theatreCat

A MUSICAL IS BORN…OUT OF POP”S PAST

         I liked this  rackety, brassy, exhilarating  banger of a show: a  cartoonish bit of history, a jukebox musical with a heart of gold . It’s from an East Anglian touring consortium of five theatres with a feeling for their North Sea coast, celebrating the brief, glorious cheek of  a 1960’s pirate station:  Caroline, a battered ship anchored off the coast to beam all-day pop records to teenagers fed up, as the entrepreneurial founder said, with listening to Vera Lynn on the BBC Light Programme on Sunday afternoons. 

     Its creator Vikki Stone builds it around a fictional couple, shopgirl Caroline  shopgirl and Robbie, one of the first DJss (loosely based on Tony Blackburn).   Haunting the record shop with bno money and hanging around with his mates, sharing chips and scuffles  on the Clacton seafront,  he is recrsuited by the entrepreneur Declan echoing the real Ronan O’Rahilly) and his chic partner,  who sees the advertising potential of the station as more and more young women were working and wanting glamour and fashion and music to move to.     

       Against them is the Postmaster-General who hastily brought in the Marine &C Broadcasting Offences Act:  played here (as he was in Riochard Curtis’ flop movie about the period)  as puritanically right-wing, huffing about the moral decadence of the young.  In reality, it was Tony Benn , pillar of the Left, and the issue was more about interfering with shipping radio channels than morality.   Actually,  Benn suggested the BBC should start a rival pop channel, and was sternly told by the BBC Chairman Lord Normanbrook “You can’t have popular music all the time, it would be like having the pubs open all day”

        But despite the chic-lefty treatment of the minister (Gareth Cooper enjoying his villain-role a great deal)   the heart of the tale is real, and fun; and the staid old BBC of course read the room and within weeks of Caroline being criminalized it started Radio 1,  poaching several pirate-ship DJs.   So it’s all well worth telling again, and not just for my generation ( a cheerful grandad next to me murmured “I was a scooter-boy!”).   Two newer generations all around, though, cheered  every roaring number,   as the onstage band flowed around with blasting saxophone and fierce drum-beat, reminding us what ferocious fun pop was long before today’s  angry rap and morose break-up songs.  Everyone erupts at  old Stones numbers like “Not Fade Away” and My Generation,  but there’s sweetnesss in “What becomes of the Broken Hearted’ and Robbie’s astonishment at his new baby “Can’t take my eyes off  o’you”. 

It’s a nimble company of actor-musicians,  only ten in all, deftly moving in and out of characters.   Claire Lee Shenfield as Caroline is particularly nifty,  blasting out Lulu’s terrifying “Shout!”in glee as she marries her Robbie on the ship “under Panamanian law’,  then with gentle sweetness crooning “You’re my world!” when it turns out she’s both pregnant not not technically married. Jake Halsey-Jones as Robbie is pretty adorable too,  leading the fierce band in |Not Fade Away,  twistin’ and shoutin’ in between cracking very terrible DJ jokes and introducing jingles for forgotten names.     Director Douglas Rintoul knows to keep his young cast moving, leaping and springing on and off tables, playing emotion and abruptly  becoming bandsmen (I specially enjoyed the Postmaster-General suddenly taking over the drum kit)

      It’s the simplest of plots, sometimes properly sweet as Eloise Richardson plays the heroine’s supportive friend Mary and Caroline defends herself to her washtub mother : this artfully prevents the show from feeling overbearingly macho (because pop, frankly, used to be just that) 

www.wolseytheatre.co.uk  to   2 May

then:   QUeens, Hornchurch,  New Theatre Peterborough , Mercury Colchester,  Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds  to end June

RATING 4

ETHICS AND EVASIONS

      It’s a cluttered upper room, overcrowded with grand old furniture, a gramophone, harp, oddities like fencing foils and a home-built valve radio. The sense is of heavy old-fashioned prosperity worn to junk.   It’s  sixteen years since the old man died,  ruined in the 1936 crash, but nothing has been moved or sold.  Now in 1968 his two sons need to clear it as the building is demolished.  Vic’s in charge:  Elliot Cowan looking resignedly weary, 

still in police uniform as he pulls  down dusty sheets, looks around in memory and winces at his wife Esther’’s belief that this sale might produce enough money for a new life where his low-grade NYPD job won’t embarrass and bore her.   The dealer Mr Solomon arrives, rising from the stairwell beneath a black hat and puffing “another couple steps, I’d be in heaven!”  . It is Henry Goodman.  We know we’re safe. Frankly,   it takes no more than a couple of shrugging  “What can you do?”s to get devoted Goodman fans like me  willing to accept any price he offers.  Especially when,  as Esther gives him a hard look and departs,  he amiably says “I like her – she’s suspicious!”.     

        Arthur Miller’s is play of two halves: first domestic, often comic, practical,  set firm in its moment.  Then,  once its fourth protagonist  brother Walter has risen from the stairway as the first act ends it will stir into the rages, revelations and agonies which MIller does so lethally well. Jonathan Munby’s direction is steady, unflashy, just right. 

        Actually Walter, unseen , is a presence before he steps onstage:  the prosperous brother who completed his medical education to become a rich doctor while  Vic stayed with their father, couldn’t afford to complete school but supported old Dad and joined the police for 28 years of routine and waste of his scientific brain, alongside an increasingly depressed wife.  He and the dealer go through a series of irritations, endings and returns, but gradually each of them melt: skilfully handled is Vic’s irritation and Solomon’s manipulative teasing.  It creates  an odd connection.   Solomon is 98 and had actually almost retired; Vic, he observes,  probably used  an old phone book.     He likes to reveal his past:  five countries after fleeing Russia, a discharge from the British Royal Navy,  on the variety  bill as one of the Five Solomons acrobatic act;  62 years in the furniture trade,  a daughter lost to suicide in 1915 who he still sees in a vision.   All this between expatiating what we all know now – and even 1968 did :  that classic brown furniture  just doesn’t sell easily in an age of smaller apartments and everything becoming  disposable.  As he makes this latter point a remarkable eruption of helpless amusement flows through the theatre as  Goodman bangs on a big dining table and observes “A man sits down at a table like this – he’ knows not only he’s married, he’s gotta stay married!”.   Then he thoughtfully extracts and peels a hardboiled egg. “You want I should starve?” And comes up with a price. a low one.

         Which does not go well with Walter (John Hopkins resplendent in a coat that would cost his brother a year’s pay).  In the second half he confuses the issue, debates the price, finally offers a donation-tax-fiddle which  would bring in more, which of course Vic could have all of,  so generous is the top-dog brother.   After this the two men – with interruptions from the back bedroom from Solomon – deal beautifully with the startling, rising emotional temperature, that lethal Arthur-Miller patchwork of resentment, revelation, claim and denial,  accusation and excuse and admission.

          The shadow of the miseries of the 1936 crash which sent men like their father into shocked poverty – “a man who couldn’t bounce” – is over both the cop with lost self- confidence and the prosperous doctor who still lives on a nervous cliff-edge .  Money anxiety is the master over them all, though considerably less over Solomon, since he’s been ruined several times already and doesn’t take it so badly.  

     Family secrets open:  Walter may not be quite the villain, and the father Vic kept alive with pity and sacrifice may not have deserved it.   Miller’s own had just died, which  must have sharpened his familiar lifelong wrestle with ideas of moral responsibility. 

       But in this now rarely-seen play, somehow, two small redemptions happen.  One concerns Esther (Faye Castelow coming  wonderfully into her own in the final scenes). And the other is just the  old, old dealer Solomon, with sudden energy  telling Vic not to call Walter back.  In the last moment he’s alone,   laughing at life amid the armoires  that will never fit through modern doorways and  the harp with a broken sound-box .  

marylebonetheatre.com  to 7 June

rating 5 

UNIVERSAL ,  INTIMATE, TRUE 

           Sometimes  it’s more than worth it to flog irritably  through a London strike day, make it without even time for a drink  but find something plain wonderful.  And that is not only because Katie Greenall’s production invites audiences to enter the pub set fifteen minutes early, with Olivia Forrest’s Charlene idly playing darts,  and be invited by the barman Valentine to have a go at the karaoke . On my night two stellar audience performances, one from a robust Britneyesque figure in a tutu, one a crooning duet of “Somethin’ stupid” by a pair who only just met in the bar).    So far, fun:  that essential theatrical determination to draw you into a world.  

       As they retire to general cheers begins  one of the best new plays since Tom Wells’ The Kitchen Sink (also a Bush premiere) . Like that, Kit Withington’s family drama offers  a gift of wisdom and humour from a sensitivity formed well north of Watford.    It’s simple enough, though finally as serious about the human heart and conscience as an Arthur Miller. Here are five characters in ordinary lives, without pretension , opening depths of universal feeling, with five flawless performances .  Frankie (Rowan Robinson) is back after nearly a year away in London,  studying architecture, living with a southern boyfriend.  Gradually we learn that she was alerted by Valentine at the bar because her father Dez (Deka Walmsley) is erratic . He’s wandering at night, banging the door,  calling for the unseen Eileen, “oldest landlady in Britain” . Who is actually upstairs, and mentally out of it.  The barman’s character, quietest and probably wisest of the lot, is evoked with extraordinary subtlety by  Aaron Atnthony. 

         Frankie, uneasy, gradually has to decode what is going on.  Her pet rabbit has vanished, Dez making weak excuses. He is doing odd things,  falling asleep in too-hot baths,  scrubbing his face with bath salts. You begin to suspect halfhearted self-harm beneath outbreaks of rage and unspoken depression.  Frankie’s mother (Sophie Stanton) seems to be out or away a lot, with an unseen boyfriend.  She tackles her, noticing her smart top and new way of “swinging her shoulders”,  and learns why.  The writing is beautiful here, compassionate:  the author willing to extend hearing and understanding to even the most frustrating behaviour.   Frankie reconnects with old friend Charlene – another wonderful performance  – who scoffs at ‘That London’ and Frankie’s presumed metropolitan identity. She  is given some great Victoria-Woodish lines and behaviours but is, in fact, moving on perfectly well with her life as a nursery-nurse, living at home and putting money in an ISA.  And she’s sharp enough to round on Frankie’s half-indicated superiority by pointing out that the world doesn’t turn just for her, it goes on turning for them all.

        Indeed the core theme is about that turning,  moving on with life, or failing to.   Mum Linda is trying to,  but aggrieved when Frankie tries charity-shopping piles of childhood junk from her bedroom.    We’ll gradually learn the reason for this, which also relates to Dez’s erratic behaviour,  Charlene’s memories of how Frankie’s childhood was somehow different, even to invisible old Eileen.  Oh, and the rabbit mystery resolves (nothing gruesome, fear not).  

      Everyday,  everyguilt, everygrief;  it all hangs together, powerful sadness and sudden absurdities,  the power of sadnesses not spoken of ,  the way that losing one precious thing makes you cling on to things not precious at all.  There’s family duty and capture,  and the hunger to get some things straight before you can begin to step forward.   The final scenes and use of Hazel Low’s  set create,  suddenly and still without pretension (even with a fine rabbit-revelation joke) something remarkable, pure theatre:   a spiritual, baptismal visual metaphor.  Go for the karaoke and the northern jokes if you will,  but you’ll get that too.  All in a hundred minutes.  

bushtheatre.co.uk. to 16 May

Rating. 5 

IMPRESSIONS AND OBSESSIONS 

  The old `Players’ Theatre has a good eye of oddball new musicals, cheap enough to sample before anyone’s train home. And here off-Broadway’s Carmel Owen has made, with palpable love,  a romantic and indeed at times borderline soupy full-scale musical in tribute to Claude Monet.   In atmosphere , setting and the better performances  Christian Durham’s direction and LibbyTodd’s design  certainly do what they out to do:   convey a fascinated impression of Impressionists . 

