Ghosts

by Henrik Ibsen

seen at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith on 19 April 2025

Rachel O'Riordan directs Gary Owen's modern adaptation of Ibsen's intense family drama, featuring Victoria Smurfit as Helena (Mrs Alving in the original), Callum Scott-Howells as her son Oz (Oswald Alving), Patricia Allison as Reggie (Regina Engstrand), Rhashan Stone as Andersen (Pastor Manders) and Deka Walmsley as Jacob (Engstrand) Regina's putative father.

O'Riordan and Owen have collaborated several times before, reworking or riffing on classics: they were responsible for the play Romeo and Julie which I saw in March 2023, and indeed Callum Scott-Howells featured as Romeo in that production.

Ghosts caused a scandal when it was written in 1881 as it dealt openly with the consequences of an apparently respectable but in fact disastrous marriage, leading to the son inheriting syphilis from his father. Gary Owen has re-cast this classic in a contemporary setting in which the widowed Helena is still proposing to invest her husband's fortune in creating a children's hospital, and there are still fateful secrets being hidden from Oz and Reggie, but the then shocking references to syphilis are here replaced by a gruelling reckoning with an abusive marriage.

Mother and son are at loggerheads as she has always seemed cold and unfeeling towards him while she has seen herself as protecting her son from his father. Helena and Andersen are longstanding friends who plainly once were lovers (in their university days) so there is plenty of room for tension between them too as Anderrsen, acting as the charitable trust's lawyer, attempts to shield it from reputational damage once he realises that accusations concerning the dead man's behaviour may explode into adverse publicity.

It's a cleverly thought out adaptation given a powerful boost by electrifying performances, particularly by Victoria Smurfit and Callum Scott-Howells. Helena has long monologues in which she tries to explain to both Andersen and to Oz (separately) the stultifying experience of living with an abusive partner and feeling unable to escape, while Oz is torn by powerful resentments and is desperate now to make something of the deep connection he feels with his childhood friend Reggie - all unaware that they have the same father. When confronted by this fact he is appalled to realise that he still "feels right" with Reggie, and there is a terrifying moment when he is on the verge of becoming as predatory as his father was, only prevented by Reggie's determination to walk away from the situation.

All takes place in a cavernous reception in the Alving house, with a vast window at the back through which nothing can be seen but fog. On the whole length and height of the walls are vast panelled photographs of the dead husband and father - but they are all shots only of the back of his head, an extremely disturbing image of his baleful control. This set design by Merle Hensel provides a stunning visual counterpart to the huge psychological damage Helena has suffered and has unwittingly passed on to those around her despite her best intentions. As Andersen ruefully remarks, in many situations of this sort the victim can inadvertently become complicit in damaging other people.

What I found particularly compelling in this production was that all the characters viewed the situation from a different perspective and yet it was completely believable that each point of view could seem justifiable. The speeches were often lengthy - far longer than would normally be encountered in ordinary dialogue - but the emotional weight of what was being said overrode any qualms about verbosity or artificiality. And there was so much passion in the delivery. At times Helena would visibly flinch and cower at what was being said to her, even though in many ways she was a steely character in her own right.

Productions of Ghosts adhering more closely to Ibsen's original text are still very powerful, but this re-working in contemporary terms is also fully justified.

Rhinoceros

by Eugène Ionesco

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 16 April 2025

Omar Elerian directs Rhinoceros having translated and adapted it especially for this production, for which the set and costumes are designed by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita. It features Sopé Dìrisù as Berenger, Joshua McGuire as Jean, Anoushka Lucas as Daisy, Paul Hunter as the Narrator and Botard, and John Biddle, Hayley Carmichael, Sophie Steer and Alan Williams taking other parts.

