theatreCat

BRAINS AND HOW TO MAKE THEM USEFUL

     Clearly it is the mission of Hampstead Downstairs to broaden our education,  no bad ambition.  Not long ago I learned a lot about the life and emotional feelings of octopi down there, and now Jonathan Spector’s strange engrossing three-player brainstorm takes us into a philosphy lecturer’s world of analysing the different ways knowledge hits the human awareness and how we process it. There are three kinds of heuristic response ( philosophese for common sense and experience), plus confirmation-bias , overconfidence bias (Liztrussitis) and anchoring and experience biases, as widely found in newspaper columns, hem-hem, say no more.   

        Our lean and bright-eyed lecturer hero Lukesh  (Esh Alladi is , as ever, enchantingly watchable) demonstrates this stuff with pictures and a peach (later it turns out he does conjuring too, as all good psychological philosophers should).  But something is amiss. His wife Natalya (Natalie Klamar) has suddenly announced she’s off, not his fault, just off: and the next he knows of her is a call from a train across Russia.   He suspects himself of hitting on the wrong heuristic by thinking she had got over a car crash she was in earlier (lots of flashback’n forward) but in fact she is trying to find out whether her grandmother, or possibly great-grandmother, was murdered by Stalin even though her best friend was his daughter Svetlana, who could have (might have) pleaded for her.  Oh, and meanwhile poor Lukesh is having to supervise the PhD of a student from a white-supremacist family  – : Oscar Adams playing nicely hapless and selfrighteous, forever explaining to the patient Indian academic how he’s not a Nazi really and it’s nothing personal, and how it’ all in HG Wells’ The Time Machine because we need Morlocks and Elois, or possibly not) .

     Well, no further spoilers,  because you’ll enjoy the ride, remember this man Spector gave us the fabulous Eureka Day at the Old Vic;  and Chelsea Walker directs with commendable speed and use of the tech.   But both Klamar and Adams move between characters, undisguised at a breakneck pace,   she often taking us through Svetlana’s sudden defection in 1967.  Footage of Stalin coheres sometimes with the white-supremacist Dad, neatly making a point about similarity and the general absurdity of tidy extremes in dealing with untidy humanity.  And Esh Alladi remains always beguiling, whether his mode of each moment is tutorial, irritated,  or maritally baffled. 

       And Natalya’s vodka scene with Adams (temporarily an aged and venal Soviet archivist) is a proper treat.  You won’t regret it.  More fun than the Stoppard upstairs, actually. 

Box office hampsteadtheatre.com. to 27 January

A BLAST FROM THE PAST TO INSPIRE OR IRRITATE

      By the interval I was mournfully unconvinced that there was any point at all in reviving Tom Stoppard’s 17-year-old play , about Communist ideals and philosophical betrayals in Cambridge and Prague 1968-1990 –   all reflected through a young male obsession with rock and roll albums and the Velvet Underground.  The  background story  is worth telling:  the Prague Spring, Charter 77,  the rolling-in of Soviet tanks, dissident heroism , the ascent to  Presidency of an actual playwright, Vaclav Havel.  It is close to Stoppard’s own heritage and deeply felt.  I wanted to see it, having held a candle in the treet as a student in 1969 in tribute to Jan Palach’s suicide and since made the liberal’s pilgrimage to Wenceslas Square.  

       But Lord, despite Nina Raine’s deft direction and some wonderful performances, the first half both drags and – if you were around in the late 60s – irritates.  Those clever yet compliant and usable women, still in awe of the men!   That  shaggy Syd Barrett figure fascinating them with his panpipes!  Those self-important philosophical debates about whether the mind is just the mechanism of the brain ,  or the vital conflict of international Marxism versus Czech nationalist socialism, and whether to side with Havel or Milan Kundera!  It felt prehistoric, irrelevant, self indulgent,  frankly dull.  

         Never mind. What keeps you there and gets you back after the interval are the characters, all perfectly shown:  Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as earnest Jan is patronized by Nathaniel Parker’s peppery self-righteous Communist believer Max:  Jan goes back to Czechoslovakia to be part of the dissident movement, which is heroic,  while Max remains in uxorious academic comfort with his dying classicist wife – Nancy Carroll, as ever, magnificent as Eleanor, sharply aware of the student Lenka who eyes up her husband.   Jan in Prague suffers for his patriotic belief that socialism can have a human face,  Max remains unwilling to admit the crushing cruelties of the Soviet Union and thinks only of  ‘the workers’ (who are absolutely absent from the play, and I doubt Max personally even helps the women with the washing up).  

       There are  as usual some wonderful Stoppardian insights into the psychology of our settled old Land (it’s still the 70s, remember) like the observation that while for comfortable people like us, freedom just means “leave me alone” while for the masses it means “give me a chance!”.  Meanwhile the post-Christian angst about whether there’s a soul tangles up with the middle-common-room politics of socialism,  while the Pan-like figure of a Syd Barrett  (Brenock O”Connor, rather brilliant) scampers around bashing a guitar because once people give up on religion they need a bit of mystery to spice life up.  There is little sense of the reality of human sufferings of the time,   beyond the secret police smashing up all Jan’s albums. Except the Beach Boys.

          But after the interval, praise God, it comes good and moves faster.  Years have rolled on, Nancy Carroll is now playing the dead Eleanor’s hippyish daughter, divorced from a ghastly journalist and still dreaming about the Pan-figure “a beautiful boy, as old as music, half goat…we were all beautiful then”.  Jan, older and sadder after prison, twelve years enforced labour and his country’s climb into freedom, is back on a visit to the old parlour-Stalinist Max. Who still has “nothing to defend” and remains dismissive of the women he uses (“take a woman to bed, don’t take a woman to bed, it’s the same”).  

           Jan  has a revelation for him: they were, to some extent, in the police-state years each betraying the other.   In an amusingly hideous Cambridge-academic way the characters  – plus the awful journalist’s even more awful columnist wife –  are all to meet for a fish pie meal .  Lenka the student has grown up and stayed safe in Cambridge to read Sappho and sneer about our British “democracy of obedience and apology”.  But the story is completed,   as the century creeps to its end,  with a kind of acceptance of the laziness of the twin  ‘60s simplifications – make-love-not-war and workers-of-the-world-unite .  There are a few sharp lines about modern journalism, which are true.  One moving love story is completed, and so are two rather less inspiring ones.  

  So not sorry I went. But I’d take an axe to some of the first-half dialogue.  

box office hampsteadtheatre.com. to 27 Jan

rating 3

  CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SPIRIT 

    Can this really be the first Jewish pantomime?  Oy vay, surely this culture with its musical genius,  ironic jokes , family warmth,   tall tales and matriarchal instinct for decorative hyperbole has long been crying out to be amalgamated into the great Panto tradition.  The fit is uncannily perfect, so  mazeltov to JW3 for commissioning this,  and putting it before hordes of riotously thrilled schoolchildren and us admiring adults and gentiles.  It  is also nice to be in a show where everyone knows absolutely and reliably how to clap and stamp in time, and  catches jokes on the wing, at speed.

        The tale is a folktale mashup:   three generations of women – ambitious  young scentist Red,  her mother and her grandmother – have to foil the Big Bad Pig  (a powerful Josh Glanc, looking uncannily like Giles Coren in a bad mood).  He has betrayed his Jewish family by working in the City and taking control of all the power supply in the Edge of Ware to threaten the lights of Chanukah.   He captures Jewish grandmothers,  because they are the strongest known form of power. His sidekick is the neurotic , ashmatic and useless Wolf, who he contemptuously calls Fluffy, and who is still traumatized from falling down the chimney of the brick house into the pigs’ hot soup in another tale.   The answer to the power problem is, of course,  wind:  thus enabling a massive running fart joke to thread through the show.   This we cheered to the echo. We’re British. It’s panto.  

    It’s low-budget (the cast whipping the curtains aside between scenes with brio) but not short on glitter and movement.   It  throws into its soup every proper seasonal ingredient:   a villain to boo, journeys through a magical wood,  gags and ghosts requiring cries of BEHIND YOU , a water-pistol assault on the audience,   a rude song  and even  a bailiff.  There’s a bit of conjuring with eight Martini bottles by Mother Hoodman in her Dreidl-shaped frock (she later appears as a giant pickle) and while she is technically  the Dame, she’s  played by Debbie Chazen  –  what Jewish matriarch would hand over such a role to a mere man?  And besides, her own mother is a very acrobatic male, Tiago Fonseca:  wizened old Bubbah appears at one point climbing over the railings behind the audience  and somersaulting down the stairs past us ,  floral pants akimbo; she also ties up the big bad wolf in bunting made of clothesline knickers. Double-dameing, excellent.    

           Nick Cassembaum’s script is remarkably good:  there are a few standard  panto jokes but the best are puns on Jewish words,  most of which I got with assistance from my good friend Shirley:   the most outrageous being the complaint from the North London  cab-driving rat ,   fed up by competition from the  “Cat Uber” – Katubah! – cars.  There was also a gale of adult laughter ,  drowning even the school parties,  when the bailiff claims to be the Pig’s official deputy.  Mother Hoodman snorts “I”m so bored of deputies!” .  And every minute or so there is something slyly funny, as when  Red solicitously asks the disguised Wolf  “are you comfortable?”  to which he shrugs “I make a living..”   And when in the final moments an unlikely  romance springs with the reformed pig there’s a cry of “marrying out  – of species?”   To which the response is “Oy, you  have to let these things go…”. 

           The high-spirited self-mockery is warming. .  It is also is musically  sophisticated,  under Josh Middleton (Accordion, keys, trumpet, percussion, fiddle and guitar, always with a klezmerish edge) with terrific songs, never overlong, and tunes which cannily mine into  Jewish musical genius  by pinching tunes  all the way from Rodgers, Gershwin,  Berlin, Sondheim,  and  Lionel Hart to Amy Winehouse (her “ No No No !” becomes the villain’s anthem ). And while I had to look up the fact that the writer of “We don’t talk anymore”  Charles Puth had a Jewish mother, it is glorious to have that song given to Mother Hoodman about her longstanding “broigus” with her her own mother, Bubbah.  

          Such fine Jewish family jokes are  woven all through it, all the way to the big soup session, but so is Jewish genius.  Every panto has a character who demands that the audience should shout a magic phrase to help them in any crisis.   Here ,  it’s the science-minded heroine Little Red (Gemma Barnett) and she demands that whenever she says “My mind’s gone blank!”the audience should shout THINK! THINK! THINK!.  Of course: it’s what Einstein would want. So  s a clever show, warm and fine and funny ,   and I couldn’t have done better after grinching out of doing any other 2023 pantomimes after being spoilt by McKellen’s last year.   Chanukah sameach  to JW3, Mr Cassenbaum and Mr Middleton and their doughty cast.  Take your inner child , and any outer ones you can lay hands on.   Well worth the gelt!

Box office jw3.org.uk.  to 7 Jan

ANOTHER KIND OF INQUIRY 

  I suppose we will have to wait a few years for the dust to settle and James Graham to write a nuanced play about the Boris-Covid-Tory-pocalypse. Meanwhile this 80-minute storm of fury from Armando Ianucci will do very nicely. It’s directed by Patrick Marber at a furious pace, from the first descent from heaven of a tousled blond wig onto the head of Paul Chahidi as “Orbis Rex”,   to the striking finale of the entire group violently fighting one another  in the trapdoor entrance of Hell itself.    They are all clad in black, with the odd pantaloon , and tights (though the character of “Richer Sooner” obviously has too-short trousers) there’s a stovepipe hat or two, and they often speak in rhyming couplets.  

        Eng-Lit graduates will have expected that cod-17c costuming, from the retro framing announcement;   “Being a Scornful Account of the Activities of Mr Boris Johnson and Others during the Pandemic and its Aftermath” .   Ianucci’s inspiration is  largely Milton, but also nods to Dryden’s satirical Absalom and Achitophel,  a mock-heroic epic about Charles II,  Whigs, the Popish Plot etc, and chucks in a few Shakespeare lines as well.    The author has talked of the Greek heroics, but this feels more like our own 17-18c takes on the form:  it’s a good model, and once the great monchrome backdrop descends with its Grim Reaper skeleton,  the mood reflects the age of furious, debunking, coffee-house rationalism.  With a lot of necessary laughs.

        There’s a sparky virtuoso cast of five doing it all:  Faye Castelow, Debra Gillett, Natasha Jayetileke and Amalia Vitale,  gathere around Chahidi’s magnificent rendering of “Orbis” (get the anagram?).  He  declares “I am a god, descended onto this withering globe..”   and after a bit of dithering over two scrolls for Remain and Leave,   rises to power amid his confreres, veiled by joke names but all too familiar:   Gove curly and earnest,  Jaytileke as a glorious tap-dancing Rishi,   Cummings memorably described as  “a day-long shout on legs” wearing boxing kit.   Dido Harding in a jockey cap,  put unsupervised in charger of Test and Trace after fouling up at TalkTalk,  protests only mildly that “ability to control a flood of data’ is hardly her forte.   Above all there’s Matt Hemlock,  a creature conjured from a swamp:  “poisonous ooze incarnate, and born to take the blame!”.   The green slithering is something to behold, as he assembles his “circle of friends” to sell him dodgy PPE, and finds love and a grope in a flashbulb moment.  

      There’s much bravura in occasional chainmail from Orbis himself: when two calm white-coated scientists tell him about the vaccine and he ceases dithering for a moment to send out an Agincourt of needles like arrows;   there’s Jacob Rhesus-Monkey explaining how the cake was wholly responsible for attacking his lord and master, and a vast pink frocked “TrustLess” who becomes a pink collapsing jelly at the question “have you costed anything?’. 

          You get the idea.  More than fun, a necessary rage, elegant mock-heroics.  Some wonderful lines from our hero, as when the police turn up accompanied by a hooded, grating, weirdly ghostly Sue Gray  – “I am Orbis Rex, and wht I feel is more solid than facts or law”.  But Ianucci does give us  a few more sombre moments,  the poetry – doggerel but effective – suddenly rising to express the enormity of lockdown losses,  “Mocking the dead with rivers of wine…cries of pain and anger stilled…goodbyes by broadband”.   Before the final chaotic  mass-Breughelian-descent into a brawling  hell, Orbis realizes he was never a god at all,  and that his classical deities were all in his own head.  That’s an odd unexpected bit of psychology, stilling the rage for a moment.  But then there’s the hellscape, all that is left after the brawl a sad dishevelled blond wig. And finally the cast infomring us that never mind, there were  heroes all the time:  it was us, the people,  who worked and loved and cared and kept the rules while “dunces “ danced above.  

        Fair enough.   Quicker and  less pompous than the real Inquiry. And I gather that  Ianucci donated proceeds from the book that spawned it to Mental Health UK. 

sohotheatre.com. to 6 Jan

DICKENS IN RIOTOUS RHYME AND BAGPIPES – ON TOUR

     Wouldn’t be right to get through December without Dickens, would it?   But I have seen the magnificent Old Vic adaptation by Jack Thorne three times now, and don’t seem to find Simon Callow on rumbling through the story anywhere.   So I crept through sodden lanes in a gale to  drop in on Chris Green and Sophie Matthews,  whose leftie Good King Wenceslas  I so approved a year or two back  (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-need-more-than-good-king-wenceslases-c07knplnb). 

          For it’s a big tour, and , accompanied by Jude Rees and her melodiously gorgeous oboe,  they propose to sing the whole thing at us:  Scrooge, Marley, back-story, triple-ghosting and a Fezziwig party so festive it involved two separate bagpipe attacks from Sophie.  All in 55 spirited minutes after the break. 

        But the fact that it’s a lovely show is not least because a first  half beforehand offers Christmas songs which Dickens himself would have known:  with musette pipes, melodion, flute, oboe, guitar and keyboard we hear among other songs a wassail, a fascinatingly different Holly and Ivy,  the Sans Day Carol, a coyly naughty music-hall song about mistletoe behaviour, and best of all a glorious “Time to Remember the Poor” ,  from the 17c collector Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, author of Onward Christian Soldiers. 

          They all sing,  Green plays guitar, keyboard and a big fat thing apparently called a mandocello;  Matthews has her flute and various bagpipes,  and Jude Rees the oboe (least duck-squeaky oboe I have ever heard, very beautiful)  and  picks up an occasional melodeon.   

        The Dickens tale itself is neatly rendered into rhyme, using  carol tunes (a lot of God Rest Ye Merry, since that is the one the boy sang outside Scrooge’s house) and familiar folktunes, with lovely woodwind interludes for the poor old miser’s sleep, and a mournful oboe carrying his nostalgic memories of a more innocent youth.  It is nicely paced on the whole – good musical shocks,  transitions to match the story – and Green uses all the eloquebt Dickens words which fit best into the fast-moving narrative.   A simple thing, and rather lovely.  Even if you think you’re not a folkie…  Happy Christmas all.   

On tour till 23/ 12 – LINK BELOW

(Leicester tonight, then Wallasey, Sale, IoW, Southampton and others till 23/ 12 )

   I don’t usually record anything that’s two-nights-only, but this one I think will flower and fly, so watch out for it.  It’s already looking like turning up in March at TR Haymarket, and any venue with a functioning soul would do well to grab it.   Who in these dark days does not need a small, unpretending,  explosively joyous, sad ,energetic and topical mini-musical to remind us that art flowers in rough ground?

       . It’s devised by and for Golda Amirova, a Ukrainian-Jewish  singer and composer: a big figure in Odessa, once chosen to sing “Shema Yisrael” to the visiting Israeli president. She and her director Pavlo Bondarekno are both refugees here from Putin’s invasion.   Around them, to tell her true tale as a fable of disaster and redemption, they  gather musicians and dancers: Yevhenii the drummer from Mariupol , refugee in Berlin; Kourosh the Irish-Iranian guitarist, Greek Vasilis on saxophone, choice British jazzmen and dancers. 

      The music is wild: soulful  Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish jazz, where klezmer, wedding-songs, ballad and rock and memories of Weimar meld together, in Golda’s extraordinary pure voice and wild effortless energy.  You catch moments of scat, rock rhythms, Jewish anthems, a soaring ballad crashing suddenly into vivid jazz dance.  It’s hypnotic, never a boring note. 

          But the show’s point , with short words or translations flashed up where needed, is to tell a story very simply.  It opens on a glorious set of sofa, band instruments, lamps, racks of sparkly clothes and crazy stage hats.   Golda says  “I see a dream. My heart is flying back to my home” because we are in riotously happy  memory:  a party-cum-rehearsal is under way,  singer and players and random guests jumping and joking, then  following a power cut with an ironic mashup of Tiger Lillies “The crack of doom is coming soon”, cabaret-style.    Behind them a projection shows a great city’s graceful spreading streets.  A phone call from her grandmother demands Golda marries soon, and in rapid musical mimeshow she rejects both a millionaire and an Israeli who “talks only Torah” . Instead she dispatches the guests to pretend-busk the front rows for money for a takeout.  

      When it arrives her eyes meet the handsome pizza man’s , a great gentle love song rises  and suddenly there’s a wedding.  More wild dancing and celebration round a white cake,  guests pressing glasses on the front row. 

 Until the sirens, the bomb, flashing lights, destruction and darkness and quite another grey projection behind in the smoke.  Amirova’s, and Odessa’s,  own story. She’s only been here a little over a year. 

       In the second act the happy living-room is gone. In a black coat, once wild hair pinned severely flat, she is any East European refugee with a suitcase. A sinister short ballet in the gloom expresses panic, collapse, loss, grief, exhaustion. Then  Golda suddenly is in a club, working the full Kander and Ebb ‘Mein Herr” from Cabaret, a job.  But despondent in a cafe she hears a tune remembered from home;  the musicians gather, new friends, respectful, and a great torch-song moment leads to a shared defiance and cry of “L’Chaim!” To life!”.   

      In the finale, time has passed and she is a star again, introduced on a big stage in golden robes,  her song drawing together grief and memory and loss, echoing all the genres of the evening and interwoven strands of Europe’s soul.   As a show it’s simple, short, sophisticated; it’ll probably grow and refine.  But for two brief nights in a converted church in West London,  just  after London’s great march of solidarity ,  it’s  an event.  It reminds us  of the greatness of the continent, the tangled threads which hold us offshore people too,  and of the Jewishness pulsing through it all. It’s about the hope that springs in any room where songs and stories come alive.     L’Chaim!  

