether his pet python Agadoo has escaped again.  After a while he nips out and reappears in a shabby Little Noddy outfit, yellow scarf and all, demanding a comeback. Perhaps a reprise – fully demonstrated to chokes of audience laughter – of his karaoke Kate Bush. You’ll rarely see a more bravura performance than Cooke doing that in a Noddy suit and shawl. But does he really want to face an audience ?   As Billy says “Stockton gasfitter’s social club – do you want to go through that again?” Cliff is inspiredly odd. And potentially very dark indeed, as is Gulliver. Something awful happened, fit for blackmailable memoirs, in their joint past. 

      The oppressive nature of the terrible double-act’s former relationship becomes clear through splendid banter along the lines of “Only way you’ll get inside a woman is with a donor card”.  At some point along the way we learn that Cliff’s decline was partly from an onstage injury at Billy’s hands, and partly because he was repeatedly arrested for indecency ( masturbating off the pier because “Rod Hull told him that’s how you get mermaids pregnant”). At some point he got religion after “Keith Chegwin talked to him about Jesus”.  

              Well , you get the references, and very entertaining they all are, names artfully chosen to be beyond legal complaint.   A decade ago Mark Jagasia used his background in tabloid journalism to give us the enjoyably terrifying CLARION here, with Greg Hicks as a barking-right editor.  I quaveringly described it as  the “howl of an England struggling without grace for identity, and a newsprint industry in decline”.  This author seems to be that rare thing,  a darkly observant, slightly pessimistic spirit who properly understands that the way to come at doubts and unease about your country is through comedy, provided you put the craft in and overlay the acid with half-shocked barks of audience laughter.  An ex-showbiz hack and product of that Blackpoolish north-west himself,  after a few years of explosive scandals he has hit on a good moment to dramatize the feeling that,  as he muses in the programme,  “there was always something a little weird and creepy about British light entertainment,  an intimation of darkness beyond the brightly lit pier”. 

And it’s come off beautifully. Though we may never know, in the final thunderstorm scene, whether the python was really imaginary. Oscar Pierce directs a remarkable three-man cast with killer precision create a two hour treat. Or as the director puts it,  a “dark-comedy farce absurdist satire gothic-horror revenge tragedy mystery play”.  

arcolatheatre.com. to 22 feb 

rating 4

A DARKER THOMAS CROMWELL 

        Edward Bennett as Thomas Cromwell is a proper thug:  everyone’s memory of the  HR-outplacement weasel who starts the sacking meeting with soft-soap about having always admired you;  the one who,  forced to drop one charge,  finds another. “It has to be done by law. It’s a matter of finding the right law. Or making one” he says firmly , while Sir Thomas More defies HenryVIII’s desire to have his divorce approved by the most decent man in court.     So,  fresh from Rylance breaking our heart in Wolf Hall on TV with as Hilary Mantel’s preferred  Machiavellian version of  “Crom”,  it’s a grand time for a moment of revisionism as  Jonathan Church revives this classic.   Robert Bolt’s celebrated play made Paul Scofield’s name in 1960,    scooped an Oscar  in the 1966 film and therefore has never quite gone away.   

        And watching this elegant production, framed by Simon Higlett in linenfold-panelling, glimpses of dungeon and artfully lit suggestions of the river beyond to Chelsea and Richmond, I kept thinking how very much it was of its time:  a product of the Cold War years of granitic Soviet persecutions.   It is a drily angry, passionate epic of personal conscience, loyalty and the uses and abuses of Law.  It suits our age very well,  reminds us of Alexei Navalny, Jamal Khashoggi and  others who did not bend conscience to tyranny.   Not to mention our global problems with free speech and thought; at one point the exasperated  Cromwell explains that Henry,  newly married to Anne Boleyn,    “is a man of conscience” – so can’t bear being disapproved of by anyone or the language they use.  His  Chancellor  must either explicitly bless his marriage,  or  be destroyed.  

         Martin Shaw is at the play’s heart as Sir Thomas More, a silver-maned lion, patriarch, lawyer and devout Christian who, from the first conversations with Nicholas Day’s pragmatic Cardinal Wolsey  clearly sees that Henry VIII’s determination to get a male heir by ditching his first wife is politically reasonable – without one the nation could split again, as in the Yorkist wars.  But divorce will lead inevitably to a rift with Rome and the whole ancient structure of the Church which  More has grown  in and believes to hold the truth.    Yet he thinks he is “not the stuff of which martyrs are made”,  and manages for a while to believe that there is safety in silence:  which of course there is not, since his passive-aggressive refusal to sign the Oath of Succession bring him down in the end.   And his family:  Abigail Cruttenden is a spirited Alice, his wife, Annie Kingsnorth their daughter; the domestic scenes  are beautifully achieved, whether the women are domestically  impatient over his  stubbbornness condemning them to “parsnips and stinking mutton“ and burning bracken on the hearth, or in the final jail scenes, which are heartbreaking.  

       The first half I admit dismayed me slightly:  it’s a slow-build by modern theatrical standards, but Bolt’s framing of all the story by The Common Man –  Gary Wilmot amiably moving from steward to boatman to  jailer in different hats  – gives moments of acerbic cynical realism to steer it along. And after the interval – which he informs us with a sigh covers two years of history – the tension mounts as it should. Building fear focuses ever more tightly around  More, moral  grandeur  shining  through outward destruction.   Shaw does more than justice  to the great polemic moments,  crumbling only to humility in the last prison meeting with his wife and daughter.  His timing is beautiful; the final reproof to the ratlike Rich (Calum Finlay splendidly evoking a courtier’s littleness)  produces one of the classic laughs of relief from the audience.  

        But all through there are some  wonderful minor lines that lift this intelligent, adult play to gaiety: mostly from the magnificent More himself, who is very dry at times,  but also in moments like the French Ambassador’s confrontation with Alice More:  a thwarted grunt of. “For sheer barbarity, commend me to an Englishwoman of a certain class!”.  Greg Wallace would understand.

         It’s touring for months – details below – and well worth finding.  And such in the end was the  reality to me  of Sir Thomas  that I  remembered something else:  his  last letter before  execution, written with charcoal on cloth as Cromwell  took away all his books and writing materials.  It  isn’t in the play,  but  offer to anyone who hasn’t met it before the lines to his daughter Margaret:  

       “Farewell, my dear child, and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven”.   

