theatreCat

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOXOFFICE.  Rsc.org.uk. To 18 jan 

SPRINGTIME FOR…EVERYONE 

      Joyful, headlong and full-hearted, here comes sacred outrage.  If director Patrick Marber and the Menier had been minded to issue wet ‘trigger warnings’  it would take up so much extra paper we’d be re-triggered by the environmental impact.  But what was firmly grasped by the great  Mel Brooks (with Thomas Meehan for the musical) is that for all their horror Nazis ARE funny : that preening pomposity ,blind hero worship, ersatz folksiness.   Rich thwarted old ladies in leopardprint and endlessly willing Swedish divas are funny too. So is over-camp gay culture and  the desperate ambition and bitter disappointments of Broadway show-people .  Even  accountants are funny.  And – loud gasps from the be-kind mafia –  so is poor Leo’s anxiety disorder. 

        It doesn’t mean all these things are not also deserving of all serious and gloomy respect in other plays.   It just means that if you don’t sometimes laugh at them and yourself,   you’re barely human.  So rejoice at the cleansing mirth of this legendary musical, and feel lucky to be drawn into it in this quite intimate space,. 

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

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

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

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

menierchocolatefactory.com  

to 1 march  rating 5

MAZELTOV!  JEWISH PANTO STRIKES AGAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

box office jw3.org.uk to 5 Jan 

FEARED IT MIGHT BE TUTU MUCH, BUT NO…

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

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

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

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

nationaltheatre.org.uk to 22 feb 

LOOK BEYOND THE LETTUCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

whitebeartheatre.co.uk   to 14 December

HIGH SPIRITS, HIGH COMEDY, EVEN HIGHER HEELS

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

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

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

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

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

devilwearspradamusical.com    to 31 May 2025

rating 5

C’EST MAGNIFIQUE !     

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

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

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

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

Jermynstreetheatre.co.uk to 5 jan

TA-RAN-TA-RA !

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

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

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

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

eno.org.   14 more performances till 21 Feb.

Rating 4

THE COOLEST CAT IN LONDON. AND SOME RATS. 

         Here’s your traditional Christmas outing, proper panto.  No rackety popstar hype or tedious suggestive jokes from worn-out comicS,   just  bright colours, and sets that make a kid want to go home and build their own even if they can’t build a revolve.  Add cheerful sixties tunes and a swinging plot with some genuinely eccentric twists; plus, as it is set in London,   the odd well-deserved swipe at Sadiq Khan.

       Anthony Spargo’s couplets even rhyme and scan properly,   and the author himself takes the role of the evil Ratticus rising, as he should ,  demonically from the floor in a startling 1960’s red-and-black pinstripe with giant shoulderpads.  Not that evil has any chance against the gallant Dick (a likeable Samuel Bailey) and his eyecatchingly very cool Cat. Who is Inez Ruiz, prowlingly ginger in furs,  who slinks around occasionally playing the saxophone.   

        Just enough modernity for the bells of London to be played by a projected clock-face talking in a Kenneth Williams voice,  just enough weird crypto-educational plot for a Dr Who phonebox to swallow various cast members and go back to the Great Fire of London ,  so the  more thoughtful children can muse on the impossibility of changing past history.  Only it does, as back in their present day nice Dame Megg’s bakery has become a dodgy Rat-a-Manger,  and there’s a thrillingly naughty casino.  Those in the young audience who have already  done Tudor History can appreciate  the idea of a shop called Catherine Tarragon.     Oh, and there is the kitchen scene, the fight scene,   and the odd bum and slime joke,  as there should be.  And there’s  Louise Cieleki as a wet minnie-mouse trying to be a convincing powerful rat, a social sensation we have all had in our lives.

         There’s nothing like sneaking early to a  schools matinee to judge a proper panto.  My lot  – I think three SE London schools – were singing along deafeningly to “Last Christmas” well before the curtain,  and more than willing to yell back every catch-phrase.  But just as importantly they were concentrating on the story, properly and quietly when needed and  roaring approval when appropriate.   Close to me one small lad, previously showing every signs of getting “challenging” on his report card,  leaned forward keenly at every twist, especially the time-travel. After the interval he hurried back to wait for part 2.   So there you are: you’ll find starrier pantos and louder ones and ruder ones and far more expensive ones,  but if we still lived in Greenwich that’s where I’d start Christmas. 

greenwichtheatre.org.uk  to  5 jan

rating 4

GALSWORTHY ?  WELL WORTH SEEING 

    With late Victorians, there’s plenty to bite on:  a rising bourgeoisie aflame with parvenu ambition,  piety , pannier skirts ,patriarchs, an empire nobody can grasp the idea of losing, and under it all the fresh energy of women deciding they have had enough.  Then roll it on a decade or two and everything changes,  WW1 leaves old certainties grasping at straws,  and cue the roaring twenties! 

        Plenty to get your teeth into, and  John Galsworthy did it con brio  and won the literature Nobel in 1932 with  his series about three generations of the  Forsyte family.  Just with sober 1990s  chaps enjoying being rich and  identifying themselves as “in banking/ in Law/ in Tea”   but who like all humans prove more than able to make a heroic  emotional mess of life.

     It became two beloved TV series: perfect parlour-soap for Sunday suppertime. . But here in this enterprising new-writing theatre Shaun McKenna and Lin Cochlan, fascinated by the key women in the story,  grasped the core tale and clipped the books with care into short, excitingly juxtaposed scenes :  the nimble Josh Roche , directing, thus creates a sort of nourishing julienne of the novels. Ignoring the heavy impediment of period sets and and clunky furniture (though getting the costumes bag right) ,  two plays are created:  the first subtitled Irene, the second Fleur.   

         Fun to see them in sequence – see below , sometimes you can make a long afternoon and evening of it –  but each stands perfectly well alone, linked by the magnificent monster Soames Forsyth.  Which is an  unforgettably thrilling performance by Joseph Millson as the Man of Property  who does not willingly let any possession go.   Especially his  young wife Irene whose marital rape (still legal till 1991 here, btw) is the key disaster.   His “a husband shouldn’t have to beg” moment leads to rape, disaster, rage, alienation,  several peerlessly comic moments of absurdity ,   eventually an actual divorce,  and the retrospective discovery of the disgrace  by the next generation.

    Indeed that first play, Irene, is framed by that discovery:  Soames’ daughter  Fleur, as yet unborn , is watching as a shocked family historian, a ghost from their future watching the fatal family tendency to cling to “money and things and secrets”. It’s a three-sided stage, bare red carpet and an occasional chair;  the family gather in various combinations, often some standing aside not truly there but implicated.  Ten actors play 25 characters with elegance, some of course changing age by decades between the two plays. 

        Towering over it are some superb depictions:  Millson a tense, brooding, heavily  Brylcreemed Soames, all too aware that his wife Irene (Fiona Hampton, statuesque and helpless) has fallen for a dashingly tousled  architect, Bosinney  (the Forsyte grandees all love art and talk about it a lot, though largely pleased at its price:  it’s one of Galsworthy’s sly ways of discussing what is of value in life).  

          Even Millson’s occasional blinks feel dangerous,  but Soames’ “Why can’t she love me?” almost bringings him to tears. Which of course horrifies the nearest lady relative who snaps “O Dear Lord, we don’t do that, wash your face and straighten your tie”.    Meanwhile Michael Lumsden, in one of his roles as a very endearing old Jolyon Forsyte,  is reluctantly letting his granddaughter June (Emma Amos) plan to marry the said Bosinney.  Who, of course, will let her down in his pursuit of Irene…

       Enounters, often brief,  keep the excitement going:  you are drawn in so that fears like scandal, disgrace and divorce spring atavistically to life and modern audiences gasp.   A family rift opens with lines like   “I have lost faith in the good judgement of Forsyte and Forsyte!” .  Victorian certainties fade as the old Queen does.    Irene finds  a better Forsyte,  who is willing to be “a perch, not a cage”.  Soames discovers that roaring “Give me a son!”  to an estranged wife who can’t bear to be in the same room, let alone bed, with him  does not work. So he takes up with French Annette and instead, as the first play endes, he gets a daughter, Fleur , instead…

   And so to the second play: FLEUR.   As I mentioned, , they’re standalone plays and both well worth it,  but watch in order and you get the progress of the characters to enjoy: especially Soames grown silver-haired, grimmer than ever with his black coat and ebony cane, his only weak spot his devotion to Fleur.    On the far side of the War the women are  now out of corsets and into loose 1920s flapper clothes and insolent insistence on doing their own thing (Soames does not like Annette’s ways one bit).   

      And – Flora Spencer-Longhurst does this with great skill –  the Fleur we met in the first play as mature,  dryly observant of her ancestors’ emotional chaos,  is now younger, a spoilt rich Daddy’s girl who explicitly does not care about the poor, or the aftermath of war,  or anything that makes her miserable, but does very much like her cousin from the now-enemy part of the tribe, Irene’s son (nicely, it’s  Andy Rush who also played Bosinney).    The tension comes from  this:   young Jon  is too devoted to his mother Irene  to commit himself to the daughter of the man she hates,  they part, but will that last?   Just say that Fleur shows herself a chip off the old block, refusing like her Dad to give up anyone she owns.  

       It’s all engrossing, wonderfully executed, unassumingly a theatrical event of the year .    And through it all runs Millson’s extraordinary Soames,  always with the terrible thrill and danger of personality,,willpower and delusional, vulnerable determination  radiating from him:  it’s like watching a boiler that could blow any moment: a top-hatted Lear , a frock-coated Othello.   Well worth seeing. 

parktheatre.co.uk   to  7 dec       many tue/thu/& sat have the double on same day!

rating 5 

WISDOM IN A LIFE BACKWARDS

     Forget the awful fim made from Scott Fitzgerald’s story about a life lived backwards – a man born in old age, working towards youth and infancy in reverse.  Jethro Compton and the composer Darren Clarke have made of it the most touching, humane, magical and wise new musical of the year.  It’s always good to see Southwark Playhouse’s finds transferring and growing big- west-endy – as did Operation Meatloaf.  Equally transporting to see theatres full of every age – quite young last night, tickets go down past £50 here  –  warming to something genuine and different,   with the sincerity of folk-music energy and humour in a spirited ensemble spirit.  The last parallel was COME FROM AWAY.   

         Compton and Clarke have been seven years finessing this, and far longer thinking it through. That shows: so does the sense of community, the beloved ordinariness of smalltown life, this time in a Cornish fishing harbour.    At Southwark it was more simply set and smaller, but now it has a fine seagull-haunted set with ropework and nets, most of it scavenged feom the real western coast,  and a ladder up and down and around which the 14 actor-musicians scramble and caper with their instruments – fiddle, whistle, accordion, base, cajon, mandolin, cornet, trombone, assorted percussion. 

     Fine tunes and heartfelt unaffected lyrics drive on the story of poor Benjamin, who we see first as an old codger, decrepit in bowler and pipe,  shut away from the world as a monster by horrified parents,  looking through his attic window longing to “live a little life, feel a little freedom, see a little sea”.  His mother’s  grief before her suicide on the clifftop is wrenching and real, too.  They may be stuck in an impossible fairytale curse, but the feelings are universal.  And so it is all through, an unspoilt folk melodiousness and honesty in all of them: not least John Dalgliesh’s Benjamin , and Clare Foster’s marvellous clear sound as Elowen . 

Thus a whimsically impossible tale becomes  something that drills rapidly into real feeling, a real wondering compassion for all of us who whirl through our brief lifespans in the normal direction, womdering how to deal with it, being disbelieved, looki g for love and home. It takes little time for BEnjamin to become likeable, lovable even, as he escapes to the local pub , is dazzled by Elowen the barmaid – who finds 55 just the right age for a man – and, as he grows younger into middle age, gets a job on the trawlers . His relationship with Jack Quarton’s young Jack is endearing: his gradual winning of the (temporarily) much younger Eillowen irresistible.  Their song about the moon and the sea breaks your heart, happily.   The years roll by, recited by minutes and hours and seconds by the narrating ensemble: the second World War comes, he joins the Navy, finds love and has a son; always growing younger, kmowing it can’t  end well.  It almost doesn’t, then does, because that is how the best folktales end.

       Around him the big cast caper and whirl, argue, and chorus, powerful observers, telling the tale, explaining  how events create turning  points nobody could predict. If I have one cavil about  this glorious show , which deserves to run and tour like Come From Away , it is that it would be easier to follow some of the neighbourhood events – a bit under-milk-wood – outside the central life if they were spoken more than sung in tight exuberant choruses.  

      But it is the smallest of cavils and fails to knock off the fifth mouse. Because after a rushed day far from home I came out of it younger than I went in. Button magic. Or as he would sing, “a little part of this old heart is feeling young tonight”.

Theambassadorstheatre.co.uk   To 15 feb

Five.

THE BIG  RATHER UNFRIENDLY  GIANT

      Tom Maschler, legendary publisher  and once a Kindertransport child,  summed up the appeal of Roald Dahl:  his stories offer  “A glorious playful path through the chaos of childhood”.  Dahl was a writer unafraid  – like Grimm – to offer young readers a world containing  both wickedness and resistance.   But when a quarrelsome 1983  luncheon  has run its course in this remarkable play  another verdict comes from  Jessie,  the US publisher sent to try and  talk him into apologizing – at least a  bit – for floridly antisemitic remarks.   Her final summing-up of him is ‘You’re a nasty, belligerent child!”         

          Mark Rosenblatt ‘s play, imagining such a meeting,  reminds us that both have a point.  Dahl has enchanted generations (though some of us shudder a bit at his caricatures of older women).    He was a philanthropist at times,  a gallant fighter pilot, a devoted and doubly grieving parent.  Yet there is about him a quality which  transford a wayward, angry,  bullied, naturally impish child into a grumpy old curmudgeon with little temperate adulthood between.  To have this quality captured here, memorably, in an extraordinary performance by John Lithgow  is treat enough.   But it’s even  more of a stimulus to  have the nature of such men’s  appalling antisemitism skewered and defined in two hours of tense drama .  Especially now,  when that sickness is horribly reviving across Europe.    

          GIANT   has only another week to run, a sellout from the start, and I come late to it for odd reasons.  But since it has garnered 5* reviews and will undoubtedly transfer up West eventually, it feels worth joining the chorus of praise (and of necessary, topical unease) to remind any readers  to go and see it.  As I shall again, wherever it goes .     Nicholas Hytner directs –  a first time at the Court for the NT and Bridge veteran – and there’s never a false note.

              Some fear that its scale – four people at lunch, plus a couple of others briefly appearing – means that the play  can only ever suit a small theatre like the Court.  I disagree: I think it could hit home across a far bigger one and have seen lesser plays and smaller casts do it.  It needs a wider audience, certainly.    

          It’s set in 1983.   Dahl (Lithgow) is looking over the illustrations for The Witches:  irascible,  just divorced, soothed by his new partner (Rachael Stirling) and his publisher (Elliot Levey wonderful as Maschler, whether standing apart trying not to bite his nails, or sitting in a resigned pose of near-defeat when Dahl starts baiting the Jewish New York publisher (Romola Garai). She is elegant and controlled until the old man gets effortlessly under her skin by asking whether she does the stuff with “the funny scrolls”,   and making a distinction between someone being Jewish and being “aggressively Jewish”.   

        Her job is to point out that his remarks are endangering sales of the new book in America, and perhaps a boycott by librarians (Ah, he says ” Satan’s spinster army!” and we can’t help laughing) . She cites one Holocaust survivor bookseller who is concerned.   Dahl  just sneers  that “the kinder of his shtetl” in New England will just have to settle for Helen Oxenbury. The two words clang on the stage like casually thrown daggers. 

           Well, you get the tone, and brilliantly done it is. Frissons of shock run through the theatre as Dahl takes on  Jessie until she shakes with surprised horror and hunches into each angry riposte.  Another kind of shock occurs  as he turns  on Maschler, jeeringly throwing  the publisher’s friendship and admiration back on him to inflict real pain.  Moments of softness-  Jessie  has a brain damaged son, as he once did, and he understands  – swing suddenly to moments of real dangerous hatred. Even while he continues eating the housekeeper’s tasty sorbets .    Stirling, as his partner, does her best to control him with both impatience and love, but it’ll never work.   The sacred monster’s  brief late moment of self-doubt evaporates, taking us into the final twists – two of them. The last one sparks both outraged laughter and then silence. .  

           He throws all the insults, not only at Israel but at all Jews – “hoarding your ancient wounds”  and denying the suffering caused by Israeli warmaking.   When Jessie points out that if he’s not careful some may interpret  the Witches as Jewish (hook nosed, cultish, tormenting children and amassing wealth)  he suddenly gets really outraged :   they were, he says, just  versions of his grandmother.  That’s clever of Rosenblatt, as it momentarily gives Dahl the authenticity of a creator misunderstood.  But in no time he’s  off again,  the nasty belligerent child back among us.

