theatreCat

A THING OF WONDER 

    People who saw Mnemonic  at its origin 25 years ago  still talk about it. A few say it changed them. It was a collaborative, at first wholly unscripted , creation of Simon McBurney with his  Théåtre de Complicité. This reworked version, new-cast and directed by the man himself, opens with a tribute to those first makers, and an artfully faux-improv  speech on the nature of memory and how neuropsychology now understands it not as solid embedded facts and feelings,   but as an ever evolving set of memories-of-memory:  ever- sparking, chemical and electric connections between neurons. This neatly forms a parallel to this reimagining of the show.

      Then  on the bare stage, with only a chair,  the speaker tells us to put on provided eyemasks as the great house sinks into  a total blackout, and remember moments of our lives. And then feel a leaf (also provided),  while reflectng on the fact that if you go far far back, thousands and millions of years all humans are related. Then the lights come back ,  masks off ,  and the speaker is not the same we remember at all  but interrupted by  disembodied voices on a phone with him fussing  about someone called Alice, who is missing.

        Such metatheatrical gimmickry could be quite annoying to some, but no: bear with it, because two qualities always  mark McBurney – whose work I have  met with both joy and bafflement over the years (the latter being chiefly Beckett’s fault).   One is his undented, childlike sense of wonder and ability to kindle it;  the other his mischief. He fears neither self-parody nor profound awe and emotional greatness.    He can handle both, and there is no rabbit-hole of strangeness down which one should hesitate to follow him.

          The idea of recall,  ancestry and quest begins to develop,  staged with gauze mist, an occasional screen,  very deft movement and changes of role by the seven players,  and some sliding furniture and brilliant lighting and sound (Paul Anderson, Christopher Shutt) .  Stories interlock: it’s as confusing as a winding dream fed by uneasy half-memory, and as urgent as a sudden waking to one’s inner chaos.   

       At its core is the 1991 discovery of Øtzi:  the corpse of a man suddenly uncovered by freak weather in the Alpine ice, on what is now the modern  border of Austria and Italy.  At first he was thought to be a 20c mountaineer, but gradually archaeological and scientific inspection showed him as over 5000 years old. Early Bronze Age.   Preserved in the cold, amid traces of his clothing, food  and mountain man’s equipment  he is a unique figure: as one researcher says, a Neolithic person who “stepped to us straight out of his everyday life”.  With delicate brilliance the story grows, combining  deep, growing respect with the absurdity of a media sensation  and, later, a bickering scientific conference where each speaker has built a theory of who he was: hunter, shepherd, shaman, doctor, patriarch, refugee. To make us laugh so much at that stage of the solemn story is a noteworthy achievement: very McBurney.  

       The quest for Øtzi’s reality is entangled with a modern story: of the missing Alice, who went to a mother’s funeral , was never told about her father, and crosses Europe, distressed and baffled, with great train sounds and wind and jostling crowds and encounters and questions, from Paris to Berlin to the Balkans and Kyiv. The father’s reality is ironically elusive, compared to what we learn about the Iceman:  maybe  Jewish, a prayer shawl found in a mysterious box;  maybe Russian, Ukrainian, always to his daughter  half-imaginary,  existing in half-helpful answers by half-remembering strangers, and in a mother’s long silence.   There is a cab driver’s story too, picked up when she is on her way,  relating the tides of migration and struggle and strangeness in his own ancestry. 

     Grand themes  are of memory and death, the natural cycle and human rejection of it to create funerals;  of the honest pathos of nakedness too,  as on the dim stage the modern man Omar longing for his Alice sometimes becomes the frozen Iceman corpse, vividly done, a solemn beauty.         Stories and feelings immerse us for two hours:  is it real, who is dreaming,  why was Øtzi apparently fleeing, why did he lie down in the snow leaving his axe,  why would a father disappear? Above all, how can we contemplate and connect the immensity of time and the chaos and cruelty and yearnings of striving , misremembering humanity?

  Well, two hours in the Olivier offer one way.    I was glad to be there.  The final moments, small and intimate then vast and ancient, are overwhelming.  

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 10 August.   

A WARTIME SPRINGTIME 

     It’s not the reptile but the turtledove, as in the Song of Solomon “The time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land….Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”.  Our hero and heroine,  in John van Druten’s intimate 1943 play,  are both fond of quoting,  not pretentiously but with lonely yearning private  feeling. They are all the more likeable for it.  

         Philip Wilson’s careful, delicate production catches that human yearning,  and in this small space his revival expresses it brilliantly.   It could hardly be simpler in story (TV would be unable to cope with such workaday credibility).  Sally is an earnest, very young actress in New York,  a bit mousy at first sight and beautifully contrasted with her older, raunchier friend Olive,  who barrels in shrieking about the darling tiny apartment and wanting to know about Sally’s break-up with her married producer.  Sally is starting to wonder about these short affairs, and whether they count as being “promiscuous” as well as leaving you sadder than before.   Olive has no such moral worries or devotions.  She has invited Sgt. Bill,  a  fling she had in Detroit, to meet her at the flat, but when he turns up  she is summoned  to dinner by an even hotter fling , just back from the Navy (the men are in khaki: it’s 1943).  

        So she confects a lie about a husband, and Sally is left with Bill as he finishes his drink. They take to one another, slowly and awkwardly,  through his weekend leave.  The click of kinship comes, beautifully, when he asks about acting and she, a bit-part ingenue,  says how work at her art is a real need. He gets it – quotes Milton’s frustration about  “that one talent which is death to hide”.   They joke a little about theatre (he is tired of plays where “there’s always a prostitute and a clergyman. That’s what they call a cross section of society”  – a nice jibe, in a play about two ordinary young people).  They go out to dinner – she a little reluctant as Olive has so firmly snarled “he’s sweet and he’s mine!”   But he sleeps on the daybed, and they meet at breakfast,  and spend the day:  both adrift, having loved and lost. Their slow mutual discovery is all the story (except of course that Olive reappears, disgruntled, and very funny, near the end).

          It’s wonderfully done.  As Sally,  Imogen Elliott is a find:  fresh out of Guildhall in a first professional job.  She has an ability to display subtle, self-doubting humour, and her deep young qualms about  sex, and the risk of loving again,  are perfectly pitched.  Nathan Ives-Moiba as Bill was new to me (though ten years ago he flitted through Coronation Street as a dumped boyfriend of Todd) and he is also a revelation.  Bill is a decent, straightforward, sensitive but soldierly character ,  and in creating him Ives-Moiba disproves the old saying that “goodness writes white” and simple good characters are hard to play without being  dull.    Both he and Elliott hold us, anxious for their happiness,  all through the play: we live with them at home in Ruari Murchison’s perfectly styled 1940s flatlet (I applaud him for finding a period toaster). 

        As for Skye Hallam’s gushing, predatory, ultimately furious Olive,  she’s a treat in any show. And her return in the last scenes is a perfect, clever van Druten contrast to our sentimental audience anxiety about whether this springtime of young love will flower.  Another Jermyn gem.

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. to 20 July

Rating four

AN ANGLO-INDIAN EDWARDIAN YORKSHIRE… 

     Good to be back for another year,   up on the high tiers in the last golden hour, waiting to watch the great trees darken against the sky.  Fitting, too, for a  heatwave production to celebrate a far smaller and more secret garden, in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic.   Mary Lennox, cross-natured and pampered child of Imperial India. is orphaned in  a cholera epidemic and sent to the gloom of  Misselthwaite Manor.  Yorkshire moors and their people – notably  the maid’s brother Dickon, friend of all wild creatures – begin to change her and  she finds her long-dead aunt’s locked and abandoned walled garden.  Discovering her crippled, angry cousin Colin she deploys her gift for unsympathetically robust comradeship,  and teaches him in turn the power of life and growth.   Hodgson Burnett  has thus charmed generations, even more than with her Fauntleroy or Little Princess (it helps that Mary Lennox is less virtuous than either).   

       But, inevitably, fiction of this period will not be left to speak unfiltered (the film of A Little Princess suffers mawkish brutality when the father turns out to be not dead, or even ruined: my children were outraged),    In this case,  the book reworked by Holly Robinson and Anna Himali Howard suffers no such atrocity but is firmly recast for the sort of modern sensibilities which need warning of “ableist and colonial language” as well as death.  Mary’s late mother is now Indian, but her father a colonial official, with disparaging mention of Curzon and the partition of India in early scenes.  Her missing aunt Padma appears late on, after being involved in a resistance movement.   As for disability,   the novel’s original payoff which sees Colin rise and walks towards his father father  is firmly replaced by an affirmation that being fully able doesn’t matter:  he stays sitting, and is still loved and precious.  Meanwhile the family doctor has a disabling stammer and Dickon walks with a stick: to be honest you do sometimes feel you are being beaten about the head by the subject.  

      I tell you all  this for the record, because it says much about the way theatremakers now work , and feel they have to work,  in a more caring Britain.  But the adjustment it rarely stands in the way of the story’s essential charm,  and Hannah Khalique-Brown is a wonderful Mary:  skinnily stroppy,  a right little Memsahib when she arrives and believes the Yorkshire maid Martha can be treated like a subservient Ayah.   The latter is Molly Hewitt-Richards, a real treat, especially when she skips.  And the heroine’s slow spiritual thawing on the moor, and the hidden garden, are neatly handled: her stroppy scolding of Colin is magnificent. Theo Angel is a fine Colin too , sickly and lordly and convincing in his discovery of life and the green growth of spring – the Yorkshire word “wick” for that liveliness if nicely used.   In fact all the moments of the original author’s prose shine out, often spoken in chorus or antiphon by the ensemble:  I could have done with a bit less of them all  bustling forward at key moments because it spoils the sense of the three children’s autonomous progress,  but on the other hand there is some charming puppetry .  Shan Phull is a nimble and tuneful robin,  a fur tippet becomes a squirrel, a sweater a fox,  and Mrs Medlock’s  shawl is beautifully handled as a crow by Amanda Hadingue.  

        If there is one proper disappointment it is in the adaptation’s  direction of Dickon:  of the three children he is given less to do, less personality of his own.  In the book, for instance,   he strikingly introduces Mary and Colin to the “doxology” – a Christian Sunday hymn of praise –   as part of the garden’s growing marvel, and there’s an honest Yorkshire innocence in contrast to posh sick Colin and posh angry Mary.     Here,  he has no such identity but  is just the creatures’ friend , and his magic is not religious but  part of Mary’s half-remembered Indian/Bengali magic chanting dance, which Aunt Padma eventually teaches them to do more authentically.    So you lose some of the Yorkshire quality in Dickon being so bland.  Never mind. Yorkshire grit gets its turn as  Martha the maid is a joy, and so is Richard Clews as Ben Weatherstaff , who stumps round with a spade and takes no sentimental nonsense. A good-hearted family show. . 

opeanairtheatre.com to 20 July

rating four

YOUNG GENTLEMEN (AND LADIES) TO CELEBRATE

     This is very good fun indeed. Who does not want an onstage dog called Crab, benignly upstaging a rarely seen Shakespeare clown? And  a riotous rendering of Mambo Italiano at a Milanese f1 party by a hirsute drag queen who, wig removed, is the stately Duke himself? Who does not warm to daft young love, betrayal, remorse, and the sort of cameo detail that has the wayward Proteus’ Mum ordering him to Milan to improve himself while  haughtily having her nails done? All that, plus  outlaws disguised as bushes, a terrible soft-rock serenade with accordion , and – not least – immaculate RSC-standard respect for both verse and spirit of a rare classic.

     This is a student production ,but rather than lectures and workshops this year’s Cameron Mackintosh visiting professor at st Catherines College opted  to collaborate with student actors, producers and crew, and direct this short run at the Playhouse .  For he is Sir Gregory Doran, recent and celebrated RSC chief, fresh from a project tracking down the first folio. And this early, little discussed work is the only Shakespeare play he had never before directed.  It is full of premonitions of later themes – a girl disguised as a boy, flight through a forest,  a dictatorial father planning marriages.  Better still,  it is very much about youth’s young friendships and loyalties,  and the way falling in love can cause heartbreaking betrayals in tempestuous immaturity.Perfect.

    And so it proved: joyfully funny, full of sharp clever touches (the teasing, rhyming  banter of lovelorn Valentine by his servant (Jelanie Munroe, a Rhodes scholar) turns into a communal rap; Leah Aspden’s dry northern maid Lucetta has a beguiling scorn of sentiment.Valentine’s first sight of the Duke’s daughter Silvia finds her in f1 gear and helmet like any  motor racing it-girl;  Thurio her proposed suitable suitor is a bouffant pink-haired nightclub poser with shiny leggings, a manbag and a powder compact.  And in that teenage clubbing world under the witchball , Proteus’ announcement in soliloquy that “I cannot now be constant to myself without some treachery used to Valentine”, feels like a perfect modern “it’s just me”  flounce.

     Indeed while both the men around whose friendship and betrayal the plot turnsare excellent,  Rob Wolfreys’ Proteus is particularly remarkable: he is a first-year student  ,but under this director and with immaculate line discipline , he creates a wholly credible creature of youthful fire and confusion: a good heart overcome in turn by desire and remorse.

      This was not the press night, which is today. But it only runs until Saturday, so it feels worth recording now just how good it is (still some seats). And celebrating how robust a company they have become in these short months.  Doran announced from the stage that illness tonight nearly meant cancellation, losing the vital character Julia (who follows her lover disguised as a boy and suffers Proteus’ treachery – prefiguring Viola in Twelfth Night). But late on, the assistant director Imogen Usherwood agred to take the role, script in hand.  And blow me, she was immaculate: in manner, conviction and  gesture (managing awkward props and tearing of letters even when the script was in her other hand.) She made Julia touching, as she should be, and dignified in the final confrontations.  And the final moment Doran cleverly avoids the rather trite redemptive ending (Shakespeare was only starting out)  by letting the reconciled lads go off happily together while the girls – perhaps wondering about the whole happy ever after idea – simply stare across the stage at one another.

  Not my place to star-rate a first preview. But it’s terrific. Just wanted to tell you. Oh, and during the interval Jo Rich, who plays Launce, wanders round selling dog leads just like the one on Crab, for the RSPCA. It all left me so fond of the rising generation that I easily tolerated the caterwauling party kids on the late, late, late train back to London..

Oxford playhouse, to 18th. Five more shows to go, well worth it.

Not rating but here’s a director-mouse for visiting-professor Sir Greg Doran for making it happen

TWO YEARS AFTER THE NEXT ELECTION..

      Here, a mere meringue’s throw from Eton itself, is an imaginary Prime Minister of that ilk.  Tidier in person and with a touch more integrity than the last one, but personally almost as insouciant, as resistant to reading red-box bumf , and as prodigal with tags from Aristotle and Virgil.  It’s an unBoris.  

    This is  a touring play from Michael McManus, a veteran if bruised political insider, centrist-sensible himself but fascinated by the mechanisms and personalities.  I rather liked his “An Honourable Man” (https://theatrecat.com/tag/an-honourable-man/) which like this one was brooding on the possibility of a centre party, and like his quote from Mencken “for every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, clear and wrong”.   Not to mention the deathless comparison of referendum-year Britain as “a cat which doesn’t know whether it wants to be in or out, so just sits around licking its balls”. He also had a small hit with Maggie And Ted just after the lockdowns. 

     But a tsunami of mad politics has rolled over us now, and it’s a brave thing to turn Uk politics into improbable farce, given that it does it so well without assistance . And an awkward thing too,  when real wars and savage partisanship split us nastily for real. All this McManus acknowledged in a brief q and a the night I went. But hey, sometimes you gotta laugh just so you dont cry. And maybe audiences normally uninterested in Westminster have thoughts prompted by jokey drama: it doesn’t have to be James Graham or indeed the immortal House of Cards that make people think.  

         And in that enterprise you need an affable comic presence like Matthew Cottle ((deathlessly funny as Primce Edward in The Windsors). He is John, leader (to his own surprise) of the new One Nation party, which after the 2026 implosion of both Labour and Conservative parties, has landed a hung parliament full of brand new , massively inexperienced MPs barely under the control of a camp tarantula-wielding chief whip, with a tough Northern Labour matriarch as deputy PM and an angry SNP redusing to be bought off without another referendum.

      The meat of the situation, though, and the main driver of its drama, is the presence of Ryan Early as the Spad, Seth , the Cummings/ Campbell adviser. He is horrifying:  manic, never still, knows he is right, angry when challenged , unelected but dictatorial, he twists and jerks and poses and shouts and points: the very inverse of the smiling, insouciant, punning, jokily unworried PM.  The PPS and deputy PM and others detest Seth, and his instinct to break things, court trouble, stir up anarchic events and mess about with the very constitution appals them. What the PM jokingly calls his “Fannymesto” – good gag – is ultra Brexit neocon brutality disguised as centrism.  He bas brought in an AI asistant which crunches data and operates only within his framework: it’s called MediaAnnie  and is quite funny quite often. Meanwhile all the old jokes get an airing  – about fake sincerity etc – and there are some nice passages as staff try to keep the PM on message and he breaks away and charms the electorate again.  Two crises occur, a poisonous volcano cloud which might cause lockdown, and an incident with the King’s car hitting a protester.

        There were more laughs at the old too-familiar jokes than I expected, from  a pretty full Windsor audience .  And I would like McManus to write more political plays.  But ironically,  I don’t want them to be comedies. I think he has things to say – this became very obvious in a tremendous rant near the end when Seth the Spad has been disposed of.   But daft farce dilutes it. Even delivered by the divine Cottle..

RATING 3

TOURING:

Theatre Royal Windsor  to 18 May
New Theatre, Cardiff21-25 May
Cambridge Arts Centre 4-8 June
Worthing Connaught Theatre12-15 June
Theatre Royal Bath 18-22 June
Malvern Festival Theatre 25-29 June.

NYPD FAMILY BLUES

         I fell for the solid, paternal, irascible Walter “Pops” Washington immediately over his whiskey breakfast, as he listens half-patiently to the unreliably recovering addict Oswaldo prating about his latest health kick.  He knows that won’t last – though not how personally dangerous it could get, lodging random lowlifes rent-free.  But he gives Oswaldo a chance, alongside his own petty-criminal son Junior and fiancee;    the latter wandering through their kitchen in short shorts and bending at the fridge as the old man  expostulates “Full moon rising! Lulu, mind your hindquarters!” .   He and Oswaldo think she’s a bit “retarded”, Junior insists she is an accountancy student.  Walter doubts this, given that her lips move when she read the horoscopes.

          We are meant to fall for the old boy, benign widowed patriarch in a salty working-class New York,  as he later puts it “A feeble old patiotic, tax-paying, African American ex cop war hero senior citizen” .  And Danny Sapani makes it easy to love Walter as a good ol’ boy, before his complications and the driving force of the play become clear.  This is an actor who can make his creations both endear and infuriate,  able both to simmer and explode, sometimes briefly terrify. Remember his recent Lear..

     It’s all going to happen, because eventually  (the playwright Stephen Adly Guargis likes to take it slow and gradually, drawing us into the family) we will learn what it is he and Junior (a strong Martins Imhangbe) were briefly bickering about alongside the normal family irritation at one’s son stashing stolen goods in the bedroom.  For old Walter is eight years into a lawsuit  which, Junior says, “ everyone knows you shoulda settled no  fault with the city years ago”.  A longtime cop  with all the bruises and conflicts of a hard city (“everyone hates cops. Cops hate cops”)  he was shot,  in a lowlife club off duty,  by a rookie white cop. Who called him “N——r” with a bullet for every letter.  And he won’t settle. Nor will City Hall.   

        The play predates the seismic cultural changes of BLM, and one suspects that today the NYPD would be more likely to come down hard on the white cop: anything to avoid the long attrition of decent old Walter’s claim.  And it may be that Walter, being where he was and acting however he did (we never quite know) bears some responsibility for things heating up.  There are electrically charged confrontations with Daniel Lapaine as a white younger Lieutenant trying to get him to settle,  and Judith Roddy as a young white detective who worked long ago alongside Walter and loves him.   But he is adamant, stubborn on his honour,  to the point of derangement.  

        It’s a constantly, evolvingly gripping evening, Michael Longhurst’s direction never letting it flag for a moment. There are  perhaps a few almost surreal improbabilities,  especially a very funny (and it turns out, pivotal) encounter with Ayesha Antoine as a dodgy ‘church lady” with a sexual ’n voodoo edge.   The satisfaction of the play is the way it hovers on the edge of tragedy,  creeps closer then steps back  with an unexpected laugh.  It won a Pulitzer, quite right too. 

        I see from the notebook that at one point late on  I anxiously scrawled “sign the deal, Walter!”in pure empathy.  It’s good to get drawn that deep into a play.  It’s why we go.  

hampsteadtheatre.com. to 15 June

Rating 4 

A LOST WEEKEND WORTH FINDING

       It helps if you fall in love with the set;  even more if the set helps tell the story. For this tale of a louche, tender, disreputably memorable weekend in Edinburgh, Libby Todd has built a dolls-house mashup of the Old Town: tenement and mansion, cathedral, bridges and archways. These will open and shut , be lit by sudden projected messages and scrambled over for two hours of swooping, darting adventures; a glorious backdrop to David Greig’s louchely beautiful rom-com where drifting midlife disappointments come together and solidify into love. 

         Lawyer  Helena (Karen Young) is let down by her married lover and scared to do a pregnancy test; trying to be “all perfume and control” she  despairingly picks up Bob (Ross Carswell) in a bar.  He’s an aspiring storyteller-singer who reads Dostoievsky and dreams of busking through Europe,   but meanwhile works for a bullying car-thief gangster called Big Tiny Tim.