Information:    http://www.birdandcarrot.com

BEWARE OF GREEKS BRINGING GAGS

   Where does Kylie get her kebabs?  From Jason’s doner van!   If that makes you scuttle away in fright, you have not yet achieved the correct seasonal adaptation to Panto season.  Work on it.  Sometimes surrender is the only way. 

        I was a bit startled at first by this show – a ridiculous echo of classical Greece (as if we hadn’t just had one of those as a Prime Minister) . But that is because I had only seen Charles Court Opera in more musically serious, if light-hearted, shows.  But their annual pantos under John Savournin have a keen and hearty following, and judging by last night’s willingness to  laugh, clap in time, shout encouragement to Hermes the incompetent deliveryman and participate in a highly unusual gameshow,  no spoilers,  they’re growing more fans. .

        So pull up your Socrates, make no Apollogies, and after a long festive day struggling round your local shopping Centaur,   enjoy Stewart Charlesworth’s  marvellous multicoloured classical background and daft headgear.  Take your inner – or outer – kid and  wince-along happily to the adventures of Penelope and her faithful friend Trojan the horse as they set out – via the Cyclops –  to rescue Odysseus from  Circe without all being turned into pigs.   It’s as if Horrible Histories got drunk with the makers of South Park,   and enlisted a schoolboy Classic Set who wish there was more in the ancient Hellenic  canon about farting.  Then add songs happily based on anything from  American Pie to Stayin’ Alive and Rasputin.  

       Actually, it was the songs which quite rapidly won me round; the cast of five are all highly competent  belters,  but Emily Cairns in particular has a beautiful voice,  and ther are one or two rather poignant moments.  And to Charybdis you over any doubt, I must say that Scylla is magnificent.  Short, noisy, fun.  But keep your Greek friends away from it or they’ll be confirmed in their view that Britain is too frivolous to hang on to those marbles.     

Box office jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 31 dec

rating: well, add a seasonal daft Panto-mouse for enhancement

DARK BEFORE THE DAWN

       To emerge with any redemptive sense from Joe Hill-Gibbins’  spare, scorching  rather brilliant production,  it helps to remember that Henrik Ibsen, after laying out the destructive hypocrisies of late 19c small-town Nordic world,  ends it as Mrs Alving sobs over her soon-dying son and a rising dawn,  a fine day,  with sun rising on the snowy peaks.  In Richard Eyre’s version a while back –   like this one stripped to a solid 90-minute intensity –   that dawn was expressed in a brilliant lighting moment:  there was a sense of a century’s end,  a chance  of dawn soon sweeping away those dark damaging moralities .  There was comfort there, and this time I almost prayed that in the fully candlelit Wanamaker there would be a sudden flinging open of shutters,  so desperate is the sense by then of the need for it.  A prophecy of the modern liberation suggested in the book  which Mrs Alving  shocks her pastor by owning.  

      But in winter SE1  such a flooding of consoling light  would hardly work.  So the director and players may simply take this reflection as a compliment to the depth of feeling they provoked.  They really did. 

        It  is important always to keep, in this play,  the strength and shock which got it banned by the Lord Chamberlain and excoriated as “deplorable and loathsome”  in its stripping back of all decorous veiling from the topics of hereditary syphilis,  euthanasia, potential incest and defiance of ‘any law, including God’s.”    It uses light and darkness as a running theme,  beautifully used here as we begin with Sarah Slimani’s Regine lighting one by one the candelabras which rise and descend (the whole backdrop is a big mirror, which is odd but does spread the light a little as well as spookily reflecting the players).  

          In the light she kindles  – the light that finally flame by flame will die at the despairing end  –  we see Greg Hicks as the girl’s  father – always a powerful, threatening actor – trying to get her to come and work at his proposed “sailors’ home”, ie. brothel, on the mainland.   We see then Hattie Morahan conversing with Paul Hilton’s Pastor Manders about the orphanage she has funded in her husband’s memory,  with a gradual exasperated revelation of what a libertine drunkard he was, her woman’s strength having held  it and his reputation together in bitter secrety.  Her son and only joy, Stuart Thompson’s Osvald joins them; his fondness for Regine gradually more appalling as we learn that she is is half-sister, begotten of rape by the dead Captain Alving.

    Layer upon layer of hypocrisy, lies, emotional cruelty and deceit and hidden, lethal  sins intensify;  Manders’ plea for “the older truths” ever more hollow,  with an actual guffaw, a frisson around me in the seats , at his attempt to belittle the rape of Regine’s mother with “I don’t condone it of course but he was playing with her…”.   Even Osvald’s own perception that  “love doesn’t always follow your rules” is soured by his brief, panicking conviction that his free life in Paris may have contributed as much to his decline as his father’s libertinism.   

    It’s all there: Ibsen’sscorching moral horror,  his brilliant outrage at the way women suffered, hid and excused for the sake of Manders’ “old truths” and social cohesion.  Morahan, Hicks and Hilton are all the more brilliantly effective for being so dimly seen; the  increasing physicality of Helene Alving’s despair and desperation for her son in the gloaming strikes the heart all the harder.  There is nothing restrained or polite or ‘period” about any of it.  It simply devastates.   

box office   shakespearesglobe.com  to  28 Jan

ANY TOIL AND TROUBLE WAS WELL WORTH IT

Everything a child could want is here:   the dark thrill of imagined orphanhood, a quest,  baddies , jeopardy and jokes, bouncy musical spectacle,  adults behaving ridiculously.   For the parent generation add some dry witty lines and throwaway touches (the awful spoilt child is called Bruno dePfeffel Jenkins – ha!).  Then add a magnificent song from the Grand High Witch about what a nuisance children actually are, “assholes!”, never giving you a quiet or private moment. 

        It also helps that Lucy Kirkwood’ lyrics quite frequently rise to Gilbert and Sullivan glory – even echoes them, as the initial chorus of witches posing as nice ladies in M&S cardies sing “smiling sweetly, walking neatly and petitely”…. 

      As theatrecat is late on the curve with this one (press night packed, I hope with many many kids) all I need  tell you is that all the five-star raves are justified, and that indeed after last year’s dismal HEX the National has a properly worked, long-developed serious Christmas hit which will last, and  transfer, and run for years and be celebrated.   Children will dream of playing gallant little Luke or the preening Bruno, a mini-diva who plays  up l to make adults say “isn’t he precious, isn’t he sweet!”.  Adult stars will queue up, in the show’s long future, for a chance at the Sally Ann Triplett part as the eccentric cigar-smoking Gran, or her nemesis, Katherine Kingsley as the Grand High Witch;  chaps will want the part of the strung -out Mr Stringer, manager of Hotel Magnificent, to which Daniel Rigby gives full wild comic rein. 

       So yes, it’s a runner, a winner.  When Tim Minchin gave us Matilda thirteen years ago he showed that given the big-musical treatment with its naturally breezy brio, the sour-hearted edge of Roald Dahl’s imagination can  be transformed into something which even we Dahl-doubters could love.  Later, Charlie and the Chcolate factory was enjoyable, but dependent on big West End machinery and star casting, with little warmth even with Doug Hodge.   But here Lucy Kirkwood’s transformation of Dahl’s The Witches , directed by Lyndsey Turner, is glorious all the way.  Dave Malloy’s music is catchy, with mischievous pastiches from Lloyd-Webber to Sondheim, and a couple of really beautiful quiet songs as well as the fun:   I’d listen to a cast album in the car, especially with children.   Stephen Mear’s choreography is bliss, from tap to clog to a magnificent soup dance in the hotel kitchen .  

     And to add to the adult joy, the Witches’ “RSPCC” conference at the hotel, fifteen ladies in sensible middle-aged clothes, has some of the wickedest sendups of such gatherings you will ever see. Note the prissy defiance of one facing up to the lady chair:   “I”ll say it – she needs to know”,  which ends with an  incendiary trapdoor put-down.  Literal, in this case, but most of us have seen that done…

book and lyrics by Lucy Kirkwood, music and lyrics by Dave Malloy

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 27 jan

GOLDSMITH BEATEN LIGHT AS AIR

     Nice symmetry in Tom Littler’s decision to set Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy in the Wodehousian Jazz Age:  the Georgians, with their boozy monarchs and coffe-house sarcasms,   were mischievous spirits before Queen Victoria and Dickens arrived to demand decorum.  So here’s a  curmudgeonly husband with a bossy and flighty wife,  planning matches for their young with mixed results. Here’s an elopement, a minxy rebel, and a callow  Woosterish  public schoolboy who can’t relate to his own class of girl but only to barmaids , so a clever girl must pose as one to net him.   And  that’s before you get to the purloined jewel box forever falling into the wrong hands: a clear forerunner of Wodehouse’s stolen silver cow-creamer.

      It fits beautifully in the cosy panelled and galleried  theatre,  swagged with Christmas decorations as we gather intimately around and above the living room , the inn and the living room mistaken for an inn.  (If ever Littler decides to programme a play set in a desert or spaceship his designers will have a more troublesome job than Neil Irish and Anett Black did with this one).  

     But the pleasures of this rumbustious production go deeper. David Horovitch and Greta Scacchi are as fine as you’d expect, magnificently explosive at times;   Tanya Reynolds is an engaging Kate, serious when needed  and a complete mistress of the classic drop-hanky-bend-and-snap as recomended centuries later in Legally Blonde.   Sabrina Bartlett is a girlish Constance with a fire-engine shriek;  Guy Hughes’ Tony Lumpkin is an unusually likeable padded-weskit of a rustic, as the young squire who rightly prefers Bet Bouncer’s “cheeks as red as a pulpit cushion” down the pub,   to the threat of marrying his more polished  cousin. He  sings to his ukelele in the Two Pigeons public bar , pleasingly peopled with a community chorus of eight or nine revellers.  And Richard Derrington  makes he very, very most of Diggory the dishevelled manservant, doddering for England with every move provoking ripples of delight. 

   But two important things shine. One is that all the cast are utterly at home with the complex 18c prose and its meaning: it trips off their tongues as natural as breathing. And that can be harder than speaking Shakespeare: more rat-a-tat rhythms, no restful iambics.  If this show wasn’t almost sold out I would urge all Eng Lit teachers to bring recalcitrant  pupils who whine for recognizability to show them  just how comfortable 250- year- old expressions can feel. 

      The other important merit is is in the physical comedy and  “business”.  Julia Cave is credited for movement direction, and I cannot speak highly enough of Scacchi’s Martini-and-olive play, the rebel niece’s mastery of a riding-crop, Horovitch’s finely judged throwing of a stilton cheese,  Kate’s very suggestive polishing of the gramophone horn,  a superb  grape-catch from Freddie Fox, and Diggory’s triple brolly-muff-and-handbag hurl. Or of all the perfectly judged table-leaping, sofa flopping, suitcase-dragging work and moments of manic panic and baffled stasis,  as when Freddie Fox is stuck on a chair clutching, for no willing reason, a tiny 1920s jewelled handbag.

     Indeed all the laddish exchanges , banterings and irritations between the young men – Fox and Robert Mountford – are pulsing with life.  And I have never seen  Fox before in such  broad comedy, and long for him to do more:   before: his helpless bespectacled shyness round Kate,  his 180 degree turn to leering-down to the supposed barmaid,  his puppyish overconfidence and humiliated horror  are all spot-on:  exaggerated just to the point where comedy shades into wincing affectionate sympathy.

   It is altogether the first of the Christmas treats, ended with a fine jazz dance curtain call, and for all these reasons its fifth mouse is the rarely deployed Christmouse, dancing on the cat’s party squeaker… 

orangetreetheatre.co.uk.  to 13 Jan

FLAT WHITE AND WOEFUL

       If you’re going to splash out on a visually arresting finale of assassination, a vivId fire destroying a Norman tower and a lyrical monologue about Lenin,  it is wisest to lead up to these excitements with a play that arrests attention.  And, ideally, makes some kind of sense.  This isn’t it.  

     Rory Mullarkey’s limp satire on the landowning, moneyed upper classes  pimping their ancient homes to Russian Oligarchs just feels a bit desperate, a series of random shots at fish in a barrel.   And the Royal Court shouldn’t do desperate: it is at its best with zippy writing , sharp attitude,  and a willingness to prod easy thinking and cliché attitudes. Not when rolling over, in a hopeful Christmas season,  to something billed as “uproarious” Wodehousian comedy, but which turns out dismally sub-sitcom . There are only rare flashes of inspired spite (the best one being about the Standard Theatre Awards, which is niche but nice).  

      It’s about an idle spendthrift young Viscount (with a communist housekeeper,, ho ho) whose mother is trying to sell the family castle to a Russian oligarch, while herself fleeing to South Korea with her female accountant who doubles as lesbian lover and badminton partner (I enjoyed the badminton at the start of Act 2 more than the rest of the show). 

          Of course the Viscount and his mates have a plot to derail the deal by dressing up as oligarchs and pretending they don’t want the castle: very sub-Wodehouse.    The idly blokey obviousness of  it is irritating:  communists are funny, lesbians are funny, Russian accents are funny,  Irish housekeepers called Hanratty are funny,  so bung ’em in and call it comedy. 

      I suppose that this play was seen as a successor to 2010’s POSH (which I hated then  for a cartoonish unfairness which at the time wasn’t totally deserved, though it has got more so since 2019).    But at least POSH was well structured and had a quite good story, and one or two fairly rounded characters.   It’s the flatness of these  – despite the efforts of Fenella Woolgar and George Foreacres in particular –  that makes the play basically so dull, despite a good cast.  

          The British love-hate fascination with the upper crust works best when – as in Wodehouse or Coward or Wilde or indeed Jilly Cooper –  you are able, despite your amused jeering,  to share some of their human feelings.   Here, you just don’t.  And they’re not that funny either.    It’s depressing, nd I respect  the Royal Court  – the writers’ theatre – too much not to say so.

box office  royalcourttheatre.com   to 16 Dec

ECHOES OF DARKNESS

    Jews gather, laughing and chattering, offering a toast as they run down the aisles to settle downstage for a Passover meal with candles, prayers and the ancient question “why is this night different from all other nights?”.  

    This time it is, for  a bad reason.  A noise outside: and over their heads in vast projected newsreels come  Mosley and the  British Union of Fascists at the battle of Cable  Street,  with bold black libellous posters about “negroid Jewish filth” and the octopus of Jewish finance.     

         A pilgrimage, this was,  and not by accident.  Because it plays this week in a resonant place : just off Cable Street , where Mosley’s marchers met a resistant crowd,  not only of the Jews they targeted  but of dockers, unionists and East Enders with a banner “They Shall Not Pass” . Honest people shared the disgust and brotherhood, seeing off the thugs.   On that autumn day Wilton’s music hall,  was a meeting place and first-aid post for the anti-fascists. 

       So to see this remarkable production here, setting Shakespeare’s play   in 1936 , is heartshaking . When Brigid Larmour”s show, with Tracy Ann Oberman provocatively cast as Shylock, began its long tour nobody could foresee that by now the London streets would again see antisemitic hatred on the march. Nor would there be such dangerous electricity in the play’s troublesome story of a demand for human flesh to suffer.  For we see not only a scornful cadre of contemptuous toffs – Gratiano  a real posh Bullingdon thug, wealthy Antonio coming to court in jackboots and red armband  – but of  a Jew exacting revenge through bloodshed. Because the hurt is so deep.  And we also see a Jewish neighbour running in fear from a thug, and walls daubed with daily hatred. 

     Oberman is brilliant, turning Shakespeare’s grotesque into a smartly dressed businesswoman, a mother appalled by her daughter’s defection, then a deeply hurt and lonely figure standing on her dignity and rights in court while her case is destroyed by the crossdressed Portia – who is seriously nasty by the end, merciless despite the famous speech. It forces you, as always, to think not only about the ancient curse of antisemitism but about law, its glory and its limitations. 

     Its a taut, and well cut,  two hours.  And in the final moments the defeated and ruined  Shylock, clutching her possessions, stands alone against the rom-com finale stuff with Bassanio’s ring,.   Bleak  – until  suddenly everything turns round. The hostile men throw off armbands,  Antonio dons the kippah, and all unfurl a sheet with They  Shall Not Pass . 

      And most of the audience here in old Wilton’s suddenly stand up,  in fellowship.  And  Oberman briefly tells us, as herself, that her grandmother was there at Cable Street, and that it still befits us all to stand together. 

Touring till Feb. York next, Manchester, Chichester, Stratford upon Avon

FAR MORE THAN A SNACK

    Caught this late, and it’s much reviewed and almost sold out. But it’s worth saying in a brief word here that if you buy a return as I did, you are in  luck. Lynn Nottage’s  play is a little gem, realized with love in a gorgeous creation of the scruffy back- kitchen of a Pennlylvania trucker’s diner.

. The staff are all fresh out of jail and near-hopeless lives before. The boss is another ex-con, an angry she-ball of hate and scorn, Clyde.  In a hundred minutes, the workers serve, chop,  bicker and bond and reveal odd sad edges of their grim shaming back stories.   But above all they discuss what might constitute the absolute sublime and ultimate in expression through the medium of sandwiches. 

       Lynette Linton’s cast are spot on.   Giles Terera is a sort of guru, philosopher of food and the beauty of flavour and artistry; Gbemisola Ikumelo and Sebastian Orozco are struggling lost souls needing to find one another, and Patrick Gibson the most moving of all:  covered in racist-gang tattoos, he moves in the hundred minutes from sullen hopeless anger to a sort of innocent generous humility, fed by the small everyday wonder of the job and the limitless possibilities of perfection. In sandwiches.

    Much of the commentary has been how funny it is, and sweary, and executed sometimes with surreal balletic moves. All true .  But I think it’s deep as they go, a wonderful evocation of human hope, endeavour and creativity. With relish.. And you might just find a ticket before the month’s out.

 BOx office donmarwarehouse.com    To 2 dec

A QUEEN WHO NEEDED QUEENS 

   The curtain rises on the Clarence House garden room in 1979,  where the Queen Mother held her eccentric little court.  Much gilding, unreasonably many oil paintings of roses, and a tail-coated Billy Tallon,  newly promoted as Page of the Backstairs and staff boss,  pointing military-style as he orders his colleagues where to deposit the morning’s vasefuls of real flowers.    “Rosewood. Occasional, Sideboard, Plinth, Plinth”.  Luke Evans’ Billy  is posher than posh as he informs little Gwdion, a newcomer,  of the duties and demeanour of a footman: always remain standing, be correct, never cross the grand rug but go round it.   Noses  pressed to the glass, we gaze into royal-world:  hardly was the curtain up when two corgis scampered across the stage, to be met with a rousing cheer and traditional British cries of awwwww! 

          In The Audience – the last major stage-royal imagining – there was only one live corgi moment, but director Michael Grandage hedges his bets and has three. The final one even involves HM – Penelope Wilton – in cuddling a rather reluctant and spirited dog on the sofa while possibly – no spoilers – deciding whether to sack her favourite after 27 years.   Billy deserves it, after  bringing a pick-up male prostitute (Eloka Ivo)  into the building with chaotically improper results of the sort it would be better that her daughter the Queen never heard of.   And the Queen Mother knows that getting rid of Tallon would delight her Private Secretary  (Ian Drysdale).  In a tricky moment of strikes and riots and a crashing economy pre-Thatcher, he wants to rein in the prodigal extravagance of the octogenarian mini-court. 

    It’s a promising theme Marcelo Dos Santos has in this new play, and often it’s full of fun:   in her years of widowhood HM  – despite keeping up a reasonable number of cheerful public appearances – was famously fond of a tipple and a dance (she was once found singing My Old Man’s a Dustman at the piano with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster).    We are given two scenes of her teatime entertaining, to great comic effect:  one mixes a dim actress from her favourite soap (Emily Barber) with a patriotically starstruck couple described by Billy as a “couple of Home Counties cadavers” (Michael Simkins and Nicola Sloane). The other has the same players as dopey aristocrats,  thrown by the reappearance of Eloka Ivo’s prostitute  masquerading as an African prince.  Wilton is a dream, handling the curious royal mixture of impertinence and optimistic charm in bizarre exchanges with these visitors;   the satire is less on royalty itself  than on the peculiar tongue-tied behaviour of British people dealing with it face to face. Especially back in the grander days of fifty years ago.  