Box office theatreroyal.org.uk. To 25 Feb

TOUR DATES 

28 January – 1 February Chichester Festival Theatre
4 – 8 February Malvern Theatre
11 – 15 February Cheltenham Everyman
18 – 22 February Oxford Playhouse
25 – 29 February Yvonne Arnaud Guildford
4 – 8 March Canterbury Marlowe
11 – 15 March Richmond Theatre

 SUBURBAN ANGST IN THE NEW SA

There’s nothing like a tight, awkward comedy of neighbourhood strife, where neighbourly differences reveal unexpected fissures within the couples, and tiny points of lifestyle niggle, heat up and explode into wider issues of capitalism and power. . Think of GOD OF CARNAGE,  CLYBOURNE PARK,  or one of the darker TV sitcoms .   In such showed we expect – and here we ferociously get –  ludicrous but painful social distinctions, resentments, middle-class passive-aggression and the occasional burst of rage. Doing it right  takes deft acting and a particular kind of tightly-bottled sincerity of character.  These too are pretty well served here.

      It’s a South African suburb,  Stillwater.   A black couple  (Sifiso Mazibuko and Mimi M Khayisa) find themselves after living there two years suddenly befriended and entertaining one set of white neighbours.  Christopher and Lynette,  are reluctantly impressed that  the black hosts are sophisticates: Sihle is  a high-salaried finance man and they’ve been to Italy. Bonolo,  drifting around in a purple kaftan , pours the Merlot through an “aerator” and speaks of fine wine and the beauties of Sardinia.  The white visitors  (Kai Luke Brummer and Olivia Darnley) admit that their travel is generally to visit a sister in Swindon.  First top laugh from the Royal Court Audience there…. 

      They all try to be warm. And non-racist, and modern.  But there are glitches.  Christopher,  a mass of ‘white fragility’,  speaks of another white neighbour who hasn’t got promotion because “in this climate” there is a ceiling.  Though of course the rise of chaps like Sihle is “about time” .   The host, amused, taunts him a little.    It becomes apparent that the reason for the sudden rapprochement is that the white couple want to set up a neighbourhood group to protest against a newly erected shack on some waste ground down the road,  suspected of housing unseen squatters.  In Ultz’s teasing design the shack is always there in the background, tin-roofed but with obvious windows and door.   Not a good house, but a home..perhaps…which is threatening.  Another local suburb,  they fear, was  ‘overrun” with such shanty-town arrivals.  

    There’s a rather wonderful time-stops moment when, with the white couple still sitting unwitting on the sofa,  a slight lighting change shows  Khaysa and Mazibuko in their minds are rolling about hysterically laughing at the obviousness of the guests’ mission, and at the fact that “We’re black ! Black!  But we’re Insiders!”.  Back in conversation,  Christopher’s horrified description of how the cul-de-sac’s peace might be broken soon,   by a family of eight or ten crammed into the shack, cooking odd food and playing odd music.  Whereon Bonolo, their hostesll,  says that down in the Cape that could have described  her childhood . This later turns out not to be quite true.  Everyone likes to polish their own legend.

The action rolls on to a third couple, younger and poorer  and right next to the shack, where the young husband (Scott Sparrow) is almost hysterical with dread about it pulling down the house prices.  Mistaken identity and more moments of pass-ag and open rage follow.   

    Full disclosure:  at the height of apartheid in the early 1960s my Dad was posted to Johannesburg and I spent a year partly at a boarding school with some derangedly racist nuns, partly at home in the suburbs where next door’s kids were banned from playing with us because we swam and larked in the pool with the black servant’s kids.    So after watching over the years from afar the release of Mandela’, the ANC ’s rise to power and the joy and subsequent disappointments of South Africa,  I was mad keen to see Any Jephta’s play (in association with Bristol and the Johannesburg Market Theatre) for some kind of insight into how the new deal might work out at the basic ,social , black-next-door level. 

           For logistic reasons I nipped into the antepenultimate preview not press night.    So I won’t presume a star rating, though it was excellently played especially by Mazibuko.    But it did feel like a real, rueful insight into how it must be for both sides.    The black couple  for instance are slightly divided in attitude to the new worls: in his suit-and-tie Sihle has a  joshingly obliging determination to fit into what is still a white world and system, at one point admitting the strain of  constantly “performing it – performing my education, my salary”.   She is more activist,  take-back-the-land-for-my-people, but as her husband exasperatedly y points out you can’t be an activist while clinging on to your own privilege (a lesson for the world far beyond SA, indeed). 

        The white couples are not malicious but yes, fragile:   still finding  trouble accepting the change, uncomfortable in the “climate’` where they are awkwardly both members of the old oppressor-tribe and , sob, possible victims of antii-white discrimination.  Everyone is guarding their own boundaries.  And property.  Especially poor young Andrew (Sparrow) because he paid even more for his house than the older couples, and his ‘artisan sandwich’ business is not doing too well.     There is a surreal moment when they all stare at the shack,  and it starts growing in size and grandeur, sprouting a chimney and extension….   

     We , and they, never even see the shack people.  The invasion is all in their heads. But it still hurts.  “How much assimilation has to go on before that house is part of Stillwater`~~?”   . Lovely, funny, sharp, 100 minutes well worth spending.

ROYALCOURTTHEATRE.COM TO 8 feb

AT THE  SUMMIT OF RAGE AND HOPE 

       Fear not, this isn’t a Greta-gloom lecture but  a lively, imaginative, borderline wild reconstruction of  the years culminating in COP3 climate summit in 1997.    Kyoto was historic in the breadth of its final unity on a protocol to limit global warming, never mind that the years since have dented that agreement and we all woke this morning to some pretty bad figures.    Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson – backed by the RSC and Good Chance – make it well worth hearing the story of this furious, angry jigsaw of “diplomacy through exhaustion” .  After all it did achieve a signature from 150 nations,  some of whom had not previously heard of each other:  giant powers nonplussed by being challenged by tiny “stains on the map”, and being made to listen.   