            You come out exhilarated, horrified, wiser,  and better attuned to the terrible spectrum  of this ancient irrational hatred: how subtle and genteel attittudes creep effortlessly up to pogrom level.  You come out remembering the outrage of Jessie but also the real pain of Levey’s Tom Maschler. And yes, we do get that famous Dahl line “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”    You come out thinking.  That’s what its there  for.    Bravo.  

Royalcourttheatre .com to 16 nov 

rating 5, of course

1648, Agra: marble and murder, a terrible beauty

    One of the worst photo-ops of Princess Diana’s collapsing marriage was that shot at the Taj Mahal, billed by romantics as “eternal monument of a husband’s love”. Beautiful it is, ambitiously so. Mughal art is: plenty of it right now at the V& A. But even when you can’t help but marvel (I gasped at the Taj like anybody else)  history makes you too aware of its human price. The Mughal Emperors were one of history’s most brutal, vain, murderous and generally dislikeable ruling cadres, Shah Jahan among the  worst. 

  Whether he did indeed have 20,000 skilled labourers be-handed and the architect murdered to prevent his vanity project being imitated – or  topped –  remains uncertain and semi-legendary. But all too credible,  given the godlike status of the dynasty and its casual chopping-down of fellow-creatures .  That tale fuels Rajiv Joseph’s strange, gripping, gruesome – and finally philosophically fascinating  – 85-minute play. It’s about two Imperial Guards, who we first meet presenting scimitars on an octagonal platform. Its the night before the dawn first breaks on the newly completed Taj.    Babur (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain) is younger, breaking the rules by chatting; Maanuv Thiara’s Humayun is from an army family, stricter but unable to resist identifying the birds whose cries fill he silence of their post on the palace wall.   They’re immediately likeable, recognizable, young men at work together in any century:  bros.  

  They discuss the rules – Babur pointing out that the sentence of only three-days prison for blasphemy, while torture and death are the punishment for  “sedition” against the ruler,  suggests that the latter rates himself above God.  Humayun is horrified at such youthful irreverence,  even though they’re out of earshot, up on a wall together in the small hours.  They shudder at the expected dictat that the 20,000 builders will have their hands chopped off, and the disgustingness of whoever has  to do it – 40,000 hands!    Babur hopes one day to get the plum job guarding the ruler in the harem,  while the elder reprovingly says “It’s not some depraved home of sluts. Just a place the Emperor goes”.   They know they must not turn to look at the newly completed wonder in the first dawn of its completion but of course they both do, in a beautiful golden light..

        But next time we see them they are blood spattered, with a chopping block, having done the job of hand-chopping.  From  here  – amid their slow but efficient cleaning up of a  mass of stage blood – comes much remarkable philosophical reflection, lad-style, about it all.  Which somehow, subtly and unpretentiously,  sets the mind roving over all hierarchies, all extremes of lowly servitude in every age.  

       Sometimes there’s  horrror at the filth of what they had to do  – one cutting, one cauterizing, over and over.  Then Babur ,  after fretting about what will become of the handless men,  thinks about the ruler’s reason :  to prevent anything as beautiful ever being built again.  In shock, he suddenly thinks that by doing that terrible job he has personally ended beauty: since nothing as beautiful can never be built again.   It becomes an angry obsession.  But Humayun, the older, sterner one with a soft centre, suddenly says birds will always be beautiful.  They have talked about their younger job, in the forest, cutting fragrant sandalwood, building a raft. That inspires them for a while .  Also inspiring – and very laddish – is their flight into creative conversations about imaginary flights to the stars and whether you could invent a transportable hole and if so whether it would fall through itself…

    Final scene:  cleaned up, they’ve been promoted to the harem. But Babur throws another curveball, and the terribleness of what such servitude does to human beings – impossible not to think of the Holocaust –  returns in a climactic end. 

  The play will not be to everybody’s taste. But I see why it won prizes – including one for its director here, Adam Karim.  Couldn’t take my eyes off it, and it stays with me.   Credit to Thiara and Hussain , for Humayun and Babur will stay with me for a long while, speaking for the worker across four centuries . 

Orangetreetheatre.co.uk. To 16 nov

Rating four

LOOK BACK IN COMPASSION

         The Rattigan renaissance of the last few years is more than welcome:  ever since Flare Path hit the West End fourteen years ago there seems to have been a rising consensus that he really was one of the greatest modern dramatists. And although social and attitude changes will date any contemporaneous play,  Terence Rattigan’s  humanity and deft, wistful honesty (a quieter Tennessee Williams) endure  better than the snarling ferocity of the John Osborne fashion that overtook him.   So it is apt and entertaining that director James Dacre brings together under a firm date – 1954 – two short Rattigan pieces. 

      The first , Table number 7, is the midpoint of the “Separate Tables” trilogy;  the second is the standalone The Browning Version.  Both are treats,  delicate as a filigree cakestand and as sharp as the lemon in the Lapsang.  

           Both are set in an elegant revolve by Mike Britton;  first a Bournemouth boarding-house where among the  settled ,mainly long-term,  residents  “The Major” (Nathaniel Parker) is a tolerated bore, full of military stories, affably harmless, striking a warm friendship only with Sybil (Alexandra Dowling),  the spirit-crushed daughter of the monstrous Mrs Railton-Bell.  Who is Sian Phillips,  matchless as usual, deploying sour-faced bullying majesty. She is  wolfish in her relish of virtuous disapproval, especially when she finds from the local paper that the supposed  “Major” is not only of that rank, but has just been arrested and bound over for “importuning”.  Her face  as she reads the story is a treat in itself.    

     The joy of this little story – and Rattigan knew how it was to be gay back then – is that while her indignation-meeting gets backing from the more cowed co-residents (even the reluctant Gladys,  a delicate performance from Pamela Miles), she can’t win them all. The young male lodger (Jeremy Newmark Jones)  refuses to join in, despite his young wife’s prim disgust.   Richenda Carey is a magnificently scornful Miss Meacham,  and Lolita Chakrabarti solidly tolerant as the landlady.   Parker is heartbreaking as the Major himself, at last opening  – perhaps this is improbable, but it’s dramatically tremendous –  to offer self-analysis, and to cement his fealty with poor scared young Sibyl,  He has  a hangdog-Tony-Hancock face which exactly suits the character: cheerfulness over deep pain, a weak spirit searching its way reluctantly towards courage . 

       For Rattigan’s ending – perhaps again improbably optimistic – is something fine:    a message across the ether from the cruel 1950’s,  promising that cold hard virtue is not where beauty dwells. Nor will it necessarily be the winner every time.  

        The Browning Version – the set now a schoolmaster’s house and purlieus –  is also finely, delicately done. This time Chakrabarti is Crocker-Harris’ awful wife Millie, more likeable than usual but shot through with bitter frustration.  Newmark Jones is her lover, the younger teacher who finally sees through both her, and his own young cynicism.  I was initially very unsure about Parker in this play; partly because his Major Pollock  remained so imprinted on memory throughout the interval,   but also partly because we usually see the old classics-master Crocker-Harris as a less likeable,  more clenched character, and a frailer figure than Parker. 

        But again, a fine performance.    And as Taplow  Bertie Hawes is excellent: catching  just that schoolboy uncertainty and gruff sensitivity the piece needs.    An evening to enjoy, if not a period of our cultural history  to feel nostalgic about.  I hope James Dacre, who did such fabulous things at Northampton,  does more work with Rattigan.  They’re well in tune. 

theatreroyal.org.uk  in Bath till 2 November

Then touring: 

• Malvern Festival Theatre. 5 November 2024 – 9 November 2024. …
• Cambridge Cambridge Arts Theatre. 12 November 2024 – 16 November 2024. …
• London Richmond Theatre. 27 January 2025 – 1 February 2025. …
• Cheltenham Everyman Theatre. 
• Oxford Playhouse Theatre.

THE GRANDEST OF GRIEFS 

Not Renaissance Mantua but New York a century past: smart bars and low dives, gangsters in fedoras. Why not ?  In any world might be a lonely jokester, missing his life’s love, protective of a daughter,  trapped forever by the  expectation that he will be both a jokester and the butt of jokes. There too might be a local duke, duking it out and bagging the best girls. It fits. Always did.  For now, five years after Jonathan Miller’s death,  and for the fourteenth time since 1982s the great director’s production of Rigoletto is back in town. 

    And not to be missed.    Its Like having Halleys Comet turning up again, a thing of perfection retooled with fresh artists, thrilling and thrillerish:  1950s Little Italy atmospheric in its dark street corners and bright-lit bars, the final storm by the murderous riverbank seeing rubbish blowing under the dim streetlamp. 

It is always the most dramatically breathtaking of Verdi operas, lowlife and seduction, loneliness and mockery, yearning and revenge and final youthful sacrifice. The setting gives it immediacy:   the great tides of musical emotion carry the tale remorselessly onward in both passion and reflection, never a note wasted.   It is of all productions the one which – when seeing a few empty seats and the signs reminding us that under 21s easily get in free –  makes me long to dash out into St Martin’s Lane to  corral a few idlng, unaware half-term teenagers and drag them in to have their lives changed. 

        Richard Farnes conducts the great orchestra; Weston Hurt  – first UK outing – is a magnificent, wounded Rigoletto, the barman everyone thinks they know and can laugh at, tender in his marvellous duets with Robyn Allegra Parton’s Gilda, a consummate physical actor, showing the outcast’s uneasy restraint and slumping, poleaxed, as he learns of his daughter’s betrayal.   Both are first time at the Coliseum, and I hope they love its audience as much as we loved them.  Unusually arresting too is Yongzhao Yu, another newcomer here are fresh from the Met, as the Duke,  smug in a grey suit in the smart bar of Act 1,  lounging in jeans as the “student’ seducing Gilda, throwing out Donna e Mobile (albeit in English, as ever at ENO) as if he’d made it up himself that moment.  

   And through it all wash the great tides of music, tracking every mood and pain and hope,  Verdi never wasting a note;  the chorus moments thrill,  shaking the great gilded room.  Unforgettable. ENO tickets begin at a tenner, which is another sort of miracle.  

eno.org.    to 21 Nov.    Seven more performances.  Selling fast, as well it might. Get in!!!

Rating 5

A short catch-up on one of the season’s greats (was away..)

Mark Strong is made to play great tragedy: a long powerful body,  controlled bleak intelligent  features.A figure from any age or culture, fit to express hope and power and belief , and to wrestle before our eyes with conscience and fate. 

    You don’t necessarily get that on screen, but it took me days to get over his Eddie Carbone at the Young Vic: his stage name is no understatement. It is also a fact – accepted now by this occasional Icke-sceptic – that Robert Icke is born to bring Greek tragedyi to the 21c.  After the irritating and pretentious Zeldin attempt on Antigone (https://theatrecat.com/2024/10/09/the-other-place-) last month at the NT, his adaptation and direction here is the real thing.

      Icke sets it on election night , as an idealistic newcomer is on the edge of victory. Lesley Manville is his wife Jocasta, relict of the former PM: confident, mature, content in his success and their children.  Into the campaign  room bursts a scruffy, tattooed man talking of seeing the future (perfect modernisation of Tiresias: he’s be peddling crystals these days).  Meanwhile the hero’s old Mum in a raincoat wants a word, and keeps being put off by his officials. And so, off it goes.     It’s  a slow burn for a while but worth it. 

     We know that two harsh revelations await Oedipus, and before long see how they might hit him. The first, Laius’ death and his involvement, stirs deep enough.   but the second – well, I suppose some very few people may turn up and not know what it is .

 Its arfully made credible in a wrenchingly brilliant speech by Manville, but when the real hit comes the final minutes – between June Watson’s Merope and the central pair – rise to a bomb-blast of terror and pity, as Sophocles intended.  All the more powerful for being set in a world of real power and conscience, unlike the selfpitying Zeldin last month.  Greek Tragedy done properly: respect!  

Delfontmackintosh.co.uk to 4 jan 

“…HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB”

       That was the subtitle, when exactly sixty years ago a shower of Oscars fell on Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly tasteless, seriously necessary comedy about nuclear war: a crazed US General Ripper has unilaterally orders B52 bombers to devastate Russia and won’t reveal the secret recall code.   Peter Sellers played three parts:  a crisp RAF Captain Mandrake who tries to reason with Ripper;  the beleaguered president Muffley in the War Room,  and an aged ex-Nazi scientific adviser in a wheelchair.  Lunacy, hierarchy, confusion and incompetence make it one of the great comic films of all time.  I was a cold war teenager, and not allowed to see it at the time. 

         So on the eve of an American election not entirely devoid of lunatic speeches, in a world once again riven with dangerous wars and nuclear capability,  London theatre storms in,  to wake that remarkable film’s ghost and set it on stage. And – eat your heart out, ghost of Sellers – Steve Coogan plays not only Mandrake, Muffley and the Doctor but  Major Kong, the even nuttier B52 pilot who ignores the recall and finally straddles his bomb in a cowboy hat, yee haa!. 

          The tale is the same, tweaked beautifully to rouse sharp modern echoes by Armando Ianucci, king of intelligent political comedy,  and his director Sean Foley.  It’s swift-moving, shockingly funny,  and staged with flawless style:   Hildegard Bechtler’s set becomes the crazed Ripper’s office under fire as the President tries to get back control,  the vast War Room at the Pentagon full of uneasy-colleague generals, and the cockpit of a B52 swooping – actually quite frighteningly – over snowy peaks while its crew josh about women and beer.   

           Coogan is extraordinary (so are his fast-moving costume and wig crew, who deserve a documentary of their own).   He is sometimes, almost, in the same room as his other self.   But each part works remarkably and none of them are even remotely Partridgeous.   As Strangelove he is  necessarily a vigorous caricature,  as  Major Kong another,  but he brings real heart to the anxious, professional, baffled Mandrake in his RAF uniform,  trying civilly to deal with John Hopkins’ huge, magnificent, cigar-chomping lunatic Ripper.   His President Muffley has moments of reality too.  And of topicality:  when he mutters that he almost wishes he’d lost the election , a colleague points out tht the other guy thinks he did,…

         The bullseye topicalities for today are part of the dark pleasure of this glorious production.  Ripper’s conviction that communists are poisoning the pure bodily fluids of Americans with fluoride is pure anti-vaxx conspiracy;  his worry about devilishly clever Russian fake voices pretending to be him, or the President, or Mandrake prefigures deepfake tech paranoia today.  The  Soviet Ambassador is terrified of his unseen President and expects, accurately , to be poisoned any minute.  The satire on suspicious all-American values also rings familiar as Colonel Bat Guano is convinced RAF Mandrake is a “prevert’ , and the gung-ho General Turgidson (Giles Terera running wild and stormy) urges the President to “pretaliate” by attacking Russia to stop them retaliating for the mistaken attack.  His leading of a prayer at the critical moment is unmissable.  And I haven’t even mentioned the Vera Lynn moment.  Some may jib at yet another play made from an immortally famous film. I don’t. It felt worth it, and of the moment.

noelcowardtheatre.co.uk    to 25 jan 

A HARD AND ICY WORLD

    A 1970’s Hull folksong chorus: “Next time you see a trawlerman on Hessle Road half tight – remember, o remember, the perils of that night”.  It was a tribute to three distant-waters boats and crews lost in one storm: it made the national news. But many more were lost, barely reported,  in an industry more dangerous than any other of the time:  single deaths from drowning or machinery,  whole boats lost  beyond the Arctic Circle in the Cod War years before Iceland’s 200-mile limit (a late twist in Richard Bean’s play). 

         Bean wrote Under the Whaleback about the lives of such  fishermen,  rich with conversations and empathy.   It is not hard to shudder at the casualness with which big money treats the lives and deaths of a casual workforce. Maxine Peake wrote a striking  play about Lillian Billocca, the ‘headscarf revolutionary” who in 1968 campaigned to force better safety standards.  

     But in this new play Bean widens the story in a way that – at its best – sends ripples of understanding that there could be the human cost on both sides of capitalism.  In the first act we find John Hollingworth as Donald, heir of  family shipowners, taking down figures by radio about catches and returns,  bickering with his old father who hasn’t quite given up control, and confronting the fact that the loss of 15 men in a sinking means that tomorrow he must do “the walk” to condole with the widows and mothers (the tough old man offers salty advice about accepting tea and not looking at the children).  He is also sacking a skipper, back from another 6000-mile run with too little catch , who also sinned by admitting by radio that he’d found fish.  Donald roars that Grimsby boats would  thus steal `“My cod and my haddock..yes they fucking are mine,  if you were using my ten thousand pound Marconi Marine Fishgraph 2 fucking fish finder! Do you not understand capitalism?”

          But he is not a monster:  one of the wives (Laura Ellsworthy) rolls in, boots and headscarf, fresh from the filleting-shed. He treats her decently and responds to her fears for a son and to her (slightly shocking) admission that she’d rather her rough husband – one of the five survivors in this latest loss –  was not coming home for his three-day break between three-week journeys.  It’s an intriguing encounter, his softening foreseeing what happens in the second act.