      Especially Monet himself, though there are many scenes of his comradeship with Renoir, Manet and Frédéric Bazille,  all struggling with the rigidities of the French Salon and the Royal Academy.  This means  it is sometimes frustrating not to see more of all their loves and personalities, since Monet himself is a one-track obsessive.    Though I did cherish Sam Peggs’ Renoir,  panicking when his friend Monet’s wife Camille asks if he knows any midwives to abort her dangerous pregnancy.  

          But Monet is the writer-composer’s magnet, his life and frustrations the engine of the simple plot.  Jeff Shankley  addresses us first as the painter in old age, around 1926,   blocked and frustrated and taking it out on his devoted stepdaughter Blanche (Meg Matthews at my matinee, standing in for Natalie Day).   She was of course herself a considerable artist within the school: more of her would also be interesting.    Old Monet stares at us in the opening moments, demanding we be his mirror: he stands on an excellent painterly set of screens and doors and frames which will flower, singly and en-masse,  into projected paintings from sunsets and portraits of Camille to a great swirling mass of waterlilies.Then we meet DEan John-Wilson as the artist’s younger self, with a glorious low tenor voice and properly magnetic presence, and for most of the show he is leading a happily rebellious determination to kick the pompous studio conventions and  paint outdoors – “side and side, we will share light and air – en plein air!”  

       The songs are mostly likeable, none standout as memorable.    Brooke Bazarian’s Camille – who acts well and looks superb –  is  perhaps given too much overdone musical angst for my liking: all crises and no calm.    Some sharp pattering numbers beetwen the hostile critic Louis and the scornful gallery Marquis  are good:   I had forgotten that the term  “impressionist” started as an insult from this conventional cadre ,  Louis observing that they were  just impressions on canvas, not properly crafted artworks.  

       But Monet’s vigour and conviction holds the stage as rebel roles will:  in the swirl of images around his famous sunrise he cries “Our work had a splendour, a grandeur. The world was changing, and we were in touch!”.   But Camille and he had stormy separations: she hated their London exile to avoid the war draft,   while he became thrilled by painting British fog  and the Thames at Westminster.  It’s a portrait of artistic obsession; by  the end he is rejoicing in his paintings as if they were his only friends, comrades, his great love.  So old Monet furiously rebukes him . So does the ghost of Camille who, in a splendid rant, hands him a brush: the thing he loved more than her.   It’s a sharp moment. 

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk. to 9 may

rating 3

A SHUDDER FROM THE PAST

I came to this fresh from admiring two 76-year-olds , Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep, being painfully cool and haughty in a trailer plugging Devil Wears Prada 2.   I was also foot-weary from accidentally doing two sides of the vast and gruesome  Victorian Brompton Cemetery,  which always  leads to reflections on long-past lives and deaths.   This is a Rodney Ackland revival, well worth it,  the Finborough always does these forgotten-plays with great class. In it Catherine Cusack , Abigail Thaw and Julia Watson reminded us what it was like to be an Old Lady in 1935  (and what patronizing attitudes men, including playwrights, often  had towards them).  

      The play is based on a Hugh Walpole novel – never forget that it was he who Stella Gibbons sent up in Cold Comfort Farm.  Ackland’s version is less forgotten than some of his plays, having turned up in 1969  and again in 1994 with Miriam Karlin.  But it started out as an Edith Evans vehicle and strirred a lot of inter-war feeling.  The programme deliciously quotes one critic saying what lonely figures old women were: pathetic, because ‘at least “an old  man has his pipe” and the pub. 

       But yes, pre-welfare  old women of the gentry classes, living alone,  had it rough, with only the possibility of a “companion” job.  And yes – as the programme also says – loneliness still exists now,  with  “a lack of visibiliy on stage or screen” for older women.   Except, obvs, Streep & Wintour and Reid and Routledge and Dench , Berry, Leith, May, Beckett.. OK.

      But Walpole knew what he was writing about, especially in that inter-war period when too many “spare women” faced a lifetime alone or as dependents on wider family. However, despite three fabulous perfomances – totally immersed in that past sensibility of warding off both poverty and pity – there was something a touch creepy about the construction and presumptions in Ackland’s play.  There’s nice, churchgoing, kindly Lucy (Julia Watson) senior in the boarding-house or home: she has one cousin over the bridge dreams of the return of her wandering son,  who is trying to make good abroad or in “land property down south” .  She makes the best of life, though suffers a disappointment over a legacy.  Then there’s the newcomer Miss Beringer (Cusack deploying a finely-judged series of nervous collapses) who is grieving for her little dog and for a distant friend who gave her a cherished lump of amber.  She becomes rapidly terrified of Abigail Thaw’s Mrs Payne  (frankly, I was too: this stern gaunt figure in jet beads and funereal broderie  roosted mainly in a rocking-chair just in my eyeline and I didn’t dare take notes).  Mrs Payne spends the play keeping us guessing as to whether she is a bit “wanting” or actively malevolent.  

       She may have killed her husband for throwing her gypsy hat on the fire: the text is full of dark suggestions, never completely resolved, though she does produce one hell of a big hat with feathers and fruit all over it to go two doors down to the chemist for nougat.  But she wants the lump of amber, and claims this need as part of her natural passionate nature and unfulfilled desire.   Gradually the relationships get worse, right up to a slightly unbelievable ex-machina event at the end.     

       Agatha meanwhile delivers her  outspoken conviction that “we’re all old and dull and penniless …we’re not happy. We make no-one else happy”.And suddenly, from the depths of 1935,  I sense that patronizing critic at my shoulder, saying how much better it is to be a man, able to alleviate loneliness and draw on a pipe and knowing that “a half-pint if sipped carefully gets him an hour or so of lights and good fellowship at the local”.  

      So I emerged still loving the Finborough, revering all three fine actresses, but slightly disliking Ackland.  Though I did love Before the Party, and hope for a few more in this little powerhouse…

Finboroughtheatre.co.uk 

To 19 april

rating 4 for the performances

FRIENDSHIP, BRILLIANCE, DOUBT

       The universe as a bundle of unknowable of approximates:  Relativity and Complementarity, Uncertainty theory, quantum mechanics, particles hanging out in two places at the same time, Schroedinger’s Cat.  If you back away from such topics, take heart and return.  Michael Frayn’s extraordinary play is rooted in deep humanity and an understanding, both of far intellectual frontiers and the simplicity of friendship.  It has no answers.  In Michael Longhurst’s  production it is brilliantly set by Joanna Scotcher on a double revolve: an arena around infinite waters, with glass bubbles and sharp lanterns randomly reflecting away into infinity and a single pole lamp which – in a moment of frustrated expatiation – young Werner Heisenberg grabs to represent a travelling photon.

        Frayn’s imagination, set in an imagined reunion long after both their deaths, deals with the mystery of why in 1941 Heisenberg, a senior German nuclear scientist, visited his old mentor Niels Bohr  – “the first of us all, the father of us all”.  Bohr is in occupied Denmark: both men are under Gestapo surveillance, able only to talk freely by walking outside.  On warring sides, both have reason for suspicion: Bohr might fear the German is part of a programme to harness fission to the first nuclear bomb; Heisenberg might to fishing to find out if his old mentor has contact and knows what the Allies are up to on that fearful project.  But they are also old comrades on this barely-imaginable scientific frontier and Margrethe – Bohr’s wife – remembers young Heisenberg as almost a child when he first came, “shy and arrogant and anxious to be loved”. She is the vital third pillar of the play: not a physicist, but an observer of both men and their ways, a citizen under Nazi occupation who is understandably suspicious of Heisenberg turning up out of the blue.  Her presence dives into and punctures the human uncertainties of both. 

        Three times, with the younger man pacing the moving revolve, halting, entering the supposed home, arguing, once grasping the older man’s hands with real emotion,  the pair, with sardonic additions from Margrethe,  re-examine what happened  between them on that autumn day in Copenhagen, before the friendship’s final rift.  It draws us into the science but also the human pain: Bohr at one point has to accept that Heisenberg has witnessed savage allied bombings in his homeland, had his shoes burnt off by phosphorus, watched much death.  Heisenberg is at times half-defensive about his stance towards the Nazi leadership: he had earlier refused an invitation to emigrate to America to join other Jewish-German nuclear scientists there.  There’s at one point a curious suggestion that he maybe even deliberately miscalculated several zeros to suggest that a nuclear bomb couldn’t be made without ruinous resources.  To prevent Hitler commissioning one.   In their afterlife of course they both know that the Allies did build one: Heisenberg was to har about Hiroshima on the news, later on when he was interned at Farm Hall (worth remembering  this play too- https://theatrecat.com/2023/04/04/farm-hall-jermyn-st-theatre-wc1-then-bath/ ). 

          The casting is fine: Richard Schiff very much the old mentor Bohr, likeable, slightly melancholic,  Damien Molony an energetic, pacing, argumentative younger man,  Alex Kingston brilliantly evoking Margarethe’s impatient wisdom and anger at an oppressive occupation.   The two Nobel winners’ conversations dazzle, sometimes frankly baffle in my case, but the underlying humanity is always visible. It is there both in their questing enthusiasm to know about the infinitesimal atomic world, and in their awareness of how this unprecdented knowledge can be used both for peaceful power and for unspeakable destruction and murder. 

        Only in imagination and an afterlife can any sort of clarity about such moments be created.  Probably only Frayn – philosopher, artist, great and questioning spirit, humble before uncertainty –  could have attempted it.

hampsteadtheatre.com to 2 May

Rating 5.    And by the way, on more frivolous matters,  do not miss the extraordinary  new radio play about a hoax surrounding the original premiere of this play – it’s on Radio 4, two parts, also co-written by Frayn himself: CELIA’S SECRET. 

A HOUSE OF ANCIENT SHAME

        What terrible secrets lie in an impressive yet spooky mansion,  with artful descending ceilings and a trapdoor designed by Jon Bausor ?  Well, gven that its is a mid-18c house imagined by playwright Winsome Pinnock, its fearful non-secret is, of course, bygone  slavery.  Like  the virtuous Sir Thomas in  Mansfield Park,    Henry Harford made his money on Jamaican plantations. 

        Now his distant descendant Fen bustles about to keep the crumbling house  going  (loud noises reveal its popularity as a set for TV bonnet-dramas and rock videos).  She has just found a set of the first Henry’s diaries from Jamaica, which now  need “authenticating” .  The visiting scholars – rather improbably put up as guests in the house for weeks – include a young PhD student Marva, whose Jamaican Grandad used to bring her on trips here and talk of family traditions,  having long ago got his surname, as many slaves did, from the master.   Her supervisor and mentor is Abi (Rakie Ayloa)  who aspires to professorship and a keen mentor and – we learn with equally convenient probability – used to jam away in rock bands at Oxford and get ignored by posh Fen.  

        One masterstroke in Miranda Cromwell’s production  is casting Sylvestra le Touzel as Fen: Aryan-blonde and breezy she skilfully deploys a pleasingly inbred quirkiness from the start.  She groans,  as such writers assume all callous white people do,   at the boringness of Henry’s endless lists.  These of course immediately grip young Marva  (Cherelle Skeete)  the moment she glances down –  “Inventory – Livestock – people, alongside pigs and cows!” she cries with improbable shock. 

