theatreCat

HOBO ,  GENIUS,  AMERICA’S SOUL 

 “Everybody might be just one big soul, so everywhere you look in the day or night, that’s where I’m gonna be” . That’s Woody Guthrie, in his last years, knowing his body was succumbing to the cruel speechless paralysis of Huntingdon’s Chorea.  That link to universal human soulhood was hard-earned, through decades of hard work, wandering,  poverty in the dustbowl years and political persecution under Senator McCarthy. Because all the time he was picking up songs and writing them in answer, in tune with the campfire laments, work-songs, jokes and grievances of the ordinary poor.   Like many here I had been aware of songs like “This land is your land” – written in defiance of the schmalz of God Bless America – and the Plane Crash at Los Gatos,  the lament for working deportees made famous by Joan Baez . The latter has been  added to this remarkable, moving likeable and thoughtful 90-minute show as a gesture against the present ICE raids under President Trump. 

        I saw David Lutken’s show – with different backing musicians – twelve years ago in London. ( https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/england/london-travel/woody-sez-at-the-arts-theatre-london-wc2-2snkwv75j6g). And when I heard it was coming back, first to Edinburgh then to this short Soho run,  interviewed him (https://www.thetimes.com/culture/theatre-dance/article/woody-sez-edinburgh-david-lutken-interview-9dkd86bv7)

     So I went back, and found the old magic still there:  an elegantly compiled, fast moving tale of a man’s beginnings, experiences, and gradual reflections about politics, justice and war.  It starts with a moment of him happily disrupting a jngle-dotted radio show with mischievous streaks of leftism,  then runs from Guthrie’s childhood and the tragedy of his mother’s end in an asylum with the same disease that finally struck him.  His fellow musicians this time are Raquel Chavez,  Nyssa Grant and David Finch:   busker-virtuosi on guitars, fiddle, banjo, zither, double-bass, a sort of dulcimer (I think) and, with one fine outbreak from Finch,  the spoons.  They move with friendly ease and fellowship between moments of deeply-felt emotion and riotousness (“Union Girl” had a fair few joining in with ‘Can’t scare me, I’m stickin’ to the Union”).  Guthrie’s lament for the WW2 sinking of the Reuben James “tell me, what where their names?”  prefigures his anger at the way news shrugged at the Los Gatos deportees years later.  Unwarlike,  distressed at all pain and grief,  he himself servced in the merchant marine in that war after deciding  that  he had “learnt the differentce between wanting something to stop,  and wanting to do something to stop it”. 

    Lanky, dark and sardonic, looking a bit like his hero,  Lutken holds the show together in an atmosphere of ceilidh and storytelling: it’s deeply researched, deeply felt.  Each Thursday – the first is tonight – he invites any audience to bring along “whatever instrument they won’t let you play at home” and have a hootenanny after the show with the four of them.  But with or without that, I recommend it yet again.  Tickets start at £ 29 and don’t go much up;  indeed if you’ll stand,  the balcony is £15.      Just go.   We need to hear in this dark time the old  voice of the USA, how it felt and shared and struggled and reaches out far beyond the age of Trump and Musk.  We need to believe it. 

Tickets: via  www.woodysez.com or underbellyboulevard.com. to 19 September

rating 5

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE, OR HANG ON A MINUTE..

         Everyone (especially journalists) loves a drama about  newspapers.  Hot-tempered rackety bantering , stories urgently chased, rivalries and righteousness,  secrets and lies.  In Tracey Scott Wilson’s 2003 play, now updated (though without including social-media in its plot)  we are in a hot and  troubled American city. A young white man, heir to a Wall St fortune but working altruistically as a teacher in a rough black areas, has been shot dead when driving in the neighbourhood at night with his pregnant wife, wanting to show his parents a hip Brazilian restaurant, to prove that its not all scary black thugs.  In other words, a perfect focus for white outrage: a goodie.  His wife reports in a stark opening police scene that it was a big man, black, who shot him…

  Projections and clips on Fleischl’s stark basketball-court set show that over weeks many black men have been arrested, roughly, with no conviction yet; the story rolls on, the  wife harassed by media.   Meanwhile we are in and out of a respected newspaper office.  In a dept called Vanguard,  devoted to reporting and speaking for the black community,  tough old campaigner Pat (Lorraine Toussaint) and her colleague Neil ae  settling in the rookie Yvonne.  Who is black, but of another class:  college-educated,  sassy and ambitious and furious at the idea of being “a black reporter” rather than  – well, a star reporter with a Pulitzer. She rather despises being sent on community stories  (“my father” she says haughtily. ” never let us go to community centres”) .   Letitia Wright  plays Yvonne with almost cartoonishgly overdemanding gen-X arrogance,  and is naturally furious not to be on the big murder story.

        But at one of the despised community centres she finds a brilliant, multilingual, underrated social victim of her own generation. The girl Letitia  tells a harsh back-story,  and confides in her that with no other opportunities she’s in a violent girl-gang, who dress as men and may have shot the victim for a dare. Can Yvonne convince her boss Pat – who keeps whipping the adjectives out of her copy and demanding more professional facts   – and Neil. He  (in an understated, subtle performance by Ashley Thomas) never seems easy with her new story.  But there’s something there: enough to put Yvonne  in hospital at the rackety, shocking end of the first half.   

           Trevor Phillips, musing on this play, places it in a long tradition of American satire in which the cruel legacy of slavery makes white citizens too willing “to believe both the best and worst of our fellow countrymen” if they are black.  He also relates it to  the temptation to cultivate  a sense of reparation due,   exaggerating victimhood, diasadvantage and back-story brilliance and expecting  to be believed. So  this revival falls with dark, accidental aptness after the tragic end and unveiled deceptions of poor Jason Arday.  

        As this play goes on,  there are those who believe easily and guiltily – not least Wilf Scolding’s Jeff, senior on the newsdesk and adoring boyfriend of Yvonne – and those who devoutly want to.  No spoilers,  but as it unfolds – jerkily, often in a series of staccato, shouted one-liners from figures and projections at every corner of the stage, and some clear dream-moments  – expect some tremendous reckonings. And  some unreprintable,  now publicly unutterable, words from the lexicon of racial difference.  The audience gasps.  Toussaint’s Pat has a remarkable  speech about her former years of battle and campaigning,  and how the sisters like her were butts and victims of the angry bros but still marched for them next morning. When it comes to whether to let a big particular  truth out,  she feels that she’s owed the right not to… 

         It is not a perfect play,  the ending not entirely satisfying;  often the quest for authenticity blurs the narrative, (in the interval several were muttering in puzzlement).   But Toussaint is remarkable in her grand intensity,  and Wright manages to just about convince us of what Yvonne is hiding.  Both deserve more.

nationaltheatre.org.uk to 24 October

rating 3 

ABSURDITIES OF PASSION WIND UP A TORRID SUMMER

       This is by Turgenev,  revolutionary in his time (banned for a while),  now adapted  with mischief and appreciation by the late  Brian Friel and  directed – with even more mischief but a redeeming humanity –  by Lyndsey Turner.   Like the later Chekhov masterpieces it’s there to remind us that  a country estate household is both potential idyll and terrible trap:  Moscow, as ever,  mentioned in the background as both potential escape and source of emotionally troubling visitors.  Ah, we’ve all been there. 

      So Leslie Travers designs a great suspended cage of thick foliage, sometimes rising to reveal a garden or interior, sometimes falling balefully around them all. Before the start a woman’s face peers through the leaves at us,  hopeful or cautious. Its Sophie Okonedo, my favourite Cleopatra:  a strong -boned, defiantly handsome face, beauty past the prime but aristocracy unchallengeable, her moods and games dangerously expressive. This is Natalya, wife of Arkady and lady of the estate where he buffles around enthusing about weirs and winnowing machines.  It is her electrical personality  which will dominate the next two and a half wickedly enjoyable hours in old Russia. 

        She has her work cut out to dominate it , because for all Natalya’s Okonedo  magnetism this is a cast of twelve:  each  with distinct comedic chances and talents ,  each given at least one memorable two- or three-handed scene with the sort of strong-flavoured, never-wasted tragicomic intensity which makes you think “YES of course!  this is the way to write a play! Why doesn’t everybody?”     The very opening effortlessly shows us  Natalya’s boredom,  being read to by a family friend who adores her,  tje devoted Michel (Alister Petrie, memorably helpless, subtly drawn).   But behind them runs a card game evoking the whole big household and its frustrations:  her  bossy mother in law (Susan Brown, who should get a whole sitcom  to herself),  sullen companion Lizaveta fighting a  snuff habit, and Mark Hadfield as an outrageous comedy German professor forever afloat on malaprop mistranslations and rural outings  (“I go to apprehend fish”).  Add a simmering potential love affair between two servants,  and another between Dr Shpigelsky and the fed-up Lizaveta. Then feel for the  innocent foster-daughter Vera ( a very sweet, honestly played  Rachelle Diedericks) . And all the time be electrically  aware of  course the glamorous invader:  the unseen kid’s tutor, a boyishly Irish Aleksey (Patrick Gibson). 

      With him, naturally, Natalya falls in love,  deeply envious of his romping friendship with young Vera and therefore tempted by the embittered peasant-bred doctor to marry the kid off to Bolshitsov (another little comic masterpiece by Michael Hodgson, goodness they’re all having fun,  no boring walk-ons in this play).  

       Poor old Michel sees all this, being the least deluded of them all and knowing he’s stuck in friend-zone forever with Natalya.   Arkady sees hardly anything at all until late on, since the winnowing-machine is malfunctioning and takes up his attention.  Sometimes internal struggles are expressed by audible voices from within Natalya or Michel: filmically odd but effective. 

         It is all wickedly entertaining (sometimes verging on Jilly Cooper for social observation and inappropriate desires),  and played beautifully,  broad helpless audience laughs alternating with real sympathy (“Am I unhinged?” cries Okonedo more than once) . There’s a real kite.  And every shade of human love:  erotic or familial,  habitual and tolerant, dominating and manipulative,  irrational and gloriously   transformative,  discreditable, from the tutor starstruck bonkers.  And, from  the doctor to the snuff-sniffing spinster Lizaveta,  an excellent down-to-earth growl about sometimes just making the best of it all , settling for a “bitter angry crawling peasant” rather than a bossy madam.   Glorious. Get in! 

donmarwarehouse.com  to 4 October

rating 5

THEY’RE BACK. SO AM I.

Well, you know by now how it is with me and Mischief Theatre.  All the way from 2013’s first west end outing to the new Thespians (https://theatrecat.com/2026/05/14/thespians-mercury-colchester-and-touring/) . I am a devotee.  To borrow a trope from espionage-fiction ,  I am but a fluffy white cat lying devotedly on their Blofeld lap.

         For a full and OTT rave in detail about this 2025 manifestation of Mischief Theatre I refer you down the scroll:  https://theatrecat.com/2025/05/14/the-comedy-about-spies/  . This offers my own terrible jokes and some of theirs. 