          For – and this Bean bases on a real shipowner – Donald suddenly decides to go to Reykjavik , meet the survivors and fly them home rather than the utilitarian norm of putting them on the next boat.  So we are in a small hotel, with three men rescued, the body of a fourth and  some very entertaining laddish bickering,  plus dark violent fury from Jack (Mattthew Durkan) about his injured finger.  Eventually a fifth arrives  – Paul Hickey as Quayle. He had got taken off two days earlier with a premonition, faking illness.  He’s the storyteller,  rich in horrid tales and superstitions lyrically delivered.  Quiet Baggie and dopey Snacker (ogling the manageress, Einhildur) complete the group, until to their shock the boss,  Donald himself, walks in .   Jack muses on whether they should kill him. He’s not serious.  Yet. But as  the long, strange act rolls on a knife appears, and the surreal midnight scene thickens into weirdness.   Sometimes the act slows too much, as such a night might well do.   But Sophie Cox as Einhildur, the one woman among them, adds weight :  both with short-tempered commonsense and an Icelandic oddity in a fable she tells about love, death, ice and a ghost. 

           So there are the opposite poles of capitalism – big money taking money  risks (“I lose three thousand a day staying in port”) and vulnerable, zero-hours employees taking the real risks in the ice, while as Quayle says “the women are left with the eternal glory of their widowhood”.    Donald knows it all in his heart: constantly plays back the last words on the radio of a dying skipper (these are real, from the period) “Going over – going over –  love and crew’s love to the wives and families” . Quayle knows it too. The word “dignity” about the corpse enrages him. “Three weeks sharing a focsle the size of a prison cell with eight other fools, sucking in their farts, their ciggy smoke, pissing on yer hands five times a day to convince the blood of life that it’s still worth the flow – the day he went fishing was the day he lost his dignity”.  

      And another darkly interesting detail in Donald’s earlier brief conversation with a new vicar about a memorial service . The hymn   “For those in peril on the sea” will, says the shipowner patiently, see half the congregation walk out. Too naval and romantic . “Makes dying at sea seem something noble and patriotic” rather than having died for half a fish and chip supper.  

      But in the final moments in the Reykjavik bar, the men sing their own song. Humans can’t lose all dignity. 

hampsteadtheatre.com to 23 nov

BROTHER,  CHRISTIAN,  WITCHFINDER

 I reviewed this play about the Witchfinder General  Matthew Hopkins last year, in Ipswich:  I write only to add thoughts,  now that it has deservedly reached the capital and is set for an off-Broadway run next year . America needs it just as we do in times of bigotry and fanaticism: .  just as in the McCarthy era it needed The Crucible.

    Below  is a link to my original review  in Ipswich,  but here are some fresh thoughts.    See a new play several times and forgotten feelings rise. The terrible grandeur of fanatical and murderous madness into which Joanna Carrick’s brilliant evocation  of the 1640’s witch-trials had made me almost forget its opening scenes, and how fast one falls in love with the sweetness of the central pair –  Christopher Ashman and Nadia Jackson as Richard and Susan Edwards of Mistley.  His farmerly humour ,her womanly commonsense , their gradual love and marriage draw you into 17c rural Essex life:  we enter their griefs for lost infants and – atavistic as it seems – honour their Cromwellian-Puritan language about God’s will and the need to control base lusts.   Jackson – for whom a year ago this play was a first professional job – is particularly astonishing in her gravity, humour and simple-hearted sensitivity;  Ashman is bluff , straightforward,  in perfect tune with his young wife and , while they live, his babies.

    I had forgotten, too, how comfortably in the early scenes they, and we, laugh  at the teenage geekiness and stammering religiosity of their half-brother Matthew Hopkins with his ever-clutched Bible and uneasy distaste for their warm marital sexuality. That extends to all women,  doorways to the devil ever since Eve.  I had also forgotten how, even late on during the rising horror of interrogations and hangings, his superstitious absurdities make the couple,  and the audience,  suddenly laugh again .   

       But the play’s trajectory is the same, works even better :   its set of 16c furniture, nimbly movable props and tables, : a broomstick and baskets , a workmanlike stack of wooden furniture under a guttering candelabra.  Simplicity can hit harder than theatrical splendour, and that applies equally to its form: four players, one kitchen, the sense beyond it of marshland and farms, community quarrels and jealousies, cows suddenly dying,  a polecat’s scream on the river bank.    A place where “lecturers” on the evils of the body and of Popery can become local dictators, self-appointed purifiers of the land,  and lay the blame on old women whose mumblings might be curses, whose pet animals ‘familiars’ made of “condensed and thickened air” to hold demons. 

     Each of the three matures before our eyes for good or evil, growing in complication and subtle confusions.   Nadia Jackson’s open sensible face is creased by grief, recovers, then hardens as the witchfinder’s persuasion offers the relief of vengeful rage for her griefs, her lost babies. We watch Ashman’s farmerly confidence growning as landowner, then crumbling as the demonic illusion reaches him under Hopkins’ persuasion. At last we see him struggling to right himself.  Equally credible,  we watch Vincent Moisy’s evolution from stammering inadequate to devout missioner – using fanaticism as relief of private stress, a lot of it clearly about sex  – and thence to self-glorified power.   We realize in horror that he was only 27 when he died, after years in which more witches were hanged than in  over a century before.   His is a progress which strikes uncomfortable parallels with many current fanaticisms led by youth,   from jihadism to soup-flinging.  

        And the fourth player – Rei Mordue as the cowering, sometimes defiant Rebecca who is forced under Stalinist questioning to repeat evidence against her mother and the other old women – is remarkable too:  grown since a year ago, heartbreaking. 

Here is my original review, includes notes about the remarkable author and company:

southwarkplayhouse.co.uk.  to 16 nov.   (it’s the Borough branch!)

Rating five   

LEHMANS REVISITED

The first time I saw Sam Mendes’ production at the NT,  I exclaimed that the evening had no right to be so much fun: three hours, three chaps in black frock coats, no song and dance stuff, a mainly monochrome cyclorama of Alabama fields and New York skylines. And it’s all about money, the progress of a financial dynasty from 1844 to the final collapse – after the last Lehman died – of the legendary Lehman Brothers.   Immigrant struggles, a few decorous marriages,  lads dragooned into the family business, and disaster.

    But it is in fact wonderful. I say it again, after the third time viewing, second in this big theatre. Here are my first two reviews – to explain what happens: 

The first one in the period saw Trump visiting the UK,  the second was post-Trussonomics.  Both had echoes then.  Now the age of Reeves and the invisible huge Black Hole  made it a great one to see again, and reflect on the way humanity treats money and the way money treats  people.   

But this time  – with a terrific new AngloAmerican cast   – it is just as fine.  Aaron Krohn and Howard. W Overshown were tremendous, fast and physically witty (especially Krohn) and flexible;   on the night I was there Henry, the first brother to land at Ellis Island and begin the narration, should have been John Heffernan.  He was unwell, though, and we got the particular, very theatrical, pleasure of seeing his understudy – Leighton Pugh – doing a note-perfect, witty, confident job of that huge role.  It is always good to know that a production is careful enough to have that quality of understudies.

     But as I have linked to my old reviews, got once as a veteran audience member I thought I would reflect on extra ways it is so brilliant.  There is the  way the men need to be shape-shifters, clowns, yet always themselves – always Henry, Meyer and Emanuel,  so that even when oddities in the family crop up, the old resemblance haunts you.  They are sometimes their own sons,  or wives, or customers; sometimes their own ghosts requires flexibility and wit in all three performers (Russell Beale was the original Henry).   

   There is the  use of metaphor:  sometimes obvious, as in the sense of confident gambling in the tale of  wire-walker Samuel Paprinsky,  who crossed Wall Street for years before falling,  but sometimes gentler:  each of the three,  when they seize a marker pen to draw shop names on the glass wall, does it subtly differently.  

    But above all, more of a warning every year,   there is the play’s sense of wild, stormy, exuberantly adventurous drift away from the solid and into the magical-realism of 21c finance.  You begin with overall cloth in bales,  switch to lending seed for a return in cotton;  link with those who make the cotton into cloth… and as you encounter the bigger, biggest big-time of the New York world move gradually into expansion into other materials, from coffee to railroads,  until you see that you need none of these real and solid things, only numbers on a screen… 

       It’s a wonderful production,  humane and sorrowful and adventurous and wild, all done in frock-coats.  Defy you not to love it.

Thelehmantrilogy.com.   To 5 jan

Still 5, obviously.

CHOSEN PEOPLE, CHOSEN LIVES 

   The saying goes “two Jews, three opinions”, though some say that’s an underestimate. Here  are five people and innumerable opinions: two couples,  plus a teenage son pouring scorn on both. The  flashpoints are culture, religion, rules of modesty and marriage,  parenting, politics, and of course Israel’s very existence and current self-defence.

        Hot stuff, veering skilfully between serious pain and a sharptoothed hilarity reminiscent of  Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage.   Given the moment and  the topics it is not surprising  that Co-writer and director Patrick Marber found a big West End theatre nervous of it .    But Marylebone does well to lay it out with panache and sincerity, because we need it.  I can only write as a gentile, buy such plays (like Joshua Harman’s  Bad Jews) are a window into the complexities of owning that remarkable heritage,  and navigating the conflicts and gradations within it.  The dense, talkative, witty, thoughtful play crams plenty into two hours, gets verbally and briefly physically violent and grows to an unexpectedly moving end.  If it does nothing else, it will stop anyone ever saying “they’re all the same, Jews..”

 .    Phil, a lawyer,  and Debbie are affluent sophisticates in Florida: to the disgust of Joshua MAlina’s Phil, wandering around in pink beach bermudas, Debbie has laid out kosher snacks for a visit from her former college friend,  who has shed modernity to become ultra-Orthodox  and lead a Hasidic lifestyle in Israel with her black-hatted traditional husband. They’ve changed their names to Shoshana and Yerucham, and observe  the prescribed married-woman’s wig,  a thing of such hellish brightness and curl that it fascinates Phil and leads to a strangely creepy moment once they start smoking pot in the second half.   

       The Israelis are over to visit his father, a holocaust survivor in a palm beach retirement home where – we unnervingly learn – he sees on another old man’s arm a tattoo number which is three digits lower than his, but does not form a sentimental bond as Yerucham hopes but grunts  “Just means he got in the queue ahead of me”.   Yes, the Holocaust haunts the piece, as well it might:  Debbie is tearfully obsessed by any mention of it,  and certain that all Jews everywhere should be permanently  afraid that “they” will be back.  Her  son Trevor refers irritably to the horror as her “happy place”, and Yerucham is well up to making staggeringly tasteless puns about it,  musing that it may have happened because Jews got too far from God prayer.  The Floridians gasp. 

        All  the best comedies have flashpoint differences between couples: not hard to guess how many there are here.  Phil is smugly against what he sees as performative and dangerous Zionism;  to him the future is America. Debbie, neatly drawn by Caroline Catz, slightly envies her friend;s  emotionally  wholehearted conversion-back to the music,  rhythms and tribal rules  of her friend’s  life in Israel (Dorothea Myer-Bennett plays her at first as witty and  confident,  praising Israel’s freedoms as a democratic  beacon in th middle east:  Simon Yadoo as Yerucham  has a pompous patriarchal strength which riles Phil no  end, especially when they get to the sexual insults.  Good lines zing between them all,  many so sharp that only on a stage would they not get a visit from the hate-police.

     Its based  on Nathan Englander’s short novel, woth sharp collaboration by Marber and updating to acknowledge  the current terrible conflict. And the way the West now is:  when the book was published there was a sense that outside extremists or dumb bigots, real  antisemitism was quite rare in the civilized west, or confined to acknowledged fools and bigots.   Given the London streets lately, not much like that now.  So it is all great fuel for both conflict and comedy: conflict because argument is at the heart of Jewish thought – Talmudic, indeed  – and comedy because, come on, Jewishness is brilliant at it: clever, ironic, self-deprecating  or hitting down hard universal human truths.  And hard human bigotries: quite lightly the Hasidic couple admit they don’t think you’re a proper Jew at all unless you live in Israel. But they have  a private grief, which slowly emerges, and brings out the shock of ultra-orthodoxy: they “sat shiva” for a week and declared the death of a daughter who dared fall in love outside Judaism.  

        For all the pain it’s a bracingly funny, moving and well-contructed play:  the first half ends in a bravura rant by Gabriel Howell’s brilliantly teenage  Trevor (who rejects both parental capitalism and the visitors’ orthodoxy with all the scorn of a “pastafarian” environmentalist).  The second concludes with an uncomfortable but suddenly  moving truth-exercise, one  apparently not unfamiliar in some Jewish childhoods since the Holocaust:  who would have risked death to hide Anne? Who would save me?   After a surprising move from Phil softens the rocky terrain of the evening,  Yaweh himself gets a line, a startling one.

     I’d go again,to  think further about many things they discuss.

Marylebonetheatre.com. To 23 nov 

rating 4.

Sent from my iPad

ZELDIN AGAIN

I sometimes feel real sympathy (possibly unwanted) for actors who, trained and motivated to channel and express extreme and painful emotions, do their absolute and skilful best but find themselves having to do it in a mediocre play.  Even if it is preceded by long rehearsal analysis of their character, and garlanded with learned programme notes about Sophocles and essays about how we don’t do grief properly any more.  And even if it is written and directed by the famous Alexander Zeldin, chevalier des arts et lettres and darling of the NT (his tribute to his mother, The Confessions, was the last one her, an evening weirdly depressing to any actual live mother).  

       Here, in a modern kitchen set with patio doors (much discussed in a mumbly sort of way)  we have a family gathering headed by the excellent Tobias Menzies as Uncle Chris. This fine actor will be required in turn to be sensible , a bit controlling and normal, then shouty, and borderline deranged by the end. There’s also sterling work by Emma d’Arcy as his niece, returning to join her siblings in the remodelled family house where Chris and they live. She’s back after spending some considerable time stumping around with a huge rucksack,  full of her late Dad’s shirts, a tent,  and some seething, grieving rage.   Both performances are good. So are the others (though Alison Oliver too-often delivers a TV-naturalistic performance only barely audible by row G).

  But for all the skill and effort, and the insistence that it’s based on Sophocles’ Antigone,  it doesn’t fly however hard they all pedal, however surreally rackety the occasional soundscape,  however mysterious the huge white reversible screen overhead (design by Rosanna Vize, music Yannis Phillippakis). 

      What is happening is that Chris wanted to get them all together to scatter his later brother’s ashes (in a surprisingly small vase, I’ve seen ashes and there are clearly some missing).  They are all grieving the long-absent Alan, who seems tohave killed himself in the garden beyond the patio doors.   Chris is very keen on cutting down some trees.  But when Annie arrives,  she insists the ashes must stay in the house forever, so she can “talk to them..he died here, he needs to stay here”. Thats the Antigone bit: uncle-defiance and views about human remains.

She steals some ashes, and Uncle Chris gets furious and wrestles her for them, and there’s a fair bit of decanting , wasting still more of the inadequate supply.  Their friend and project-manager Tez wanders in and out, once with a takeaway,  observing that “no-one takes any banter in the country these days”.  Night falls,  Annie decides to sleep in her tent in the garden, everyone is uneasy about everything and quite angry, except Issy , who seems almost sane about it all and occasionally tells Annie she loves her.   

       There’s a denouement  – of course there’s a Bad Secret in this family, and of course it’s sexual (we’re in 2024, audiences expect no less). Sophocles didn’t need to bother with all that stuff because  there were real wars and executions and , importantly, a concept of personal honour-unto-death rather than  the kind of wallowing emotional unwellness fashionable dramatists prefer today.  

So after the 80 minutes of intensely trying to care about these people I left the NT defeated. But Menzies and d’Arcy are both strikingly good, and give it all they’ve got. Respectful sympathies.

I am now quite upset that owing to theatrecat’s sadly necessary travel-rationing I missed the Dorfman show with Meera Syal the other night. That sounds better. 

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 9 Nov

Rating two  

POETRY AND PITY

   Tremendous swagged,  fringed, and roped retro curtains ,  the Gielgud looking much as it would  100 years ago when  Sean O’Casey’s most famous play reached London.  Before them hangs a single high crucifix, below it a simple stove. And when the drapes  flourish aside to reveal a Dublin tenement room,  its detail draws you right into a hardscrabble life,down to the frying pan and the battered tin box where young Mary keeps her precious hair-ribbons.  

       Matthew Warchus (with design by Rob Howell )does well to take care of the physical detail: there is always a special fascination in contemporaneous plays from past decades, by a writer who knew and lived in such exact rooms and conditions. Curiously, it is that period reality which wakens a wider pity for all conflicts which hard down on the humblest.    O’Casey sets this in 1922, the Irish civil war still raging, when in one family there could be former allies falling out, republican ‘diehards’ set against ‘free-staters’.  Juno and Jack Doyle’s family  has its own ordinary problems. He’s an idle drunk, she just about keeps them fed, this harder even than usual because daughter Mary is on strike and her brother Johnny  disabled, one-armed and lame from  his share in the fighting . He is a mournful occasional presence, bitterly uneasy – we will learn why – and afraid to leave the flat. He sees nightmare ghosts, unable to rest without a candle burning safely in front of the Virgin Mary’s statue in the unseen room behind the curtain.   They all live within a deeper violence,  and all through the first act come odd moments of shock:  Aisling Kearns’ Mary reading aloud the detail of exit-wounds on the latest young body found,   Jack and Joxer, tipsily carefree, suddenly soberly nervous at a rapping at the door below that sounds “like no-one that belongs to this house”. Llow distant street sounds make heads turn sharply.  