          Oh come on: the hideous history of  Caribbean and US  chattel-slavery is widely known by now and many such ledgers survive: one in our local museum shocks every eye with the page headed  “Children gang” .  It jars that Marva, supposedly entrusted with authentication,  should rear back in shock.      So does the way that in all the first scenes she is played as a cartoonishly silly black-teen babe,   forever taking selfies,  screaming for the rock band filming noisily above,  and ignoring the historic house tour by putting on a prop helmet and sword to run around shrieking  “Sooo fucking cool”.Any young black woman academic in the audience must have cringed.  

            Gradually, the relationship between the three does develop, and Ayola as Abi is more interesting, half-uneasy in her routine confrontations with Fen, who likes showing them round the house from cellar to royal bedroms.   She finally deploys the outright demand “Give up your power and privilege!”.   An interesting factor,  though, and in this particular cause a rare one,  is that Abi is not of Caribbean slave descent.  And has to acknowledge in her own  family history that her own African forebears were keen slavers or enablers.  At one point she expostulates that this  was quite different from the chattel-slavery of white-owned plantations, much less toxic because in Africa the slaves mingled socially with masters. 

       But there’s a supposed missing “ghost page” revealed by indentations in one diary after “Black Sarah” is mentioned as delinquent,  and hugger-mugger the researchers (notably Marva) break all the rules of academe and create both a personal story and a scandal with tentacles into the present day.  There are several drunk scenes and a possible imprisonment of which nothing comes,  but le Touzel holds it gloriously together by going madder and madder, with excellent work on her drunkenly tousled hairdo. 

   Winsome Pinnock’s last play in this space was three grim hours of pretentious grievance billed as “a swirling journey through black history” which I couldn’t even bear to review  (that’s the joy of having missed press night and bought your own ticket :  you’re not forced to the misery of kitten-drowning).   So I  was anxious to like this one more, hoping that a mere 90-minute squib with a single setting might do better.  And indeed it did pick up in the last quarter,  as the ‘secret’ finally emerges and le Touzel finds yet another way to come out on top. 

         But it feels oddly lazy for the NT:  as if  any play about the disgrace and misery of the slave trade gets a free pass,  exempt from any rigour in playbuilding , character and probability.    Finally the two academics, in emotional conversation about a dubious commemorative bust,  come to an oddly  dispiriting conclusion.  Even Abi appears to endorse the perilous but sometimes fashionable  idea that because slavery was a great evil until two centuries ago,   all  academic authenticity, method and history doesn’t matter  next to present-day emotional grievance. This may not be its intention, but is certainly an effect.   

Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 9 May

ratign two 

RUPERT AND BRENDA

    Couldn’t miss this piece of 40th anniversary history by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky because I had a very small –  infinitestimal –  dog in this fight. I was freelancing for the Times in 1986  when Rupert Murdoch squared up to Brenda Dean of the SOGAT print union, secretly setting up the Wapping printworks for his four newspapers with modern direct-input machines.   I saw the picket lines and  had to find ways (before easy online access) to get my minor bits of copy to the paper.  It was a sharp turn towards today’s world in several ways: advancing mechanization,  corporate ruthlessness, and fierce industrial relations (Thatcher’s new laws restricting strikes had come in: the miners’ strikes were over).  So this sharp, well-researched new play of conversations and confrontations is gripping. And it feels true of the period and the people, especially when Claudia Jolly as the tough, idealistic Brenda Dean confronts Alan Cox’s vigorous Aussie Murdoch.  

            In brief, the old craft typesetters and printers with the hot-metal machinery were expert ,traditional and  protected by extremely hawkish shop-stewards and – even their supporters in the battle had to admit – they often got away with absurdly short hours, moonlighting and fake name check-ins : known as “Spanish practices”.  Walk around Fleet Street in those days and you knew the time of day because you heard the great rumble of the presses starting.  But printers  could hold owners to ransom daily by simply stopping the machines:  lose a day and owners lose money (a few years earlier the Times lost a year).  Technically the modernization, in which journalists type in their copy directly, was well developed .  But resisted by unions.

       So Murdoch, craftily, set up the new Wapping works announcing that he was going to produce a whole new paper ‘The London Post”.  Artfully, a line early on remembers a similar trick he played on his rival Maxwell over a sale.   When Wapping was ready, he  informed the staff of his four papers that they were moving there. Immediately. Without the unionized printers.  So the battle of Wapping began.   It was a brutally artful move,  and somehow the change had to happen: today of course, all the papers use direct-input , it’s how they survived. Those which most vigorously condemned the Murdoch tactics have, at some point, had to admit that. But it was brutal, and cost thousands of jobs, not only of printers. 

          It is a lively account on the little stage,  and much of the fascination is in the sparring and rivalry between print unions – Dean’s SOGAT, the rival NGA, plus the electricians’ union (which was of course key to the new scheme) and the TUC itself. The editors are there too – Andrew Neil a self-important Andrew Neil, Russell Bentley a puckish, dirty-mouthed Kelvin MacKenzie; both able to offer rises and BUPA to sweeten the pill to any staff journalists queasy about the business.  Dean’s union comes close to running out of money, and she has to take hard decisions: it’s a calmly passionate depiction by Claudia Jolly, and Cox’s   Murdoch is shown as, for all his rough determined edge, a man who could in other circumstances have liked, admired and hired her.   But she was a union woman all the way from childhood, honourably a believer in fair dealing but unfashionably also devoted to the idea of hard manual work,  the idea of old printerly craftsmanship passed on like jobs from father to son.  

      It’s sharp, funny at times (not only accidentally in the passing reference to Labour’s “man you can trust”, a certain Peter).  There’s some brief doubling of parts, neatly done with coats.  I would like to see it grow, in a bigger theatre which could evoke the miserable and dangerous picketing period beyond the conversations and rows.  Because it’s a story we should not forget.

Kingsheadtheatre.com to 3 May

Rating 4 

    CRY HAVOC!

  Director Tamara Harvey, who gave us that beautiful, thoughtful PERICLES last year (also starring Alfred Enoch),  is not one to interpret Henry V in the stormingly militant-heroic mould once so beloved and familiar as successive leading-men urged us once more into the breach.  Indeed we meet the young King first, briefly,  in a reprise of the last act of Henry IV part 2,  as a prince beside his father’s deathbed trying on the crown as the rebellious, carousing young Hal.   Moreover, he – not a separate Chorus, is given the prologue calling for a muse of fire to narrate the story better than he can ,  and also the aside-storytelling interlude describing the  warships setting sail , just before Act 3.   

      This creates, beguilingly,  a sense that this young hero is anxiously telling himself his story:  making it up as he goes along, hoping it comes true.   His court too is hoping, wanting him tougher and more responsible than of yore, as if “the strawberry grows under the nettle”.  Making him make war on France is the obvious way to toughen him up, they seem to feel. Alfred Enoch is attractive,  nuanced, groping for authority rather than wearing it easily when the bishops unroll screeds explaining why he really owns France and therefore must deploy “blood and sword and fire”.  There’s a touch of shrill unease in him even as he sends the traitors Cambridge and Scrope to the gallows (which are visible , dangling with gloomy bruality as the scene goes on).    And the production’s very deliberate sense of war as brutish and senseless grows (as it did in Greg Doran’s wonderful Henry IV production) with a line of bent, weary, shuffling soldiers passing across the stage , just as the young King claims that “all the youth of England is afire” with keennness.   

        This is even more pointed in the several battle scenes, more like yobbish football-crowd brawls than soldiering:  the movement and fight-direction are brilliant, indeed stunningly watchable in their wrestling violence.  The busyness of embarkation is elegantly evoked with great rushings-round by most of the cast, all hanging cloths from the top of Lucy Osborne’s simple , giant ,revolving scaffolding.  Late on, the slo-mo or sudden collapses and agonies of battle are graphic.  And shockingly,  the language-lesson of the French princess Katharine (Natalie Kimmerling) is conducted entirely on a battlefield , learning body parts by prodding woulded soldiers.

            The King’s visit to the dozing soldiery and exchange of moral views with an excellent  Jamie Ballard as Williams the soldier, in the “creeping murder and pouring dark” of the night between battles , is sharply done. And if  his “once more unto the breach” is given an interestingly panicky tone,  the big St Crispin’s day speech is done to great , if unusual,  effect by having most of it not orated from a platform but mainly spoken with fatherly persuasiveness to one of the smallest, youngest-looking soldiers (there are many women among them, which oddly does not jar).  When at times Henry remembers he is meant to be a merciless conqueror, threatening to have naked infants spitted on pikes,  there is always that edge of painful, doubtful growth in him. He’s very young. 

       And usefully that sense of his immaturity, a kind of laddish innocence confronted with the brutal duty of war,  is emphasised by the lowlife characters, comfortably long-steeped in self-preservation and opportunist sin:  Paul Hunter’s tufty-haired Pistol is splendidly disgraceful, out robbing the dead and planning his brags in the pub.  As  the unnamed Boy, Tanvi Virmani has a nice withering moment summing him up by observing his “full voice and empty heart: an empty vessel makes the most noise” .   Sion Prichard is also an excellent Fluellen, finally brandishing his leek with proper fury. 

       So the viewer’s interest is drawn all the time , perhaps even too much,  away from any interest in the war and its outcome to contemplation of human weakness, particularly of Henry himself as he slowly grows up to his aweful responsibilities and status. Again , the lasy moment over the glove when he reveals himself to Ballard’s stroppy (and much older and wiser) squaddie is neatly tellling: I had never noticed before the pathos of that generation gap. 

       So there is a lot of satisfaction in it, and some lovely staging enhanced by  the mass movement , collapses and risings and silhouettes.   Of course as usual the weird coda of the wooing of French Katharine feels anticlimactic. Maybe it should do.  It’s just politics, after all.   Striking again, though , and raising us back to reality is the French King’s emotional collapse at his moment of acquiescence:  barely able to name English Henry his heir over his own son’s bier.  I notice to my surprise from the cast list that this is Jamie Ballard again as the King:  wouldn’t have known it.  Indeed there are several not at all noticeable doublings and triplings in the vivid, fast moving cast of twenty.  Pretty good, because quite often they look more like fifty.   

    And great, great credit for movement and fighting to Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster and Kate Waters, who put the whole cast through what looks, frankly, physically gruelling and riskily bruising.  Again, so it should be.  We are not living at a time to be comfortably sentimental about war, are we?.

 Rsc.org.uk to. 25 April

Rating. 4

TOO DEEP FOR TEARS

Perhaps this imagining of the young Vincent  gains extra power after the emotional hit of the recent Van Gogh at Arles exhibition; starry nights and wonder lie fresh in memory, , signals of immortal beauty from his last years. But even without  that reflection,  Nicholas Wright’s 2002 play is more than worth a revival, first in 13 years, and in this intimate little  arena Georgia Green’s  tight production is immaculately cast and focused.  Naimh Cusack gives us the landlady Ursula in dignified, housewifely Victorian widowhood , laying down terms to Jeroen Frank Kales as the gawky young foreigner, with Rawaed Asde as the laughing youg charmer Sam in the other room , who is courting AyeshaOstler’s  Eugenie, daughter of the house. Add,  in brief but arresting moments later , Amber van der Brugge as Vincent’s sister. She makes the most of a basilisk unforgiving Nonconformist eye and a savage way with a clanging mop-bucket. 