       But the show was worth revisiting, literally and criticslly, as all excellent theatre always is.  Besides, a year on and the far side of alternate casts, I was curious as to how the early Mischief Theatre founders would feel about returning to the core of this blissfully ridiculous show a year on.  Might they be…a bit tired, a bit jaded?     The company is, after all internationally successful now, and its leaders must be too grand to be in urgent need of  6 shows a week with fast-patter,  pratfalls,  and the trademark physical peril of Mischief  stunts.  Or maybe the jokes might sour a bit in these Putinesque days? (it is set in the 1950s cold war era of Bond and Smiley) 

      Well, not a bit of it.  Mischief haven’t tired us, or themselves.  It is clear that writer Henry Lewis still enters with glee the role of hopeless yet pompous old-thesp Douglas Woodbead, trying to audition for James Bond but falling out of windows backwards, half-dangling through a broken floor in the hotel set,  and suffering a serious grapple on the rooftop. Clear too that the other Henry, co-author Shields, is content to return to the role of hapless and much-abused Bernard;  that NAncy Zamit is personally nourished by entering the role of CIA-Janet,  domineering mother of another founder Dave Hearn, and that Chris Leask has no reluctance to return to the role of Ivanov the spy, who struggles so bitterly with his cover story as a spleen-consultant raised in the Channel Isles. 

     Greg Tannahill, another veteran of Mischief, is not only the hotel proprietor but fight-director and captain; and believe me,  if these people are to survive the run,  razor-sharp fight direction is their only chance.

      So I just wanted to refer you back to my five-star review last year – here it is again – https://theatrecat.com/2025/05/14/the-comedy-about-spies/ . But also to go again and pay them , and new recruit Bryony Corrigan, a fresh tribute because they really are national treasures, and do glory to LAMDA where they first met.  And astonishingly, though I had retained all year a vivid memory picture of the Battenberg-cake hotel rooms set and of Lewis trapped in a washing machine,  I had entirely forgotten the thrill of the lift-shaft scene,  and the brilliance of the fight-and-freeze lighting in the rooftop confrontation. Bravissimo!

www.lwtheatres.co.uk.  to. 19. September

Or mischiefcomedy.com 

WHEN THE SAGE OF SCARBOROUGH SAW THROUGH THE SWINGING ‘SIXTIES

      1969: nearly half a century ago, and this was Alan Ayckbourn’s breakthrough.   Philip Breen’s direction respects the author’s taste for in-the-round production (which the Old Vic can do, since Spacey insisted on that reinvention).   It achieves the famous immersion without loss (especially since Roger Allam can act expressively with his shoulderblades even if you’re sitting ten feet away behind him).  It  also beautifully respects both the period and the middle-age  tastes of the older couple,  Allam;s Frank and Dorothy Atkinson’s Fiona: there are  a few bars of Sarstedt and Elvis between scenes,  and a prim tea-tray and madam’s lounging pyjamas (Atkinson is the perfect ‘60s wife, her wardrobe pleasingly hilarious throughout, especially the final dirndl). 

         The younger pair, Bob and Teresa, have a nicely messier living-room,  though of course in the clever, tricksy Ayckbourn convention both are the same space,  the pairs passing one another unseen like ghosts.   And the extraordinary dinner-party scene,  two separate events staged simultaneously,  has the tables set crosswise:  so Fiona’s more decorous pass-ag hospitality runs simultaneous, alternate lines even,  with the later gathering  which ends in soup-flinging chaos.   That all this timeshift and omnipresence is perfectly clear even to first-time audiences is almost the most remarkable thing about Sir Alan’s contrivance.

          Anyway, it’s glorious.  I sneaked into a matinee preview, without a press ticket, but all six players were perfectly attuned to every absurdity and farcical moment.   From the opening entry of Frank, a lumbering Roger Allam in running shorts preparing to skip and knees-bend,  the struggle of flawed and confused humanity is all there.  Old Frank is a bit pompous, a bit of a gull,  but Allam gives him decency and puzzled innocent dignity:  Fiona was out till the small hours and left him to drink his surprise anniversary bottle of wine alone. 

    In the other living room Bob – Fiona’s adulterous paranour – is less admirable and far from innocent,  enraging and belittling his wife Teresa.  Rowan Polonski catches Bob’s yobbish sexiness bang-on:  as the story moves complicatedly on, he evokes a genuine nastiness,  the darkness only compensated for by the steel in  Ayesha Antoine as his resentful homebody  wife (it’s  fascinating to be back in the age of  non-earning tradwives:  pure nostalgia).  The sextet is completed – still with pin-sharp casting – by Adam Gillen as the nerdy  Featherstone and a wonderfully mouselike Laura Elsworthy as his wife:  innocents used as inefficient alibis by the misbehaving Fiona and Bob.

      It’s a classic play, but no spoilers.  Say only that it’s delivered with perfectionist energy and the streak of sad humanity behind the jokes that is a perennial mark of Ayckbourn.  Gillen and Elsworthy,  a shade of middleclass below Frank and Fiona and knowing it, are given little but helpless bewilderment in the first half, but  each rise to glory in the second. He funs furious with a mole-wrench, as outraged nerds always might. She – Elsworthy giving poor Mary a delicate ferocity –  has three remarkable moments as a mouse that suddenly, unpredictably yet inevitably, roars. Perfect. All the way to the cheese.  

oldvictheatre.com.  to. 19 September

A LEGEND REBORN

      On a sweltering opening night under the trees, what more can you ask than fresh life and passion flung into a famous show which had become, frankly,   a bit of an eye-roll?   And suddenly to find that it’s a 19-year-old understudy playing the crucial leading-lady role and doing the big (and often hackneyed) number Memories with such intensity, soaring purity and breaking emotion that a reputation is made while you watch.  It was a terrific night for Taziva-Faye Katsande, and us.   And we got a great deal else from director-choreographer Drew McOnie’s vigorous, eerily beautiful revival.

          I last saw CATS at the end of it’s 21-year London run,  still with the Gillian Lynne choreography and Nunn’s determination to have the cats roaming the stalls.   It felt, somehow,  wincingly tired despite the familiar scatter of memorable numbers: hard to believe that it won an Oscar and a Tony and kicked off the global-British-musical phenomenon.  Some songs were good, but who cared any more? Then  came the  creepy horror of the 2019 film with its illjudged digital abuse of a human cast: wittily, the composer himself took to claiming  “Cats movie” to airline officials as the explanation of why he needed an emotional support puppy.  

      But Drew McOnie, dancer-choreographer  as well as director, was in Cats years ago and loves it.  So he decided,  as leader of the Open Air Theatre, to make it anew. His passion shows, and pays off.  I have loved the TS Eliot Practical Cats poems since nursery (and was intrigued at the way fragments of the Four Quartets and Preludes got snuck in alongside their whimsy) . But the sketchy plot about cats choosing who gets reborn  wasn’t ever much to my taste.  I wasn’t all that optimistic,   but McOnie has done something properly beautiful. 

       It really is: sung-through, danced-through with frenetic energy and sharp physical wit, under and on a Sami Fendall curving set around a great moving moon, with fabulous costumes (non-furry but inventively catsuited, free and fine and varied as street-cats themselves) .  Any old weariness is gone. The first half feels almost like a meditation, a choreo-poem as McOnie puts it;  the vast Jellicle-cat ensemble (not furry, but in ingeniously beautiful stretch catsuits of pronounced indiviual charater) surge around exuberant. They are gangs and loners, feral and wild, striding, leaping, bending, hissing,  moving in eerie unity for a moment then suddenly ragged individuals on the prowl.  It’s mesmerizing.  Gradually characters emerge: Jaydon Vijn a rocking tomcat Rum Tum Tugger spitting rebellion in leather and fringes, Charlotte Riby a Gumbie Cat of dignity, Elliott Broadfoot in spats and white gloves a broad smug grandee Bustopher Jones; Katsande’s Grizabella’s  lonely, silvery figure drifting through the chaos.   Macavity cartwheels crazily, celebrating depravity and battered Old Deuteronomy gives  a gentler moment,  rising to a moving chorale in the smoke as the  wise ancient stoops and blesses. 

    It works because it’s not just jolly pop-rock dance: McOnie masters the emotional depths of choreography,  understands the expressions melancholy and hopeful that a body can show,   and as cats so eloquently do but we not often enough after infancy. At three points in the show there is a moment when the whole huge cast lean upon one another in a long row,  suddenly saying something about human community which took my breath away.   

       I felt for a while that the first half was lacking in big dramatic moments – it really isn’t much of a plot – but the second, 50-minute part was breathtaking, rich in character and story.  Gary Wilmot in massive patchwork robe is wonderful as Gus the Theatre Cat,  reminiscing about past glories and the way they don’t train kittens any more, perfectly delivering the Eliot wit ( I really do want the part taken over for a night by Ian McKellen.  Or him to do it as a solo).   The saga of Growltiger and the Siamese pirates sees proper sails appear, and junk-sail banners, and a grand fight:  it’s directed with pin-sharp wit and detail.   Skimbleshanks has a proper train,  Jet Yau’s Mistoffelees is a street-dance phenomenon,   and Macavity sets a ring of fire round the stage.  

        But again,  one of those sudden movingly beautiful moments of a long , leaning line of unity: cats, telling us much we need to know about being human. Lovely.  

openairtheatre.com. to 19 September 

but a fifth one for choreography….

SHAKESPEARE: OUTDOOR, OUTRAGEOUS AND OPEN-HEARTED

  Start by knowing that this is a bangingly entertaining evening out under the Suffolk skies, with ragamuffin costumes and lovely ramshackle beach-huts under the great chestnut tree.  Red Rose Chain has been doing outdoor productions for years, and their venue ever has been,  in recent years, this field at the Anglo-Saxon ship site, well supported by the National Trust.  The summer show’s  tradition, which Shakespeare would probably approve, involves a good deal of clowning and audience-teasing, music-hall or panto moments combined with a real Shakespearianist ability not only to treat the poetry with respect, but to ease down  to poignant feeling when – between the larks and misunderstandings – real human loves and fears are played out.   

      Those who follow this extraordinary little company and deeply mourn its founder – Jo Carrick died this year –  will rejoice as I do at the way  David Newborn and Katy Latham chose, in her memory, to bring back Jo’s own rampaging production of Twelfth Night, complete with her songs and treatments. And, let me just mention,  the uniquely ground-breaking casting of  Antonio,  rescuer and devoted friend of shipwrecked Sebastian.  Here, Antonio is a puppet dog: large, dishevelled and hairy, designed by Maia Kirkman-Richards and operated by various of the seven human cast depending what’s going on (this is a tight, neat production with some good doubling (Orsino and Aguecheek,  Maria and Sebastian).  