        In in the foreground, and this is what which has made O”Casey’s Irish play echo through many times and nations, there is the comedy of Jack Doyle himself : an almost music-hall turn in drunken, self-glorifying fantasy,  eloquent in inventive complaint about everything from the clergy to “pains in the legs” striking whenever a possible navvying job is mentioned, tipsily co-dependent with the sly parasitical Joxer.  There is laughter at the pair being cowed by Juno’s entirely reasonable furies of impatience at their lurching hopelessness and empty pride.  Mark Rylance is on irresistible form as Jack : a piercing tipsy stare beneath heavy black brows, his tiny moustache and striped pants sometimes seeming almost Charlie-Chaplin as he lurches around,  airing fantasy reminiscences  about global seafaring exploits (one passage on a collier to Liverpool).

       He’s a wonderful joke: the immemorial Mr Hopeless, comedy drunk right down to a mournful little ditty about a robin, sung over the stove. Rylance, as ever,  is a scene-stealer.  Even more  when, as the second act begins,  he has been told of a legacy and gone massively into debt for fancy furniture, cabinets of china and glass and a smart new suit (again, brilliantly evoked with loving detail).     An idle drunk who’s gone up in the world and thinks he’s posh is of course even funnier. 

        But the genius of the play is that Jack Doyle is  a comic figure living  in the middle of a tragedy.  He didn’t cause it, but he doesn’t rise to it with any dignity or real human sweetness.  Juno, on the other hand,  is magnificent, and does.   J.Smith Cameron (Gerri from Succession on TV!) is compelling, unforcedly real:  worn out but full of hope that Jack will pull himself together,  tenderly anxious over the gaunt, haunted youth Johnny (Eimhin  Fitzgerald Doherty) and tolerant of the social activism of Mary and her lover Jerry (Leo Hannah).  She is everything that is decent and, sadly for them all, believes in hope and luck  when a stranger arrives with news of their inheritance (another kind of shock in his very appearance: so dapperly dressed,  such a fine overcoat, next to the women’s careful drab and the shambling Jack’s tragic trousers. 

      We care for them all, laughing or admiring;  with Anna Healy’s Mrs Madigan they celebrate and break into song (Irish songs, and odd musical moments, are brilliantly used). But no sooner have we laughed at Healey’s terrifying top C than a funeral passes and a broken mother is among them, speaking the famous prayer to the Virgin Mary  to “take away hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh”. But they laugh together again; someone has to. 

      That the play darkens deeply in its longer second half is famous, but no spoilers for those coming new to it.  Only to say that we have, by then, been drawn to affection and concern for the reality of the Boyles, the poetry and the pity of humanity.  But will be soured, too, by the reality of Jack Doyle,  patriarch and drunken fantasist.  I was uneasy for a while after Rylance’s magnetism in the glorious first scenes,  wondering how well even this great actor would serve O’Casey’s final  merciless dissection of a man’s egotistical worthlessness.  But in the moments of Jack’s continuing, reckless, cruel self-pity Rylance does this for us.  It is both brilliant and painful to watch.   

Delfontmackintosh.co.uk.   For 9 weeks only

Rating 5 

SHARP SCRATCH?

    Crossing the Edgware Rd yesterday a shouting vaccine denier with a loudspeaker informed us all, stomping past in some sort of hurry,   that vaccines were lies, inoculation an International conspiracy.  It reminded me first to book my autumn double at the local pharmacy but then – another evening plan being cancelled –  then that I really ought to nip up to Kilburn for Pins and Needles, the Kiln’s latest offbeat booking, opened last week.  Written by Rob Drummond , it is about vaccine , trustfulness,  disinformation and suspicion, and the nature of scientific method.    It’s very meta – keen to keep reminding you that the speaker – posing as the author, played by Gavi Singh Chera – is trying to make a play out of recorded interviews and that the supposed verbatim stuff might be “edited a bit”.  

     Thus, in an elegant set of neon strips , shapes and steps,  he talks first to Mary – Vivienne Acheampong – who was convinced by the now-debunked Andrew Wakefield researchthat MMR caused autism. Having one autistic son already, she deceived her husband, didn’t vaccinate the second; and of course he had an unusually bad bout of measles and was disastrously damaged. This all comes out gradually, skilfully interspersed with the other interviewee – Brian Vernel – who lost his mother from, he thinks a very rare reaction to the Pfizer vaccine and attempted to have her secretly exhumed to prove it.  His life is now devoted to antivax propaganda.   And near the end, the narrator “Rob” talks of a bereavement of his own, and more self-blame.

    It’s an interesting and well-acted examination of the emotions that surge around this aspect of medicine, but for a while suffers tendency towards glum, sad and flat (who the hell wants 80 minutes of glum Covid stories? We have our own!) .  What lifts it mercifully soon is the arrival of the 200-years-dead pioneer of smallpox vaccination,  Richard Cant as a cheerful, self-confident Edward Jenner,  thrilled to hear that the disease is now eradicated, and full of anecdotes – in between short trills on his flute – about how he did it.  18c medicine previously tried a terrible thing called ‘variolation’ to create immunity,  but his experiments with the milder cow-pox bore fruit, though experiments on young lads, only one of whom seems to have died from it. 

       But then, face it, scientific method  is king,  and as Jenner says,  “what happened to Samuel was a statistical likelihood”.  Just as the furious antivaxxer’s mother’s blood clot presumably was.  Always hard to take.  He also remarks that “the plural of anecdote is not evidence”, a motto I shall hold to my heart every time I read some overemotional press tale on a medical subject.  Jenner indeed has all the best lines, insisting that in medicine “you have to DO things, not just talk” and that open minds are vital with zealots on both sides, and that we should dwell in “the difficult and murky world of the honest exchange of ideas”.   Then, as the play ends, Drummond mentions how much of Jenner’s peacock-pioneer pride is not entirely justified.

     Short, interesting, incomplete, thoughtful: I liked it.  There will be bigger plays about vaccine –  maybe about Jenner himself – as there was about antisepsis in Dr Semmelweis. But this was a good sharp scratch at it… 

Kilntheatre.com to 26 october

STONED STONES IN WEST WITTERING, 1967

      At the end the 1200-strong crowd explodes to join a final roar of “Satisfaction” with the cast – lawyers, police, fans, three generatons of the  Havers family – leaping and bopping to the acid twang of reborn Rolling Stones.  Brenock O’Connor’s uncanny Keith Richards lookalike snarls from one high platform, Jasper Talbot channels Mick’s unruly lip-and-hip work from the other.  Charlotte Jones’ finale feels like the end-of-term party for the Chichester Festival Theatre: no booking could more appropriately reimagine Sussex’s finest rock ‘n roll hour. And the Chichester magistrates’ court’s, too..

      That  was in winter 1967, when Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were holed up in Keith’s moated mansion at West Wittering with friends , including Marianne Faithfull emerging from her bath wearing only a fur rug. The  police were tipped off, probably by the News of the World , to raid it. There certainly had been acid present – here an American dealer has turned up with his “psychedelicatessen” box of tricks,  and Richards consequently became convinced that the helmeted policemen were dwarf elves  come to “navigate the cosmos” with him, and invited them in to warm themselves by the fire.  A slightly soberer Mick says sorrowfully “Keith, I don’t think they’re fairies”, and  we’re off, with a freespirited reimagining of the famous case when the ‘sixties breakout versus shocked establishment morality.  

   It made the name of Michael Havers QC, later Attorney-General, who was persuaded to defend the pair on charges of possessing a tiny amount of benzedrine and allowing smoking of cannabis.  His son of course is Nigel Havers,  and Jones’ play has great fun with the family dynamic: Louis Landau (a fine professional debut). plaintively playing the schoolboy longing  to avoid being  a corporate lawyer and go to drama school,  his father disapproving, Olivia Poulet as the mother likeably holding the ring and supporting him.  

       That conflict is I suspect upscaled in ferocity – it’s the origin-story of so many actors emerging from establishment families in the 60s – and provides  fun in a warmhearted sitcom way:  Anthony Calf is magnificent as the patriarch, a traditionalist prone to explaining his horsehair wigs but who must , we know from the start, learn new ways.  He is wonderful flinching away at first from the rock stars’ manager – Ben Caplan’s Allen Klein – and from the lads themselves,  just as he flinches from his son Nigel’s terrible new flowered shirts and awkward drainpipe pants.  The lad is defended, of course, by Clive Francis as the grandfather, the once-eminent hanging judge Sir Cecil Havers. Francis, as always given half a chance,  is slam-dunk hilarious and almost gets cheered at every line. 

      But the core story itself is too good not to tell: the raid, the plea hearing where Richards is asked why the men were not shocked by a young lady’s rug-clad nudity and politely replied “because we’re not old men..”  Emer McDaid, fragile graceful blonde,  is a wonderful Marianne, and her strand of the story –  a woman supposedly protected by being called Miss X in court but not allowed to speak, and left to be widely sniggered about because of the made-up Mars Bar story (it rang through my late teens, I remember it well). She sings like a bird, too: three of Marianne’s gentle breathy numbers,  most notably When Tears Go By  in a smoky dream for the exhausted, combative Havers asleep in his chair.   

     There are times in the first half of Justin Audibert’s production  when I could have done with fewer surreal explosions of Stones rock,  good as it is under Alan Berry’s musical direction.   There is a bit too much whimsy as police and lawyers join in,  though I have to admire the way that the 2024 choreographer has allowed stage and disco dancing to be as authentically dreadful as it was back then.   

      But the second half is great, with the real trial,  sentence and appeal backed by the late William Rees-Mogg’s famous Times leader “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”. And of course young Nigel’s RADA audition,  the appeal victory,  and a fine imagined scene in the Garrick Club where Mick and Keef confront Judge Block.  And then we all go nuts to the final triumphant blast of Satisfaction.  Especially those of us (always plenty  in the Chichester audience) who were actually there first time round. And even more pleased than Rees-Mogg about the outcome. 

Cft.org.uk. To 18 october 

VICTORIAN MISCHIEF WELL IN TUNE FOR TODAY

.  Do you want to see a senior Government minister entangled with a socially climbing financier and a fashion-greedy wife,  playing the flute to calm himself? Will  you, in these troubled times,   feel the better for seeing  Dillie Keane having more fun than is decent in black bombazine and lace cap, quavering ferociously about lochs in an  extreme cod Scottish accent while her kilted giant of a son strikes up on the  accordion?  Have you always wanted to see Nancy Carroll in a bustle wrestling an insider-trading cockney upstart to the ground?  Seek no further, for the Menier will provide.

   It seems that during  the gloom of Covid Nancy Carroll decided to set about trimming and adapting one of Arthur Wing Pinero’s less remembered drawing-room farces from 1890: a knotted social, marital and political tangle whose absurd intricacy makes PG Wodehouse look like Ibsen. With a stroke of theatrical genius (and director Paul Foster and composer Sarah Travis) the cast of 12 is over half  actor-musicians,  who troop in at the start playing together and later keep dropping in the odd few notes to illustrate the action. Thus Rosalind Ford’s  Imogen may impetuously seize her ‘cello and bow when  stricken with inappropriate love for the fiery social rebel Val, or Fanny Lacklustre, the scheming socially ambitious dressmaker,  make her point with a fiddle-based double entendre when the hapless, disillusioned politician – Nicholas Rowe a  frock -coated skinny gangle of gloomy discomfort – picks up his flute.  Brilliant. 

       A painstakingly fringed and tasselled Victorian parlour gives way in the second half,  with much rapid shifting,  to the great hall of Drumdurris  castle. Sir Julian is broke and both he and his lady (Carroll herself) are entangled with Lacklustre’s financier brother, so have been forced  to bring the pair of vulgarians up for a toff August. It’s complicated by the ambition of Lady MacPhail  (that’s Dilly Keane) to marry her speechless son into the political stratosphere : though poor Sir Colin, as she says while he awks beardedly around in a dinner suit, “feels like a caged eagle in the drrresss of the South”.   The embarrassingly low-caste but massively rich houseguest, however, is not only eating the wrong way at breakfast but nursing a corrupt political plot as well as a social one.  The plot thickens.

      It’s a slyly delightful moment to revive it:  some of Pinero’s lines ring out 134 years later to general glee.  Val is a global wanderer seeking freedom from sham and bluster who finds himself disgusted at finding fellow-countrymen even in Bolivia  – “British pomp has spread like mould across the globe”.  Lady Twombley, having herself risen from a humble dairymaid,   lives in dread of her husband having to quit politics and retire to live “in a marsh, growing vegetables”.  The Minister hates politics anyway,  and calls Westminster a lion’s den of dishonesty.   

      Everything is further complicated by the interference of the dowager Drumdurris,  the unmatchable Sara Crowe who darts in and out of the set’s two doors making everyone’s life more difficult, including an invisible daughter-in-law who can’t decide whether to train her baby for politics or the Army.  And Lady MacPhail’s romantic insistence  on the superiority of the heights of Ben Muchtiewhatsit and the kilted North is not, it turns out, shared by her  son,  Matthew Woodyatt a magnificently cowed hunk.   I require their brief unforgettable duet at the opening of the second half to be filmed and provided online in perpetuity, to improve national morale.  Though possibly not the SNP’s.

Menierchocolatefactory.com. To 16 november

Rating 4.

LAURIE LEE, REMEMBERED AND REMEMBERING

       A nine-part orchestra, gilded harp and flute at its apex; behind, monochrome photos of a century past show rural Gloucestershire,  then the plains and forbidding splendours of Spain in its time of suffering.  Downstage two lecterns, an old man and a young one, offer brief vivid memory then return to sit quiet for music. Both are the same man, Laurie Lee: his story is of childhood, youth and wonderment through the eyes and soul of a born poet

      This is a beauriful thing, selling out fast but made to tour, so check the link carefully below. It has a well- thought-through simplicity, honest words and honest sentiment served wkth delicacy by  musical choices. The Orchestra of the Swan,under David lePage,  deals mostly in concerts but storytelling is its forte, and in this labour of love for Laurie Lee’s work and life Judy Reaves and Deirdre Shields offer short excerpts of the writer’s work with the orchestra playing between.   As if , unpretentiously, each time to make space for meditation on what we have heard. It asks us to stand alongside him all the way from rustic infancy , watching close to the ground the teemings of nature,   to teenage wanderings with a fiddle and the  ideals and terrors of the Spanish civil war.  

     The speakers are   Anton Lesser reminiscent in age, Charlie Hamblett the youg man’s voice. They are not overdramatic but each at times briefly becomes some third: a mother or sister, officer or deserter, someone insome moment fixed in memory, pieces in the jigsaw of his growing up, from a baby of the family bundled into his school coat by big brisk sisters to the teenage wanderer with tent and guitar, falling in love with Spain, fighting in the 1930s International Brigade. 

     We breathe it with him,  poet and blundering, hoping, half-understanding volunteer  in the fight against fascism. To see it in Wilton’s, just off Cable Street and once the dressing-station for casualties in our own domestic fight, is sobering. And fresh from news bulletins advising Britons to flee Lebanon, there was an extra frisson at the passage where young Laurie – busking, careless, unaware of the unrest but suddenly evacuated as a British subject to safety and home on a Royal Navy destroyer.  But of course he goes back to help, unskilled at life and war, is imprisoned as a spy then released into hapless soldiering and invalided home.

        It is extraordinary how complete Lee’s story and character  feels, in such short moments. But each is amplified by the music between: deepening feeling without obviousness (though goodness, Mark Ashford’s Spanish guitar solos, falling into rapt silence, unforgettably evoke the land).  The orchestral arrangements by lePage – from Vaughan Williams to Rossini and Britten –  are careful, fitting every moment,  beautiful use made of the flute in particular.  The rendering of the Internationale, a lonely solo gathering every other voice around it, is thrilling.  Altogether, it’s a lovely thing.   If you can catch it, do.  

Orchestraoftheswan.org. rating 5

POLITICAL ECHOES, CLASS ARROGANCE, THRILLS

       The award for ExIt  of the Year goes to the magnificent David Oyelowo, tearing up the central aisle  of the Olivier in a fury as the first half closes,   with the timelessly furious shout of the unappreciated :   “Thus I turn my back – there is a world elsewhere!” .  

       If I had a problem with this vigorous, elegantly staged production it is being drawn irrationally to the hothead warrior’s side from the start.  For all the clarity and dramatic arc of his arrogance and fall,  I risked turning into his Mum Volumnia myself,  albeit without the mad raving about how lovely his wounds are.  After swaggering on in a plum velvet suit,  disdaining the plebeian rioters,  our hero hopped into uniform for some spectacularly athletic savagery in battle against the Volscii leader (“A lion I am proud to hunt”) , achieving wounds all over,  about which everyone concerned talks a great deal.  