   They are all note-perfect in the play’s moods, passions, and lines  of drop-dead flat sudden  comedy (especially Cusack). But the revelation is young Kales, on his first professional job combining the passionate innocent sensibility of young Vincent with gawky absurdity, sudden outbursts and a  peculiarly ultra-direct Dutchness which,I can tell you from sailing with that nation,  reliably throws us Britons offcourse every time.

     In his intense scenes with Ursula – it is a joy to see a debutant and a veteran lead playing so perfectly and geneously off one another – it could  have been crude to give glancing references to stars in deep blackness or sudden intense feeling for every knot of wood. Wright’s skill averts that, and the evocation of their shared depressive bipolarity is starkly convincing.. 

     Ursula’s long unresolved  grief and the young man’s answering  reflection create a painful beauty of connection,defying all the bawdy old landlady-and-lodger jokes: Vincent’s “I love you, I love your age, I love your unhappiness”  shakes you with unanswerable recognitionin that small room, a theatrical seriousness in depth  rarely found in any other art form. . And when young Kales reappears two years on with his new  nonconcormist fervour to make preaching his art, Cusack’s expression of grieved exasperation in every limb shakes your heart out, barely needing her sudden rage. . Magnificent. 

Orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 18 April

Rating 5

REACH FOR THE LIMITLESS STARS

      This 70-minute squib was a big Fringe hit, though one clenched reviewer suggested that it could only appeal to those who love physics.  This felt like a challenge, as my school didn’t teach it and I failed in a brief attempt to learn the basics from a GCSE cheat-book during lockdown.  But for any theatre-buff there is temptation in the idea of “physics, faith and magic” challenging the human quest for the unknown while using bursts of interpretative dance and a feminist take on forgotten female genius.  And as it turned out, Emma Howlett’s play performed by four versatile young women in leotards,  was entirely engaging, a good brief cheeky booking for the Jermyn.  

       Because it is, above all, about the “thrilling immensity of our ignorance”:  the things we do not know but grope towards, fascinated, accepting that the visible and tangible can’t be everything,  making thought-experiments.  I liked the four particles, quarks at the birth of the universe,  prancing through a TV game-show in a quantum realm.     All four performers switch between roles –  a modern PhD supervisor,  the murdered genius Hypatia in ancient Egypt, a Victorian occult medium, Vera Rubin uncovering the rotation of galaxies,  staff at the Large Hadron Collider – but at its  centre is a PhD student (Sophie Kean). She is  trying to decide whether to carry on with her research,  arguing about Deliveroos with her partner who stuck to the observable and became a doctor. She has to hunching over screen upon screen of data looking for an elusive sigma (apparently that’s an electron or orbital with zero angular momentum about an internuclear axis, don’t ask me).  But there’s a jolly little particle dance about that too, and a proper thrill even for us outsiders in the lines “The model starts to tremble, knowledge begins to shake, and what we think we know is bending,as to break…when your data shows five sigma, it’s Nature telling you that of all her clueless subjects, YOU have found something new!”.  

           Someone, appallingly,  said of Stoppard that his plays make you “feel cleverer”.   To me that was always the problem with him.   This does the exhilarating opposite: makes you realize you aren’t that clever , and that humanity hasn’t solved it all and probably isn’t meant to. But that there’s beauty in the quest.  And, incidentally, that a female brain is no less likely to find the answers so than a man’s.  

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. to 4 April

Rating 4    

SECOND HOME HOLIDAY HELL IN OLD RUSSIA

      Watch a Chekhov play,  and however deep the characters’ despair and disappointment you feel the author’s love, just as you do for the hopeless in Tennessee Williams. The laughter or headshaking dismay evoke pity, and are meant to.

     This is not often the case in Checkhov’s contemporary and friend Maxim Gorky: a full-on awkward squad bolshevist with a fine and savage wit to flail the bourgeoisie.  This massive attack, last at the National in 1999, has a cast of 23 from various families and linked businesses, and all but one of them are pretty deplorable.  They’re having the summer months in their dachas, second  homes for the affluent (very topical) and Peter McKintosh’s  spare, woody set beautifully frames their world . First indoors –  lots of terrace meetings and a bit of piano-strumming –  and then in the second half a picnic by a real river: much hoiking up of gathered frocks and paddling.  The least deplorable – though helpless – figure is Sophie Rundle’s gently stately Varvara,  married to an oaf – Paul Ready bearding about in a manspreading spirit.  Only she recognizes their untenable and illogical privilege in a deeply socially unfair country.  

       The story, insofar as there is one, deals with unsatisfied marriages – Kirill and Olga, Sid Sagar and Gwyneth Keyworth, very funny, she bemoaning her lot as a mother . There’s disappointment in  Varvara’s  former idol the writer Yakov,  and the uselessness of mere words, with Doon McKichan as the spouting poet Kareiia,  amusingly  grim. They’re all convinced life is pointless, as indeed in most of their cases it is.  Though at the picnic there’s a hopeless Mrs-Robinson passion from Alex Lawther’s quite sweet Vlass  towards the baffled, outraged but receptive Maria. Who plays her feelings, again, pleasingly hilarious.

         Indeed  the company, with Nina and Moses Raine’s modernized language and Robert Hastie’s mischievously wild direction,  all hurl themselves fullheartedly into the absurdities, rows, and general bourgeois entitlement to both luxury and selfpitying victimhood  about life (still topical). All seem to realize that there’s a  doom coming in the form of the Russian revolution – two rustic locals standd around, occasionally uttering a  viewof the invading Summerfolk. 

         It’s nearly three hours,  though,  and there were periods when I didnt really want to be in their company, or care about them. But it’s fierily done, and ends with some admirable furious leaping on tables (just as there was  round the corner in the Dorfman at Man and Boy till last week:  what is this, a new rule under Indhu Rubasingham.? Every audition room with a table test to prove leapability?) 

        But a particular shout-out to that rising star Arthur Hughes as Petrov, the grumpy lumpen engineering boss . He has a particular lightness and humour in every part – his Richard III was fastastic – and here he gets to utter the ultimate upwardly-mobile capitalist’s great self- justification at the  final dinner party, and shakes the rafters.. Bravo.

nationaltheatre.org.uk  to 29 April 

MYSTICISM AND MISCHIEF 

       This extraordinary show from Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story (and absolutely not with  the Streisand movie ending)  –  drove Sydney Opera House audiences and critics wild. And this adventurous little theatre is an obvious place for the UK premiere, with its gift for finding Jewish-related plays both light and devastatingly dark.  But this is the first time Marylebone has plunged so joyfully – surtitles and all – into the curious judaeo-German-Hebrew-Slavic-Aramaic Yiddish language and also,  barring one golem in The White Factory, the first time it has gone so deep into the weird, mystical tale-telling world of that tradition. 

       And – full disclosure – there was a point in the first half when I thought that it demanded slightly too high a tolerance of two things: Talmudic picturesquery,  and the often tiresomely intellectualized  “queer theory” which is lavishly pointed up in the programme.    But I give in.  It’s rather wonderful:  intelligent and wild and wise and, especially in the second half,  profoundly touching.  It’s springingly alive, so  L’chaim to it! 

       Bashevis Singer’s central story of Yentle the 1870  “Yeshiva boy”  is timeless, and for women a vital, enlivening one.  Our heroine is desperate for the deep study of Torah and Talmud which only males study, but “a learned woman is  an abomination” and women are for breeding , kitchen and marketplace .   So  when her father dies she dresses as a boy, becomes a loyal study-partner to Avigdor,  who has no idea. While pleading his cause with the lovely Hodes, Yentl under her new name finds herself the object of the girl’s adoration.  Think of Twelfth Night, Viola, Olivia and Orsino. Or of the constant interpretation of male and female behaviour by a disguised Rosalind in As You LIke It. 

         But here there is no easy way out:  even when it would be possible for Yentl to confess she cannot bear to,  because she needs this learning, godliness and mystery for her own sake.  And you don’t get more feminist than that. There is a devastating moment when she admits her sex to Avigdor, taking off her top to show her breasts, but cannot bear not to reach out and put the tasseled prayer-shawl, the Tallit,  back on.  Not for modesty , but for sheer need.   It’s about prayer. 

        Amy Hack is extraordinary in the role; when she speaks or sings in Yiddish hairs stand up on your neck.  But she always conveys the trapped , baffled but determined reality of a young girl, and  there is comedy in the awkwardness of finding herself a ‘man among men`’ , in settings where boys wistfully talk of sex and swim naked.  Ashley Margolis’ Avigdor is  perfect too, and Genevieve Kingsford, the most deeply baffled of the three, a graceful presence as Hodes.  But the whole is framed, often narrated,  by  Evelyn Krape as “The Figure::  ancient, dishevelled, wild and bawdy and mischievous  in several characters and arguments, yelling and laughing, donning goat-horns, primitive in sexless power..  From the opening moments The Figure expresses old mysticisms:  the completeness of God who contains  both male and female, so Yentl is a kind of flawed, biologically impossible image of that perfection.  Except that of course we are in an Ashkenazi shtetl in 1870, not heaven and eternity, and there is biology to contend with. And despite it she does marry Hodes, and the Figure brandishes a bloodstained wedding sheet .   But then as reality kicks in the poor bride is pleading for her ‘man’, demanding ‘he” come to her bed more often as the holy books prescribe.  And meanwhile Avigdor yearns for her, but at one point embraces his “bruder” , until he discovers the truth .

       Hence the “queerness” theme much talked up:  two apparent men together, two real women together,  one Yentl being both male and female:  a  reproductive conundrum but real love and a quest for mystical completeness. Around it all the often alarming Krape cavorts, addressing us with glee . It’s  staged in often dim light, sometimes with sudden sound,  always with a lucid narrative and clarity of emotion from the central players.

         In the theological arguments there is plenty to chew on – fascinating to hear the sin of Adam and Eve explained as the snake being deliberately “made by God because the fruit needed to be eaten”.   That chimed weirdly in my convent-girl head with “O Felix culpa” and the medieval chant `’blessed be the time that apple eaten was”. 

              But even without all that,  the central story of a girl in disguise is universal and inspiring.   It’s Viola and Joan of Arc and Margaret who became James Barry to train and become a miltary surgeon. It’s sweet Polly Oliver and all the lasses who followed their men to the war in breeches. You can set aside modish queer-theory and trans-politics, and be reminded that at the heart of the story is the ancient outrage of women being excluded from learning and mental growth. And the determination of women who decided that no, this just won’t do…and wore the trousers.  

marylebonetheatre.com. to 12 April 

rating 4

BROKEN HEARTS AND MACAROONS: A DISTANT WAR CLOSE TO HOME

         How is it for a family to be a symbol, focus and vortex of murderous global disharmony?   The Rosenbergs know:  North London Jewish in  the 2009 Gaza/ Israel crisis.   Honourably brave for the Menier to revive Ryan Craig’s play right now in an even worse Middle East war , in a city marred by furious weekly demonstrations  and antisemitic attacks.  Craig has actually kept the setting in the original timeframe, but the resonance is even stronger.  In the living-room tradition and fragile pride is  evoked with fierce detail : silver and glassware cabinets, brown furniture ,a tidy suite.  But on its sofa an untidy young Jonny lies with a racing paper listening to rap, only  reluctantly getting up to call his sister Ruth when Simon the Rabbi arrives.  He pauses to shudder about  new fake roman-pillars his socially ambitious Dad has put up by the door. “Chav-palace!”.   