      The brilliant dramatic twist is that ,as in Richard III ,the central figure and guiding narrator is the main villain:  climate-change-refusenik Don Pearlman,  lawyer and lobbyist for Big Oil.   Stephen Kunken is a marvel, spare and vigorous and lawyerly, clicking his fingers and striding  around the great table,  driving to despair his patient wife (Jenna Augen) as he prowls the summits over years,  watching and jeering and being taken aback.  

        The show is dense and big and excellent in its pace and pauses:  sometimes unbearably shouty , sometimes offering a sudden moment of awe. There’s a  Brazilian rainforest moment when Werner Herzog tips up with actors to annoy Pearlman,   and there’s that fragment from A Midsummer Night’s Dream about “distemperature…the seasons alter”;  suddenly our antihero grasps that the climate cause has become fashionable – “a brand, a movement,  an identity” not just a scientific squabble and one he might win through scorn and character-assassination.  The pre-Kyoto moment of Japanese stillness is beautiful too, cutting through the rage.  But the rage is grand too:  Andrea Gatchalian as the Pacific islands of Kiribati shouting “We will not drown in silence!”,  but also American Don asking “Is this what we fought the Cold War for, to be bossed about?” And more movingly calling on his Jewish-Lithuanian roots and the way America saved people and let them work and prosper.  

      On it goes, meeting after meeting until the big one,  wonderful rows about square brackets and nuanced words (“pledge” versus “aim”,  “discernable” versus “clear”).  Rows erupt over  targets and timetables,  cost in jobs and prosperity.    The question of America’s status and supreme rights is a hot one – wonderfully topical as President Trump Mk 2 approaches – and Aicha Kossoko asTanzania speaks for the developing world with withering scorn, pointing out to rich America and the West that “Your emissions are luxuries , ours are for survival”.   

        It’s grand ensemble work, but apart from Kunken  there are tremendous standout performances , notably Jorge Bosch as Raul Estrada-Oyuela, the indefatigable and decent chairman, and wonderful moments of miffed determination from Raad Rawi as Saudi Arabia and Kwong Loke as the permanently annoyed China delegate.   Our John Prescott has a splendid moment (|Ferdy Roberts) both complaining about the lack of lunch but then offering the real wisdom acquired in his ‘20s as a young seaman’s union negotiation:  you have to keep talking. Always keep talking.  In the end it works…just. Despite the darkly comic moment overnight at the end when the interpreters go off duty and ancient Babel overwhelms the great room in a terrible projected alphabet soup.   

     It’s an exhilarating evening, another slam-dunk for Nimax’s very cool new theatre.  And yes, Ed Miliband was there, two rows in front of me .  Joined the standing ovation: well, he would, wouldn’t he?

sohoplace.org. to 3 May

rating. five

SACRED MONSTERS IN THE UNDERWORLD

Deep darkness within the U-shaped seating,:   into it on wheels glides the dark gondola:  Charon the ferryman, after millennia punting to and fro across the Styx, is resigned to hearing  jokes like “dead on time” from the clever-dicks he  picks up.    He’s just collected A.E.Housman, poet and professor of Classics:  Simon Russell Beale . But this play being by Tom Stoppard, Housman finds  that Hades is the Oxford of his youth: deans, aesthetes, mavericks, earnest undergraduates athletic or studious, Victorian grandee academics like Jowett of Balliol and  hearty old Ruskin ,  who made his students break roadstone for the sake of their souls. 

         Old Housman finds them in Hades and in memory,  bickering over points of classical scholarship,  playing croquet with invisible balls and beautifully timed “cloks” (sound and movement are immaculate in Blanche McIntyre’s production).  The younger ones row around on wonderfully convincing wheeled boats, getting to know each other.   One of them is the poet’s younger self:  pale, shy ,enthused about classics (they all quote Latin and Greek at one another) .  His joy is finding inspiration in the heroic loves of antiquity, where male friends adventure, fight and die together in chaste but passionate  fealty.  His best friend is Moses Jackson,   studying science and running races,    sometimes in dreams overhead  running towards us white in shorts and singlet .   But the love young Housman yearns for is impossible, illegal:   “beastliness”  as Jowett thunders, sacking another student.    Tricky balance  for those dons: one moment set on giving intelligent lads a classical education (“if you can’t write Latin and Greek verse, how can you hope to be of use in the world?”) , the next having to throw them out for such Greek  “boy-love”.  

        The early scenes with the academics are priceless,  Stephen  Boxer’s Jowett a star turn in itself,  Latin tags and textual arguments flying (let’s admit it) over many heads but stimulatingly :  vintage Stoppard but staying just this side of annoying.   Roaming in Hades through his memories Russell Beale is as usual extraordinary:  able to turn in half a word, a twitch of the brow,  from pedantry to pain and back again through comedy. His Housman is  impassioned, dry, tender ,  cynical of his own worth, exasperatingly lovable.     But alongside him – literally for one riveting ten-minute scene  merely talking side by side on a bench – is his younger self.:  young Housman played by Matthew Tennyson absolutely shines. He  stands alongside masters like Beale and Boxer, playing younger than his years , rose-white boyhood wanting  “the good and the beautiful”,  the Greek and Roman idea of Virtue.   He leaves Oxford early and shares rooms with his adored Jackson as junior civil servants at the Patent Office,   only late and finally admitting  – to the straight, astonished Jackson  in a flare of fatal passion  –  the love that dare not speak its name.

         Not that it had a name till later , when Lord Alfred Douglas coined “homosexual”.  (Housman of course pedantically horrified at the barbarity of blending Latin and Greek)  . But Tennyson’s performance takes the emotional centre of the play, sets fire to its complex anecdotal wordiness.  He stands perfectly alongside Russell Beale , older self and younger, a poet in painful development. The “Shropshire Lad” series about the shine and early death of youth  comes of this period of hopeless and serious love, and watching them old and young you believe it.  Though , as one contemporary casually observes , that he “never read such a man for telling you you’re better off dead”

        Stoppard has wicked, insider-scholar fun with the fact that the period, from mid-Victorian down to 1936, saw an exotic zoo of personalities who ran into one another or one another’s reputations – generally at Oxford .  There are  wonderful lines drily delivered: like Housman’s about the contrast between Walter Pater’s emotional intinctive aesthetics and Ruskin who “stares hard” at art’s beauties and has them stare back hard at him, exhaustingly.   Donnish quips abound (“when he died it was the first time he ever finished anything he’d started”).  In the second half,  on a picnic blanket in London young Housman watches Ben Lloyd-Hughes’ solid athletic Jackson win a race, and their other friend Chamberlain (Michael Marcus) sees how love lies and how it will go nowhere.