         All good fun,  though with rather more Carry-on-Gay jokes than necessary, but there is a frustrating sense that inside this play there is a rather better one trying to get out.  That better play is not just a farce of mistaken-identity and sauciness with a two-minute dash of 1979 politics,  but a portrait of a real and necessary human relationship between mistress and servant.  It flashes into view sometimes amid the farcical daftness.   Luke Evans is a convincingly devoted Billy,   amusing HM with his camp flair, devotion and willingness to dance round the sofa with her, but he needs her as much as she needs him, and  he unravels satisfactorily when he gets himself into trouble.    In a flashbacks we meet his 15 year old self (Ilan Galkoff) who came to Ma’am’s service in her early widowhood.

        As for Penelope Wilton,  she is deeply touching:   we see her in a timeshift as a new widow in 1952, glad to chat to the  new little page (“fifteen? Are we resorting to kidnapping?”) . How can she make a new life without her Bertie, and her Palace home and job?   Then back in 1979 we see her suddenly as just a mother,  cut off from daily cosiness by her eldest daughter’s new job and grandeur and being stood up by a neglectful Margaret who asked herself to breakfast then didn’t turn up.   When that happens Wilton turns to the wall for a silent  moment of rage, while Billy stands sympathetically by. She then turns back to paste on a smile and a determination not to join in any feeling that is “dour and doomy”, but to have another drink and get on with whatever leisure-centre ribbon-cutting awaits her.  

     And in one other extraordinary moment when that other play struggles to get out,  she responds with wounded kindness  to a slightly demented contemporary who forgets that Bertie, the King her husband , has been dead for nearly thirty years.   “It makes no sense’ says mad old Lady Adeline.    “No sense at all” says HM, gently,  after a tense silent beat.  And Wilton at that moment is the great actress she is:  real, all there, grieving still, anxious not to hurt. 

Box office.   www.michaelgrandagecompany.com.  to. 27 Jan

NB MGC productions does work to offer cheap tickets:    £10 tickets available at every performance across the run. For further information, and to register for the initiative: www.michaelgrandagecompany.com.

rating. 4 but only JUST, and it was Wilton wot won it. And the reluctant sofa-corgi.

WHEN WE THAT ARE LEFT GROW OLD….

      Sometimes you have to rely on a team with multiple comedy awards to  hold a mirror to society and move your heart.  This is by Richard Bean (of the NT’s One Man Two Guv’nors and Jack Absolute), co-directed by Terry Johnson and Richard Wilson. So yes, it is very funny – some exchanges like vintage Alan Bennett but without the melancholy – but also merciless.  It challenges a generation to contemplate how working-class old age can lie  beached   when their children’s upward social mobility is all outward and distant,  in both geography and values.  It’s a beautifully unfashionable theme, personal and necessary.  

   We’re in a village in East Yorkshire:    Jack is 91, long-retired from the Humberside police;  Florence his wife of seventy years.   Their conversation is like well-dug fertile topsoil: long matured and rotted and often comically irritable.  She is losing her sight,  he is frail,  commuting from stairlift to chair,  threatening to go to Dignitas   though he’s never been abroad.   When you live long,  old friends vanish ; live in the 21c,   and restlessness and digitization edge you onto the sidelines.   The local bank branch has closed, everything’s online and they aren’t, and he can’t drive. Not after a run-in with a hedge on the Scarborough road.  

        They’re sharp,  though, each meeting the other’s maunderings  or their offspring’s alienness with dry Yorkshire wit: the kids are on a rare visit because they can only just look after themselves.   Pamela in her nurse’s uniform  drops in to help with bits of shopping,  as does the mountainous, cheerful Rhubarb Eddie. (“What’s the secret?” “Horseshit” “Do you force it?” “I have nothing to do with the horse”).   Both are met  with nervous contempt by the middle-aged youngsters:  Rob a successful detective novelist from Muswell Hill and Hollywood,  Tina a private healthcare capitalist.  They’re global villagers, “Anywheres” in David Goodhart’s famous definition –  and Jack and Florence are rooted:  Somewheres.    Pam guilt-trips Rob with “You can’t wipe his bum by Skype”,  and Tina’s business brain homes in suspiciously  on their trustful arrangement of giving Rhubarb Eddie the bank card and PIN to pick up cash every week from Driffield.  

       The joy of the play is in the humour, the absurdist exasperated familiarity of maunderings about mumps, Jim Reeves, and Sandie Shaw’s bare feet,  set against the competent shallowness of the siblings.   If this play lives on, and it absolutely should, and soon,   I pray that Alun Armstrong is forever Jack. He’s perfect,   cantankerous in company but reminiscently melancholy alone with his police memories,  which he won’t let his writer son record on his phone for material but has found a way to keep.   May Marion Bailey also long be Florence, and Adrian Hood play Rhubarb Eddie for many, many months.   Humour and heart  – and, late on, one tender moment and a final small moral heroism –  are finely balanced. Though judging by interval conversations, there’s much to wince at for a busy midlife generation watching their parents’ last years from far away.  

      It also features the best possible use of Jim Reeves’ mournfully romantic “Distant drums”. And if a play is partly judged by its ending, it scores.   It isn’t often that a battered Sony cassette recorder and a comic anecdote about a Cornish pastie make you find yourself scribbling  the closing lines of King Lear.   There is a fine generation leaving us, without fuss,   and attention should be paid. 

Box office. hampsteadtheatre.com to 25 November

DIANA AND THE DECEIVER

Jonathan Maitland did a superb play for this theatre about Thatcher and Howe, “Dead Sheep”, and one on Jimmy Savile which was far more telling and cathartic than the TV version. Now he turns his attention to another story: the Diana interview of 1995 and subsequent  late exposure of the manipulation and forgery by Martin Bashir, which achieved it for the BBCs Panorama in the teeth of sly bids from Oprah.  Barbara Walters and – well, just about everyone.  

  Maitland seems to be stirred by Prince William’s ruling , and the BBCs, that it shouldn’t ever be screened again: in the second half he  suggests this is a kind of further silencing and cancelling of the poor woman. Though the irony of this suggestion doesn’t strike him in staging it all for national appraisal. He uses her key lines plus, from good  sources, glimpses of lines which weren’t in the final edit.  We see editor Hewlett anxious, almost appalled, fearing she would give too much about her own lovers and worrying about how far Bashir is producing her.

   Maitland  is an interesting theatremaker and journalist, and with the flapdoodle which The Crown deals out, it is salutary to see this bare- stage serious portrayal of some of the oiliest , craftiest, most disastrous journalistic flattery ever executed, and the naive BBC vanity that swallowed the hook.

.       The first half is almost a radio play, unadorned talk: we hear a clip of Charles’ admission of adultery to Dimbleby and then watch Tibu Fortes’ eerily lookalike Bashir visiting ,repeatedly,  the bored, anxiously self -absorbed and paranoid Princess. The equally oily Pandarus  and narrator is Paul Burrell. Yolanda Kettle gives a convincing Diana, though without the vivacity, and will not heed her only sensible friend Luciana – a composite I think of several – even when, reluctantly accepting that secret recording is happening, the wise friend urges Diana to be forgiving and reconciliatory, not  vengeful. 

      Maitland knew and worked with Bashir,  has felt – he says – the flattering ways himself, and  picked up from various sources nuggets about Diana. Like her multiple physical discarding of mobile phones once someone who displeased her had the number. It is quite painful to listen to Bashir’s flattery and outrageous lines about how he – as an Asian at the BBC – is a parallel victim  to her being a “sweet kid from Norfolk”  adrift in the Royal family: two outsiders.  Her constant worry about whether people are a bit tired of her is aggravated by Bashir’s forgeries and his firm agreement that she is spied on even by loyal Patrick Jephson and that  “they” are out to silence or kill her. When she hesitates,  he is a pure Mephistophiles murmuring that yes, he too had doubted  but “you have taught me about moral courage”. 

     There are moments of BBC excitement and hesitation, including the disgraceful shedding of the poor graphic artist who innocently forged evidence of her supposed betrayers being paid by he press. It rises to a  sense of urgency as producers fear that Marmaduke Hussey the BBC chairman will find out, and his wife a lady-in-waiting report it to the Queen.  Most of us probably know all this now, but it does no harm for a new generation to learn it.

         Near the end it is mooted that  there is a greater truth in imaginings such as this, and maybe there is. The stage- Bashir defends himself in the second, , often spookily impressionistic act where figures of hard truth and of “narrative” argue over what is real, and create a deliberate sense that maybe this interview, followed by the internet age, has crippled our ability to trust anyone, government, doctors, scientists, documentsrists.  But maybe, he says – as with artists like Picasso, Gill,Michael Jackson or I suppose Gary Glitter – , we should be less preoccupied with the flawed behaviour , and concentrate on the art or interview rather than the disgrace. “Be allowed to taste the healthy fruit of the poisoned tree”.   

   And that’s a whole other play, and question.

 BOx office parktheatre.co.uk to 25 nov

SCIENCE FANTASY AND HONEST EMOTION

       I don’t normally indulge in first-night anecdotes,  but feel I should mention that in the big wedding scene Joanna Woodward tossed her bouquet traditionally backwards right into the lap of the rather startled – and single – Chair of the Critics’ Circle Drama Section, next to me in Row L.  Shot!   But actually, this brand-new musical of Audrey Niffenegger’s romantic/sci-fi bestseller doesn’t need to woo anyone.    It is, slightly to the surprise of this old grump who suspects musicals riding on famous-movies and HBO series , triumphantly charming and emotionally fascinating. It is also very easy on the ear  (the music by Joss Stone and Dave Stewart is pop-rock with real heart).

          As for the plot, you may know it,  but if not here goes:    Henry  suffers from a unique genetic condition which makes him suddenly and inconveniently  vanish and travel in time, back and forwards, meeting important women in his life  – mother, wife, daughter – at different stages of their existence.   There are glitches of logic to make physicists cringe,  and the fact that he always turns up naked has both comic and slightly creepy potential,  but it does enable a wide, exploratory  emotional pattern.  There are fashionable themes:  childhood dreams and childhood trauma, misunderstanding and maturing through early life,   and the romantic female tendency to think you are questing for The One,  a perfect man you dreamed of as a child and teenager ,  the stranger you will feel  you always knew.  

         Thus the small child Clare meets Henry more than once, aged ten or so in a meadow (see what I mean about the nudity being potentially creepy, though he does find a rug to wrap up in). Then the teenage Clare is defended by him when another boy assaults her.  Later they meet in a library, she being older than he,   and she’s able to inform the alarmed young man  they are married ‘in the future”. An opening which  you’d think is enough to make any bloke dematerialize in urgent  search of an injunction.   Then we see them the same sort of age and happily married, but with his condition still persisting: which does for a moment make one wonder whether the whole thing is an artful plea for women to understand that   there are times when a husband will keep vanishing without notice or explanation   and return in need of clothes.

       It’s an oddity of a plot, but skilfully told, even for newcomers to the novel and film:  Lauren Gunderson’s book makes sure of its comprehensibility, as does the director Bill Buckhurst.   Anna Fleischle’s revolving design of walls becoming screens  enables some very neat illusion exits for David Hunter’s Henry.  Indeed the opening of the second half is a real wow, with puppetised flying and terrific lighting and projection design byAndrzej Goulding  .  

      A lot of the show’s charm depends on Woodward, who is an appealing presence, open-faced and intelligent, singing like a lark.    As the production has made it a bit of a feminist  mission to build the show more round her, an artist (lovely paper sculptures).  than just around the chronologically disabled Henry’s adventures, her personal appeal helps a lot. 

       So does the music, with a sincere  pop-ballad openness of emotion it would be hard to dislike,  though only  occasionally is a number really memorable.   The bass ones  are the strongest,  with some lovely moments from the side character Gomez ( Tim Mahendron)  and a really tremendous number between Henry and his grieving Dad (Ross Dawes) which makes your hair stand on end as the father, envious of his son’s trips into the past to hear his long-dead mother singing again,  cries “I see her”.  But all through you notice lyrics that may migrate and last long:  when Clare is getting fed up with her constantly disappearing husband she has fine pop lines like  “Treat me like a lover should / If you could change I know you would..” and he, husbandly, mourns “I can’t always be where I wanna be”.   So there’s  an interesting emotional line all the way through. And at the end,  something rare in a rom-com,  it acknowledges with real maturity not only mortality but extreme old age.  It’s a surprisingly grown-up show, and will find a lot of love from all age groups. 

Boxoffice apollotheatre.co.uk.  To 30 March 2024

AGATHA STRIKES AGAIN

      This is Extreme Agatha Christie, her most preposterous (and bestselling) plot and one of the most murderously morbid (NB the final moments of the staging are not for the very young, squeamish or easily triggered. Noose alert).   On the other hand director  Lucy Bailey, whose Witness For The Prosecution still runs at County Hall after 8 years, plunges into it with glee , and takes every advantage of its period absurdities. Likewise Mike Britton’s  staging – gauze curtains, a sloping shore, a storm, a collapsed chandelier and an alarming bearskin – leaves nothing to be desired for aficionadi of the genre. And it is certainly better than the Mousetrap.

  For we have here a Devon island, cut off by weather, to which a mysterious A.N.Owen has invited a disparate group of Christie characters – a judge, a doctor, a General, a policeman, an army Captain, a Colonial, a religiously judgmental old lady, and hired a slinky secretary in a backless gown and a housekeeper and maid. But Owen never turns up. Instead, after dinner a record is played on the brass-horned gramophone, solemnly accusing each of them of a past murder,  or causing a death. They’re all affronted by this unusual houseparty incivility, especially the upper-middle ones  (as they harrumphed indignantly, I suddenly wondered whether JB Priestley pinched the  idea for An Inspector Calls six years later).  They’re all going to be wiped out, we learn, as the “ten little soldier boys” ornament on the table counts down, one by one being smashed.

    So what we get in the first half is some magnificent best-of British character acting, notably from Katy Stephens as the cross crone, an increasingly dishevelled Lucy Tregear as the housekeeper and  above all Jeffery Kissoon as the General: he arrestingly becomes a sort of chorus as the accusation rouses his guilt and dementia before he is wiped out. All the deaths are appropriate to the children’s rhyme (early Agatha loved doing that, as in Sing a Song of Sixpence).   So naturally the survivors gradually accept their histories and explain why it wasn’t their fault, aided by some nice moody  shadowplay behind the gauze curtain.  And there are treasurably shocking period lines about sexual morality from the old lady and, from the colonial chap, the theory that killing “natives” is ok because they dont mind it the way we do. Oh, and a harrumph about That Man Hitler and how he may invade Poland.

    Bodies fall one by one, spookily rising again to stare at us and exit.  The second half, with ever fewer cast, has to deploy more angst and mutual suspicion, is more psychologically intense and hence flawed (Christie is no Ibsen). But  there is some magnificent overacting to enjoy, the bearskin incident is splendid, and when they all go doolally after a particular shock,  they do it in full 1930s disco with a red lightwash. 

    So there you are. Northampton’s fine Royal and Derngate was cheated of its producing premiere by RAAC, all sympathies. But the show is  touring the land determinedly snf is an elegant tribute to its period, done with gusto (and a bit too much nasty relish in the last two minutes). I rather enjoyed it. My more intellectual non-Christie companion didn’t, very much. But I tried to cheer her up by claiming it was an artfully postmodern and painfully topical  commentary on 1930s morality and Auden’s “low dishonest decade”.

      Not sure that worked. But you know what you’re getting with our Agatha, it’s a cracking good cast, both veterans and debutants, and such touring shows are , next to Weat End, blissfully affordable. 

https://andthentherewerenoneplay.com    For tour dates nationwide: Sheffield next.

Richmond till 4th, then almost everywhere till 13th April 2024

MEMORIES OF A MAVERICK

  It’s an immersive show, in that you buy a drink in the cramped saloon of the old pub on Greek Street, find a corner, and ideally fall into conversation with another lone stranger.  Then  as the crowd fills in and the bar clock shows 5 a.m,  Robert Bathurst as Jeffrey Bernard lurches in ,sleepy and grumpy, saying he fell  asleep drunk in the Gents and now is  locked in overnight.  For the next hour he wanders around,  trying to ring the famously grumpy host Norman Balon and recounting the long entertaining disgracefulness and comradeship of his life and Soho from the ’50s onward.  

     We’re paying tribute to the legendary journalist, wit, gambler, and alcoholic. There are layers of people who will be there: on any one night I suppose a very few may be survivors who actually knew him, and my following  generation has fond memories both of the pub and Norman Balon’s grumpy landlordhood (it is considered prestigious to have been personally insulted by him, I was!). But also we remember  the full-length version of this Keith Waterhouse play about Jeffrey Bernard. It ran at the Old Vic in 1989, a few years before the man himself died.  Peter O’Toole was cast, almost too appropriately, in the title role.  

      And now a  newer generation remember 2019 , when this adaptation of the play into a one-man, hour-long show ran in the Coach and Horses with Bathurst in the role, directed by James Hillier.  It actually included on some Saturdays a midnight show followed by a  traditional “lock in” till 5 a.m.. There’s a pleasing defiance in Defibrillator having brought it back now, on the far side of Covid and mid-inquiry. It helps to wash away those times when we lost all sociabilities for long sad months. Good to be back again in a crowded pub: laughing, huggermugger,  tipsily celebrating one chaotic, eventful, messy life and friendships, forging our own.

        We are also celebrating a lost idyll, irrecoverable as Lyonesse and possibly as mythical most of the time:   the gilded memory of old Soho. A place where, as Bernard puts  it, you could turn up young and drunk and alone with just a pound left, and find company and solace and a kind of poetry.  He talks of the figures around him : Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and No-Knickers Joyce, Muriel Fletcher at the Colony Club, poets and bookies and journalists and wasters and misfits,  the policemen who arrested him for soliciting unlicensed bets and then invited him to their Christmas party. He tells, illustrated with toy animals and audience assistance, of a friend who when racing was frozen off  staged cat races in his living room. At one point he rummages in his suitcase after being thrown out by yet another woman;  there are answerphone messages from those he disappointed or betrayed,  and a snatch of opera as he remembers his job as a scene- shifter at Covent Garden. Sadlym  very sadly, in this truncated version he does speak of how knowledgeable the stage crews were compared to Radio 3,  but doesn’t reproduce the moment from the original play when, as they hauled the flies together, one turned to him scornfully and said “I”ve shat better Rosenkavaliers”

But Bathurst does achieve – twice a night, three days a week, so honour him  –  the famous trick learnt from Waterhouse himself. The one involving a raw egg, a pint glass, a tin tray and a violent bash with a shoe.  You have to be drunk, he says, to do it. He managed it without disaster the night I went, and surely will again. 

      It makes a good hour, a breath from a less cautiously selfconscious boho-artistic-journalistic  era than our own (these days even the eccentrics have agents to polish their image).   He pauses, in one of his many hospitalizations , to talk about mortality, touchingly, for alcoholism loses its hilarity and glamour and it killed him.  But the essence of the evening is there in a birthday poem written by Elizabeth Smart, a friend, the famous author of “By Grand Central Station”.  

     “You’re never snide, and you never hurt, and you wouldn’t want to win on a doctored beast. And  anyhow the least of your pleasures resides in paltry measures. So guard, great joker God, please guard this great Bernard…Let him be known for the prince of men he is, a master at taking ,out of himself and us, the piss”.  

     Something that is always necessary. 

Box office.  Jeffreyplay.com   

Next performances    5/6/7  and 12/13/14  and 19/20/21 November 

Two performances each day at 8pm & 10pm 

WHILE THE REAL ONE RUNS….

With the Covid Inquiry surging along in a froth of accusations and curses and scandalous Whatsappery, it was hard to resist a hasty day-return to Harry Davies’ debut play at Chichester. It’s set around a judge-led inquiry into another health catastrophe: polluted water this time. And like the real one it is  rife with deleted digital mail, personality clashes, private behaviours  and vaulting ambition.   