        Then he got  nagged by his pushy mother (Pamela Nomvete, splendid)   into becoming a Consul.  Politics and public affairs are not his thing at all,  grubby business compared to banging Volscii on the head with shields,   but the terrifying Volumnia wants her man-child to be king of the world.  He goes through the ceremony of presenting himself humbly to the proles, with “a humble spirit, a beggar’s tongue”  but hates it,  still doesn’t think much of them because he has no wish to be their ‘harlot”and they know it.  He’s the ultimate anti-populist, refreshing in a strange way at this time of creepy populism :  “You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate as reek o’ the rotten fens-  whose loves I prize as the dead carcasses of unburied men!”.  Calling your electorate smelly didn’t work even in Rome, so the Tribunes of the people (especially Stephanie Street’s Sicinius,  a real angry-leftie-lady with an unforgiving bob) point out his “soaring insolence” .  He just snarls that he did it all for them, ungrateful sods – “For your voices I have fought!” . 

          Through all this,  the energy of Oyelowo’s magnificent physical expressiveness mesmerized me,  so that for all the speeches (huge projections) and rackety riots,  I only wanted to watch him rather than the democratic plotters.  And that’s despite his unsettlingly modern insistence on the validity  of “mine own truth” and his conviction “I will be loved when I am lack’d”. Very Prince-Harry. 

          The political speeches are sharply done and fine,  especially by Menenius (Peter Forbes) eloquently making the case that, like bits of a human body,  in a nation you’re all in it together,  well-fed belly and skinny extremities alike.  Altogether,  it’s a great booking for a party conference season after a big election.  But all the way,   it’s Oyelowo who draws the eye and ear: that spectacular high-speed run defectiing  to the Volscii  did actuallyu raise a cheer  at the preview I saw.  

         It’s grippingly presented: no togas in Lyndsey Turner’s production, just Es Devlin filling the Olivier stage with Roman sculptures at the start ,  so it looks like a special exhibition at the Barbican because it lies among immense descending square concrete pillars. The period is nicely unfixed, with both loud bangs and flashes in battle but plenty of swords and shields to keep the savagery of ancient Rome respected.  All the cast have immense energy, Nomvete is a tremendous presence and Kemi-Bo Jacobs as Coriolanus’ ever-anxious wife is, in her brief scnes, properly touching.    

nationaltheatre.org.uk   to  9 November

FIRST CLASS FROM CHRISTIE, LUDWIG AND BAILEY 

This could have been a bit of a groan, like the overcomplex Rebus Game Called Malice , also on tour .  But actually it’s a class act in every sense.   Michael Maloney is a wonderful Poirot: almost my favourite so far,  except perhaps John Moffatt on the old Radio 4 productions (a secret  podcast vice on my dog-walks) .   Maloney gives us a Poirot only gently moustachiod,   prim,  gently  authoritative, his Belgian accent likeable,  his Continental man-hugs with M. Bouc of the Wagons-Lits very endearing.  Around him the  multinational passengers,  smartly dressed and befurred,   from Sweden and Hungary and America and England but each with their own quirk and secret,  gather  round a bloodstained corpse at dawn, shuddering in horror  (or are they??)    

        No villages or vicars here, not a Manor House or Marple in sight  : this is the most glamorous of Agatha Christie stories, starring the  Orient Express in its 1930’s glory.   Mike Britton’s set and costumes  revel in that: gorgeous panelled compartments swivel  to be cabins and dining-car , sometimes opening out the stage, sometimes tiny claustrophobic scenes in its centre.  Overhad a great white  Balkan snowdrift traps them in their griefs and secrets.      It’s one of Christie’s  most familiar plots ( though  at the interval some in my matinee row still couldn’t remember whodunnit).  But without spoilers  I can approve the fact that that while the corpse in the sleeper-car  is not, it turns out,  a figure to grieve for,  Lucy Bailey’s production revolves vividly around another victim from years before. A child;   it was the Lindbergh case which inspired Christie to this imagined aftermath.  And  there is  something excellently respectful about the way this production evokes an  old tragedy: a little girl\s  imagined face ghostly overhead at the start, her voice heard.   

     There is also a shiver of proper respect in Poirot’s famous dilemma about what to do with the solution of the case.  Mentioning an old murder at the start he reiterates his steely belief in letting justice run its course, bring a deserved punishment,   whatever the provocation has been .   And when he makes his final judgement we are reminded that this story lies  between the wars: he’s a Belgian whose country was illegally invaded in 1914.  Without laws, the old policeman says,  we are all lost.   For all the fun and thrills, that  gives the production a thoughtful, sober edge. As you’d expect from Bailey as director. 

        All beautifully done, even if you know the plot.   And as for Debbie Chazen,  never mind her Calendar Girls Olivier nomination, I insist she should now play far more stroppy old Russian princesses.  She’s priceless.  

rating 4 

https://www.murderontheorientexpressplay.com Touring to 25 april 2024 – Plymouth now!

FRIENDSHIP HITS  THE ROCKS OF TASTE : MISCHIEVOUS, SAD AND FUNNY

        Not everything that tours the country is Agatha Christie or star-fed froth: sometimes a serious emotional and intellectual treat turns up just down the road from where you live,  probably around twenty quid a ticket.  Isn’t theatre wonderful?    This certainly is:  thirty years after its opening,  Yasmina Reza’s ART is still a favourite, its sly wise originality caught wonderfully from the French by Christopher Hampton’s translation. 

       Forget the usual dramatic themes of  romance and family angst (though heaven knows that’s referred to).  This,  in 90 minutes,  deals with another kind of bond, the pitfalls and bonds of friendship  – especially, dare I say it, male friendship.  Iqbal Khan directs,  enchantedly coming brand-new to it,  he fell in love, and in the programme draws his own thoughts about the comedy’s painful undercurrent (Reza, when it was referred to as comedy, famously said she thought she had written a tragedy; though I find the ending rather soothingly redemptive) .  

    Anyway, it’s simple enough:  Serge, a wealthy consultant dermatologist,  has bought a contemporary painting from £ 200,000,  and his friend Marc – former mentor in some sense , we will learn – drops in and is shown it. It is just a huge white square.  Serge, who likes to talk of contemporary and fashionable  ‘deconstruction” , is affronted when Marc, an engineer, laughs at it and its mad price. “It’s shit”.   Physically, they are an interesting contrast: Chris Harper’s Serge slim and smooth in blue,  Aden Gillett’s Marc a big bluff scoffer, scruffier and contemptuous.    

          That Serge is wounded, snubbed,  is obvious. The third of the friends is different again – Seann Walsh,  curly-haired and amiable,  is Yvan, who  tries with each of them to heal the misunderstanding and the wounded pride.   He is far less successful in life,  embroiled in a complicated row about his coming wedding, rival mothers-in-law, and the horror of working for his bride’s father’s stationery company “Does any man wake up every morning looking forward to selling expandable document wallets?”  he cries in misery late on.    His attempts at  mediation, offering to join in the art-crit nonsense about monochromatic resonances with Serge and acting tactful with Marc, is doomed. 

        Each of them criticizes the other to him :”Marc is moody”  says Serge,  and Serge says Marc “doesn’t have the training or instinct”  to appreciate the white square and is stuck with boring “Flemish” landscapes (I daresay in France this was an awful insult).  But he also insults  the picture in Yvan’s house (Ciaran Bagnall creates a nice simple moving set, lined with light,  no fuss) . Says it’s a “daub”, forgetting that Yvan’s Dad painted it.   Serge’s artistic claims are satirically brilliant,  skewering the language,  like the claim that the white blank  “stakes its claim as part of a trajectory”.  

      Seann Walsh, better known as a standup and new to the “legit” stage, treats the play with delicate honesty and – in the moment Yvan gets a proper raging collapse –  is wickedly, wickedly funny. And sad.   For the dazzlingly written, horribly credible text leads the three deeper and deeper and, since they’re men, to a moment of ridiculous but painful violence and beyond.   It all moves fast, deceptively simple, a few piano notes by Max Pappenheim between the scenes. Altogether, it  strikes every note right.  A tiny masterpiece, delicately done, is coming your way soon.  

Touring,  Mercury Colchester from tonight

 then  Malvern, Eastbourne, Nottingham ,  Coventry Sheffield

 originaltheatre.com  to 20 Oct

rating five

REACH FOR THE STARS: IT TAKES HARD GRAFT AND VODKA

Any week now at the Gielgud we shall hear the famous drunken cry in Juno and the Paycock   “what is the stars?”.    At the heart of Stella  Feehily’s  exhilarating play is the answer, as historically discovered by 25-year-old Cecilia Payne Gaspochkin  in her PhD thesis, delivered when she had fled the ban on women taking degrees in Cambridge, UK for the slightly less patriarchal Harvard. Where they could.   The young astrophysicist’s calculations  massively upset the received belief, by working out that stars are made of hydrogen and helium,  not solid like earth.  She was told by her supervisor Henry Norris Russell to re- submit with changes, and did so, guardedly, for pragmatism’s sake. She needed to go on in research .    Four years later Russell and the rest changed their minds and – with only minimal mention of her work – agreed with her theory.  After similar histories of woman scientists in DNA and penicillin,  it’s a tale worth telling. 

     But it’s not only that which makes this play a humdinger, with the redoubtable Maureen Beattie as Cecilia  at its heart. It is bracing for several reasons – not least her bravura lady-academic performance, redolent of all the clever women who have stamped their way into male redoubts, been told to shut up and failed to (Nice that it comes hot on the heels of cinema’s  celebration of Lee Miller in Ww2).   But Feehily and director Alice Hamiltom have artfully framed it – after the lordly Russell putdown – mostly in Cecilia’s academic heyday in the 1950s, with her supporter Whipple  trying to convince his Harvard colleagues that despite being both female  and married, shock horror, to a Russian (it’s the cold war) , she should follow him as chair of Astronomy. It made her the first woman to achieve such a height at Harvard, after being several times passed over.

  Meanwhile a student (history not science) is interviewing  her for the campus paper.   Annie Kingsnorth is a very demure 21-year-old (Cecilia’s assistant Rona  snarks that no woman over 7 should wear a hair-ribbon).   She is being courted by Budd,  a  dashing Korean War vet, who fixed the the interview gig for her but  gradually reveals  an agenda, which he’s even happy to enforce by blackmail.  McCarthyite, obsessed with the red menace, he wants her artful questions to “smoke out” the Prof as a Commie.

     Will she? When Cecilia necks some  Polish vodka and recklessly speaks her mind about both Russell and Mc Carthy, will the girl stitch up the scientist for her political indiscretion?  Or will she see she’s being played by Bud?

    It’s grippingly done, twisty, all beneath a lovely diorama screen  either with  blackboard scribbles or glorious constellations: science and wonder together.  Cecilia is  tough and sweary, but Beattie catches her  passion in fine moments like her thrill at novas, stars that die in an immense flare of glory. She also expresses a dry, decent humanity in dealing with the younger women, Sally and her sharp devoted assistant (Rina Mahoney, another strong presence). There  is a fascinating moment when Sally is indignant that Cecilia did not stand her ground in 1925 over modifying her PhD, and the older woman explains about pragmatism: you deal with your  own time. It’s a familiar example of the way every stage of feminism has challenged the generation before for compromising, taking it step by step.  And there’s a gloriously comic,cruelly enraging sequence where Whipple tries to get  dinosaur colleagues to see sense and appoint Cecilia to the Chair.  

      A double ending: the 1959 solar eclipse is beautifully evoked as the three women watch through smoked glass and the hairs rise on our necks. That would do. But in the spirit of unromantic science, we then see a moment of her emeritus prize  lecture in 1977, naming female astronomers all the way to our own Jocelyn Bell Burnell.  Some theatrical romantics will find that a bit anticlimactic. I think that Cecilia, as a scientist with no nonsense about her, would have  preferred it that way. Good. 

Hampsteadtheatre.com to 12 October

Rating. Four

PS appalling journey specially for this: awkward day, 35 minutes traffic gridlock, then train delay,  no time for food, Jubilee line breakdown homeward so, missed only good train, drove home in fog, bed god knows ehen, we’re still at Colchester.   I never record this sort of thing because it’s unprofessional even for little humble theatrecat.com, but wish you to know that the 90 mins was well worth the trouble, so you should go too

DATING FOR A CONFUSED AGE 

      I have written before of the particular glee I feel when a brand-new and original show emerges , not from anxious corporate calculations but from young and gifted friends who lark about with ideas and then putting in the grunt-work to make something  real:  the Goes Wrong lot, the Operation Mincemeat group, lately Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder.   And at the Broadway peak of this stand Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the friends who invented SIX: smart and sharp and mocking   and –  pleasingly – a bit heartless.

       Now they present a new show,  with more personal heart and artfullly larded with meta-theatre,  as the protagonists Oliver and Nancy (pseudonymously naming themselves after Lionel Bart’s old banger) explain that they have been commissioned to write “a big fancy musical” and have to work out a story.   Which, of course, is pretty much what happened to Marlow and Moss.  In the show these real-but-fictional  writers  are played with brilliant energy by Jo Foster and Leesa Tulley.  They’re epresented as Marlow ‘n Moss  pretty much are:  university friends,  she a young woman and he (ok, ok, ‘they’) male ,gay self-defined as non-binary.  

         Together they realize that the story they need to tell is their own, wanderers in the modern forest of dating who encounter and are both disappointed in men (there’s a great MEN ARE TRASH number).  They’re hoping for love but in the process realize that actually the platonic friendship between them was there all the time, important and glorious. 

          Comradeship between single women in their thirties and gay men has been around in romcom land forever; as Bridget Jones observed, both being resignedly used to disappointing their parents .  But rarely has the gay-best-friend relationship been more determinedly, and indeed seriously, examined than here.  It is of its time, in a rather good way.

        Shouldn’t have said seriously, might have put you off. It need not.    This is a riot, Oliver in bare legs and a short red kilt (“It’s not a skirt!”)  and Nancy in likeable grungy big-shirt and sweats,  well aware of their various absurdities. They are hanging out in his flat,  in which a 13-strong ensemble and swing gamely represent most of the furnishings, lamps, bathroom and houseplants, capering around as necessary and constantly repurposed.  First they are  disco denizens of the dating world,  as she mourns her ex , an older man in finance, and he takes every delay or cancellation of an online meet-up as his personal failure even if it really is appendicities.     THen in in a wonderful number they watch FRIENDS (they’re millennials who grew up on it)  and get overwhelmed by a crowd of clambering, dancing Rachels and Rosses in the “I got off the plane” climax. So the pair curse all Friends, di-Caprio-Winslet and other screen lovers,   for being “so retro,  so hetero”“But so f—-ing good!”. Schlock romance reinforces their own sense of failure, as it always has from time to time in all our lives. 

         That’s fabulous: and so is a glorious sequence in a brunch cafe where all the patrons are hunched, texting “Hang soon?” and vainly hoping for replies, until Noah Thomas as Artie, representative of their only sane and happily coupled friend,  shouts at the pathetic lone brunchers  to just text “C U Never!”at the absent swains,  and leads them storming into a defiant tap-dance routine. 

    On it goes, cleverly pastiching several musical-theatre styles .  There’s  a less successful online-dating number, though  the staging, under Lucy Moss’ direction with  Ellen Kane’s as choreographer and co-director , is always wittily inventive.  And  there is sweet genius in the profile-planning  lyric “a picture of me working out to show me at my best / a picture of me laughing,  so they don’t know I’m depressed”.

           Foster and Tulley are both tremendous stage personalities, he camply exuberant, she more openly vulnerable.   Sometimes there are moments of real depth of feeling – notably in Nancy’s heartfelt number about her ex  – “I would abandon it all, go when you call”,  but wisely that moment  is skewered instantly by Oliver’s thoughtful:  “I don’t buy it.  It’s just not possible to feel that much about somone who has a LinkedIn profile”.

           But if Nancy is sometims taken seriously in her yearning, his (theirs, if you must)  as a queer nonbinary seeker is taken even more so,  with an extraordinary big  number late on where he compares himself to a disco ball: nobody wants to see the broken bits of glass as long as it goes on sparkling for the rest of the room to enjoy.   

         And that’s the seriousness of it,  vulerable humanity shimmering beyond the self-indulgence of a date-crazed generation. And that is what  earns it as many hoots and cheers at the curtain as SIX ever had. It’s a step onward for Marlow and Moss.  I cannot wait for their next adventure.  

nimaxtheatres.com to 13. Feb

Rating. 4 

WORTH ANOTHER VISIT? O YES

It’s a gig, it’s a party, it’s as  glorious as ever. Down on the floor the promenaders surge between changing stages as they rise and fall to create old Manhattan:  part of the show, New Yorkers themselves,  teased by gangsters, bombarded by strippers’ pompoms or appealed to by emotional lovers. Up in the galleries meanwhile we pause fascinated for a moment as we look down to see the stage crew, dressed as cops,  smoothly ushering these braver, cheaper audience members to new vantage points – once a small crowd momentarily surrounded by wild Cuban dancers. Then like them we are caught up again in the tensions and hilarity of Damon Runyon’s glamorous lowlife 1920s.  On it goes, joyful, until Nicely Nicely barracks the conductor for another chorus of Siddown and as the tumult of applause ebbs up from nowhere come Miss Adelaide and Sarah Brown, drinking furiously on barstools as they  work out that if you want to change a rascal you gotta pin him down.