             Cameo moments demonstrate the changing times. Boxer reappears as the MP Labouchere, irritated with Dominic Rowan’s campaigning journalist Stead who exposed child prostitution,  but himself amending an Act making homosexual acts even more stringently punishable than before.   Rowan also reappears as Jerome K Jerome, a tiny contemptuous player in the downfall of Oscar Wilde.    Wilde himself (Dickie Beau)  has a vital late moment in Hades, lounging in velvet and reproaching dead Housman for not grasping at love , freedom and life . He reminisces about his own beloved Bosie:  “spoilt, vindictive and utterly selfish , but those are only the facts..He is Hyacinth, ivory and gold..joy” .  We all, he says, invent the object of our love.    Yet  his scorn  at Housman  melts, because A Shropshire Lad justifies its writer.  Beautiful.    

hampsteadtheatre.com. to 1 Feb.  

A HIGH-KICKING WOODEN WONDER

       Serious fun, this.  Never  liked the Disney Pinocchio, or even in childhood the over-preachy Carlo Collodi book about the defiant wooden puppet who defies his creator Gepetto and falls in with a talking insect and sententious fairy.  But Joanna Carrick’s retelling pulls all the right strings with mischievous energy, and  this is a pure delight.    Schools have been flooding in and booking it out, and though I was at the adult-full premiere the children in my eyeline were shrieking with glee.  

      Pinocchio is every small child:  running around breaking rules, looking for excitement, deciding to be good and then not being,  discovering the energy in its body and dancing with manic indiscipline.  A child seizing at novelties, easily fooled, dismayed, repentant.   Evangeline Dickson’s remarkable performance  catches all this.   Her `Pinocchio is entirely beguiling, mischievous grin slumping to sudden realization of the latest disaster . Above all her moves – mad dances in particular – are mesmerizingly wild and odd.  I see she is credited as movement director, but with designer Katy Latham as choreographer:  what is clear is that a lot of work and thought has come in to creating something so gloriously kicking, capering, wild and childlike.  You really need to see the donkey dance.  Really. 

          Alongside her Jack Heydon is a wild-haired Gepetto, Vicino, Fox, Fairy and Wagoner;  LIam Bull is ten others.  Both are adept at the revue-style genre which (ever since the Reduced Shakespeare Company shows)  I have cherished as a favourite:  call it the “Sudden-different-hat” genre,  complete with comic metatheatre acknowledgments of its absurdity.   Both Heydon and Bull are astonishingly deft , and Bull a natural audience-baiter: more happy shrieks from front row, even the adults.  Carrick’s adaptation also takes the trouble to have the giant shark (or whale) swallow the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine so that the friendly tuna-fish which Gepetto and Pinocchio meet in its stomach is actually Paul McCartney. Talking entirely in old Beatles’ lyrics, of course.  

      So pure pleasure, altogether.  The set is built with remarkable folksy old-Italy detail by Vincent Moisy (himself fresh from the copany’s London triumph as Witchfinder General in  Carrick’s The Ungodly and going to Broadway in 2025). The invisible stage management is by Rei Mordue (the said Witchfinder’s victim): she creates  endless deft appearances and set tricks  as the two men dart between characters. At one point Heydon mutates into the Blue Fairy , changing costume in the middle of a song and appropriately shooting up an octave for her last notes.   

           Red Rose Chain is a community, small and locally rooted.   If my account of principles in the last show operating backstage and building sets in this one  makes it sound a bit jolly- am-dram,  be assured it is not.   Professional, skilful  and funny, it is  one of the best children’s Christmas shows Carrick has done,  and the finest  anywhere I have seen for a few years.   Need to say that, because critics  often responsibly have to acknowledge the merits and suitability of kids’ theatre  without actually enjoying it much.  But this one is pure pleasure.  Take a child if you can.  But if not, enjoy.   

redrosechain.com  to 5 Jan

PRESENT MIRTH HATH PRESENT LAUGHTER. AND MELANCHOLY. AND FALSE NOSES

    In a play as familiar as this it is small touches that spring fresh life.  Like the moment when the fool Feste defines drunkards: “one draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns him.” Sir Toby, a roaring Joplin Sibtain in Prasanna Puwanarajah’s new production, is very much a dangerous drunk,  no mere belching buffoon.   Olivia, suddenly anxious, orders the jester  to go after him as he reels off,  and is reassured that he is not yet at the drowned stage.   In that tiny moment of glances between servant and mistress we are reminded that she is a woman in authority over an often chaotic household , where servants collude with invading  kinsmen and her stiff steward merely disapproves. Madam, beleaguered,  is concerned for her kinsman.  Plenty  such small pleasures crop up, comic or touching:  as when in the final scene Orsino starts to declare his love and momentarily picks the wrong twin, setting  Sebastian scuttling  back to his heterosexual ladylove with real pre-gay-pride horror.  In another endearing domestic  touch Olivia’s wedding celebrant is a sweet smiley lady-vicar with white collar and teacup, clearly game but baffled.  Emily Benjamin does it beautifully. 

           Mining the text for refreshing nuance and detail is part of the RSC’s gift, and keeps you going even through early qualms. Which I suffered by initially really disliking James Cotterill’s stark-ish monochrome set, based on Edward Gorey’s spooky, uneasy surrealism.  A vast white glaring screen starts by blanking out the shipwreck survivors coughing and struggling at the start,  and  hangs about too long before turning into a sort of roof.  And there’s a constant presence of a chap (it turns out to be Fabian, Olivia’s manservant) spending a lot of time up a ladder at the side silently slapping on black paint.  It felt for a short while as if the  set was dominating, rather than serving, the play.  But fair enough, I recanted once some gigantic organ-pipes descended to hide the plotters watching Malvolio in the box-tree scene. They even managed to knock out a quarter-chime with their heads as they bickered.  Even more reconciled when, O glory of glories,  Samuel West’s deceived Malvolio made a grand entrance at the top of the monstrous pipes,  wearing  a Santa hat, saying ‘ho ho ho” , and suddenly sliding a fireman’s pole some thirty feet to the stage to reveal that he is trouserless , in a brass-buttoned tailcoat jacket with bare legs cross-gartered over yellow knee-socks.  I hope this national treasure of theatre  is in some way padded at the crotch for that experience, but it certainly raised a wild opening night cheer.   