      There is also joy for regular aficionados of the group in seeing last year’s Hamlet now in a garish full-body bumblebee-striped onesie as the deluded Malvolio. This is  Vincent Moisy ( also memorable as the Witchfinder-General in Ipswich, London and Broadway).   His is  a lovely interpretation of the haughty major-domo in Olivia’s household: very selfconsciously officer-class at first,  dealing fiercely with  Emily Jane Kerr’s diminutive drunkard Sir Toby and Darren Latham’s pleasingly OTT camp Aguecheek.   His outraged cries of  “Sir Tob-eh!” is masterly.  But when he has been deceived that Olivia loves him and will make him her lord,  there’s a brief, properly touching,  moment as he wonderingly says “I thank my stars I am..happy!”.  He never has been, poor Malvolio. Always played the hopeful Jeeves, always uncertain beneath it.  

      Feste , the revellers and Maria hide beautifully behind the lower branches of the great tree, delighted at his foolish credulity over the fake-news letter.   But in the second half  Malvolio’s  torment  by this gang is genuinely nasty, more so in the growing dusk as the tree becomes spooky, full of danger; the drum-banging , shouting, accusing campaign of the joke that goes too far is  properly horrid,  as it should be.  Alex Murray’s Feste,  who spends much of the show winding up the audience to the correct level of panto frenzy ,  also has a good moment of reality when he tries to deny  it all to his outraged mistress. 

       And so it all resolves, as the old tale has these four centuries, with the absurdity of errors and the relief of truthful love. And, let me say, some impressive fights.  This young company  (Ryan Penny organizes the mayhem) always seem well up for a bit of wild brave physicality.  Just as – under Jo Carrick’s insistence for years working together  – they are strongly audible:  projecting properly and intelligibly,  not needing to be miked as so many outdoor shows now are. 

       Red Rose Chain dedicated this production to its lost leader. And she would be proud of them.

www.redrosechain.com   to 22 Aug

rating four

   THE SEASON BEGINS!

  Not doing formal mouse-rate reviews of these, but for local eyes and visitors it’s worth nipping through the ones I can get to   – this one is around all week, before moving on to Southwold and I can report that director Charlotte Parry and cast do old Oscar proud.  Respectfully, and Mark Sterling’s design is beautiful, economical and sleek as Wilde would want.  

       The only eyebrow-raiser is, I suppose,  the genderswitch of the manservants, Lane in the city and Merriman in the country: Megan Sharman plays both as a Sloaniely elegant, if slightly improbable, female senior servant in 1920s cocktail-trousers .  Fair enough , Algernon might have been a trendsetter.   And it’s the only improbability: everyone else is just-so.The young quartet are fun all the way,  hugely active (the physical direction is splendid, mobile and free and funny: some productions are so overwhelmed byt he language they never remember how young these larky creatures are).  

Will Howard’s Algernon is  fast-moving and slick, Joe McArdle the slightly slower Worthing (especially when attempting dignity),  Kate Hunter beautifully upmarket as Gwendolen and Charlie Cameron edibly sweet and huge-eyed as Cecily.    The elders,  Michael Shaw’s senatorial Chasuble and Annie Miles Prism, are what they should be.  

    But you need to know about Lady Bracknell?  Naturally.  As an experienced Bracknell-watcher for some sixty years I can assure you that Nicola Sanderson is just what you want:  an immense presence, dour in determination, implacable in authority,  a walking monolith of wealth and hauteur.   And when it comes to “a handbag!” she avoids the traditional Edith Evans roar,  just murmurs it amazedly, and keeps the shocked fury quietly seething until moments later it erupts in a cry of THE LINE IS IMMATERIAL!

       Just what you need.   It’s a lovely evening, two sharp hours with interval, and it’ll be nice to see McArdle again next in Show and Tell…

all bookings www.act.co.uk  and 01728 343344

TROUBLED HEARTS AND TORCH SONGS 

   When someone pops a sticker on your cameraphone at the door it generally means a performer is going to get their kit off, repeatedly.    Not in this caseI am relieved to say, though this 90-minute chamber musical does have one late and I suppose spoilable coup de théatre.  And the first excitement is the seats: if there’s one thing the dear Menier’s usual benches are not, it’s an acreage of  comfy pink plush. But for  Mark Sonnenblick and David Cromer’s show there it is:  a few of the audience are sitting  at cabaret tables below, the rest of us  are tiered above, on the plush, between moody little shaded lights. Shoulda brought a Martini. 

       For we are in a basement back-room jazz club in Greenwich Village NY, early 1960’s. The last generation of melancholy, yearning torch-songs are struggling on against the jolly simplicities of rock ‘n roll (in one lovely line, a hero scoffs  that “I wanna hold your hand” is not a song for grown ups but a kidergarten rhyme.   Here, the mood is adult, Sinatra-mafiosa, bruised and melancholy with impossible loves. 

        Our narrator is Ben Platt as the ebulliently showbiz Trevor, hosting apparently a cabaret memorial to Arthur Brightman, a songwriter to whom he was muse and lover in their twenties. He tells the tale, with Sonnenblick’s original songs in a Gershwyn or Porter American Songbook pastiche style. Some are brilliant: “The mercy of love”  and “The bells keep ringing” both sound like originals one had temporarily forgotten.   Trevor’s storytelling is   assisted by the more sober figure of Gregor Milne at the piano as Arthur himself : they are improvising , composing together, gradually expressing the progress of their early relationship and commitment to one another  through  the numbers.     And – this is the heart of the tension  – at a time when such love was still illegal, its expression confined to dark late night shows in oft- raided dives like the Never Get. 

         At first I was not much taken by the figure of Trevor, cocky and camp and a bit too  self-assured as a singer (that becomes important later). But the men’s situation fascinates, draws you in; they are both artists with ambition and a need for expression,  and lovers forbidden to express what they are.    “We were the biggest show that didn’t exist” says Trevor.    When you remember how many gay songwriters  and artistes have resignedly changed the pronouns to fit the hetero world, that stings. When Arthur starts to make good, their best song goes to Peggy Lee. 

       Trevor is up for self- assertion , as the age of gay marches and demands approaches. There’s a beautifully funny song about being arrested in a raid and fancying the cop “The kinda joy I hadn’t felt in ages, a pretty boy – on City wages!”.   He rejoices in the idea that “my song is a little too loud, my song doesn’t blend with the crowd”.  

       But Arthur is a quieter artist,  doesn’t want to be an outlaw, utterly despises the “hippies and druggies” who line up for the cause and are sometimes overenthusiastic in their cabarets.  “I am not someone who deliberately provokes law enforcement!” he yells once.  Now that is  beautifully topical at a time when many sober gay and lesbian voices dislike and resent the aggressive violence of trans campaigns.   

      The story builds, the songs throb emotion, crystallize deep feeling;  Trevor never changes.   But Arthur’s talent is real ,not just performative. If Columbia and the mainstream draw him away, what will become of Trevor?    By the last ten minutes you really, really mind.  Platt is not on the very top level as a singer, but as an actor he delivers a great deal. So does Milne.   And someone else,  which might explain the reason for the phone-sticker.  Bravo. 

menierchocolatefactory.com  to 12 September

rating 4 

FLOWERS, PHONETICS, PHABULOUS

     Always a joy to have them back: the phoneticist and the flower-girl, born to enthral one another and us.  Cheers first for Keziah Ibe as Eliza, fresh out of Arts Ed on a first professional job.  She eooowessand garrrrns at the start with confidently alarming shrillness,  then suddenly  – as the opera-crowd leave the stage to Covent garden workers round a brazier  –  sings “Wouldn’t it be loverly” at first merrily then downstage with a brief wistful sadness, then again cosily with the gang.  Ibe from the first sinks deeply into character, face, voice, and body:  defying Higgins with brave frightened brio then winning every heart in the house when suddenly the knack comes to her,  and the sweetness of her voice breaks through with “I could have danced all night!”.   And you believe, and foresee,  that the infuriating educator who showed her this power is the only man for her.  

        Hadley Fraser,  playing Higgins to the OCD maximum, was to me an absolute joy:   but then I am a sucker for anyone who can deliver complex Lerner-and-Loewe numbers while running at speed round a revolving living-room and shinning up a high library ladder in a rage about woman.  I loved his wild physicality,  including the theatrical cringing or rejoicing in the corner during Eliza’s eventual victories: he quite drove away memories of Rex Harrison in the film.  My companion  I should confess was less enthusiastic, yearning I think for more professorial dignity. But I thought him an absolute blast.  So is Gary Milner’s spirited Doolittle, though it feels odder these days to laugh merrily at his willingness to sell his daughter to a random toff for a fiver.  

    But overall the joy of Rachel Kavanaugh’s production is its fabulous liveliness: a relief after the oddly flat feeling I had at her Barbican Top Hat.   Stephen Mear’s choreography contributes much to its delight,  and   Peter McKintosh’s elegant, detailed but rapidly fluid set design carries the story through its three hours always bracingly. The costumes from East End to Ascot are magnificent:  honour to Poppy Hall’s wardrobe team for flawless high-speed changes for the nimble ensemble.  And almost best of all ,  the older women are wonderful.  Finty Williams is Mrs Pearce the sensible housekeeper,  reasoning with the appalling Higgins at the start and eventually, fondly,  assistd by her team of eye-rolling maids helping him into his shirt and tie in his thwarted fury at Eliza’s flight.   Rachel Stanley’s Mrs Eynsford-Hill is perfect,  all hat and good manners,  and even finer  is Belinda Lang as Higgins’ own exasperated matriarch.   When in the latter scenes Higgins and Eliza properly confront,  the glint in the mother’s  eye at the stage’s edge lights up the night.  Luverly!

cft.org.uk  to 5 sept

rating 5 

extra mouse for set/costume…

AMBITION, LOVE AND CHOICES IN AN OLDER IRELAND

       Jonathan Bank’s Mint Theater company lately gave us an arresting revival of Miles Malleson’s Yours Unfaithfully in this theatre,  and here he is reinvigorating another 1930s play, this time  by the near-forgotten Irish playwright Teresa Deevy,  From the title I vaguely expected a familiar story of wifely submission or rebellion, with the local crone andMother Church giving trouble on the sidelines.    Actually Deevy’s story is more interesting than that,   sparkingly youthful,  and  until the final moment (no spoilers)  Fiach Kunz’s dashing James Whelan has  as yet  married nobody.  

    He’s made a grand life for himself, though:  we meet him first by report,  in a short first-act scene where amiable Tom (Patrick McBrearty) and Bill McGafferty (Darragh Feehely) are joshing with pretty Nan Bowers (Cliona Flynn).   We get a sense of the town and its rumours:  Bill is off to a new job,  the others impressed that Whelan got the Dublin job several of them had been in for.  When our hero himself appears it is to swagger a bit, cocky and confident, pretty sure that though he hasn’t been accepted yet,  Nan will wait for him.  But she has an eye for another lad, Jack.    In the background is the sensible, less glamorous Kate (Eavan Gaffney). She’s everyone’s friend, and Whelan as he leaves has brought a bag of marbles  for her little brother Willy – known as Apollo.  