Two major things are happening: a radical interrogation of theatrical experience, and a fantastical story set in a small town ("not in France", this Narrator insists, despite the French names of many of the characters) in which almost all the townspeople except the increasingly agitated Berenger turn into rhinoceroses. The stage is bare and white, with a rostrum in the middle and a raised platform at the back (luckily with steps down to the main acting area), and a table on either side each holding a variety of implements used by the cast to create sound effects. The Narrator, having begun with a welcome to the audience and a warm-up session in which we are encouraged to follow his gestures at first in real time, and then one gesture behind his, and then two (by which time almost everyone is relaxed, amused and confused), then sets the scenes, helping the actors as much as the audience to visualise where they are. He frequently reads all the stage directions as well.

With all this business to distract us, the sheer implausibility of the transformations can be smuggled past us, especially as the first appearance (or rather drumming sound) of a rhinoceros is not connected with any claim that it was once a person. What we are first concentrating on is the rather prickly friendship of two very different people - the uptight Berenger and the laid-back Jean. Later there is an increasingly chaotic scene in an office one Monday morning: there are more rhinoceroses roaming by then, and it transpires that one of them is one of the office workers, whom the manager had assumed was merely malingering.

By this time, the visual style of the production, the painstaking reading out of stage directions, the occasionally hesitant and often inappropriate attempts of the cast to enact the directions, and the weird progression of events, have conspired to make for much hilarity, but in the second half, when Berenger visits Jean to apologise for creating bad feelings between them, we witness (so far as is possible) Jean's own transformation, a superb piece of physical acting by Joshua McGuire, and later we the audience are conscripted into providing an unpleasant sound effect (by following the Narrator's gestures again) when Berenger baulks at slapping his girlfriend Daisy. Many in the audience had been provided with kazoos during the interval: they too had become rhinoceroses. By the end of the play, only Berenger is proclaiming his determination to resist the communal transformation, desperately shouting his resistance while the others take the curtain call. What seemed like an absurdist joke has become a disquieting examination of herd mentality and dehumanisation: no wonder the play was seen as a commentary on French collaboration during the Vichy years.

The jokiness of the visual style, and the commitment of the cast to taking their predicament seriously, means that there is very little overt preaching or too-obvious allegorising in the production, leaving us to find whatever messages we want in the undercurrents of a play by turns hilarious and worrying.

Playhouse Creatures

by April De Angelis

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 10 April 2025

When the official London theatres re-opened in the 1660s after an 18-year hiatus acting skills and traditions had been lost and there were no trained boys to take on the female roles as they had done in Shakespeare's and Jonson's days. For the first time women were on stage professionally, but it was not without controversy and what we would now call trolling.

Playhouse Creatures concerns five such actresses, the unimpeachable Mrs Betterton (Anna Chancellor), married to the important theatrical manager Thomas Betterton, Mrs Marshall (Katherine Kingsley), Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr), Doll Common (Doña Croll) and of course the up-and-coming Nell Gwyn (Zoe Brough). The title "Mrs" was a sop to respectability, and did not necessarily imply the presence or even existence of a corresponding "Mr", while Doll Common was actually Katherine Corey, forever associated with a part she played in Jonson's The Alchemist.

April De Angelis has created a play examining the highs and lows of these women's experiences, including some amusing pastiches of the kinds of roles for which they became famous - there was always an element of ogling involved on the part of the audience, not to say outright harassment, and though actresses could be taken up by aristocrats and even the King, they could also be dropped and vilified. The play covers all these eventualities in episodes mostly based on historical fact (though there were actually two Marshall sisters).

The play seems to be the dream reminiscence of Doll Common, portrayed here more as a wardrobe mistress and long-term confidante of Mrs Betterton than as an actress in her own right. The irrepressible Nell bursts into the lives of the others with blithe insouciance and an astonishingly resilient self-belief. Mrs Fawley is not so lucky, her career effectively destroyed by an unwanted pregnancy. No amount of sisterly sympathy can overcome the social disgrace once Mrs Fawley quails at the awful realities of an abortion (in the intimacy of the Orange Tree I suspect most of the audience was relieved that she called a halt to proceedings after the first probe proved too much to endure).