        The greytoned set and great organ chords which keep popping up are  all part of Puwanarajah’s perception of the layers of melancholy within Shakespeare’s Christmas-season comedy. Olivia is mourning a brother, Viola thinks hers is lost,  Orsino’s love is hopeless, so is Viola”s until the end; Malvolio knows he is disliked,  Sir Toby’s drink problem is getting worse and wilder. Hey ho, the wind and the rain.  Happy endings come, but you can never bet on them.  

        None of the melancholy, however, damages  the lyricism or the comedy.  Gwyneth Keyworth is one of 11 RSC debuts in this cast, a superb Viola:  scared, resolute and dishevelled at first, then a neat little Cesario speaking her mind – shouting, indeed, at Orsino’s contempt of women’s ability to love. She is marvellously, credibly comic in her dismayed scenes with Olivia.  Who is Freema Agyeman, another newcomer to Stratford and a good find:her icy dignity and authority melting into astonished girlish adoration  – “even so quickly may one catch the plague!”made me long to see her Cleopatra one day.

       No cavils in other casting (though an eccentricity in Aguecheek:   Demetri Goritsas who for some reason in dress and voice seems to have come from New York 1945).  Danielle Henry’s Maria is manically lively in her hoaxing defiance; West’s brief early appearances as Malvolio offer enough clarity as to why his woeful deficit of humour has been infuriating the revellers.   And Michael Grady-Hall’s  Feste is a pleasure all through, whether singing with thoughtful tunefulness Matt Maltese’s new tunes to the famous lyrics, looking on drily at the Cesario situation, or  descending from the roof crooning into a microphone.   He’s an adept physical comedian and an effortlessly  likeable presence.  He puts in the extra time in the 25-minute interval by larking around with foam nose-balls , throwing them around the front rows with sharp mimetic humour.  They’re bright yellow,  those noses,  the play’s colour-theme sparking through the Goreysque sobriety just as jokes break through life.   In one of the magnificently spirited brawls, chases and fights near the end, when Feste is hit and whirls round dazed,   his yellow nose magically changes colour.  See? It’s the small touches,  alongside the grandeur of emotion,   that keep us coming.

BOXOFFICE.  Rsc.org.uk. To 18 jan 

SPRINGTIME FOR…EVERYONE 

      Joyful, headlong and full-hearted, here comes sacred outrage.  If director Patrick Marber and the Menier had been minded to issue wet ‘trigger warnings’  it would take up so much extra paper we’d be re-triggered by the environmental impact.  But what was firmly grasped by the great  Mel Brooks (with Thomas Meehan for the musical) is that for all their horror Nazis ARE funny : 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 .  Even  accountants are 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 all serious and gloomy respect in other plays.   It just means that if you don’t sometimes laugh at them and yourself,   you’re barely human.  So rejoice at the cleansing mirth of this legendary musical, and feel lucky to be drawn into it in this quite intimate space,. 

         Marber, fresh between runs of  directing the brilliant “What we talk about..” at the Marylebone Theatre  (scroll below) has assembled a sixteen-strong cast doing the work of sixty, led by Andy Nyman as Bialystock, amiably manic , with Marc Antolin clutching the blue-blanket of reassurance as the sweetest of Leos.  And two sacred monsters of absurd excess : Harry Morrison’s Liebkind and Trevor Ashley as Roger de Bris.  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 (credit to designer Scott Pask) got a laugh of its own.    Lorin Latarro’s choreography is witty all the way,  tiny jokes making you want to go again in case there are more.   

         So revel in the klezmer Jewishness of the opening dance around Bialystock,  in the treasurable rhymes (faster pace/master race,  obscurer/fuehrer) . Feel the sudden moments of real emotional empathy even with  Liebkind (“Hitler, there was a painter!”  and “Hitler was BUTCH!”).  Love his chorus of pigeons with swastikas on their wings. Identify with  the crazy progress of Bialystock and Bloom , with Max’s repeated “It’s nothing, I\ll tell you when we’re getting in too deep”, when even Leo sees that they definitely are. 

       Marber has mused that curiously it’s a story about love, and it is:  between the two producers,  between Leo and Ulla, De Bris and himself,  even Liebkind’s devotion to Hitler and the pigeons.  And there’s love pulsing out from a happy audience, too. 

   The fifth mouse is a special and particular  ensemble-mouse.  The ten chorus,  sometimes assisted by principals (Bialystock turns up as an auditionee!)  were nimble , physically witty and perfectly attuned.   They cycle through so many costume changes I lost count – as fans, old ladies in leopardprint, auditionees, pigeons, stormtroopers, police, showgirls. Some of the changes are lightning. They’re a joy.   

menierchocolatefactory.com  

to 1 march  rating 5

MAZELTOV!  JEWISH PANTO STRIKES AGAIN

      Goldie Frocks, rightful heiress to an East End schmutter workshop, has been enslaved by the evil Calvin Brine, whose  behemoth of too-small clothes for annoyingly thin people has driven the bears who run the Circus Oy Vay away from their East End homes to Pinchley Road.  Brine is plotting to capture the youngest  of the dynasty as he prepares for his bear-mitzvah. and  turn him into a coat.   Big Mama Bear in her big frocks – Debbie Chazen no less –   and gallant little Goldie in her skirt of remnants must foil this plan. They are  assisted by the pearly-jacketed Morris Bloom and his conjuring tricks before the curtain  (all of which work).  Morris is the magician  Ian Saville,  one of the oldest performers to make a panto debut this year. 