      Gordon McIntyre’s songs drive their tale along with dry rock-ballad lyrics: “Love will break your heart, sometimes you want it to”   and “Gimme darkness, gimme pain, and take it all away!”; the songs are performed by two wry narrators and the lovers themselves, all four nimbly snatching up  guitar, flute, saxophone or fiddle as the story unfolds.  The pair are  both 35, lost disappointed souls,   and the night they meet think the answer is to get drunk and hook up . 

        Expect the funniest, truest, most excruciatingly recognizable sex scene of the year,   followed by a unique moment in which Bob, alone and still drunk, is given a severe talking-to by his own willy (played with deadpan irritability by the narrator Will Arundell , popping up beside him in a rubber hat).  The disapproving appendage says it’s tired of stupid , pointless adventures and strange partners and wants stability.  

        The pair meet again,  she in a ridiculous bridesmaid dress with sick on it after accidentally sabotaging her respectable sister’s wedding,  he nervously clutching £ 15,000  of his boss’s money in a plastic Tesco carrier bag with the bank closed.   Suffice to say that stumbling  and talking and finding more dodgy company in the granite mazes of the old city,  they find one another.  Greig’s writing, as they gradually discover one another’s disappointed selves , has a tender delicacy – he is quite a prose poet, no syllable wasted – but  through that rainy day and disorderly night he  meanwhile leading them, and the troublesome Tesco bag,  between cafés, benches and bridge arches,  from Oddbins to a Japanese fetish nightclub and an IKEA car park. The narrators intersperse moments like miniature Ted talks on human development and the nature of decision-making. And beautifully, as the sun at last breaks through the foggy Edinburgh haar,  love makes sense.   A good last show for the AD , Ryan McBride, as he leaves this lovely theatre for the freelance world, after five very good years.

mercurytheatre.co.uk  to 18 May

then co-producers:

barn theatre cirencester  22 May – 22 June

GANG LIFE,  GRIEF AND GREATNESS

     There is a very tense moment  late on in the second half when Jacob Dunne, only just holding himself together, finally sits down in person opposite the parents of the young man he killed two years earlier with a single punch outside a Nottingham pub.  The victim’s father David explicitly will not forgive;  the mother, Joan, is set on somehow doing so but in this moment suddenly begins talking, urgently, unstoppably,  about her son James and her loving memories of his life.  Dunne sits rigid, every effort in listening , looking  making himself take in her grief.   

        We know the outcome: James Graham’s play is based, co-operatively, with Dunne’s book RIGHT FROM WRONG,  a remarkable chronicle of successful  “restorative justice” and personal redemption after his prison sentence .  But the strength of the drama,  and notablly of young David Shields’ performance, is in that moment of real dread.  We know it will be OK,  more than OK,  beautifully so.  But it might not have been.  That meeting might have been a disaster.   ALmost the most useful thing about Graham’s flawless pace and storytelling, and director Adam Penford’s willingness to hold these moments,  is that it doesn’t make restorative justice easy or cuddly.  It is a tough business,  and this is a tough play. 

       Tough but not dour.  As it opens, we meet Jacob in the toxic flower of uncontrolled young manhood,  running wild pub to pub with his mandem, his gang, coked-up,  looking forward to an evening’s fight.  Once or twice in a brilliant pivot he becomes the older, wiser, sadder man of today, the campaigner and youth worker,  to explain what is going on.  He offers memories of the better bits of his childhood in Nottingham’s “Meadows”, a failed social experiment turned ASBOland.  But we see him and the others run and scramble and vault round Anna Fleischle’s set, a great metalled curve above a concrete subway, expressing both kinds of confinement  (the ensemble of five owners move nimbly between parts). 

      After the fight – a random stupid punch for no reason – we see the news reaching James’ parents,  the horror of James’ Mum,  the panicked moment when the “M….r word is spoken (reduced to manslaughter later, as the fall caused the death more than the punch).   Jacob,  burning his clothes in fear,  suddenly hears church bells and remembers his Confirmation and his childhood fishing for stickleback in the river.  The playwright deftly picks up such moments from the real Jacob’s book, without sentimentalizing, moves on, holds us in the reality of the lost scared boy within the dread oaf,  the s “one-punch hard man” his idiot friends applaud. 

          Shields holds the part remarkably, but towering through the play even more is Julie Hesmondhaldgh, her round ripe Lancashire voice holding a profound humanity even in the deepest shock and  grief.  She it is who looks at the first awkwardly written – slightly dyslexic –  response to their questions through the restorative-justice  (“RJ”) scheme when Jacob has done his sentence, and sees that he cannot just be a police mugshot: “it’s a person!”.  Against her husband’s reluctance (Tony Hirst still , powerful, broken) she decides that to honour her paramedic son she must, like him, be “the best I can be. What do we do with this? What is the sense of wasting another life?”  In a wonderful moment of workaday levity she tries to remember the RJ told them it the tone shouldn’t be punitive. “WHat\s the word? I keep saying..Pontefract?”  

       It’s a history play, this, and an important one.  Nottingham Trent university sponsors it, the theatre has set up a talking-circle by the Forgiveness Project alongside it, James’ parents and others involved have been close to the process,  including the Remedi charity whose sysrems are carefully explained in the text.  And there are two mentions of things which saved Jacob and now are dust:  since this all happened, Probation services have been incompetently privatized and the   proposed rebuilding of the Meadows estate cancelled in Austerity.  Also mentioned in passing is the pivot of the East Midlands from proud manufacturing to logistics and warehousing,  and the contrast between the wisdom of fixing potholes early and the national failure to fix wild kids like Jacob early.   

        All of that could make some people swerve away, fearing educational-campaigning worthiness.   It shouldn’t.  Great drama feeds off truth. And this is a James Graham play:  craftsmanlike, careful, agile, gripping,  thoughtful and humane.  

Nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk to 25 May

A RIOTOUS RUSSIAN SATIRE, FOR ALL TIMES 

         The local governor and councillors are posing for a photograph, more than satisfied with themselves and their genteelly corrupt side-hustles. But a letter announces an imminent government inspection. But  the schoolchildren are underfed, the hospital a disgrace,the judge corrupt, the townspeople discontented .   Funds have been cavalierly “redirected” to councillors’ interests. News of a lordly stranger calling for good wine at the local inn throws them into flat panic.  One councillor gets topical 2024 laughs with the panicked line “I hereby call an independent Inquiry” and another even more with  “We can’t blame it all on the plague, like we did last time!”  

        A grand one for local election week, because Nikolai Gogol’s famous satirical farce from 1836   is essentially about localism: petty bureaucratic tyranny and corruption.  In its day it was considered so offensive that Tsar Nicholas I personally intervened in its favour and had it put on, saying it is not sinister “only a cheerful mockery of bad provincial officials”.  

      The stranger is not, of course, an Inspector at all: he’s  a sacked low level copying clerk and gambler , summoned home in disgrace.  He’s all swagger and  irresponsible fantasy, held only in check from time to time by his faithful valet.  But governor and council – the latter always scuttling brilliantly in and out  together in close formation – welcome him with flattery and bribes. He accepts happily.  

     Patrick Myles’ merrily updated, fast-moving two hour version is sets to great effect in a sort of Ruritanian mixed-up period:  the names are a bit 18c-comedy (the stranger is Fopdoodle, the Governor Swashprattle, and the two inseparable Ivans and Brabble and Grubble).  Theres a horn gramphone and Fopdoodle  boasts of writing Wilde’s plays and collaborating with his friend Dickens, but also writing Jane Austen’s novels, and when he imitaties his friend the prime minister, it is Churchill;  but his uniform is all Napoleonic gold froggings, sword and breeches. All of this absolutely works.  So do the jokes,  not least physical: all the cast are fearless clowns with a gift for  slapstick pratfalls, including Chaya Gupta as the Governor’s lovelorn daughter.  

       At its centre of course is the fraud himself:    Kiell Smith-Bynoe’s  Fopdoodle,  particularly impressive in the  long crazy ever-drunker bragging scene at the end of the first half.  But his plan to seduce both wife and daughter moves just over the edge of prank into proper predatory nastiness, as does the moment when Dan Skinner’s Governor initially panicks and cries “It’s all in the wife’s name, take her!” 

         Indeed Gogol’s proper anger strikes through as it should  in sharp moments between the jokes (which are excellent).  At last when the fraud is uncovered,  the trickster gone and the angry crowd throwing cabbages in through the French windows,  Skinner becomes properly horrifying .  It’s a theatrically famous breaking of the fourth wall when he leaps down to roar at us  “What are you laughing at?” and utters a really Satanic lamenting boast that he, the con-man who cons con-men, the thief who robs thieves, has come to this.  The council then turn on one another in a crazy final  brawl, for all the world like the 2024 Tory party. 

     Owing to the infernal train strike I had to sneak up to the antepenultimate review,  on the bank holiday and with the company having two days left to polish it up.   No need to make allowances: already the cast were roaring through a riot of high-speed accurate farce acting, doing Gogol proud.  

marylebonetheatre.com  to 15 June 

rating 4 plus an extra comedy-mouse for fearless pratfalls

MODERN ECHOES OF A DYING FALL

         Years ago I came out of a dullish production in Yorkshire of Chekhov’s last play, set very traditionally with samovar, parasols and big hats. A reluctant chap behind me observed to his wife as they left  “Eh, it was about time they had that Revolution!” .    Of course the playwright got there first: the slow-burn ineffectiveness of Ranevskaya’s family and disaffected domestics, all facing the end of an era and of a great estate,  is already skewered halfway through by the passionate social politics of Pyotr the eternal student.  He rants to good effect against the selfishness, the social gulf, the idle aristocracy running out of money in the big house while serfs toil and beggar children go hungry.  At this point Benedict Andrews’ verbally very free modern-dress adaptation drops in references to Austerity and to the exploitation of immigrants seeking a better life. 

       It’s a play about a society whose old top layers are crumbling broke while a middle class rises – personnified by the wealth and business sense of the kulak peasant’s son Lopakhin. And straightaway let me say that one of the best things in this eccentric, rather overlong production is that for once Lopakhin is not satirized as a grabby city chap:  Adeel Akhtar has charm, a beguiling presence always, and is credibly decent in his hopelessness when he tries to persuade Nina Hoss’ airhead Ranevskaya and her chattery brother Leonid to sell the orchard and pay the debts. 

       But all the family are in various states of depression and disaffection: Marli Siu’s Varya tying not to fall in love, Sadie Soverall’s Anya sweetly protective.   Michael Gould as Leonid is often funny:  Andrews, who also directs, keeps bright lights up on us all (which is quite distracting)  and has cast members leap up from the front benches. When on the vast empty stage (the back wall too is made of carpet ) Leonid decides to deliver the famous romantic speech to a hundred-year-old bookcase,  he just hauls up a random audience member to play the piece of furniture.  For there is no furniture, just a waste of patterned carpet, continued on the back wall. So only by wandering around in the interval might you find candles and a Russian icon-corner just offstage.  No samovar ’n parasol picturesquery tolerated here. 

         One problem, despite the excellent cast (Daniel Monks as Pyotr particularly magnetic once he gets going) is that modern dress – oafish manservant Yasha very much the Hoxton hipster  – creates a credibility gap.  Hard to believe they ever were aristocrats. Their workless uselessness and mournful fatalist idleness loses the  period romance which usually (whatever past period the director chooses) offers a distanced softening and empathy.   This lot in their T-shirts can, whisper it apologetically,  become just downright annoying.    The best moments are from June Watson as the ancient retainer Fir, deploying some truly masterly  doddering and an air of wise contempt for the lot of them. 

           The second half gets a bit Saltburn, as a drum kit, mic, amps and smoke machine come out for a prolonged drunken party scene complete with conga  and a rendering of the Turbines song “don’t waste your pearls on me I’m only a pig”.  (Dan Balfour’s sound design and May Kershaw’s music are very much front-and-centre). During the rave  Leonid is off at the auction,  and only the most deluded believe that a distant aunt is going to stump up and save the orchard.  His return does energize the drama, something for which we are hungry by then. But the long drawn out final farewell to the old house, cast ripping up the carpet into disorderly heaps, would be more properly poignant and Chekhovian were it the end of a more heartfelt human saga.   Didn’t quite get there for me: recollections may vary, though . And there is beauty in Hoss’ last collapse and speech, and in her daughter’s lovely consolation. 

      But it is only when Fir , alone and forgotten by the family as the chainsaws start in the orchard,  that the heart moves a bit. Come the revolution, at least give the old folk some respect…

donmarwarehouse.com.  to 22 June

Rating 3.

A FEARFUL FUTURE 

  I am wary of futurist dystopias, but this is a real treat: intelligent sci-fi with serious thrills.   As it opens, we are the 2050  audience at the celebration of ten years of “British Pre Crime” : we hear that in  2040 a referendum agreed with the plan to implant “neuropins” in all citizens, behind the ear and near the brain. Through these transmitters a central cadre of trained “precogs” can scan powerful computers every sixty seconds for any sign of amygdala activity indicating a preparation, even subconscious, for violence.   Each pre-murderer, who may have no idea the killing is brewing inside them,   gets put in a Humane Detention Centre. And  bingo!  Suddenly the streets are safe.  Rebels in “Cogito”  (yes, ergo sum, you gottit) break in to demonstrate in favour of free and private thought, and are severely quelled. 

     Our heroine Julia – Jodie McNee in a truly barnstorming performance- is CEO of Pre Crime, dedicating herself to it in memory of a murdered  sister. But the computer suddenly reveals she is a pre-killer herself:  she has to gouge out her neuropin with a corkscrew and go on the run, aided by the Cogitos. Her husband George and smooth MP Ralph are not necessarily  on her side: they are, after all believers,  admitting openly that having  a few accidental innocents picked up by the precogs is  worth it for the scheme’s success.

      It couldn’t  be more timely, for all its fantasy. Not only are we rightly wary of  AI and the pitiless judgment of algorithms in daily life (ask any HR computer analysing CVs) , but have seen the  extraordinary recent idea that  a  “non-crime hate incident” can go  on our record every time  someone overhears a disobliging opinion.   So topicality is  all there, intelligently pre- cogged by the adaptor David Haig’s sharp contemporary references (delightfully, despite all the robotic taxis and video-programmed skyscrapers, the 2050 train still says Mind the Gap).  

     There is little space for character, but McNee and Nick Fletcher’s  George express some realities of grief, jealousy and living with a partner’s obsession. And more widely  the final scenes touch, melodramatically but without preaching, on truths about deterrence, moral self-mastery and redemption

      The plot’s ancestor and skeleton is Philip K Dick’s Cold War novella; it became a Spielberg film. But Haig’s  adaptation carves its own track, adjusting much and keeping the weirdest revelation – which Spielberg threw away to make max use of Samantha Morton with no hair –  till near the end. It is bracingly theatrical and properly thrilling: full of gorgeous contemporary jokes – like the one about Apple watches being back as trendy retro toys, or as a robotic  personal AI laser—-  annoys its owner and is threatened by being de-programmed to be a mere Alexa, or worse, Siri.  

     There is also a lovely parallel laid before us in Max Webster’s sharp ninety minutes of accelerating direction.  In the Pre Crime procedure  human neurons are still needed – at a nasty price – to supplement machine learning.  And  here the  fabulous scifi projections and near-holograms  are combined with warm human messiness:  wild crowd choreography in the street scenes and  a lot of spectacularly athletic clambering and  crawling by the fugitives,  as they fight their way into weird laboratories over  breathtaking frames and along high steel catwalks.   McNee kicks out the window of two robotic taxis, beautifully.   Jon Bausor’s design and Tal Rosner’s video projections combine breathtakingly, and the costumes have a lovely sly futurism , odd lapels on an MP’s pinstripe and peculiar jodphurs on Julia. 

     So anyone with a teenager who only does video games and chase movies can here, in historic theatre surroundings,   convert them on the spot to understand that sometimes, live action by real people in the very room is irreplaceable. Loved it.  

lyric.co.uk.   To 18 may.   Let’s hope it transfers.

Rating 4.

Sent from my iPad

THE COURT AND THE BEDCHAMBER

      Theatre will never tire of the Tudors, nor should it.  From every new angle they offer a dramatic gift which never stops giving.  Here’s 1534,  and Mary Boleyn  in a very understandable temper, telling it like it is.   “I am an adulteress and a whore” she says .”My sister is an adulteress, a whore, a bigamist and Queen of England!’ 

     Mary  (a spirited Lucy Phelps, crackling with defiant life) has had enough of being ordered about  by a lordly patriarchal society, including her ambitious, nervous, probably gay brother George.  She’s done her turn as royal mistress,  lost her husband to the sweating-sickness, and now wants to be left alone down at Hever Castle with the man she properly loves,  the low-born farmer Stafford. Small chance.  Above them all, throughout this properly thrilling play there hang jousting-lances pointing downward:   sometimes descending to become barriers or the posts of a great bed.  None of the characters have ever been safe or fully in control of their lives, not from the very start.  Except, of course, Henry VIII. 

         This is a very classy production indeed, which must surely live beyond its Chichester summer.  Mike Poulton wrote the play based on Philippa Gregory’s carefully researched novel:  he knows his Tudor world, having brilliantly brought the first two of Hilary Mantel’s  Cromwell trilogy to the stage (his absence from the third being the reason it was sadly flatter).    And Lucy Bailey directs with characteristic speed and brio, having wisely enrolled Ayse Tashkiran to create the movement. That’s a key to its atmosphere and solemnity,   renaissance dance from time to time illustrating  the fragile marital, sexual and power politics of that edgy court.   Orlando Gough’s music, under ChrisGreen of GreenMatthews,  is perfectly judged too:   evocative of period but without pastiche (the religious chants wisely avoid the easy cliché of plainsong).   The whole thing is just very, very good: it  holds together, and holds the heart.

      We encounter the Boleyn siblings – Mary, Anne, and George – at first ten years earlier, huddled together in nightgowns, laughing. They are all under the sway of Alex Kingston’s ferociously  ambitious and not at all maternal Lady Elizabeth and their noble  Howard “Uncle Norfolk”.  Mary has been married off to a discontented but complaisant husband,  who puts up with her having become  the King’s acknowledged mistress “before the wedding flowers faded” , and mother to his illegitimate son and daughter (the latter ancestress of the late Queen Mother, by the way).  But as the elders say `”Bastards are worse than girls!”  .

          Anne has a passion for  Harry Percy, and the three hold a ceremony of  wedding vows – “Once betrothed and bedded, what can they do?” she says – Freya Mavor playing it rather colder and more selfish than her sister.   The elders are furious – “beds are business!” and love irrelvant.  Queen Katharine, a stately Spanish galleon stepping through the dances,  is kind to Mary; having failed to produce the essential male heir she will shortly be divorced. 

          The King’s eyes are on Anne now: watch James Atherton, predatory, circling round the dance. She holds off his physical approaches until wedlock, as the Harry Percy marriage and bedding  are hastily denied.  Cromwell and Cardinal know which way their bread is buttered and how to keep their heads safe. George, the loving brother,  pulls rank because he is the man,  but lives in dread because the rumours of him and his very close friend Francis are increasing as his sister’s star fades.  Lily Nichol, as the thwarted and bitchy wife forced on him, is no help.   Anne’s mother and uncle moan of Anne’s desperate reproductive attempts “Until she gets him a son and heir we tread on glass!|”   It is all,  as Mary so rightly observed in   that outburst above, disgraceful.   

          But fantastic drama:  by focusing on Mary and Anne,  on the helplessness of women in that world and the guile they are forced to use,  a real sympathetic urgency throbs through the story.  There are terrible rows,  fears, pregnancies, births,  and when poor Anne has a malformed “Satanic” foetus which assists her progress towards disgrace and death,  there is treachery by a terrible old midwife (Kemi-Bo Jacobs nicely doubled with Queen Katharine) .   But there is loyalty and determination in the story,   and in the manipulated women, especially Mary, a humane nobility .  Character and endurance ring down the centuries.  Altogether terrific. 

box office cft.org.uk  to 11 May

rating five

MEN BEHAVING RIDICULOUSLY

The lord of Navarre and three nobles have resolved to retreat and study for three years, eschewing  female company: so even the princess  suing for land has to be encamped outside the court with her ladies, with messages  exchanged  more or less comically through interfering underlings. But of course all four men fall in love, break their vows, find one another out in forbidden yearning, break the vow  and proceed to be tricked by the wily ladies.  In Emily Burns’  s lively, rather overlong production it has been sportily set on a Pacific island and the lords, in shorts and shoulder-sweaters, are the tech bros from Silicon Valley who run our lives now.

     Abiola Owokonira ‘s prince  is good and Luke Thompson as Berowne (an RSC debut) is the life and engine of the Lords group,  and the only one showing some depth of intelligence, while Melanie-Joyce Bermudez, also new here,  carries real dignity as the Princess, even in the scenes where she is amid her gigglingly Instagrammy gal-pals. But It’s an odd play, early Shakespeare; overrich with wordplay and banter (indeed it has the longest madeup word in the canon,  ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’. That  crops up in one of the more entertaining moments between Tony Gardner’s surefootedly funny Holofernes and his underling (Nathan Foad as Costard, generally seen in chaotic remnants of a spa-day wrapper).  There is a comedy Spanish idiot called Don Armadio, shamelessly overdone in tight tennis kit by Jack Bardoe, and a lot of physical comedy elsewhere, most effective in the hiding scene where up and down the palace staircases and trees the four lords spy on each other. Jordan Metcalfe’s Boyet is reliably funny, and at one point does the same terrified squeeze-past as he did in the same director’s Jack Absolute.