Here directed by Michael Oakley, the Orange Tree stage is used to excellent effect as principally a backstage space where the actresses can confer, advise and support one another. The rowdy audiences are just noises off, and a dialogue between Mrs Betterton and her husband, in which she puts the case for actresses owning shares in their company, is all the more poignant for us hearing only one side of the conversation: this as much as anything reminds us that the women's world was totally circumscribed by male power just out of sight.

The Merchant of Venice (1936)

by William Shakespeare (adapted by Brigid Armour and Tracey-Ann Oberman)

seen at the Richmond Theatre on 9 April 2025

The most problematic aspects to modern eyes of The Merchant of Venice - its racism and anti-semitism - are confronted boldly in this re-imagining of the play set in London's East End in 1936 as the Jewish community there faced the increasing activism of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. The director Brigid Armour and the "first female Shylock" Tracy-Ann Oberman have adjusted and streamlined the play to fit this tense time not far out of living memory, and in doing so have shone a disturbing light on the play and the period.

In front of a backdrop representing the terraced house fronts of a typical East End street the play opens with a Passover supper celebrated by Shylock and her family and friends, with daughter Jessica asking the time-honoured questions (usually it is the youngest male child who performs this task, but none is present). It is interrupted by the first shouts of the baying mob, and then Shakespeare's text takes over with Antonio's world-weariness, his friends' easy badinage and Bassanio's importunity. For Portia's scenes a white gauze curtain is drawn across the back of the stage lending an insubstantial air to the setting of Belmont, but back in town it is always the East End, and there is little reference to Venice: Bassanio is even referred to as an Englishman.

Gobbo, the clownish servant who determines to leave Shylock's employ, is here Mary (Evie Hargreaves, doubling as Nerissa) rather than Lancelot, and there is no sign of the father met and hoodwinked in the street (no bad thing, as the scene needs to be exceptionally well managed in order not to be tedious). But the sense of Shylock's house being only a precarious safe place is enhanced by the encroaching Blackshirts: a drunken Gratiano (Xavier Starr) sporting the scarlet armband relieves himself against Shylock's door while shouting insults. No wonder Shylock urges her daughter to keep away from the windows, little realising that Jessica has decided to elope with Lorenzo.

In this setting, with misogyny added to the anti-semitism, and the jeering males increasingly colluding with the Blackshirts and adopting their uniform - even Antonio and Bassanio are wearing armbands by the time of the court scene - Shylock is all the more threatened and her "merry bond" a forlorn hope for some redress, ultimately forestalled by the legal nicety revealed by the young lawyer (Portia disguised) in court. The whole atmosphere of the play shows up the "Venetians" as an unpleasant and self-righteous lot, with the casual insouciance of their prejudices most in evidence in their treatment of Jessica. She is completely disdained by Lorenzo's male friends, and when she addresses Portia the latter rudely cuts her off (an interpolated exchange, I think): Portia is clearly an upper class anti-semite (and she has also evidenced an unpleasant disdain for the Prince of Morocco here re-imagined as a Maharajah).

In the trial scene Shylock's determination to execute the bond, followed by her utter humiliation, is loaded heavily with prejudice - the jeering of Gratiano at her discomfiture is particularly grating in this production - and she brokenly disappears from the scene by walking down in front of the first row of the audience while the two young lawyers persuade Bassanio and Gratiano to part with the rings which they swore would never leave their fingers.

Back in Belmont Lorenzo (Mikhail Sen) and Jessica (Gráinne Dromgoole) spar with their talk of past lovers. This scene can be played as a romantic and lyrical teasing between two youngsters in love, but nowadays it is often, as here, played to show a mounting unhappiness and strain between the two speakers. When the triumphant crowd returns from the city Jessica can hardly feel comfortable surrounded by black-shirted men. But the usual conclusion of the play - a perhaps wary reconciliation of the other two married couples after the debacles with the rings - is interrupted by the off-stage raucous crowd and a sudden collapse of all the characters into a group of doughty East Enders fighting off the fascists in the Battle of Cable Street, as described by Shylock herself.