    It’s cosy,  the group”s natures well laid out in preparaation  for the longer, sharper life after the interval.  Now, seven years on, we’re in the office of Whelan’s  “Silver WIngs Motor Services”, with Tom as one of his drivers,  a proudly  grown-up Will in the front office and a more assured Kate dropping in and out,  disapproving of a new wild card  in the form of  posher uppity Nora, who clearly wants to be wife-to-james-whelan.    He , though, is oddly awkward with her advances (“showing yourself in that cheap way”) and observes “”I never speak long with Nora than I feel myself disappointed”.  The language is lovely. 

   David Rawle’s Will too is a bit of a treat here:   a touch camp, a touch absurd.  Decent workaday Tom,  his sharp understanding  drawn in a few moments , is another.   And of course into the office comes Nan: in a  black shawl, widowed with a child, wanting a job.  Small touches, and fine acting, enable all the principals to have visibly aged in the seven years:  Nan tired and beaten,  Whelan tougher and harder, Tom more perceptive.     But old slights and old loves live on: as Whelan says , Nan has “the same soft look she always had.”.   

        The emotional undercurrents and doubts are beautifully, gently achieved by them all: when Whelan snaps “nothing torments me. I’m perfectly happy” or Willy suddenly rises to disrespect his boss over his behaviour, your belief is complete.     It had for a while has seemed  sentimentally clear what will – and should –  happen between  these still-young people,  but then Deevy gives us one extraordinary dramatic moment that capsizes everything.  So when another six months have passed before the final scene,  the resolution leaves you , as you always should be in a play or novel,  reflecting with some worry on their afterlives.  Bravo!

Jermynstreettheatre co.uk  to 25 July

rating four

SOLDIERING AND SACRIFICE

.  This is one of the RSC’s big hitters:  five stars everywhere ,and promoted more as comedy than the romantic-chivalric classic it is,   Rostand’s 19c tragic epic in hexamers,  set in Franco-Spanish wars of the 17c.   So,  having missed the press night of this adaptation (by Simon Evans and the poet Debris Stevenson),  I bought a proper ticket. Can’t miss  Adrian Lester, even with the famous Cyrano false nose – and it’s always good to check how these  acclaimed shows actually feel from the cheapest seats. 

         I can report that actually the sightlines are  fine , once the framing meta-theatrical horseplay  of side boxes and a theatre manager searching for Cyrano are past (all amusing enoigh).And it’s the RSC,  they are all beautifully audible. So sit anywhere.  Just do: for Adrian Lester is one of our great 21c theatrical giants, and holds the stage through  every scene, from first swagger and banter, through formidable depths of feeling, all the way to his last words. Epic indeed. 

        The bones of the  original story have been borrowed by countless rom-coms: Cyrano is a great warrior, great heart and poet,  but his ugly nose makes him feel unlovable by women.   But to help out young Christian (Levi Brown, a handsome hunk but no talker)  Cyrano writes beautiful letters on his bEhalf to Roxane (Susannah Fielding), who he of course also loves at a distance.   The very expression of his adoration is a balm to his spirit.  

        Lester is tremendous, selfconsciously self deprecating, bantering, agile in proper heroic style.  He even does the best stage cartwheel since Bonnie Langford in Paddington (or Haydn Gwynne in 9 to 5, I record these with respect).   He is elder- brotherly to Christian, mocks  his idle commanding officer,  stays silently dazzled by Roxanne but not about to show inmanly weakness.   Fielding’s Roxanne is far more than he original author ever made her: funny, active, strong willed, likeable.   There are laughs, and the staging has two good theatrical devices following  Cyrano. One is a comically insistent  small onstage band suddenly turning up at his entrances (his legend, as great warrior and poet) and the other a small child version of homself, in straw hat, an innocent who wanders through, shy but clear eyed , a heartbreaking presence in the battle scene later. 

         For it’s the second act that makes it (the first, to be honest, makes your mind wander a bit, and two separate couples near me actually decamped in the interval).    That’s their loss;  for now we see seriousness,  soldiers weary and hungry  under draped canvas,  Cyrano writing  what may be a final  letter because they are ordered  to draw lethal fire for strategic reasons and may die. “I cleave to the memories of landscape without enemies” sighs the heroic poet. 

        But  Roxanne and her companions arrive, boldly,  dressed as nuns with provisions. And what is gripping is the reaction of the others.  Roxanne says to Christian that his beautiful words “chased me”, inspiring her journey.  But when he realizes that Cyrano has gone on writing to her in his name, every single day – Christian is  furious that this poetic adoration drew her into danger, and even more furious that she loves not him as a man, but the beautiful soul of the writer.   The lovely irony is that like Cyrano, he dreams of being  loved for his real self not “stupid bloody letters!”.   So what Cyrano thought of as being selfless, Christian sees as selfish. 

     The guns boom; Christian’s death in his friend’s arms devastates them all.  Roxanne is never disabused of her adoration for the lost lover who she thought wrote the letters.  Or not until the very, very end;  the final twenty minutes between her and Cyrano  in a monastery garden years later are memorable;  you feel the audience’s emotion breathing around you.  So, having wondered a bit about all the fuss until the interval,  you wonder no more. 

Delfontmackintosh.co.uk, to 5 sept

rating five 

1939:  TWO NATIONS, TWO MEN, TWO WIVES  

     It has a familiar sitcom structure: a couple whose marriage is not what it respectably seems, making anxious preparations for weekend guests.  Said guests  unaware of bohemian structures beneath  the necessary decorum of welcome.  Awkwardness over drinks, a mother-in-law mentioning the elephant in the room a bit too early.  Guests conferring in the bedroom,  mistrustful unease over a social event,   separate confidences between the two men and two women.   There’s even a scandalous bedroom discovery and, at one point, a dropped tray.

          But Richard Nelson’s is a beguiling history-play,   set in 1939 on the eve of WW2 and inspired by a correspondence found 25 years ago between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his confidant and probable mistress, Daisy Suckley (delicately played by Rachel Pickup).  It imagines  the moment when FDR invited George VI and his queen to round off their Canadian tour and brief visit to the World’s Fair by visiting him in the countryside:   at his mother’s house by the Hudson.  

      It was the first visit of a British monarch since the American revolution,  and dthe aim was for intimate informality: the invitation letter is fascinatingly reproduced in the programme.  The King, pitchforked into the job after the abdication three years before snf, stammeringly shy, hopes for US support against Hitler. Both men are aware that  many of the American people consider this distant war to be none of  their business, nor – as FDR bluntly says – will they necessarily be on the British side once  they decide it is.   Anyway  as the President unkindly remarks,  “you already owe us a fortune from the last war”.

         An added complication is Eleanor, by this time highly independent and influential, willing to play the wife role despite having decamped to live elsewhere (among furniture-makers who, as shocked Elizabeth says “are women who like each other”).  She has organized an entertainment with native-American drums and beer and a hot dog picnic. Around this shockingly informality revolve a lot of the anxious diplomatic conversations and much of young Queen Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon’s worries about royal dignity.  Will the King’s eventual beer and hot dog (with mustard) seal the Special Relationship?   

        It’s history, and in the end it sort of did.  But Nelson’s interest is in the interlocking personalities of that moment: Robert Lindsay’s magnificent, battered, drily ironic President crippled with polio and  Andrew Havill’s anxious, shy, bravely benign King – “Bertie”,  ashamed of his stammer.   And the women:    Jemma Redgrave is the left-liberal, republically inclined and militantly determined Eleanor (so nice that it’s a Redgrave,: shades of Vanessa in her vigorous remarks about royalty being “like out of Grimm..they don’t mean anything” ).  As to Elizabeth, née Bowes-Lyon and later our Queen Mother,  Rebecca Night gives her a slightly stroppy anxiety.  This is maonly  for her gentle husband’s weakness.,  but  also doubts the good faith of  FDR and Eleanor:   there are magazines in her room mocking the absurd foreign visitors, notably her for not beeing chic like Wallis Simpson. Seeing the guest list names for the picnic she cries “German, Italian, they;re Irish, they’re Jewish, they hate us!”    Her final conversation with Eleanor and capitulation to  hot-dog diplomacy is beautifully done.  

      It all is.  One companion felt  Havill cast too old for Bertie (who was just over 40) but his depiction of that heroic, shy, fragile but determined King was for me something  too perfect to care about that. Your heart goes out to him.  Robert Lindsay’s battered, wily, decent silver-fox of a President is  equally fine, again probably cast too old,  but who cares:  he’s glorious,   judged to a hair. Late at night with the women out of hearing,  when he  tells Bertie his father would be proud of him..well, call me sentimental, but….

    So I loved it, both as entertainment (there are some shockingly good laughs) and as material for refletion on the interaction of personality , influence, image and hard history. Especially right now, with such a President , such a King,  such differently competitive dignities  and such an anxiety about whether wars on the European continent are strong, rich,  America’s “business”.  

hampsteadtheatre.com  to 15 July

rating   4

LAUGHING AT LIES

       It’s ten years since Florian Zeller’s elegantly embroidered  trompe l’oeil sex-comedy about two couples opened at the Menier under LIndsay Posner’s direction (it’s him again for this revival).   In summer 2016, we  swooned and five-starred it with delight,   revelling in sharply mischievous Gallic callousness; it coasted into the West End with an Olivier nomination. Christopher Hampton’s translation is perfect.    It’s simple enough to start with:  Michel is sleeping with his best friend Paul’s wife, lying constantly to his own wife Laurence,  who plainly sees through him while pretending not to.   He constantly talks with sympathy and devotion of how much he loves his friend Paul, including to Paul’s wife while they’re together.   Paul himself may or may not know what’s going on: the situation knots, unknots, and almost resolves: at various stages  two of the foursome seem to be the victims of it all, but are they?   

           The role of Michel needs blusterous comic talent,  which is supplied beautifully by Stephen Mangan.   He has wonderful lines from the start, in his hotel-room scene with  Sarah Hadland as his minxy but baffled companion in sin he protests  “people don’t go in for ethics any more”,   and explains that his cheating on Laurence is not the same as her cheating on Paul,  turning on a sixpence to an indignant “We’re both married. Especially you”.   Confronting his wife later when she makes it subtly clear she knows what he’s up to,  ramping up his main weapon of indignation again with wonderfully blokey “how dare you suggest” lines.   A central conviction, which to some extent they all share, is that to hide wounding truths is actually altruistic. 

     There’s are wonderful confrontations with his wife – Janie Dee a calm, adult Laurence – and  with Paul  (Ardal O”Hanlon, his deadpan quite remarkable).   One longs for Mangan’s Michel to be the loser in this game,  since he seems to have started it (or did he?) and as we finally leave them we hope that.  But Laurence is cleverer than she seemed and something else is in the air.  When MIchel asks petulantly  “what sort of play are we in, comedy or tragedy?”  there’s a whisper of a reminder that Zeller is the writer who brought us the poignant The FAther and The Mother.   