    The Rabbi has a tricky request, rooted in the war two thousand miles away and   Jonny has no wish to be dragged in to another family drama, so gets clear as soon as he can get the car keys off his dad David, a kosher caterer just back from provisioning  miles away in Stoke Newington with his wife Lesley snarling “we risked our lives for a piece of fish!” . She plies Simon with tea , biscuits and macaroons till Ruth snaps “he’s a Rabbi,not a spaniel!” 

         I detail all this to emphasise how powerfully Craig draws us sharply into a particular community with a mosaic of tiny, often funny, references to past and present neighbours and events.   It may sometimes feel a bit cartoonishly Jewish-family but we need to feel its ordinariness to engage with the un-ordinariness of the tragic and politically edgy story.  The patriarch is Nicholas Woodeson,  a tiny ball of desperate energy wrapped in well-worn corduroy; Lesley is Tracy-Ann Oberman , her drop-dead  Jewish-mother timing and control masking – for a while – a crumbling fragility.  Ruth  — Dorothea `Myer-Bennett – is a cool young lawyer . They are all grieving: tomorrow is  the memorial service for the favourite son Danny,  whose  Israeli helicopter-gunship was shot down over Khan Younis.   But Ruth is fresh back from Geneva and a war-crimes investigation which  very much includes Israel’s conduct alongside Hamas’ atrocities, and Rabbi Simon came to warn them that some of the community will demonstrate against her being at the service. Old David, though,  wants her to deliver the eulogy, and her mother won’t even have her job spoken of.  Ruth’s “There are things happening in Gaza that shouldn’t be happening” is met with “I don’t want to hear about that evil thing in this house” .`

      But life has to go on, together the women lay the table for guest Saul , who might save the failing business by having them cater his daughter’s wedding. He is, as David cannily points out, a man with two more daughters, as well as being the synagogue chairman…

          I remembered it from 2010 as a sharp play, but today it hits twice as hard.   There is everyday comedy,  a solid  sense of the quotidian Englishness of this particular London community: none of it is their fault, and as David says of the local newsagent, “He’s a Waziristani Muslim and I’m an Ashkenazi Jew and every morning we talk about the weather”.    But it is also classically about two things:  how in families  stubborn  expectations can blur real love, and the immense issues of international morality , justice and the never-ending  plight of distant Israel surrounded by genocidal ambition. 

         It echoes Arthur Miller as it thickens and tenses through the second act , with David too desperate to get Saul to sign – a Willy Loman, on the edge –  and with the gradual revelation of certain responsibilities surrounding the dead pilot Danny, just as  in All My Sons.  A moment of angry debate, perhaps a shade too discursively op-ed, has Dan Fredenburgh’s Saul angrily confronting a smooth senior lawyer (Adrian Lukis), who arrives with a certain vital transcript to show to Ruth.  Through him it also makes the vital point, so bitterly hard on diaspora Jews far away, that while far more savage killings are perpetrated daily all across the globe, dwarfing the Gaza disaster and making mockery of international codes,  as a western-allied democracy Israel always gets “held to a higher standard..strip a country of dignity and you lose your own” says the lawyer. 

         But how fair is it to be Jewish today, far from Israel and feeling far from safe,  helplessly loyal to its right  to exist but blamed for it daily?   as Saul says  “we’re all seen as guilty, for wanting  to be safe…cosy England is a myth”.   Even in those late scenes the play is shot through with comedy alongside real emotion: how can it not be?  Humans are absurd as well as tragic.  When the lawyer suddenly spots the leftover macaroons on the table or the furious, under-loved Jonny takes an axe to his father’s naff new pillars ,  even in the tense tragic moment you  can laugh.  The Rosenbergs are trapped, like all of us but more paintfully, in  this miserable, inextricable angry rift within  the human family.   Woodeson’s final moments, with his daughter, are haunting.  So they should be.    

Menierchocolatefactory.com to 2 May

rating 4

A DARKNESS FROM THE PAST, WITH MODERN ECHOES 

         Fittingly in ou age of outing, condemnation and cancellation there have within a twelvemonth been three plays about the 17c Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins:  The Ungodly, A Tryal of Witches, and now this very classy adaptation by Ava Pickett of AK Blakemore’s book, The Manningtree Witches.  The latter two focus, as is normal and obvious now, on the appalling misogyny which picked on any woman who was single, eccentric, elderly, socially rebellious,  sharp-tongued and/or learned in female talents like midwifery and herbalism.  The women legally-murdered as witches areshown as courageous victims, the men dominant brutal bigots.   Especially Hopkins: in his brief terrible heyday he managed with legal help and the Biblical line “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”  to bring more “witches” to the gallows than had been condemned in the preceding 15 years.  

          It is good that writers are exploring what it was all about, the best of them trying to step back into that Cromwellian post-Reformation world of harsh, uncelebratory religiosity.   The first of the plays was Joanna Carrick’s remarkable THE UNGODLY (https://theatrecat.com/2023/10/27/the-ungodly-red-rose-chain-ipswich/) which toured to London and New York. That was  a small, domestic chamber piece set in a farmhouse where Hopkins is the shy, nervy, sexually anxious brother-in-law of a couple who repeatedly lose infants (not uncommon: it was a hardscrabble world in rural Essex).  They become followers, then feel a dawning doubt of sanity.    Carrick offers us young Hopkins’  development, even some explanation, which makes it horribly easy to think about modern bigotries in twisted angry young men (he died at 27). Today he’d either be an Islamist “martyr” , go about shouting “Punch a Terf!”, or be deep in the Andrew Tate Manosphere.  

           The second witch-hunt play I mentioned, Tryal of Witches, was less successful but musically interesting.  This one, however, is a skilfully written straight play with a big ensemble: we meet Hopkins first as a black-clad, striding figure arriving in the village, charismatic enough to dominate the local pastor and the scarce local men (the civil war is raging, there are many widows). It is framed by narration from Rebecca West (a real historic character, played with shrill sparkiness by Lucy Mangan) .  It was she who, imprisoned and in fear of her own life,   gave  made-up evidence about a coven including her tough mother Anne: she confronts the audience from the start with a scornful “What would you have f-ing done?”. 

      It’s a good question.  When a madness of belief grips those with power and hyou add  an undercurrent of puritanical sexual anger,  resistance by the weaker sex is futile. As Sam Mitchell’s stern, looming Hopkins says, “Satan dwells in dark moist places of the woods”: it’s not  hard to spot the male accusers’  anxious Freudian parallel with the dark moist places of women, when the accusers lay out helpless starving old Bess to examine her for a Satan’s mark (any mole will do).  

        The strength of the piece is in the ensemble: we are taken into the midst of a lively, sweary, gossipy group of women.  Scott Graham of Frantic Assembly is movement-director and  keeps them y  surging round the stage like shoaling fish  in a lively expression of community alliances, jokes and quarrels.  Gina Isaac is wonderful as Anne,  seen-it-all scornful and tough on her dreamy daughter,  yet  kind towards Fiona Branson’s  old Bess when she begs food.  One inter-family quarrel over a boy’s wasting bacon fishing for crabs (a lovely Essex rural touch) gives a foothold to Hopkins when the child dies.  So does a furious “pox upon you!” from old Bess, hungry and begging food.    Shout witchcraft, blame the noisy women, though heaven knows  though deaths were common in 1743 : as Anne says “hard lives in hard times. All we are is poor!”.  As to the law, more than once Rebecca observes that truth seems not to count, all that matters is “what’s written down”. Confessions, depositions, comfortable lies.

        Matthew Hopkins  is also, in this telling, particularly and personally obsessed with young Rebecca, which enables the play to be given an unhistoric brief coda after the hangings.  Unexpected, but something I found surprisingly satisfying.  Overall it is a gripping show,  well worth catching and fit for an afterlife,   its gruesomeness shot with humanity and pity.   And, from the past,  a reminder of  how quickly horrors  can surge back after seeming to fade .  And how in some still extant cultures years later  – need I even mention Afghanistan or Iran? – it is true, as Anne bitterly tells her daughter , that   “a woman’s skin is but a paper for a man to write on”.    

mercurytheatre.co.uk  to 14 march

rating 4 

1939:  GLOBAL MOMENT , INTIMATE PAIN

     There are some tremendous moments  in the last ten minutes of this late-period Arthur Miller play: some from Pearl Chanda as Sylvia,  some from Eli Gelb as her emotionally disintegrating husband Phillip and Alex Waldman as the doctor, Harry, who has been trying to heal her of “hysterical paralysis”.   It becomes a great complicated cry from the soul of the Jewish diaspora in 1930’s New York,  and equally one from the personal  distress of a marriage. 

      And at  this late point, leaning forward, gripped and driven along half a dozen tracks of thought, you can just about forgive it for certain  longeurs in the preceding 110 minutes (it’s two hours straight through , as it should be) .  And it’s worth it, because it is by Miller, to whom attention always should be paid,  directed by Jordan Fein who gave us that remarkable Fiddler on the Roof,  well cast and magnificently played and  – moreover – agonizingly topical towards our present global politics. 

       But brace yourself:  too much is talk, often circular, in dim lamplight and psychosexual confusion,  penned in a deep arena littered with newspapers and benches and a bed, where uninvolved characters stay trapped in corners.    Sylvia has suddenly been gripped with a genuine, but physically unattributable, inability to stand or walk.  It  is 1939 :   her shock paralysis seems to be rooted in horror at the newspaper pictures of Kristallnacht and the jeering, humiliating crowds laughing at old Jewish men forced to scrub the sidewalk with toothbrushes. Her great cry – late on in the play – is  “Where is America, where is England, youve gotta do something before they murder us all”.  

      Her husband is puzzled, a prim chap always in black, and before his disintegration with the smoothest of waxed partings.  He is proud of his job in mortgages but even more of his unseen son for going into the army – a Jew needn’t just be a lawyer, banker of businessman , and he himself  “doesnt run with the crowd, who says a Jes has to be a Democrat?”  Late on, when Dr Harry is challenging him, this attitude becomes clear as an attempt to  resist the otherness of being a Jew and “melt into the goyim”.   Phillip in his despair  about both Sylvia and a professional setback and implication from his boss that  Jews stick together against the mainstream,   wishes he had been a proper fulltime observant Jew in the comfort of  ritual and community.    He’s a lost soul: Miller is expressing something interesting here, a sort of parallel with Sylvia’s distress: what is  it to be Jewish? Why must we be?   

        He adores Sylvia, but has been pretty much impotent these twenty years, somthing he lies about to Dr Harry.  His wife’s collapse is overwhelming him to the point sometimes of violent anger; he cannot bring himself to understand why the events half a world away are so threatening to her, safe in NY.    Though there’s  also a sense that she has made Harry into that distant enemy (can’t help thinking of Sylvia Plath’s  terrifying poem about father or husband   as “a man in black with a Meinkampf look”: female sense of weakness, oppression) .   At one point Harry perceptively says “it’s like she’s connected to some wire that goes right around the world”. And maybe, more thoughts intruding,  this is so: perhaps some  spirits absorb and genuinely suffer , at distance, the sickness of the world.   Ideas spin out from the play even when you’re most frustrated with it, and indeed with Harry’s inappropriate own sexual feelings about the poor woman. 

     But I forgave Harry-the-character everything during his exasperated yelling at the collapsed Phillip near the end.  As a doctor, he points out, everybody who comes in thinks they’re  persecuted – by whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, protestants, catholics, whoever – and everyone’s scared,  “a newborn baby is not a picture of confidence”.  Yet somehow as they all kvetch – that glorious Yiddish word for complainting –  nobody admits they might be the ones doing the persecuting.   Back of the net, Miller!  a message for today.