This transposition on the whole works well, though some of the sound effects and silent projections of headlines and crowd scenes are a bit heavy-handed; the final account of community resistance is doubtless uplifting but has virtually nothing to do with the play. Of course some aspects of the play are sacrificed in order to re-shape it to the political scene of the 1930s. The emotional centre of the play rests on Shylock, a startlingly powerful performance by Tracy-Ann Oberman; we cannot engage very much with the fortune-hunting Bassanio (Gavin Fowler) or the frustrated if entitled Portia (Georgie Fellows), or even with Antonio (Joseph Millson) perhaps impossibly in love with Bassanio himself. The supporting cast are strong, but their characters are on the whole unappealing, a factor which is certainly present in the original play, but which is understandably highlighted here.

Three Sisters

by Anton Chekhov

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 19 March 2025

Caroline Steinbeis directs Michell Terry as Olga, Shannon Tarbet as Masha and Ruby Thompson as Irina in Rory Mullarkey's translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters. 

The candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is an ideal space for rendering the intimacy verging on claustrophobic intensity of a Russian household existing on faded grandeur (their father was a General) and over-optimistic hopes for the future - fulfilment in work or fulfilment in Moscow seem to keep the sisters going, though Olga is crushed by her work, Masha is disillusioned in her marriage, and Irina enthuses about the ennobling prospects of work without having yet had to try it. Their brother Andrei (Luke Thompson) meanwhile dreams of becoming a professor - or is it that his sisters dream this for him? - and in the meantime giddily marries a local social climber Natalya (Natalie Klamar).

Soldiers are billeted in the town and provide a welcome distraction, though they too are marking time. Tuzenbach (Michael Abubakar) and Solyony (Richard Pyros) both fall for Irina, while the philosophising Vershinin (Paul Ready) attracts Masha. Despite these developments a certain listlessness pervades the play, as the characters talk and talk but rarely converse: even Tuzenbach's declaration to Irina is baffled by her less than enthusiastic response, while we have to infer a dalliance between Masha and Vershinin and wonder at the credulity of her husband Kulyigin (Keir Charles). In a clever twist, Natalya's infidelity (also obvious to all except her spouse) is with someone whom we never see.

The first act is comparatively brightly lit for Irina's name day celebrations and the first arrival of the soldiers, but the middle two acts take place at night time (though not the same night) and the overhead candelabra are extinguished; the light sources are simply the candles on the pillars and those held close to the face by the actors. This cleverly focuses the attention on the tell-tale signs of stress and impatience particularly among the women. By the time of the second act Andrei is married and Natalya has begun her take-over of the management of the house, relying on a cunning mixture of sentimentality over her children (who could criticise her for wanting what's best for them?) and a ruthless way with servants and old fashioned views of loyalty. The sisters are powerless to stop her and Andrei has retreated to gambling and domestic inaction.

The third act, notionally in the bedroom now shared by Olga and Irina (since Natalya's son "needs" the healthier atmosphere of what had been Irina's bedroom) is here envisaged as a general space at the top of a stairway cleverly revealed in the stage floor. It's hardly surprising that menfolk retreating from the fire raging through the town should bed down for a while here until they are evicted in the name of propriety. Even more effectively, when Andrei embarks on his long self-justification, where it might be presumed that his sisters can hear him while modestly behind screens, here, they have retreated to further annexes, leaving him talking to no-one. This serves to reinforce the general unwillingness of so many of the characters to face up to unpleasantness of any sort: Olga's tired "oh, leave it until tomorrow, Andrei" is quite understandable at the end of an exhausting night, but also fatally symptomatic of a pervasive procrastination.