         But here it’s all sexual sophistication and merciless exposure of humanity’s lying ways and,  until a stunning final moment from one protagonist,  little space for compassion. So as I wrote last time “It zings, it turns on a sixpence, confuses, delights, prods pretentions”.  Yet it feels as if something, some different receptiveness and mood,  has changed in the decade since.   Maybe it’s to do with Brexit,  and new anxieties about Gallic sophistication.  Or maybe we all feel less safe in relationships, marriages, and indeed “truth” itself;    we have in this online age dined overmuch on lies and turnaround obfuscations that defend them.  So  we laugh at them, especially Mangan,  but wince too.    Newcomers to the play will love it,  but something’s changed. 

thetruthplay.com  to 12 September

rating 4

OL’ BLUE EYES, THE COMEBACK

       It’s one of the great showbiz comeback stories: how a tough Italian-American kid saw Bing Crosby in 1935 and had a dream;  rose in he 1940s to crazy fame, albums and films,  married his Nancy with the laughing face. But as decades rolled on he erred,   was dropped  by both film and music giants after upsetting American moralities with his affair with Ava Gardner and being suspected of Mafia links after going to Cuba with a childhood friend turned Mob. . He dumps Nancy, marries Ava but is abandoned by  her two years on.  Near broke for a spell,  Frankie fights his way back, wins an Oscar and  becomes a legend once again.

      Here’s a  man who faced scorn for being Eye-talian in his youth, who  messed up his marriage but adored his children, an emotional stormer who turned down work rather than sing numbers he didn’t “feel”.  There’s a really sharp, sensitive play in there, unwritten, which haunted my imagination all through this big,  blasting,  powerhouse show by Joe DiPietro and Kathleen Marshall (who does the terrible 1940s-50s choreography brilliantly,  bobbysoxers racing onstage at the start).  

       OK,  they did it their way :   a great 17-piece band and  number after number meshed into the plot even when you are pining for more dialogue, more pauses, more nuance.   Joel Harper-Jackson is a likeable star, not of course quite the Sinatra voice though  he makes a good try to convey the later, sensitive deepening and seriousness which  kept him at the top for my parents’ generation.    Set against the immense witchcraft-star power of Ana Villafane’s Ava Phoebe Panaretos is a convincingly wifely Nancy,  especially as she snaps that he’ll never be up there with Bing Crosby “if you keep going with dime-a-dozen women This too shall pass”.  Singing, she’s an unsubtle old-fashioned belter.

      Scenes are stolen a good few times by Frankie’s parents, especially `Jenna Russell as Dolly, and when she and Marty Maguire roar into their own “You make me feel so young” in the second half the first real cheer came from the big audience, especially the Americans around me.   There’s a particularly skilled ensemble – hard to believe there are only 17 including Swings – who they drop in and out of roles from Nat King Cole and Lana Turner to Dietrich and Gene Kelly (teaching Sinatra to dance, though we never get to see Harper-Jackson doing it).    Lee Zarrett is a lovely rueful presence as manager George Evans. 

       It moves fast, and ther are some funny sequences involving Hollywood bed-hopping and a few glorious lines, often from George.   The brief “My Way” is touchingly staged, and so is “One for my Baby”  in Sinatra’s hardes moments,  with the star suddenly, properly, seeming to feel it.   But too often it is, oddly,  the sung numbers which stall the show’s momentum. 

        Never mind.  It storms out with the compulsory Broadwayish standing ovation and a deafening  “New York, New York”. So  you leave feeling pretty good.    And, in my case, after being so much reminded of the kind of  my parents played and danced to in the 1950s,  I enjoyed the appositely retro  fact that the Aldwych has real brass stair-rods on the carpet on the way back out.  For some, the show will be a five.  For me,, not quite.  But it’ll be a treat for many.

sinatramusical.com   booking to February

rating three

BEAUTIFUL

     This, to me unexpectedly, was the most beautiful single hour in a  theatre yet.   Visually, musically, and in its majesty and depth of speech impossible to fault, it’s a little piece of perfection.  I came to hear Simon Russell Beale narrate,  from a chair , this long, wild, erotic and romantic poem about the goddess Venus and her pursuit of the mortal Adonis. I came too for the pleasure of seeing him directed with Greg Doran’s invariably thoughtful judgement of Shakespeare’s  clarity, pace and meaning.  I had vaguely heard that there was also  an elegant set and some puppets,  and Nick Lee with atmospheric guitar  for mood and period.  

         But I did not expect the power and small-scale grandeur of Robert Jones’ design – an intricate gilded and draped theatre frame, with shadow-puppetry and tiny figures deep behind drawing you into the mythical dream  as the first doves pull  Venus’ flying carriage through the blue distance.   And I certainly  had not appreciated in advance  the brilliance of five dark-costumed puppetteers,  who bringing startlingly downstage  and vivid the three-quarters lifesize puppets. Importunate goddess,  upright warrior, great stallion and reluctant mare, and ultimately the massive terror of the boar with bloodstained tusks.  Name the puppetteers, for this is a great and  strenuous art:   Steve Tiplady directs Bartolomeo Bartlini, Edie Edmundson, Rachel Leonard, Lee Maeda and Sarah Wright, 

       Russell Beale, of course, speaks the verse with gentle beauty and finely calculated wit – it is lovely to hear amid its stateliness odd phrases which feel almost modern, especially from Venus.    No line is wasted, no gesture missing or overdone.  Hard to say which moments thrilled most: sometimes amusingly, with the goddess’ brutal cougar-pouncing ,  twerking or lounging and  all too clear what she wants beyond mere kisses.  Relish  Adonis’ prim attempts to get upright again, every small move of head or arm evoking his overwhelmed reluctance .  

       Sometimes the thrill is the great stamping  galloping horses, equally expressive.  Sometimes verse and movement together create  real  psychological changes as striking as any human actor could express,  as Venus’  adoration becomes  frustration, victory  and beyond that  – as she begs him not to go boar-hunting –  the  timeless wifely terror. Once  a long deliberate pause, a tense moment before a new dawn, rises into  excitement and fear as the hounds bark. There is  an extraordinary coup de théatre as the whole proscenium becomes giant Death himself, clawed hands reaching out to alarm, and then weirdly and terrifyingly to excite the goddess.   You feel the audience around you draw breath, together. 

       Poetry, puppetry, and beyond it all the deep, deep timeless pity that love, in the end, often means conflict and always final grief.  “Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend… all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe”

        And so with the picking of the flower and the sad goddness’ dove-drawn chariot fleeing into darkness, a  last few notes resound and it’s over. One hour, flat, and  a lifetime worth living.   The Barbican, as I write, is sold out because it’s in the intimate little Pit.  You can still get in to the Oxford Playhouse.  It’ll be worth it.

Oxfordplayhouse.com. To Saturday. 

 .

WORTH SINGING ALONG TO?

     Ask ourselves in all honesty: did we  all schlepp out to Richmond  for press night because national-treasure Dame Maureen Lipman, at 80,   is doing eight show a week on tour before the West End, as doughty as any McKellen?  Or because it is good to see her onstage again  and in something lighter  after the haunting,  profound solo performance she gave us in  ROSE, as a Jewish woman sitting shiva for all the lost, including an Arab child killed “by my own blood”?   Or is it furious  solidarity,  after those dim antisemitic idiot protesters demonstrated against her very existence until she has to  hire security? 

          All very good reasons to hail this  undauntable , recklessly comedy-legged empress. Moreover,  this is a new play by Peter Quilter, who also wrote her the role of Florence Foster-Jenkins in GLORIOUS and promises to give her some dodgy-but-infections singing moments, only more in tune.  So yes, it was a bit of all that.  And Quilter’s a good name: his  End of the Rainbow is just being revived after its storming 2010 performance with Tracie Bennett (though this time, naturally, it’s a drag queen as Judy Garland).

        But in the end, I do not see how Quilter  deserved Maureen Lipman.  It is in some ways a great role for her:  an elderly eccentric with a spring of personal joy and irresponsible merriment,  loving bright colours,  prone to bursting into song anywhere she likes. At any hour. And volume. 

       It’s set in her cottage kitchen , where her brother Ronen (John Middleton), a sober solar-panel salesman,  tries to reorganize her and recruits a Czech housekeeper (Elizabeth Bower) to make sure she eats properly and tidies up.  Her preference is always to go out and about – though we never see this – because you meet “interesting people in restaurants who don’t always want to talk. So I waltz over merrily and chat away” .  She breaks into song often,   just because it’s in her head,   and is utterly uninhibited about time and place because “I want to try to spread joy”.   She is actually mentally sharp enough – the housekeeper’s mention of Brno has her talking Mozart,  and Lipman’s gift for  drop-dead irony, especially about her gloomy brother,  gets a good few solid laughs.  At one point, in an American football number, she succeeds in leading at least a third of the audience near me in a singalong.  Allegra has presence and she has nerve, and as she blithely says about her uncomfortable, shawl-draped chairs “style over substance, which is just as it should be”.  As for disruption  “We shouldn’t be scared of it.  Some do cocaine, I do cabaret”.  

          But the police come round  – Patrick Bailey as an improbably stolid rural cop who doesn’t mind sitting down for a cup of tea or bowl of Czech dumplings – but who eventually, after some 3 a.m. renderings of light opera have driven the neighbours craze,  hauls her off to the station; the final scene begins with a looming unseen basso-profundo judge condeming her to compulsory medication as prescribed.     But when it succeeds in flattening her even Ronen is dismayed , misses “all the chaos..you’re such a bright flame, that’s what everyone’s jealous of”.    

        It could have been interesting and convincing about dementia, socially unacceptable neurodiversity,  intolerance and overmedication and the way “unhappiness is the new normal” . It should have spoken more deftly on behalf of mavericks whose only concession to reproof is to “put on a very serious cardigan”.   And it really doesn’t .    Every decent line Allegra is given is nailed, spot-on, by Lipman – her timing as ever magnificent –  but there aren’t nearly enough of these sparks, and the other characters are oddly empty: light  sketches.  Some awful very old jokes around keeping a dead father’s ashes in cocoa-tins are dragged out for too long.  When Lipman does hit her moments,   physically dextrous in comedy as ever and  fearless in wild song,  the show rises up to meet her and make us  happy.  But in between these gaudy joyful tent-poles the structure sags dreadfully.  No show should need to hang on only by one performance.   Lipman deserves much, much better.  The woman can tiptoe through any number of tulips, but these are plastic.

allegraplay.com     to Saturday then touring Windsor, Glasgow, Bath, London to 8 Aug.

rating three

THE ELDERLY ENDGAME

      We are seated in a big arena, on three sides of a care-home sitting-room,  clearly secure – staff tap door keypads –  designed for the containment of dementia cases..  Two kindly careworkersare introducing Linda Bassett’s Joan, a well- spoken new resident dropped off by her anxious, nervy widowed daughter Lynn  (Rosie Cavaliero) with her teenage sons. The trouble is that Joan does now know, or will not believe, that she is staying. She thinks it’s convalescence after a fall, and is not pleased . 