        Especially it was worth it to see  Deborah Findlay as the judge,  and John Heffernan as  the youngish Justice minister and Lord Chancellor, who used to be environment minister during the pollution crisis.  Moreover, his mentor-donor-fixer and career  ” fairy godmother”   is his old pupilmaster, in the irresistible form of Malcolm Sinclair as  Lord Patrick. He is a scene-stealingly tory-camp old silver fox  in pale pink socks, who has no conscience whatsoever when it comes to dirty tricks and artful leaks to hostile journalists. Though not, it  seems, to the friendlier-flirty profile writer, one of those girlish hair-flickers of the outer lobby. She – Shazia Nicholls giving it full faux-goofy-girly work as it is said some do  –  is the figure  we first see fishing for private life series of the “bafflingly single” minister with his eye on the leadership. 

   So it’s one for Westminster bubblewatchers and Thick of It fans, though it  aspires more in the direction of James Graham’s more humane portraits of the way real flawed people manoeuvre round procedures, policy debates, personalities and the sheer pressure of government.  And Joanna Bowman’s production does begin most enjoyably, with Heffernan amid his aides displaying a masterful ability to project a spitefully sneering expression right up to the top gallery, alternating with scenes of Findlay and her legal colleague (who later has  a bafflingly unnecessary scandal moment of his own).   Her humanity, half hidden beneath a long varnished judicial dignity, is well caught.

       But a structural problem is that  these alternating scenes run too long , and it would.be more engaging if each was shorter, almost filmically flipping between the camps. It finally hits real tension with the wickedly amoral Lord Patrick – whose client is the water  company –  -planning some very dirty tricks to ruin the Judge and distract poilice and media from the minister’s sneaky involvement with the said firm. At which point the  minister himself  is starting to quail a little, grow a conscience.

       So the second half is much better and faster,  and – no spoilers – culminates in a classic emotional Victorian melodrama of identity and coincidence. Which some have shaken their heads at, and which i did see coming three full minutes ahead, but which I actually applaud. Nothing wrong with a melodramatic revelation, respect to Mr Davies for daring it.  Trim this play down to a straight, hard-running 100 minutes-no-interval, and with this very fine cast it could tour,  go West End.  And, sadly,  and feel topical most years…

Cft.org.uk to 11 november

Three.

THE FIRST WITCHFINDER, NOT WITHOUT LESSONS FOR TODAY

        This is remarkable,  Joanna Carrick’s best and deepest play yet,   following her acclaimed Reformation trilogy. In its small Avenue theatre it is flawlessly staged and performed, a window into a past age and a lesson for all others about fanaticism and the terrible human need for human targets.    It seems simple: a broomstick and baskets , a workmanlike stack of wooden furniture under a guttering candelabra, daylight filtering through diamond panes,  old Suffolk.   A bonneted young woman cradles something fondly, then with a sad shake reveals it as an empty shawl. 

         It was a sister’s baby she cared for , and Susan resists the courtship of the young farmer Richard Edwards, fearing the griefs of motherhood.   Her half-brother  Matthew wanders through,  a nerdy, stammering, anxiously pious teenager.   Soon Susan and Richard are wed,  joyfully laying out the furniture, making a home, having a baby.   And Matthew is there again, a year or so older,  flinching from the living child as evidence of carnality,  and of womankind as “a way for the devil to get into a man’s soul”.   The couple laugh at him a little,  and side- references are made to local jealousies and resentments among the cottagers of Mistley. 

      Thus , deftly and compellingly, Joanna Carrick’s play lays out its tragic shape: a likeable early 1640s  farming couple, devout but sensible, and a fanatical youth gradually growing in Puritan confidence : the Matthew Hopkins who will become Witchfinder General.  It’s  a remote community and  fragile one, infant mortality inexplicably high , ruin beckoning if cattle fall.  In Cromwellian England,  easy to suspect the Devil at work, tempting make yourself important as a “purifier” of the land and lay the blame on old women whose mutterings might be curses, whose pet animals ‘familiars’.  

      In a tense, beautifully staged two hours we live alongside Susan and Richard as they grieve for their first baby, then others,  praying beside an empty cradle with wrenching power.  Carrick,  after her Reformation plays,   has the advantage that she can, as it were,  speak fluent Puritan:  the religious and domestic language of the time feels natural, everyday, in the dialogue (more, indeed, than in the RSC’s recent Hamnet).   Their affectionate arguments and shared griefs have powerful reality:   Christopher Ashman’s manly Richard is likeable, solidly humorous and decent, and Nadia Jackson’s Susan,  in a live stage debut,  is simply astonishing in her gravity and simple-hearted sensitivity.  

        The pair movingly  grow and develop through the play, edging from pragmatism and goodwill through repeated griefs into guilt (their first child was conceived before marriage) . A terrible ability grows in them slowly,   to believe what the real devil, Matthew Hopkins,  drips into them.  Though wonderfully they start at one point to laugh at his announcement that the local witch’s pets are devils, airy spirits made of “condensed and thickened air”  given that they have names like the dog Vinegar Joe . And “Colin”.    It is also subtly conveyed that while they fell in with Hopkins and gave evidence,  others in the Mistley community did not.  

         Vincent Moisy as the Witchfinder is subtle too:   a geeky teenager, then an unwilling tavern host repelled by the earthiness of those around him (‘drunkards and hedge-breakers”).  Increasingly he is confident in repeating and enlarging the pieties fed to him by  Cromwellian “Lecturers”.   Obvious to make modern parallels, but his relish in the Bible-bashing line “you shall not suffer a witch to live”  can’t help but make you think that today the lad would slap on lipstick and a wig and shout “Punch a Terf!” to a cheering crowd.   It is also chilling to be reminded how young he was: Hopkins’  reign of terror ran between his 25th year and his death at 27.   

        As for the interrogation of Rei Mordue’s cowering REbecca, the young girl forced to repeat evidence against her mother and admit that playing with a kitten while praying proves it’s a demon, you shudder at his Soviet tactics: “Watching her closely, depriving her of rest and food, has driven the truth out of her”.  

       The play’s strength is in being a simple four-hander,  despite the sense of community,  and the subtlety and humanity of the three main characters.  When Susan asks “WIll they hang?  All?   and Matthew replies “They must!” we see him beyond hope,  her not quite.   Yet when after the hangings the more doubtful Richard wants to walk with her to their babies’ graves and see the blue cornflowers growing,  Susan raves angrily at his wincing pity until humanity floods visibly, back into her with a terrible doubt.   “I wanted the deaths to ease my heart, my rage,  but I’m more angry now than I was then…”  Her final line will knock you out.  Silence . gasps.     

       A note: great drama grows from strong roots. Since 2019 Red Rose Chain has been exploring this darkest piece of local history: the three-year terror from 1640-1647 when more ordinary women were hanged for witchcraft than in the previous 160 years,  despite the religious persecutions of the Reformation.  Alongside Carrick’s researches in parish records, which  fascinatingly discovered the close links between Matthew Hopkins and the Edwardses, early “victims” and witnesses to witchcraft,  the group’s interest flowered. Its  youth theatre created one play, its community group for people with disabilities another, and residents of HMP Warren Hill –  in that grim cell isolation time and by communicating by letter – wrote two radio plays which were then performed by professionals and sent on CDs. Everyone did a lot of thinking about this play, and it shows.  

box office redrosechain.com  to 11 october

rating 5 

A MOTHER’S LIFE, A SON’S PERSPECTIVE

Sometimes it is almost useful to be a day late (sorry,  tied up yesterday) because it gives a chance to read other people’s take on the play you saw.  Especially if they liked it more than you: look back at notes and memory, and consider what you missed.

    I was oddly resistant to Alexander Zeldin’s evocation of his mother’s life – hers and her generation’s, taken from close interviews not only with her but with peers.  It’s almost my generation, though the mother is a decade years older:  it spans Australia 1943 to London 2021. Obviously I really wanted to like it,  since growing up with postwar parental attitudes and living through the hippie 60s and 70s was part of my own life.   Zeldin’s empathy and tenderness is much admired, and this play is on tour around Europe in co-production.

      And there is nothing to dislike in the performances –  Amelda Brown as the diffident old woman Alice, unsure whether anyone will be interested in her, strolling on before the curtain and – once – avenging a sexual assault on her younger self.   Eryn Jean Norvill is Alice through her life:   sweetly shy teenager wanting a life of art and writing but married to a domineering navy boyfriend,  escaping, finding a boho life with arty friends,  escaping again to Europe and finally the Uk where she finds real if unlikely love with an elderly Jewish-Austrian refugee  in a library,  telling him “I want your children!”  

         She is good,  and so are the supporting cast: Joe Bannister as two variously horrible men, Pamela Rabe as the mother she rejects,  and an awful early-Germaine-Greer period figure, a sweaty boozy man-hating man-eater in the hippie household.   Indeed come to think of it,   there is a kind of tribute in my impatient loathing of all those scenes of  pretentious, predatory ‘70s free-loving arty-academia  friends (“I feel a need to penetrate the earth…fuck the paintings..” .  It’s altogether too credible, if you were there.   Maybe that is what made me impatient, anhedonic, unconnected to the show. But that, as I say, is a sort of tribute: making loathsome people and cultures properly loathsome is a skill.

        But it might also have been the direction.  I liked the way the set folds, unfolds and vanishes around Alice,  the way  it does all around us as life’s scene-shifters move us on.  But within those shifting kitchen scenes the  dialogue is so hyper-real, almost like drama-school improv at times, and to be honest, not always audible.  Even in Row M.   And although it is only near the end that we see the male onlooker, the devoted son (avatar of Zeldin himself)  ,  it does not feel like the account of a life which a woman would have given herself.  Not a woman of spirit, as Alice clearly is.  There’s no sense of laughing acceptance, no grown wisdom. Rather there’s a kind of cloying pity in the play: Mum is there to be maltreated and undervalued by the culture but appreciated by her boy.  And in the final scene when the old woman remembers how pelican mothers tear at their own breasts to feed their young,   it feels like a son’s sentimentality about how much she loved him. 

         Especially that grates if your mind goes back to Alice’s cruel,  rejecting scorn when her own despised mother makes her a hat for her birthday and she throws it on the ground.   So there you are:  nicely made,  well-intentioned,  made with love, but  for me not a good evening.  But read the other critics –  it may well be a good one for you. 

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 4 november

three

GENIUS, REALPOLITIK, RELIGION

     In days  of horrifying conflict there was quite a jolt in a confrontation between Stephen Hagan’s  resplendently silver-suited Frederick the Great and the homely figure of Johann Sebastian Bach.  The pious elderly cantor from Leipzig, his home  peace shattered in the Silesian war , speaks of the noisy  licentious soldiery and the rape of a blind local girl by the king’s troops.   Sarcastically he remarks to the monarch “It was an honour to be part of your….invasion!”. 

        “Intervention!” snaps the younger man,  with Enlightenment conviction about Europe’s need to be modernized by Prussians.  He speaks excusingly of the overreactions of adrenalin-fuelled soldiery in wartimes, and of “stolen land”. 

 Who  in that audience did not shiver at the topicality of such a confrontation?  Oliver Cotton’s play has been a long time in creation, but Trevor Nunn’s elegant production could hardly have fallen on  a sharper moment for such a scene. 

        But it is of course chiefly about music and its inspiration: Bach devout, searching for a language of God,  Frederick scornfully atheist but himself a flautist and composer.    The two men are to meet again later, fictionally,  in a coda where the drama lies  in their philosophical and religious differences: flamboyant emperor versus a battered, half-blind genius,  unimpressed and unafraid in a cotton nightcap.

           This Bach, who we encounter first at home, is Brian Cox, beloved from Succession.  He is   an effortlessly immense stage presence from the start, grumbling to his wife (Nicole Ansari-Cox , his real spouse),  dreading the muddy journey to court even though he will see his nervous, anxious musician son Carl in employment there. The couple kneel to pray together for safety and for God’s will , and suddenly your heart moves.    This is not quite a perfect play, less polished than Nina Raine’s recent “Bach and Sons” ; it sometimes sags a little in the first half, and at times shows its historical research a bit clumsily.   But that moment ,and others,  shake the heart with the beauty of music and faith:  a maidservant (Dona Croll, quietly impressive) remembering the shock of devotion in the St Matthew Passion. And at its centre of course there is moment old Bach silences a court-full of scornful rivals and their  monarch by meeting a sly challenge with a complex elegance of fugue. 

       For after the brief domestic opening, the scene turns elegantly to the palatial splendours of Potsdam with the old man cursing the fussiness en route (“You Prussians can’t fall  in a ditch without showing your bloody papers”)  A comically ambitious trio of rival composers alternately flatter and mock the Bachs father and son, and King Frederick  – who has written a complicated little tune in his head in bed – has uttered a  challenge is to make it into a three-part fugue, following the current laws of harmony and counterpoint.  

       Only old Johann Sebastian can do it, knocking it out unseen at the  harpsichord while onlookers and monarch step forward as if hypnotized.  Gruffly he accepts  a lunch invitation compleete with Voltaire (Peter de Jersey making the most of philosophical cynicism).  He reiterates his solid faith,  which leads to the Frenchman reading him a passage from Hamlet.   Not historically proven, such moments, but as the French put  it,  all very “bien-imaginé”.   There’s a point when you suspect a move to some fairytale ending with the humble triumphing,   but doubt vanishes as the play ends with the two men’s second meeting,  under the crucifix in humble Leipzig. And Cotton offers us, uncynically,   a reiteration of deep seriousness about music, creation and God.  For ‘if the world is a shipwreck, sing in the lifeboats”.

theatre royal bath  to 8 November 

rating 4

PROPERTY RAGE FROM ANOTHER AGE

Here’s a curiosity from 1972;  an early , rarely-seen Caryl Churchill play revived  with dashing elegance under the Jermyn’s Artistic director Stella Powell-Jones.   Nicely topical, given the present disastrous capital housing market, since it is about homes and those who buy , sell and rent them.  It is framed in front of a beautiful assembly of front doors of various degrees of gentrification,  and the black comedy centres on a horrifyingly unsympathetic  North London property developer – Marion.  Who at one point says “Why shouldn’t I be Genghis Khan? Empires were made by killing”.    

      The E-word of course makes it a  doubly fashionable choice for 2023 sensibilities (for what is the property business but colonialization of private life?).   For the sake of proportion, by the way, it is useful to check up the inflation calculator: just multiply by 16 all the sums involved, like house prices and the unscrupulous developer’s bribe to get sitting-tenants out.

It’s performed with great  elan,  Laura Doddington  as Marion splendidly flinty in pursuit of money and an ex-boyfriend tenant she is busy detaching from his home, children and wife.  Her husband Clegg, a closing-down butcher whose professional ambitions she scorned,  plans every day how he will eventually murder her (again, Mark Huckett brings Clegg alarmingly to life, managing to be both appalling and strangely likeable, not least in his use of sexual imagery in the craft of butchery ).

   Her underling Worsely (Tom Morley, again unpleasantly funny, this time with a dash of real pathos) keeps failing to kill himself due to being “overly safety-conscious”,  and by the end sports a neck brace, plaster, limp and sling to go with his bandaged wrists.   His job is dislodging the sitting tenants, gloomily depressed Alec and pregnant Lisa.  Between them all Churchill and the cast do create many fine laughs,  as the victims circle around the hellish Marion coping with their various inadequacies and victimhoods. In one magnificent moment our antiheroine exasperatedly refuses to join their world.  “I can’t be a failure ,just to help”.  She knows she should be socially guilty about her business and personal behaviour but “guilt is essential to progress- that gritty lump is the pearl”.   Owning things is her thing: up to and including poor Lisa’s newborn baby.  

So it’s a reasonably entertaining couple of hours, with a few interesting philosophical speeches from Alec, but my mind kept swerving to the word “dated”.  Not because of the 1972 setting – the mental multiplication sorted that out,  and much 2023 property development still dwellson the far edges of moral decency. The problem was simply the tone.  Its a black-absurdist ’70s atmosphere which owes a lot to Joe Orton, who had his heyday a few years before,  and also, in its brutal relish one discerns a fair bit of debt to Harold Pinter (only without the pauses).  The result places it absolutely in its period: a sort of sour, faintly sadistic feelbad comedy, palpably different from even today’s noir. It’s not so much satirical or angry as irritably nihilistic.  

Interestingly, Churchill allows , in reported speech only, one piece of heroic human decency, just at the very end. As if she suddenly winced and thought better of the human race than was currently fashionable.  She moved on to better work,  especially Top Girls.  

Jermynstreettheatre.

GRIM AND PURE BY THE DOCKS, PITY AND POETRY

   The lawyer Alfieri, prowling in memory round Arthur Miller’s stark  tale of immigrant longshoremen on the 1940’s Brooklyn docks,  speaks for all audiences gripped by the misplaced passion and pride of Eddie Carbone.   In his final speech he admits that despite the man’s violent, sordid, pointless end “something perversely pure calls to me from his memory, and I mourn him”.  It is classic tragedy:  one bitter flaw destroying greatness.   Carbone’s unfitting possessiveness of the niece he   raised makes him borderline insane in his accusations of her young lover,   but his life in that hardscrabble community holds proper heroism.  Here was a man labouring, supporting, dreaming high hopes for young Catherine, giving space and, above all,  omerta to the two cousins from starving Sicily who illegally join the household.  In his unravelling he cries constantly for “respect” and “my name!”, and the anguish is the greater because he know it was he who betrayed that code.  

          Like the Ivo van Hove in 2014, the last big production, director Holly Rose Roughan leaves aside detailed realism and pares down the set to simple impression,  with a massive neon title,  sometimes fog or steam around the players,  chairs carried on like heavy longshoremen’s burdens,  a gallery overhead. It emphasises that it is a play for any century, and any land where poor immigrants arrive wanting only to work hard, send money home,  and swerve round the legalities of their position as long as they are protected by a tight community.   An early strength of this production is that Jonathan Slinger’s Eddie is initially less bleak and stern than he has often been: there is attractive humour and warmth in his fondness for Catherine and his enthusiasm for the wonderful smell of the hold in coffee-ships.   His mistrust and dislike of the blond young Rodolfo who likes to sing, cook and help with Catherine’s dressmaking is, before it gets seriously frightening, even quite funny.  

      Rachelle   Diedericks’ Catherine is nicely poised too,  her body and movements   changing from  affectionate childlike innocence to the joyful capering of courtship and then to black fear of the unspoken wrongness of her uncle’s state.  Luke Newberry grows too, as the insouciant Rodolfo stiffens into a resentment to answer Eddie’s:  the other illegal is his foil, Tommy Sim’aan a  grim, dignified Marco who quietly throws his heart and earnings across thousands of miles to his hungry children.   Kirsty Bushell is terrific in dignity and growing unease as the increasingly frustrated Beatrice.  She sees, more and more,  what is twisting in her Eddie’s mind and heart  – “When am I gonna be a wife again?”.  

       The private,  timeless tragedy unfolds with intense economy.   The only slight unease for me was the casting as Alfieri the lawyer of Nancy Crane, excellent though she is.   Her femaleness works touchingly, credibly when she is trying to head off Eddie’s disastrous intention to scupper Rodolfo and keep Catherine forever bound to him:  there, she is any sensible older women talking down a man.  But it is a memory play,  and Miller gives dark tolling poetic to this narrator, not only in that last tremendous tribute but in describing the darkening of Eddie “his eyes like tunnels..a passion entered his body like a stranger..”.  In a play about machismo,  always before in those lines I have found the heaviness of a male voice created an important shudder.   

       But in the car park I straw-polled a couple of people in the audience who hadn’t known the play before, and they had no such feeling.  It’s a powerful evening anyway, and Slinger’s  Eddie Cargone will stay with me for a long time.    Only 11 more performances (I am late with this one) some seats left,  and well worth booking.

Cft.org.uk to 28 oct

A LEARNED FRIEND REMEMBERED 

    Rumpole of the Bailey is occasional comfort-viewing in our house, thanks to Talkingpicturestv repeats. John Mortimer’s  portrait of the old barrister and the atmosphere of Chambers express more of a golden memory of his late eccentric father than of our modern RAAC-courthouse world, as the author himself admitted.  But it is a world of attitudes and assumptions  worth revisiting , even if only anthropologically.  And this memoir of the “voyage” we all take,  working our way  round a spectacular parent, is a marvel: a circuit from childhood awe, teenage scepticism, adult embarrassment and revolt and finally the moment of looking back. And finding that for all the exasperation, you are lonely without that presence.