In the open air again, the final act in which hopes are dashed is a masterclass in dramatic tension: a duel is obviously going to happen but no-one will directly talk about it, and in the meantime the departure of the soldiers prompts only banal farewells.

The cast performs well, the verbosity of some of the characters, and their infuriating blindnesses, are convincingly presented without unduly exasperating the audience. Intriguingly there is more unbridled bad temper on display than in other productions of the play as tempers fray: Masha is obviously highly strung from the beginning; Solyony (the definitely rejected suitor) verges on the psychopathic; Natalya veers quickly from a nauseating wheedling to perhaps confected but still vicious rage when crossed. In this intimate theatrical space the sisters are more certainly trapped no matter what.

Elektra

by Sophokles, translated by Anne Carson

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 17 March 2025

Daniel Fish directs Brie Larson as Elektra, Stockard Channing as Clytemnestra, Patrick Vaill as Orestes, Greg Hicks as Aegisthus and Marième Diouf as Chrysothemis, with a chorus of six women, in a version of Sophokles's play adapted from Anne Carson's translation from 2001. (As a pedantic point, why the choice to use 'k' rather than 'c' for the more usual 'Sophocles' and 'Electra', but not for 'Clytemnestra'?)

The play presents a moral dilemma in the starkest terms: Elektra's father Agamemnon has been murdered by her mother Clytemnestra, and the aggrieved and grieving daughter feels that vengeance is the only possible response. She hopes for the return of her brother Orestes and that he will perform the requisite act of vengeance - yet how can it be right to murder one's mother?

Elektra herself has no doubts: she is consumed by rage against her mother and her situation as a virtual slave in her mother's household, overseen by the usurping paramour Aegisthus, her mother's lover and fellow murderer of Agamemnon, and himself a victim of the family feud (though this is not mentioned in Sophokles's version of the story). The chorus while alert to the moral sickness pervading the city, questions whether Elektra's unrelenting fury is wise. Her sister Chrysothemis appears more or less comfortable with accepting the current state of affairs. Both these attitudes earn Elektra's scorn, and only serve to wind her up to further paroxysms of anger. Clytemnestra's appearance only intensifies her rage.

All this is brilliantly conveyed in this production.  Elektra dominates, her anguish amplified by the use of a hand-held mike as she prowls around a slowly revolving stage sparsely littered with electronic paraphernalia. Every time the word "no" occurs she wails it in varying degrees of outrage. Every time she (or anyone else for that matter) mentions Aegisthus by name she spits derisively. By way of contrast, every time Orestes is named, there is a ritual thumping of the chest over the heart by the six members of the Chorus. In the meantime these women chant their supple lines of comment in close harmony; the perennial problem of how to manage a Greek chorus has here been triumphantly solved. The conversations (or confrontations) with Chrysothemis and Clytemnestra are impassioned but occasionally relieved by a bleak humour as Elektra makes knowing asides to the audience.

Daniel Fish has intensified the concentration on Elektra herself by dispensing with the opening scene of the play in which Orestes plans with his old tutor (the Paedagogus) the ruse by which news of his supposed death is brought to Argos; and indeed Orestes himself, rather than the old man, delivers the hectic account of the chariot race which is supposed to have killed him. Again, with the use of microphones, this account comes across like an excited radio commentary of a modern race meeting. Though it is a little confusing to have blended the two male characters, the force of this "revelation", hard on the heels of Clytemnestra's blasphemous prayer that her dream should only come true if it is advantageous to her, indicates that she is actually trapped, though she does not yet know it. When Orestes finally reappears as himself clouds of mist envelop the stage rendering the climactic murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus as spectral occurrences.

The consequences of this act of vengeance are not examined; Agamemnon's own guilt in sacrificing his daughter at the outset of the Trojan war is adduced by Clytemnestra as a justification for her actions, but her daughter utterly rejects the argument, so the focus is totally on Elektra's own predicament. With its stark setting and intense concentration on Elektra herself, it is a powerful play embodied here in a powerful production.