       Gradually author-director Alexander Zeldin shows us her companions and how their mental planets are varied, changeable and sometimes eventful, especially that of physically fittest and youngest, the roaming Simone (Hayley Carmichael, evoking a damaged being , arrestingly out of control). She livens things up no end with sexual dives at the visiting teenage boys and reminiscnces about lovers but having  “no littluns, they all fell out”.  Agnes (Ann Mitchell) talks vaguely of an otter colony she values.  

      So we are ,for just over two unbroken hours,  in this company, watching Joan’s confusion and her gradual erosion into helplessness after  moments of appearing to be a more solid piece of articulate commonsense than the daughter who can’t look after her at home  (we get too little detail of why, which I suspect is to universalize the social-comment aims of the play. Certainly that is made sharply clear in a late moment,   when Joan has fallen out of bed and Lynn is kvetching about paying for  poor “service”. The senior nurse snaps that it’s her who is looking after Lynn’s mother…

      There are some excellent lines and moments, as when Joan, clutching  for memories and associations, says she feels like a dog under the table hoping to catch scraps.  Bassett  is excellent throughout, and there is a proper moment of emotional drama when one of the two male patients, John  (a magnificent Richard Durden)    moves her heart with  a sudden song and then, tearing his shirt off ,  hugs her as he remembers a long gone wife.  The days roll on; there are seceral deaths, in which characters – this is very effective – walk off to join us quietly in the audience.   There is a long, long, graphically harsh-breathing deathbed for Joan,   and then a coda with the family back home. And a small odd surprise,  calculatedly redemptive.    Though one’s sympathy by now lies entirely with the two  poor lads who consider their mother Lynn “just mental”.

            It’s taxing, well acted, sad.    Frustrating, too,  not least if you’re not in the raked seating : directors should remember that if their characters are mostly seated or wheelchair-bound that means you crane and shift  desperately in order to see much. Nor does Zeldin = acknowledge much need to be a storyteller, moving things on:  frankly he makes most Ibsen  plays look like seat-of-the-pants  thrillers.

        I had bought a late matinée ticket out of fascination for him and his many enthusiasts after being lukewarm about The Confessions and Love (both NT) .  I should have remembered the particular Zeldin rules:  a demand for patience, attention to every nuance and long, long silence, painful compassion towards humanity and never succumbing to exasperation, even when the fourth or fifth scene change involves a blackout and a loud portentously doomy  musical chord.    That’s just the rulebook  for the audience: his onstage  characters on the other hand  are allowed any amount of irrationality, temper, basic emotional  incompetence and self-pity.  Nothing is their fault, and if you dare mutter otherwise you’re a  kind of judgmental monster.  The kind who elsewhere might rudely consider the mother  in Inter Alia to be a bit of a div.

        In other words, Zeldin is a very modern writer.  . 

youngvic.org  to 11 July

rating 3

A SWELL PARTY, EVENTUALLY

 We “Call the Midwife” fans all suspected there was more pizazz to nurse Trixie than bicycling round Poplar in the 1950s,  and indeed Helen George always was a dead classy, RAM- trained musical-theatre professional. In the vast dour Barbican hall  she’s a golden breeze of a presence, as happy in showy absurdities as in the famous plaintive beauty of “True Love” . A number which, by the way,  she delivers not in a boat like Grace Kelly but sprawled with Julian Ovenden’s Dexter on the cold marble floor  of the oddly bleak mansion set.  But fair enough:  Helen George is more of a Marilyn Monroe than an ic-queen Kelly.  Her seductiveness is all warm mischief and rueful wit., her acting full of truth: after her magnificent drunken scene with Freddie Fox’s Mike she sings Porter’s fabulous lines about “wrong time, wrong place, wrong face” and  there’s a fine, sad stillness there alongside the nonsense. 

      This is, despite the wonderfulness of any Cole Porter musical, quite the silliest  show of musicals’  golden age: Arthur Kopit’s book a featherlight romcom about the Newport yachting rich.    Headstrong Tracy on her second wedding-day gradually develops the wit to ditch George the accountant and return to her yacht-obsessed ex Dex, the realization assisted by getting hammered and swimming naked with Mike the gatecrashing reporter.  Who, of course, is himself in absurd denial of his love for his photographer Liz (Carly Mercedes Dyer, the other rather fabulous diva of the night).    The show’s last big outing was Kevin Spacey’s last hurrah at the old Vic ten years ago under Maria Friedman, and I remember that as really being a swell party,  revelling in the screwball-comedy gags and hurling everything at the big numbers.

     So I was a bit worried in the first half at how primly straight this felt,  sometimes the characters looking dwarfed by the great looming mansion set and only sporadic moments of fine energy.  Notably Freddie and Liz doing Who Wants to be a Millionaire around the great gifts-table get things moving for a few minutes,   and, finally Nigel Lindsay’s Uncle Willie leads Now You Have Jazz with a proper big wild chorus moment.  Overall, though, the first half has a weird lack of atmosphere despite a fine cast,  somehow flattening even the best of the screwball-comedy gags (“women like that bore the pants off me” “So that’s how it’s done!”). 

             It brightens wonderfully in the second half,  from the moment Mike and Dexter let rip with “Did you Evah!” (Freddie Fox, physically witty and airily tuneful,  must do more musicals. Soon. Please!).   It picks up pace,  thundering and dancing through the Cole Porter songbook as they all get drunker,  giving the big Let’s Misbehave number a wilder, rougher energy and, vitally, letting Fox’s comic talent and Helen George’s subtle, mischievous, honest characterization shine through all the nonsense.   It’s as if the whole show suddenly got younger after feeling creakingly middle-aged for the first hour.  What a relief.  

     Tracy’s priceless “aren’t men great!”is a classic moment to take home, and so is a nice sour reprise of Millionaire by the weary domestic staff.    Felicity Kendall meanwhile deploys all her growly-pussycat national-treasuredom as she completes her marital reconciliation with a mournful, tuneful Malcolm Sinclair as Seth,.  And poor George – David Seadon Young bravely playing that patron saint of geeks – leaves the stage . With an authorly contempt which usefully reminds you how brutal those old golden-age musical conventions were: any modern romcom author would have chucked the poor sap  a consolation-prize romance with one of the housemaids.   

barbican.org.uk to 11 July

Rating 4

HOME AGAIN IN TRIUMPH

     Can it really be nearly twenty years since this show about WW1 galloped into world theatre history on this stage?   A maverick experiment with two life-size puppet horses (and let’s not forget the goose) it has been seen by nine million people in a dozen countries and several languages, including Mandarin.  Its star Joey met Queen Elizabeth more than once.  It released the long-neglected idea of puppetry back into the general idea of British theatre, from large shows like Life of Pi and The BFG to a new confidence in the skill which can suddenly make a scarf become a fox, or a doll a living child.    The story is often told (beautifully in Nicholas Hytner’s BALANCING ACTS)  of how the project began :  Tom Morris’ fascination with the Handspring company in South Africa , family stories, , a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo.   Hytner’s rare mischievous bravura and his – subsidised – ability to let it grow from actors-with-boxes on their heads to a full commission of puppets from Handspring.  Then came  meticulously sensitive choreography of the horses’ movemet,  and original direction by Morris and Marianne Elliott. 

          So much for history: how does this old show feel, now?  Is brilliant, skilled, extraordinary athletic and taxing puppetry by  three people inside each horse enough to move and overwhelm us in the age of AI and deepfake?  Turns out ,yes it is:  when Joey and Topthorne end the first half with a great leap over the terrible front line wire there was an immense shudder across the great room.    But has the production been diluted by time and fashion, gussied-up for a fretful new generation?  Absolutely not: Morris directs,  and it still credits Toby Sedgwick’s choreography, Christopher Shutt’s sound ,Adrian Sutton’s music and the brilliant Rae Smith set.  She frames the whole story in drawings, as if from a torn forgotten scrapbook, of Albert’s home village and then the fields and horrors of France. Animation complements but never overwhelms the solid reality of horses and people. 

    What I had forgotten, though, is the hugeness of spectacle: the moment when the foal Joey becomes adult,  the galloping duel between him and the army horse Topthorne, quickly ending in tolerant fraternity with a bitter irony when humans are taking  them into savage cold-steel warfare.  I forgot about that terrifying spring for the wire into blackout,  and the vast terror of the onstage (puppeteered) tank.  Even  the sketch-animation above becoming suddenly a vast troopship overwhelmed me for a momet=nt.  Only a ship:  but by this time we are so weirdly involved with the  innocent perceptions of the country-bred Joey that it unnerves us, as if we too were horses. 

       So all the equine and puppetry magic is there, undimmed in two decades: a national treasure and global theatrical pride.  As for the music – a wonderful, plain-truth Sally Swanson is the singer – Adrian Sutton’s blending of old songs , brass and woodwind and great harmonies from the immense ensemble is breathtaking.   The human cast of course are new: Tom Sturgess a touching Albert, especially in the bleak trench scenes,  and Stephen Beckett splendid as both his drunken, angry father and the furious German colonel.  But the curious thing about this remarkable show is that actually, the story itself (Morpurgo adapted by Nick Stafford) is where the humans are concerned the weakest bit of it.  It’s a children’s story version of WW1, and none the worse for it.    That Albert should seek and find his familiar horse in the bitter chaos of the Somme is frankly not believable;  the horsemanlike desertion of the German officer ((Manuel Klein) only a little more so. The point is that,  like the reality of the gauze-cane-aluminium horses,  it’s a dream we need to have.  One we need to share,   live in the big Olivier cavern, breathing together.   So yes, it’s still magnificent. 

nationaltheatre.org.uk.  to 30 July

Rating 5 . Of course it is.  But an extra design mouse, because I haven’t get got a specific puppetry-mouse.

THE SAD SERIOUS COMEDY OF DEATH

     A Devon cottage kitchen, opening to a tangled spring garden: beyond this  idyll a semi- abstract tangle of branches around a great circle of sky:   a hole , perhaps a portal. For in a back room, unseen, an old man is nearing the end of his life’s journey.   In such times a kitchen can fill with family and visitors:  weary daughter Sarah is tired from nighttime calls, soon brother Jonathan is back from London,  tensely on the phone to an unseen girlfriend unlikely to turn up and share this death-watch. But an earlier, betrayed one, does. Wants to see old Edward one more time. 