     For Shakespearian interest it is useful: here are prefigurings of later plays: disguises, overhearings, Mercutioid banter, clever shrewish womanhood outwitting men, classical references, a play within a play messed up by underlings. But it hasnt the tautness and pace of the great plays, and the director does little to tighten it,: a lot of the allusive wordplay needs cutting to keep a modern audience halfway content and up with the story. Last time it surfaced here was in a brilliant double with Much Ado, and set on the eve of WW1, which gave pathos to the stoey of overheated young men and their delusions about love and women.  This one is baggier, more pleased with itself, indulging every red-nose physicality.  There are moments when you suspect, sitting in the big theatre, that this production’s  very presence there is sending a smug message  like the M & S ad which presumed too royally on respect: as if it was saying “This is not just larks with background ukeleles and actors gurning and doing silly voices and messing around in beachwear – this is ROYAL SHAKESPEARE  actors gurning and larking around in beachwear. Therefore it must be good.” 

     And you think OK, inconsequential as the story is and overblown the playing-for-laughs and real golf-buggy antics, they will come to a resolution, surely?  They will move the heart as even great comedies do,  and earn our forgiveness for the longeurs between the good  jokes over three hours,  and the almost unbearable final  dressing- up- box sequence of classical-sixth-form  jokes about Pompey , Hercules and Hector.  

     In the famously shock ending,  when news that the  Princess’ father king has suddenly died and all revels and wooings are postponed for a year and a day, that redemption almost happens: suddenly the Princess stands crowned above, and the ensemble sing, bery beautifully, a Polynesian hymn of homage and nationhood. And you leave wishing you’d stayed as engaged as that all through. Not least because a fine cast deserved a tighter, better show. 

Rsc.org.uk to 18 May

Rating 3. Just.

MUD, MARSH, MONEY

     Now here’s a bracing new way to do Dickens:  avoid sets full of Victoriana by keeping the stage pretty much empty beneath a set of uneasily moving lighting-bars evocative of a tidal river. Cut out all the harrumphing Cheeryble rhetoric and lovable Peggotying; choose a late,  least-familiar novel and  get Ben Power to fillet the meaning out of the story  in short scenes, as he did with the Lehman Trilogy.  Then find a modern , eerily original and hypnotic songwriter – PJ Harvey –  to set  thirteen songs for individuals and whole-cast chorus  at moments of high emotion.  

       I suspect Ian Rickson’s production , based on Our Mutual Friend,  will be, as they say, Marmite.   It’s over three hours long , lacks set-piece glamour,  has no desire to razzle-dazzle you,  and Bunny Christie’s strange set of moving bars of light overhead may be  downright unsettling until you see it as reflections from our ancient uneasy estuary.  

        But  it is a sort of weird masterpiece and exactly what the NT should be doing.   I was drawn  into the idea of the murky old river-life of the London Thames from the moment the cast (21 strong) scrambled singing from the downstage pit and Jake Wood’s Gaffer Hexam – a plank representing his boat –  found a drowned corpse, picked its pockets  as was his way,  and towed it home while his gentle daughter Lizzie (Ami Tredrea)  began narrating their world.  

     The plot has all the intricate bonkers quality we love in Dickens: a bad old miser has left his money , made in “dust” – rubbish disposal – to his son John who ran off to Africa.  But the condition is that John marries Bella, from a low-born but respectable family. Since the returning son is thought to be the corpse, the money goes to Noddy Boffin, an employee who is thus propelled into the affluent middle classes and adopts Bella into his richer home out of kindness.  Baffled by business, he takes on a secretary who is of course actually the non-dead John (Tom Mothersdale).  He observes and falls in love with Bella, who is getting a bit flighty in her new upper-middle status and unkind to her honest struggling real family.   Meanwhile back down the social scale Gaffer the corpse-fishing riverman is thought to be a murderer, and dies – leaving daughter Eliza to struggle alone to get her brother Charley the education which will enable him to rise in society,   while their reputation is blighted by the father’s crime.  

       Which by the way he didn’t do. Oh, and up in Holborn – each London district flagged in surtitle – there are lawyers, as ever in Dickens,  including Eugene (Jamael Westman) who is fated to fall in love with Lizzie and educate her by reading Ovid together in the sunset beside Deptford Creek.

        So it’s all about money and class and injustice and deprivation and the upward struggle of education, and it’s complicated.  But Rickson keeps it absolutely clear:  characters are drawn economically but sharply,  Bella McLean’s Bella able, within brief moments of dialogue, to develop and grow up. The two romantic heroes’ glamour is  offset by the fact that by and large the women have more sense than the men, though tending to be victims of their own generosity (Dickens by this time knew a lot about that, not to his credit).  

       And there are moments of great entertainment: some considerable laughs  are provided by Jenny Wren,  fiery little Ellie-May Sheridan on a lovely professional debut as the teenage daughter of a drunkard ,making her way by confecting dolls’ bonnets in Limehouse poverty with Eliza.  She embodies a pitiless adolescent feminism,  her one-line retorts bringing more than one snort of unexpected laughter.     Other good laughs  are provided by Scott Karim , barnstormingly nasty  as prim Bradley Headstone,  the savage rote-learning schoolteacher who certainly deserves to end up in the river.  

      The quintessential Dickens lines Power picks up  or adapts are always choice ones, like the policeman explaining that it’s hardest to find murderers because  “Burgling, and pocket picking, wants apprenticeship. Murder, any of us could do”.  Or bumbling Noddy Boffin, proud to have his “shirts made by a an who goes on holiday with the Prime Minister”,  and advising Bella not to write off John as a lover since “When Mrs Boffin met me she thought me an utter vegetable, (but) she’s grown to tolerate me”.  

         The pleasure is like reading a long novel,  flowing alongside and immersing yourself in the brawling, hoping, tragicomic business of small significant lives both middling and harsh.  You live with them in a London of intermingled fortunes and feelings.   To build those three hours of escape and empathy PJ Harvey’s music plays a vital part. The singing is simple and  unadorned,   every song natural to the moment, expressing its truth.   Harvey’s tunes are struggles and yearnings, long mournful notes and falling triplets. They have all the atmospheric power of a river buoy’s whistle and clang on a foggy night.  Loved the journey. 

nationatheatre.org.uk. to 22 June 

Rating four.

REFLECTIONS ON A FAT KNIGHT

Due to train disruption – speak not of overhead wires and wind – I had to bail out at the interval,  from  Robert Icke’s epic three and a half hour modern-dress combination of Henry IV parts 1 and 2.

         But I got my money’s worth, oh yes.,  Patt I, the least cut down, takes us to the interval in two magnificent straight hours.  We reach Hotspur’s desth at Shrewsbury and Falstaff’s faked death,  with almost all the favourite Falstaff moments   (though I would have liked to see more of Clare Perkins’ Quickly and may have to go to Norwich for that later).   But we do see the beginning of young Hal’s journey to becoming – well, to put it in modern terms, more of a William than a Montecito-poloplaying Harry (though heaven knows Meghan is no Falstaff or Quickly). 

    But I digress. This turns out to be not only what we all, lip-lickingly, expected –  a chance to see the tireless Ian McKellen doing Falstaff – but an intelligent, fast-paced modern take. Icke gives us surtitle information about where we are, and – importantly – about the losses in battle: these are khaki troops, Falstaff and all, and there is immense sound and flash of all too familiar battle, though Hal and Hotspur end up close, with knives (and in a departure from custom, Prince Hal’s final blow makes no pretence at chivalry: almost in that moment a rogue alongside Falstaff. The “reaurrection” of the fat knightis brilliantly handled, his desecration of Hotspur’s corpse both repellent and irresistible.

   And that is the first moment when I properly felt what McKellen has been talking about: that the beloved Falstaff is in no way lovable, no cosy rogue but a gangster. It ahould be apparent earlier, with his venal abuse of the  conscription powers given  him by Hal: the only time I have seen that forced-labour of convicts and cripples come to lofe is in Greg Doran’s RSC production when the cannon-fodder victims limped, in silent silhouette, behind Sher’s joshing Falstaff.  

      But McKellen leaves it longer to repel us.  His take on the great speech decrying “honour” is very much his own, too: he means to duck the fighting , of course he will,  but makes it a joke and a mockery of those who believe in honour. . Another way to take it is what Roger Allam did at the Globe: his was a Falstaff whose shining quality was that he was cleverer, just thought more than his fiery young friend: he made you feel that he feels the pity of war. This Falstaff just makes you feel what a good chance it is for personal profit. Both being truths, that’s another pleasure of seeing Shakespeare well done.

Toheeb Jimoh’s  Hal is good, especially in his moments of tryihng to be, or look, grownup at last.   His desire to reform bubbles under the surface even at his wildest: the  tavern play-acting of his confrontation with his father is fascinating,  as Falstaff takes the mick but then Hal tries on the kingly manner, half-uneasy.  

Richard Coyle’s tweedy, impatient King is good too:  suits the sense of a selfconsciously heavy father,  weighed down by his own past of rough dealing.    And of course at the centre always is  Ian McKellen:  vast-bellied, contemptuous, nearing his end and knowing it but burping noisily into unrepentant old age.  Had to see him: he’s  lately been Lear and Hamlet and pantomime dames and a sly gay seducer in Frank and Percy, and this Falstaff is a pleasure, a masterclass:  every pose and pause immaculate, every unnerving moral question tantalizingy dangled. 

        Had I not had to flee in disorder to Shenfield and beyond to have any chance of home , I would have stayed rhe last 70 minute sprint to “I know thee not old man “.   Probably will, as the tour goes on. It’s a heroic tour:   here till 22 June then Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich,  Newcastle, many very good prices.  Is it not wonderful that one of our premier stars,  in his eighties, should be determined to do this for his country?   

all boxoffice bookings:  playerkingstheplay.co.uk 

Can’t ‘star’ it, as lost the final hour. 

WHY HALESWORTH MATTERS TO THE NATIONAL DRAMATIC ECOSYSTEM

   The other day I did an overview-preview from some dress rehearsals at the INK short play festival in Suffolk (scroll below),  where each “Pod” may contain up to five short plays.   Now its four crowded days have passed, a few comments.

         Firstly, an audience point was made at the Future of the Arts debate:  that we should respect the short play – 5 to 15 minutes – just as we respect the short stories of masters like Graham Greene or HH Munro.  A lot can be conveyed in a short time.  Some of the fun at INK lies in comic pieces which would not fall amiss in a TV sketch show – another ignored art form, too expensive for the networks now:    whatever happened to the golden age of Armstrong and Miller, Victoria Wood,  Enfield?    But others are seriously thoughtful plays in their own right; and others again may prove to be the seed of full-length drama.  That is why INK is so important, and so unique.

         So – aside from the ones mentioned in the preview below – here are a few others worth picking out. I liked Richard Laurence’s quickfire cocktail party in which ideologies converse, unite their sympathies or bicker about outsiders  – Marxism and Conservatism both hating Environmentalism and the suspicion it is gangng up with Populism to give birth to  Authoritanism.   In the same pod Martin Foreman offers a wicked take on the age of doorstep delivery;   and two plays about gay and teenage-influencer culture were met, respectively,  by close interest and hilarity by an audience which probably never touches much  discussion of such lives on TV or in print.   that’s another boost to human awareness that INK provides.   Sometimes it’s familiarity -like the  one on doorstep deliveries – and sometimes unfamiliarity that does the trick.

     In another pod there were Celtic nuances at the White Swan:    JOhn Boyne’s gloomy Galway landlady but better,  Mike Guerin’s duel between political bill-posters.  LLoyd Evans “Terrorist working from home” neatly skewered both that culture and the familiar misery of bureaucratic form-filling.     But above all a really remarkable comedy by Tim Connery,  LIght Entertainment,  set up rivalry  for a  new quiz show job between the two most familiar figures of our time.  Viincent Franklin is the Les-Dawson or Brucie figure, the old pro comedian with a daft but irresistiblg gag for every subject.  HIs rival is closer to a handsome smoothie presenter fresh off reality TV and one bland album.  The former, monstrous and hilarious,  knows that controlling an audience involves creating a kind of helpless terror (think of Dame Edna). The latter wants to be smooth and cosy and safely dull , with scriptwritten gags provided .  But they are both  men terrified of not working, not being seen.   It is the cleverest piece I have seen for months. I will look out for Connery’s name everywhere now.  And Franklin’s too: he is also credited as directing that pod.  

    There were more; it is sad to have missed them.   But pay attention to INK: it is always worth it.

      CROOKBACK DICK REIMAGINED

         Saving Richard III from Shakespeare’s calumny seems to have a particular appeal to women: probably because around his accession in the 1480s there surged both female ambition and female victimhood . Both are stunningly present even in Shakespeare’s story of his murders and infanticide , which was basically a 16c court  conspiracy-theory to solidify the dubious legitimacy of the Tudors.    Josephine Tey wrote the brilliant detective story “The Daughter of Time”,  debunking that theory and making a hero of the King.  Then Philippa Langley, an ardent Ricardian,  discovered his skeleton twelve years ago beneath a council car park in Leicester,  and put paid to the hunchback story (mere scoliosis, hardly crippled at all) .   Now comes Philippa Gregory,  a distinguished historical novelist (her Boleyn girl is at Chichester shortly).       She was among the entranced crowd at the royal funeral in 2015,  and resloved to make a new play of his life. 

          Which, she honestly admits, cannot ever be the whole truth.  The result is no classic, but interesting and – thanks to Katie Posner’s imaginative direction and a rather wonderful in-the-round disc design of stairs and trenches by Richard Kent – often very fine to look at.   Smoke rises, firelight burns,  hooded figures process and chant,  and Gregory’s determination to get inside the medieval mind does at times produce a useful spookiness.  Talking of curses and witches  the narrator – Tom Kanji’s lecturing  “Historian” – at one point usefully remarks “This is the sort of thing they thought when they were thinking that kind of thing”.    Fair enough.  It wouldn’t be the same without the rhetorical Shakespearian reference to an unseen world, and indeed once or twice Richard quotes Macbeth directly.  

       There’s an awkwardness, though , in the fact that the Historian figure at first doesn’t seem aware of how much has been pretty well debunked already (the murder of the young princes, the hunchback, the incestuous marriage to his niece).  And a more terrible clunking awkwardness when – just as it becomes clear how many other suspects there are for the Princes’ murders, including an order from the terrifyingly Margaret Beaufort – the historian starts talking about how it’s hard to focus on these two when so many other children die as in small boats “on a darkening sea”.  We know this. We know that she is trying to tell the story in two periods and that ours is far from perfect.   But it grates,  makes you feel as if you’re at school assembly.     

      Aside from that, the storytelling is good , the characters sharp (plenty of neat doubling)  and the experience becomes better in the second half (the first  risks confusion, despite a wonderfully cheeky rap-type sequence when all the characters explain which of their in-laws or relatives they have had killed).    But once Richard is crowned, and embarking on his wish to create a free and peaceful land,  the excitement does rise.  And it is quite funny when Laura Smithers’ genuinely threatening matriarchal Margaret,  determined to get her “1-32nd royal” son Henry on the throne,  barks “I will never obey a man”   “She doesn’t mean it!” squawks the Historian in his white suit and Burberry,  anxiously  mansplaining that ‘medieval women” accepted being second best.  

        And so it wends on to the end on Bosworth Field, a battle beautifully staged despite a mere cast of 8,  and there is majesty in the moment when “the Tudor dragon comes out of the sun”  and the last Plantagenet is the last English King to fight and die in battle.   But if part of the aim was to make us fall in love with Richard as a person, it doesn’t quite get there.  Kyle Row is a solid performer,  but plays it a bit thuggish, a bit unsympathetic despite the King’s virtues.  And the script does not catch fire to help him.     

theatreroyal.org  to 27 April

rating three 

DIVING ABOUT IN A UNIQUE SHORT-PLAY FESTIVAL

         Join me on a parked Hoppa minibus where Henry VIII is chatting up a new Jane.  She is not impressed by the Tudor-Tinder qualifications  of a man who divorced two wives and killed two,  but he  protests that he was “in a bad place back then”.Since faking his death and living on for 477 years  he’s taken up yoga, and deserves a new start.

        This fifteen-minute treat is in the most unusual of the Halesworth settings for this year’s INK festival;  why not, since the bus usefully ferries people netween the venues around the Cut ?.  Next I dive down to the Kiln studio for one of the radio plays, where  Richard Braine pays homage to his fellow Ipswichman, Sir Alf Ramsay.  It imagines the 1974 moment when the hero of 1966 was sacked as England manager and his (real) friend Richard Burton might have invited Alf to join him  and Liz Taylor in Mexico. Romantic Welsh actor tries to make staid, seasick Ipswich man go marlin-fishing. 

          I am in mid-festival (runs to end of Sunday ) and diving in and out of several days dress-rehearsals  at INK ,  to report on what sort of fun is on the way this long weekend.   The festival , in its tenth year, is unique in the UK as a showcase for new short plays: it’s  enabled many first-time and improving writers  to see professional actors and careful directors of all generations make  their work come alive.    In a nationally stressed theatre ecosystem this seed-corn of theatre art is vital.  For the rest of us,  as  pure entertainment  its one-hour “pods”are a treat.   Each one holds  up to five different plays ,  enabling  audiences to see characters, ideas, and some very good jokes professionally delivered without a journey and a long evening.  

       Topics  this year  range from shivering threat to sly comedy:  plays  about families, love, crimes, artificial intelligence ,  scams,  drones, ageing, gangsters: all of life.     There’s speed-awareness and speed-dating, smartphone-flirting and, in Guy Newsham’s play in Pod 6,  the funniest launch into space you’ll ever see:  Newsham is  Canadian,   and remarkably knowledgeable about blast-off protocols. 

          In Pod  2, just up the road where Suffolk New College becomes The Apollo .   “Bed Head” is a  beautifully off-the-wall imagining in which a young man gets trapped inside a girl’s imagination about him;  in the same set Hattie Chapman becomes  a modern take on Eve in Genesis , a gangster in leopardprint and, most strikingly an grumpy, aged Welsh grandmother who is being headhunted  by a smooth American  as  a quarterback in his American football team.  Watching his pitch, absurd as it is,  I kept thinking about every USA big-talker who has taken  over dazzled British companies and changed them.  No idea whether WIlliam Patterson wrote it as a parable, but that’s the pleasure of theatre: pushes your head outside the box.    Chris Larner , playing her son in that one, was only five minutes earlier doing an arresting, tenderly moving monologue by Gary Ogin in which he explains a man’s OCD and army career while skilfully putting on full make-up and costume as a clown.   

       Indeed apart from the crazy diversity of plays and themes INK is also a rare chance to watch tiny masterclasses in acting. Four or five plays within an hour can vary from dark themes to dementia or absurd comedy.   I particularly enjoyed  Joe McArdle in Pod 6,  moving between a crisp NASA spaceship commander, tough Scottish mental nurse and overconfident middle-manager while Charlotte Parry moves from lovesick co-pilot to doctor to outraged wife brandishing muffins.

             There are a few star guest writers,  and  Pat Whymark of Common Ground has a commissioned full-scale play about addiction and sexting,  which will  go round schools  like INK’s tour  last year about County Lines . Some authors have had fringe or radio work before, but many are first-timers seeing their ideas come to life. So it’s      

a feast of imagination serious and quirky,  emotional and oddball,  set from Bungay to Bosnia and painful cocktail parties to  NASA.  One of this year’s innovations is a brand-new partnership with the University of East Anglia , which runs an MA in script writing:  five of the students’ plays were chosen, and three of the five cast in “Pod 7” are students.  Those,  I must say,  have absolutely nailed an ability to play teenagers at their most endearingly  annoying (top wriggling from Theresa Jane Knight as a lovestruck girl gazing at a lad’s window, and brilliant gawkiness from the lads).   The writers’ topics ranage from school-bus dating to a Filipino fisherman’s life and perils, and finally explode in a  chaotically grumpy  family seaside scene (all too recognizable round here).  That one made me reckon that in young Grace Bartle we are nurturing the next Alan Ayckbourn.  So we should be.  INK is doing its bit.  

www.inkfestival.org 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weareinkfestival

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ink.festival

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@inkfestival9235

X (Twitter):https://twitter.com/INK_festival

HOLINESS IN THE WHALE

        It pretty much had me harpooned at the words  “Call me Ishmael”.   As Mark Arends’ earnestly naive schoolteacher speaks the opening lines and begins to pack his carpet-bag,  it is clear that this production of Herman Melville”s classic is properly in  love with the novel’s strange, harsh nobility.   

          Fleet though it is – two hours including interval,  and shorn of 19c orotundity – adaptor Sebastian Armesto of Simple8  and director Jesse Jones respect it in every way:  in language and attitude, its sense of the ocean’s rootless people and their rough lives of threat and beauty,  and the manic obsession of Captain Ahab.    By the time Ishmael has bedded down nervously with Queequeg the Polynesian “savage’  (Tom Swale),  and been made a fool of with his patronizing preconceptions,  I’m sold,  five minutes in.  It wouild have taken a lot for this beautifully created show to lose me. 

        It never does. With rare delicacy the scenes aboard blend with shanties, hymns, and ballads, always perfectly judged:   the loss of Franklin, the Greenland Whale,  Will your Anchor Hold.  A final hymn after the disaster sets your hairs on edge.   Nine  actor-musicians are casually expert with accordion, fiddle and guitar.  The ship is created with stark economy  but its scaffolding and planks are  more than capable of evoking a square-rigger’s  world  (I have sailed as crew on several: it feels right, understated and businesslike,  as the crew clamber, haul and hasten, positioning planks as decks and lowering  rowing-whalers).  