        There’s nothing like this innovative, physically exciting and musically gorgeous revival, a whole new life for a classic.  It raised spirits and esprit de corps after the pandemic , has run for nearly 18 months and storms  on until early January.   Casts have been refreshed: now we have Michael Simkins  as  a sweet solemn Abernathy and Gina Beck as Sarah : she unmatchable in voice, poise and – importantly – wild discarding of that poise.  Some shows sort of wear out, and the latter days of CATS felt frankly exhausted; but so far here  there is no fatigue, either in the show or the multiple returning audiences.  Who will probably need therapy on January 5th.

      I revisited it on its birthday  and have bought tickets with friends twice more.  Here for more detail are the old reviews if tou want them: 

       But this time I just thought I’d record new affections for Hytner’s direction and Bunny Christie’s complex engineered design , and as a veteran of those galleries here are some moments you really don’t, want to miss. 

       Like the moment when suddenly it’s Havana – how did that happen so fast?  How did Sky Masterson and Sarah fly five hours in two seconds?  What happened to the promenaders?  And where the hell did those lamp-posts come from, strong enough for Sarah to swing around them in drunken glee singing “If I were a bell I’d be ringing”?

   Or perhaps it’s a small thing, like the arrival of Miss Adelaide’s kitchen-shower mob, barely there for two minutes but unforgettable down to the last banged saucepan.   Or the boxing-match that pops up and disappears again.  It might be the deliciously vulgar Hot Box bushel-and-a-peck routine, or the more suave one with the mink and pearls.  Maybe the tap routine in the interval makes you hurry back from your drink so as not to miss anything. It could be anything. But you’ll love it.

         But maybe it is just the way that when the big cast and crew assemble at last to salute one another and the band,  and melt amiably to dance with the prommers – gratitude makes you fall in love with the whole lot of them, and with every technical, lighting, musical, choreographic, design and directorial hand that assembled to make us happy, together, as a show is meant to. 

     One other note of gratitude, by the way. When someone, a virtual stranger,  asks a critic, socially “What’s good to see in London now? Where shall we book?”  It is usually awkward .  You don’t know them,  and can’t judge instantly whether they’re Ibsen-and-David-Hare sort of people or the Mamma Mia ’n Wicked crowd.  Send them the wrong way and they’ll curse you.  But you can send them all to this particular, particularely special,  production of Guys and Dolls.  If they’re not happy , they don’t deserve to be.  

bridgetheatre.co.uk. to 4 January

Note that under the usual G & D 5 there’s a Director Mouse for Sir Nicholas Hytner.

And no, I can’t make it bigger or add a design-mouse for Bunny Christie because my fine IT guru ,who set all this up 10 years ago, is recovering from a near-lethal snakebite in Mozambique (which sounds like the best dog-ate-my-homework excuse but is dramatically true.). So let the director for once stand alone, modest in nature though he is.

UPMARKET EDINBURGH ROCK, SORT OF

    Sir Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus accounts for a tenth of all crime  bestsellers in the UK:  the ancient mazes around Edinburgh Castle, set against te 18c dignity of the New Town,  symbolize the tangled mysteries which his policeman’s mind must solve.  A novelist can evoke such a city,  play with time and space and live in the detective’s head;  screen adaptations of Rebus reflect that. So it was brave for Rankin, bored in lockdown, to write this for the stage (the previous stage Rebus used Rona Munro as writer).   His lockdown imprisonment also, he has said, meant confining it to one room, one set.

        It’s a grand dining-room,  with a startlingly crowded set of paintings under picture-lights (as it’s a touring set, my former theatre-electrician companion mused a bit about possible difficulties of folding and unfolding the flats with all that fiddly wiring).     The pictures are Scottish 20c colourists, important in the plot:  Harriet’s first  husband collected them, but  Paul prefers whisky and gambling. Their guests on the momentous evening are Jack the local Casino owner (Billy Hartman,  bonhomously shady) and his slinky, elegantly braided i girlfriend Candida who is an “influencer” and (one senses RAnkin’s revulsion at the trade) frequently explains her life of being comped and given freebies. Rebus is the plus-one for lawyer Stephanie  – played by Abigail Thaw, a figure cool enough to make you wonder if she’s the killer or, even more exciting,  a proper love interest for Rebus). 

  There’s a menacing thump of music as the lights drop, but then comes a long period of  worryingly un-tense banter and chat.  It’s mostly  about a murder-mystery game – all butlers and wine-cellars – plus remarks about Jack’s dodgy past.   In  an aside Rebus (an agreeably dry, spry Gray O’Brien)  explains that he hopes to nail Casino Jack.  Meanwhile an offstage chef,  Brendan,  seems to have left the kitchen in a mess.  He may by the interval be reported dead. 

       Oh dear.  A murder game with a real corpse?  It starts to feel  like an Agatha Christie tribute act,  only set in Scotland and with mobile phones (Jade Kennedy’s Candida,  a serpentine Instagram dream in a body-con frock),  does a lot of Googling to assist Rebus’ cerebral detective work).   The whole thing is frankly  clunky, in a relaxing Sunday-night-telly sort of way.    Despite director Loveday Ingram’s  valiant efforts to keep the cast moving  it just wastes too long explaining back-stories:   Rankine remaining in novelist-mode even while co-writing, as he is here,  with Ian Reade. 

        I was a bit despondent about it by the interval – its two forty-minute acts, pretty brisk –  but luckily the second half livens up a bit.  Hostilities and lies and the fracture of the hosts’ marriage are exposed,  with revelations about everything from a photo of a Dubai freebie to a possibly bloodstained vase and the personal history of an offstage former detective.   And is the missing Brendan really dead?   If so whodunnit?   Wait and see.  It’ll all be explained.  A bit too lengthily, and through the fourth wall as Rebus returns to address us.  But O’Brien is perfect in the role, so keen readers won’t, I think,  be disappointed.  

cambridgeartstheatre.com    to 7 September

then touring UK  to 30 Nov

rating 3 

A MOMENT FOR REMEMBERING

   A desk, leather chairs, a heap of file boxes, a single sunflower in a pot.   The century has turned, and it’s the last day in the office for Simon Wiesenthal,  holocaust survivor and for half a century the most famous and redoubtable hunter of Nazi war -criminals. Christopher C Gibbs plays him, in Tom Dugan’s measured, thoughtful monologue 75-minute  play,  back after ten years and landing in this theatre at a horribly apposite moment.  

        The old man, well over 90,  has things to tell us. But he keeps checking on the phone to confirm the whereabouts of one last target thought to be in the Meridian Hotel.  His wife Cyla calls to remind him about bringing home the fish.  She, we will learn as his autobiographical lecture goes on, has sometimes wanted him to give up the relentless pursuit and go and live in peace in Israel .     But Wiesenthal has stayed on in Vienna,  working, collecting, finding, and seeing dozens  of officials and guards brought to justice. 

       It has not been everything he expected in his early days of trauma and relief.  In a startling spotlit moment he re-lives one early capture, in which he played a small part: the trial of  Eichmann,  architect of the “Final Solution” .  He expresses his personal shock and confusion.  “A little bookkeeper..tiny…where was my monster? I wanted a monster!”   Other trials fill the same awareness that monsters are humans no different from us, apart from their terrible choices. When he was rescued from his final camp, starving and close to death,  the SS guards had seemed huge and powerful , almsot another species.  Through the decades of finding and seeing war criminals,  he learned the terrible truth that  they could be almost any of us.    “It does not need to be a criminal to commit mass murder.  Just someone obeying authority….”. 

       And again later  he reflects that every mass killer from Hitler to Bin Laden “is part of us. All we can do is contain him”.  He acknowledges firmly those – notably two SS men –  who did not obey terrible orders so readily:  to him it is proof that the containment, personal and social,  “is always a choice”. He also muses with some compassion on how it was to be German after the great defeat of  WW1:  ‘they were hungry and ashamed..Hitler lifted up the German people’s shame”.  And as shamed people do, they found someone to blame. Jews.  

       The personal memories, drawn from Wiesenthal’s several memoirs,  are inevitably stark,  though enlivened by moments like the extraordinary discovery that Cyla had survived, and reflections on the birth of their  grandchildren and great-grandchildren since.   His message is the simplest:  remember and acknowledge that this terrible thing happened , a dark moment when “barbarism met techology”  to create industrial-scale murder, not only of  six million jews but five million others, homosexuals ,gipsies , black and disabled people who did not fit the Nazi template.  

           He remembers the cemetery alongside Dachau, where every grave had a sunflower, and mourns the millions who will never have a graceful grave:  his own office sunflower remains, under a single light,  when he finally leaves the stage, because he is enjoining us all to remember, because he is old and has not much longer.   And  we have to remember, because it is the business of us all :   not revenge,  but remembering. Acknowledging where human choices have led, and could again.   Immaculately done: go see it.  

kingsheadtheatre.com  to 15 Sept

On this day of the report, a reminder of those two excellent verbatim plays from two stages of the inquiry. How theatre, with Nicholas Kent, reacted . There have been other plays about the experience of survivors: this is about engineering, technical and systems failures, vital to note. Links below.

I IMPERSONATION, ILLUSION AND INTRIGUE

          Cottonwool clouds, a scatter of furniture and instruments, an ancient cine camera, a noble arch and some pillars and fake trees. On a 1920s film set, the director’s bawling megaphone shouts  at ten invisible extras trying to be a throng (‘seven years of fascism and they can’t even walk straight”) .  A chap on a hobbyhorse with wheels arrives dressed as Zeus while the director snaps “i’m refracting reality through the dreams of Achilles”. A  chap in commedia del’arte magician’s striped pantaloons arrives saying “I am the maestro and the air is servant to me”, before  turning a flame into a rose and levitating a table while falling instantly and operatically in love with the  director’s sister. 

       It’s a very good start, admit it. This little theatre under the thundering Charing Cross trains always suits an oddball musical, ideally of modest scale and massive eccentricity, and this is a forgotten late-18c comic operetta about love, women’s rise, Enlightenment science and magic tricks. Only   retold and set in the 1920’s, with an  Italian illusionist on the run from Mussolini and from the  Catholic Church’s  ban on conjurers.  Got it so far?

     The 18c science-v-magic-v -religion theme  remains, as does the classic operatic plot about a father disapproving of a suitor; and the  music is  the original . It’s by Napoleon’s Kapelllmeister, Giovanni Paisiello, a composer of great  bounce and tunefulness admired by Catherine the Great and respected by Rossini. 

        The rework is a labour of love and it shows, in a good way. The new book and lyrics are by  James P. Farwell, who when not writing  is an exper on cyber-war and bio-defense, working in numerous international bodies. And I  tell you, if he  brings the same cunning and detail to zapping digital villains  as he does to this, they must watch out.   It’s an  enterprise which hovers pleasingly netween pastiche, philosophy and  homage to opera’s more florid period. 

       Directed  by John Walton,  it has six skilled singers (notably Reka  Jonas as Clarice)  , a tiny but elegant band aloft, and magic tricks devised by Harry de Cruz and performed  by Dan Smith as Julian aka the Great Agrofontido (How hard must it be to find a decent bel canto tenor who also belongs to the Magic Circle?) 

      It fizzes along, duets growing to quintets, spirited quarrels, ridiculous disguises, expostulation from an endearing James Paterson as the scientist-Count father,  and the growing menace of the Cardinal’s pursuit.  The dialogue is sharp, and the lyrics no more  absurd than any Italian-to-English translation of Rossini or Donizetti.  Actually many are well shaped to the music and smart, in the patter somgs or gloriously ridiculous rhymes like the Cardinal’s defence of torturing  heretics with electrodes “Don’t be so prickly, it’s all done very slickly”.  Some arias are lovely, especially from Jonas as Clarice. And one duet is gamely sung  by the  magician and his sidekick Pupupptino  (Constantine Andronokou) dressed as Trojan slaves  tied up back to back, in rags. 

     By the interval I was well content with it as an entertaining absurdity . When your basso profundo is a fascist Cardinal, your scientific Count has an Einstein hairdo and your sopranos soar and bicker at  speed in a hair-pulling  spat while the magician turns  another hankie into a rose , who’s complaining?  But proper magic crept up in he second half: Stuart Pendred’s villainous (and gloriously pompous) Cardinal prowling   the gallery and the aisles with a torch looking for heretics,  while the fleeing pair reappear in ridiculous drag to the  panic of their womenfolk.  But then the two basses sang Addison’s great hymn “The Spacious Firmament” to Paisiello’s music with the backdrop of stars behind,   and a shiver went through the house.

     On went the stratagems and disguises, Julian and Pupuptino  disguised as  a pair of renowned Greek scientists for  a marvellously heartfelt debate between the Count and the conjurer about how  science must be willing to believe in the impossible..But  for all the jokes and the false whiskers  it was working towards a dimming of lights and a sombrely  splendid  magic demonstration, levitating the golden globe from the orrery into the  shimmering air. With the rapt watchers , us among them,  wreathed in music from above.  And I thought yes, this is what theatres are for. To be transported. 

   Which is more than I was for some long time stuck at Colchester in the late train home, writing this. But it was well worth the effort.  The tixkets, by the way, start at £20 and the best are £45.  A  steal.

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk   to 21 Sept

rating four

and a musical mouse in respect to Giovanni Paisello

ROLL UP, ROLL UP…

       What sharper summer draw than “The Greatest Show On Earth” remembered within one of the smallest theatres?   Jonathan O”Boyle’s production has the pretty little theatre  decked out with bunting ,  retro posters and  a circus-diner stall with hot dogs;  worth getting to your seat early to see three of its performers swinging and twirling around on hoop and trapezes,  costumed not in forbidding modern Lycra but white tights and – even for males – sweetly absurd modest bloomers with blue ribbon.    

         This odd musical by Cy Coleman, Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble is  as much about spectacle as story, which can be quite frustrating:  the retro romance of the circus usually tends to blot out the interest of Phineas T Barnum’s actual life in business, philanthropy and fierce political battles as well as showmanship.  But then,  he himself demurred at any “gilding” of seriousness saying “I am a showman by profession” and nothing more.   

       But curiously, I like this small-scale production better than any of the big theatrical extravaganzas :  close up to them all you become more aware of the risks, business as well as physical,  and of the hardscrabble nature of 19c touring showmanship .  Matt Rawle is a very engaging Barnum,  all flop-haired enthusiasm for the noble art of humbug and hauling in the punters. 

     And, indeed, getting rid of them when you need to:  when the crowds in his big New York museum lingered too long, going several times round to see the White Whale , Elephant and assorted freaks,  he brilliantly ordered a sign at the exit saying TO THE EGRESS,  correctly assuming that thrill-seekers without dictionary-learnin’ would expect some giant eagle or ogress and leave.   Thus demonstrating the great truth that you can use big words and panache to fool people into piutting your interest before their own.   In fact, more than once I kept remembering the rise of Boris Johnson.  

           Barnum did less harm, though, and  Rawle also has quite enough charm to convince the parents of the undersized Tom Thumb that making him a spectacle was displaying his abormality as “a gift from God”,  and making you believe that his wife Charity (Monique Young, sweetly grave) would stay with him even after his fascination with the dazzling operatic soprano Jenny Lind (Penny Ashmore , glamourously operatic and melodious).    O’Boyle has found some grand circus performers and with Oti Mabuse as choreographer moves a big cast joyfully around with extraordinary discipline  in the small space,  and some standout moments with “One Brick at a time’  and the big Follow the Band;    there’s a good coup-de-theatre when the curtain and costumes turn monochrome because “I humbugged myself into being respectable” in politics.   Altogether, satisfying: you leave after only two hours ten minutes with a spring in your step.  What more to ask on a summer’s day?  As usual, the Watermill proves worth any detour…

watermill.org.uk  to 8 September

LAUNDRY, LECHERY, LADIES, LAUGHTER 

     if anyone is ever so impertinent as to demand an audition piece from the RSC-seasoned John Hodgkinson, I suggest he delivers – with or without a mud-stained city suit – Sir John Falstaff’s indignant description of his ordeal in a basket of greasy stained laundry and the deep Thames mud, and tops it off by drinking a full quart of ale,  while glaring furiously. A rapturous audience gave that effort of imbibing a slow handclap, rising to tumultuous applause.

    The three piece blue city suit ,by the way,  definitely adds to it, for Blanche McIntyre’s modern Merry Wives is set in today’s suburban Windsor, and this Falstaff’s knighthood clearly derives from some shady City deal rather than a royal court or noble ancestry.   He is sleazily magnificent, venal, overconfident bossman of his scruffy pack, charming until panicking.  The women in his eye are Siubhan Harrison’s Mistress Ford and her best friend Mistress Page (Samantha Spiro):  both full of matronly  mischief and schoolgirl theatricality,  middle England neighbours, decked out at one point like gymbunnies in colourful Dryrobes with  young Anne in tennis gear. 

