A Brew to a Kill!

by Eli Murton

seen at the Hogs Back Brewery, Tongham on 24 October 2026

Matt Pinches directs Jack Whitam as Richard Gloucester (part owner of the brewery), Emma Fenney as his sister Edwina, Robert Maskell as Tommy Tyrell his business associate, and Laura Smithers as Anne Prior (the managing director of the rival Priory Ales) in the Guildford Shakespeare Company's murder mystery play A Brew to a Kill!, with the Shakespearean-themed subtitle Ale's Well that Ends Well - or does it?

The audience is presumed to be the great and good of Tongham invited to the opening of the Hogs Back Brewery's new Tea Room in 1954; after the official ribbon-cutting presided over by the Mayor proceedings are interrupted by the discovery of George Gloucester's body emerging from the "new" hop drier. The surviving siblings, together with Tommy Tyrell and Anne Prior, are all keen to solve the mystery of who killed George before the police arrive, and the audience is co-opted to help. The 1950s setting pays tribute to the classics of the genre as well as providing useful back stories for the characters involving the Second World War and safely placing the action before the proliferation of modern technology.

From the outset it is clear that all four characters have the motive and the opportunity to do away with the feckless George, who had a drinking problem and was ruining the business by financial mismanagement. The audience, divided into four teams, is directed to circulate to different rooms on the site to visit the shop containing written clues and to interview separately Richard, Tommy, Edwina and Anne (the order in which our team met them) to try to discover the murderer, the means and the motive (all three required to gain a suitable accolade). 

The cast relied to some extent on the teams managing to ask suitably leading questions: one felt that certain lines of enquiry led to assured expository speeches while unexpected questions resulted in uncertain responses. Some questions, of course, only met with stonewalling (Tommy was particularly good at this technique). In the event, none of the teams at our performance solved the case, but this hardly impacted the pleasure of attempting the challenge. Even poor weather failed to dampen our spirits as we were guided to various outbuildings to conduct our investigations.

Apart from the classic requirements of a whodunnit mystery - the proliferation of motive and opportunities, the closely bound group of suspects, and the difficulty of winnowing out insignificant clues and red herrings in order to recognise what really mattered - there were also some amusing in-jokes for a company with Shakespeare in its name. Richard Gloucester is clearly a reference to Richard of Gloucester the third son of the Duke of York in the Henry VI plays and ultimately King Richard III, who marries an Anne from a rival allegiance in Richard III; in the Shakespeare plays his elder brothers are Edward (thus Edwina) and George (who dies, or more accurately is killed, by drowning in a barrel of wine). Tyrell is employed by King Richard to murder his nephews (the so-called "Princes in the Tower") and so is a suitable name for the somewhat shady Tommy. Bad Shakespearean puns abound: the Guildford Shakespeare Company is clearly having as much fun as the audience.

Murder in the Cathedral

by T. S. Eliot

seen at the Church of St John the Divine, Richmond on 14 October 2026

Tom Littler and Francesca Ellis direct David Suchet as Archbishop Thomas Becket and a supporting cast of twenty-three in an Orange Tree Theatre production of T. S. Eliot's 1935 play Murder in the Cathedral performed in a nearby church.

Robert Jones has adapted the layout of the church by adding a screen of wrought metal before the high altar, which itself is draped with cloth and festooned with candles (lit in the second half). The central aisle of the nave has also been transformed into an acting space by placing a raised platform above it for its entire length. This, together with a slight mistiness enhanced by incense reinforces the atmosphere of the play, which was originally performed in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, and of course commemorates the notorious murder of the Archbishop in 1170 in the cathedral itself.

The play is not a narrative history of the dealings of King Henry II and his chancellor turned archbishop, unlike Jean Anouilh's play on which the film Becket was made with Peter O'Toole as the king and Richard Burton as Becket. Indeed, the king does not appear in Eliot's play at all. Rather, the play concentrates on the last month of Becket's life when he returned to Canterbury from self-imposed exile in France, apparently well aware that his fractious relationship with secular authority (and even ecclesiastical rivalries) might lead to his own death. After an intemperate outburst from the king four knights indeed travelled in haste to Canterbury and on December 29th murdered the archbishop.

The play is heavily influenced by Greek tragedy, with a chorus of the women of Canterbury providing numerous interludes of poetic reflection on the transient perils of hard life; in this production many of their interludes are sung to the specially composed music of Orlando Gough. In a church setting there are subliminal hints of church singing (though at the time this would have been exclusively provided by men) as well as folk-motifs derived from seasonal chants.

In the meantime, in the first half, Becket is confronted by four Tempters, providing a series of reflections on the nature of action and suffering, and the dangers of embracing martyrdom with muddled motives. The difficult task of embodying these often intellectual points in dramatic form is largely resolved by the clear language and the evocative choreography of this production in its church setting.