      There’s a posse of official helpers. First on, doffing  her coat, middle-aged Karen bustles comfortably about, efficiently nurselike , chatting about  reading-glasses.  Others appear, talking of hoists and morphine and changes in the dying man’s breath,  doing a matter of fact job kindly, with years of experience.  THe siblings, joined by one ex-partner and one possibly-current one lack any such aid to emotional balance.  They are vulnerable to explosions of  pointless frustration: first  Jonathan, with a cursing shout  about strawberry yoghurt after an absurd and horribly recognizable, polite   domestic discussion about it.

        The helpers – especially Lizzie Hopley’s gloriously northern Linda – are calmer.  They’ve seen deaths before, are kind, midwives to this  strange, hard time.  Sometimes, in quiet moments of memory, the group of mourners  speak beautifully in memory: Mariam Haque’s troubled Nell remembers old Edward saying of the home he built with his family that when you arrive and click the garden gate shut, you feel   everything is all right.  More often there is comic absurdity tinged with metaphor: throughout the first half Paul Thornley’s Graham is uninvitedly trying to mend the toaster.  He keeps saying “All it is, is –  the release mechanism..”.  They are all waiting for the ultimate release mechanism. For old Edward

        Sometimes they are purely absurd,  helplessly, resentfully ridiculous in the way we all are over matters of dodgy bread-knives  and wrong orders of Chinese takeaway.   The playwright and director, after all, is John Morton, whose sharp observation of ordinary life’s expressions and disguises gave us joy on television in Twenty Twelve,  W1A and now Twenty Twenty Six. All three TV series were dealing with boards of management,  but before that he wrote groundbreaking People Like Us and the strength of his portraits of institutional-man is his understanding that he is just everyman in a business suit.    So this, his first stage play, is at moments very funny indeed.

      But its centre is compassion: the core characters wound tight with tension, bottled-up British.   As nurses, a doctor, milkman and postman come and go   the immensity of Edward’s unseen battle hangs over everything.  It takes professional Karen, near the end, to tell the civilians  “there’s nothing to be frightened of at all”. Everything will be all right. That last click on the old man’s gate of life will be soon. In the weary small hours it comes. So does dawn.

      Morton tells that he wrote this over many years after his own father’s last days, with visiting nurses and carers easing it.  It feels like a tribute to those professionals who deal daily with the immensity of death.  Parish’s tense Sarah, Rupert Penry-Jones’ conflicted, restless Jonathan, Haque’s nostalgic, regretful Nell are the amateurs “It’s your first time” one is told, gently.  

      I acquit Morton and Chichester of any topical calculation,  but this play – which feels, in a good way, more like a poem or a watercolour than hard drama – comes at an apt time. We have had  long months and bitter arguments around assisted dying,  always promoted with the idea of  “sparing” families the memory of watching these long, last struggles.  ECLIPSE has no agenda,  but feels in the end like a philosophical affirmation of the fact that, by proxy and at last in person, we all we all have a duty to face the reality of being mortal.  It is a serious  message.

Cft.org.uk to 10 June

Rating 4

A FUNNY SHOW HAPPENENED ON THE WAY TO THE COLISEUM

        Ancient Greece is suffering drought and near-famine, and on a small island (population 16 and a half) prayers to Dionysius (“Dionysus, end this crisis!”) are getting nowhere.  The Tyrant of Athens summons  scattered Greece to a prayer competition, meeeting little enthusiasm from the grumpy middle-aged elder Melampus,  her nervous servant Atlas and the preeningly military Adonis.  Young Thespis and his sister Poly offer to write the new prayer,  and he has a moment of inspiration.  Since they’re all fed up one way or another,  and sing about being trapped in their disappointing selves,  Thespis suggests they should understand each other better. Well,  obviously the way to do this is to “walk in their sandals” – impersonate someone  and get inside another’s character and feelings.  

       They all try this:  thrillingly, they have just invented Theatre!   And, naturally, modern cries of “I feel seen!”.  As the young caper and clamber around the elegantly distressed columns and pilasters and persuade Melampus, for all the cheerful nonsensical songs, I was oddly moved.  That, after all, is what this art is all about.And  I was already softened up by Claire-Marie Hall’s first number as careful, swotty Poly.  “A girl who knows everything and nothing at all”.  

       The idea of theatre throws old Melampus into a prophetic fit (MIa Jerome beautifully going into Caribbean every time she has a vision)  and she foresees much, including tales of “Kings and Queens and a play where everybody is a cat with no discernible plot”.   So Thespis leads them in some drama-school exercises and they set set off to Athens to see how this revolutionary idea of therapeutic impersonation goes down.   Obviously, it first gets them arrested for blasphemy, but since the rain arrives…

    Hats off to the Mercury,  whose homegrown premiere this is, and more comedy hats off to Mischief Theatre,  the goes-wrong troupe for branching out into their first musical , written by co-founder JOnathan SAyer with music and lyrics by Ed Zanders.   I was a bit doubtful – apart from anything else their glorious normal  ‘goes-wrong” trope can’t quite work in this genre, especially with a sstory (very necessary right now in the UK) of youth confidently and bravely looking for a future.  I also wondered how long any musical comedy in-joke about actors could last.  

        I was wrong.  Sayer and Zanders have avoided every pitfall.  It’s fast, its funny, and it has some absoslutely banging numbers which never, ever go on for too long.  Some are touching,  some rockingly absurd:  when the other islands attempt their new prayer there is wicked pastiche of rock, romance and rap.   In the second half Melampus has the most storming of all,  as she leads the ensemble as bearded old codgers in “Old Man Tango – where did my man go?” in search of her long-ago lost lover (the rhymes are good, no grim Tim-Ricery but a lot of cheek).  

         It was crafty to give us elders that glorious moment,  but exhilaratingly a lot of the show  feels very Gen-Z:  very open to delighting the young in the packed house last night.  Poly and Thespis  (a delightful James Spence) are brother and sister,  so the cautious romance is actually between him and Luke Latchman’s anxious, helpful  shy Atlas, who has a number about how he needs to play a part as someone less feeble in order to propose.    Mark PIckering as Adonis is consistently funny, the most OTT of them all.  There’s a satisfying plot development Thespis takes the familiar journey of becoming both a major star and a dickhead drunk on the success of his own “merch” and big contract,  but is redeemed by his cast-mates.  

       And hey, Sayer even offers us both a greek-tragedy ending moment and a beautiful joke at the end,  as Rhys Taylor the heavily bejewelled Tyrant realizes that in every theatre company there is room for someone like her, with money and power and ruthlessness.  A producer.  Of course. 

mercurytheatre.co.uk    is  selling out fast till 23 May

then touring – to July.   BATH · SWINDON · GUILDFORD – WEEK 1 · CHELTENHAM · CARDIFF · GUILDFORD – (twice)

mischiefcomedy.com 

THREE WOMEN AND  A DISTANT QUEEN 

 Ava Pickett’s  breathlessly exciting début play won, at the Almeida,  both a prestigious prize and mixed reviews.   As a first-timer, seeing its transfer to the West End,  I can say that it well deserves the move,  and that it keeps  all the unsettling intimacy and power that split the critics.    And it’s piquant to have a  more sobering reflection on Anne Boleyn running here:  seven minutes’ walk from the latest cast raving through the riotous SIX on the Strand. 

      So I liked it a lot:  beautifully set amid reedy grass and stunted trees in the Essex countryside , three young women meet, gossip, and express their daily concerns and fears . Gradually  the news comes in about the arrest of Queen Anne Boleyn and  her imprisonment, trial and death.  The passage of days, sunsets and a terrible distant bonfire of celebration is achieved with Jack Knowles’ remarkably fine lighting;  Lyndsey Turner’s direction keeps it moving, and the characters are firmly distinct, recognizable to anyone who has been a girl,  without being caricatures. 

       SIena Kelly’s Anna is sexy, triumphant in her power of attraction and first seen vigorously at it against a tree,  but she is clearly in love as well as lust.   Liv Hill’s cautious, rulebound Jane is scornful of Anna’s ways and her faster wit – “all you do is kiss , all you do is tell”  . But she herself is engaged for family and community reasons to the very man – Richard – who is Anna’s lover.   Mariella – Tanya Reynolds – is almost the most interesting: rather unwillingly inherits a trade  as a midwife (a dangerous one, as it proves, easily blamed for the many perinatal tragedies of the period).  She has had her own love with a local grandee, William, whose wife’s baby she now must deliver.   Like Anna, she is of a perceptibly lower social scale than Jane. But Jane is scared of her affianced Richard, who does not love her.  After their wedding night all he can say of his bride, wandering lustfully back to Anna,   is “all she does is eat, pray and tremble”.    

           Pickett’s sharp, modern-spoken dialogue draws us easily into  the ordinary rural 16c world of girls no different from us in heart but confined in a harsher society.  The play was criticized as ‘yet another’ one about patriarchy, but come on!  This stuff happened. Ask any beheaded queen, burnt adulteress or obedient skivvy.  The reports about the imprisoned queen feel distant and grand to the girls  (“Kings don’t kill their wives!” “A lot of things kings don’t do, he’s done!”) . But they’re also familiar: a scornful phrase about “not the kind of woman who needs to be forced” ‘ occurs both about Boleyn and, much later, about Anna.   

        In one sharp moment, hearing that Boleyn  is still in the tower, the three react in turn :  “She must be terrified” “She must be furious” “She must be starving”.   They are all haunted by her, and see what her fate symbolizes in their own female helplessness.  Anna in particular,  bucking and cussing against the way the world is,  resents the ease with which rumours about a distant queen’s  misdeeds are accepted,  not least by Jane:   the distant woman’s treason and adultery are something for the men to enjoy talking about . Her death  – in a horrifying late moment – has them keeping the distant pubs open to celebrate, bonfires staibning the innocent Essex sky.  

       But Pickett’s courage lies equally in showing how,  when the worst happens, there is no guaranteed sisterhood or revolt.   Terrified women can turn on one another to save themselves.  She also allows a touch generosity towards the two men, as their dominance  and rage is in moments diluted by an ability to be weakened – if not saved – by the need for women’s love.  It’s a play to unsettle and annoy, but also to admire and love.  As I did. 

Atgtickets.com to 1 August

rating  5 

     FREAK ALONG WITH ANCIENT GREEKS

        The Greek gods, with their  legends , family rifts and seduction of hapless mortals,   are irresistible to all who love dramatic retellings.  It might be a heartbreaking Antigone at the National,  a sombrely tragic Oedipus wowing Broadway,  Hadestown up West or a ballet of Leda being ravished by Zeus as a swan. They’re beloved by  jokers, too: Spymonkey did Oedipussy and the Frogs with great energy.  So when a  determined band of former Plymouth students – LE NAVET BÊTE,  founded  in 2008  – had knocked about Dracula and Treasure Island (https://theatrecat.com/2025/06/13/treasure-island-new-wolsey-ipswich-touring/)  it was natural for director-writer John Nicholson of Peepolykus, their regular co-creator,   to turn to the ancient heavens. 