      Around them Falstaff’s hooligan mates caper and quarrel and plot to get one of them the heiress Anne Page. Each of the posse is glorious in their own way, Emily Houghton finely crosscast as a punk Garter Inn host. Among the suitors Patrick  Walshe McBride is a  gawky, effeminate  Slender, who can’t even stick his thumbs arrogantly in his pockets with the  right buttons done up, and  Ian Hughes the dodgy Welsh parson who,  when panicking about the supposed duel,  breaks quaveringly into Calon Lan while wielding his bike pump. Jason Thorpe creates  Dr Caius as a vain French dentist whose accent  confuses ear with arse, and Shazia Nicholls is a  sportive, two timing  Mistress Quickly working towards general confusion.  

     So far so sitcom, and beautifully done it is too. In the central scam, nothing could be more glorious than a man of Hodgkinson’s  padded majesty coming on all kittenish, turning a tumble from the sofa into a beguiling Recamier pose and doing playful tiger snarls reminiscent of nothing more than certain accounts in the past of MeToo approaches of the kind later claimed as the woman’s idea.   Treasure too the moments when Mistresses Ford and Page,  with Falstaff,s vast waistcoated gut  bulging behind the curtain,  play their scene of affrighted panic very loud while struggling – in character, cushions on faces –  to keep themselves from corpsing.

      One notable thing McIntyre does – with a full rounded careful performance from Richard Goulding – is to give realism and real pain to Ford, the jealous husband, and also to  the painful insult that his suspicion means to his wife: when he abases himself in apology she stands a moment, queenly, before forgiving him. That gives a tang to the comic nonsense, and strengthens it.

      Until the final woodland scene it all takes place in Robert Innes Hopkins’ ingenious revolving neighbourhood, all half timbered  pastiche houses with pylon wires overhead and, a TV aerial and a Yale burglar alarm (which I hope was product placement, if not they owe the RSC a bung, see how venal Falstaff makes you).

      I must admit that I always fear anticlimax in the final fake-fairy scam about Herne the hunter, the fleeing couple and Falstaff in horns – too whimsically  Elizabethan for now – ; but it was alldone with such style and  dispatch, and offered such hilarity as Hodgkinson thinking  for a moment he’s scored a threesome, that I loved it. That’s judgement, that’s pace, that’s RSC in one of its merry moods.  

    It got many stars and plaudits this summer, but I was away, so since it  runs four more weeks I thought to  catch up. A riotous matinee proved them right.  Get there, do: Stratford is on a roll right now with this and Pericles and School for Scandal (scroll down, rvws both there). Worth anybody’s visit…

Www.rsc.org. To 7 september

rating. 5 mice

A TALL TALE, A SHIMMERING MAGIC

Of all Shakespeare’s plays this is now the rarest staged, not without reason: some early scenes are co- written with a contemporary John Wilkins, its tale is dependent on intricate interrupting narration by the medieval poet Gower, and the scene ricochets around the ancient Mediterranean kingdoms and cities  – Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, Mytilene . Our hero escapes murder after discovering in horror a ruler incestuously abusing his daughter ,is  shipwrecked, finds a wife, loses her and the newborn Marina in yet another storm, only to find both again years later in a  blaze of healing magic and coincidence. It is messy.  Moreover,unusually in Shakespeare its hero the Prince of Tyre is an innocent: no tragic flaw, no envy or malice, Pericles is a proper gentleman, trying to do right.

      So salute director Tamara Harvey for choosing this as her first outing as the RSC’s new co-director,  and making of it something remarkably beautiful. It is dreamlike, moving, long-memorable.  She artfully uses, early on,  dim-lit tableaux of movement and stillness,  veiled dance and half-glimpsed action behind a curtain of ropes (Jonathan Fensom’s design is framed by cordage, and the storms at sea are an elegant tangle of wild movement by Annie-Lunenette Deakin-Foster). All this reinforces the folktale-epic strangeness of the story, lulling and enchanting us.   Claire Van Kampen’s score is no small part of that enchantment: when the healer Cerimon (Jacqueline Boatswain) calls for music as she looks into the coffin of Thaisa, the spine tingles. 

     Against this dreamy storytelling  stand the real  humans. Alfred Enoch’s Pericles is perfect casting: youtful, natural, steadfast, boyish, alarmed by wickedness and hostility, childlike in his beginnings but  deepening into the immense broken grief of his losses,  and a hysteria of final relief which brings actual laughter from the audience. Around his story circle bad people and better ones: honest Helicanus and creepy Antiochus, Cleon grateful for his aid but collaborating in murder and lies with his evil wife Dionyza (Miriam o’Brien stepped in with panache on press night). And there’s a scene-stealing Christian Patterson as King Simonides, presiding over a comical setpiece tournament for his daughter Thaisa and, after some top grade teasing of Pericles and audience,  handing her over to shabbier shipwrecked Pericles as a bride with Lychorida giggling behind him. For yes, there is human comedy here as well as magic: the fishermen of Pentapolis, the infuriated bawds of the Mytilene brothel, are all a joy. 

       And beautifully, the narrator is not Gower: here it is,  we discover, the lost daughter  Marina herself.   Rachelle Diedericks tells  her father’s  tale from before her birth  until she becomes in the late scenes a protagonist, kidnapped and enslaved to the brothel where – in some more  wonderful scenes – she ruins their business with her steadfast purity.  

     For all the play’s oddity the playwright’s   best tones  ring true   through Marina: “Born in a tempest when my mother  died, the world to me is like a lasting storm..”  As  she pleads for her life before the pirate kidnappers swing down on yet more ropes, Shakespeare’s voice echoes unmistakeable  “I never kill’d a mouse, nor hurt a fly:I trod upon a worm against my will, But I wept for it.”   Wonderful. 

     And wonderful to give her, back as narrator, the epilogue with its  blessing of us all, for gathering to hear the old tale :  “New joy wait on you!”  So it did.

Rsc.org.uk to 21 sept.

Rating 4.

 L’CHAIM ! THE VERY STUFF OF LIFE 

   Of course it helps to be under a real sky:  a lone fiddler high above the cornfield scratches out the first lonely notes against the evening clouds,  the great “Sunrise, Sunset” wedding number falls just as the last light fades,  making the brutal burning of the cornfield a vivid shock minutes later;  and a single star appeared behind the trees as the villagers of the Anatevka  were at last driven from home on the Ukrainian plains to scatter across the world. 

          But Jordan Fein’s perfectly judged production does not rest only on this glorious setting under the trees; its vigour and tenderness and humour and dazzling pace would stand out anywhere.  Nor, with a wonderful ensemble,  does it even need to rest only on Adam Dannheisser’s Tevye, though it almost could have:  here’s  a great wild booming bull of a man,  huge-hearted and choleric ,  emotional and ruefully self-aware,  turning in bafflement to his God or to the audience with sudden impish wit.  He’s irresistible, fully human, idiosyncratic.   

      One can forget sometimes that ,as Fein himself observed, this show is the very definition of musical theatre.  It moves from one great number to another at speed but never lets them stop the impetus of the story, rolling it on, as Bock and Harnick’s songs  define characters’ doubts and longings.  It  builds up to great  set-pieces like Tevye’s nightmare (you need to see it, I defy description, a lot of sheets are involved) or the marriage scene,    where the moment of profound emotion in “Sunrise Sunset” merges rapidly  into a classic Jewish-wedding breakfast taking trouble to develop  abruptly up into rows about chickens and dead grandmothers before some forbidden dancing.  

       On which subject let’s say that  all the choreography  – by Julia Cheng  – is wild and Russian and stampingly, clappingly brilliant.   Bravura moments like the bottles-on-heads quartet are memorable of course,  but even more so is the way Raphael Papo, the fiddler who roams and haunts the set high and low,  will sometimes move sinuously with and around Tevye in his moments of vexation,  playing,  his notes a dramatic living expression of inner conflict.  

      There is not one detail that does not touch the heart or make you reflect – in this of all years – about the ancient character , tenacity and evolution of the diaspora.   Even the black-bundle busybody matchmaker Yente (Beverly Klein) has her broad comedy suddenly and late shading into poignancy as she resolves, quixotically, somehow to move to the Holy Land.     The daughters are all wonderful, Liv Andrusier’s Tzeizel, Georgia Bruce’s pleading Hodel and Hannah Bristow’s magnificent defiant Chava each distinctive in their confrontations with the furious but adoring father as they marry for love even – in Chava’s case – breaking with race and faith.  Mark Aspinall’s musical direction and new orchestrations  chart these  emotional lines almost uncannily: the parents’ lament “Chavaleh” dissolves into a harsh wild instrumental duet which makes your hair stand on end:  when the milk-cart,  which so often fed the comedy, crashes over,  Tevye’s back turned to his daughter expresses a vast deep primitive grief that takes your breath away.    A quite wonderful production on every level. 

openairtheatre.com. to 21 September.  

rating five

Duke Theseus offers instructions, Act 1 Scene 1.     “Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments,  Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth!”  

          You can trust Red Rose Chain, triumphant on its 25th year of outdoor summer productions ,  to stir up merriment.  It is well-supplied with nimble youth.  From the moment Lysander and Oberon in Charlie Chaplin trousers, usher you into the car park, a joyous esprit-de-corps fills the air, enlivening the picknickers as they trail towards the great trees above the theatre.   Even before the appearance of Caroline Bowman and Oli Simonon’s extraordinary  – and in two cases huge –  fairy puppets we are merry.  And after two hours of dashing, chasing, protesting,  conflicting, fighting, leaping, rolling action has taken us towards the resolution of all lovers,   we shall have our moment of  sunset sentiment too:  as Oberon and Titania reconcile it is with a startlingly beautiful choice of “You were always on my mind” ,  with quiet flute and guitar under the branches behind. 

             It is  a play which, in its youthful erotic confusions and fairy absurdities,  always benefits from being taken as just that: play.    Joanna Carrick’s troupe know how to do that: nobody hides in a dressing-room,   Bottom the weaver starts a circular argument about donkey-heads with a pair of enchanted seven-year-olds well before the start,  and  once it begins the  young cast’s doubling and trebling of parts – with bursts of ad-lib but always secure in their various characters –  draws the audience into that joking playfulness.  I still don’t know quite how Emily Jane Kerr’s  Hippolyta/Titania manages to become Snout of the Rude Mechanicals several times at speed (though  she’s spared being Wall:  he  is recruited from the front row of the audience for their final performance) . Nor do I see how  it is even possible in the time  for Ted Newborn’s Lysander to be got back into that harness for puppet-Cobweb’s last gigantic entrance. 

                It is woefully easy,  in grander theatre,  for newcomers to Shakespeare’s tale to lose the plot in a thicket of verse,  and forget which set of lovers is which and why,  but Carrick’s storytelling is immaculate and Katy Latham’s costume design – quick-change as it often is – holds clues neatly  in polka-dot and stripe.  No viewer will go astray, the small children got it without trouble.    All the cast  – only seven –  are adeptly, physically expressive and seem sharply to relish the contradictions of their doubled-and-trebled parts:   Ted Newborn’s poshly confident  Lysander turns into a Flute who overcomes his reluctance to being a drag Thisbe and then gets lunatically too keen on it;  Vincent Moisy, memorable as the terrifying Witchfinder-General in  Carrick’s The Ungodly (which comes to London this autumn) morphs between Bertie-Wooster arrogance as Demetrius and glorious confidence as Bottom.  Ailis Duff is a wonderful, gawkily despairing Helena , and Evangeline Dickson beautifully pertly furious in their teenage bitch-fight.   Jack Heydon  brings lordly dignity to Theseus / Oberon, plays the accordion and handles the enormous Mustardseed puppet with character (it does a rather touching sidelong look, very responsive to the scene).  Rei Mordue is a sharp swift Puck when she isn’t being aged Ageus on two sticks, hobbling with indignation . 

        It always fascinates me how the rigorous careful professionalism of Carrick’s theatremaking –  nurturing serious actors and serious work – intertwines with her Red Rose Chain’s consistent community work with amateurs, including the most vulnerable,  and with its net of volunteers.  But somehow it does that trick without denting the quality: there is  never anything indulgently am-dram about these plays, even at their larkiest, and the Forest productions now moved to Sutton Hoo have been remarkable.  Maybe it’s that esprit-de-corps that makes it all work:   worth noting in the programme that, for instance, the set was personally partially constructed by  Bottom/Demetrius/Mustardseed  and Theseus/Oberon/Mustardseed/Musical Director/ Starveling, that  Lysander/Flute/Cobweb manages the onground marketing,  Hermia/Snug/Moth is also movement director ,Puck leads the community work, etc. 

        I think all that would meet approval from the youthful Shakespeare,  whose Lord Chamberlain’s Men hit Ipswich  in  1594 to earn 40 shillings, and probably had to knock up their own stage too.  He would recognize the spirit.  It’s worth being part of:  I hope some of the crowds flooding East Suffolk for the commercial hype of Latitude down the road  have the wit to head  to Sutton Hoo as well, and be awoken to proper merriment. 

box office   redrosechain.com      to 24 August   

Forecast’s very good… go.

AS LONG AS WE NEED IT…

To do a timeworn musical, entangled in all- too -familiar earworms, you can either sharpen, challenge and update it   or lovingly polish the old machine.  If you sharpen and strip it you risk a certain dismay in the faithful ( as in the Fish and Fein  noirish Oklahoma)  but it might be a revelation.   Harder, in a way, to polish it with such loving respect that a half-forgotten gleam suddenly makes all its world new.   This takes the second route, and Oliver 2004 comes up shiny fresh.

    To achieve top polish of this Lionel Bart perennial,   you gotta pick a genius artist or two: this Chichester has done,  with Cameron Mackintosh’s loving re-production . Matthew Bourne directs and, importantly, choreographs, giving the ragamuffin boys and surging London crowds just the right level of joyful looseness, kicking and swirling and crowding and revolving.  Graham Hurman’s musical supervision  faultlessly finds its way between music-hall Oom-pah-pah and the ethereal beauty of the dawn street cries in Who Will Buy? Oliver –  Cian Eagle-Service on press night   – is confidently, heartbreakingly touching. And it all takes place within Lez Brotherston’s astonishing , vigorous, atmospheric and intricately detailed old-London set which  turns and grows, brilliantly exciting from any of the three sides of the auditorium: here’s : Sikes lurking on metal stairs, Oliver singing his aubade on a balcony, Fagin’s den shrouded in stolen silk handkerchiefs,  crowds whirling beneath.  

        Fagin, though!    Simon Lipkin is a revelation, free of both caricature and the merry familiar tributes to Ron Moody: he’s as  vigorous and teasing  as a standup,  giving the rogue an air constantly conflicted,  tremblingly scared of Sikes,  waving away the klezmer violin moments,  human and redeemable: his final appearance, arm in arm fatherly with the Artful Dodger, is unexpectedly moving.  Aaron Sidwell’s  Bill Sikes was unexpected too:   his assured menace explodes into sudden violence,   but more unsettling still is a curious edge of nasal camp in his voice.  Shanay Holmes’  Nancy is tarty and larky, decent and deluded: when she wanders round the stage singing  ” As long as he needs me” she seems to be searching , without much hope,  for someone to agree with her fatal loyalty. 

      Full confession: after 64 years of star-studded productions and school galas, and the movie, and endless muzakized tunes,   I was tired of Oliver.  Barely wanted to go.    Before last night, the  last pleasure I got of its existence was Alan Bennett’s wonderfully catty  remark about trying to cast The History Boys,  ans suffering theough auditions of prematurely aged child actors  – “The boys who’d been in Oliver:   Lionel Bart cut a swathe theough the youthof England like the Somme”. None of that here; even Bennett might smile at the natural, ebullient, Bourne ensemble. Bravo.  You got me back.

cft.org.uk   to  7 Sept

UP WHERE SHE BELONGS

Imelda Staunton is a marvel, from Mama Rose in Gypsy to HMQ in The Crown. There is no lady of the stage more worthy of being greeted at the top of a Grand Staircase   by an intermInable chorus of dancing waiters in velveteen  tailcoats , buttons hellishly a-gleam,  while a first-night audience of  2,280 go noisily bananas.  She’s earned it, albeit often more strikingly than in this grand old smoker of a 1960’s Jerry Herman spectacular.  Mind you, even  the arrival onstage of a fullsize locomotive in steam had previously had its own rapturous applause, and that was in the much slower first half.  

       The setting- up of half-millionaire Vandergelder’s feed store and the widowed Dolly Levi’s artful matchmaking in her own interest is fun (she and Andy Nyman strike nice Beatrice “n Benedick sparks when they’re together, and one wishes it was more frequent).   Harry Hepple as Cornelius the clerk seeking  adventure in the big city  is lovely, though his gift for physical comedy (Toby Parks of Spymonkey is credited) is underused:  as so often in this very traditional show it shades too fast into yet another huge and datedly overfaithful ensemble.    Imelda indeed  only briefly comes into her own as a spellbinder in  a couple of poignant solos, especially the one  about not wanting to let the parade pass by without her as she ages.   Otherwise – until the big title chorus – her gifts too feel underused: curbed by Dominic Cookes’s untypically vanilla traditionalism.    

