Intimate Apparel

by Lynn Nottage

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 31 July 2025

Lynette Linton directs Samira Wiley as Esther, a Black New York seamstress, Nicola Hughes as her landlady and employer Mrs Dickson, Faith Omole as her friend Mayme, Kadiff Kirwan as her suitor and husband George, Claudia Jolly as Mrs Van Buren, a wealthy client, and Alex Waldmann as Mr Marks, a Jewish fabric merchant, in Lynn Nottage's play Intimate Apparel, set in 1905 and loosely inspired by the career of her own great-grandmother.

Skilled dressmaking was a respectable occupation for poor women who valued their reputation, and Esther hopes one day to set up a beauty salon using the carefully hoarded savings from her exquisite corset-making, as she is much in demand by the likes of Mrs Van Buren. An alternative source of livelihood is represented by Mayme who works in a brothel. Out of the blue Esther receives a letter from George who is working on the construction of the Panama Canal and has heard of Esther through a mutual acquaintance from the parish church of her childhood home. As she is 35 and fearful of being a lifelong spinster she responds through the good graces of Mrs Van Buren (as she is illiterate herself) and a charming correspondence flourishes as the couple gradually gain confidence in one another. But marriage, when it comes, brings perhaps inevitable disillusionment as Esther loses her hard-won autonomy and George, whose own letter-writing was also aided by someone else, proves less loving than she hoped. A very subdued flirtation with Mr Marks is hemmed in by her shyness and the social customs of his faith, but is channelled through their shared enthusiasm for fine fabrics.

The characters and themes could so easily be stereotypical but Nottage's dialogue is supple and nuanced, the insight into the the appreciation of fabric and style completely assured and convincing, and the situations resonant with carefully observed emotional weight. Esther, the focal point of the play, is long-suffering and often almost inarticulate but Samira Wiley invests her with a quiet steeliness which receives the blows to her expectations with painful grunts more eloquent than wordy outbursts of feeling: it is a superb performance offsetting the worldly wisdom of her landlady, the breezy self-assurance of Mayme or the entitled but unhappy bravura of Mrs Van Buren. Alex Waldmann gives Mr Marks a courteous reticence which ultimately hides a deep disappointment while Kadiff Kirwan's George moves from lyrical correspondent to domineering husband with all-too-plausible ease.

Lynn Nottage has re-imagined her forebear's experience and the cast and creative team have done her proud in bringing it to theatrical life.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

by Eugene O'Neill

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 30 July 2025

Rebecca Frecknall directs Ruth Wilson as Josie Hogan, David Threlfall as her father Phil and Michael Shannon as James Tyrone, with Peter Corboy as Josie's brother Mike and Akie Kotabe as their neighbour T Stedman Harder in Eugene O'Neill's 1957 play about two young people so insecure that they are unable to admit their feelings for one another in any productive way. 

Josie presents a transgressive front to hide her fears, while James tries to avoid his shames and self-loathing through massive alcohol consumption. This being an O'Neill play, alcohol figures prominently not only for James but also for Phil, an embittered Irish-American tenant farmer all too ready to drown his own sorrows and frustrations in drink. James Tyrone is, of course, the name of one of the two sons (and the father) in Long Day's Journey into Night, and though this character is not exactly the same person in the two plays, both share a tortured family history inspired by that of the playwright himself; in A Moon for the Misbegotten both James's parents are already dead.

The challenge is to render these characters believable and interesting despite their verbosity and inebriation, and both Michael Shannon and David Threlfall manage this tricky task with great skill, and in completely different ways: Shannon trying to be tight-lipped but occasionally permitting a despairing giggle; Threlfall clumsy in his movements, and hamming it up to a certain extent because Phil is probably not as drunk as he makes out to be. In the meantime Josie fends off her father's manipulations and warily engages with James Tyrone using a front of almost raucous bravado: her final relinquishment of any relationship with James, couched in rueful good wishes for his future, is painful to witness. Ruth Wilson, known in the past for portraying deeply repressed women with stillness and menace, here demonstrates a more brazen exterior, but the inner pain remains.

The Almeida stage was stripped back to reveal the brickwork at the rear, and most of the stage podium had also been removed to be replaced by dusty wood-floor areas on different levels, with all sorts of farming bric-a-brac - old planks, sheets of metal, implements - lying around: the chaos of the Hogans being both internal and external. With most of the action in the central part of the play taking place during a moonlit night, the atmosphere was almost derelict, and perfectly suited the action. Designers Tom Scutt (set) and Jack Knowles (lighting) made excellent use of the space available.