        You are drawn deep into a world twenty thousand miles from home  by Rachel Nanyanjo’s carefully choreographed movement and , not least,  Johanna Town’s remarkably created lighting: a man-overboard moment is shockingly arresting, suddenly and profoundly expressing the emptiness of any comrade’s death.    When the watch below turn uneasily , woken from sleep by the thump of Ahab’s ivory leg, you’re with them.    At  the terrible red rain of bloody victory falls from their first whale and the crew settle to the horrid routine of flaying and boiling you shudder with the wondering newcomer Ishmael:  “Fear,  joy,  guilt..what does it mean?  

       And then, turning schoolmaster, he  explains in another  beautifully economical piece of staging the marvel of the precious, terrifying head.  As the oldest crewman says, reproving the gung-ho hostility of a young harpooner,   “there’s a holiness to a whale”.  

             We are haunted by unseen whales as much as they are;  the great creature that took his leg obsesses Ahab,  the veteran with his charts  who “knows their hidden journeys as I know the veins in my hands” .Guy Rhys, in his impossible ivory leg,  plays it quietly terrifying in his steadfast quest for vengeance.   Hannah Emanuel’s decently sensible, homesick Starbuck protests at his  crazy extension of the journey, risking the loss of the cargo  – “what we came twenty thousnd miles to get is worth saving!” .  Tension builds.  The  men  josh and argue,  but when one harpooner makes claim to “my whale” a wiser says angrily “A whale is his own beast!”. 

        Armesto’s skill is in picking, from the huge book, these shiveringly sacred moments. Ishmael himself sees the grandeur of the whale as alongside “Elizabeth the first, Shakespeare..”  The tight, versatile, skilled ensemble play out the fearful tale; you can’t take your eyes off it.  Melville drew no trite moral and nor does this rendering:  humans  have always survived by hunting wild creatures and  felt that shiver of kinship, mystery and terror.   Two hundred years ago whale oil  lit most of the world’s lamps and oiled its machinery, whale blubber made soaps, ointments and food and   the world in return hunted them almost to extinction.  But even the most savage hunters of every century have tasted the grievous mystery, wonder  and sorrow which Melville found long ago, as a green-hand in a forecastle.  It is a deep eternal sense to share, and this  beautiful production achieves it.

royalandderngate.co.uk   to  13 April

rating   5  

Then touring to 22 June:  Perth, Wiltons, Ipswich, Northern Stage, St Mary’s, Blackpool, York, Malvern,  Oxford Playhouse.

WUTHERING SIBLINGS

     Grace Smart the designer sets the scene as we settle in with a sweet miniature moor, all harebells and heather and cloddy bits of earth.  But it rises in the air as soon as Gemma Whelan’s cheerful, swaggering Charlotte Bronte has toured the auditorium demanding to know what our favourite novel is.  The overhead grassland stays up there throughout, just occasionally throwing down sheets of paper or a microphone. 

         Charlotte opens the family scene with her two sisters – Rhiannon Clements as gentle Anne and Adele James as the tougher middle-sister Emily,  whose first enterprise is throwing a bucket of water over the drunken brother Bramwell.   Charlotte already longs to express herself publicly, to be “forever known” and the poet laureate Southey has written a letter back to her.  It repressively tells her that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life” because women have other jobs to get on with, and should do so. And off we go, in a revue-style but heartfeltly indignant feminist take on the struggle of all three to break into the 1840s literary world from an impecunious Yorkshire parsonage.  

       Reimagining the Brontes of Haworth is a perennial temptation: in an am-dram imagination by the gipsy artist Vernon Parker Rose I once played an imaginary extra sister called Shirley who did all the work while real Heathcliffs, Rochesters  and Lintons lounged around the house drinking with Bramwell (one cast member kept forgetting his lines, and I can tell you there is quite a skill in prompting someone out of the side of your mouth away from the audience).  And then there is the more famous appropriation, when in   Comfort Farm the intellectual Mybug is convinced that brother Branwell wrote all the books.

    This version,  by Sarah Gordon,  directed by Natalie Ibu of Northern Stage, has a more serious purpose. But it executes it with plenty of jokes, a lot of thoroughly modern “dickhead-and-fuckwit”  language,  and on a neat outer revolve a lot of quickfire visual jokes and sound effects (when Anne goes off to be a governess, the obliging ensemble of five nip out with a portable gale,  and the second act obliges with a genuine coconut-clopping carriage). 

      Sarah Gordon has usefully picked up on something I had not quite grasped before; that the three sisters’ novels were all , in 1947,  published within three months:  Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (a rapid hit), then Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Wuthering Heights.  The relationships between the sisters – collaborative, pseudonymous as three “Bell” brothers, and sometimes envious – are the core of the story. Certainly it is not improbable that Anne would be irritated by Charlotte borrowing the governess-figure and getting her version published  before the gentler satire and romance of Agnes Grey;   nor that Charlotte’s disappointment about the initially rejected one about her Belgian professor was keen. And we know that Anne’s far more powerful , shocking and angry Tenant of Wildfell Hall was – after her  death – blocked from reprinting by Charlotte. The drunken violent husband was too close to Branwell, by then also dead.  The truth of it was too painful, or discreditable. 

       All this rolls out between them, and between various more or less hilarious male figures – snotty publishers, a chorus of admiring or shocked critics, condemnatory moralists.   As Charlotte observes, they had to write because the normal life of a Victorian woman left an awful lot of spare time for “putting dead people’s hair in lockets”  and as to private life”you wonder why we didn’t smile in photographs – we were horny and terrified”.  The moment when at last, outing themselves as females, she and Anne go to London and are invited to a private male club is evoked as a sort of  blokey Groucho rave.  It drives Anne to hide and afflicts Charlotte with unwonted loss of personal confidence.   Being “in the room” with the Dickenses and Thackerays was both thrilling and dismaying.  

       And from the fine and funny Ensemble Nick Blakeley appears at the end as Elizabeth Gaskell,  politely-mannered biographer of Charlotte, to put her in a glass display case.  So we can reflect on how and why the reinventions of the Brontes have always been necessary, and salutary.  Some of the stuff about literary “gatekeepers” may strike a useful note with female playwrights too: the NT hasn’t done entirely badly in recent years, but 74% of successful dramatists in the UK are still chaps…

Nationaltheatre.org.uk.   To 25 may 

Rating three. 

THE GAME’S AFOOT. EVENTUALLY.

Nick Lane’s adaptation of Conan Doyle’s late, broodingly complicated novel has met many huzzahs from Sherlock Holmes fans, previously here, on tour and  streaming. So as a Southwark supporter I thought I should at last have a look now it’s back.   Lane’s take on the 221b household is certainly refreshing: both Bobby Bradley’s lanky arrogant Sherlock and the tweedily amiable Watson of Joseph Derrington are more youthful than usual, and Alice Osmanski’s Mrs Hudson un-Victorian in her laid-back confident impertinence. So far, so modern. They double – everyone does, often tripling  – and Victoria Spearing’s set, rearranged with choreographic elegance by the cast, admirably serves a three- sided house.

      It has to , since the scene changes from Baker St to a Kentish murder scene and repeatedly  to 1875 Pennsylvania, on a train and in the headquarters of a freemasonic gangster set, based apparently on the Molly Maguires and their pursuit by a Pinkerton agent. 

  But there’s the trouble,  not really the fault of the adaptor – though he does draw out the Pennsylvania scenes – and certainly not the nimble cast. The Victorian obsession with retro American gansterism can rapidly pall on us today.   The first half drags, intricacies getting downright dull sometimes despite spirited performances from Gavin Molloy as a snarling mafioso and – not  least – from Osmanski in two of her many quick-change  frocks, plus a gun.  Blake Kubena in a ponytail is another villain – or is he?  How deeply do we care?

    The second half picks up, especially when Molloy returns, heavily Brylcreemed, in a flashback as an Irish-accented Moriarty taunting Sherlock in an art gallery (that’s a very good bit) and triggering a temporary breach in his bromance with Watson . So on it winds, with Pennsylvania kicking off with shots and knives while back home  Holmes discovers the devilishly cunning solution to the mystery of the missing dumbell, the bicycle in the moat, the yellow overcoat…

   Well, it runs at 2 hours 45 minutes,  heavy for this material,  but those who know the Conan Doyle canon will love it for its faithfulness, and indeed its expansion of the American scenes.   And the cast are fine, especially Molloy and Osmanski. Tristan Parkes’ music is perfect,  using echoes of old America and thriller moments with a rare sensitive skill.   Perhaps it’s just that simpler souls like me ruefully prefer our Sherlock in his more strictly UK adventures:   hounds, speckled bands, disguises, rascally lascars in opium dens and the occasional scandalous diamond necklace.  

Southwarkplayhouse.co.uk.     To. 13 April

DOSTOYEVSKY IN DALTON

      “These days” says the man on the empty stage,  “people are precious to me, even when they insult me.  I have woken up”.  His stark features do not smile as he says it, because he has an urgent stoey  to tell.   Greg Hicks, restlessly prowling with a suitcase, making himself shabby, explains how he made a career, made friends, lost both as it dawned on him that ‘human existence is an unhappy accident in a malign universe”, and that there is no reason for anything.   He evokes a Dalston pub where people are drunk,  quarrel,  laugh at him and one another;  the streets he crosses uncaring amid lights and horns (brief skilful projections, flashes, sounds off).  He tells of meeting a desperate child  asking for help, and ignoring her because nothing matters. He evokes the bedsit where around him other desperate people wait hopelessly for ambulances, and prepares to shoot himself in the head.  Pausing, horrifyingly, to take the gun from his mouth and a memory of lovelier things, the plaintive Irish “She moved through the fair”.  And he falls asleep, and dreams.  

        This theatre has, in its launching months, developed a deliberate feel for the Eastern European soul:  a remarkable Russian/Ukrainian story of the Polish WW2 ghetto in The White Factory,  another tale of a wartime Polish forest in The Most Precious of Gifts;  in a few weeks comes Gogol’s Government Inspector.  And now, hauntingly extraordinary,  this short story by Fyodor Dostoyefsky. It’s  adapted , and moved from old Petersburg to modern East London by Laurence Boswell.  He also directs it,  grippingly, with Loren Elstein’s starkly arresting design and absolutely the best-chosen solo actor..  

       For Greg Hicks is a phenomenon,  an RSC and national theatre veteran but exotically un-English in expression :  he has a kind of menacing grace, not quite balletic (closer indeed to the Brazilian fight-dance of capoeira, in which he is adept) .  To every role he has  brought that unsettling difference,  to good effect whether as Lear or the terrifying newspaper editor in Clarion .  Here, he becomes the wandering witness narrator of the deepest truth.  HIs dream takes him to a paradise, an island where simple people live without fear , lust or deceit.  It is evoked with subtle lights and projections, all still before the curtain which has not lifted.  His gravity, barely smiling even in wonder but intense, expressive in every limb,  holds it clear of romantic absurdity though it is the oldest trope of religious philosophers:  the sinless Eden. But the second oldest is of course corruption – the serpent, Pandora’s Box opened.  

         Awakening – the whole stage behind him suddenly broader, revelling in his happiness at this discovery that human beings are born pure and good – he pauses, the gun forgotten, but has painfully to tell the rest of the dream:  that   it was he who spoilt the Paradise.  Lightly flirting,  he taught them to deceive and enjoy  deceiving. From that flowered lust,  then jealousy, cruelty, fear, the forming of groups, suspicion, blame, shame, denunciation , patriotism, war.    Remembering, he becomes a tyrant rallying all these evils with glee (very Trump, Stalin, Putin).  And startlingly concludes, as Dostoyevsky did,   not that mankind is evil but that it doesn’t need to be.  So his task is to say so..

      Hicks holds us for 75 minutes;  every light-change or brief projection judged to the second.  It’s hard sometimes to work out what a “five-star” review is for ,  but sometimes all it means is that here is a thing of great simplicity, portrayed with perfect judgement to become subtle and unforgettable. 

marylebonetheatre.com to 20 April

Rating five 

CAMPUS RITES AND WRONGS

Sometimes, I do like a stage set you could cosily move right into.  Paul Farnsworth’s is a nice  evocation of a Harvard professor’s study: shelves and panelling and framed certificates,  and a leather chair redolent of five generations of chin-stroking academe and Democrat politics.   Oh, and there’s a model yacht: things will happen to that.

         The latter matters,  because the witty poster for Paul Grellong’s play, written in 2019  and suddenly even more topical on its European premiere,  has that same pointed sail with two black roundels added, making a Ku Klux Klan hood.  We learn in moments that Professor Charlie (Julian Ovenden) is running a symposium on extremism, and  has rashly invited some chap called Carver who is a white-supremacist Klansman of evil repute.  It’s all in the good cause of “taking his pants down” and exposing the monster’s absurdity in fearless debate.  Just as liberal academics always feel they can. 

       The students are in full no-platforming rage,  and the Dean (Tanya Franks) is furious with Charlie.  He argues back,  saying that “we need to face this threat, let light in” ,  and that you can’t give in to a “tribunal of triggered children”.  His old friend Baxter (Giles Terera, the last NT Othello)  now has a cool TV presence which Charlie rather resents, and turns up to   join in the protest at giving Carver a platform

      His ex-student Lucas , a PhD,  rolls in on his side though on his side,  though  quipping  “I hate hatred”,  and being a bit fed up and not getting tenure where he wanted it because of diversity.    Meanwhile a student,, Maggie, invites Charlie  to an “SSM”, a Safe Space Meeting,  with the protesters. She snarls “I don’t sit down with white supremacists” when it transpires Charlie has not only agreed a pre-meet with Carver at his gated compound in the woods, but is going to include cocktails and dinner with him, the fool.  Lucas agrees to go along too.   The professor murmurs “perhaps I need a disguise!’.  “Try a hood” says someone.   

     It’s a funny start:  sharp witty lines running through the familiar de-platform arguments ,  and you feel for a while that maybe you’re in a talky-talky Stoppardy philsophical piece.  But no:  just as the set itself intriguingly swivels and re-forms  to be a station platform, a favourite bar, later on the Dean’s home,  the story swivels too. And darkens.  And after the offstage catastrophe at its centre it offers a couple of flashback scenes which make  a lot of things clearer.    

        One occurs in the panelled study;  the other final one,  more alarming still, in a bar-room exchange of horrid emotional truths between Baxter and Michael Benz’s chillingly clever  Lucas (Michael Benz holds Lucas’ dual nature beautifully in balance : believed in him all the way).    So we see unveiled not only a certain hidden motive , but  the revelation that at least one white-skinned,  coastal-academic liberal with irreproachable modern views is no such thing. 

             There are domestic and professional undercurrents,  a brick through the window finishing off the sacred model yacht,  and offstage as usual the proof that words can prove lethal.     Maybe some of the plotting is a bit too pat,  but you leave with your preconceptions adjusted a bit,  and an uneasy sense that in the world of academia  nobody is ever quite  as sincere about anything as they smoothly seem.  

menierchocolatefactory.com    to 12 may

rating four

HOMAGE TO THE FIRST CELEBRITY DIVA  

     Last time theatre’s pre-Victorian glory days  – silk breeches, rowdy audiences and Garrickian hamming  – were celebrated on this stage was in 2015: in Mr Foote’s Other Leg by Sam Kelly, with a rumbustious Russell Beale. This time it’s a decade or so later: the century has turned with the final King George, and  actresses were becoming  respectable and idolized .  So we meet our heroine  Sarah Siddons  at her peak of female celebrity, recreated.  by April de Angelis and director Anna Mackmin from careful research and a wickedly sharp sense of our own time having seen an elephantine growth of that phenomenon. “How wretched is she” cries Mrs Siddons, as any celebrity might,   “who depends on the instability of public favour!”    Few could inhabit that personality better than Rachael Stirling: she gives with humour and reality a diva in a woman-thwarting society,  emotional and defiant and romantic and sharply funny,  a performer able to move between Shakespeare and melodramatic schlock with enough truth to carry it,  and tough enough to play grieving mothers while actually being one herself (two infant deaths, two lost daughters).   She had us from the very first moment before the curtains,  delivering that East-Lynne style line at a husband’s feet:   “Forget an adulterous wretch who will never  forget you” , swooning, and being  carried deadweight  to a chaise longue by her irritated co- star, manager and brother John Kemble.

        The play is a peculiar but constantly entertaining mixture of pastiche, theatrical in-jokes, feminist irony, mischief, absurdity and heartfelt reflections on the alchemy of dragging up yout real pain to transmit universal  emotional truths, audibly, across footlights to a paying public.  De Angelis uses the recorded facts of Siddons’ long career – by the time we meet her she is famous, painted by Lawrence, but afflicted with a spendthrift husband and no power,  operating in a scratchy  professional relationship with her  brother  Kemble who as actor-manager  of Drury Lane is perennially anxious about takings  – “I have to muddy my talent with business!”  He is also unwillingly aware that  she is not only the greater draw but the better actor. Dominic Rowan as Kemble gives it – in his “onstage” moments beyond the great swooping curtain – enough extreme volume and exaggerated hamming to shake the set’s  halftimbered roof .  His fancy leg-work is a treat, too: proper pre-Victorian dandyism.   It is important to him to be master, but at the same time he is jealous of the female star who always gets to do  all the suffering and win sympathy.

        But in Angelis’ flight of fancy – based in fact on a real woman playwright Siddons favoured but never got onstage – , along comes Joanna Baillie,  who has  creatied a sensitively suffering hero for him to howl through.  But she actually makes the hero’s sister the real power, to Siddons’ delight, for “what man has a notion of writing a woman with an aged above five and twenty or as a rational being?”

        It gets taken off on the second night.   Later, after doing a she-Hamlet in Ireland with some spirited swordplay, Siddons demands Joanna write her a female equivalent of Hamlet complete with “madness, grief, wit, love and fencing’.   Joanna concurs, promising that the heroine “goes mad, but not conveniently and quietly with herbs”.  It’s  a take on Ophelia I shall treasure forever as the male Hamlets rave on.  But meanwhile  there is  a real  abused young woman driven by marital cruelty to Bedlam – well,  never mind, it’s a sprawly plot. 

         But excellent fun, taking its element of bonnet-drama lightly, with brief narrative bits of  of selfdescription by  Siddons, in the third person as per stage directions,  and a few diva cries to keep us amused – “Tour??? I don’t like dressing-rooms with buckets or anywhere north of Birmingham” had the first night whooping. 

     The ensemble is fabulous, Anushka Chakravarti bustling around as a put-upon maid doing the job to avoid marriage to a missionary, and three others doubling and trebling beautifully as the rest of the anxious, labouring, maverick world of  theatre. Eva Feiler does some splendid gender shape-shifting from  scuttling anxious playwright to fugitive madwoman and various  chaps; Sadie Shimmin moves between lady censor in a terrifying black feather hat and a raunchy wench-comedy turn,   and Gareth Snook is among other things the oiliest drama critic of any century. 

      Larks, sharp ideas and a sense of considerable fun being had by all.  For,  as one of the silk-breeched cast in Kemble’s company wisely observes,  “The best way to survive in this business is to adore everything you’re in”.

      Having lately watched the superb Sheridan Smith’s brave online interviews praising   Ivo van Hove’s  production of Opening Night , that rang out as one of the perennial and useful truths of the trade.  

Box office. Hampsteadtheatre.com.  To 27 April 

Rating four

HOW TO WASTE A STELLAR CAST

      Sheridan Smith is not only a box-office draw  but a rare and genuine talent:  two decades a star  on screen and stage, musicals and drama:  phenomenally  hardworking (she flew off to make a TV series in Greece, complete with toddler, the day after her last curtain call in her sellout solo Shirley Valentine).   In 2016,  her father’s terminal illness during the run of Funny Girl (as usual, selling out) drove her into what she calls a  “meltdown”. She ran away briefly, got a number of tattoos, wanted to hide, thought she’d never get work again.  People talk about that a lot, though tending to forget that actually, she was rapidly back onstage and, moreover, did the whole national tour.   A trouper.

          This is relevant, because her one bad “moment”  is not unconnected to director Ivo Van Hove’s casting of her in this new musical by Rufus Wainwright,  based quite loosely by the director himself  on a film by John Cassavetes .  For it is  about a female star having a mental collapse on the eve of a big Broadway-bound opening, causing chaos, breaking the fourth wall, ad-libbing, drinking.   As Smith  blithely said to me in December,  “It’s about an actress having a crisis.   And that’s really facing, head-on, my past. You know?  Hopefully that’s what I can bring to it.”   As she does,  every time,  digging recklessly deep and bringing herself to a part 100%, whether as  Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic or Mrs Biggs on telly.  

        I have to say, sadly,  that Mr van Hove does not deserve his luck, either in his star or in the creepy frisson of people’s interest in her past.   The play, a platinum-plated example of  theatre vanishing  admiringly up its own backside, is a bit of a mess.  It claims in publicity to be an insight into the labour,  agony, tension and sturm-und-drang of making a big musical:  we are backstage and front,   watching a dressing-room mirror, in the wings and occasionally back in the director’s digs. EVeryone is surrounded by creeping cameras,  faces blasted up onto a huge overhead screen in case we miss some rictus of pain (this fashionable tech does, of course, also magnify the brow microphones:   something screen-crazed directors cannot admit to themselves). 