      Another great line: Harry studied in Germany and loves its art and music,  and his own delusion is believing  that this  Nazism cannot last.  Challenged about everyone being persecuted he remarks that   Hitler feels it, and is a top kvetcher himself:  “He has turned his whole beautiful country into one gigantic kvetch”.

       For that line.  everything is forgiven.   Thank Arthur Miller for that insight.

youngvic.org  to 18th April 

A THOUGHTFUL ANGER

       We need to know and feel something beyond the daily global news; sometimes theatre can place us carefully and mercilessly in the room and try to make us understand the experiences of those caught up in war, and the  political forces sweeping over them.  Nearly twenty years ago Nicholas Kent did this by commissioning, collating and directing THE GREAT GAME about Afghanistan in a dayful of short plays.  Now, with five playwrights,  he does this in an evening for the recent history of Ukraine: that an ancient country long predating the Soviet empire, whose heroic struggle has made Britain fky yellow-and-blue flags these four years in windows and along country roads. We need to know  and feel it.

      The feeling begins immediately, and runs between each play,  as it’s framed by Mariia Petrovska  perched overhead playing the traditional 65-string bandura and singing the songs of sadness and of protest which she learned growing up in Mariupol.   It’s a moving and elegant way to link the plays,  all set since the collapse of the USSR , with the country’s far older history from Tsars to Stalin.  There is no attempt at exoticism and the six actors sound English, recognizable: David Michaels, Ian Bonar, Daniel Betts, Jade Williams, Clara Read and Sally Giles sharply versatile.

       The first play,  by Jonathan Myerson, takes us to something familiar: the early 1990s, a referendum for independence, demonstrations in Maidan Square and repression as Yanukovic tried to “balance” a relationship with Russia.  In a hotel room a couple – he collaborative, she fired with their son’s dream of a New Ukraine –  worry about him down in the square. But the breakfast trolley that enters is full of guns, manned by two pro-Kremlin snipers ready for massacre.  The father’s conviction that they only fire “over their heads” is gradually shattered by savage volleys.  Given their phone, do they warn their boy, or give him up to ‘build a future?”.  Bleakly classic. 

        Next comes David Edgar’s Five Day War, set in a hunting-lodge, a puppet government preparing to move in:  it’s clever, discursive, a sly portrait of ambition and political manoeuvring,  and also an acknowledgement of the Russian conviction, or downright lie, that what the Special Military Operation  really aims at is just a limited action to ‘protect”, “de-nazify, de-militarize” and modernize the country.  Being political it is, unfortunately, the least gripping.  Political wannabes do not after all spark sympathy.   Interesting is the general contempt they express for “a little Jewish comic’ – Zelensky.  

     After the interval come three more, each in their way devastating.  Natalka Vorozhbit (translated by Sasha Dugdale) gives us, against the relentless sound of bombs, a  tremendous monologue by Ian Bonar as a young man, unable to sleep, thinking about his best friends.  He is of conscription age but didn’t sign up, feels “hunted down” now, but both afraid and ashamed.  One friend has fled expensively to Vienna and texts him jokey messages about ski-ing.  Another is in the front line, maybe dead already.  His girlfriend is safe in the UK but he is wretched without her, alone with his thoughts and fears and self disgust.  Bonar’s performance is extraordinary, and Vorozhbit’s last line draws us straight in, with a reminder that we are safe behind the lines but not necessarily forever.“Thank you” says the young man “for the honour of battling to fight off Russia. Why us? “

      David Greig takes us next right to that front line, a battered primary school classroom in East Ukraine, where two soldiers, tired and hungry and only just hoping, notice a body in the corner: one of the Koreans.   He has a paper of useful phrases “Please – thank you – drop your weapon – cigarettes”. They take the cigarettes.  But their Sergeant appears, notes that the man is still just alive. The question is whether as they get themselves out they will take him.  Sarge says yes “No exception, evacuate  the wounded”. Taking that burden will probably kill them all but “What are you fighting for?’ “Ukraine” “What is Ukraine? At this moment Ukraine is the idea that freedom can be chosen. Right is right. The consquence of a right action is not our concern.  In the dark place where only soldiers go, honour is the light that guides you home. I will not quench that light”. 

        And so , with another poignant song from Petrovska overhead, we get to the last play, Cat Goscovitch’s portrait of the most unnerving of Putin’s war crimes: the kidnap of Ukrainian children for “Russification” , adoption and training.  20,000 of them over the last four years.  Some have been able to be reclaimed, but at what cost to all?  It’s short, devastating, horribly relatable when the now-teenage child returns, different.  

      So that’s it: Ukraine Unbroken, an extraordinary evening.  

arcolatheatre.com to 28th March 

THE MARY ANN WHO BECAME GEORGE ELIOT

     It’s 1842; Bird Grove is the handsome house near Coventry which Robert Evans bought in his retirement from managing a grand estate. With her brother  Isaac married, the devout, churchgoing Evans believed that the respectability of their new household (rather than a humble estate cottage) would help to find a husband for his daughter Mary Ann, unglamorous but clever, self-educated by wide reading. Her bluestocking passion makes him even more uneasy because she has befriended the Brays, freethinkers; as we first meet them this daringly radical pair are here for tea, accompanied by Monsieur Lafontaine, a touring mesmerist who is at this moment waving his hands over both reclining women.   

         Isaac has introduced a friend, Garfield,  who might, he hopes, marry Mary Ann.  The idiot attempts a proposal , is firmly rebuffed , huffs about freethinkers and foreigners, and is thrown out by the gruff father. We seem to be in a fine social comedy, Austenian perhaps (Jonnie Broadbent’s scene-stealing absurdity is pure Mr Collins: marriage would be “the confluence of my economic and romantic aspirations”). Elizabeth Dulau is perfect in her serious simplicity and flashes of sharp brilliant intelligence,  every response and line d line timed with quiet grace. Likewise Owen Teale’s kindly, fatherly grandeur , his solidity and honour apparent even before great emotion is asked of him.  

         And this comic opening is a brilliant way for Alexi Kaye Campbell to start his play about the young woman who later became George Eliot:  cerebral and humane genius , rebel against rigid religiosity and women’s subjugation, author of Middlemarch.  Because if ,like me, you had known only vaguely that she fell out with her father over churchgoing, and not read all the letters and memoirs that Kaye Campbell has carefully studied, you might dismiss Evans as another old patriarch.  But  Owen Teale’s decency and distaste for the clownish Garfield have won you over early;  it is clear that coming battle of ideas with his daughter will be a real one, painful and gripping.  

   And so it is.  He might have been fine with her unmarried, still turning up at church but bravely studying freethinkers and writing from a woman’s perspective to, “wrestle the pen from men’s hands”.   But her steady, brave opinion is that while honouring the magnificence and beauty of Jesus’ message  she would be a hypocrite to kneel and sing hymns and accept all Christian dogma. It is useful – in our times when very many churchgoers feel more or less that way and have no problem being there – to be reminded of earlier battles of feeling and belief.  They were real.

         The big confrontation is immense.   and the better for the father’s unsettlingly topical cry about the need for religion: “if we do not pray together, agree on what it is that makes life meaningful and good and precious, then what will become of us? We will be like a thousand scattered leaves…a madhouse full of madmen and madwomen tearing one another apart”.  Historically,  that too makes you understand the power of the storms which raged a few years later, around Charles Darwin. 

          This thoughtful, moving treatment of the great 19c novelist is apt for Hampstead, for she lies not far away in Highgate cemetery: rejection of dogma and living unmarried with a man barred her from a place in Westminster Abbey, among the men of privilege whose hands had held the un-wrestled pen for cenuries.    Anna Ledwich directs with measured pace  a traditionally made play, chronological and conversational, no party tricks or timeshifts. The only 21c point of style is Sarah Beaton’s elegant creation of four lightly furnished rooms and a lobby on a revolve, characters freezing during scenes where they don’t speak.   Its simplicities echo beautifully the spirit, restraint and honesty of ‘George Eliot’s own work: you feel you have lived through a novel in its two hour-long halves.

Every performance is finely judged,  the Brays  asTom Espiner and Rebecca Scroggs credible in their kindly, comfortable unbelief.  Small details – like Teale’s throwing down his napkin at breakfast when his daughter has gently spoken her piece about church, but we know a wilder anger is looming – give the other side of the battle utter reality.   Not everyone will get it, in an irreligious age, but I was with it every minute.  May go again.

hampsteadtheatre.com. to 21 March

Rating 5  

PEERLESS,  COMPLETE WITH PEERESSES

    Melodious romantic yearning and extreme nonsense, Victoriana sending itself up in rap-speed pattering rhyme and lovesick fairies invading the House of Lords:   all curated by Charles Court Opera and directed by John Savournin, whose works both vocal and directorial have rarely failed to spark joy . There’s even a full chamber ensemble this time alongside piano:,  flute, oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon and horn (the latter vital for”ta-ran-ta-ra, Bow down, ye lower middle classes’).  This group were wonderful enough with just a piano, but this takes us up and beyond. 

     Savournin opts  to drag the House of  peers into the new century,  so Matthew Kellett’s twinklingly vivid Lord Chancellor is accompanied by only one male – David Menezes as Tolloller – and  tweedily formidable female peers, notably Catrine Kirkman’s  Lady Mountararat,  playing it in a Lady Hale spider badge and an eerie ability to sing  at moments in Margaret Thatcher’s unmistakeably breath-heavy  tones and catchphrases. The sentry Lewis becomes a doddering House of Lords  librarian – taking on the front row with an accusing glare at the deathless information that every little boy and girl that’s born into this world alive is either a little liberal or else a little conserva-tive.  Matther Palmer of course doubles as Strephon the hybrid fairy-human, voice and leg-based comedy immaculate in both roles.  The Queen of the fairies – fabulous contralto line from Meriel Cunningham ,  it’s like being massaged  – updates her curse on Parliament by dooming them all to Clacton and a Reform vote. 

      Comedically, there is nothing not to love as one expects from the gentle mockery of Charles Court Opera in its G and S mode. But it does not neglect the actual musical beauty,  the yearning romantic tone which Gilbert and Sullivan were artful enough not to neglect. And which, face it,   in our brutally cynical age comes as balm to the spirit. Especially in Wilton’s, between the barley-sugar pillars.  Even the happy ending for Thatcher-Mountararat and Tololler moved the soul a bit.    And yes, you G and S purists, Kellett delivers the nightmare song with laser precision, before collapsing on a dispatch box, bum in air.  As you would.  Bravo to all. Quick, there are still a few tickets. And join the Friends,I am…

box office wiltons.org.uk  to  28 Feb

rating 5

GAGS BEFORE GRAVITAS

 They’re a national treasure:Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey,  inventions of Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay long before the age of Spads and WhatsApps.  The TV shows,  46 years on, still often hit   a disquieting parallel with today’s issues.  But  despite longstanding awed affection for the pair’s creation I found the  2010 stage version a bit cheesy, edged with dated  racism.  This one is much better: years have passed, and this is a final lap of honour for the pair as old codgers, facing what we all do in declining years and significance.

    It’s by the surviving Lynn, who co-directs with Michael Gyngell and gives us an aged Jim Hacker , dishevelled in saggy old trousers, lording it as master of Hacker College Oxford – which was  founded  after his years as PM with Russian oligarch money.  Griff Rhys Jones is grand casting, combining a baffled twinkle with Hacker’s familiar yearning for Churchillian grandeur and  legacy.   His college wants him out, due to some leaked but  pretty harmless remarks about ladies’ lingerie and the effect of Empire. So he invites Sir Humphrey, lately released from St Dymphna’s home for the elderly deranged, to advise him once more.