By Royal Appointment

by Daisy Goodwin

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 29 July 2025

Dominic Dromgoole directs Anne Reid as the Queen, Caroline Quentin as the Dresser, James Wilby as the Designer, James Dreyfus as the Milliner and Gráinne Dromgoole as the Curator in Daisy Goodwin's play about Queen Elizabeth II as revealed through the clothes she wore on fifteen occasions during her reign.

The conceit is an interesting one - that the Queen, bound by constitutional proprieties not to reveal personal opinions, nevertheless revealed something by means of the clothes she wore for certain occasions. Furthermore, she trusted her designer (Hardy Amies) to devise clothes that would suit both her and the occasions for which they were designed; and she relied increasingly on her dresser (Angela Kelly), here presented as an often fierce and opinionated presence in the private apartments of the monarch.

The occasions range from the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 to Prince Philip's funeral in 2021 and the Queen's last greeting of a new Prime Minister just days before her own death in 2022. These scenes allow for glances at significant events such as the murder of Lord Mountbatten, the impact of Princess Diana (but not her death), and the Brexit referendum, as well as more personal crises such as the frustrations of her designer and her milliner and the impact of the AIDS crisis on the latter.

The trouble with the play is that it is too formulaic. The curator sets the scene each time, mentioning the year and the costume, and then the significant cultural or political events of the time, some of which are frankly bizarre choices. The rivalry between the three characters attending the Queen simmers throughout,  without really developing into character studies or a serious narrative arc. The Queen herself remains largely as she has always been presented by authors desperate to invest her with personality without overstepping the mark: straightforward, serious about her duties but often waspish about their incidental absurdities. But on the occasions when her staff revealed deep personal feelings her role as almost a counsellor figure seemed just too neat and idealistic.

The first half flags as the routine presentation of the material establishes itself without fully taking flight. Part of the problem must be Anne Reid herself, who at 90 years of age is simply not credible as a woman in her mid-forties to early sixties. To make matters worse, the set, a series of diaphanous curtains on an otherwise almost bare stage, gave no assistance with the acoustics, and it was occasionally quite hard to hear what was being said. (I attended the first performance of the run at this theatre, so the cast may not have been familiar with the auditorium; the play is on tour.) The pace picked up in the second half as events fell more securely within the adult memory of the audience, and hence had a more certain resonance, though there were rather too many appeals to knowing laughter in hindsight.

Unfortunately, with the far more intriguing portrayals of the Queen provided by Alan Bennett in A Question of Attribution, or by Peter Morgan's The Audience as predecessors in this field (to say nothing of The Queen on film or The Crown on television), By Royal Appointment seems rather innocuous and derivative.

Women and Troy

by David Stuttard after Euripides

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildfords on 27 July 2025

David Stuttard created these dramatic readings from Euripides's tragedy The Trojan Women, supplemented by some speeches from Andromache and his reconstructions of the lost Alexandros, partly in response to the 9-11 attacks in 2001: the notion of the passengers on the planes being trapped inside a vehicle reminded him, he said, of the warriors in the wooden horse, though the analogy is by no means exact. However, the theme of the brutality and inhumanity of war remains all too relevant today.

The readings, given by Siân Phillips as Hekabe (Hecuba) and Rachel Donovan speaking variously as Athene, Cassandra, Andromache and Helen, reveal the complex web of fate whereby the infant Trojan prince Alexandros (the other name for Paris) was sent to be exposed on the slopes of Mount Ida to forestall a prophecy that he would ruin the city of Troy, but instead was found and raised by kindly shepherds. Later, having received Helen of Sparta as a reward (or bribe) for judging Aphrodite to be the fairest of the three goddesses Athene, Aphrodite and Hera, he did indeed ruin the city.

The action of The Trojan Women takes place soon after the fall of the city as the female members of the royal family face enslavement and degradation; Hekabe reels under successive blows of bad news, in particular the callous murder of her young grandson Astyanax (the son of Hector and Andromache), thrown from the city walls by the victorious Greeks in case he should grow up to be a threat to them.