In the second half, after the archbishop delivers his Christmas morning sermon on peace and the apparent contradiction of celebrating both the birth of Jesus and his death in conducting a Mass, the Tempters return as the Knights, and the rarefied arguments give way to impassioned argument and threat. The confrontation is rendered all the more powerful by the use of the space in the church as Becket faces down his opponents but refuses to compromise his beliefs.

Astonishingly the four Knights deliver long speeches justifying their actions, asking us to reconsider our judgements of what has happened and who was in the right. Much of this speech-making is self-serving and the political and prudential points are delivered in the eloquent but often condescending tones which may be familiar to us in the outside world. What may have seemed an ancient dispute mired in medieval quarrels is revealed to be relevant to the modern world after all. Political expediency is still rampant and still has its eloquent defenders.

It is fascinating to see a modern play so clearly influenced by classical Greek precedents, particularly so soon after seeing the modern retelling of Antigone Exits. Equally fascinating to have seen a play about martyrdom and self-sacrifice for one's ideals so soon after a small and quiet light (intriguingly produced at the same time by the same theatre company as this production) showed us a similar trajectory in the twentieth century. This play, though testing in its form, was really powerful in its effect. 

David Suchet was superb as the Archbishop, intellectually brilliant, warm in the Christmas sermon, and ultimately brave and yet poignantly almost faltering under physical threat. The supporting cast - including a late replacement for one of the Tempters/Knights with script in hand but barely used - was also excellent.

Antigone Exits

by Nina Segal

seen at the Minerva Theatre Chichester on 10 October 2026

Jeff James directs Nina Cassells as Antigone, Max Bennett as Creon, Anushka Chakravarti as Ismene, Brandon Bassir as Haemon, Lizzy Watts as Eurydice, Testimony Adegbite as the Messenger and Melody Chikakane Brown as Teiresias in Nina Segal's play Antigone Exits based on Sophocles's tragedy (5th century BCE).

The story of Antigone, daughter of King Oedipus of Thebes and Jocasta his mother and wife, and sister of two brothers who died fighting each other for the throne of Thebes after their father's abdication and death, remains essentially unchanged in this newest version of the play, but the formal structure of Sophocles's play - confrontations interspersed with choric interludes - is replaced by a studied modern informality, and references to the gods are replaced by more general appeals to moral imperatives.

There are no curtains in the Minerva Theatre so everything is revealed to the audience as soon as they enter the auditorium. For this production, designed. by Alex Lowe, there is a golden yellow floor, with some large rocks at the back supporting a quarter of a huge hollow white sphere which has a stark passageway at the back. Sitting perched in the sphere is the entire cast chatting quietly among themselves until the play begins.

The back story needs to be explained of course - not the full tale of Oedipus's woes, which would be too distracting, but the more recent strife between the brothers who could not agree on their arrangements for ruling the city as alternating kings, and who have killed each other in the resulting civil war. Their uncle Creon (their mother's brother) has taken control and decreed honourable burial for one brother (Eteocles the defender of the city) and effective desecration of the body of the other (Polynices, who attacked the city) . It is this decree to which Antigone objects, claiming that both brothers deserve respectful burial, even though her attempt to provide this rite will lead to her own death.

All this is economically managed by the cast taking up the story, the phrases moving from one speaker to the next, at the opening of the play. In fact, the device of the cast telling the story as well as being the characters within it persists throughout, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Often it seems as if the characters are just speaking their thoughts aloud in the middle of the action, which gives an immediacy to the dilemmas they are facing. In particular, Antigone's determination to honour Polynices drives her to an acceptance of her own death, which must be presented in a way that does not alienate the audience despite the overtones of recklessness and even self-indulgence that could hover round it. Nina Cassells largely maintains sympathy in this potentially difficult task.

Creon too must be comprehensible, not merely a despot issuing unreasonable decrees. Unfortunately his decision, which looks pragmatic at one level - honouring the defender but not the attacker - is highly questionable in other ways, but Creon is unable to face up to the problem he has caused until it is too late: for him political authority, once invoked, cannot be weakened by concessions, especially to one's own family. Both characters are intransigent, but perhaps in our modern world with its emphasis on the individual's right to live by her or his own lights, Antigone's personal passion is more compelling than Creon's more intellectual reasoning about the nature of political power.

The sense of impending doom is relentless, marked by a constant slow drumbeat (sound designed by Kieran Lucas), and visualised by a great circle of black fluid poured out over the yellow stage by Antigone symbolising her first attempt to honour her brother's body. The cast nimbly avoid treading in this mire until the sense of catastrophe is so intense that being stained with it can serve as a visual reminder of the spreading contamination which threatens Creon's attempt to draw a line under the chaos which has afflicted Thebes.