      It goes for gags rather than gravitas: many of the jokes about “wokery” and Brexit are a bit predictable, and the political jokes well-polished over many years (MPs joining the Lords means “leaving the animals to join the vegetables” is a classic, and good). Rhys Jones is reliably funny as ever. But what proper energy the play gets is from the other two: Stephanie Levi John as Sophie his care worker (a  former student with an Eng Lit First  and a quoting habit), and a wonderful, unexpectedly rounded and comically sharp portrayal of old Sir Humphrey by Clive Francis.

      Not only does Francis negotiate the deep sofa and stairlift with hilarious physicality,  but in his desperation for a lecturing job and misstep over inheritance tax and a demon daughter in law, he weirdly makes you hope for the happy ending (which we do at last  get, in a very British spirit: these figures are too precious to be tortured)

      The issues around which the two old men and the fearless care worker clash and banter are pretty predictable – women, race, empire, slavery, safe spaces ,zero tolerance, cancellation  and ” free speech”, that last meaning any old brexity bufferdom the men may spout. Levi John is wonderful, drily tolerant, a rising victorious generation but without malice. In one great moment Hacker says she could get a proper job (he despises carerdom) because “You’re young, you’re gay, you’re female and you’re black. Ticks all the boxes”.   She replies “I ddn’t realize I was so fortunate”.  

   Back of the net! But, somehow, kindly. It is indeed a kind show: these are old men, their day gone, Sophie has the future to build and will do. . We can laugh at Sir Humphrey’s entangled obscurantist loghorrea and Hacker’s clinging to the notion that he was a sort of Churchill, but pity them too.   And be grateful for all the bygone laughs at govenment: it was good to see. at the curtain call,  the cast all  salute a photograph of Eddington, Hawthorne and Fowlds. 

Apollotheatre.co.uk to 9 May

Rating four 

WICKED ECHOES FROM ANOTHER DEPRESSION  

       Well, here’s something oddly familiar!  A legendary international financier with charm, vast wealth, grubby fingers in many pies and a charitable foundation to distract attention and draw influence. He’s an alpha-male predator, likes being on the cutting edge of  tech, and prudently  keeps a proud “dossier” about the weaknesses of numberless people of significance . His name gets the phone answered by every head of state in Europe and the US (“With Stalin I can do business. With Ramsay Macdonald, no”.)   And critically ,  not only is he a gleeful pirate of finance and cracks  deals with Mussolini and Goering and that ‘nasty little guttersnipe Hitler)  but he has absolutely no scruples at all where sex and its uses are concerned. 

          Perfect, after days of Epsteinery: plays take time to programme ,cast and rehearse  so there’s somethiing exhilarating when by serendipity launch night comes slap-bang in the middle of an overheated news cycle.  Especially piquant if it happens to be a revival of a little-known late Terence  Rattigan play from 1963, set in the Depression of 1934. 

     So here we are, being darkly delighted by Ben Daniels playing Gregor Antonescu as a human volcano of charm, aggression, danger and dominance.   Daniels is breathtaking, almost crazedly, physical:  Anthony Lau’s violent direction in Georgia `Lowe’s starkly simple set has him – and several others – leaping on and off tables, confronting and looming ,  sometimes using his whole long angular body and battered, brutal face to express, fascinate, dominate. When he isn’t practising his powers on other characters they tellingly often remain onstage, frozen or prone.  He is everything.   Until, as his alienated son screams at him on understanding his amoral emptiness “you are nothing!” 

        It’s that son, Laurie Kynaston as Vassily – now calling himself Basil Anthony – who we meet first. He’s in a Greenwich village basement eking a living playing bar piano and in love with an aspiring actress Carol. We learn that five years ago he walked out on his father in socialist disgust and personal contempt, involving a gunshot.  Though as the father scornfully points out , “a bullet in the chandelier six feet over my head” isn’t much of a parricide attempt.

             Amtonescu is the fabulous focus of this energetic, noir play:  a  Hungarian-born tycoon whose empire is about to collapse and crash international finance, because accountants in a potential merger spotted that his real liquidity absolutely does not justify his overweening confidence (he delivers a lovely brief lecture on those two essentials of speculative capitalism). His shares are tumbling. So – for a wickedly dark reason scholars of Rattigan know but I will not spoil (we gasped) –  he decided to use his son’s basement digs for a last-chance meeting with Herries, chairman of the potential merger,  and his accountant.  They too are wonderful casting and subtle performances: Malcolm Sinclair senatorial, respectable and in control until Antonescu neatly suborns him,  and Leo Wan gloriously offended as the accountant, brandishing all the facts of the financier’s con-trick on six metres of rolled out paper , but gradually losing the battle.   As the first half ends and Daniels does all but dance a fandango on the table, it looks like another Antonescu miracle escape. For as he often says “ in finance man makes his own miracles”. 

         That first half is wonderful wicked entertainment, though it then becomes true Rattigan in its undertow of real sad, odd, wistful emotional truth: Vassily  is his father’s opposite, still the “little boy who  was scared of horses and wouldn’t learn how to swim”.But the magnetism of his father draws him back as the old monster’s fortunes abruptly crack.  And we are drawn too, despite the truly appalling thing we just watched Antonescu do in the first half.  He is after all a tragedy: he had his chances to love and be loved – Isabella Laughland as his second wife appears swathed in leopardskin  in the second half – but has not been able to bear the danger of such emotions.Not from her, not from his boy.  Brilliant corruption made him hollow. 

        But goodness, you can’t take your eyes off  Ben Daniels.  The final scene – still no spoilers – is wonderful,  disgracefully funny, a last deal struck  between the financier and his efficient henchman Sven ( that’s another great performance, Nick Fletcher as a grey suit with a steel core of self-preservation).  

          It’s good to have Rattigan valued again, with many revivals of classics from his heyday like The Deep Blue Sea and Flare Path.  But even better to see this – from the period  in his fifties when his star had faded and the angry-young-men thought him  dated.  It’s a treat.

Box office nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 14 March 

rating. 5

This is an adapted version of a piece I wrote for The Times on 19 January. Following Joanna Carrick’s funeral on Friday, it seems right to put it up here, because theatre pioneers and projects like this deserve remembering and honouring.

         A light has goneout in Ipswich.  The death of Joanna Carrick, at 58 after a short illness, threw sadness over Suffolk’s unassuming county town. Her little theatre stood dark;  the shock hit friends, professional colleagues,  her community companies and the Christmas audiences for a scholarly and hilarious Alice in Wonderland done with  aerialism and rabbit-jazz.////        

        The sudden loss of  the founder and creative director of Red Rose Chain is grievous, briefly blotting out for some of us the racket of international and domestic chaos.  The only healing reflection is that in a not-quite-broken Britain,  this unique professional-and-community company survived decades and launched several serious theatre careers while staying viscerally close to its town’s historic and modern identity.   Raised in theatre from childhood (her father Antony Carrick)  Joanna  was  a skilled playwright,  and as a director kept tight, high standards of work  whether with professional casts or her teenage, disabled or marginalized local companies.  That rigour showed,  and mattered.

          I came across it first ten years ago, when with Heritage Lottery money the Avenue studio theatre at the  Tudor Gyppeswyk Hall opened with her play PROGRESS.  It’s set during the 1561 visit of Elizabeth I to Ipswich, and despite  knowing that her  Anne Boleyn play had been performed at the Tower of London I expected a mere local diversion.  I was shamefully wrong: like Carrick’s other Reformation plays it is a fiercely humane  portrait of neighbours scarred by family memories of persecution and burnings,  knowing who recanted and who betrayed.   Impossible to watch without empathy for 21c global terrors;  impossible, too, not to feel how a local audience gains dignity when its history is given back so vividly.  The depth of Carrick’s research and Shakespearian background also had the advantage that she spoke, as it were, fluent Tudor:  in her period plays the dialogue never falls into awkwardly  effortful “prithee, my lord” language, but lives.      

           Maybe they also live more vividly because  of input from  the idiosyncratic nature of Red Rose Chain, whether portraying 17c  history or anything from a local Zeppelin crash in 1915 to the Victorian development of lawnmowers.  Experience with youth theatre inspired her to explore what might emerge,  personally and artistically,  from the contribution of people with lives far from comfortable middle-class artiness.  Alongside her young professional casts and sometimes graduating to perform alongside them,  three companies formed.   ACT is for adults with disabilities, addictions or other vulnerabilities:  she worked alongside victims of the notorious 2006 Ipswich murders of  sex-workers.   Then there are “Chainers” : inclusive without audition  from age 10 to late teens and beyond, and “Gold Chainers”, children with learning disabilities.   All studied and workshopped company  themes, from  17c witch-hunts to  wartime England  or the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf.   Some with  mental difficulties spoke for the first time.   And into this odd, fertile little community flowed other insights and lines from narrowed lives:  local prison inmates.  Some she mentored have, after release, worked alongside the company;   their writing was notably strong during lockdown  when Red Rose Chain continued online and assembled individual green-screen videos for a full Twelfth Night.    

        The words “inclusivity and diversity” can get cheapened into tick-boxery, but it was a revelation to watch Red Rose Chain’s ecology,  from the simplest Gold- Chainer shows to summer spectaculars.  I stood back all I could as a critic, despite a growing friendship with Joanna, her husband David Newborn, son Ted and the team.  It was fascinating to watch the symbiosis as even the most marginalized  fed into serious professional work: as if in  music  a hesitant piping was picked up and melted into full orchestra.   The atmosphere was uncombative:  the  name comes  from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis where the goddess foils a “direful god of war” by binding him in a chain of red roses.

         Sitting  by Joanna’s hospice bed with her husband and son, the sadness was a little dimmed by knowing that her last year was so triumphant. There was  a cracking Pinocchio, now sought by another theatre,   and a remarkable outdoor Hamlet at the Sutton Hoo ship-burial site,   young operators working a  20ft Ghost directed by international-quality puppetteers.  Earlier,  Carrick’s  latest play THE UNGODLY,  about the 17c Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins,  had a London run at the Southwark Playhouse and a short exhilarating New York season in  “Brits on Broadway”.   Her best moment was when a group of black women passionately connected it to their lives and  “Roe v Wade, women manipulated into worrying about men’s rights…it made me get into perspective why we actually do this job, which is to make people have emotions, think, and see the world differently. To feel that it communicated across the cultural divide was wonderful, just what we needed.”   

          They surely did:  the small team  had hastily been scavenging faux-17c props and building the set on a shoestring. As director,  she walked in Central Park with Vincent Moisy – cast as the Witchfinder –  to work on his coming role as Hamlet,  but only after he had finished hammering together a 17c farm kitchen.    She eschewed hierarchy: everyone at times worked  front of house, bar or backstage.  If there was ever an exemplar of believing in drama as a gift of humanity,  it’s been this little outfit.

          Of course not all theatre can be like this; of course there is hierarchy and hard commercial pressure, and some community work is merely therapeutic or “let ’em come on as the chorus”,   without the electric charge of artistry and scholarship that Carrick gave her unregarded hometown.  But it happened.  People will remember and  its  spirit survive. The community work continued, and at her packed, extraordinary funeral service members professional and amateur sang the songs she wrote for her productions over the years.  Her husband, son, cast and team carry on: this summer, as usual, their major Shakespeare production will be outdoors at Sutton Hoo. It’ll be the Twelfth Night she directed.