Even presented as 'dramatic readings' from two lecterns the story is compelling and the grief and despair raw and intense. The two actors switched from deep identification with their characters to detached commentary, and in the Q and A session afterwards remarked that in some ways it was easier to be 'reading' rather than 'declaiming' or acting in a full production, because it allowed for these shifts and removed the problems of staging, costuming and movement: all was dependent on the poetry, which was admirably translated and adapted.

The readings lasted only an hour or so but the grim tale was vividly presented. In the week that I saw this performance, not directly referred to but nevertheless clear in my mind as I listened to Hekabe mourn over the broken body her little grandson, were the photographs of the children starving in Gaza. The ghastliness of war, and the ease with which its perpetrators justify any barbarity they choose to inflict on one another, has hardly changed in 2500 years.

The Comedy of Errors

by William Shakespeare 

and

A Company of Rascals

by Phil Porter

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 24 and 25 July 2025 

The Guildford Shakespeare Company has created a fascinating double bill directed by Joanna Read and designed by Neil Irish, whereby a new play by Phil Porter, A Company of Rascals, is entwined round Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. After a scene-setting prologue which takes place on the banks of the River Wey outside the theatre, the Comedy is enacted in the main auditorium. Audiences for both plays see the new prologue and the Comedy's first scene, after which those seeing Rascals leave the auditorium and are taken to three different locations nearby to watch what the characters of the Comedy are imagined to be doing when they are not on stage; the two audiences are reintegrated for the final scene of the Comedy in which "all is revealed".

Shakespeare's play involves proliferating misunderstandings when two sets of identical twins, each separated in infancy due to a complicated shipwreck, are continually mistaken for each other not only by the residents of Ephesus where one of each pair lives as master and servant, but also by each other, because the other pair (also a master and servant) have arrived unexpectedly in town. By an improbable sleight of hand, which can't be called into question without destroying the whole basis of the farce, each master has retained the name Antipholus, and each servant the name Dromio, and each named twin dresses alike, thus allowing all the mistakes (or errors) to occur until finally all four are on stage together - and even then there is still room for confusion. 

The new play, set variously in the Centaur Inn (where the visitors have chosen to stay), in Doctor Pinch's premises, and in the Porpentine (where the resident Antipholus has dined when unable to enter his own house), capitalises on the mistaken identities wherever possible, but also follows the progress of the golden chain commissioned by the Ephesian Antipholus through many more hands than merely the goldsmith and the visiting Antipholus as seen in the Comedy, and also follows the continuing misfortunes of Egeon, the elderly Syracusan merchant arrested at the beginning of the play. Where the Comedy relies on chance meetings and displays of verbal wit, Rascals introduces madcap physical comedy with swapped bags, outright chicanery, and bravura charlatanry.

The cast of twelve expertly manages to perform both plays at once (though the audience of course can only see one of them at a time), aided in the case of Comedy by some extended pauses between scenes which are gloriously filled with 1960s pop songs (it's a modern-dress production). Cleverly, the new play focusses more on the minor characters of the Comedy, giving particular prominence to the jailer, and ludicrously making him the twin brother of Doctor Pinch to explain cast doubling, and introducing a few new characters to fill out the town scene.

Fortuitously I saw Comedy first and Rascals second, which I think is probably the most satisfactory order: the new play enriches the older even in retrospect, and its fast-paced double-dealings and general context require familiarity with the Comedy for maximum effect. The two together made for a really enjoyable theatrical experience.  

Anna Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy adapted by Phillip Breen

seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 21 June 2025

Phillip Breen, who has adapted Tolstoy's novel for the stage, directs Natalie Dormer as Anna, Tomiwa Edun as her husband Karenin, Jonnie Broadbent as her brother Stiva, Naomi Sheldon as his wife Dolly, Shalisha James-Davis as Dolly's sister Kitty, David Oakes as Levin (eventually Kitty's husband) and Seamus Dilate as Vronsky, with whom Anna has a passionate affair in this staging of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina.

All those relationships, together with Russian patronymics and nicknames, famously cause complications for non-Russian readers, but are perhaps easier to keep in mind when embodied by actors on the stage (who dispense with the patronymics almost entirely); there are a number of minor characters as well. The novel examines three fraught marriages, the trajectories of which are interleaved; the play remains surprisingly faithful to this structure rather than taking the easier but less satisfactory option of focussing attention only on Anna. This does make for an intense experience which runs the risk of being too long-winded, but it also allows for the famous opening sentence of the novel - "All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion" (in the 1954 translation by Rosemary Edmonds) - to be fully demonstrated.