          In story Myrtle, the star, sees a  young girl fan killed on the road.  The distress of this unhinges her,  the ghostly kid appearing alongside her sometimes as support or a younger self,  sometimes as a malevolent haunting.  Sheridan Smith as ever throws herself into the pain (all the famous tattoos are  on show for once, which must be a relief since she has talked amusingly of the bore of covering them).  She manages to give the character an edge of ironic humour too, in soite of the lines. In one good song she says that in a theatre you  “make magic outta tragic”, which is amost lovely .  Anyway,   Myrtle is hyper,  and nervy.  This is not surprising,  given the  intensity of her director  (Hadley Fraser as Manny) who is neglecting his own wife (Amy Lennox)  in his obsession with the show.,  and the attitude of Maurice,  her leading man and former lover .    He is supposed to hit her,  and in a horrible sequence  she flinches away at every rehearsed attempt,  despite being gruffly told it’s “just fingers”.   The director furiously shouts “It is necessary to my  staging that you’re hit” .   The misogyny, and the director’s contempt for her “need to be loved..she is like all women, she seeks immortality” starts to grate more and more.

          Things are not helped by the fact that Myrtle, sensibly, doesn’t think much of the script,   feeling many lines hopelessly unlikely to be spoken by any woman. The playwright is  stroppy  Sarah (a wicked waste of Nicola Hughes)  who thinks she’s Ibsen reincarnated and must not be challenged, and  is always in the wings looking miserable and irritated (great singer, though).  Her obsession, like the men’s, seems to be to hammer home the idea that this is a menopausal woman who hates growing older, as women obviously do, being vain and vapid compared to heroic males.   More gold-plated woman-on-woman misogyny there,   and snarls from Sarah of “there must be some reason you cannot say my lines”.   The producer (played by John Marquez)  is a more kindly soul, but  to emphasise how very, very difficult and important musical-theatre is, compared to normal life and work,  he yowls “Underneath the pit of hell is a little heaven – why else do we do this, fly into darkness?”   

        Through all this Sheridan Smith is flawless, expressing every required frustration right up to the edge of a manically fighting-mad breakdown in leopardprint ,  involving  a curious battle with her now malign ghost Nancy and a standard lamp . And then, as in the original film,  there’s a sort of happy ending in which love pours out on both sides of the fourth wall and it doesn’t matter that the play has been changed by the diva.       It is a terrific cast, of course.  All of them sing wonderfully, though few of Wainwright’s numbers are memorable.  All of them efficiently do as the director’s curiously sadistic vision requires.   But it’s a pretty awful play.   And it would be good if one day, someone firmly  took away van Hove’s tech toybox and asked him to try just telling us a story. One that we’d believe and be moved by, ideally without benefit of onstage cameras and screens.  He did it in 2014 with a brilliant, starkly set  A View from the Bridge, after all.

gielgudtheatre.co.uk  to 27 July

rating two.

MAGIC . ALWAYS BETTER WHEN DISASTROUS.  

       God bless Mischief Theatre.  Eleven years ago this coming May I saw THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG in the tiny downstairs space at Trafalgar Studios (upstairs, a dour Macbeth was giving way to Pinter).    It was  fresh in from the Old Red Lion,  where its creators,  Henry Shields , Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer began their fringe career.     I am happy to say that my Times review drew producer Kenny Wax to drop in,  and notice that their anarchic student-revue wit was , a rare thing, balanced by exceptional and perfectionist discipline. 

        That set in motion a decade of success and awards,  up West and on tour (the original is still at the Duchess,  Peter Pan Goes Wrong touring the land after Broadway).  They have brought much joy.  It’s the theatrical immediacy that does it: interestingly, their TV versions don’t quite do it, polished as they are. This is life done live and dangerous, as it should be, and as an early-adopter Mischievite I am proud.

       Now – after their Magic-goes-Wrong collaboration with veterans Penn & Teller,  here’s Henry Lewis centre stage in the role of a wannabe Derren Brown, a big bearded figure of genial ambition  fresh out of divorce, having an ill-advised crack at being heir to the great music-hall magic acts,  and getting it wrong, Tommy-Cooper style.   Spooky announcements precede him, audiences put secret words in glass bowls, and overhead is a multiply locked secure safe  (“suspended till further notice, as I am from the Magic Circle”). 

      Lewis is immediately funny,  noisily cheerful , portraying a man attempting authority with an undertow of desperation. He boasts of a coming Vegas tour under his manager “Bob Kojak” (of whom we learn more later) and claims membership of an important online chatroom for “high profile men on low incomes”.    The two-hour riot of a show is partly very gifted standup – there’s brilliant audience manipulation without humiliation ,  everyone delighted to be drawn in –  and partly proper theatricality, exaggerated projections and tricks,  and a running joke of his inability to get the sound-effects right.  The joy of it though is that sometimes the mind-reading is brilliantly lucky and sometimes the deft tricks work – he can do the old newspaper ripping one, though all the headlines in it are about how terrible his act is.  But often they don’t.  There’s a very British satisfaction in that.    

     He plays with obviousness.   His “guess what colour I am thinking of”  is backed by a bright orange screen and the first audience member to come up is in fact Jonathan Sayer, a slight, geeky figure unwisely clad in a T shirt saying AUDIENCE MEMBER, later ANOTHER AUDENCE MEMBER.   Everyone by now is giggling helplessly (it hardly needs the sudden giant squirrel).   He moves on to parodic versions of every old chestnut:  the secret word revealed,  the ’30s style scientific woo-woo of brains in jars playing chess, a couple of quickfire alleged miracles,  a ’20’s style ouija-board session with Sayers,  and some Uri Geller attempted spoon-bending – now that DOES become proper theatre . There’s even a radio mind-reading device pleasingly insulting the audience as we appear on the big screen. 

         We just kept on laughing, my millennial companion and I and some 700 hundred others, just as I did nearly eleven years ago when Mischief first flowered.   That’s valuable, more than ever after the Covid years.  MIschief  have done the state some service,  and we know it.   Here’s to them. 

box office    theapollotheatre.co.uk to 28th April      from 22.50

rating four

KIDS WITH A KICK IN THEM

       There’s been an interlockof themes in theatre lately: DEAR ENGLAND at the NT displaying Gareth Southgate’s work in fostering the openness and emotional expression of  topflight footballers (43% of whom are of black heritage and most of working class).  Meanwhile we had FOR BLACK BOYS brilliantly educating the rest of us in what it’s like to be a lad of African heritage in a white majority culture ,    and how annoyingly you are seen,  your nice warm hoodie constantly identified with villainy.    

     And now, after selling out at the Bush, the newest glitzy in-the-round theatre welcomes Tyrrell Williams’ short and lively three-hander about the teenage seedcorn of top football:   three lads kicking around on a Pitch near the Elephant in Southwark while it – and every bit of their familiar ‘endz’ – is under the shadow of  destructions ,rehousings and urban renewal.   And like Dear England and For Black Boys, it is less about the intricacies and triumphs of football – or even society – than about male teenage masculinity.  It’s about  vigour and banter and ambition and the hidden tenderness of boys,  and the precious fragility of friendship.

       Daniel Bailey’s direction – and his cast – are vigorous, skilled and constantly exciting.    Pitchside, we watch Omz and Bilal and Joey before the start wandering in foe kickabouts, header teicks and keepy-uppy to the sound of deafening rap.     Under way we watch them bantering, teasing (especially Joey ), showing off magnificently and growing  increasingly on edge about the coming trials fot the QPR under-18s.      The three characters are delicately delineated:   Kedar Williams-Stirling is Bilal,  a thoughtful ironic tease,   FRancis Lovehall is Omz, who looks after his Grandad (anxious phone call about something wrong with the boiler switch)  and Emeka Sesay is tall, strong, sweet-natured Joey who always gets put in goal on their practice sessions on the beloved Red Pitch. 

          Occasional surreal sequences of lights and roaring  crowd sounds emphasise their individual dreams – Joey’s save in goal memorable, the others shooting snd scoring in glorious dreams.  Edges of concern emerge about the ‘Endz” , the neighbourhood,  a favourite chicken shop closing snd others boarded up, threats of family moves (“where IS Kent?” an at one point a horrified reaction to the idea of ending up far away near Liverpool St statin – “YOu’ll come back? To red pitch?”) . 

    It’s a chimera, the football fortune-seeking.   Joey at one point lectures them all about  having a plan B if they don’t become Premiership players:  he’s doing business studies, Bilal is a maths whiz,  Omz into art and design.  But when you’re barely seventeen you don’t think that way .  

        Its spectacular to watch often, choreographed with reckless balletic vigour – we often gasp – and the three are immensely likeable.  There are plenty of laughs, though the argot is strong and anyone who doesn’t hang out with south-London estate teens much will miss some lines.   The drama itself is slow to build, but does so,  to a terrifyingly graphic collision and fight (I am glad to see there are two understudies, this 90-minute performance as stressful as a match).  We await the result of the trials alongside them,  share moments of remorse (“Shouldna gone to that party” “You’re SUPPOSED to have fun when you’re young!”) .   

          When Joey turns up for a farewell game and says to the others,  who weren’t selected,  “If it wasn’t for you, man, I wouldn”t have got in”.   No dishonest machismo:  formally untrained, he had told the surprised selectors “I kicked ball with my boys”.  Lump in the throat.  \

sohoplace.org   to 10 May

rating 4 

HOPE, HEART, HARDSHIP

   Brian Friel’s 1979 remarkable play stands on its own, offering a kind of depressive beauty: beneath the story of one ramshackle troubled couple it is a meditation on many universal human  griefs and glories, losses and absurdities.  The shape is dramatically brave (it wasn’t by any means instantly applauded)  because it consists of four monologues by three characters,  the first and last from the eponymous hero himself.  Thus, the writing being Friel-brilliant,  it needs to be held up by three remarkable performances.  It’s almost tightrope-walking.

          And that is no bad image, because Frank Hardy,  who wanders onto the bare stage  beneath a tattered and much-travelled banner , offers a form of showbiz performance along the Celtic fringes of Scotland, Wales and his native Ireland as a healer.  As we meet him he is murmuring a string of names “Aberader,  Aberayron,. Llangranog, Llangurig,. Abergorlech, Abergynolwyn ,Aberporth…”  an incantation of rootless travel which he has used to calm himself. All three of the characters at times fall into this, a kind of lonely chorus.  Before him in poor village halls have come the crippled and the deaf, the maimed and the barren and the blind. His manager Teddy, he tells us,  always plays “The Way You Look Tonight”, to soothe or confuse them.  Sometimes, though, his healing works:  autosuggestion or miracle, he does not know,  but when it does work a great contentment moves through him, displacing his unease and guilt.  He speaks of his mistress and companion Grace  “from Scarborough” and of his parents’ deaths and his emotions, and at last retailing  a “restless and ritual” wild Irish pub night when he came home to Ballybeg.    And there is something that happened at remote Kinlochbervie in Sutherland. 

      But before the interval we see Grace, a woman in recovery from traumas which increasingly become clear. “I am getting stronger..” is her desperate refrain.   Nothing about her life and losses is simple: she describes a doctor’s brisk advice to use her knowledge and sophistication – she was once a solicitor – to control her feelings. “He meant so well. It is so simple for him”.  What is also clear is how much of Frank’s account has been lies, fantastic self-serving adjustments of truth;  she is not even from Scarborough, but Irish like him.  Why would he lie so much?  We learn how hard her life has been since in the words of her estranged father the Judge, “she ran off with a mountebank”.   We gather Frank is now dead and learn more of that last pub night but also of the quality she saw sometimes in Frank : something she calls “magnificence”.

     At this point let me say that Justine Mitchell’s performance is extraordinary, electric, unforgettable;  starting on a chair with a drink until she rises, her vast emotion filling the house, taking our breath.  This is when the evening catches light, because Conlon’s opening –  skilled and subtle as it was –  felt distractingly like a screen performance:   muttered asides for some unseen camera,  oddly unprojected.  That wouldn’t work  if you hadn’t known the play’s text:  the only flaw in Rachel O”Riordan’s production. 

      After the interval Nick Holder storms through the third version of their travelling lives:  he is magnificent as Teddy the manager, a big cockney getting through bottle after bottle of beer,  shaking his head at the stupidity and immensity of talents down the years from Olivier to Houdini,   rousing laughs with his performing-dog stories and the long ago stardom of his client Miss Mulato and Her 120 Pigeons,  aka Bridget O’Donnell.   But he was there through the tragedy,  the birth, loss and field-edge burial of her baby at Kinlochbervie.  And about the ending of the pub night. As his bonhomie fades into sorrow and love and exasperation, and the last of the bottles clatter into the bin in desolation,   Holder too rises to unforgettable levels.  Then we are back, in the final monologue,  with Frank himself,  and a dying fall.  

        The play is  remarkable,  saying much about performance, charisma, self-deception and helpless anger. Its birth in the worst of Ireland’s ‘troubles’ years is always spoken of as important in Friel’s history and thought.  But like Shakespeare he always throws out many different tendrils of understanding. So seeing it now, it seemed to me to speak more powerfully though of women: of  the painful disaster of loving female tolerance.  Justine Mitchell is remarkable, as is Nick Holder; Conlon may be so yet, growing more powerfully present as the season goes on. 

        One other point:  the sound design by Anna Clock is also remarkable: you’re hardly aware of it but it is affecting you, every minute. As it should do.  

 Lyric.co.uk to 13 April

Rating 4 

RO$$INI BONANZA!  Guest reviewer Dean Thompson finds much in a small space…

Opera lovers or new to opera will love this!  So, get on your horse and gallop over to see Charles Court Opera’s cowboy without a dime, but a goldmine for a voice! Over the years I have seen countless productions that have played it safe in terms of setting, costumes and characters.  Rossini’s comedic musical genius makes it so easy to get laughs, so why mend what isn’t broken?  So in this production, director John Sauvournin takes a risk in setting this production in the Wild West, and strikes gold over and over again with extra laughs thanks to the sparklingly brilliant translation by Musical Director David Eaton, who is also the tour de force saloon bar pianist (complete with cowboy hat) doing the job of what would normally be a whole orchestra.  If Champagne (or perhaps rotgut whisky) could sing, this is what it would sound like.  

One of the many reasons I think this flawless production works so well is because of its excellent cast of singers; every word is sung so precisely and clearly that the meaning is never lost.  The narrative flows beautifully from one wild, perfectly timed caper to another, laugh after laugh, ‘everybody in motion – madness,’ as I heard one audience member behind me comment during the interval on the Act I finale. 

Rossini was a bel canto composer, the style of early 19th century Italy characterised by beautiful, long flowing melodic lines as singers glide effortlessly up and down the musical scale.  It is difficult to do well, requires a god-given voice with years of dedicated training, flawless technique and endless hours of practice for evenness of tone and phrasing.

The performers have a wonderful rapport with the audience.  The stage is set with a Wild West saloon bar entrance complete with swinging doors.  Lower down, almost in the audience is a table where outlaws and cowboys can get down to some heavy drinking and gambling, or in this case flirting and plotting.

The production features fantastic comedic overacting with brilliant facial expression, and because there are no bad seats in the theatre, we clearly see all the action and subtle stolen flirtatious smile between Almaviva and Rosina, and sarcastic, mocking grin in the direction of her foolish guardian, Bartolo and his accomplice, Don Basilio.

The supremely confident title character Figaro, ubiquitous barber and matchmaker, performed by New Zealand baritone Jonathan Eyers,, sings his fast paced and energetic arias with manly voice with precision and great acting skill.

Handsome young aristocrat Count Almaviva, played by Anglo-Irish tenor Joseph Doody, will never be single for long once he sings ; it certainly worked on Rosina, hilariously acted with beautiful flowing tones and knowing facial expressions by British mezzo-soprano, Meriel Cunningham.

Ellie Laugharne as Berta is like a fusion of the late Dame Edna Everage and Dolly Parton, ribbing the front row of the audience about the trials and tribulations of searching for love at a certain age but with cowgirl panache.

Box office www.wiltons.org.uk to 23^rd March

Tickets from £12.50 (£10 with concessions)

Rating 5

A CELLULOID INVASION

  This  was at first a startling choice:  Eastern Angles’ tradition is generally, as it heroically tours night-by-night across the eastern counties,   to programme plays about our region, past or present.    But here’s its new CEO Jake Smith picking up this quirky little modern classic by Marie Jones,  set a long way west.  In it  two players evoke a moment when a major film company is shooting in rural County Kerry.     But why not?   our own rural counties have had their fair share of similar unsettling, thrilling invasions (the last Curtis one round Gorleston way) ,  so it has enough to say to us as well. And nice to launch it in Oscars week..

         At its centre are two local lads,  enrolled in a big gang of turf-cutting extras at a very welcome £ 40 a day,  willing for that to put on special “dispossessed” faces or gaze in awe at the hero on his horse,  as represented by the floor manager holding up a hand at the correct eyeline.     Charlie (Lorcan Strain) is  recovering from his video-shop’s business failure, and clutching his own film script treatment which he vainly hopes to thrust on the visiting director. .   Jake (Cathal Ryan)   is back from trying for a better life in America. 

         Between them, in front of some beautiful simply evoked projections sketching interiors or distant Blasket Islands by Amy Watts,     the pair neatly move between other characters –  director,  bossy floor manager, other villagers,  the poutingly glamorous female star . They adjust  the odd hat or garment, switching often almost within a sentence.  

        Ryan from Tipperary most memorably becomes bent old Mickey,  keen on the drink and anxious everyone should remember he’s a seasoned extra, the last surviving one from “The Quiet Man”, (John Wayne once spoke to him, he insists) .  Strain , a seasoned drag artist from Donegal,  evokes the gormless optimist Charlie splendidly but has most fun in his moments as Caroline di Giovanni,  the star. She picks up Jake in the pub and has,  the crew murmur,  “a habit of going..er..ethnic” in her relationships.    At one stage Jake is summoned to her Winnebago to find her standing yogically on her head.   Both performers are good comedians and mostly the demanding character-switches are fast and clear:  this was the start of the tour and they will only become even more so.   They also perform a startlingly spirited Irish dance at one point.   

           But it is when the tragedy inside the comedy flowers that the play properly grips. A younger lad, Sean (briefly evoked, drunk and angry) tries to get an extra part and is not only turned down but snubbed and removed from the pub for “bothering” the star.  “Kicked outta the pub in his own town”.   He is it who after this reportedly fills his pockets with stones and walks into the lake.  Briefly the  film crew, anxious about light and timing and costs,  even try to stop the extras from going to the funeral.  The sense of outrageously unbalanced, invasive power is harsh.  And when Charlie and Jake start wondering how this real story could and should be told,  there’s a redemptive heart to the play’s ending.Though as the haughty director observes,  turning down Charlie’s earlier script,    “People don’t go to the movies to get depressed. That’s what the theatre’s for”. 

      One of those ironic  in-jokes every audience of this play  enjoys.  Every time.  We certainly did. 

TOURING: halls to 18th May:  4 nights in Ipswich Sir John Mills in early May, but a good spread across the region. 

DATES –  see easternangles.co.uk    As ever, the Angles are awarded a touring mouse alongside raw .. it’s tough going, the one-night village hall circuit, the regime Shakespeare trained on, and few theatre companies achieve it..

rating. 4

BOARDROOM BEASTS

    This may break all records for the smartest costumes ever at the Southwark’s smallest space: six irreproachable business suits, including two sets of tweed-chic female tailoring on Natalie Lauren . She is the only woman in this over-declamatory boardroom drama by Farine Clarke. It  met approval on the pub theatre circuit and does, in a tiny way, after  the end of Succession fill the liberal aesthete’s innate need to watch horrible   very highly paid corporate directors ripping each others’ guts out.

     . Though this time its without the family element: the giant UKNNG  newspaper company is trying to acquire a surprisingly successful and even profitable smaller paper,   in order  (in the villains’ plan) to asset-strip it , sack much editorial staff, and ruin its  integrity for a profit.   Arabella admires it and wanted the merger; she says “Editors used to rule here too, fight like hell for editorial independence”.  Christian shudders at the very idea.  He also makes it clear that her concern for staff morale in a time of mass redundancy is `”an HR driven girly approach” and sneers at Charlie  the finance director for being “a girl” before taking him to an all-male club to seduce his loyalty. 

     The play is a bit weakened by being set around the millennium, so the characters  are looking ahead nervously to the age of “everything migrating to the web” including ad revenue.    Now they would be crunching through podcast, paywall , TV  and Times Radio statistics.

            Also, when Arabella is admired for knowing about this new subliterate Japanese thing calles emojis – “like learning to read in reverse” it dates it a bit too hard.   And that’s a shame, because Clarke  is – though often far  too discursively as the characters engage – offering some nice sharp takes on both complex racism and the misogyny that hires women as tokens and doesnt listen to them across the table. 

       Simon Furness’ nicely depicted Charlie the bean-counter  is essentially decent,  but constantly forced by the shouty American chairman to produce a better lot of figures by sharp practice and sackings.   Salem the rising Asian on the board  – a brooding Anirban Roy – is a creepy piece of work, briefly seen as proud  of his rise to the  British  polo-playing establishment from an Indian childhood,  but openly racist in  contempt for the African-heritage black and principled owner of the targeted newspaper – Odimegwu Okoye. Christian (Harris Vaughan) , the nastiest of them all, is baffled by this difference since he reckons Salem is “halfway there himself”.  We dont  often get portraits of inter-BAME racism, so it’s interesting.  So is Christian’s cod-psychological speech about successful women having broken childhoods (though I suppose that scene is there to push Arabella over the edge) .