Inserted into the classical story are a series of interludes provided by most of the members of the cast, replacing the choric interludes of the original (which serve to comment on and generalise the action). These monologues, some of them powerful in themselves, are to some extent a distraction from the main thrust of the play. The Messenger speaks first with an account of the first dead body he saw, that of a fox, while playing with his brother. I thought that a messenger might well have had this experience as a young boy, and so was not prepared for Haemon's (or Brandon's) account of not knowing his father but imagining that a TV star might fit the role. Was this Brandon's experience - or is it what any actor taking the part of Haemon in this play would be given to say? Later interludes were even more intrusive, and some were arguably in poor taste. Antigone's claim that we are collectively cursed by our non-interventionist witness of modern atrocities, while extremely powerful in the midst of a play about the curse hanging over Thebes, was perilously close to hitting the symbolic point home with a sledgehammer. 

The story remains powerfully dramatic; the pared back visual style suited its universality; the cast was excellent; not every intervention by the author was successful.

a small and quiet light

by Stephanie Street

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 29 September 2026

Elin Schofield directs Priyanga Burford as Noor-un-Nisa Inaya Khan and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Vogt with a supporting cast of five taking all the other parts in a small and quiet light, a play about Noor-un-Nisa, a cosmopolitan woman of mixed heritage (Indian father and American mother) who became an SOE/ resistance operator in occupied Paris until she was betrayed to the Germans, interrogated and eventually deported to Dachau.

The play opens with the beginning of the interrogation by the Gestapo officer Ernst Vogt, and it employs numerous flashbacks to earlier episodes in Noor-un-Nisa's life: born in Paris, but moved to Britain once her father had departed to India; recruited by the SOE despite some reservations concerning her suitability, and finally a hectic time evading capture when again in Paris, until the fateful betrayal. With an all-female cast taking all the parts, it requires concentration by the audience: there are very few costume changes, so context, mannerisms and accents are of vital importance, and there are helpful projections of the dates of each scene. However, the requisite attention is well repaid as the story unfolds and the complex personality of the principal character is revealed.

Priyanga Burford brings a clear-cut intensity to the principal role: Noor-un-Nisa is passionate, at times wayward, fiercely patriotic and unexpectedly resilient under pressure: a reckless bravery, verging on foolhardiness, enables her to resist the psychological pressure exerted by the insistent and apparently friendly Vogt, though ultimately there is no escape from the degrading rigours of the concentration camp (thankfully reported rather than depicted). 

Such a career seems almost quaint, and certainly hard to fathom, in this modern more cynical age, and there is an element of the "derring-do" of the classic war movies of the 1950s and early 1960s, though with a salutary reminder that much of the work involved was performed by women as competently as by men (if not more so, depending on temperament).That Noor-un-Nisa's story is relatively unknown is partly due to the general secrecy of the whole enterprise, but also to the ease with which non-whites and women are casually erased from the picture when broad strokes are painted. This play shows us a woman who was far more than a two-dimensional hero of the resistance, reminding us that such careers were often suited to quirky people who were prepared to take what most of us would consider insane risks for their ideals.

A Month in the Country

by Brian Friel after Ivan Turgenev

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 26 September 2026

Lyndsey Turner directs Sophie Okonedo as Natalya Petrovna, Alistair Petrie as Michael Rakitin, Patrick Gibson as Aleksay Belyayev and a supporting cast of nine in Brian Friel's modernising adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's play A Month in the Country (written in the late 1840s). 

The month is principally the young Aleksey's time on the Islayev estate, where both Natalya, the wife of Arkady Islayev, and her young ward Vera are attracted to him; in the meantime their neighbour Michael has been holding a candle for Natalya (apparently both recognised and held in check) for years. The disruptive influence of an attractive young stranger does not exactly resolve the deceptions and confusions of the group of characters who have been rubbing along "in the country" for some time, but it does serve to crystallise the pervading sense of stifling uncertainty on the estate.

Clearly we can now see this play as a fore-runner of Chekhov's work, though Turgenev did not rate himself as much of a dramatist. The country-house setting is an ideal one for examining the lives of leisured people who seem to have little better to do than to be unhappy in various ways, and nothing much seems to have changed in the decades between the two writers' works. Indeed, as Summerfolk (recently seen at the National Theatre) shows, Gorky could still make use of the setting some years after Chekhov's death, bringing his own distinctive attention to familiar situations. 