SLY USEFUL OBSERVATION…MARRIAGE OF EQUALS

Noel Coward was a lad of 18 when he finished this very adult portrait of a marriage in trouble, invalided out of the army, nervous and tubercular.   But he had been a dangerously observant child actor since he was eleven:  perfectly placed , with childlike dispassion,  to portray a pair of writers whose romantic passion  and determination to be different for ordinary boring couples,  but whose nature and talent sours into married rivalry and rows.  Well, after all the  referee sees most of the game… 

     He thought the play  immature, but it’s none the worse for that: indeed for Troupe – after their magnificent  Forsyte Saga here which the RSC picked up – it is a clever choice.    I seem  to have scrawled in my notebook early on the words “adorably relatable”. Unlike some of his later more high-society plays, with guaranteed success and silk dressing-gowns,, it’s set amid absolute beginners. Sheila , an aspiring novelist and her flatmate Olive, a journalist,  we meet first on the eve of Sheila’s wedding to Keld – who is writing a first play.  Ewan Miller is a boyish, exuberant Keld, Lily Nichol’s Sheila more serious, rangy, thoughtful.   Theyre starry eyed but Olive (Gina Bramhill, briskly sophisticated) warns her that when two creative careers and intellects marry, one is going to have to give up a bit of personality to keep the peace.   Sheila of course denies this.  Relatable? They  could be any set of ambitious young media or theatre types right now. 

        And as they get going in the second act, it’s blissfully Coward (though Bill Rosenfield has “reimagined” it a bit, cutting down some exuberant overwriting).  The gasps and guffaws kept coming,  as all ages and both sexes recognized, as did the artful teenage Coward, where he pressure points would come. Keld is at his desk with the only typewriter, constantly enraged by the servant  –  Angela Sims a wonderfulky realized Burrage –   wants to know about the mutton for dinner. His sacred creative flame must not be disturbed. Except by the pink-flounced fur-tuppeted Ruby Raymond, his proposed star who is  keen to get out of musical comedy to the real stage.   Zoe Goriely performs the most poisonous starlet imaginable, harder-treated than anyone else in Coward . Well, he was young.  But of course when his wife Sheila nips in to borrow a pencil for her own writing, he’s enraged again by the disturbance,  and the whole thing erupts into a foreshadowing of the big row in Private Lives. Especially when she points out the flaws in his characteirzation of women. That’s glorious. 

    Totally in lovewith it by now,  I winced a bit at the third act, in which two successes later Keld’s confidence has somehow sapped all of Sheila’s, who gives up writing to be a supportive wife:  a wonderful sequence has her discussing laundry problems with Burrage while he reads out starry reviews of his brilliance feom the papers then loses his temper because the women aren’t listening.    Miller’s strength as Keld is persuading us that he is not, in fact, any kind of monster. Just young.   Of course worse is to come, as Olive reappears from a sparky career in showbiz and social gossip writing, and reveals somethig.   Not an entirely surprising twist;  but come to the short fourth act,  and we really are surprised. 

       No spoilers, but it’s a distinctly odd ending: , Coward himself said…”The last act is an inconclusive shambles” based on a  “sentimental and inaccurate assumption” about married couples.  Never mind, Noel.  It was a really fun evening.  Maybe even definitely one for a cautionary stag and  hen night….

parktheatre.co.uk  to 14 March

rating 4

A VERY GREAT TALENT TO AMUSE

        Rival psychopathies emerge from the first moments of “Cornley Drama Society” as Chris (Daniel Fraser) and Robert (Henry Lewis) face off  at auditions over which one will be Scrooge and which will be director. Both want both jobs.   Chris is nervy, controlling, aspiring to dramaturgical seariousness, attempting deadpan authority as he turns down auditionees he knows he will have to use anyway as there’s nobody else.  Except the local tennis club as extras.   Lewis’ Robert is  a different shade of psychopath:  big, bluff and determined, destined to continue fighting equally vigorously onstage for the Scrooge role,  at times actually throwing his rival out of the four-poster bed (set and costumes are tremendous, classy work by Libby Todd.  They  have to be  because some of the technical jokes are –  let’s just say unexpected, and perilous). 

      Just as in this Mischief Theatre’s Peter Pan  – which used a lot of Barrie’s text alongside collapsing bunks and disastrous flying – Dickens’ lines are kept around a lot, their own comic and dramatic value appreciated even as modern arguments pop up about matters like whether Die Hard is a Christmas film .   The various am-dram personalities are firmly established from the off: apart from the warring Chris and Robert there is helpful optimistic Annie,  starry-eyed aspirant Max, traumatized Dennis, and not least another budding psychopath in Chris Leask’s Trevor the angry stagehand. Who,  after the second crashing descent of a stage light , snarls “Only when the weak have fallen will the lighting rig be strong”. 

       It’s casual lines like that, alongside the artful escalation  of running jokes and immense physical absurdities (no spoilers)  which make us howl with helplessness.  There’s universal recognition too: almost my favourite moment is Annie’s prolonged deadpan reading of the minutes of the last hopeless drama-soc committee meeting. That deserves an Olivier all to itself.  

           No more description. Just go, just enjoy it.  As I have:  ever since 2013 when the Play that Goes Wrong escaped from pub-theatre into a basement at the Trafalgar,  I have cheered on Mischief Theatre. Not that they have needed it what with Offies, Olivier, Broadway, sellouts everywhere.  They’ve devloped and moved on in the same style:   Peter Pan, the bank robbery, the spies,  and at one point two of the creatives  Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer in the barmy Mind Mangler magic spoof, after which nobody will ever respect Derren Brown again.     Each new show makes me anxiously  wonder whether they will pull it off again:  that exuberant comic precision, inventive parody,  the good jokes on the theatre profession’s own vanities,  the merry good humour and frightening  slapstick physical bravery.  American Matt diCarlo directs this , as he did The Comedy About Spies, having encountered the Mischief crew while associate on the Broadway Play That Goes Wrong .  He clearly bonds in spirit with our heroes. 

          So as usual Mischief has pulled it off, triumphantly.  . . Always the same spirit,  a fierce determination to release surprising barks and sudden uncontrollable waves of laughter.   Lewis, Sayer and Henry Shields as founding creatives and writers earn much of the credit, alongside Nancy Zamit,  and three  are onstage in this one (though Zamit will share the role of Annie with Dumile Sibanda).  But the whole ensemble gathered round the founders (two of whom, Lewis and Sayer, also perform this time)  is remarkable.  A newcomer is SAsha Frost,  who as Sandra takes on the narration, solemn Dickensian style, as well as several parts.    And it’s good to see no fewer than seven understudies credited, because it’s always hard to believe Mischief players often get away unbruised.   They  are a credit to the nation, rejoice in them.  And wish them all the happiest of Christmases.     

nimaxtheatres.com  to 25 Jan 

rating 5 fine mice! and an extra for the stage management, as this stuff isn’t easy…

OH DEAR…

    Event theatre!  New from NY!     It got Tony and Pulitzer nominations,  and smart Broadway people called it “heartwarming:  and “best crafted and exactingly directed” (though one briefly brave but finally panicky  critic  says “silly, nasty, tasteless and  in the end, good theater”).  Its author is  Cole Escola and its star Mason Alexander Park ,  both  defined by him-or-their selves as nonbinary: though honestly, despite the huge black crinoline and the finale spangle-glittering mini,  every gesture , yell and galumphing pratfall presented by Park  is 100% unmistakeably bloke.  

         At 80 minutes it is,  as several London audience members observed quite loudly as we left,  an hour too long.  The premise is simple:  Mary Todd Lincoln is an unhappy,  drunken, thwarted wife of a President (we’re supposed not to name Lincoln) in the throes of the American Civil War. She wants to be a cabaret star.  Her acting coach is – wait for it! – John Wilkes Booth. So guess what happens.   Her husband is a semi-closeted gay who gets blow-jobs under the Oval Office desk from his aide, and at one stage launches into a screaming-queen row with Booth .  What that fine actor Giles Terera is doing in this show I cannot think.  

      As a fifteen-minute sketch on an unchallenging comedy show it’d be OK.  Park is skilled at what he does, which is low-comedy drag with an unconscionable number of gay-fellatio jokes,  at which the audience feels uncomfortably compelled to giggle.  There were very few real loud laughs, though, certainly at the matinee I went to: perhaps nobody was fully drunk.  But hey, I suppose that when a historic President gets assassinated in a theatre it is only fair for his wife to be character-assassinated a couple of centuries later,  albeit with a little final crypto-feminist queer-ally speechlet about her frustration,  in which she compares herself to a tectonic plate rising from being deeply crushed to be a mountain. 

       The subsequent cabaret supermix redeemed it a little, and won the second mouse. Just.  But knowing how ‘hot’ this piece of dreary rubbish was on Broadway,  I left a lot more worried about America’s future  than before.    Certainly needed a soothing few hours’ application of Sondheim afterwards, just to repair the special relationship.    

trafalgartheatre.com  to  25 April 

rating 2

UNDER AN ALIEN TREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almeida.co.uk to 8 jan

Rating 3

DRINK DEEP OF GLORIUMPTIOUS FROBSCOTTLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rsc.org.uk. To. 7 feb

Rating 4 

I

CINDERELLA AND THE MATZO BALL.          JW3. , Finchley Rd

L’CHAIM !  TO LIFE,  AND PANTOMIME JOKES

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

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

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

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

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

Jw3.org.uk.        To 4 Jan

Rating five

JUST FOR KIDS? CONTRARIWISE!  WE ARE ALL ALICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.redrosechain.com   to 4 Jan 

HELLO AGAIN SAILORS

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

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

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

   But meanwhile, off to ENO for a Christmas treat… 

www.londoncoliseum.org         to 7 ‘feb

A GHOSTLESS DICKENS TREAT FOR CHRISTMAS 

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

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

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

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 20 December.

Then Theatre royal Windsor , then  Holy Trinity Church, Guildford

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

LADIES WHO LURCH

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

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

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

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

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

menierchocolatefactory.com  to 21 feb 

rating 4

  A BEAR WHO DESERVES HIS STATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

GRIEF, GUILT, CONSCIENCE

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

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

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

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

delfontmackintosh.co.uk   to 7 march

ABSURD, TRANSCENDENT, JOYFUL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

eno.org.    five more performances before 6 December.  

   A VERY CIVIL CRIME

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

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

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

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

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

Thecut.org.uk. On sat 22 nov

AN INNOCENCE OF WITCHES 

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

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

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

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

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

www.kilntheatre.com   to 17 Jan.   

Rating 4

NOT AT ALL A DRAG…

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

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

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

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

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

watermill.org.uk  to 15 Nov

INNOCENCE, WICKEDNESS , RAGE

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

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

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

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

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

Trh.co.uk to 17 jan

rating 4

EVERYONE’S CALIFORNIAN NOW..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk to 15 Nov

Rating four 

EDWARDIANA FOR A FEMINIST AGE 

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

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

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

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

Rsc.org.uk. To 22 nov.   

Rating 4

A FAMILY SAGA , A MEMORABLE AUNT

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

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

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

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

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

 hampsteadtheatre.com.  to 22 nov

Rating 3 

OLD FAITH IN A MODERN CITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.marylebonetheatre.com.    To 29 Nov

Rating. 4

CHAOS IN FRAYING CHINTZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

Youngvic.org to 8 nov

Rating four

A BRILLIANT ECHO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk  to 15 november

rating 5  

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A DARK SERENISSIMA

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

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

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

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

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

Rating 4

Thu 9 – Sat 25 Oct New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich

Then to the co-producing house:

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

Tickets from £12

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