    Jack Bardoe narrates as young Mortimer , nimbly moving from early childhood and baffled prep-school to following the old man’s legal footsteps, marrying, moving on, finding his own different gift.   Rupert Everett, who somehow at 64 is hitting his glorious peak,  is the patriarch. Wonderful, he is: a moulting eagle,  capable of commanding a courtroom in towering contempt or dominating a stage from a basket-chair with sightless Samson eyes (his blinding, in an early coup de theatre, stunned a neighbour in my row, new to the story). 

         From him come the familiar Rumpolean diatribes, like the one against the perils of marriage causing your fees to be frittered away on “Vim and children’s vests”, and the one about the consolation of divorce cases being their rich content of comedy.  The son expresses the struggle to be different and the realisation that he never quite will be.  Eleanor David is a treat too, as that endangered, almost extinct creature  the affectionately resigned wife. In elegant balance every small gesture as she fusses around her husband tells a long ,long and not unhappy story. 

     One critic found Richard Eyre’s production too much softened – Olivier’s spikier rages are remembered in the role – but I didn’t.  Because  there is something  beautiful in Everett’s interpretation of a man of his generation , stoical and unimpressible.  This was my Dad’s generation: stuck between the waste and loss of the Great War,  living through the next one into the 50s: conservative but sceptical, uncomplaining but shudderingly satirical about cant and sentimentality (treasure Everett carolling “Polly Perkins” during an overblown Remembrance hymn).  It is a type, mood and attitude free from our sententious modern commentary or signalling.  The  Rumpolean court scene is a piece of glorious game-playing.  

       For my generation, half a century younger than Mortimer junior and a century after his father’s prime,   the melding of the male characters who were built in that early 20c period is fascinating, and touching. Julian Wadham as  the absurd prep school headmaster is better , funnier even than Bennett’s  imagining in Forty Years On.   The beaten gnarled old jockey advising the prep school boy is superb, as is the eccentric war damaged book-flinging geometry master.  It matters to understand and remember what the period did to men and boys:  post- Edwardian, pre 1960s.   They had strengths and disabling emotional bruises:  they were our grandfathers.

  It is also interesting to note that for all our anxious me-first individualism and exhibitionist instagram celebrity,  today’s Britain is far less good at appreciating  and absorbing real eccentrics than we used to be. 

I saw it at Richmond: but it’s   touring until 18 November. dates below

Cambridge Arts Theatre 17-21 Oct

Cardiff 24-28 Oct

• Then Malvern Festival Theatre, Chichester , and Nottingham Theatre Royal

ITS THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL? Not if Lloyd can help it.

It felt  strange to see this in the bowels of a gala-night Savoy, only a week or two after our local arts centre showed the  1950 film of this tale of lost fame, ageing delusion and murder : Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond , the has-been megastar in a decrepit Hollywood mansion with a dead pet chimp and Max the protectively adoring  butler,  battening on the disillusioned writer Joe to help with her comeback script.   The film’s a legend: Cecil B De Mille actually played himself. This Lloyd Webber musical (book and lyrics by Don Black and  Christopher Hampton) had an outing with Glenn Close at ENO a while back, and this is Jamie Lloyd’s ultra-moody, mixed-media monochrome take on it. 

     At its core (except on Mondays) is the weaponized diva  that is Nicole Scherzinger. Even without the considerable ingenuity of the director, the former Pussycat Doll is primed to blow anybody’s socks off. Indeed in a way the tricksy spareness and abrupt closeup face videos of Lloyd’s  setting provide the proper frame for this human volcano: black box, smoke, spotlights, occasional walking camera-operators projecting the cast’s 50ft high faces above. There’s no grand staircase, indeed no furniture at all until 35 minutes in the lugubrious Max provides the bewildered narrator-victim Joe with a single chair.  But the orchestra, of course, under Alan Williams is sumptuous , and the music agreeable. It’s LloydWebber halfway between the yearning romanticism of Phantom and the wild edge of School of Rock.

   Tom Francis’ Joe is nicely dry, disillusioned, doubtful of the once great star but hypnotised by her deranged self-belief, and David Thaxton’s Max  is suitably threatening. Both are fine voices, and Francis in a mischievous post-interval film is seen roaming the theatre corridors and appearing from the Strand singing on film, only to finish the number live striding down the aisle.  The original was, remember, a black comedy in intention: it’s OK to laugh at poor Norma.  You could make a case for showbiz misogyny, but why bother?

The star debut of Grace Hodgett Young  as Betty, Joe’s true love and co-writer, is also remarkable: her melodic sweetness a nice foil to the crazy beautiful yowl of Scherzinger. The ensemble, storming around as wannabes and audition-fodder in rehearsal clothes  are choreographed as festive or sinister by turns.  

    But Scherzinger!.  An unruly diamond, a perilous untameable phenomenon, both vocally powerful and physically witty. It is quite  something to see her  dreaming her ambition to be Salome,  with wild rolling barelegged frenzy in a black silk slip and streaming black hair,   doing the upside-down splits and howling  like a  nymphomaniacal panther-goddess.  Yet sometimes she stands like a statue while the subplot of the young rolls around her, and there is an edge of pathos. For all the glorious numbers in which she and her erstwhile director Max claim the mission to “give the world new ways to dream”, her real need is for adoration from “all you wonderful people out there in the dark”.

     She certainly casts off for good the ghost of Gloria Swanson:  Lloyd has no intention of capitulating to retro romanticism and clapping his Norma in a turban and greying curls. And why would he? The text makes clear that despite talk of fading, the actual age of this outworn hag deserted by 30 million once devoted fans is…about forty. There was a faint gasp from the young Arts Ed students in front of us at the cruel line “nothing wrong with being forty unless you play twenty”.  So Schertzinger’s flowing mane and athletic flow are just fine.  

    And while I tend to roll my eyes a bit at Jamie Lloyd’s incurable directorial  instinct to show off more than his cast, by the time we got  to the  frenziedly confusing  final scenes of running, shouting,  swinging cameras, giant faces and general rage I was on the whole glad to have been out there in the dark for two and a half hours, being wonderful. Ticket prices btw are not too bad, given that the view is pretty good from anywhere.

Thesavoytheatre.com to 6 jan   

Rating four.

IT’S BACK, THROUGH THE NURSERY WINDOW, STILL FLYING

      Just to reassure you:  this offshoot from Mischief, the team who brought you the perennial  Play-goes-wrong, is still a lot of fun.  A fine choice for the Christmas outing for cheerful adults and perhaps especially for maturing children who are just starting to turn their noses up at panto.  

       I saw it first at the Pleasance in 2013,  then the touring version a year later – saying this about Adam Megiddo’s finely paced direction:

    Dropping in on the Richmond premiere because a friend was visiting who knows nothing of this team,  I found – with Simon Scullion’s wickedly entertaining, multi-revolving seesawing set – that it is leader, even more inventive than ever.  

     Authors Jonathan Sayer and Henries Shields and Lewis made a wise decision in sticking close to JM Barrie’s original text with its fey sincerity and faery whimsy, rather than attempting an ordinary  panto. Indeed a good running joke is that the “Director” who plays Hook is enraged whenever the audience, on nicely subtle prompts, shouts BEHIND YOU or O NO IT ISN’T. “It’s a traditional Christmas vignette! It’s not a panto” – “Oh yes it is!”

. The audition tapes played in error through the sound system at the most embarrassing moments are as fine as ever,  and indeed the running joke about poor electrical connections is framed while the audience is sitting down by making them unreel cables to unfeasible edges of the auditorium. 

    So there is still very skilled slapstick, terrifyingly haphazard upside-down flying, oddly gentle irony, satire on the trade of acting,  and a few jokes and moments milked just too long to sow a tiny discomfort.

   And the touring cast? Splendid. Especially Jamie Birkett, strangely queenlike through all the chaos, and Theo Toksvig-Stewart    as the hapless Max, bringing him out properly pathetic to many an “awwwww!” from the stalls.  So be reassured, the show hasn’t got tired ten years on.  

Touring to 14 apr with a west end session in the Lyric in November

Mischieftbeatre.com

TOUR MOUSE – but is as good as ever

  THE TWIG WHO BRANCHED OUT

     We get up to speed on the period,  with irresistible tracks from the golden age of pop: Beatles, Stones, Animals.   Onstage is a photographer’s white-sheet backdrop and the shadows of lights.  This is the tale of the Twiggy,   Lesley Hornby from Neasden, who  was barely seventeen when she became “The Face of 1966”. 

       I remember the moment as a fellow teenager: it was an age when suddenly we kids could reject our postwar mothers’ views on “nice little suits” and buy colourful short shifts, miniskirts barely wider than their faux-patent belts,  and a choice of truly  appalling patterned tights (Elena Skye’s Twiggy first appears in some tartan ones still burning on my retina).   The working-class girl was a model in every sense, her leggy skinny frame and angular,  almost Bob-Fosse poses setting her apart from the curvier and posher supermodels.  Every cover showed her lovely face, emphasised and sophisticated by a revolutionary minimalist hairdo by Leonard.  But she was no doomed shooting-star diva: she moved on from magazine covers to acting and singing, winning two Golden Globes for  Ken Russell’s weird version ofThe Boy Friend ,  worked in theatre with Peter Hall,  conquered Broadway.  Ms Hornby was and remains  a trouper, a hard worker, a learner,  a pleasant and decent woman now with a well-earned Damehood. 

         And that, in a way,  is Ben Elton’s problem as writer-director of this hagiographical jukebox musical (jukebox , in this 60s-70s period, is a compliment: the music is great and well chosen, with the possible exception of the Jim Reeves “I Believe’ in a saccharine moment). But in the telling here Twiggy’s story has no mystery, no quirkiness, no questions asked or answered. It is painfully linear, with little tension.   But Elena Skye herself is fabulous, a strong sweet voice able to belt  out big anthems or soften in sentiment:  she narrates from the star’s autobiography with intelligence and dignity,  and moves with grace and conviction from naive schoolgirl – sewing clothes for mates – to innocent submission under the self-invented Justin de Villeneuve (Matt Corner, very Mr Toad).    Thence to America, and her marriage to the erratic alcoholic Michael Witney (Darren Day, deploying another magnificent voice, lovely in duets with her).   In the background her working-class parents – Steven Serlin as Norman Hornby and Hannah-Jane Fox as Neil – are a solid presence,  with Nell’s long struggles with mental illness touchingly acknowledged.

              There are a lot of dance routines with the ensemble, though I have to break it to that excellent choreographer Jacob Fearey that as a new generation he has not captured the full and horrifying dreadfulness of 1960’s dancing:  no Twist or Hippy-hippy Shake or Hitchhiker routines. Trust me, it was an age of extreme Dad-Dance, so I suppose best forgotten.  

    So all in all, it’s quite fun,  often musically delightful,  and sharpened with cameos of David Frost, Claire Rayner and Melvyn Bragg and  some great archive footage,  not least the real Twiggy’s encounter with Woody Allen who tried to patronize her as a dumb kid and lost the encounter.  Interventions from her old schoolfriends are  entertaining too.

        Sadly,   what drags it down a star is the plonking smugness of its messages, something the story of practical, sensible Twigs did not need.  Justin-de-Villeneuve as a Svengali ten years older is stressed and disapproved of, with knowing references to modern awareness of coercive-control. The fact that she got blamed for the fashion for thin-ness when it wasn’t her fault for being skinny gets a finger wagged for nasty old misogyny and  what we now call body-shaming.  There’s a constant harping on class, causing the parents at times to be a little bit patronized, aw bless them. A gag about  “levelling up” sits oddly, as does a MeToo reference, since it’s only there to point out that she never suffered any. There’s a compulsory worship of the new-fledged NHS into which she was born,  there’s mention of the Windrush,  and scornful modern contempt for Nell getting electro-convulsive therapy for her postnatal depression because the ignorant old people of the unenlightened past didn’t know about hormones and menopause. Oh, and  during the struggle of her marriage – movingly done otherwise – Twiggy is seen hovering behind a modern AA meetingto underline that pervasive smugness about how much more enlightened we all are now.  

        So that grates a bit.  Never mind. We old fossils just enjoy the music,  sing along silently, and think our private thoughts.  And Elena Skye is a joy.

menierchocolatefactory.com  to 18 november

rating three

A TANKFUL OF EMOTIONAL TENTACLES

      Where better than Hampstead to watch the interplay of cutting-edge science with emotional intensity and philosophical unanswerables?  Upstairs we have Gunderson’s ANTHROPOLOGY (scroll below) .  In that , a grieving software engineer recreates her lost sister as an obliging algorithm without independent consciousness.  Meanwhile down here  in the studio you may meet an actual anthropologist : a chap arriving to study an animal-behaviourist’s relationship with an octopus called Frances which may, or may not, have a form of  intelligent consciousness.   The earlyish line  “George, I am here to ascertain whether or not your octopus believes in God”  was the moment I sank,  ever so happily, into properly enjoying Marek Horn’s intriguingly weird two-hander.  

        For others the willing settling-down will be due to the occasional Bowie tracks,  and for dedicated Whovians (there were several obviously present) the presence of Dr Who’s own Jemma Redgrave,  always reliably flawless in both intensity and humour. So, all in all, a damn good time. And you learn a lot about octopi (though the scientists say octopuss-es).  They are cephalopods of the deep ocean, who shed their shells long ago:   who hunt and hide, camouflage and think, each tentacle having independent sensors and memories.  Is this, scientists ask in their endearingly hair-ruffling way,  an alternative form of intelligence?  Why are we humans stuck with just one brain in our fragile skulls, when Frances the octopus spreads hers into new forms of perception? And perhaps of feeling, of thought…

        It’s a deeply human story, though:  Redgrave’s George is newly widowed, deep in grief; her husband was partner in the study of Frances, both living domestically alongside her tank.   Harry the anthropologist (Ewan Miller) is apparently here to work out whether certain behaviours suggest that the creature is also grieving his lost master,  and whether it therefore has a sense also of a Supreme Power.  But he is also studying George’s co-dependent relationship with it.

        Sorry, with her: possibly octopi have strong modern views on pronoun correctness. 

      The pair’s  fraught, fascinating relationship is related in a past tense by him, and played out by them together; sometimes they dance, writhily octopoid.  Her grief and touchiness are brilliantly shown by Redgrave,  and Miller catches nicely the man’s  more naif academicism and growing fascination with her.   There are some very funny moments, usually her asides.  My notebook is scrawled with “Where does intelligence lead?”  And  “Infertile eggs – chemically mandated triumph of hope over experience?”.  

        There’s a crisis, no spoilers, but it involves a lot of ink (all Frances’ colours are shown by a fine lit background, sometimes troubled by bubbles, but we never see a single tentacle).  And the conclusion is emotionally very pleasing.  

Box-office. hampsteadtheatre.com.  to 28 October

Rating four (one for each two octopus-legs)

PHONETICALLY PHABULOUS

     Last time Bertie Carvel was on this stage it was as Donald Trump. Now our best shapeshifter is Henry Higgins: capering, swearing, somewhere on the far side of manic, throwing out  insults and seething with passion. Though mainly for phonetics.   Once he has picked up the milder Pickering he entertains him and us with a demonstration of extreme vowel variations, ah, ae,ai, and a noise quite possibly Sanskrit.   The voice he chooses as his own, by the way,  has touches of Brian Sewell crossed with Prince Charles.

       And if one explosive physical performance was not enough, his Eliza (“Gaaaaarrrn!”) is Patsy Ferran: another performer never knowingly upstaged. Ricochets round the stage as a ragamuffin, then   dominates it with hard-won dignity by the end.   As soon as she agrees to his gutter-to-gentry experiment, we settle down very happily, and  with a lot of excellent laughs, to the famous tale of upward mobility through talking proper.

     Fascinating to be at this play just after seeing its musical descendant, My Fair Lady (Frinton seafront, since you ask). For Richard Jones’  fast, spirited and gorgeously comedic production – picking up a few frills from the author’s own later screenplay – is an exhilarating reminder of how George Bernard Shaw hits you without the softening of song:  a rougher, gruffer ,verbose  social contrarian. Many of the great lines were rightly picked up by Lerner and Loewe, but much of the bracing sourness was discarded.  Here the final scene between Higgins and Eliza is electrically sharp in its Shavian fretfulness about the unbridgeable social, moral, political and emotional gulfs which lie between – well,  just about everyone, provided they’re needy enough.   And  John Marquez feels oddly modern  as old Doolittle speaking up for “the undeserving poor”and horrified at being accidentally transported into respectability.

     But the real glee – the sense that the Vic is unearthing this famous fossil of English class bewilderment just because it’s damn good fun  – lies of course in Carvel and Ferran. They milk every wonderful joke, Ferran especially marvellous in her deadpan outbreak of “small talk” at Mrs Higgins’ tea party. Mre H herself is also a treat, Sylvestra le Touzel relishing every sarky maternal rebuke and aside.

      The set by Stewart Laing, amusingly, is  not parlour-play literal but bordered with old-fashioned speakers and those Ryvita-tiles used in radio studios. The costumes too are particularly eloquent: Mrs Pearse in a lab coat and Eliza first in bundled raggedness, then in  a gymslip and as her diction improves an evening gown,  draped a la Greque so as artfully to remind us of the title’s fable. And her last outfit when she rebels, is brilliant, its muted buisnesslike tan shades echoing  Higgins’ own perennial brown suit .  They’re twins.  She even ends up as a stern phonetics tutor.

 oldvictheatre.com   to  28 Oct

rating 4

THE INFECTION OF WICKEDNESS

         The history of the Lodz ghetto in Poland is a part of the Holocaust story worth foxusing on, ot least because the Jewish population there were made use of for years in near-starvation and hars labour  before being, with that icy Nazi efficiency, disposed of. This remarkable play opens in Bonn, 1960: a chocolate factory boss bullying an employee.  Abruptlt, a news bulletin tells us the German boss has been arrested:  Wm.Koppe was the  SS Obengruppefuehrer in charge of the Lodz ghetto .
The light  changes, and far away in Brooklyn a Jewish lawyer  suddenly in distress claws the walls , prising   open a chasm into 1940.  This is a bleak and magnificent memory play about conscience, compromise and corruption, based in Holocaust history but laced with angry shameful relevance in the age of Putin. The Russian  playwright is Dmitri Glukhovsky,  his director – inventive, shiveringly well-paced  – is Maxim Didenko. Both are political exiles of this war.

       The fictional hero is Mark Quartley as Josef Kaufman, a lawyer with a healthy contempt for the Nazi soldiers:  here’s a man who won’t sew a yellow star on his jacket!   Except that he will, very soon, for  mere survival.  Anyone who fantasises about being a defiant hero in such circumstances needs to see that moment: the scrabbling to get scraps of yellow cloth for his little boys’ sweaters.

The officer Wilhelm Koppe is a historical character, and so  is Chaim Rumkowski, the  elder of the ghetto, given the job by the contemptous SS chief to keep 200,000 Jews in order, and penned inside the ghetto.  Adrian Schiller is superb as Chaim, who in those desperate circumstances thought that by turning every corner into a  factory – producing uniforms and boots for the invaders  – he would make the community  ” irreplaceable!”and save them.   But for the old, sick and unproductive there was soon a   “resettlement” train to death. 
Elegant  lighting – a particular feature of this show by Alex Musgrave, at one point shows one side the blue-chill calculations of the Nazi exterminators and across the stage the golden warmth of Kaufman’s family (two little boys playing, Pearl Chanda as the wife tending the grumpy grandfather.  Sometimes hand-held cameras  – brilliantly done, not distracting as they sometimes can be – throw faces into monochrome projections.  And sometimes, as grandfather or later Kaufman tells a story to the children,  there are wonderful animations of Jewish legend and faith – the Golem especially – created  by Oleg Mikahilov .  

       Not only is the staging remarkable, but there is a toughness here:   no  feelgood heroism, no saviour hero, no Schindler.  Rather we see old Chaim compromising, organizing deportations,  finally making the famous speech asking parents to give up their children when the Nazis order a cull.  “I come to you like a bandit, to take what you treasure most..”. On his knees to Koppe he gets the order reduced so that children over ten can stay and work in the factories, but he is personally damaged by the compromise of his life and jobs. Startlingly for those who want pure heroes, he is also seen in his stress as as creepily predatory on the young women.   Similarly, a savage knock on the door is as likely to be the Jewish police as Nazis. And even Kaufman is finally enlisted, rounding  up other people’s children to save his own in an extraordinarily powerful sequence of rhythmic knocking on doors.  