The Oblonsky marriage is under constant strain because of Stiva's serial infidelities and Dolly's exhaustion from child-bearing; the Karenin marriage is stretched to breaking point by Anna's grand passion for Vronsky and her husband's intransigence; in contrast, the Levin marriage, delayed by misunderstandings and almost sabotaged by Levin's tactless revelations about his past, seems set to be solid even though it will be always be volatile as husband and wife strive to accommodate and understand one another.

This was a fine cast and a well-designed production with a versatile set (designer Max Jones), but it did not always convince. The main problem, perhaps inherited from the book itself, is that Vronsky does not come across as the heart-breaker he needs to be: there was insufficient emphasis on Kitty's crush on him, or on his caddishness at abandoning her, so that the impact of Anna's presence at the ball where the family expected him to propose to Kitty was not as traumatic as it should have been. Then, in turn, there was no real spark between Anna and Vronsky to justify the grand passion, though the later stages of their affair, when the social pressured crowding them in upon themselves laid bare the paucity of their inner resources, was very well handled.

In a fluid staging which included simulated train journeys and a finely imagined journey by carriage during which Dolly vented her frustrations while an impassive coachman concentrated on driving, and mercifully refrained from offering any peasant wisdom at the end, Anna's final desperate act was somehow not made fully clear. I knew what she had done, because I have read the book and seen other adaptations, but I wonder whether someone completely new to the story would have been certain about what was shown. These two events perhaps indicate the weakness of an otherwise successful adaptation: Dolly's outburst just too modern, consisting almost entirely of expletives, and Anna's demise the victim of too-clever stagecraft.

1536

by Ava Pickett

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 4 June 2025

With characters named Anna and Jane, and with the year of Ann Boleyn's downfall and execution as its title, one might have expected Ava Pickett's play 1536 (here expertly directed by Lyndsey Turner) to be yet another work appealing to our apparently inexhaustible fascination with Tudor history. But Anna (Siena Kelly) and Jane (Liv Hill) and their friend Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) are young women in a village in Essex, a place which considers Colchester, let alone London, to be too far away to provide anything except distant and late-arriving news. What they hear about the disgraced queen profoundly disturbs them, but they are at the same time aware that more may well have happened in the time it has taken for the news to reach them; that what sounds like an impossible rift in the right way of the world may well have already been resolved.

In the meantime Anna pursues her wanton ways, for the most part blithely unaware that her reputation is being tarnished, while Jane prepares to follow her father's bidding into an arranged marriage with Richard (Adam Hugill) - the man currently infatuated with Anna. Mariella, slowly assuaging her own heartbreak over William (Angus Cooper) who has also married for social advantage in the village, is apprenticed to the midwife and hopes her work will see her through, even though she does not like it.

The menfolk are occasional presences in what is a tense but cunningly localised drama of conflicting desires and social oppression. Anna appears to be in control of her life, and she often treats the bland and none-too-bright Jane with amused contempt even though they are supposed to be firm friends. Jane herself, seeking utterly naive at first, shows an unpleasantly ruthless streak under pressure, as the mild-mannered so often do. Mariella is less amenable to this treatment and more aware of the danger Anna is courting; their personalities and attitudes make for a powerful microcosm of late medieval society as it impinged on womenfolk, while the news of the catastrophe enveloping Queen Ann acts as a counterpoint to the development of these women's "small" and (of course) undocumented lives.

The action takes place in the fields outside the village. The set, designed by Max Jones, is a field of wild grasses, very suitable for the illicit assignations Anna so enjoys, and for conducting female gossip away from the unwelcome attentions of fathers and husbands (until the men come looking for the women). Since the Almeida has no proscenium, the set is visible from the moment one enters the auditorium, and it is framed at the front by a huge rectangle of thin neon light, almost like the border of a giant cinema screen. The wildness of the Essex countryside immediately destroys any expectation that this is going to be a play about court life, and the modern earthiness of the language only reinforces the point that we are dealing with articulate but essentially unlettered folk. But, as news percolates that the queen has been executed, local events put the three friends in danger: their prospects for surviving in a relentlessly patriarchal world are completely uncertain. The resonances with the modern world are all too clear: who will be believed? Is it safer to strike out or to bow to one's fate?