       The title by the way comes from Regents Park in London. Here as in any boardroom there is  a wide outer circle and ain inner one: the question arises of where rhe mosque is , and where “the zoo with the monkeys”. A properly amusing metaphor.      But the distinction between goodies and baddies is too sharply simplistic, and the surprise black-comedy resolution in the very short second act more startling than satisfying.    I suspect it would be a better play if the author was not also director:  it needs sharp trimming, some show-dont-tell in the characters’ various flaws.  But it was topical on a day when two 2024 news groups were rumoured to be bidding for the Telegraph in the UAE takeover threat.  The rating below doesn’t  mean its not worth doing, and Clarke aims at some good targets. . But it misses a lot of chances.

southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. to 30 March

A FRESH CAST, ONE YEAR ON 

Can it really be a whole year since, with theatre still gallantly recovering from Covid, Nicholas Hytner rolled the dice and opted to offer us some razzle dazzle?  This glorious revival of the classic Loesser-Swerling-Burrows musical of Damon Runyan roguery turned his playhouse into an escape hatch into 1940’s New York.  Hordes of promenaders have been shepherded night after night between rising and falling scenes and streets by amiable stage crew dressed as cops,   while trilbied lowlifes and furred and spangled women capered between and overhead,   and the missioners’ drum marched through them exhorting the gamblers to sin no more.  

        Above it all those of us in the galleries have watched with equal if less strenous joy and a good few come back again and again, noticing something new in Bunny Christie’s remarkable set every time:  an artfully unnoticeable arrival of new street furniture,  the suddenness of the switch to Cuba.  Or  it might be just a fresh gasp at the close ensemble drilling and sheer night-vision determination which enables the setting up and populating of a whole missionhall full of neatly arrnaged and occupied chairs , achieved during a blackout too brief to notice as a chord from the band fades. 

       Nobody has been surprised at its run extending:  the show is  a treasure, a blast, a night of crazy funny musical romance with defiant transgressiveness and real heart in two sets of wayward lovers.   Nobody has been the least surprised that it ran on and on.  It’s deserved it:  the production nimble to the edge of acrobatic, fast-moving, witty  and full of nerve and fun. 

          This week saw the formal launch of the latest new cast, and it is good to see that heart intact, and the important chemistry still there.   As Sarah the missionary Celinde Schoemaker  is glorious: quite apart from the lyrical beauty of her voice she proves to be a fearless and agile comedienne, swercing from righteousness into bacchanal revelry and a breatakingly choreograohed brawl  after she discovers Bacardi in Havana.   Timmika Ramsay’s Miss Adelaide is an equal joy, pneumatically irresistible in her big numbers and enchantingly plaintive as she pores over her new psychology book about frustrated singleness.    The new Nathan Detroit is Owain Arthur,  making it is own as a solid, hapless semi-competent  wheele-dealer:  George Ioannides as Sky Masterson is the smoothest lounge lizard to be found under any hat, but cracks into reformed virtue with boyish conviction.     And speak with reverence of Harry the Horse – Dashaun Vegas – hitting his big Siddown number like a runaway truck. 

         It matters that the principals are again excellent and well cast, but what matters more  a year on is that it is such a gloriously achieved ensemble show (and that includes the stage crew).  You don’t need to be a theatre economist to suspect that its warm  brilliance and deliberate joy , culminating in a party  atmosphere between promenaders and cast at the final curtain,  must have gone far to save this still-new theatre from the chilly financial wind. 

         But almost as importantly,  it has been in the capital – and among those who visit it – a powerful and reassuring affirmation of audience morale.  Nobody who has spun out happily onto the riverbank singing and laughing can maintain or endorse postCovid timidity about sharing delight , breathing together,  with crowds of strangers.  It’s a public service.  It’s still here. Till August, anyway.  Lucky London,  brave bright Bridge.

bridgetheatre.co.uk. to   24 August 

Rating … unchanged… all the fives there are.

PLANT FOOD PEOPLE FROM THE PAST

       I missed this first time round, due to the babysitting years, so it was grand to catch up. It’s a 1980’s  revival,  a spoof on  1960’s sci-fi horror movies,  with a lot of vigorous be-bop and early Motown.  And what could be more Britain 2024 than a skid-row set with roving drunks and dossers, and a chorus of three teenage girls bunking off school hanging around by the bins beside a small shop in the process of going bust?

         Inside the shop   Mr Mushnik  tells his staff it’s all over:  there’l be no job for orphan Seymour, and poor Audrey in her form-fitting leopardskin outfits is sporting a black eye from her loutish boyfriend (what dates this piece is that this, and her subsequent broken arm”from the handcuffs’ is treated as a bit of a joke).   Will she have  to go back to working the clubs in “cheap and nasty apparel”, and leave Seymout jobless?    But Seymour (a sweetly geeky Oliver Mawdsley)  has been tending a new kind of Venus flytrap, a flesh-eating plant. Perhaps if they put it in the window, people might come in?  They do. 

      Unfortunately,  the lad’s cut finger reveals that the only thing that makes it grow  – it leaps three sizes in the first half alone – is drops of human blood.  Before long he is  getting anaemic with the effort of keeping it going. But when you’ve got a really good  and very hyper villain – Matthew Ganley as Orin the sadistic leather-jacketed raving rockabilly dentist,  the plant’s first big snack is a no-brainer.  He falls to his  (nicely topical)  dangerous nitrous oxide sniffing habit and the plant becomes an instrument of natural justice , wiping out the dentist liberating Seymour to woo the golden-hearted Audrey.  

       By this time the plant is 8foot tall and a very messy eater:  credit to invisible puppetteer Matthew Heywood for good writhing , innards-sucking and flawless green lip-synch,  and a salute to the terrifying baritone of Anton Stephans (a man who has sung with both  Tina Turner  and Elton).  During the interval a set of screens goes up on the open stage, suggesting the happy certainty that the plant , named Audrey 2 by the besotted Seymour, may be even more enormous in the second half.  And so it befalls.

         The four co-producing theatres,  and director Lotte Wakeham,  do good honour to Howard Ashman’s gleefully ridiculous story, and even more to Alan Menken’s music.  I could, do be honest, have done without the doo-wop chorus of three girls, though  Chardai Shaw in particular is a grand belting voice. But Laura Jane Matthewson stops the show with Audrey’s plaintive dream about wanting a house and front garden “somewhere that’s green” . And her “Suddenly Seymour” duet with Mawdsley is actually properly moving,  though by this time the lad is becoming the Macbeth of horticulturalists,  seduced by agents and the promise of fame. It won’t end well for anyone.  Shrieks of glee meet every demise. And when in the last preview two stagehands had to nip on and sort out a  wobbly prop fridge,  the plant displayed showed a gift for meaningful upstaging gestures  which made us shriek even more.   Maybe not for under-7s, nervous horticulturalists or dentists who take offence easily. But otherwise a cheering night.

At New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich, to 23 March. 

Then TOURING, SEE BELOW

Rating 4 

TOURING

Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, 27 March–20 April; Octagon, Bolton, 24 April–18 May

 Hull Truck, 22 May–8 June.

A MAVERICK MINISTER  

      There’s another play to be written about Aneurin Bevan,  stubborn founder of the National Health Service: perhaps a more contentious one, or a fantasy in which the grit-hard, down-to-earth workaholic Welsh firebrand comes back as a ghost ,to confront the bureaucratic absurdities and clumsy scandals of the 21c giant.   But Tim Price’s play could never be that:  the NHS right now feels too precious, too fragile, and the only treatment of Bevan had to be affectionately hagiographic. Which means that we got an enjoyable play which asks and answers no questions beyond the fact  that as Bevan said, universal free healthcare was the most civilized idea a nation could have. 

      Michael Sheen was obvious casting – currently another of his hairy, furiously-Anglohobe- Welsh-hero roles is running on BBC1, entertainingly enraging the Daily Mail critic. Here he deploys his familiar magnetic watchability,  no small achievement when wearing a colourful pyjama suit throughout. For we meet “Nye” first in hospital, not yet knowing that he is dying, tended fondly by adoring nurses and his wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small is wonderful, and I next want a whole play about her spell as Arts minister).   Around him the hospital-green curtains of Vicki Mortimer’s clever design rise and fall, to be everything from childhood to the Commons and a coalmine.  We see him struggling in school against his stammer, falling on the device of changing words to avoid hard consonants;  thrilled by a free library,  rebuked for spending too litttle time with his own dying father, and earlier being taken down the mine to see the marvel of a seam (this is beautifully staged, mysterious, deeply respectful of that grim old trade). 

      We see him as a troublemaker in the wartime Parliament, roaring at the despised Winston Churchill, persuaded only with difficulty to join the “truce” with an Aye vote,  to get America in by displaying commie-free British unity.  The best moments are his interactions with Clement Attlee (Stephanie Jacob) whose elusive genius  is wittily shown as he glides around on a desk or suddenlly appears at the top of a pyramid. A wrestling-match with the reluctant  Herbert Morrison is fun too. And Mortimer and director Rufus Norris give us two wonderful coups de theatre with projection: once when `Nye sees and hears illimitable crowds of anxious patients reaching out,  then again when a phalanx of masked doctors defies him.  Thir resistance to becoming a state employee featured strongly in the recent The Human Body (scroll down for Donmar review).  It is well done here, albeit without the sympathy the earlier play briefly allowed it by reminding us that many – not all – of those doctors already ran highly philanthropic services for their local poor, and that it was state control that worried them. 

           Interestingly,  Price does not use two of Bevan’s most familiar quotes at all: “we stuffed their mouths with gold” about consultants,  or the one about Tories being lower than vermin. Having looked those two lines up to check, I notice that there are pages more of fantastic, rude, furious Bevan rhetoric he could also have used. Maybe another time.  Or give Sheen a one man show, in proper clothes,  to deliver them all.  I’d go. 

      But for now, it’s a workmanlike history play at a time of anxiety about the great service itself.  In the final moments the dying man is embraced and lifted by doctors and nurses towards his father’s miner’s lamp, and then statistics come up to remind us how fast mortality declined after the NHS was born.   

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 11 may. 

Then Wales Millenium Centre 18 May-1 June

Rating 3 

ONCE BRITTEN TWICE SHY?

   The late David Hemmings, one of Britten’s mentored, worshipped boy sopranos, was unforgettable aged 12  as the original MIles in the composer’s  terrifying opera of corrupting ghosts and childhood innocence, THE TURN OF THE SCREW.  Hemmings  told me with a laugh, years later, that yes ,Ben was besotted and he stayed in the house and once in the bed but no, nothing untward happened, and never would have. Not least, said the adult drily, because Peter Pears kept a very tight eye on them. “He knew I was a naughty boy..curious”. He was generous about the whole glamorous and artistic experience, though it is public knowledge  that the composer blanked him when his voice broke and his star run ended.

      I was away for this King’s Head plays opening,  but its worth catching up to alert you in its final week. And after the RSC’ s BEN AND IMO (scroll down for review).  it wasirresistible. For the action of Kevin Kelly’s well-researched piece takes place a year or so after the other play and the fraught year of composing Gloriana, th deal with that difficult, creative obsession of Britten’s and the alarm of those around him – Pears, Holst, and Jonathan Clarkson as the director Basil.  At one point the composer screams that he and “Miles” will be together forever, conflating the boy with his hero and those sinister notes “Malo..Malo..”, and indentifying Pears with Peter Quint ,the ghostly villain who lures the innocent child.  At another there is a nightmare sequence when he dreams that a hanging judge is condemning him for the terrible sin , sodomy, “not to be spoken among Christians” as the terrible old law put it.   His partnership with Pears was still illegal, and men had reason for such terrors still.

       Yet it is a thoughtful, rather than sensationalist play. Gary Tushaw’s Britten catches the man’s  vulnerable petulance and anxious perfctionism, sliding into hysterical unreason in the heat of creativity. Even better, Simon Willmont’s brings Pears a solid decent dignity: the quality very  striking when the kid rounds on him, with jeers about Leicester Square lavatory pickups and dirty “homos”. Musical moments are integrated well, notably when poor Pears sings “the foggy dew” while  mentor and boy have gone night swimming alone.

    .  The whole is book-ended by first person narration by Liam Watson as Hemmings;  my only quibble being that he ends the show with a mawkish yearning back, long after Britten’s death,  wanting to be reassured that he did well. More interesting would be to acknowledge that his career as actor and director, and singer in his own right went on, and flourished for fifty more years. That Aldeburgh interlude was only a moment. But it was a remarkable one, and part of a troubled artistic and social history. Both shows are worth seeing, but hurry for this one..

Kingsheadtheatre.com to 10 march

THE WINDRUSH WARRIORS

      Moses’  crowded bedsit  is where the new ones turn up off the boat train, wanting to know how to do London;  he can tell them names like Clapham -“not Clap-farm!” and Notting Hill,  and make it clear that it is not paved with gold, “you had better mind yourself! Or this London City will eat you alive, swallow you up whole”. It’s a weary job,  putting them right,  especially when like “Galahad” they’re so clueless they didn’t even know to bring duty-free cigarettes and rum with them, and have no luggage – “no sense to load myself with a lot of things, when I start work I will buy things”.  The more experienced men shake their heads:  “City” is a ticket hustler,  Lewis hating his menial jobs and darkly suspicious of his wife, who is settling rather better.  

      Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel about his Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants to London is a modern classic:  easy to see why Roy Williams, clear-eyed chronicler of a later generation,  wanted to make a play of it.   But the book is a plotless collection of individual stories – sharp portraits,  honest chronicles of  struggle and rejection and confusion – and drama needs a plot, a rising tension to anchor it.  Ebenezer Bambgoye’s direction  does its best to make it theatrical, offering surreal, beautifully choreographed moments expressive of the men’s experience,  and brief yearning musical flashbacks to Moses’ decision back in Trinidad to leave his pregnant girlfriend.   But the most an audience gets – and to be fair,  it is not nothing – is immersion in their world: empathy.   On a side wall there are three props pinned – a gun, a knife, a hipflask, and any tension comes from wondering which of them will be driven to which  by bafflement, homesickness,  the crush of failure to find work or the temptation of felony?  All three are picked up one point; all three do go back.

      Gamba Cole is thoughtfully, gently likeable as Moses,  Gilbert Kyem Jnr gives us “City” as a towering but likeable fool,  Romario Simpson’S Galahad, the newcomer , suffers the most agonizing self hatred after a fight, staring furiously at his arms, raging against his body.  “Why the hell coldnt we be blue, or red, or gree, if we can’t be wrhite? Why did we have to be black? We have done nothing to upset these people..So black and innocent and yet its causing nothing but misery, this black!  I hate it!”.   He wants to go home.  

   Moments like that are full of life and reality:  what stands out strongly is how much it was a world of men. The women are more scarce, but here shown as doing rather better. Lewis’ wife  Agnes (an impressive Shannon Hayes) is carefully learning to sound more English with tongue=twisters,  recruiting Carol Moses as “Tanty`”,  her mother-in-law,  to the effort.  Tanty is a delight, explaining to a reporter that she dissuades others in Trinidad for coming to England “Over there it so cold, only white people do live there and demn rude. No offence”.  But she tells her son “This is your country now, if something dont fit, make changes!”    But after a wonderful scene upbraiding a greengrocer for trying to cheat her with old vegetables, the wife Agnes returns to report with pride that he ended up smiling at her,   and Lewis immediately falls into Othello-level rage – “What reason you give him to smile?”.  

    Indeed the most overwhelming effect of the play is to emphasise a cramped maleness – not unfamiliar in some of our new wave of immigrants today –  which brings with it a fiery anger,  a sex-starved itch of desire, aggression and contempt, and anequally male weight of shame at failure and poverty. Lewis, knowing he is disintegrating,  says “Its like I am a different person here!!”  Moses is jacked off at a prosperous Polish restaurateur of an earlier wave of immigrants  – “We are British subjects , he the foreigner!”.  His response, though, is a resigned withdrawal from his situation,alleviated by his weary care of the newcomers.

          So great moments.  But perhaps to compensate for the exigous plot , and the too-rare use of Sevon’s lyrical passages,  the effect is almost ceaselessly one-note shouty.  Culturally appropriate  perhaps (I lived in 1971 Notting Hill long before it was posh, and the male-voice decibel level was high),  but tiring  over 105-minutes.   It’s a tribute tohistory, and to a group of pioneering immigrants,   vital to remember and love.  But as drama  it is not the next Roy Williams triumph we were hoping for.  

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 6 April  

GUEST REVIEWER AND OPERABUFF DEAN THOMPSON LOVES ENO’S LATEST

Ingenious – Dazzling – Hilarious!

If you haven’t seen The Magic Flute before, then this is the one to see; if you have seen it a hundred times before, then you should still go and see it as this is such an ingenious production, it is like seeing a new opera.  It is a brilliantly funny, thought provoking interpretation using projection, live sound effects and orchestra participation in the action in Simon McBurney’s fabulous production under the direction of Revival Director Rachael Hewer.  It is performed by an all-star cast of home grown and international talent.  The elegant translation of Schikaneder’s libretto is by Stephen Jeffreys.

The story begins as handsome and single Prince Tamino finds himself in a strange land being pursued by a deadly serpent.  Along stumbles bird catcher Papageno, who unable to save him stands by whilst the job is done by The Three Ladies, servants of The Queen of the Night, whom you might say has a few anger issues, justifiable some might say.  As soon as Tamino awakes from his trauma, the ladies show him a picture of the Queen’s daughter Pamina, with whom he instantly falls hopelessly in love. 

The music is precisely and beautifully conducted by German-born conductor Erina Yashima with the orchestra elevated to stage level which for me creates a friendly rapport, almost like being in the pub with them as they oblige fellow patrons with a tune.  To the left and right of the stage are two curious boxes which look almost as though they could be furnished with the contents of a man cave.  However, it soon becomes clear that these are all part of the ingenuity of the production.  On the left, video artist Ben Thompson’s box of tricks, with which he supports the narrative and gets laugh after laugh with projected text, sketches on a chalk tablet and images using various objects onto the stage.  On the right, Foley artist Ruth Sullivan creates live sound effects, performed with a cheeky smile as she interacts with the singers.  She even bashes out the introduction to Papageno’s Act II aria on wine bottles!

American tenor Norman Reinhardt as the almost too good to be true prince next door, captures everyone’s heart with his suave and unassuming demeanour as Prince Tamino and his gloriously heroic high notes and beautiful phrasing.

American soprano Rainelle Krause majestically delivers the Queen of the Night’s dazzling arias, mesmerising Tamino in the first act and terrifying her daughter in the second with her murderous rage, sending her on an errand to kill her adopted dad!  Krause’s performance is stunning, singing both arias with her powerful trademark laser precision, colouring her top notes with a beautifully rounded and perfectly controlled vibrato.

Pathos, joy and hope in the form of Pamina, the Queen’s daughter, is sung with serene beauty and gracefully acted by British soprano Sarah Tynan. 

Peter Hoare sings brilliantly as Monostatos, declaring his unwanted love for Pamina giving everyone a laugh with his comic dance routine to Papageno’s magical bells.

Beware ladies, of the outrageously flirtatious and somewhat desperate singleton bird catcher, Papageno, performed by British baritone David Stout who sings and acts hilariously with his stupendous rolling tones.  In Act II his desperation to find a wife leads him into the auditorium and shy he is not in his absolute determination.  He flirts with, by the look on her face (projected onto the stage) an unsuspecting lady, and then writes his mobile number on the projected chalkboard.  I wonder how their first date will go?  Well, Papageno’s impromptu flirtation does not put off his equally eager future bride, Papagena, Australian soprano Alexandra Oomens, who sings beautifully and acts (in the auditorium of course – where else?) with a crafty comic sparkle in her eye.

The whole show is grounded by the heavenly voice of Canadian bass John Relyea as the steady and wise Sarastro. 

Box office www.eno.org to 30^th March

Tickets from £10 (under 21s go free – see website for details)

Rating 5

CORONATION, COMMISSION, COLLABORATION

           You need not be a selfish pig to be an artist of genius,  but there’s no question that it often helps.  Occurs, anyway.  In Mark Ravenhill’s exhilarating two-hander  Benjamin Britten knows his own habit, one recognizable to many who worked with him (not least the young boy stars, mentored then dismissed) .   “I find a person, enchant the person. Pull the person in closer, until they’re in love with me. ..”I think often I’m in love with them back. Then one day suddenly I despise them. Their weakness in being easily enchanted. I try to push them away. they’re too deep in. So I draw on my cruelty..break them..”.

       “You won’t get me”says Imogen Holst lightly, arriving as his “musical assistant” for the absurdly short nine-month deadline in which he must write the opera “Gloriana” about Elizabeth I for Queen Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation.  But we know she will be “got” , for all her bravura and brilliance.  She is too generous, too respectful of the reality of his gift,  not to be made vulnerable.  Holst was a blithe and lovely figure in her own right,   who expertly supported her famous father Gustav for years and now in her forties had turned to educating amateurs, forming community choirs, collecting folksong,  spreading music.  But there was no room for another important figure  in the 39-year-old Britten’s universe: nervously ambitious,  tasked to do a national “duty” in this “new Elizabethan” age he was both flattered and terrified.

          The role of amanuensis as nanny, foil and innocent challenger is beautifully caught by Victoria Yeates as Imo:   breezy, brisk, tweedy, travelling light, living sparely but caught delightedly in moments of musical joy –  she dances like a fiend to inspire the galliard and morris of the court scenes.   Samuel Barnett as Britten deploys a chilly  light-tenor petulance covering his real fear of failure;  this  curdles at times to breathtakingly vicious spite, something  Ravenhill as a writer relishes no end. Barnett gives it full, full value: you cringe. The real Holst made veiled references later to things Britten said to her,  to terrible to repeat or bear to remember. The play brings that to life, fortissimo, in a crashing final scene:  no spoilers, but a final monosyllable from Holst had women in the audience hissing “Yessss!!!” 