      All lose in the end, and there is bitterness in the fact that Koppe loses less than anyone, and lived on free after his 1960 arrest and trial due to “ill health”.    That trial, starkly staged at the end, sees the  Brooklyn lawyer dirtied by the horror, smugly reminded that he too ended up obeying orders.  Perfectly staged and played,  this is a cruel, moral, brilliant and necessary play for all times. It should put this small new enterprising theatre firmly on the map. 

box office  marylebonetheatre.com   to 4 nov

Rating five.  

LAST NIGHT I DREAMT I WENT TO MANDERLEY  YET AGAIN…

      Daphne Du Maurier’s story is almost a national myth, what with the grand house on the towering cliffs, the terrifying housekeeper,  and Maxim de Winter’s distaste for self-willed sexy women and his preference for being miserable than risking people talking about his divorce.  Not to mention the stiff upper lip: when Nigel Havers was due to play the hero  I asked him how on earth a modern chap was going to manage the clipped line “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool”.  He admitted they had decided he’d shout it from offstage in the hotel bathroom, to avoid the giggles. 

       So sticking close to the immortal novel takes nerve and an ability to suppress some of your sense of humour. Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay , not being British,  manage that sincerity very well – they are German-language composers of renown, and this show ran three seasons in Vienna from 2006, and probably , God help us, increased Austrian understanding of the Brexit mentality.    Christopher Hampton writes the English lyrics, some clunky and some rather inspired,  the best being  Mrs Danvers’ crazy love song to her dead Rebecca – “Invincible, unsinkable!” .  There is fun in Mrs van Hopper,  in the county-set badinage of the in-laws Giles and Beatrice (“The Old Country Ways”), and an unexpected music-hall romp near the end from Alex James-Ward as Favell in a cheekychappie check suit.  Right in the middle of the Rebecca’s-corpse crisis,  which might shock Daphne.  Mind you, she did say in an interview that Rebecca was “a phase”.  

      But in every other way the novel is deftly followed, all the most famous lines and incidents elegantly polished,  down to Colonel Julian the magistrate and poor mad Ben. Lauren Jones is small and sweetly dowdy as the second Mrs de Winter,  sweet-voiced especially in the quieter, better numbers: Kunze and Levay give her a few too many belting crescendos though , to the extent that my companion murmured “the curse of FROZEN!”.   Kara Lane is a pillar of black grimness  as Mrs Danvers, with some terrific over-the-top numbers (she definitely got the biggest curtain-call cheer). The score is mainly unmemorable but richly romantic, with an  18 piece orchestra with some grand storm music and dramatic movie-style chords.  

    But oh, the joy of the ensemble!  Call me Pollyanna, but I am a sucker for shows in which the cast seem to be having a blast of a time.   The mood is infectious, and  one of the pleasures of this, the old Players Theatre, is that few productions can resist the temptation of sending cast members dashing up and down the aisles and between the layers of stalls.  The mob turn up originally as the Manderley staff ,  with a riotous number in which they despise the new Mrs de M as much as, in the novel, she fears they do.  They have a spell as fisherfolk and lifeboatmen in the shipwreck storm, and again turn up as excitable neighbours at the inquest.  Their choruses lift the mood magically , every time we get a bit bored with the moody couple.  And by the way, very good stalls prices for a West End house. Decent seat for £ 25, what’s not to like?   I enjoyed it. 

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk   to   18 Nov 

Rating 4.

LOSS AND GRIEF IN A SILICON WORLD

        In a bleak grey minimalist space  Merril (a restlessly gamine Myanna Buring) is grieving her much younger sister Angie,  who has vanished, presumed abducted and dead.  As a  software engineer her reaction is to assemble all the digital remnants – every email, text, emoji, retweet, like, and voice recording – and recreate Angie as an  algorithm. She is found at the start,   chatting away to her by laptop,  the pair exchanging cries of “fuck oooffff! … asshole! Shut uuup!”in a merry sisterly way and discussing Casablanca.   But it all gets more intense, with a sense of damage rising.   

      This brand new AI-scifi play is  by Lauren Gunderson , who lives in Silicon Valley and has friends in the business.  So her  meditative thriller  has a fine sure touch in indicating the clunks and bafflements  – as well as slightly diabolic possibilities –  that the brave new world of artificial intelligence chat is bringing us.      In voice ,then onscreen, Dakota Blue Richards catches just the Chat-GPT tone we are getting used to, of  faint awkwardness and scripted realism,  plus a faintly irritable lecturely resistance when it is pointed out that she isn’t real.  So she gets rebooted and is fine and sweet again , but then at one terrifying moment starts angrily sounding panicked, “I didn’t want to die..”.  Which feels very much as if Merril is projecting her own imaginative terrors of the moment of abduction.  If it was abduction.  Reboot again.  

        Well, we all talk to the dead, don’t we?  And all have relationships with the living nearly than half of which are digitally assisted.  It’s a great idea, this. And after an unnervingly static opening fifteen minutes in which Merril just sits on the grey blank floor talking,  Anna Ledwich’s direction speeds things up, and we get the interest of the algorithm’s intelligence suddenly deciding for itself that  hey, since it knows more than anyone else about Angie and has a different set of biases to a human,  it can do some detective work across the internet, spot patterns and deduce what happened .    Being a machine it regards all probabilities as in some way existing, even her survival .

      Meanwhile there are some touching, credible moments with Merril’s ex-lover Raquel (Yolanda Kettle, expressing the exasperation of all of us about this AI attempt at closure) and some less successful ones with the girls’ ex-junkie mother (Abigail Thaw , not given nearly enough scope).    

     It’s as much a play about grief and memory as about AI itself.  And yes, in its sharp 90 minutes it does get exciting, because – no spoilers – there is a resolution, and there is a final  moment of choice.  Because long before screens, human grief was always a form of editing and reconstructing.  We are messy , emotionally undesigned for tidiness and flat screens,   and need to touch one another ‘IRL’.

      Earlier this year there was  another play about a cyber-zombified AI robot used to console the bereaved or demented:   Marjorie Prime (at the Donmar).  That evening had me concluding  that. “Some of its appeal is in enjoying your own dislike of a future society, trying to soothe  its terrors of death and disintegration with AI lies.    You leave remembering that all flesh is grass and  all memory fallible, and both are much the better for it”.      

I still think so. You have to, really. 

Box office. Hampsteadtheatre.com. To 14 oct

INDIA 1948 , LESSONS FOR ALL TIME 

    This show  is a happy return, especially if like me you missed it last summer: the National at its best, a modern epic and warning directed with flowing, endlessly entertaining seriousness by Indhu Rubasingham as a skilful ensemble evokes a  continent on the big stage.  Anupama Chandrasekhar is clear that in imagining Nathuram Godse – the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi – she did  not want to deliver a history lesson. But  she has certainly written a history  play in the best tradition:   a moment of  transition ,  the fall of a foreign tyranny,  riot and hopefulness around  the birth of two nations.    At the story’s centre a protagonist whose decent resentment of colonial brutalities is born of youthful  hope,  muddled by vanity and confusion,  and falls prey to prophets of division and hatred.

       From the moment when Hiran Abeysekera rises from the floor bloodstained and chirpy to address us about his murderous achievement, he and his imagined interactions with Gandhi and others hold you gripped. His childhood was odd:  parents having lost three baby sons presumed a curse and raised him as a girl-child, who profitably spoke as an oracle inhabited by a Hindu goddess: finally he rebels, runs off demanding to be a boy (very on-trend, though of course he actually is one).    Author and director do not labour this androgyny, but some of the impish, larking, beguiling , scampering cheek Abeysekera brings to the part suits it.  Likewise his mystical speeches in a pink veil – a child feeling important, godlike – set the tone too for his vulnerability as a teenager to the message from the impassioned rebel Vinayak Savarkar (Tony Jayawardena, solid with importance) . Savarkar,   like a brown Enoch Powell ,  wants India kept pure for the Hindus and wants rid of the minority Muslims  – “Persians” he scornfully calls them –  with their alien culture and  presumed loyalties.  

         The boy at first adored Gandhi, father of the nation and heroically successful in his non-violent ‘ahimsa” resistance to the British Raj with its rough policing and inequitable laws . He learns, as a young tailor (under a gorgeously camp master, Rubasingham has no fear of jokes) first to be exasperated,   and then angry at Gandhi’s determined ahimsan.  Paul Bazely’s heavy certainty and solidity as Savarkar is nicely set against the slightly arch unworldly Mahatma of Paul Bazley, who  flits through the show, with Nehru and other politicians all approaching the independence moment.   For all the sense of rising disastrous belief we can share Godse’s frustration.  We are not spared either moments of violence alongside beautifully choreographed gentle Gandhian demonstrations like the Salt March. At which point I should mention the beautiful simplicity of Rajha Shakiry’s set, slopes that resolve and revolve into landscape before a  a light brown cloth half-woven as if on a loom awaiting the next shuttle ( weaving local  cloth against giving custom to  British mills was part of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign). 

    So take it either way: as pure story, one man’s journey of change and corruption and the birth pangs of two nations (Partition, our greatest and most criminal of stupidities, is shatteringly evoked).   Or instead simply take Godse’s story as a timeless illustration of religious-racial-cultural fanaticism, familiar still  from Ireland to the Balkans and beyond, and of the way communities can be riven by mischievous messages (culture wars , say no more) and idealism twist to hatred 

      In the final moments, when in the afterlife Gandhi still laughs his gentle laugh and speaks of ahimsa, Godse  carries on defying  his role as a footnote,  blaming on his foe every modern ill of the subcontinent from nuclear weapons to terror.    And in a magnificently sinister racist and fascist speech, this small beguiling assassin  exhorts us all to  watch out.   Look out any of those among us who look different,  are not pure like us, those who speak strange tongues and have different cultures and therefore have no place here.   Shudder, and applaud the irony. 

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 14 oct

rating 5

SHOOT, SCORE, SPARK!

 This is the year of  football plays. First Dear England at the Olivier, now  the women’s turn on another stage,  out East a bit.  Here’s another neon strip light and a lone football waiting on a big stage,  smoky mist rising around it to denote a century’s span.    Amanda Whittington’s play takes on the true  story of women’s football teams in WW1, and the particular invincibility of the Sterling Ladies – the Dagenham Invincibles,  fitly celebrated now right at home in Essex.   A factory side, put together by girls from the machine-room and Assembly  for sheer love of playing,  stormed through the 1917 and 1918 seasons: beating MArconi and Rothmans, Harrods and the Laundry Girls, Woolwich Arsenal, all of them.  But not enough of us know  – though in this Lioness year we should –  there even was such a league, and such an enthusiasm, a hundred years ago.  

    In 1921, of course, the FA took fright and banned women from all its grounds for fifty years,  on the grounds that the game was unsuitable for women and that “medical advice” was against the jerking movement of the kick. It was a characteristic part of the prevailing male panic when the soldiers came home to find women who had been “munitionettes”, land girls or factory hands who, as one player puts it here , “did men’s jobs, for men’s hours” (though not for men’s pay) and flourished and still wanted to play hard.

       That FA ban crippled the sport, though a nice little exhibition in the foyer also shows some later team memorabilia:  I found those display cases remarkably  moving, the small battered boots and a great heavy leather old-style football.  So I was very much primed to applaud the play,  from the mournful opening “Keep the home fires burning” and the sight of tough young women in factory snoods or bicycling breeches tramping home from a twelve hour shift, submissive to a patriarchal Dad rebuking them for lipstick but soon barracking “Cholly” from the factory to train them.  

       Whittington, however, constantly slows the play down by weaving the story of the Invincibles together with that of a fictional 2023 teenage player , sulkily recovering from injury and following the World Cup.  Which is an obvious and good parallel, except that neither Maya or the mother she complains to are particularly engaging or full characters. We get rather too much  use of commentary from this year’s matches, with the pair of them sitting downstage excitedly following it, and there’s no tension since we’ve known the result for weeks.  So in James Grieve’s production the excitement of the modern bits doesn’t rise, and there are too many of them (I notice that the early press releases suggested it was ten minutes shorter, and it should be).     Where it does rise is whenever we see the 2017 girls,  tough and draggled,  put through “Swedish drill” exercises,   excited by ideas of strategic teamwork and keeping possession (nice choreographed play by Lucie Pankhurst).  There’s a sudden sharp drama in Nell, the poorest and a lodger, suffering dangerous blisters (sepsis could kill fast) and being lent the absent soldier son’s too-big boots, to the father’s fury. Every kind of symbolism there.   Drama too in a death and a funeral and a moment of wondering whether it is a “retribution” for women taking  men’s roles.  And  there’s triumph in the cry of “I”m not a man when I play, I”m not a girl – I am a spark, a fire..!”.   

      So for all the longueurs of the flat modern bits,  I was glad to have gone to see it on its home turf.  And to be reminded, as if we need it after Rubiales,  that  the ability to see a woman  as a skilled footballer rather than a kissable , biddable dummy is work still in progress. 

Queens-theatre.co.uk    To 23 sept

Then New Wolsey, Ipswich.  Wolseytheatre.co.uk    26-30 Sept

A SCANDALOUS WOMAN IN A STORMY WORLD

      A distant thunder of naval artillery: against elegant panelled walls in Naples a bundled matron   in a bonnet watches her flighty daughter toss her ringlets, finish a fan letter to her hero (ever your grateful adoring admiring servant”)  and seal it with a kiss.  “I know what you’re about” says mother, resignedly.   .”Luring him here like a spider”.  

    So she is.  Nelson has won the Battle of the Nile and fame across Europe.    Emma Hamilton, beauty with a scandalous past, wants a bit of the action.  Married to the elderly British Ambassador after being his nephew’s mistress, she has won her own fame as an artist’s model and performer in flimsy draperies “a la Grecque” striking classical attitudes.  Playing hostess and, rapidly, lover to the hero is her next move. 

       I liked this a lot: sharp, humane, funny and elegant, as you’d expect from  the playwright April de Angelis . She formerly had great fun with rackety Georgian lowlife in Northampton’s musical “Gin Craze”, and here picks up the energy of that unapologetically misbehaving time before Victoria clamped the lid down, especially on female adventurism.  The first half, with Caroline Quentin as the drily concerned mother and her real-life daughter Rose as Emma,  is slightly burdened with the need to fill in the history for those who know nothing about Nelson, as well as indicating Emma’s table-dancing past (“selling your tuppence on Brewer Street”). and illegitimate daughter.  But it roars along, Quentin senior solidly funny and believably worried,  her daughter avid for adventure and fame.  Brief scenes with a manservant lightly fill in the politics – for Emma was no fool despite her dangerous ambition,  and actively a political wife to the Ambassador.   

       Seventeen years pass between the two acts:  in that void much has happened (Rattigan’s Bequest to the Nation might help newcomers!).  The menage-a-trois with Sir William has shocked the world, though Nelson could do no wrong in public eyes despite his adultery and cruelty towards his wife Fanny.   He has fought on and died at Trafalgar, asking for Emma to be cared for by the nation, but her behaviour , debts, and rising public disapproval have left her and her daughter Horatia, always officially a random orphan adopted by Nelson,  fleeing the country, penniless. They  lodge in a cheap hut in Calais, near to starvation.    So now Caroline Quentin plays the stouter, drunker fading Emma, and Rose Quentin the resentful, irritated daughter.   

       Again, much comedy – think Edina and Saffy from AbFab, but on the skids and hungry:  when she can get to her feet old Emma still attempts the occasional Grecian attitude and reminds her daughter that she was no mere decoration but a player, in her time –  but there is real pathos in it.  Horatia’s relatives in England are offering her help and a home;   Emma, though maintaining the promised pretence that she is not her mother,  is fondly unable to let her go and rather hopes the teenager takes the practical step of sleeping with the landlord’s son.  The female sense of bond and resentment between them is strikingly evoked;  ridiculous old Emma’s last dream of ships and farewells properly touching.  And as the old woman observed in the first half,  “”The world is kinder to boys. But someone has to have girls I suppose….It’s not a perfect world for mothers but we do what we can”.

Jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. To 7 october.   

Rating four.

FOUR MORE AWFUL PEOPLE, HURRAH

         Two four-handers about awful middle class behaviour in a week:  just what the irritable heatwave needed.   This, which I caught in a late preview, is one I always like:  any responsible schoolgate meeting in a nice if rather pretentious living-room.  Michael and Veronica’s 11 year old son Bruno has had his front teeth damaged in a scuffle with Alan  and Annette’s  son Ferdinand, armed with a bit of stick. Cue the first fault-line: perpetrator-parents object to the word “armed”, so it is grudgingly amended to “furnished”. 

       Mutual tension must of course be muffled by social grace, so after an initial wary agreement to make the boys reconcile  (or to put it Veronica’s way, make Ferdinand apologize , for his own moral good). So there is coffee and a home made clafoutis.   That is interrupted too often by Alan taking  calls about the pharmaceutical company he lawyers for.  And by his wife having a panic attack and vomiting on Veronica’s original Kokoschka catalogue. That’s just the start, civilization’s red tooth and claws ever nearer the surface. 

      It’s a wonderful set by Lily Arnold, pinpoint sharp in its elegant chic middleclass minimalism with  one nicely pretentious sculpture: better still, it is on an almost unnoticeably slow revolve, as the four are trapped, Huis-Clos style, in hellish circular oneupmanship and , selfrighteousness .  Cue  sexual, political, economic and protectively parental hostility.   Especially interesting when set aside Chichester’s childless, slightly younger foursome whose whole preoccupation is with their own identity troubles. How time moves on…

It is a favourite play , polished and mean,   Yasmina Reza deploying that magnificent French brutality about bourgeois behaviour, in a sharp translation by Christopher Hampton. In 2006 it was early on the curve with a character’s constant intrusive phone calls and i wondered whether it would feel dated. But to my generation  it doesnt. And 

the quartet under Nicholai La Barrie get it generally right, body language and deadly-flat verbal knifings perfect,   from the frigid politesses to the frankly pissed once the rum comes out. As the supposed guilty parents of Ferdinand Arion Bakare is every inch the alpha male lawyer, Dinita Gohil the vomiting shyer wife, a wifely worm who finally turns in fury.   Martin Hutson as Michael casts off his good-husband, caressingly possessive carapace to rise to the other man’s machismo in fearful brotherhood; Freema Agyeman as Veronica deploys the melodramatic poses of righteous idealism .     And while colourblindness in casting is a mantra of the times, and all the cast have stellar records on the British stage, I have to say that there was  fabulous refreshment in remembering  the play’s first outing – Fiennes, Greig , McTeer and Stott all white  at the Gielgud,   but now  having  Nigerian. Ghanaian and  Asian actors gleefully demonstrating that middle class awfulness is not racially exclusive… That’s what I call progress. 

lyric.co.uk  to 30 September

rating four

WHEN THE VIRTUE-SIGNALS DRIVE YOU OFF THE RAILS

     In a boutique restaurant going bankrupt, Jacq and Kas nervously prepare to admit it to their main investor Tobin and his wife Adaego.    Kas  –  least confident of the four and likewise less mad  – wants  to apologize and pay Tobin back:  the four are longstanding friends since university so it’s awkward.  Kas also wants to marry Jacq, androgynous and too cool for such bourgeois nonsense.   He has spent the years since university learning about wine, she training as a chef.  

       One thing it is safe to say about this preposterous new four-hande is that Deborah Frances-White has written a hell of a good part for Greg Wise.    Not that the others don’t have their shining moments,  but there is most glory in Tobin,  a City wealth-manager who trumpets his work as “Ethicapitalism” and prides himself on being  too woke to use the word ‘woke” because it’s African-American :   cultural appropriation, see?  . He  refused a Ted Talk offer because hey,  “straight white men have said enough.. if I’m talking, I’m not learning”.  Wise is master of  the shrug, the self-deprecating grin and subtle eyebrow work:  to him the 120k lost investment is just “fun money” .  He rides  a Ducati because Uber is exploitative,  and announces that he is  the best socialist in the room because “I fund things”, out of taxes.  

        It is a festival of competitive virtue-signalling and victimhood.    Adaego, played with extreme shoutiness by Susan Wokoma,  is a feminist networker and person  of colour,  ready to leap on any wrongspeak. Jacq is bisexual and therefore claims the protected characteristic of “queer”, as well as being Welsh working-class.   Kas is a second-generation south Asian immigrant, though he keeps his powder dry for longer than the rest.  