 As seasoned panto-goers know, the correct way to being back harmony and justice is to pur new words to a lot of songs – from Fairytale of New York to Reviewing  the Situation from Oliver,  and including  Mein Herr from Cabaret  (mein Bear, obvs) .  You must also make a lot of horrifying puns (“I am beartrayed! Says Chazen the  overbear-ing matriarch).  Be sure to woo and taunt the young audience and make them yell, ensure you have a custard-pie fight and a zombie behind-you moment (the zombie is a retired accountant).  Oh, and make sure your characters confuse a kippah with a kipper

       For this is  Jewish panto, a newfledged genre: cue sly cultural references , like the fact that “No Jewish news is good news”, and that every page of the Jewish Chronicle is full of Volvos for sale.  Keep the schmutter jokes going,  with a tailoring plot and props and magic tricks with basting thread. Explain that the Rabbi Schlomo Drake, a squawking puppet,   is “one of those orthoducks” . Ensure that Mama’s final costume is adorned with giant pickles  and a suggestive  gherkin, bagels on head.  . Recruit a truly thundering bass villain. – ..in this case the admirable  Simon Yadoo,  joining the cast  between two five-star seasons as Yerucham in of “What we talk about..etc” at rhe Marylebone theatre (scroll down for review).    His big number in the second half is magnificent. 

        Oh, and  throw some chocolate gelt coins around and have a lively onstage band to keep the songs rolling.  The band’s terrific: Josh Middleton on accordion , Daniel Gouly on clarinet ,Christina Borgenstierna on the Ukrainian klezmer drum “Klezmerize” every song with vigour, the finale blending a celebratory bar-mitzvah dance with “Maybe its because I’m a Londoner’ The 300-odd small children at the first schools matinee clapped and stamped.  

          If any community’s small children needed reassurance of good over evil right now, it’s this one, at a time when morons throw stones at school buses.  Last year, in he shocked aftermath of the Hamas murders and during  the  differently-shocking upswing of shaming  UK antisemitism, JW3 commissioned and ran the first ever Jewish pantomime, complete wih Big Bad Pig.    I wondered at the time why it was the first such joyful cultural melding:  what with the Jewish showbiz pedigree, dame-worthy matriarchy and tradition of sharp selfmocking wit and  decoration,  panto feels  entirely natural. And it was just what was needed,  in its defiant frivolity and heart.   

      So here we are again, once more the book written by Nick Cassenbaum,  directed this time by Abigail Anderson: a new  tradition  born  in an angry century.    I saw the first, slightly raggedy schools matinee but its very raggediness made it warmer.   And oh yes, there are some jokes for naughty adults in the evenings, which mercifully went over six rows of little heads.   Every circus zoo, after all, boasts a beaver.  And there had to be an Alan Sugar joke, Oh yes there did.      Chanukah Sameach!  

box office jw3.org.uk to 5 Jan 

FEARED IT MIGHT BE TUTU MUCH, BUT NO…

    I immediately fell for Frankie Bradshaw’s set: a two- storey house lined with fossil skeletons in cases, and a spirited opening in which the prime mover – Great Uncle Matthew – lectures on their wonders and then in rapid successiom suffers graphic shipwreck, abseiling disaster and an earthquake,  all the while picking up spare infants. Justin Salinger is magnificent in plus-fours , before turning into a massively furred and velveted cod-Russian Madame at the ballet school.    DirectorKaty Rudd keeps it moving and in no time the focus is on the three adopted babies grown into girls being removed from school for brawling (in the book it was mere poverty, but modern kids need lairy role models). They resolve to invent their own surname: Fossil, and aim to make it famousl 

        After the glorious WITCHES last year I had some qualms about what the NT would serve up as this year’s Christmas family treat. Especially as it is based on Noel Streatfield’s earnest 1936 romance about three girls  adopted from varius disasters  by a flaky palaeontologist and left to be raised by his housekeeper,teenage great-niece Sylvia and assorted lodgers, one of whom  gets them into stage school so they can support the household from age 12 on hardearned shillings .  Pauline, Petrova and Posy have fascinated little girls for decades – one first loving to act,  one almost psychopathically focused on  ballet, the third longing only to be a motor mechanic, .  But for all its insight into child actors  in the 30s, today the book feels both farfetched  and (whispering bravely) a bit of a fossil. 

         But Kendall Feaver has tweaked it, dealing  robustly with adjustments of tone for an age less tolerant of friendly random adults mentoring  young girls. The girls are less obediently subservient to gruelling routines,  and ruder to adults,  than the 1930s tolerated.  Grace Saif, Yanexi Enriquez and Daisy Sequerra are fun, adults but very convincing  as young teens; Jenny Galloway, in a big grey shawl and apron, is an entertaining Nana and Pearl Mackie as Sylvia – “Garnie” – gets a romantic plot as Mr and Mrs Simpson become the single Jai Saran, whose irreproachably teaches Petrova car maintenance but in a chaotic tango (the dancing is great)  finally woos Sylvia.  Rather than two lady academics we now  have just one, Helena Lymbery magnificently donnish as a bereaved and scorned lesbian, another example the girls of making your own brave unashamed future.”Depression is the malady of the narcissist” she says sternly, a useful message at any age. 

          It is enjoyable, mostly in a slightly restrained way,  but its strengths are in the messages of optimism through hard work and in the dance interludes: most beautifully in the second half a ballet of Madame Fidolia’s youth,  Bolshoi triumphs and loss first through revolution and then old age: it’s genuinely moving and beautiful.  The other dances are lively,  good in character,  Ellen Kane as choreographer and an 18-piece orchestra.   For me a favourite moment was when the girls are hired for a progressive, 1930’s modernist Midsummer Night’s Dream,  dressed in surreal space-age tinfoil and doing robotic movements under a pretentious director.   A cracking bit of flying, too, right over the front rows.  And I am happy to say that Salinger returns not only as the elusive Great-Uncle Matthew but, fleetingly, as yet another queenly old Russian ballet mistress.  

nationaltheatre.org.uk to 22 feb 

LOOK BEYOND THE LETTUCE

      It is a tribute to Greg Wilkinson’s monologue play that I had not previously seen the rise and fall of Liz Truss as having a gripping dramatic line.  It had seemed like just the final mad flailings of the age of Boris and Covid,  before the Rishi lull:  ridiculous,  a passing joke,  nothing much to do with either Britain’s past or future.  But this tightly researched, unexpectedly fair one-woman drama made a difference.  