         It’s a gripping couple of hours, watching them work in taut brief scenes; they quarrel, sometimes meet like real friends sharing ideas (though Britten will suddenly panic and refuse to admit that any were hers:  his proprietoral attitude  to the idea of a small boy dancing is frankly edgy).  Softened by drink  they laugh together: once he crashes on the piano keyboard  as “Wagner after six rums” while she capers  as Brunnhilde with a lampshade on her head.  She often picks him up from despair, but when his inspiration suddenly begins to flow freely he blocks her out.   Soutra Gilmour’s design gives grand dramatic effects to Erica Whyman’s production;  a low light sometimes throwing the piano as a great menacing battleship shadow on the bricks, the sound of the Aldeburgh seas crashing, Imogen’s wild morris-dance spinning her into darkness.  

              Behind it all is the artistically perilous absurdity of the whole project: Lord Harewood and Kenneth Clarke demanding an instant new-Elizabethan renaissance (shades of all those unspeakably ghastly “Cultural Olympiad” subsidised events in 2012).  Britten, though he knows finally that “Gloriana” will be an honourable failure,  buys into this but regrets it, hating every new arrangement or suggestion from above, especially if it involves some bete noire like poor Frederick Ashton.  There are moments when I think Ravenhill is mourning our current government philistinism and arts cuts,  but the the 1953 dream  is skewered in one of Barnett’s last speeches.  He predicts   “a new hunger for music, the government spending proper money on the arts, great buildings, enormous sensational national arts, huge great audiences of thousands upon  thousands  – brought together by their dullness. I don’t want any of it. Back to Aldeburgh, writing for my friends. With our little opera group every year looking glumly at its pocket book with figures written in red ink. Hand to mouth.  I’m not a national person, I’m a local person”. 

        He didn’t, of course, predict that sixty years on, cut upon cut would mean that even the great national companies are staring at red ink. 

Rsc.org.uk. To. 6 APril. 

Rating 4 

AN ATTIC WARNING

     Fasten your seat belts for a bracingly odd German play by Marius von Mayenburg; hold on tight as it veers  in a switchback weirdness, which  I for one ended up thoroughly relishing.

       Its a simple enough story, on the face of it:  two siblings and their partners, clearing out dead Dad’s attic (boxes, a drip stand, pushchairs, a music-stand) discover a neatly wrapped picture of a church in Vienna. It’s signed A.Hitler.  Bossy Nicola (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) , who did most of the end of life care and resents it,  scoffs that it can’t be Hitler and is just awful anyway,  banal.  Her husband Fabian (Gunnar Cauthery) –  is excited at the possible price,  and so is brother Philipp, a nicely wet John Heffernan: he  works out, with splendid unselfawareness,  that it’s OK to profit from because it represents a vision of a better age. You know, the imaginary one when young Adolf hadn’t failed his art school exam and thus became a harmless bohemian (extra pleasure may be felt by Times Register readers, since the 100-year-ago anniversary report this week was about the future Fuehrer’s trial (Feb, 1924).  He already knew what he wanted all right, spoke for 4 hours about the need for  National Socialism) .  

         Philipp’s wife Judith, being Jewish, is just horrified at the picture and wants it destroyed.  Jenna Augen as usual is terrific, small and angry, here a  witness to history.  All of them of course need its “provenance” if they sell,  and call in an icy Nuremberg museum lady – an unrecognizably chilly Jane Horrocks –  to admire it. She confirms that the  label is from a Jewish framer  Adolf regularly used before refusing to save him from the camps .  All of this leads to Nicola’s revelation that Dad had specially asked for all Granny Greta’s stuff to be binned, because she was a Nazi party member.  Like any German family  (von Mayenburg knows his people) they reassure themselves  that everyone joined the party if they wanted a job,  and she was an Opera singer.  But she was also sleeping with Martin Bormann, Hitler’s top aide. So   maybe  those initials on dear Grandma’s ring  – which the prat Philipp gave to Judith  – are well, awkward. But also handy to back up the picture’s provenance…a buyer finally appears. And is nastily thrilled. 

         Good story, but wow, how it lurches gleefully around.  One might unkindly suspect that there was a bet going: how many kinds of play can von M  squeeze into 95 minutes in a piece concerning the Holocaust.  An Ayckbournian comic family row about money, a serious Stoppardian discussion about the morality of the individual as artist,  a touch of incest, a brief surreal ballet interlude with an unnamed chap in peephole fetish underpants and an Aryan-blonde  galleriste, plus a writhing tetanus attack ending in heil Hitler by a man covered in jam aftr rolling in a skip with Greta’s Nazi love letters. Add an erotic bargain, a farcical conclusion,  some courageously overwritten soliloquies, and  the most terrifying surroundsound evocation  of the year by Richard Howell, based on an unseen bathroom door.   

      There’s even a line which in the present febrile national mood felt topically and salutary.   Nicola begins to turn on Judith about Israel and the suffering in  Gaza, offering  the hideous common trope: “Jews, of all people,  should know..”. To which Judith snarls “I didnt realize the Holocaust was an education project to make Jews nicer to people in Palestine”.  

     It’s a grand oddity, and, for my money von Mayenberg  wins the bet , and keeps us on edge. So  does the almost worryingly fearless director Patrick Marber, never one to swerve away from weirdness.   And none of us, however flawless our ancestry, can afford to swerve away ftom the perennial risk of  resurrection of the far right.  The players are all fine, particularly Augen;  Jane Horrocks has an unexpected gift for Germanic stiffness, and Angus Wright – an actor of great  natural presence, authority and threat –    deserves some kind of award for deploying both that and a mercifully unsuspected gift for twerking in fetish underpants.  

Youngvic.org.   To 20 april

THEY SHALL NOT PASS

   Given the current swell of antisemitism there was a heartstopping moment from Jez Unwin as Yitzhak Scheinberg,  patriarch of a hardworking East End Jewish family whose son Sammy is leaning towards direct action against the British Union of Fascists.  Keep away from trouble,  the older man says, dreading the “Jewish lightning” arson attacks and the beatings-up.  A pogrom surivor, he asserts an ancient grim humility:   Jews cannot afford to give their enemies reasons,   and “Everything we have is borrowed, they can take it back”.  Meanwhile,  when the ensemble become an occasional capering chorus of newspaperst the Jewish Chronicle is echoing it in a mockingly rhyming lyric “The Board of Deputeez/ says don’t get involved –  it’ll bring us to our knees!”

      But doing nothing will not do. Outside, the community chant is “No-one sees eye to eye, but everyone agrees – this is my street!”  Irish communist Maraid  (Sha Dessi) who works in a Jewish bakery makes common cause with the dockworkers and multicultural immigrants (making sure the audience on three sides is plentifully leafleted) against the thuggish BUF . These march under Mosley with black shirts,  red lighting-strike  armbands,  slogans about foreign masters and ‘honest work for British workers..get rid of the Yids” .  Maraid forges a friendship with  Joshua Ginsberg’s Sammy.   But these are hard starving times for everyone,  in 1936,   rents are rising ;  elsewhere in the tenement building  young Len from Lancashire is gradually drawn to the BUF by their promises of work.  When the barricades are up, he may be on the wrong side..

      This one was always going to be a rouser. With the Merchant of Venice 1936 now up West after Stratford and Wiltons,  displaying THEY SHALL NOT PASS at the curtain call ,  it is grand timing for a fresh fringe musical to remind us of when  old perils met old decencies:   the Cable Street riot of October 1936 when immigrants, Irish dockers, Jews and indigenous working-class locals refused to let the DUF march through their streets, defying police and thuggery alike.   

        Tim Gilvin and Alex Kanefsky do it proud, musical numbers ranging from Sammy’s urgent Hamiltonesque rap to mournfully beautiful ballads like Maraid’s “Bread and roses” as she toils through the night inthe bakery. There are barking BUF chants, the yearning cry of the fascist recruit “Let me in!” And of course a great “No Pasaran!”as the communists make common cause with the Spanish Civil war and adopt the defiance for themselves.  Adam Lenson directs a vigorous ensemble of eleven (feels like more, with neat doubling and trebling)  and Kanefsky’s book – framing it in a modern history guide competing resignedly with a jack-the-ripper tour – carries on beyond the barricade to the aftermath,  the complexities within and between families, and a final community effort in the citywide rent strike. 

       He makes the divisions clear: Sammy, trying to get work which seems sewn up by the Irish dockers,  claims to be called “Seamus O”Dublin”.  Maraid’s old Irish mother  (Debbie Chazen on fierce form)  thinks Jews own the banks and doesn’t approve of her daughter “consorting with them” , let alone distributing Commie leaflets.  A Black character observes in passing that it’s all very well for people who can change their accent but it’s harder for him.  

         The vigour and sound of it are overwheming,  the messiness  and doubling all part of the joy. Ginsberg’s Sammy is a mass of tousled energy,  Dessi a powerful musical presence;   Unwin’s switching between the role of Jewish patriarch and fascist leader is powerfully uncanny.  All power to Southwark and 10 to 4 productions. I hope this one grows and meets wider audiences.  Its entire run is sold out, which does the creators and London audiences credit. 

Southwarkplayhouse.co.uk to 16 march

1948 AND ALL THAT

   Right now, the birth of the NHS in 1948 is more than appropriate to write about (there’s another play about Nye Bevan next week).  For as the most jaded doctor predicts late in the play,  the gift and joy of free healthcare would never be enough – “the beautiful new girlfriend is bound to become the tired snappish wife who keeps you waiting too long for your supper”.  

       So as Britain fights to revive its old passion,  what fitter direction for the politically witty Lucy Kirkwood  (remember Chimerica?) than an ironic tribute to another 1940s monument: Brief Encounter: monochrome Pathé News, waisted coats, modest stout hats, railway carriage banter and occasional swells of romantic music.   It is all there  and nimbly staged:  only this time the housewife is the doctor: Iris Elcock, GP, local councillor , housewife married to another GP and earnest assistant to a flamboyantly sweary Labour woman minister.  She wants to be a MP and change things for the poor.  

         The man is of another world and mindset:  George is a local boy long emigrated to middling Hollywood fame, married to a starlet, never votes or gives a damn. But oh, the chemistry of middle-aged temptation!  They meet first of course on a train (the set, a spare revolving square of light,  becomes with neat scooting furniture changes an office, home, train, seafront).,   Hours later, on a home visit, she is doing a discreet intimate examination of a cantankerous old lady when her son walks in. George! 

         They spark all the genteel fire of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard but with added political argument, and are wonderfully matched.  Keeley Hawes gives Iris a worn maternal loveliness  and luminous benignity about her work and causes; Jack Davenport irresistibly handles the Coward-esque dry wit of George’s lines, cynicism covering increasing need.  Iris’ husband Julian is a lame war hero,  and one of the majority of doctors who furiously opposed the National Health Service Act because they didn’t want to be state employees:  Bevan finally had, he sourly said, to ‘stuff their mouths with gold”.   He resents his wife’s ambition and socialist fire – at one point humiliatingly rejects her “pawing at him” to try and revive their marriage.  Later we will, fleetingly, learn better of old pre-war self.    As for George’s wife – well, late on in a slightly unnecessary dramatic reveal, we learn more of her too.

          Hawes and Davenport are wonderful,  rich passion warring with adult responsibilities;  around them the outer world of 1948 and its attitudes comes alive, from social unease to the arrival of Dior’s shockingly wasteful New Look.    Deft doubling and trebling of roles actually helps:   Siobhan Redmond is the fiery minister (very Barbara Castle), several patients  and  also Iris’s crisply snobbish sister-in-law – “People are romantic about the working-class since the war, but meet one, they are so bovine” as she laments the loss of 193s  middle-class comfort and way of life.  Tom Goodman-Hill’s Julian is nine other people, Pearl Mackie about eleven: but  the direction by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee means that both this shape-shifting and the filmic, fast-changing scenes on the open set do much to create a sense of an evolving period.  Iris’s child, to her socialist  despair, is obsessed with pictures of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding-dress.  

       Onstage cameras and high moody monochrome closeups overhead are used with unusual economy and taste ,  evoking the eternal tangle of politics and human emotion. I have rarely seen this fashionable stage technology done better.  Kirkwood as ever has some lines too good to spoil in a review, but given today’s repellent political culture it is good to report how angry Siobhan Redmond’s minister is at Nye Bevan’s famous description of Tories as “lower than vermin”.  She felt it alienated people from the fast-closing window of real change, because British people  simply won’t tolerate rudeness.

        A terrific, grown-up and engrossing history play.  And for me, fascinating to come to after an afternoon watching Southwark’s “Cable Street”  on the other side of the river and the far side of WW2. (review later).   Sometimes a double theatre day just meshes and clicks… 

Donmarwarehouse.com to 13 April

WANNA BE IN MOVIES? REALLY? BRRRR!

We open in a chilly Suffolk cottage in the rain (I  am tonight probably the only person here to have come direct from a chilly Suffolk cottage, in rain. Call it Method Criticking). 

     But in this case there is a sinister banging on the door, which opens to reveal – aaaagh! Jonathan Hyde as a gloriously  convincing Vincent Price, veteran horrror movie star in  a bad mood. He is suffering from “irreconciliable differences” personal and artistic, with the 24 year old director Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski), and citing clause 17 paragraph 5 of his contract to get out of the film “Witchfinder General”. 

    Reeves thinks he is making an art movie about the truth of  human violence – hangings, rape, the rack “for serious cinema is about discomfort” . Price reckons its just  a job, knowing that the studio plans to market it as horror – like his Edgar Allen Poe films – and that  a memo instructs the director with demands like  “girl’s tits nude, and blood on tits”.

      Having  been reprimanded for overacting all day by this whippersnapper,  he wants out. Reeves pleads, but then. explodes into “Go back to America you old side of ham, I’ll get Donald Pleasance like I wanted in the first place”. But the power is not with him, and he pleads again. Funny, but already uneasy.

         Then, unseen by either, in the same set we are in a similar cottage – Alfred Hitchcock’s fanciful bit of olde England in LA –  where three years earlier the master is alone with his tightly contracted discovery, Tippi Hedren the last Hitchcock Blonde: Joanna Vanderham exquisitely lit  in iceblue silk suit, respectful but rightly wary of the man’s toadlike vastness and legendary power (Ian McNeice is mesmerisingly unnerving). 

So the sharply comic mood changes, though at the same time the other pair – Price with the upper hand, Reeves nervy and troubled – continue their evening, the veteran taking over cooking.  There is no confusion in Janathan Kent’s nimble direction, though sometimes fragments of director-actor dialogue in parallel cause a moments synchronicity.

   This in ninety minutes John Logan’s thoughtful – and much  researched –  play interweaves two actor director  relationships at points of crisis. It is full of ideas but sketchy – even a bit cartoonish – in character – which given the pace and interest did not particularly bother me. Themes of age and experience are reversed, but within each pair the power shifts.  In a startling moment Reeves (who died young of an overdose a couple of years later) is trying to tone down Price’s usual grandiosely sinister manner in a condemnation scene,  and babbles half crazily about the world’s   horrors.  A silence, and suddenly Price gives the condemnation speech coldly, matter of fact, chilling. Nazi. As Reeves had wanted. 

        Hitchcock meanwhile is also building mastery, more horribly, over Hedren: very Harvey Weinstein, very nasty. He will make her immortal on that screen. But the immortality he wants is trauma – torment – as it always is with Hitch and beautiful icy blondes. All his films he says are the same – “kiss kiss, kill kill, in any order” – and Marnie will end with a kiss , though only via the famous cabin scene of marital rape.  He needs her caught in trauma, her nakedness the moment the male “creates” her.  The rapist is like a director for whom the actor’s welfare does not matter: the  theory, a patiarchal sub- artistic wank  that still exists, is  that the greatest screen moments caught forever like flies in amber can come out of real abuse. Especially of a beautiful woman

      That could hardly be more topical. Vanderham however  rounds brilliantly on Hitchcock in this play though, giving Hedren a very modern moment of defiant rage, turning the tables, telling the old goat that in seducing her he is just the ugly boy in school screaming to be Clark Gable, wanting a co-star more than a whore, a trophy. And that people will only  laugh at him for it.  

     Pow! Cut! And that’s a wrap. Though in the 1960s it probably wasn’t, theres satifaction in it. And a play that leaves you thinking, not  least about cinema. A good one for BAFTA week. 

Hampsteadtheatre.com to 16 march

Rating 4 

TENTACLES  STRETCHING INTO PAST AND FUTURE

    Electricity is coming to the village but the elderly Randolphs wont bother, preferring the paraffin lamplight of their forebears.  Their house ,  comfortably middle-class, has seen generations play in its nursery.  It’s their heart,  and the family gathering fourteen-strong with children  for Dora and Philip’s golden wedding have it embedded in their memories.  Not always benignly,  for Dodi Smith’s1938 hit play focuses sharply both on  the perennial pains and joys of kinship – including losses – and on the  social changes of the interwar period. Emily Burns’ production does it proud:  it’s an exquisitely performed watercolour of a play,  a  period piece capturing a moment when not only was war looming  – on its  first night the news was of Chamberlain meeting Herr Hitler – but England was feeling the pains of evolution.  

         For late Edwardiana is there, as Lindsay Duncan’s amiable, demanding  (and often very funny) Dora has a lady-companion Fenny:  an unenviable status hovering awkwardly  well above mere servants but below the actual family.  In opening scenes the child Billy  (the kids are terrific). perceptively observes it might be better to be a maid, because “they get a day off”.  Charles the patriarch is a man of enough private means to have done nothing in particular with his life  – always meant to write a book or go into Parliament but settled for being “happy..so happy I sometimes think of raising  a statue to myself”.  They hung on to the old nanny, who is now tending a visiting great-grandchild in his cot , but nannies are already a luxury the young parents can’t quite afford.   One daughter Marjorie is a contentedly surrended traditional wife,  whose wooing was  a simple matter of just “twining myself round Kenneth”.   Yet alongside these happy relics the 20c is advancing fast,  so their remaining  children – two lost to the first war or after it –  are far more modern figures.  Nicholas is an emotionally underdeveloped advertising man who talks on radio panels,  Hilda an estate agent making thousands a year and anxious phone calls. Cynthia is broodingly  recovering  from an affair in Paris, and there’s Belle,  a widowed septuagenarian sister-in law fresh from America with dyed hair and a facelift which makes silver-haired Dora murmur that it must be dangerous taking a face like that out in the rain.  Belle in turn sweetly says to Dora’s daughters  that “only a very happy woman can dare trust to nature as your mother has”.  A wonderful  pair, Lindsay Duncan and Kate Fahy on top form. So is Malcolm Sinclair as Charles, dodging featly round the fact that Belle only married his late brother because she couldn’t have him. Bethan Cullinane’s Cynthia offers a fine, low-key portrait of a woman who broke the rules for love’s sake and lost:  there is a deeply affecting nursery conversation between her and the orphaned child “Scrap” about the way that grief creates a limbo of non-feeling. 

       The yearnings and frustrations,  old griefs and frivolous , sentimental or painful memories of all the family  – the dear octopus whose tentacles hold them all – are delicately drawn. It is a fine ensemble cast in a glorious set by Frankie Bradshaw, revolving rooms each with a flickering  real fire. The whole thing feels Chekhovian, though the ending – no spoilers – is less so.  

      But best of all, at its centre is the wonderful performance by Bessie Carter as Fenny,  the ‘companion’ who is not quite family:   patronized and pitied by some of the sisters ,used as a gofor with charming unconcern by Dora, and flirted with by the coxcomb Nicholas,  who is too immature to notice that she is longingly in love with him.  Carter brings it immense dignity,  and great emotional power in her gentle  self-control ,  shading to an edge of girlish hope as Nicholas teases her by marooning her on top of a nursery cupboard,  then into humiliation and a reckless attempt to be like other young women,  carefree at the evening dance.

        As the first half ends and the others wander off unconcernedly,   she is the one we glimpse as the set revolves again:  a stalwart faithful helper, alone  the high stepladder hanging all the damn bunting for their revels, with no sign of any chivalry to assist her.  And again towards the end she is the one relied on  to make waterlilies out of napkins when the first starched lot fall victim to  an emotional rapport between mother and wayward Cynthia.       Bessie Carter is, in short, understatedly, intelligently, feelingly terrific. A new star on an NT debut.   

Nationaltheatre.org.uk. To 27 March.  

Rating 4 

WHEN THE BOOMERS WERE ROCKIN’ ALL OVER THE WORLD...

    “We were there!” cry the cast of John O’Farrell’s jukebox tribute to the 1985 Live Aid concert. Memories undimmed nearly forty years on, heres a  Coldstream Guards bandsman proud to be opener for the greatest rock bands ever; here’s Suzanne (Jackie Clune) who was an A level kid in a record shop in Weston Super Mare;  here’s the sound guy and the admin assistant who surfed the chaos of Geldof’s determination to get the vast transatlantic gig up in 38 days.  A burst of We Are The Champions rises – the famous numbers are, throughout, elegantly inserted to the story as chorus or solos with a band overhead . 