One Day When We Were Young

by Nick Payne

seen at the Park Theatre, Finsbury Park, on 13 March 2025 

James Haddrell directs Cassie Bradley as Violet and Barney White as Leonard in Nick Payne's 2011 play about two people set to share their lives together in 1942, but who, it turns out, don't. It is presented in the Park Theatre's smaller auditorium (Park 90), configured for this production as a square in which the audience is on two sides with a smaller square as the acting space in the corner.

Unlike his dazzling Constellations (which I have seen with five different casts - see reviews in June 2015, July 2021 and August 2021), this play's three scenes are presented in chronological order and without bewildering repetitions: war-time Bath in 1942; Bath again in the 1960s where Violet lives; and Luton in 2002 where Leonard lives. Despite these leaps across the decades and a running time of only 80 minutes the shape of these two lives, so hopefully united amid the anxieties of war and of first love at the start, and so divergent afterwards, is convincingly revealed through mannerisms, accents, trivial topics of conversation, and understated but effective signs of ageing.

Everything - even the scene changes - is down to the two actors, who give wonderful performances. In 1942 Violet and Leonard are spending a night together - their first it would seem - in a hotel room, each having presented excuses at home in advance as to why they might be spending the night away. There are nerves and uncertainties, but a firm belief in them both that they will get married when Leonard returns from war service.

But in the 1960s it is immediately apparent that the promises have not been kept: Violet is married with two children while Leonard, visiting Bath to see her in the hopes that she will attend his mother's funeral, is evidently single and still desperately hurt at this turn of events, even though it must have happened years before (the older child is sixteen). It becomes clear that the complete lack of news about Leonard's fate as a POW of the Japanese had proved too much for Violet. Though this scene could so easily have become the prelude to an illicit affair, Violet firmly quashes the possibility, refusing to compromise a marriage in which she is happy.

But forty years further on Violet is widowed and visiting Leonard in Luton at his invitation; she has written a book, and he, seeing an article about it and her in a magazine in the doctor's surgery, has got in touch. Yet their conversation is incredibly stilted, and it may even be that he is in the early stages of dementia, judging by some tell-tale conversational tricks and an inability to wield a fancy bottle-opener. Violet too is apprehensive, particularly as her daughter had advised her not to take up the invitation (apparently it was the first she knew of Leonard's existence). They might just be getting beyond this awkwardness when the play wisely finishes.

What struck me as particularly clever was the revelation of essentially ordinary and unpretentious lives having been lived across the years, mainly delivered through inconsequential small talk which was somehow still freighted with emotional weight because of that intense first encounter in 1942. Violet as a wife and mother talks about new domestic appliances and the transformation of the high street with the coming of supermarkets (the grocery shop where she worked as a girl, and where she presumably met Leonard, has closed). A trip to London with girlfriends, and a first amazed experience of espresso coffee there, is a recent highlight. It's well to recall that these really were great events in many people's lives at the time.

Later, Leonard, unwell and single in Luton, expatiates on the tribunal which had to decide whether Jaffa cakes were in facts biscuits or cakes: if biscuits they would incur VAT; if cakes they would be VAT exempt. This too acts as a time indicator (the question arose in 1991), but also perfectly reveals his character, someone keeping abreast of things that impinge on his daily life and budgeting, but verging on being something of a pub bore. Perhaps this particular hobby-horse also relates to his background in shop trading (he was a butcher as a young man before joining up).

Such conversational gambits could seem sentimental, contrived or condescending, but Cassie Bradley and Barney White are able to inhabit their roles so completely that everything they do and say is plausible and at times extremely poignant. Even their shuffling gaits and the hunches of old age, so perilous for young actors to adopt, are compelling: it was quite surprising to see them stand straight again for the 'curtain call' (there is of course no curtain in this small acting space).