Top Hat

by Irving Berlin

seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 23 August 2025

RKO's 1935 film Top Hat has been adapted for the stage by Matthew White and Howard Jacques, and is directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall. Jerry Travers (the part taken by Fred Astaire in the film) is played by Phillip Attmore and Dale Tremont (taken by Ginger Rogers) by Lucy St. Louis, with Horace Hardwick played by Clive Carter and Madge Hardwick by Sally Ann Triplett, together with a large supporting cast.

The play is essentially a farce generated by prolonged mistaken identities and misunderstandings, interspersed with now-famous songs and dazzling tap routines. To some extent the musical numbers slow down the farce (problematic since the genre depends on fast action to disguise the improbabilities) while the ludicrous situations surround classic songs and dances with unrelated froth, but the resulting confection is very entertaining and the comic energy gathers pace, especially in the second half.

Transferring a film, in which it is easy to move from place to place with a camera fade, to the stage can be a perilous affair, but the set designer Peter McKintosh has solved the problems on the Chichester's thrust stage with a glitzy all-purpose Art Deco backdrop, the clever use of a revolve, and adroit placements of furniture by a bevy of assorted hotel staff. Even the quick shifts from one bedroom suite to another, required in both the London and the Venetian settings, are managed with flair, while a series of benches or balustrades rise from the revolving floor when required for hotel lobbies or bandstands.

The leading couple perhaps inevitably lack the extraordinary chemistry of their film originals, but nonetheless play off each other engagingly and prove sterling dancers in both duets and ensemble numbers. On the exposed circle of the stage, with the outermost area lower than the centre, the sheer skill of co-ordinated tap dancing is shown off to exhilarating effect; since the style is now not so often seen it is salutary to be reminded how accomplished the cast must be to deliver the routines without mishap.

All in all, a good evening's entertainment. 

Girl from the North Country

by Conor McPherson, songs by Bob Dylan

seen at the Old Vic on 20 August 2025

This is a revival of the Old Vic's 2017 production with a new cast, providing a welcome opportunity to see the piece again.

See my review from 6 September 2017 for details of the production. 

What I noticed particularly on this viewing was how melancholy the narrative arc was. Unusually for a musical, no applause was offered by the utterly engaged audience for any of the songs, allowing for a completely unbroken span of attention throughout the performance, and preserving the atmosphere of increasing desperation without distraction. This was by no means because the audience was dissatisfied, as the enthusiastic applause at the end demonstrated, but somehow a sense prevailed that interim applause would break the spell.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

by William Shakespeare

seen at  the Bridge Theatre on 19 August 2025

This is a revival of Nicholas Hytner's hugely successful 2019 production of the play, with a new cast except for Puck, inimitably played by David Moorst: it is hard to imagine anyone else bringing his skills as an actor and acrobat to this interpretation of the part.

Even on a second viewing the production was well worth seeing, the modern interpolations as funny as before, and the stagecraft marvellous to behold. Though it may be suspected that the Bridge is 'marking time', having hugely extended its run of Guys and Dolls and then revived a past production, the move must be justified financially and the standards have by no means slipped.

See my review from 17 August 2019 for more details of how the play was conceived.

Poor Clare

by Chiara Atik

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 7 August 2025

Blanche McIntyre directs Arsema Thomas as Clare, Freddy Carter as Francis, Anushka Chakravarti as Beatrice (Clare's sister). Hermione Gulliford as Ortolana (Clare's mother), Liz Kettle as Peppa and Jacoba Williams as Alma (servants in the household), and George Ormerod as a beggar in Chiara Atik's exploration of the career of St Clare of Assisi.

In a series of short scenes (managed with confidence and aplomb by ASMs in costumes as further servants in Clare's family household) we see Clare develop from being the typical product of a prosperous family with expectations of social standing and a marriage of convenience, to becoming a follower of the extraordinary path laid out by St Francis. 

Clare is sassy and opinionated, but completely sheltered from the the vicissitudes of life: when she and her sister are accosted by a beggar they scream in fright and run off as quickly as possible. It is only after encountering the newly scandalous Francis that she begins to rethink her priorities, though the lessons in absolute charity and renunciation of privilege are not easy to learn or to live out. Beatrice finds sharing a bed with a sister who has decided to wear a hair shirt profoundly uncomfortable; impulsive gifts to servants cause confusion in the household; attempts to run a 'clothing drive' for the poor are a bit ham-fisted. Clare is appalled that Francis will not act as a go-between to distribute the clothes she, her family and their friends have collected, and then she has to face the fact that well-meaning charity is not always well received by its recipients, because it may not be what they really need.

The play is written in an extremely modern idiom, though dressed in medieval costume. It's deliberately disorienting to hear modern expressions from the mouths of ladies in rich brocades or servant women in homespun, and even more so to have everyone speak in American accents - a deliberate nod to the playwright's origin, and a reminder that the issues facing Clare as a well-to-do person are still with us today: the play closes with an impassioned speech about moral responsibility in the modern world.

Clare's own progress towards her ultimate desire to break with her family and fully embrace Francis's doctrines seems like an exciting adventure in many ways; the growing friendship between the two has an easy familiarity once her initial bafflement subsides. Only at the very end of the play, when Clare asks to be tonsured and realises that Francis does not intend that they shall live in the same place - indeed that he intends to 'enclose' her, effectively sealing her off from the world in which he roams freely - does the full enormity of the step she is taking begin to sink in. We barely have time to register the shock of the disparity between what Francis imagines his male and his female followers are fit for, and there is no time to explore the further career of poor Clare as she becomes the founder of the Poor Clares.

In its own terms though, the play is fascinating, and the next stage of Clare's life is sensibly beyond its scope. Francis himself still seems to be finding his way as his boyish enthusiasms come up against stubborn reality, though he is adept at finding creative solutions (for example, appealing directly to the pope to forestall an unsympathetic local bishop) or in accepting from Clare some modifications to his grandiose plans for decorating a ruined chapel. His authoritative attitude to her future career seems like a harbinger from a different world, after his initial suggestions for what she might think about or do have been couched in rather more modern terms of giving hints rather than commands. 

The next chapter of their lives raises different issues for which the at times irreverent style of this play would hardly be suitable; the appeal to us to rethink our attitude to the poor among us would have been dulled by any attempt to grapple with the austere institution of an enclosed order of nuns.

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.