       Emma WIlkinson Wright, first seen silent at her desk as we settle in, is waiting for Graham Brady or someone to come in and deliver the expected final chop.  She is, carefully, in appearance very like the real Liz Truss, neat bob and bodycon dress . She observes as she powders her nose the need always to “look good”.   The then embarks on an account of her life,  assisted by the nimble-voiced Steve Nallon recorded offstage doing a series of voices:  the schoolteacher she defied ,  the exhilaratingly political Oxford friends, her Westminster allies and, of course,  the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.  Who is at first Liz’s  inspiration (though interestingly, not as much as Chancellor Lawson).  Thatcher in fact finally delivers a rather damning verdict, pitiless at the Truss defeat. She I suppose was strong willed too , tempting to emulate, but cleverer.

         What Wilkinson – through the performer – has caught and played with is the extraordinary self-confidence that fuels this woman,  combined with a real (and to many of us baffling) sense of her thrill at the very process of politics: leafleting, speaking, working out tactics,  networking, finding mentors and then judging them.  Her economic theory is all about energy:  wanting to move fast and break things and face down slowcoaches, orthodoxy and regulation.    Fighting suits her more than quiet thought, and revealing is her almost girlish adoration for Kwazi Kwarteng – “like an educated Mohammed Ali!”.  She strides around,  thrilled to rise to be Foreign Secretary,  dizzying.   Sometimes she breaks into karaoke, as with her friend “TC” – Therese Coffey.   But she is not made ridiculous.  Like any excellent actor she draws us a long way into herself, uncomfortably.   Scraps of her real speeches – including the cheese moment – are done from a lectern in the corner, straight.  Bits of her theory are banged up on a whiteboard. 

Becoming PM at last she sacks people, crying  “I can really bloody do this!”.   Urged to take her financial reforms slower she barks “what’s the point of moderation?” and says that it would be like getting her friend  “TC” going at the karaoke with just a thimbleful of whisky when what’s necessary is a damn great pint and a cigar.  

          But the crux of the story is not her final downfall – though the slow hard realization of what the markets are doing is brilliantly done,  cracks in her steeliness showing minute after minute,  the lettuce joke genuinely upsetting her – “humour is our national religion” she says, with the fury of an apostate.   Nallon’s brilliant evocation of the  previously encouraging voices of her backers – notably Jacob Rees-Mogg – gradually make her understand what’s happening: national potential bankruptcy. 

      That’s all good, but   the crux beforehand is the moment when the Queen dies,  and suddenly at the funeral Truiss is plunged into something bigger than politics,  bigger than her:  nationhood, ritual, something run by surefooted courtiers and military, apolitical. She has to be taught to curtsey by an unseen Rees-Mogg who ends up having to demonstrate how to do it. After that there is something almost touching about her storming towards “A Budget true and good and beautiful!”  and watching it collapse.    

       It was second-preview I saw, and I suspected the end would be been tightened (and I now gather that it has, the show within its natural 90 mins including interval).  But in that ending there is a real warning.  Off to America, thrilled by its energy and extremes, I watched the stage Truss reflecting on Trump, Farage, and how the key to getting a followership when people feel hard-up is horribly simple: just a identify  a “THEY” as the enemy.

     It’s a pretty remarkable couple of hours.  Honour to performer, author, and director Anthony Shrubsall.  `Not long left to catch it, but if you need something absolutely non-Christmassy….  

whitebeartheatre.co.uk   to 14 December

HIGH SPIRITS, HIGH COMEDY, EVEN HIGHER HEELS

      Elton John, who jumped at the idea of writing the music,  calls the 2006 film a favourite; many of us nod in blissful agreement.    Based on a semi- autobiographical novel by Lauren Weisberger about her time at Vogue, the modern fairytale tells how an   ambitious good-hearted young woman gets sucked into the glamorous but cruelly demanding world of an ice-queen boss (think Anna Wintour, exaggerated for effect in the masterly hands of Meryl Streep).  She risks her private life and moral instincts, but finds her true  nature in the end.  It became comfort-viewing:  glorious clothes , witty put-downs, and – not least – a darker echo of the way that women’s lucrative and hyper-demanding jobs screw up their relationships, especially with touchy men.   And it doesn’t need to be fashion that does it: ask any young lawyer or banker. 

      But I did wonder whether it needed to be a musical,  even in the hands of director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who has been making films into hits for years (Legally Blonde! Kinky Boots!) .    Book is by Kate Wetherhead – artfully keeping all the best Streepy sneers (“Florals for spring? Groundbreaking”) and her famous two-note dismissive “that’s all” .  And praise heaven, not musicalizing that tremendous speech about cerulean blue,   or the magnificent moment when Nigel lectures Andrea about her snobbish “disdain” for the real art of high fashion.  

       The lyrics Elton worked on are by Shaina Taub and Mark Sonnenblick:  they’re sharp, properly scanned, often as witty as the film itself.  One song,  Nigel’s passionate “Seen!” about a young gay man finding the fashion world, is stellar: discovering as a teenager  the part of him “never seen yet, found in a Yves St-Laurent silhouette..” .  Another opens up the difficulties of Andrea’s boyfriend “I miss the girl who used to use a 2 in 1 shampoo..I miss the old you!”.   Mitchell’s choreography is fabulously witty, too:  the fashionista  “clackers” falling constantly into those improbable model poses.   Gregg Barnes provides wild costumes  (and brilliant dowdy ones before Andrea succumbs – oh that shirt hanging out under the jumper!) .   The sets do just enough work and not too much.

      So all good then:  it’s a gig, a blast, a apectacular night out .  Vanessa Williams is a fine Miranda (Streeping-it-up a bit too much at the start, but who wouldn’t?  she does the later vulnerable scenes superbly).  Georgie Buckland on a West End debut is sensational as Andy,  Matt Henry a touchingly likeable Nigel and a gorgeous voice. And  as for Amy di Bartolomeo in the Emily Blunt role  as the senior assistant overtaken by Andrea, words fail me.  At first she pretty much shadows the film character, but with the music adds a real crazy vulnerability of her own.  Mitchell picks up on the fact that we have fallen for her (perhaps more than for Andrea, a bit of a prig)“; he adds and choreographs a fabulous “hot nurse” sequence after her broken leg accident, with lads in scrubs doing the full chorus-boy around her.  Then there is a completely new moment in the second half where Emily’s  future becomes even more glorious than her rival’s.  No spoilers but hey, Gaultier…

       So once the second half got well under way with a giant glittering Eiffel Tower,  I said to myself yeah, OK, if we must do this stupid star-rating thing, it’s a five. And yes,     it was worth making a musical of the film:  worth another dose of the shiny , fabulous and curiously wise nonsense of it.  That’s all.

devilwearspradamusical.com    to 31 May 2025

rating 5

C’EST MAGNIFIQUE !     