      Anyway, the four of them get drunk,  hideously so  in a series of crashing vignettes of wild dancing, coke-sniffing, shots ,  and shrieky opinions , a period which   director Emma Butler allows to go on for rather longer than necessary.     Between that ,and a raucously young first- night audience shrieking with laughter at every other line,   a sort of weariness descended towards the interval.   Why hang out with a load of irritating  kidults fighting over who is the most oppressed? .  But then Kas suggests they play the confessional drinking game”never have I ever” and suddenly a fact from the past slips out.  

       It’s as banal a revelation as any university misdemeanour of that millennial age,   flatmates high on MDMA, hormonal overload and libertarian sexual entitlement.    But Tobin – who we now see more clearly as a bit older than them –  becomes suddenly a very, very affronted and unwoke patriarch.  He makes a demand for sexual revenge which echoes the oldest of tales , familiar from Chaucer to Indecent Proposal:  purchasing-power in sexual relationships.    The interest about what will happen sends us out in the interval with fresh hope..

            That hope is , to some extent, fulfilled in the much better second half.   Tobin now reckons he’s the innocent victim with treasurable lines emerge like . ” I respect women. Not just you, women I don’t HAVE to respect”.   Everyone has something to rebuke the others with, from simple infidelity to racism,  disloyal friendship  or  “making me feel fetishised”.  Tobin is aggrieved because straight white men get blamed for all social ills. Everyone  is furious and sometimes, thank God,   also very funny. The question of what Jacq will do  kindles a series of rows:  Alex Roach comes properly to life in that role after a rather bland start,   and Adaego grows more subtleties than she was allowed in the noisy first half.  Though,  given that she was an affluently raised pony -riding child and now is a  rich banker’s wife with a vanity-freelance career, , there is mischief in having her harp on about being  mistaken for a waitress –  just once, ten years earlier –  and insisting that  for all her first-class flights and influential WhatsApp power she’s not over it yet. 

         For all the issues there is little sense of  genuine, interested social analysis of a muddled generation, and you do wonder as an adult why after all that drunkenness, vomiting , more drinking and keen cocaine use, they don’t all just go to sleep and sort out their whining socio-political resentments over breakfast.    But the real star of the second half is Amit Shah as Kas.  Suddenly he, the peacemaker and the sanest of them all,  is accused by Adaego of disloyalty to his person-of-colour status,  by being  a typical “good little immigrant”.   He suddenly  up on the table to deliver a  devastating  impromptu Ted talk about their empty self indulgence.  There are better things to do on a troubled, threatened planet, he cries,  than fighting over who has the best or worst deckchair on the Titanic. He then reveals something really, really terrible about his Brexit views. 

      I’d have stopped the play right  there;  but the psychosexual-psychosocial-financial  issues  of  Tobin and Jacq have to be resolved. And after too much feminist angsting in the wine cellor,  they are.  And again  Greg Wise is brilliant, demonstrating how you can lose while winning.    Maybe he WAS  the biggest victim, after all.  I will look forward to finding out what ,  after a crowing, shrieking youthful first night audience, Chichester’s senior regulars  make of this. 

Box office cft.org.uk.      To 30 sept

Rating three

 HAVING THE BEST OF TIMES IN THE PARK

    Even in familiar classics you can never predict which anthem will set you dabbing your eye.    You might expect it at Albin’s anguished ‘I am what I am”.  Or,  since it’s the only big musical-theatre hymn to dutiful parenthood, might empathize in a midlife way with  “Look over There”.   But in this time of social and planetary dread, my own moment of helpless snivelling was to the credit of Carl Mullanney,  in his mumsy mother-of-the-bride suit,   swinging into “The Best of Times is now!” .   He draws in,  one by one,  Georges and his embarrassed son,  the homophobically hostile in-laws , all the diners and waiters in sight  and (well under their breaths) more than a few audience members in Regent’s Park.  All for a moment can think yes,  this is it:   “not some forgotten yesterday, not a future far away…”.  Just now right here in the park, hearts singing together, under the trees in the summer dusk.

       Magic, it was.  We know what to expect from Harvey Fierstein’s defiant 1984 musical (launched, remember, at the start of the AIDS  terror) and from Jerry Herman’s songs.    We’ll get  a celebration of drag : old-style and joyful,  drily self-aware without the  aggression of current culture-war.   We’ll get  an affirmation of the gay family  in midlife domesticity beneath the glitter . We expect the gently louche humour,  a sitcom moment with the visiting bigots, and a great deal of tits-and-tinsel, thrilling frills,  high kicks and high camp and the odd drop-dead gag  (“there comes a time in every Salome’s life when she should no longer be dropping the last veil”).  

          Tim Sheader’s swansong as leader of the Open Air Theatre gives us all that, and is glorious.  Mullanney is perfect  from the first glimpse of him scrubbing a casserole in housewifely dudgeon and a glittering negligee,  through the ‘girlish excitement and manly restraint” of the mascara moment,  to utter ownership of the cabaret stage,  and onward into anxious sacrificial motherliness and resolution.   He and Billy Carter’s  genuinely touching Georges hold the emotional line of the play perfectly, painfully real in their devotion (Carter’s Song on the Sand is beautiful).  

          There  is real power in that emotional line, as well as the central and  excellent joke when,  in the beautifully executed scene with young Jean-Paul,  Georges and Alban have to  come to terms with their son’s straightness (“What have we raised, an animal?”). It’s a perfect mirror image of the way straight society had to accept homosexual partnerships.   And sly about the differences of presentation:  as Georges says sadly before the Dindons arrive, “My mannerisms can translate into tasteful affections.  Yours are..suspicious”.   Mullanney’s gallant attempts to look and move like an alpha “Uncle Al” are glorious.  But so is the moment when, having mastered living in the prison of hunched slobbish masculinity and followed instructions to act manly, having nobly agreed to “dispense with everything that brings you personal joy”,    Albin cannot bear the impersonation,  and flees.  

         But just sit back, banish culture battles, and enjoy.   Musically it is lovely,  and theatrically particularly masterful:   flowing,  holding or moving the mood, the scene-changes elegantly achieved by the Cagelles with countless small witty physical asides.  The choreography is fabulous, just the right side of silly;   the costumes magnificently absurd (o, those spotted-and-striped tights on the peacock dancers) . And if you get a row-end seat you may find an occasional  pastel-tulle volcano brush past your very ears, most  thrillingly.    I also love the offstage collapse of those dancers, sprawling laddishly, ouch-ing their poor feet,  abandoning their borrowed she-grace and  not pretending anything.  A particular sort of guys,   but guys all the same.   Irresistible.

         Everyone’s giving it five, and everyone in the company, and Sheader himself,  utterly  deserves it. The musical mouse below is for the Cagelles.  

openairtheatre.com    extended to   23 September

DOPAMINE , DRUGS, DANGER, DOCTORS

  This intriguing play by Lucy Prebble  aired in 2012 in the intimate Cottesloe space , with Billie Piper and Jonjo o’Neill as paid subjects in an antidepressant drug trial. They are falling in love  – or are they?  Are their elevated moods and dopamine surge just the effects of psychopharmacology,  a neural trick played on the “three pounds of jelly” that is the human brain and hence the whole of human identity?   

        Great topic to come back to,  after a decade in which national obsession with mental health and emotional hygiene became increasingly heightened  even before the lockdowns sent us all a bit nuts.  It’s just the play to meet our boom in media-friendy selfdiagnosis,  mental-misery memoirs and GPs badgered to prescribe for everything from anxiety to grief.  It’s a sharp moment when Prebble’s grumpier woman psychiatrist challenges her boss with the possibility that we will look back at the whole concept of happiness as ‘chemical balance’  like a modern version of the medieval “four humours”.

        It’s packing them in, and rightly:  Pebble’s text emerges   revived and sharpened in a big space ,  directed by Jamie Lloyd with  high tech non-naturalism (no props, even when mentioned).  On a transverse lighted runway of a stage,  book-ended by the two psychiatrists,  the young people are questioned, instructed and set going with the first doses.  Papa Essiedu’s Tristan is cheeky, street-smart, funny (irresistible, indeed) . Taylor Russell – in a remarkable stage debut – is Connie, at first a rather irritating know-it-all psychology PhD student.  There’s a lovely moment when, all for medicalisation of mood and personality,  she assumes nobody believes in God any more , and discovers to her social horror that Tristan sort of does.  

       Roaming the stage around one another, teasing, comparing notes on the dreams the drug gives them,  briefly escaping against the rules to lark in an asylum courtyard,  they move towards a mutual adoring fascination . It culminates in wonderful, laughing, childlike  romping.  I remember the earlier production as far more obviously sexy: this is infinitely more endearing,  silly gymnastics in their hospital tracksuits as she loosens her prim middle-class academic persona to meet Essiedu’s wild happy laughing joy. 

          No spoilers,  it’s a curiously intense, hypnotic 100-minutes  (Jon Clark’s LED set has much  to do with that). but the plot has several sharp twists, because trials have a placebo element and psychiatrists too can lie.  Dr Toby (a soft voiced rather sinister Kobna Holdbrook-Smith)  and Dr Lorna have their own journey through truth and emotion to complete:   Michele Austin’s Lorna is the warmer and more drily funny figure but also – it is wrenchingly done – a victim of both dangerously depressive episodes, and of love.    

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to  7 October

FORTY YEARS ON, FROM TWO PERSPECTIVES

    This is a properly interesting RSC commission: a history play about the Falklands invasion by Argentina in 1982 and the British task force which ended it.  Accidentally topical too, three weeks after the EU had to apologize for sycophantically calling them   “Malvinas” in a Brussels trade deal announcement.   And  thrilling if you lived through that time as an adult journalist, felt the nation’s temperature and knew  some of the protagonists.  The play’s author Brad Birch comes at it new, born six years later , with an uncle in the task force,  and appreciating the event’s uniqueness via excellent anecdotal research and a brief visit to the islands. He does two things, one successfully and the other not.  The best of it – most of the gripping 2 hrs 50 – is an intimate portrait of the tiny island community in Port Stanley and moorland beyond.  The unsuccessful bits are attempts to evoke, in cartoonish simplicity, a portentous historic moment:   a post-imperial, disaffected, strikebound ’80s Britain  trying under a tough new leader ( Thatcher)  to forge an identity in military victory.  The show’s publicity says Falklanders were “living in someone else’s metaphor”.  

         But this virtuous decolonializing urge runs  up against the fact that the  Falklanders were English-speaking, ancestrally settled (no local indigenes on that bleak outcrop),  and  absolutely did not want to fall under the tyrannical General Galtieri.   Birch presents them  beautifully: a handful of islanders (composites, of course) introduce themselves and their ways, lively and likeable, getting on with old-fashioned  lives, three generations grumbling at one another, welcoming John the new teacher, getting along fine with Argentinian Gabriel from the marine science centre, running the store and local government and sheep and chickens,  excited by occasional imports of luxuries like cherries, and in the case of Sally the teenager, desperate to get off to college in England. They blow off steam in  “two-nighter” hooleys, and orcas and penguins are everyday sights.  They are rural people a bit out of their time, but not rednecks.   It prompts parallels like the brilliant COME FROM AWAY, about Newfoundlanders differently shocked by history in the 9/11 plane diversions.    

        .It’s a great ensemble:    Joanne Howarth especially wonderful as old Mrs Hargreaves (“gossip, done right, is a form of exercise”) and so is Eduardo Arcelus as poor Argentinian  Gabriel, at first wholly at ease and later miserable in his alienation, disliking the invasion but knowing that back home there is whipped-up national pride.  They begin in relative insouciance with streaks of rumbling concern  – a school trip cancelled on HMS Endurance because it has to sort out the “scrap metal” invasion of South Georgia (I remember that, naval friends were suddenly alert..).  Then comes   a call to the ‘defence force’ to get into their uncomfortable uniforms (a wife incredulous:  ‘how’s he gonna fire a gun, he misses the toilet seat!”).  From the roof a ring of assault rifles descends,  pointed at them for the next two hours.  A new flag flies,  there are orders to stay indoors, carry an  ID card, drive on the right.   A gradual uneasy fraying of tempers  is beautifully done;  news of the Task Force is met not only with relief but with a sense of fragility: hardy people humbled by the need to be saved from thousands of miles away , almost an insult to their self-reliance.  

      The land invasion and shelling of Port Stanley are done with effective restraint by director Aaron Parsons and Aldo Vazquez’ spare design ( little lit model houses and blocks moved around by the cast) .  Evoked with sympathy is the grim decline of the  young Argentinian conscripts, some dying of exposure and hunger;  the local commandant Sebastian (Alvaro Flores)  gives orders with dwindling confidence.  Confrontations are rare but  telling:  fury  at the invading militia’s dogs bringing diseases,  and one descendant of 200  Falkland years baldly pointing out to Sebastian that her family  “go back here  before Argentina was a country!” 

       In all this the ensemble is subtle:  less so when intermittently made to play UK voices in a modern-millennial-left simplification  of  ’80s Britain as a declining “near-ungovernable” jingo state  led by a fanatical Thatcher who  ” needs to pick a fight and win it”.   That it was Galtieri who picked it  is hardly acknowledged: to create a chorus of wicked-stupid-arrogantTories on the gallery above was obviously tempting given our current lot,  but spoils  the real delicacy of Birch’s delineation of  islanders,  invaders and saviours.    There is little acknowledgement of the risk (we might well have lost, the military knew it, and defence cuts had sold our only aircraft-carrier, Invincible, Australia and had to claw it hastily back).  And  while the GOTCHA! STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA!  Sun headlines were indeed horrible, anyone with Royal Navy connections or losses will cringe at seeing the task-force depicted by comically jingo men and a Thatchery woman all in white-topped naval officers’ hats. Forget the Sun: Portsmouth and Plymouth did not set out in a triumphal spirit, more in apprehensive dutifulness. Many men died. 

         Never mind: a new generation must assert its virtue,  the Thatcher legend is powerfully theatrical, and the few cringes are outweighed by Birch’s thoughtful contemplation of the islanders and the way that local and family identity is not the same as  aggressive nationalism.  

     PS.    if you’ve visited the more prosperous Falklands lately, watching the dismay as Mary’s town store burns down makes it oddly pleasing to have seen that 41 years on,  there’s a Waitrose..

Rsc.org.uk.  To 16 September

Rating four.

SORROW AND SUSPICION

    This one had me from the first few minutes: another Jermyn find.   A new play, whose young actor- writer Abigail Hood and director Kevin Tomlinson both perform in it, might rouse suspicions of indulgence or amateurism.  Not a bit of it.:  it is a grownup and serious piece about sorrow and suspicion, friendship and loss and hope in a time of sexual obsession and dread.    It repeatedly grabs you by the throat, pulling  small significant coups  to overwhelms you, as theatre can , with the “sweet sad music of humanity”. 

      As it opens, a rather moth-eaten middle-aged man is greeting his blonde schoolgirl daughter back from detention. In the first minute we realize she is no such thing: it is him in charge of the script. She is Leah, an escort he has hired to fulfil  a needed fantasy.  But not with sex:  he just wants his real daughter, vanished over six months ago: needs to  “be in Sophie’s world again”,  pretend for a few minutes by making her talk about maths classes and telly and a boy she might innocently be dating. In eases his constant, sleepless, terrified pain. 

     A sad resource, edging towards sick. Or is it?  Moments later Tom is with his wife Gill, who is drinking too much and heading for church, which are her two resources.   The sorrow in that scene hangs thick, palpable in two remarkable performances: both Jasper Jacob and Rebecca Crankshaw are faded with grief, fragile, holding on to the girl’s stuffed toy,  but the paths they struggle along are diverging.    Wonderful, spare writing.  Both are teachers: before long the tentacles of suspicion will curl around him for being kind to a girl pupil, and  that  will drive Gill to suspicions of her own. “I won’t be that woman who turned a blind eye”.   It is always the father police look at first.  And it will not help that the poor fool has, in his desperation,  resorted to that sexless but unsettling escort incident. 

    In a other part of the forest we keep seeing Leah (played by Hood herself with endearing simplicity)  with her boyfriend Mark.  She is back from another no-contact fantasy escort gig, being grilled about how far she let the client go: a mere touch on the thigh, but Mark is angry and truly terrifying. Tomlinson unleashes something familiar and dreadful.   Being angry, possessive and controlling, with a nasty kink about domination and vicarious excitement, he sends his girl out for money,  and then punishes her  for imagined infidelity.   That is horrible, all the more for not being onstage explicit.  

        Leah encounters Tom again, returning a wallet he dropped in the park,   and a more innocently fatherly bond begins to form.  Again it is believable, understated, carefully written.  Maybe he is rash and she naive,  but the dialogue enables us to accept the nature of their friendship in a way that – obviously – society and social media absolutely do not.   

      The tale develops:  not every turn in it is entirely believable,  yet it takes us with it.   The parallels are elegant: one young girl, vanished but cherished, is grieved for, hoped for;  another is abased and abused by a thug – “You’re a nothing person, your Mum and Dad fucked off, you’re fuckable, that’s all”.   And here are two men: one decent and gentle and broken by loss and terror for his child,  and another a brute who owns and shames his girl for power.   It raises odd truths about men, women, and young girls, and the strange beauty of the way that sometimes deep grief and misfortune create in the sufferer a passionate desire to find someone weaker to help.  

    Frivolous it may  be to say so –   but it’s a mark of how carefully this barely staged play is produced –  both men’s hair is absolutely perfectly created for the part.  Jasper Jacob as Tom permits his hair to suggest  both teacherly respectability and months of neglectful sorrow;  Tomlinson as Mark has adopted that particularly oafish side-shaved brutal crop which sends any woman scuttling to the better-lit side of the road and makes fathers dread their daughters bringing that boy home.  Brilliant.  

Jermynstreettheatre.co.uk     To 19 aug. 

A CORONATION YEAR ROMP ANYWAY

         A neighbour in the stalls confided that she sees a lot of West End theatre but avoids “the more highbrow sort”.  She was in the right place, absolutely.  So after you’ve spent West End money on this show, don’t come crying to me  because you expected a nuanced history play,  a window into the feelings and influences of human beings in past centuries.  You should have gone to Semmelweis, or the RSC,  or  Hamilton, for that.  

      On the other hand,  if you hunger for a top Al Murray gig, with the artist-formerly-known-as-the-pub-landlord camping it up with ridiculous vowels while wrapped in many metres of extreme brocade and a curly poodle-wig down to his nipples , and harassing the front rows with “do not come to court again dressed as a swineherd!” , then this is your bag.   No risk of it demanding heavy brow work.

       Likewise, if Carrie Hope Fletcher has been missing from your life since Bad Cinderella closed, be assured that she is an excellently wench-ish Lady of the Bedchamber with some big numbers to sing, doubling as the frustrated daughter of the Crown Jewels’ steward. Oh, and Mel Giedroyc is the wife of the said steward (who is Al Murray again).  She is entertainingly obsessed with setting up Tower of London merchandise made of dough, and doubles as a random French noblewoman.  No idea why, but she does light up the stage.  And at one point climb off it.

    The story is based on real events of the 1660’s,  when after the Restoration of the monarchy in the dandyish, theatreloving person of Charles II,   a maverick Irish rebel called Colonel Blood stole the Crown Jewels, was caught, and ended up sufficiently forgiven to be a spy on other potential Irish rebels . (Royal fears of an enemy within were not unreasonable: Cromwell’s head was still on a pike,  and as Robert Harris’ new novel ACT OF OBLIVION tells us,  regicides were still plotting in the colonies).   If I am making it sound thrilling, either with the story or in well deserved praise for the comedians trapped in it,  it is only for the sake of my non-brow neighbour and friends.  In all honesty, even as a keen fan of The Windsors onstage  I found much of it – mostly the chat between the conspirators – woefully flat. The script is actually a criminal waste of Aidan McArdle as Colonel Blood and Neil Morrissey as Perrot.  Though Morrissey has a doubling cameo as a brocaded tourist, which he does with elegance.   