        For if you have a taste for determined  – and highly trained –  physical clowning and ridiculous plots,  the old gods provide a rich feast.  So here they are, starting a big tour:  Nick Bunt, Al Dunn and Matt Freeman,  between them playing over 30 roles with instant disguises , lightning quick-changes and an athletic tolerance for pratfalls, rolls, slithers and blows from a pool-noodle.   Britain needs some silliness between panto seasons,  solid basic  laughs  without reliance on the doomy overeducated whining of political satire.    There IS actually a tiny line in the programme suggesting Mr Nicholson’s dislike of Trumpian autocrats  – Zeus being king of the gods and prone to sudden thunderbolts and mood-swings, nd his wife Hera  in her sunglasses is modelled pretty closely on Meryl Streep as Anna Wintour. 

  But once the three Fates, a rock trio in black rags,  have cackled witchily about how everyone ends up dead, nonsense prevails.     The take on Zeus’ family problems is pretty broad, never missing an opportunity to do a silly voice, fall over, throw someone through the window, clap a wig and rubber lips on a fellow member or deploy the ancient time-honoured jokes  of fart or belch. The latter occurs , with magnificent soundscape, after the king of the gods has done the traditional thing and eaten up the mortal he just seduced,  lest she give birth to a child who challenges his supremacy (his own Dad Cronos did just that,  repeatedly, in the age of the Titans).  

        There is a plot:  Zeus doesn’t want his daughter Hebe to marry a mortal, Gregg the hotelier,  but her brother Ares god of war . He enlists both him and Poseidon (both in shiny budgie-smugglers and heavily armed with spear and trident) to kill Greg.    But then he changes his mind, and for complicated reasons involving walnuts tries to fake his own death, repeatedly, with little assistance from a waiter called Moussaka.  This at one point involves borrowing an audience member as a corpse: beware of the front row,  these people are good at interactions,  and though it’s not malicious you may end up in a conga. Mind you, sitting further back you may have fake droppings thrown at you by Nestor the elegantly trotting half-horse centaur (the props are excellent). 

         Anyway, Zeus  needs to go to the Underworld to save Gregg, and the second half is even more disgracefully funny than the first, and actually rather cleverer. There are classical jokes for those who know,  but you need not.  Charon the boatman of the river Styx prefers to be called Sharon , rides a big pedalo swan,  and finally resigns because his dream is to be a business strategy consultant called Steve. All within half a minute. 

          I applaud these guys: there must always be a place in British theatre for chaps who can ride a unicycle while disguised as a giant pot-plant,  and for designers like Fi Russell who decide that Cerberus, the three headed dog guarding the underworld, is best represented as a lavender pink fluffy poodle.  Who does not admire touring stage crews with the skills to manoeuvre on each few-days’ run  not only a three tier classical-cum-hotel set including a slide  but some really tight lighting and sound cues, all the kit for an underworld game of Umbrella Roulette,   and many, many  metres of inflatable hydra?  Who does not, from time to time, just need a good daft laugh in cheerful company?  We were bonding like mad in our Ipswich matinee,  and I trust that from Cornwall to the far North the same will happen.   

wolseytheatre.co.uk   to 9 may but NB,  tonight is adult-only, 18+ version 

  –   then see tour  – lenavetbete.com –   going to   Lichfield, Minack, York, Doncaster, Lowry, Salford, Poole, Hornchurch, Newcastle under Lyme and Exeter

SAD HEARTS AND SHOWBIZ

        The play begins in a pure music-hall moment:   below the stage a hammeringly jolly piano,  onto it a  capering  leg-show chorus and sparklers, ushering  in The Great Houdini.  Who is Hadley Fraser , debonair and showmanlike.  He must, of course, immediately be hung upside down by the ankles  in his vest, braces and NYPD handcuffs (the latter previously tested on an alarmed front- row lady) and swiftly wriggle out of them to wild drumbeats and applause.   

       Then we are backstage where the hero greets his own hero,  David Haig as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s a session of boxing-chat, sparring and mutual literary admiration while their wives (Claire Price and a drily comic Jenna Augen) look on resignedly.   After two acts of thrilling and revealing arguments,  director Lucy Bailey keeping the scenes changing with choreographed elegance,   the same pair will end on the same vaudevillian stage. But this time the trick will end with a moment of lonely  metaphor which  might leave you, like me,  more moved than you ever expected.   The handcuffs of mortality and grief are not so easily thrown off: some trick walls you can’t walk through.  

           Playwright-actor David Haig dealt poignantly with Kipling’s WW1 bereavement in “My Boy Jack” , and thrillingly with D-Day meteorological science in “`Pressure”.  He reads, thinks and empathises deeply with the changes,  hopes and delusions of a century ago.  So you couldn’t ask for a better sensitivity to deal, historically and emotionally,  with a peculiar 1920 moment of feuding friendship:  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle versus Harry Houdini, with spiritualism as the battlefield. 

      The creator of Sherlock Holmes had lost his son at the Somme and  been widowed. Remarrying Jean, an occult  “medium” , he plunged more deeply into his lifelong fascination with spiritualism.   With  a medical background,  he was excited by the new frontiers of science – electrical currents, molecules, radio transmission – and like many thinkers of the time he borrowed their language and mystery to feed  into a belief that the dead could speak to us through seances. There were so many dead after 1918; as he says “spiritualism brings solace to a tortured world”. 

     His friend Houdini the showman escapologist  – and the odd couple were tight friends for some years – was also mourning his Jewish-Hungarian mother. But equally he was a rigorous  sceptic: when his fame and fortune rose he poured money, research, and careful tests into debunking the hordes of opportunist mediums.  At times both men,  the celebrity British author and the lairy showman,  were on the transatlantic lecture circuit.  Houdini  would be decrying and mocking the credulous followers,   Doyle in the same cities preaching the believers’ gospel, his wife – quite darkly – warning Houdini about how many people , and his audiences,  were angry with him for his unbelief. Topical, eh?.  

      Early  in the friendship, in a chilling half-dark scene on a slow revolve,  Sir Arthur and his wife Jean host the American visitor to one of their daily séances.  The  medium   does a spectacular screaming trance,  Houdini writes in a notebook,  and late at night is found by his host having  crept downstairs to examine the light fittings and seance-table for trickery.  But the drama and humanity lies is in the way that the men try to stay friends.

         The play is elegantly, artfully gripping in its blend of sadness, anger, and personal pride (Haig beautifully evokes that blend: Fraser becomes gradually ever more stridently showmanlike).    Sir Arthur at one point is put “in touch “with his lost son Kingsley and utterly believes it, and  the  conflict  heats up when Jean Doyle plays medium and claims to  contact Houdini’s mother:  he, tight-lipped, tries for  a moment of hope but is too honest with himself.  False hope must die.  Of course it’s nonsense,   the “spirit”failed to speak Yiddish or call him by his real name, Eric.  So of course Conan Doyle accuses his friend of insulting his wife…

    There are wonderful ironies.  Houdini, who after each hysterical-emotional session just drily says “I observe trifles”,  mentions that this after all is what Sherlock Holmes does.  Whereon Sherlock’s creator strikes back with the fictional ‘tec’s famous line about how , if you eliminate every other  probability,  the impossible must be true . Conan Doyls also constantly tries to persuade the escapologist  that he really is summoning and using “a great force” of spirituality,  all magically tied up with waves and molecules,  so that’s how he does his miracles and escapes from trunks and cells and chains in the Hudson river., etc.    Houdini persistently says no he does NOT  have some weird occult force: it’s all technical trickery, practice, a lot of keys and a dislocatable shoulder.   

      This argument is given a lookingglass equivalent  after a cracking brawl when Houdini disrupts and exposes the medium Mina (Jade Williams). She just shouts insults at him as a “dirty Jew”,  but her partner-manager brings up the same argument that Doyle tried :  OK yes, sometimes there’s room for the use of trickery. But  only when the real manifestation can’t happen,  because people are getting in its way by doubting it.,,   

           Poor Conan Doyle can never accept the fakery of mediums, nor even the fact that his friend is a clever conjurer with no occult powers.  His grief won’t allow it.  When he pleadingly says “Six times I have  spoken with my son!”  Harry replies brutally “no, you haven’t!” The pain is real.  And yes, it moves the heart. 

Cft.org.uk. To 16 May

Rating 4 

AFTER THE SHOOTING

  Despite the title, Anna Yates’ setting in an episcopalian church room full of calm skylight, and one effective moment near the end,  Fran Kranz’ tense 105-minute play draws little from any Christian sensibility of forgiveness or eternity.  It  concerns,  like James Graham’s PUNCH but in real time,  an episode of restorative justice.  In this case it is vicarious on both sides: the perpetrator is dead.  His parents are at a table with parents of one victim.   The scene is set before,  Susie Trayling’s nervous Judy  and the teenage (possibly community-service) assistant Brandon , fuss about setting up, worry whther there should be coffee and food .   Kendra, a masterful social-work figure, checks it up.  And then the pairs arrive.

       We do not for a while know the full circumstance, or whether the victim was targeted. Kranz’s  technique, directed with purposefu slowness by Carrie Cracknell, is  uninterested in projection or , for a while, building much dramatic tension.    This actually is oddly effective,  because the cast is so fine: a restless audience impatience grows in the first half-hour as we laboriously work out that Jay and Gail (Adeel Akhtar and Lyndsey Marshal)   lost a son to the gun-toting,too-much online youngest  of the slightly more socially upmarket Richard and Linda  (Paul Hilton and Monica Dolan).   

     But tension  rises, and all four central figures are spot-on, deeply into character, delicately created individuals.   Hilton’s Richard is lawyerly, too calm for comfort until one devastating moment reveals how intensely, malely, stoically he has faced the horror of his son’s deed and his own failure.  Dolan is more emotional, perilously needy to speak for the child who was once her baby, shielding herself from  his dangerousness by understanding, somehow,  his pain.  In the aftermath of the inquiry’s blame in the Rudakubana case that hits hard.  

        Meanwhile the victim’s mother is torn  between womanly empathy and her own anger., and  Akhtar’s Jay  displays  sudden  violent anger, a useless righteousness which in one stunning moment is matched by Paul Hilton’s deadly forensic awareness of his boy’s deed. He, we learn significantly,  fought  to join the victims’ families to visit the terrible scene and see the outlines and the blood.   He insisted that he had a right o “To mourn 11. Not just 10” .  

    It’s strong stuff, well done. And interesting to have ,from Kranz,  an American perspective on this American plague.   Because  face it:   a British writer would find it hard to leave out the one hard question which here, shrieks by its absence: US gun law ,  kids  having no trouble getting hold of things that can kill a dozen in thirty seconds .   Also,  if it had been written a genration earlier on either side of the Atlantic an appeal to  religious faith, to pray together,  would also probably have been part of the conversation.   Insteadm the nearest thing for the poor couples is to hold a brief silence together.  Until the fuss about clearing up the room and heading for their cars begins. 

Donmarwarehouse.com to 6 june

rating 3

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