 Napoleon, defeated at Trafalgar,  vows revenge on Britain and its  “bootlicking monoglot  monarchists”. Stalking around in breeches and bicorn hat,  Matthew Kellett, a fine operatic baritone,  brandishes the arm he claims to have shot off Admiral Nelson.   A worried puppet fact-checker pokes  theough the velvet curtain complaining that this is anachronistic nonsense, the arm was lost years earlier,   and gets shot with Napoleon’s sidearm. Which is a baguette.  

    Back in London, George III in his nightshirt  (Elliott Broadfoot) plays air guitar on his sceptre,  Jennie Jacobs’ slinky Duke of Wellington mansplains annoyingly to Princess Georgina,  who may possibly change gender later (Amy J Payne). Everyone is worried about paying for the next war. Because, obviously,  the nation’s wealth is in a vault with the Black Prince’s ruby which only opens with Nelson’s fingerpint. So they need to get the arm back and “bash ’em in the Beaudelaire!”…  Napoleon must resist this, helped by the returning ghost of Marie Antoinette (Rosie Strobel, no less) and a brief chorus of headless guillotinees.  It is sometimes difficult to remember there are only six in the cast, the newest being Rochelle Jack, on a debut just outta Mountview.     

      And off we go in a torrent of Bonaparte puns, spirited songs from rock and pop to operatic – this is Charles Court opera, after all  – plus magnificent disguises, moustaches,  jokes turning on a sixpence from low to literary (cow puns, Sue Gray puns, George Orwell jokes. And an explanation of why the Trafalgar Square statue of the physically titchy Lord Nelson is 15ft tall: “it’s a 3 to 1 Horatio” ).  There are many ridiculous accents and some top-grade physical  clowning,  notably from Broadfoot and Kellett.  It’s fast, witty, tuneful, and excellently silly. All vital panto moments are here – shoutbacks, a pie, audience members recruited briefly, sly in-jones about costume changes.

       I came to it fresh from cheering John Savournin’s fine bass rants as the Pirate King at the Coliseium,  scroll below .  But here, as every year,  he pops up as co-author with Benji Sperring of the Charles Court OPera  panto.  It should be a nationally recognized event:  last year I meanly only gave their Greek romp 3+ a pantomouse for daftness, adding up to 4.   This one is still sillier,  musically even better, and so damn clever – with its torrent of goofy gags for serious people – that the mice queued up to be included.  My only dismay is that it’s in such a small house so not enough right-thinking people will  see it. But Penny and Stella and their Jermyn regulars are, after all, the absolute cream of small-scale London theatre.   Merry Christmas, Jermyn! 

Jermynstreetheatre.co.uk to 5 jan

TA-RAN-TA-RA !

  Mike Leigh,  a veteran better known for films, Abigail’s Party and theatrical experiments with scriptless rehearsal,  is also a dedicated devotee of the utterly scripted Gilbert & Sullivan, and ten years ago directed this production of their 1879 triumph.   Now revival director Sarah Tipple gives it high spirits and full vigour from an orchestra and chorus visibly enjoying the ride; it  always feels grand when an opera house lets its hair down, and Cal McCrystal’s Pinafore here was unforgettably entertaining.  So, as a fairly recent Gilbert & Sullivan convert (for full confession see here https://theatrecat.com/tag/hms-pinafore/) I couldn’t miss this version.  

       Some may be disconcerted by the way Alison Chitty’s set deliberately sweeps away the Victoriana to place the action mainly in a giant porthole cut out of  a vast blue  space  ( which editrix Miranda,  just up the road in. Devil wears Prada , would call – er – cerulean).  I resisted this  geometric colour-block starkness a bit at first,  as the cutout shapes changed to be seashore or country estate cemetery,  but in the second half  Chitty’s shapes beautifully serve the popping up of hiding,helmeted police.  And there is everything G&S  to love: rhymes both brilliant and disgraceful (gyrate/pirate!)   glorious choruses,  fine sentimental arias sending themselves up.

      Perhaps above all, in the grand Coliseum,  that’s the key pleasure of  Savoy Operas,  forever sending up not only the intense Britishness of their own Victorian age but the medium itself, with wicked pastiche. At their best the duo’s operettas feel like the bastard child of bel canto and music-hall.   When Isabelle Peters’ Mabel bursts into her declarations of love for the stunned Frederic (fellow Harewood Artist William Morgan) she shoots up into almost terrifying Puccini intensity;  John Savournin’s bass-baritone Pirate King is every Verdi villain. Except, of course, for the ridiculousness:   it also kept occurring to me how much Monty Python and Spike Milligan owed to WS Gilbert’s determinedly offbeam absurdism: grand figures unexpectedly illogical, official figures in uniform proffering unexpected values,  imperial-age concepts of heroism ,  duty and patriotism bravely guyed: think what a relief it must have been to the first audiences.  Once or twice before the police vs pirates battle  the Spanish Inquisition sketch floated into my mind.  

           But to come to the point,  it’s a glorious evening, ta-ran-ta-ra.  Richard Stuart, who last played the role here twenty years ago,  launches into his modern-major-general number through a thicket of whiskers,  rattling along like an Olympic hurdler on fast-forward.   James Cresswell, fresh from the Met and Paris,  unforgettably leads the police: his  men wincing beautifully behind him while the ladies’ chorus trills their hope for death as well as glory. Squeaks and gales of laughter.  And as for those ladies in their swagged muslins, boaters and big skirts,  I have to tell you that fearlessly on Greg Wallace Shame Day,  the  spirited kidnap by the pirates (seizing opportunity / to marry with impunity) saw several of them wildly thrown  up in a fireman’s lift over muscular shoulders, flowered bums up and legs flailing to the point that my companion wondered whether ENO had provided an intimacy coordinator.  Merriment all round.   As it should be. 

eno.org.   14 more performances till 21 Feb.

Rating 4