     But for a moment I quailed at their triumphant claim “we will be heroes for ever” and the elders’ lordly patronizing of a  new- generation sceptic  who just sees “a lot of rich white men” purporting to save Africa.  But fair dos – the familiar whining about postwar boomers ruining the world for Gen Z means forgetting what this extraordinary bit of musical philanthropy did. For all the snags and frustrations, Bob Geldof’s simplehearted horror at the newsreports and his stroppy, sweary risk-taking recruitment of all the big rockers did save tens of thousands of lives, and force the developed West to look at hard global realities.  And this show gives 10% of the take to the Band Aid charitable trust.

     Craige Els as Geldof (who is a collaborator with O’Farrell) centres the story with powerful sincerity: when he is persuaded to visit a refugee camp and hold a dying infant, the shock holds the house still for a real moment.  It becomes clear that his headlong simplicity of purpose, a “this will not do and I must fix it” conviction – parallel to Thatcher’s own though in a different direction – was key to his success. He is not  daunted  by the slow assent of the other bands, the appalled logistic protests of Harvey Goldstein the promoter,  nor by the angry “how dare they sing about us” expressed by Abiona Omiona’s  black aid- worker when the disco lot stage becomes a fiery desert sunset and we are forced to look away from the glamour and excitement of the gig.  Geldof tramples on, while around him the ordinary fans are fired with his rockstar intransigence.

    The first half mainly deals with the original moment when Geldof and Midge Ure made the Band Aid Christmas single, hauling together a supergroup including Status Quo,Bono, Genesis, Spandau Ballet et al.  Barracking of the BBC got it traction (Michael Grade knew when to give in) and fans rose magnificently to selling it. It’s good that the show admits the lyrics’  absurdity about snow, and the  cringe over “tonight thank God its them instead of you” which apparently Bono hated singing. But it is how Geldof felt, and a supremely honest line.  The startling success, and a cameo of Charles and Di there, is nicely done; the subsequent frustration at corruption and undelivered grain is painful.

     Then the second half is Live Aid, the tempo rising even more.    Luke Shephard’s direction keeps it going. It isn’t  a classic: the side-plot of Suzanne’s teenage romance is sweet but flat, the disco choreography gets quite dull, and two  cartoonish panto-rap confrontations between Geldof and Thatcher over the VAT refund are frankly awful.  But the genius is in the music,  and the briliance of the show in how those classics serve the mood. Matthew Brind, as musical supervisor, earns every plaudit going.

    Joel Montague asGoldsmith the fixer delivers a bruising Pinball Wizard, the lone aid worker’s “Blowing in the wind” asks the eternal question behind all misery, there is an astonishing shared rendering of Bohemian Rhapsody, a 2024 teenager picking up the timeless  strop of “My Generation”. And finally – and dammit the eyes water – a  Mc Cartney moment. The Beatle was, that day,  singing live for the first time since Lennon died.  As the cast old and  young  ask the hardest question,  why misery still stalks the world,  his words are the ending:  “There will be an answer….Let it be.” 

Oldvictheatre.com.   To 30 March

Rating three.

FAIRYTALE AS FESTIVAL

     “The lunatic, the lover and the poet”  are all served in any Midsummer Night’s dream.   Here the first two get most traction,  the poetry least (until Puck’s last farewell). It’s a trippy,  psychedelic ’60s teenage dreamworld that director Eleanor Rhode conceives: far from leafy tradition but highly entertaining.  A mass of round paper lanterns hang high overhead the whole vast auditorium ,  a brief flash of old TV-screen test cards hits us at the start, and the forest magic  is a thing of voices from every direction, lights and flashes and colours,  hovering bright pinpricks and voices  creating Cobweb, Peaseblossom and the rest of Titania’s entourage.  

        John Bulleid adds illusions  – understated but striking when they occur  – to Lucy Osborne’s bare design.   But beyond that,  the production’s power is its sense of of youthfulness (a good few RSC debutants),  expressed with constant liveliness in the movement across a big empty stage: the mortal teenagers, fighting and loving and quarrelling,  are set against both the initial business-suit blandness of Theseus’ court and then the eerie ancient authority of Oberon , Titania and their exasperated intern errandboy  Puck. Bally Gill’s Oberon,  mutated from the authoritarian Theseus to a scruffy military-jacketed glam rocker, is is particularly memorable in creating the fairy king’s odd otherworldly goodwill:   the prank on Titania (what is he but a prototype drink-spiker?) is oddly mellowed as he hangs about invisible to the mortals:  watching, pitying, interfering, and learning.  His reconciliation with Sirine Saba’s dignified queen is unusually touching. 

     We should speak particularly of Puck:   two indispositions in the cast mean that on press night, of all nights,  the understudy Premi Tamang took over the  wild green wig and scampering wit, and was remarkable.  It says a great deal for the meticulous level of RSC full-cast rehearsal that she does it as if seasoned by a long run:   signalling wild flashes, shivers of light and once a shower of ball-pond spheres with casual accuracy and  zipping through several very intensely choreographed and remarkably vigorous fight-and-confusion scenes with two pairs of young lovers.  She never puts a foot wrong:  an exit round of applause after the wildest of those scenes was well earned.  

       It all feels youthful: three  of the lovers are on debut seasons here, Dawn Sievewright’s Hermia at first not totally easy with the verse but splendid in the emotional line of her puzzled rejection and resentment,  and Boadicea Ricketts stunningly energetic as Helena. The brawl between them,  with the men struggling to restrain them  is pure Coronation Street classic,  right up to an eyescratching fury ending with both trying to swam up a ladder, the “modesty and maiden shame” in the text getting laughs.  Its conclusion, with Puck and Oberon zap-freezing them and chasing them off in all directions and got a wild round of applause.   

    And the Rude Mechanicals? Splendidly silly.   Four of the six, including Matthew Baynton’s Bottom and Helen Monks turning Quince into every am-dram matron,  are also on debut RSC seasons:  Rhode has clearly cast about for unrestrained comic talent. Baynton (even without his independently expressive twitching asses’ ears) is a joy, everybody’s  most-annoying drama-school diva.  A lanky shape, he milks his death by the tomb in what one can only suspect to be Shakespeare parodying his own Romeo in the previous year’s play.    But a special huzza to Emily Cundick as Snout,  whose deadpan, determined discomfort in the role of  Wall is a joy.  It’s the first time that I remember the concept of the “chink” or “cranny’ that the lovers kiss through being quite so uncomfortable for the poor battlement.   

     Oh, and one of the pleasures of  oft-repeated classic plays is noticing something for the first time, off the back of topical news.  It had never occurred to me before that what Peter Quince as leader of the Mechanicals is doing,  in those anxious prologues preventing the lion and the stabbing worrying the ladies,  is inventing ‘trigger warnings’ four hundred years before Ralph Fiennes and the rest got so annoyed by them.  Nothing new under the sun. All in all, three very happy hours to remember.  

Box office. Rsc.org. To. 30 march

Rating four 

    LYRICAL, FARCICAL, PERFECT

Figaro, rascally wigmaker and foam-flinging wet-shaver, is  basically the first rapper, isnt he? Staccato eloquence at speed, braggart confidence in breeches,  making earnings out of lovelorn yearnings .  Earning, yearning – see how fast the pleasurable infection of the Holdens’ translation infects you? Its sharp easy wit,  sung in English but with  surtitles) is one of the glories of this beloved 1987 Jonathan Miller production (Peter Relton is revival director). 

     Its a fitting moment for it,  just as the world of music has been rightly set afire with indignation at the government and ACE’s shrugging treatment of the English National Opera. How better to remind us of

ENO’S nimble brilliance, outreach  and welcome to all,  than by bringing back one of its jolliest productions?

   Roderick Cox from America is conductor on his ENO debut;   Charles Rice has it down pat as the eponymous barber, and as for Innocent  Masuku from Cape Town Opera as Count Almaviva,  not only does he sing like a bird – that goes without saying, its ENO  – but as an actor he takes the besotted Count with  aplomb from  mooning naivete to gleeful conspiracy , and hence to magnificent  physical humour in his disguises  as a drunken fake soldier and a mincing musicmaster. His fine knee-work, ‘making a leg’, is immediately parodied by the equally funny Simon Bailey as Bartolo, who achieves not only three full-on pratfalls but, in the second half,  a falsetto Handel parody as he mourns the old days of opera “when men were sopranos”. .From Ireland, Anna Devin gives us a Rosina equally  sharply drawn:  defiant, melodically gorgeous and slyly funny. 

    It”s a treat of a show. Lyrical and mischievous, farcical and glamorous, with all the self-aware absurdity it needs as Rossini sends up the  sombre tragedians of  the genre (the final prolonged love duet, punctuated by Figaro’s stamping warbling panic to get them down the ladder, had the whole house giggling until you could feel it: Rice is masterly. 

      Theatrecat does not generally review opera , having only the most sub-amateur level of classical musicality as a humble awed amphi-rat. But when shows are  as crazily and openly cheerful as any musical comedy, it’s  worth reminding musical-theatre fans that sometimes it’s good to  venture into  the grander gilded houses,  the land of the miraculously un-miked voices.

     Who, after all,  doesn’t want to see Lesley Garrett in a housekeeperly flurry of underwear, or enjoy a household in perfectly timed uproar, insult and deception, being raided by glitterimg soldiery with rifles poised and  everyone closing the act with a crazedly entanglled  mass chorus about headaches and catastrophe?

    Oh, and there’s Don Basilio’s hat to marvel at. And the Don Alonso shoes. Treat after treat. And the music….

Box office Eno.org to 29 feb

Best availability 27th, tickets down to 25 quid,  and none of them reaching the worst  west-end lunacy.

Rating 5

 AMERICAN DREAMS IN FADING BLACKPOOL

    Suddenly within a fortnight come two very classy new plays,  funny and thoughtful and moving beyond the ordinary. Moreover, in a tiny revolution goth are built around women.   Beth Steel’s TILL THE STARS COME DOWN is at the National Theatre (scroll down), and now up West Jez Butterworth follows the mystic-deadbeat caravan England of JERUSALEM and the troubled Ireland of THE FERRYMAN with another mournfully entertaining, dramatically intense tale of female lives. 

              It is set in the weary, decayed Blackpool of  the ‘70s with twenty-year flashbacks to its heyday, and to hopes. The hopes hold a family  in thrall to the passionate ambition of the mother Veronica, the father long vanished, possibly dead at war though the story changes for the ‘widow’s convenience and respectability.. She doesn’t want her girls to lark around on the roller coaster, bear five children and end up slaving at the mangle. She wants glamour, beauty, everything that is the distant shangri-la that America seemed in the Britain’s hard postwar years.  We are to see her drilling her four children in close-harmony and vaudeville tap, lecturing them on the early trials and disciplines of legendary showbiz figures like the Andrews Sisters . We see this making her become,  in some extraordinary moments from   Laura Donnelly,    a genuinely tragic figure for any century.

        But we meet the daughters first as adults in the 70s,  in the battered old front room of Seaviw (formerly Seaview guest house, then dubbing itself Seaview Luxury Hotel and Spa, its backstreet glory indicated by a decrepit juke box and a palm-thatched cocktail bar).  Somewhere up the dim brown stairs – Rob Howell’s set is  so shiveringly evocative you can almost smell the mould –  the mother is dying of cancer. She is tended by a down-to earth nurse who is not above murmuring that if the pain gets too much there is a particular doctor’s number to ring, unofficial-like.  It’s a hot July, enervating:  in a brief bravura scene the piano-tuner (Richard Lumsden) stumps in with eloquently entertaining disgust at the state of the piano – “A piano needs to be played! Salt, damp..” .   Without stress, we are offered two fine metaphors: this house’s life has suffered long enervating drought,  and many a life becomes a sad unplayed piano.  

       The plain, nervous domestic daughter Jill is joined by the others: noisy Ruby from Rochdale with husband Dennis,  and even noisier Gloria, Leanne Best all fuming attitude and fag with her equally subservient Bill.  Missing is the eldest, Joan, who went to America. And perhaps was famous there, only nobody’s heard from her for two decades. Only the adoring Jill thinks she will come.   Because the mother upstairs needs to see her. And to be forgiven for something. 

       Banter, memory, idle quarrels, the nervousness of an impending death hang over  them. But so does memory, so the great room swirls round and back twenty years to a tidy kitchen where the matriarch,  neat and queenly and determined, is drilling the four little girls in their Andrews Sisters harmonies and bewailing the cancellation of a gig at St Bartholomews by some straitlaced congregants who find this saucy American stuff a bit much. 

       It’s perfect:   the little girls’ evocation of that decorously saucy showbiz,   the mother bossing  Joe the pianist, telling off passing lodgers and tolerating the chirpy local comic Jack (Bryan Dick a poundshop Dodd, whose magnificently terrible jokes repeatedly bring the house to hysteria:  “I’ve got a new stepladder, I’m worried about how to introduce it to my real ladder”, etc).  

Of course Jack promises ‘contacts’ in bigtime showbiz, and of course Veronica leaps at it. And one comes:   Corey `Johnson is a smoothly dismissive Luther St John, allegedly Perry Como’s agent and early discoverer of Nat King Cole.   He is interested in one of the girls. But only one.  And maybe there’s a better acoustic to audition her in a private room . Upstairs. And Veronica is worried, as Joan is only fifteen. And decent Joe the pianist is worried. But Veronica suppresses her worry.  And Joe goes, muttering that God forgive her. 

       Time sees the scene revolve to and fro from the battered old front room to the bygone kitchen.     Joan comes home,  and the whole story of longing and guilt unfolds.  At times the later scenes between the sisters lag a little, unusual in anything directed by Sam Mendes,  and make you long at moments for an Arthur-Miller  explosive tragic ending.  But  Butterworth gives us something else valuable,   in an unexpected development a demonstration of the pure messiness of life and the slanting, skewed diversity of what each of the sisters needs as a resolution. 

        It’s a majestic evening,  often funny but full and satisfying, a massive cast of 21 – some characters recklessly thrown away,  though each one makes the best of it .  Donnelly shines,  and all the  adult sisters are finely realized, especially Helena Wilson’s nervy virginal Jill. The young versions are perfect too, and musically fabulous in their terrible postwar routines  (respect to the costume team).     

hillsofcaliforniaplay.com. to 15 June

Rating 4

THAT OL’TIME WESTERN DREAM OF 1979

I have a weakness for this  little theatre under the arches and its Players’ Bar.  Honouring a music-hall history, and with some of the cheapest stalls seats in London,  it often hosts smallscale but determined new musicals.  Which  is , of course,  a  medium with a high potential to be dead ropy. Yet  there are happy memories and discoveries to be made.  Here  TITANIC – later touringly successful – was a delight,  REBECCA was a decent night out, and George Takei\s ALLEGIANCE a good true personal story told with passion.  So  – admiring the cowboysish rust-draped and fringed gallery and illuminated stars –  I settled to this one with the usual hopes.  Some of them bore fruit, though infuriatingly not enough.    

        The book is by Dennis Hackin, a love story to his parents’ obsession with the old pioneer West.  Chip Rosenbloom & John Torres wrote music and lyrics, with Michele Brourman.  Quite a gang effort.  It imagines a touring Wild West show in a truck which serves as  home and circus tent (nicely realized in a big revolving box by Amy Jane Cook).   Apparently it did well in LA and elsewhere, and here a British cast   hurls itself at it with manic energy, as befits an oeuvre whose inspirations according to the director Hunter Bird include Frank Capra, the Muppets, Joan Collins in Dynasty, Roy Rogers, and Buffalo Bill.   The setting is 1979, chosen apparently because “the country’s going crazy, partisan politics, civil rights threatened, technology exploding” and everyone needs an escape (Mrs Thatcher’s election gets referred to as part of this apparently terrifying year).

         The story is exuberantly cartoonish : don’t go looking for subtle feelings, though Tarinn Callender as Billy manages to edge towards reality when he remembers a childhood in a Bronx boys’ home, Vietnam service, divorce and prison term, all delivered within minutes.   He has collected his ramshackle troupe to fulfil the showbiz dream.  One is a conjurer, another a stiltwalking clow,  and Karen Muvundukure is a big, big wild voice who introduces it all.  Josh  Butler on, I am happy to report,  a very lively professional debut as Lasso Leonard gets the deathless lyrics “there ain’t no feelin’/ quite like stealin’ cars”. 

       But this low-hope circus suddenly recruits by accident  Antoinette (Emily Benjamin), another great voice fresh from serving as alternate in Cabaret.  She is a chocolate-bar heiress whose husband and stepmother – as we see in neat drop-in New York scenes) have to kill her for the money within thirty days (“drink your murderatini” says the husband, one of the best lines in it).  Hence her flight to the travelling circus.  The problem is that the villains are so much more fun than the goodies; Victoria Hamilton Barritt  as the Dynastyish diva stepmum raises the temperature with sheer physical presence and energy whenever she’s on, as does Alexander McMorran as the hit-man, Sinclair St Clair .  

      But although there were great laughs around me at the matinee, the jokes are oversignalled, and only a couple of songs offer a probability of surviving – notably `Just a Dance” and “Everything is Real”.  Most disappointingly, despite being set amid the eternal cowboy dream,  it all draws harder on bubblegum pop and soft-rock than on the fabulous legacy of Country and Western yearning and adventure.  Not a memory of it, not anywhere that could be noticed.  Why would you throw aside a five-star winner connection like that?  Bring on the harmonicas and hooves. 

    Still, as one song says  it’s `’time to escape for an hour or two / from a world that’s overwhelming you” .  I wanted it to be better.  

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk    to 7 april

rating 3 

SMALL PEOPLE,  BIG PLAY

         A hot summer wedding-day.  The bride Sylvia is a bag of nerves, big sister Hazel competently combing and marshalling her  teenage and smaller daughters while dismissive of the marriage – he’s not a Nottinghamshire lad,  just one of those Poles, whose language that “looks like a wifi password”.   The third sister Maggie has been away, the one defector from the tight but struggling clan in a blighted former pit village.   Enter Auntie Carol with her rollers still in, dating her prime years nicely with “any time I eat a crumpet I miss Kilroy”.  The women’s chat about lip-liner and Brazilian waxes provokes helpless gales of audience laughter to match their wedding-day mood.  The line “Next door’s got a sex pond”  forever skewers hot-tub oneupmanship.  

        Beth Steel’s writing is a firework show, sparkling as any sitcom but artful,  gradually drawing out differences and family bonds, preparing us for conflagration later.    Sinead Matthews’ gruff uncertain dreamy Sylvia is the vulnerable one,  Lisa McGrillis a sassy confident Maggie,  Lucy Black’s Hazel a brave-face wife who works warehouse shifts. Her  husband John is suddenly unemployed, depressed.    Lorraine Ashbourne as Auntie Carol is glorious, determined on fun and fearfully prone to speak truth to the next generation.  When the men appear to be marshalled to the venue they too are defined with deft flicks of language and gesture: Alan Williams the patriarch Tony , an old miner; Derek Riddell the morose John, Philip Whitchurch as Uncle Pete who no longer speaks to Tony in picket-line bitterness from forty years back, but is clearly being made to behave at a niece’s wedding by the formidable Auntie Carol. 

        You have to feel for the Polish outsider.     Marek is a bluff Mark Wootoon, radiating simple kindly warmth as a man who came over on a Megabus with a few pounds, did “shit jobs” in abattoir and up scaffolding, and built his own business.  He has little time for modern complainers.  “You have to decide if you are a victim or superior, can’t be both”.   At the top table of this increasingly tense wedding (the sweaty heat is brilliantly evoked)  he vainly offers both vodka and a job to John ,  tries to tolerate Hazel’s racist sniping and gently points out that the waitress is Lithuanian ,which is not the same as Polish.   His Catholic mother has not come over to approve this culturally alien marriage.   Good old Tony points out that he worked with plenty of Poles in the pits,  after the war.  14-year-old Leanne (who will cause explosive trouble later) has gone vegetarian for the polar bears and evokes a teenage sense of cosmic global doom. This is assisted by Paule Constable’s lighting and Samal Blak’s simple set: the great green arena is both dancefloor and  planet, the glittering witch-ball above sometimes the threat of Oppenheimer’s thousand suns…  

        For alongside  the realism of a struggling working-class community and its incomers (Steel, remember, wrote the marvellous WONDERLAND about the miners’ strike) there is an understated but powerful sense of a wider, cosmic questioning, a deep human need for meaning: like Jerusalem it is both about England and mysterious immensity.    There is humour and thwarted love and social observation  but also wider yearning.  Little Sarah wants to be an astronaut and believes she will; dull unhappy John loved drawing, wished art had been his life;  Tony collects stones, fossils, tells their 480-million year story to his little granddaughter.  You can go for a merry evening of family intrigue and a wedding brawl but come away looking up at the stars, reminded that we are passing ants in a marvellous universe,  for all our heroisms and idiocies.

     That somehing of this quality should be in the little Dorfman might be surprising, except that it so perfectly suits its flexible studio quality: the wedding dinner is at a  round table on a slow revolve, every nuance catchable.  Director Bijan Sheibani keeps the pace up with a series of verbal of coups de theatre,  Steel providing cattleprod shocks to any sitcom complacency.  Not least Uncle Paul’s sudden recitation of the names of all the closed pits, Marek’s volcanic performance of a wedding song, a Tarzan tour de force by Alan Williams,  and Auntie Carol’s post- vomit reminiscences “last time I got drunk on voldka I wiped me bottom wi’ candyfloss..pink, see..”   

       It is also one of those plays where you spend the interval breathing a silent prayer that the second half doesnt fade to melodrama or a predictable political message.   But it  never does.  I rate the experience alongside the first time I saw JERUSALEM. 

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 16 March

Rating five