           The music, of course, is splendid,  big-scale. Some numbers – notably  Jenna Russell’s wistful song about ribbons down her back and hope for love – are genuinely touching.    But it feels of-its-period, the ’60s,   and not always in the best way.   It does energetic spectacle without ever being remotely surprising (though in the small part of Ernestina,  Jodie Jacobs goes for broke with her restaurant capers and Emily Lane’s Minnie is pleasingly over-the-top screwball).   But face it,   nobody goes to the Palladium on a big big starry musical night to be shocked.  It is not that sort of  auditorium,   and this is not that sort of play, even though much is made in the programme and comment of Dolly’s ‘agency’ and rejection of passive womanhood. 

         I thought director Dominic Cooke would offer us something less dogged, something a bit unexpected,  befitting a period when  we have seen  inventive, immersive freshening of old musicals like Hytner’s Guys and Dolls at the Bridge, or Daniel Fish’s  alarmingly dark Oklahoma at the Young Vic.   The staging is sumptuous but traditional – last time I saw that rolling stage used so much was when Dorothy was dragging a particularly reluctant Toto along it ten years ago.    The ensemble are top-of-the-range and throw themselves into the big numbers, but only the waiter sequence approaches that dangerous excitement a really good choreographer can produce.   It’ll be a summer highlight for visitors,  and most will love it to bits.  I really wanted to.  

box office  lwtheatres.co.uk   to 14 sept

rating 4  (i.e. 3 plus a musicals-mouse for traditionalism)

GRISLY GLEE 

If there is any aspect of 21c Western culture  sorely in need of being laughed at,   it s ithe morbid fascination with police-procedural telly,,  especially true-crime and its gruesome forensics.  Murder has fascinated people ever since Jack the Ripper,  but the digital age has made it more intensely. fictionalized and memorialized, screened and podcasted-about   all the way from the wild fringes to endless BBC Sounds trails (forgetting the Corporation’s old Quaecunque motto:  look it up) 

    So hurrah for John Brittain, Matthew Floyd Jones and Fabian Aloise, and  their joyful invention  of Kathy and Stella, from Beverley near Hull,   young adults consoling their failure-to- launch by running a halfbaked true crime podcast chat from  Kathy’s Mum’s garage. And,  gloriously, insisting on involving themselves in the matter of the Hull Decapitator,  to the irritation of the police DI Shaw (Elliotte Williams-N’Dure, who gets a lovely second-half number about the difficulty of these huge investigations and how sometimes theres “no justice –  just us”).   Their public appeals are wonderful – illustrated by an ensemble of the deluded fans dancing around them and lines like “If you know anyone with a history of arson and animal torture in the Beverley area…”

     Kathy, the brighter researcher of the pair, had dropped out of University in depression.   Stella is a sacked beautician. A touching set of flashbacks to their child  selves bonding over murder books rather than Sweet Valley High  gives us the story, and there is real heart in their relationship.   As Stella’s mother sings,  Kathy is “the only one who understands you, the  only one who can actually stand you”.   But it threatens to end when Kathy, in a hilariously bad taste morgue scene,  learns  that she could study forensics as a degree,  and move her real life on.   A thoughtful duet for our age  has them both relating to the wonders of the internet; Stella singing about the comfort of the  “approooooval of strangers, Kathy looking at university courses. 

        They’re a wonderful pair, Rebekah Hinds as Stella in fishnets, shorts and miniskirt, Bronté Barbé as  Kathy in droopy ethnic cotton.   Hannah Jane Fox does the full diva as “Felicia”, the true-crime writer who they admire and who gets murdered herself, her head in a bag posted to the podcasters by the mystery villain ( Stella knows she shouldn’t have taken a selfie with it…).  All the cast are full of glee; the songs  (Floyd Jones is musical director, composer and co-lyricist)  are sharp power ballads. 

    It’s been at the fringe in 2022 and Manchester last year.  And it is heartening to happen upon it in the little Ambassadors, proper West End.  Because something good is happening  when a young group, outside the established and celebrated mainstream,   get together and make a show on the fringes,  daring to be different,  facing the perils of launching it it down the slipway to fill the stalls with surprised glee.   Especially when the product is  fresh but also disciplined, worked-up with a meticulous affection sometimes missing from weary lollipop revivals.   A decade ago it was Mischief Theatre with the Goes-Wrong plays. In 2017 it was SIX,  two years later Operarion Mincemeat.    Both are now  mainstream must-sees.  This could be heading that way.   

 box office   atgtickets.com  to 14 Sept

rating 4 

AN OVEN-READY MUSICAL, NEVER MUFFIN A MOMENT 

   As summer heats the merciless city,  good to know that five minutes’ south of London Bridge station is La France Profonde,  a village square below faded shutters and 1930’s posters, where men in berets play petanque and concertina, Claude le patron in his big apron greets the front row as they settle down,  and  Denise sings about her village day.   Not that the Provençal village is always happy: the old baker died and they’ve been weeks without bread,  which aggravates the usual short-tempered quarrels  – Curé, Mayor, Teacher, quarrelsome boules-players – as illustrated in a spirited ensemble. The arrival of M. Aimable Castangniet the new baker is met with delight and a Bread chorus;   the presence of his gorgeous  new wife some twenty years younger arouses curiosity.  Baguettes, Croissants, Tartes aux Pommes and sexual tension:  vive la France!  But if she is tempted away by a local lad and the despairing baker can’t bake,  a village emergency will be declared.   The trolley which first was laden with glorious bakery suddenly appears equally brilliantly laden with exploded dough, split flour and cremated loaves (Paul Farnsworth, take a bow for design: stage crew for prop-bread management 8 shows a week). 

        Joseph Stein’s book is inspired by a 1938 film,  Stephen Schwartz wrote music and lyrics.  The show never made Broadway , but is one of those small unsung musicals the Menier does better than anyone and sometimes exports back to its native land.  Maybe it just felt too good-hearted, too Clochemerle-whimsical for some;  for others actually rather shocking:  Genevieve does run off to a seedy hotel with Dominique the errand-boy,  and there’s a bed involved,  but after a lovely number when she reflects that with him it’s all fire and no warmth,  she returns to minimal condemnation (only old Therese gets stern, the priest too keen on forgiveness and reliable bread).  In a cheerful chorus the ladies of the village (except Therese)  agree that you can either be “a virgin, or a realist” about these matters.  

         Its strength – apart from some good numbers – is that the  process of Genevieve’s escape and return is as solid in its truthfulness as Stein’s more famous Fiddler on the Roof.  The final scene with the couple is stunning.   Clive Rowe as the baker is tremendous: moving from naive delight in his new wife and home to stunned  shock at her flight, leading a drunken chorus as he tries not to care. Then he’s poignantly alone,  but a proper gent as he gallantly hands over his savings to the Mayor to compensate for the fugitives have nicked his Peugeot.   Vocally and emotionally it’s a five-star performance.  Lucie Jones’ Genevieve is fine too, girlishly grateful, tempted, resisting then succumbing; she tackles with belting energy Schwartz’s really difficult big numbers , each one an emotional journey.  The rascally Dominique, Joaquin Pedro Valdes, is a fine voice and good fun, but then conveys beautifully a seducer’s yawning boredom.

          But essential to its tare-aux-fraises charm is an ensemble warmly  immersed in their various identities, however jokily sketched at first sight. And this Gordon Greenberg achieves in his cast:   never a reaction, grimace or glance amiss, the group choreographed with some wonderful scuttling unities and chaotic confusions.   Some are pure fun: Michael Matus’ mayor  smoothly Leslie-Phillips with a  trio of dubious nieces , and Matthew Seadon-Young’s M le Curé properly indignant at the insouciantly sinful attitudes of his flock.  Josefina Gabrielle  as Denise, butt of her  husband’s jokes, has the voice of a lark and a valiant workaday hopefulness, and Finty Williams, bullied wife, is sweetly wistful:   kindly and nervous.  Her eventual desertion, leaving a baffled husband circling partnerless roumd the final dance, offers a lemon zest of reality after the touching central reunion .   Altogether well worth it:  crisply baked,  stuffed with feeling and iced with a ten-piece band. Not a bad seat in the house,  tickets hovering round fifty quid.  Why go up West for a musical? 

menierchocolatefactory.com. to 14 Sept.   

GEORGIANS IN THE PINK,  AND SOMEWHAT PUNK 

       Sheridan’s social satire from the 1770s  hits the age of fake news, viral reputation-trashing and post-imperial embarrassment.   There are knowing readjusted gags,  witty cringes of embarrassment whenever anyone’s East Indies wealth is mentioned,  artfully adapted doggerel pre & post-ludes and some fine Dad-dance choreography to drum-synth rhythms to update the  harpsichord.   But no modernization was not going to deprive us of 18c spectacle,  no sir!   We are reassured about that  from the first moment,   when the cast rise from the floor led by Siubhan Harrison as Lady Sneerwell in a towering  Mr-Whippy wig and pannier skirts so wide that – to general applause – all her entrances and exits along the walkways have to be done scuttling sideways.

       Alex Lowde’s designs are indeed a riot:  if – as I recommend –  you book in with a gang of mates or family or, God help us, a hen night,  it might be fun for everyone to dress in violent pink, with edges of black and champagne.   The two worst villains –  sinuous Snake the letter-forger and hypocritical Joseph Surface- are both in black,  but everyone else male and female is mostly pretty riotous and frankly camp. Rarely will you see a more preposterous display of hip-popping hetero-camp than in John Leader’s dissipated hero Charles, though Patrick Walshe McBride plays him close as the simpering poet Benjamin Backbite. As for Mrs Candour’s outfit, words fail me. 

         They never, of course, fail her.  Sheridan is a magnificently, rattlingly wordly playwright and director Tinuke Craig’s cast give the rhetoric, expostulation and rapidfire dialogue a crackling energy .   The plot is familiar down the centuries:  hypocrisy, plots to expose it, lies both malicious and absurd,  decency triumphant at last,  but the Brinsley Sheridan way to handle it is with the lightness of pink meringue.  Craig responds to this spirit by treating the whole thing more as a lark than angry satire:  there is little real darkness.   The famous set-pieces are terrific:  I enjoyed the scornful auction of Charles’ ancestral portraits (sharp  for the period, or indeed any time in our time-lag, class-aware monarchy).  There’s a fine screen scene with the hidden Lady Teazle,  formerly a contemptuous shopaholic party-girl, suddenly understanding the devoted decency of her older husband.  Tara Tijani does both moments beautifully.  

        The fun rollicks on, pleasingly ridiculous and spectacular, and the physicality is a delight. The servants whip around in strange pajama suits, making themselves felt in the narration;  Stefan Adegbola illustrates Joseph’s pious hypocrisy in nice period style  by constantly falling into Garrick-y poses to deliver his moral precepts.    Leader’s Charles drops the camp wriggling when he needs to,  and shades it into a mere overspill of  teenage energy;  Geoffrey Streatfeild is a properly touching Peter Teazle and  Wil Johnson overdoes it just enough as his stately colonial millionaire Sir Oliver masquerades in turn as a moneylender and a needy relative.   

      It’s fun, sportingly silly,   and gets good old Sheridan’s moral point home though without with all the painless feathery swish of the ostrich plumes  which tower over the ladies’ heads.   A special mention for whoever got Walshe McBride to wear his hair like that.   

 Rsc.org. To 6 september 

rating  4 

ON THE EVE OF THE ELECTION….

      …I emerged onto the Cut in a grey afternoon blinking tears, unable to process having been made to cry by  James Corden. He’s been for me   a figure hardly more than a mild  chat-show irritant ever since he vanished from theatre after One Man Two Guvnors.   But on this  return,  under  Matthew Warchus in Joe Penhall’s tense, powerful 90 minute state-of-Britain play we sceptics are reminded that if you plug him in in to a good script and director Corden is the real thing.  He walks the walk, travels the terrain, enrages and entertains and threatens and – in final dissolution – shatters you.  

        I write this on the evening of election day, and dedicate this (late) review to the memory of  the late Jo Cox and David Amess, and to all constituency MPs, especially in the hardest areas,  who genuinely want to represent and help lives.  Of course there are idlers, and monsters, and chancers among any 650 people,  but cynicism has no place on a day like this. There is hope.  Many are heroic in service.  And Penhall’s heroine,  played by Anna Maxwell Martin,  represents them all.  Corden, opposite her in the constituency office where most of this 90 minute drama takes place,  represents the immense, intractable, infuriating, demanding people who turn them.  We meet him first as an ex-serviceman installing her panic button and CCTV;  enjoy the banter about how  he went to the same primary school,  and see him, step by step,  becoming every MPs private nightmare.  His wife has left him,  moved in a new man, gives trouble over the children,  there’s a court action,  an inflammatory blog he writes,  and an irrational belief that the MP can and should change the law.

        The play between them is excellent:  as fans of MOTHERLAND know,  Anna Maxwell Martin can deploy a wonderful resting-bitch-face,  and in her mannish suit and family-woman weariness her MP has  – and needs – a hard professional toughness.  But her face lights up, pleased about the primary-school link, anxious to help, never despairing.  Every bit of sensible advice, however, bounces off the determined, geezerish,  clearly troubled  hard-man veneer of the persistent constituent.

  He becomes angry at not succeeding in his impossible demands for what he thinks is justice:  she takes police advice.   At first this  the DC – wonderfully played by Zachary Hart – offers comic relief as he stonewalls about the importance of avoiding eye contact, empathy and any sign at all of humanity, while Maxwell Martin protests – while on an exercise bike, on Zoom – that her job needs both.   There’s a  shock and a twist – the MP appears in a sling and bandages, but he hasn’t attacked – and still truculent, Corden holds his own until ,  in a ludicrously inept “restorative justice” attempt,  the policeman’s toxic maleness emerges in turn.  It’s electric.  You feel the edge, in this moment of  divided anger,  of a kind of despair. And then,  in a last quiet scene  when time has passed,  a gleam of redemption.  Corden’s last appearance is – well, it finished me off.  

oldvictheatre.com to 10 August

rating five

TEENAGE DREAMS, AND FAME AS NIGHTMARE

Got to love the dedication of the Southwark: to mark its smaller-space production of Samantha Hurley’s New York play about a demented teenage fan, it lined the cubicles in the lavatory with posters of the sulky baby-face of Maguire, and Spiderman fanzine covers. Once you enter The square three-sided space a further explosion of Tobeyiana hits you, with fairylights. On the floor big woolly rugs, on the shelves toys playing a hand-puppet fantasy of a Mermaid King and a princess.  It’s a teenage basement den , a prison of longing and unattainable desire. 

     It will remind anyone of being 14, though fandom seems to have turned wilder since my friend Katy and I fantasised about stowing away in Paul McCartney’s trunk on his American tour (such was our innocence we had no idea what we expected on emerging).    In this case Shelby – played with terrifying ferocity by Tessa Albertson – has read KIDNAPPING FOR DUMMIES and successfully captured Maguire – Anders Hayward – and handcuffed him to a pipe.  There are references to the dark thriller MISERY, and when Shelby appears in tatty bridewear at full shriek,  mouth Munch-open, the terror is so extreme that for a while I reckoned this was a nightmare of the victim’s.  Not so. He thinks at first it is a delusion while recovering from dental anaesthesia and drugs in his system, then that it’s a prank of his manager or agent’s.  Shelby on the other hand is just hellbent on owning him,  as self-defined president of his fan club. It takes a laser shock to make him say “I do”,  and none of his resistance dents her determination.

        The play runs solid at 110 minutes,  and could well be trimmed:  but New York loved it, the players are remarkably good and Tyler Struble’s direction fluent and full of small surprises. The conversations, conflicts and doubts both sides are often very funny, but its merit is in allowing pathos and a rounded, stroppy sense of emerging character to Shelby : neglected fatherless child of a QVC-addicted mother, bullied at her school and its Prom. There’s subtlety too in a wonderful performance by Hayward as her captive.   Just as her half-grown Cosmopolitan-magazine mentality is often dented by saving streaks of realism,  his horror and disbelief is tempered by awareness that he had already been trapped by his fame, and by the thousand interviews and biographies which create him as a dream persona.  When she finds out some of the interviews were nonsense she shouts “You’re not MY Tobey Maguire!!”  And he has to agree.  “Fame is very sticky, it gets all over you”.

        The third figure, occasionally,  is Kyle Birch, large-scale and comedically rresistible, who appears in the wall as a kind of inner Tobey who doesn’t buy his stardom at all,   sometimes as an invisible shouting mother upstairs,  and finally as a very enjoyable nightmare grotesque :  a realtor come to measure and sell the house.  Meanwhile Tobey somehow escapes and reappears irritably trying to get out of his Spiderman suit.   A sharper, earlier ending would have made it a better play. But you can’t find fault with the cast. Especially Hayward, who I hadn’t seen on stage before, and much hope to see again. 

southwarkplayouse.co.uk to 10 August