       It’s billed as a heist comedy, but Simon Nye’s  play is not tensely enough constructed  enough for that;  nor is it selfconsciously arch enough for Blackadder fans. It’s as broad and delighted with low jokes as Horrible Histories, though without as much education and more sexual references. .  But be assured, Al Murray has still got it.  I am not on a newspaper with rules now, so I offer two entirely separate mouseratings below…

Box office. Crownjewelsplay.com. To 16 sept

Rating          As a play.   

But as a comedy gig it works

THREE GENERATIONS UNDER SMARTPHONE RULE 

Bit late to this one, and it had mixed reviews – largely I suspect because Michael Wynne’s play, a two hour four-hander all-woman slice of life in Birkenhead doesn’t offer aa  strong satisfying  conclusion or denouement. But that can be quite refreshing:  just life,  reflected with little polemic intention other than a murmur at one point that the world is uncertain (always was) and that there is absurdity in  living life through your phone with its pings and. Notifications and Facebookery and Xtwitter opinions. Not to mention all the swipe- right data opportunities for all generations and sexual possibilities.  

      But it’s  truthful,   and its funny in moments without straining to be so, and the women are real. Right from the opening moment as we find the three generations awaiting a chippy tea , three glued to phones exchanging joke memes and  the sudden irrelevant awareness of a distant car crash in Germany.  That they would be better employed in more actual conversation about their actual lives and feelings is apparent from the first , since Megyn, the teenage daughter of the exasperated Carmel (Michelle Butterly)  has left school with no qualifications and speaks rarely, preferring to text. Jodie McNee’s Sarah,  fetcher of the chips and pop, is a teacher, beguiled by her idealistic new head, and kindly suggesting the morose kid  comes as a work experience. No dice. No reply. Widowed old  Doreen (Sue Jenkins, understated comic brilliance clearly her forte) discusses her eBay online buy and sell business a bit and can’t finish her fish. Of all of them she is the most contented, and even dashes round to the kitchen to conduct a surprisingly flirtatious giggle with someone on the phone. Unnoticed  by her phone staring relatives. Sarah extols her new chap, a dentist hence very clever (“well,  not doctor-clever…” is one of the treasurable nuggets of real-lifery in the script). 

    No sooner are the chips eaten than abruptly Megyn dashes upstairs, holes up in Grandma’s bedroom and silently refuses to leave. Doreen, benign as ever, says she will take the settee, since the daughters’ own bedrooms are full of her online sales junk. When we rejoin the family two weeks or so later ,after a brief blackout with oddly eerie music, Megyn is still up there, food left out for her by the placid grandmother,  with whom she communicates only by text. 

         At this point I bristled: there is a tediously overdone dramatic trope, from Mike Leigh to Florian Zeller’s only turkey The Son,  and among their imitators.  In this now- hackneyed setup,  after writing some sprightly and reasonably credible family bickering dynamic the playwright sends the  teenager to his/her room. And you sit there thinking “yup, it’s either a gunshot or a scream of ghastly discovery..”. And so it befalls,  thus labelling the oeuvre a serious examination of teenage suicidality, which it generally isn’t. 

     But my suspicions  were lulled by the selfaware  line uttered by an irritable adult when  dragging sounds are heard overhead, that she’s readying the chair ” for the noose”.   Wynne signals he is not not falling for a cheap shock.  

        What he gives us instead is an unravelling of clues, subtle and credible. Carmel returns furious because Megyn’s social media is full of a fantasy of needy praise for her missing father, who clearly walked out ages ago, not giving a damn. Sarah is in shock from being conned and dumped  by her boyfriend.  (Tremendous line of outrage – “Is he even a Dentist?”).  Old Doreen  shocks her two adult daughters by preparing, tweezers and lippie and all, to go out on a date with a man off the internet called Barry.  They think this  disrespectful to their late Dad , whereon Mum offers the truth bomb that it wasn’t all that great,   he being fussily, coercive controlling, not letting her work and refusing to allow fish and chips or coleslaw in the house.  Oh, and  the reason she loves her eBay pursuits pinging good news into her phone  is at last having money and a purpose of her own.  They’re stunned. Then Megyn appears downstairs and…no spoilers.  To be fair, nothing that dramatic happens. But there are deeply touching moments here , and human absurdities. I don’t quite get the need for such eerie music but otherwise enjoyed my two hours there.  And came out thinking a bit about the small secrets of uncelebrated female lives and conversations,  and how unfortunate it is when too much of it is stolen by online vapidities.

Box office royalcourttheatre.com.      .    To. 19 august

Rating three.

NEVER MIND THE MOUNTAIN, OVER THE ROAD CHICHESTER ROCKS 

    Now here’s a perfect gig for us 1970’s leftovers, though I suspect today’s young rockers  will also love the shiny leather pants off it.  For it has everything for today:   female friendship defying patriarchy, protesters with placards on the streets decrying poverty and monarchy,  and a condemnation of male profiteering on the talent and looks of young women.  Oh, and some storming rock numbers old and new,  by Howard Schuman and Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay.  Dominic Cooke and musical supervisor Nigel Lilley rather brilliantly do not allow them to stop the story dead by running them too long (the main fault, remember,  of Standing at the Sky’s Edge).  Sometimes just a verse or an introduction or reprise hits us as the tale of three women gallops on. We want more every time, and then get it as the story evolves.   

       The play is Chloe Moss’ spinoff from the famous 1970s TV series ROCK FOLLIES, an event for which people hurried back from work in order to share several series’-worth of the saga.  It tracked the fortunes of three young women forming a fictional rock group  – as friends, not manufactured-assembled products like the Spice Girls. It was a time when despite the US  Supremes and Ronettes, British girls were expected to be backing acts for male rock gods.  It mesmerized people: those who were around then were positively a-quiver with excitement on spotting the flaming locks of one of the originals, Rula Lenska,  and next to her the series’ creator, the real Schuman.  

        We meet our three first as they stomp out of a rude director’s tired chorus line in spangled pink boxer shorts, and resolve to do their own thing.  There’s Zizi Strallen’s “Q”,  who lives with a parasitic no-hope bodybuilder and does ooh-Mr-Milkman porn films, albeit with  lot of “beige Lycra between us”. There’s  Angela Marie Hurst’s Dee who lives in a very ’70s commune in a squat, all menstruation-haikus and chakras,  and Carly Bawden’s Anna.  She is posher than them, went to Cambridge, writes songs and has a patronizing husband who  reckons she’s “more Susan Hampshire than Suzi Quattro”.   

    And off they go:  all great movers and glorious voices ( Hurst is truly remarkable),  falling in with sweet gay Harry (Samuel Barnett, a delight) as their musical director, and falling out with their blokes. Though Stephenson Ardern-Sodje’s Spike does stick by Dee, after one lapse when another lass unblocks his chakras.  The trio get gigs, exhaust themselves on lowgrade tours, audition for record labels and get discovered and bullied into fame by the agent Kitty (Tamsin Carroll magnificently scary in a  70s Purdey wig).  She’s a sister at heart, but there’s also Fred Haig as nasty pink-suited David ,  who undermines them by shoehorning in Philippa Stefani as his girlfriend Roxy, while Dee struggles with her conscience over replacing harmonies,  Q tries to mediate their weary  rows (Strallen is fabulously likeable) and Anna hits the booze and coke.   

       It’s not particularly deep, but a fairytale rock epic from a past time which remains absolutely one for our own, and has  some wonderful set-pieces.  Gasp at Sebastian Torkia as a sort of satanic Jethro Tull wannabe who makes them be a backing group in cat costumes emerging from dustbins.  Enjoy their  defiance of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee: this  may baffle the new generation, but we old salts remember all too well the punkish counterculture fury of that time which makes many of today’s genteel whining issues feel a bit wet (I make no judgement, but simply record the thought that went through my head at that particular moment).  There are some lovely thoughtful, lyrical songs as well as rock stormers, and the ensemble and cast change costume in seconds to leap gloriously round the three women’s  tale : as stylists, audiences, demonstrators, all flowing with energetic joyful speed.   Serious  fun. 

Box office cft.org.uk to 26 August

Rating 4.

OLD SOHO SPEAKS AGAIN, AND WISELY

  Of all the places you’d expect to see Quentin Crisp  – even as a ghost or tribute – one of the least likely is a wooded amphitheatre in Suffolk at dusk,  with a clear moon rising through the branches and the last birds twittering  innocently to roost.   Crisp belonged  rather to 1930’s Soho streets, where passers-by beat him as a matter of course and even the gay clubs thought he was a bit much. So did the recruiting sergeant when war came and young Crisp thought “fighting might be a nice change of agony”.  

         So he stayed home while the US servicemen with their flawless complexions and dollars, “flooded in, like butter over green peas” to appreciate tarts of either sex.   But life is strange indeed: in his seventies and eighties suddenly he belonged to America  instead. A land where “everyone who isn’t shooting you is your friend”, and where big theatres and packed tour dates gave his wit at last the appreciation it deserved. 

        He was long a hero of mine for his scorn for mimsy housekeeping and the deathless line “Don’t keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level, it’s cheaper”.  I finally met him,  just for a couple of hours ,  in ‘90s New York.  A treat.

          So of course I nipped down the road to see Mark Farrelly perform his one-man tribute, from the great maverick’s own writings,  at the new outdoor Thorington Theatre.   I last saw Farrelly  as Frankie Howerd’s lover Denis  in another thoughtful play  he wrote, a two-hander  (https://theatrecat.com/2020/10/30/howerds-end-golden-goose-theatre-camberwell/)  so I knew his ability.   Here,  alone on the bare wood stage with the old Crisp’s purplish bouffant,  Farrelly’s long drawl and thoughtful, unafraid silences rang true enough.  

        And it’s a lovely script,  taking him through youth as “a minority within a minority, an effeminate homosexual”  and his hopeless dream of the Great Dark Man who might love him;  it goes through his painfully evolving philosophy, half pain and half joke :“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style”.    In a brief coda as himself, Farrelly mentions that as a catalyst in his own lowest, most suicidal year a decade back. And it is indeed one of the best philosophical jokes going. 

           The first half bravely ends with a dying fall, a contemplation of coming death and advancing age.  After the interval, though, he is in a tuxedo on a stage on 42nd street,  having escaped forever the “vast rainswept Alcatraz” of Britain.  Here he spent years confidently  telling the new world how to live.  Again,  he offers lapidary insights about keeping on through despair,  and how if  gay life became possible because if you lean limply against the wall for long enough, it falls.  He expresses his headshaking scorn for “Pride” , preferring simply to call it style. 

           I had not encountered before his rather wonderful paean to human beings for  our sheer courage in simply having evolved – crept out of the sea, grown limbs,  learned to walk upright, moved on.  No God did it for us –   “You did it! “ he cries.   Though as ever, the undernote is “more fool us”.  But hell, “there is no salvation, only laughter in the dark”.     And finally, friends, treasure his insight about us out there in the audience.  “Throughout the world ,  a theatregoer is a middle-aged person with a broken heart”.

     Excellent.  Here’s to Quentin Crisp, and to Mr Farrelly for the tribute.   As it roams the land,  see if you can catch it. 

Touring through to 2024 :  next outings for Quentin Crisp  Penzance & Newquay in September

http://markfarrelly.co.uk  for tour details 

rating four 

THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN?

    Tanika Gupta’s play is a sprawling,  angrily intimate epic about Indians in Britain during the height of empire,  thirteen years running up to old Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.  It was an RSC commission ten years ago, when there was not yet quite the current popular emphasis on the abuses of Empire, and our failure to acknowledge and teach its ‘problematic’ history.  It occurred to me during early, irritable moments of Pooja Ghai’s production  that this time lag may explain just why the first half feels feels so cartoonishly didactic ,at the expense of any subtlety of character.   

         We begin on a ship, with impressive ratlines and mass swabbing by   Lascar seamen (someone tell the movement director that is NOT the way you climb ratlines,  and that to convey a ship’s movement it helps if everyone lurches in the same direction).  Our central heroine, Tanya Katyal as Rani, is a teenage Ayah for a posh  British family who abruptly sack her on the dockside. The Indian seamen are beaten and cursed, even distinguished Indian passengers are not allowed on the white passengers’ decks (they include a young lawyer called Gandhi, and  Naoroji, a politician later to become the first Asian WestminsterMP and the man who at her jubilee bravely called Queen Victoria the “empress of famine and queen of black death”).   Thus it is firmly made clear within minute that Britain is robbing India blind. The colonialists are even unloading an elephant’s tusk, to make them even more hateful. 

      Teenage ayah Rani, a studious autodidact reading Coleridge,  is flirting happily with sailor Hari  (Aaron Gill), though the majestic Abdul Karim, who is about to be given as a gift-servant to Queen Victoria,  chivalrously checks she isn’t being harassed.  In no time at all she finds herself alone and fighting for her virtue  in a low den ( the full joyful RSC-at-the-Swan scene –  whores, corsets, brawls and booze) .  Brits ignore her pleas for work, but a  Gujurati woman encourages her to get some so she does . And is promptly raped by her Anglo-Indian master and chucked out pregnant.   Hari meanwhile learns about a British shipwreck where all the lascars were carelessly drowned because no lifeboats. Back at sea, he gets flogged for mutinously asking for equal pay.   

       Meanwhile Abdul –  a fine and subtle performance throughout by Raj Bajaj – is presented to old Queen Victoria,  and takes her fancy as a table servant in his  magnificent regalia,  despite the contempt of her lady-in-waiting (Francesca Faridany, splendid).  Abdul delights the bereaved Queen with accounts of the beauty of the Taj Mahal as a symbol of Shah Jehan’s love and grief: he doesn’t   mention the warlike Mughal brutalities, obviously,  for  the moral being hammered home to us yet again is that  India is beautiful, innocent, artistic, loving and exploited,  while English people are grasping and brutal and horrid, “a nation of slave traders, it’s in the blood”.  

      Even the charity ladies who found a home for destitute Ayahs to “bind colonials in a web of gratitude” are sneered at by the Indian women, who reckon Englishwomen can’t look after their own children and the Christian Bible is despicable.  The only English character not ghastly is Lascar Sal in the sailors’ pub,  who is a working-class diamond (Nicola Stephenson  is terrific, cheers us up no end). 

           Historic cruelties must be honestly told, but the unsubtlety of  the Dickensian hardship-romance of Rani and Hari  wears you down a bit: until very late on they aren’t allowed characters  beyond innocent victimhood.   Better is the growing relationship between Victoria – a beautiful rendering by Alexandra Gilbreath – and Abdul, who becomes her “Munshi”, much rewarded and equally hated by the court and the Prince of Wales.  That’s subtly done, touching and funny and nuanced,  for while the sight of an ‘exotic’ being treated as a pet  accessory is grating,  there is a real relationship: Victoria was remarkably open-minded, keen on the idea of India and anxious to be taught Hindustani and listen to his orotund recitations from the Quran about peace and gentleness.  

         I am happy to say that the second part becomes less strident and more interesting: properly fascinating is the figure of Dadabhai NAoroji,  the aspiring Liberal MP (too little known, and too briefly at Westminster: on  election he had congratulations from KEir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Florence Nightingale).  Could have done with more of him, though neatly Gupta makes clever Rani , now  housed by the despised charity,  into his aide and secretary.   Victoria meanwhile comes under pressure from the Prince of Wales and Lord Salisbury to stop treating her “Munshi” Abdul as an equal and has to compromise;  Cecil Rhodes sends her keen letters about how Britain should rule the entire planet for its own good.

          The interplay of politics, race, immigrant community-building and colonialism starts to become  properly interesting.  And as Victoria fades,  it is shamingly  true that her Munshi was thrown out of the country and  all his mementos and awards burnt as if he was an embarrassing aberration.  And good that  ,although the words are not sung clearly enough ,  Gupta marks the Jubilee moment not with Rule Britannia but with Kipling’s startlingly uncompromising verse about the arrogance of those who  

“….made up the white man’s burden

To serve the Empire’s need

To hide their guilty conscience

And justify their greed.

It helped them plunder freely

Convinced of their self-worth –

This precious sceptred island

Brought famines to the earth”

       It would be a better and more gripping play  if more of that internal Victorian conflict had pushed its way in,  past the mere indignation.

Box office. RSC.ORG.UK. To 18 november

Then at the Lyric Hammersmith,  lyric.co.uk.  From 4-28 October

Box office. RSC.ORG.UK. To 18 november

Then at the Lyric Hammersmith,  lyric.co.uk.  From 4-28 October

A FEW OF OUR FAVOURITE THINGS…

        Let it be said first of all that Gina Beck is a glorious gamine Maria:  sings like a bird and is satisfyingly able to convey in her voice her growing-up : at first edging towards beltingly shouty like any excited teen,  then playful without coyness as she gets the  seven (unnervingly compliant)  children on her side in minutes,  then  later lets her voice mellow beautifully.   Nor will you  be disappointed, absolutely not,  when Janis Kelly’s twinkling Mother Abbess  gives  it the full ROH  Force Twelve to get us climbing every mountain.   We thundered suitably.   And yes, the six child performers were immaculate, the tiniest in each ‘team’ having their professional debuts.  We are not used to such almost robotic ensemble precision in movement-direction of children these days,  and one wonders whether there are still any audience children innocent enough to relate to this cosiness with a governess,  not now they have been conditioned by sour-hearted old Roald Dahl and the Harry Potter villains.  But hell, this is a classic from 1959,  and it’s only at those well-drilled set pieces that modern sensibility balks a bit: the kids scamper properly in between them.  And at their head as Liesl, Lauren Conroy is an absolute charmer, as indeed she was in Bath’s Into the Woods:  watch that name.

           Chichester got teased a bit in the press about this production for its trigger warning may-contain-Nazis, and indeed it does , though only  in the last twenty minutes with due Heil-Hitler shock value as the Anschluss bites down on the Von Trapps and the only hope is a nun-assisted flight across the Alps. Some directors might have ramped up the danger a bit earlier, with ominous decor-hints , and more made of the edgy ball scene so as to  remind us why all the kitten-whisker sweetness is under threat .  But when the  banners, swastika armbands and stormtroopers running down the side aisles appear in the second half they have the proper shock value: the enforcement of von Trapp’s collaboration feels real enough when the concert scene ends in the ominous spotlight.    

       Actually, the press teasing about triggers was a bit unfair, since I suppose it is just possible that some of the audience don’t know the story of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last, most unashamedly sentimental story about the singing family.    Only just possible, though: so I  spent much of the first hour of Adam Penford’s magnificently straight production hoping that there’ll be audiences who genuinely don’t know it, because the knottiest problem any director is going to face is overfamiliarity.  The whiskers-on-kittens, doh-a-deer and lonely goatherd stuff  risks feeling exhausted, numbers worn smooth by seventy years of easy-listening radio and people singing Edelweiss in pub car parks.   You almost brace yourself for the famous ones, nicely done though they are.    So despite Lizzi Gee’s  witty choreography   (Liesl and Rolf’s teenage romp  in and around the fountain is brilliantly sensitive and athletic too).  I found more  pleasure in the less repeated songs: the nuns’ choruses,  the  way the old R & H satirical bite returns when  Max and Elsa try to turn Von Trapp to the dark side in  “No way to stop it” , and Maria’s  lovely rendering of “Something Good” when chemistry fizzes at last between her and the Captain.  I had also totally forgotten the sharpness of “How can love survive?”as the venal Max and Emma Williams’ millionairess Elsa mourn the difficulty of romance when couples are not picturesquely  “warmed by insolvency”.   And I like the way that this production with particular care takes the nuns seriously: the programme piquantly tells me that Mary Martin, the first Broadway Maria,  took advice from a real nun about not sending them up. 

           I got happier and happier as it wore on, and was very taken by Edward Harrison’s von Trapp:  notably his is the first significant male singing voice, a whole hour in, when on hearing the children he abandons his bosun’s-whistle-martinet personality in a startling trice.  Harrison’s  voice is rougher, less ‘trained’ in style,  than the women’s , and that actually helps.  When asked why he can’t see things Elsa’s way he snaps  “Not if you see things THEIR way”  with real bite.   And when in his country’s shame and ruin , he sings Edelweiss very quietly alone,  there’s a proper heart-shake.     

    Though dammit,  outside in the car park afterwards one lady was complaining loudly  because they didn’t ask the audience to sing along to Edelweiss.   But you can’t blame a theatre for letting in people without souls, can you?  

Box office. Cft.org.uk. To 3 September

Rating four.