Brian Friel's adaptation serves the play well, streamlining the text and creating an easy colloquial idiom. The cast is excellent, Sophie Okonedo bringing an exquisite nuance to the role of Natalya, Alistair Petrie an increasingly poignant hopelessness to his unrequited passion, and Patrick Gibson using his Irish brogue to accentuate the gaucheness of the awestruck impoverished but educated young man employed as a tutor to the young son of the estate, soon rapidly out of his depth in the febrile atmosphere. Though Natalya's passion for the young man creates several crises, the stoic acceptance of the imperfection of marriage voiced by her mother-in-law and perhaps endorsed by her husband provide a measured balance to the melodrama that threatens to engulf the household.

The scenes of the play move from room to room and even outside the country house; on the exposed Donmar stage the set changes are neatly managed by having the entire stage concealed in a glass box of shrubbery which ascends and descends as required (designed by Leslie Travers).

It is interesting to note that Patrick Marber's adaptation of the play, titled Three Days in the Country, chose  quite different aspects of the original text, to judge from the comments I made on seeing it in 2015 - not least in its closing moments which featured a card lesson given by the German tutor to the young Kolya: in Friel's play, the German is present as a house guest and prospective tutor, but Kolya is only talked about and never seen.

Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 27 August 2026

Carrie Cracknell directs Nikki Amuka-Bird as Hannah Jarvis, Oliver Chris as Bernard Nightingale, Seamus Dillane as Septimus Hodge and Isis Hainsworth as Thomasina Coverly with a supporting cast of eight in a revival of Tom Stoppard's dazzling 1993 play Arcadia, in which Hannah and Bernard, two English literature academics, are trying to reconstruct events at the Coverly estate which occurred in around 1810, in particular to determine whether Lord Byron visited and was subsequently impelled to leave the country. The audience is privileged to see, or to piece together more accurately, what in fact occurred (though Lord Byron does not appear on stage) and to witness the burgeoning mathematical talent of the soon to be 17-year-old Thomasina as she bounces ideas off her tutor Septimus.

In this production the action takes place on a circular stage which has two revolving platforms, designed by Alex Eales. The nineteenth and twentieth century scenes are intertwined allowing full play for Stoppard's characteristic cleverness at creating thematic connections which the audience may well appreciate more than the characters can. For example, Valentine Coverly (Angus Cooper), a modern scion of the Coverly family completely au fait with contemporary number theory and chaos theory, explains to Hannah why Thomasina cannot possibly have developed similar theories so long ago, even though we have just witnessed her doing so. He has all the cocky self-assurance of the modern scientist who implicitly patronises the efforts of earlier generations. Even as we ourselves can feel superior to him through what we have seen, we benefit from his explanation of these difficult theories, and Stoppard has brilliantly found a way to inform us without having Thomasina say anything anachronistically.

The play is shot through with this kind of intellectual sparkle, while also containing running jokes about English literature (and literary figures). All the while, the clandestine love affairs taking place on the Coverly estate are juxtaposed with scenes showing the ease with which they can be misconstrued by modern researchers from the meagre evidence left behind. With the enticing prospect of explaining Lord Byron's activities there is far too much danger that the "evidence" will be bent to the researcher's goal - and this can be exploded by one insignificant detail brought to light by a minor character in a most satisfying comeuppance. The affairs in the modern world, on the other hand, leave a more sour taste as Bernard is revealed to be shallow and self-centred as well as intellectually rash. Septimus Hodge back in the nineteenth century, though unscrupulous in his own way with the unfortunate (and unseen) Mrs Chater, is poignantly redeemed by his courteous refusal to take advantage of the young Thomasina at a critical juncture.

Even though the Duke of York's is a conventional West End theatre, in this production some seats were provided for the audience at the back and the sides of the stage; we occupied seats at the back and had a chance to see the auditorium's "wedding cake" decoration from the usual point of view of the actors. With the revolving platforms, and adroit direction, this somewhat artificial theatre-in-the-round approach worked well and we were not at a disadvantage. It was a pleasure to see another Stoppard revival, particularly as Arcadia is one of his greatest plays.

Electra/Persona

by Benedict Andrews after Sophocles and Ingmar Bergman

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 21 August 2026

Benedict Andrews has had the interesting idea of presenting a stripped down version of Sophocles's Electra (in which an impassioned daughter seeks vengeance for her father's murder by her mother) followed by a stage version of Ingmar Bergman's celebrated 1966 film Persona (in which an actress playing Electra has fled a performance of the play, has refused to speak, and is being cared for by a loquacious nurse). He directs Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss who alternate the parts of Electra and Clytemnestra in the first half and the silent actress Elisabeth and the nurse Alma in the second half, with Ella Lily Hyland as Chrysothemis (Electra's sister) then Anna (the doctor treating Elisabeth), and Patrick Robinson as Aegisthus (Clytemnestra's lover) then Elisabeth's husband.

At the beginning the four actors enter in front of the front row of the audience and the two leads ask a member of the audience to toss a coin, with the rules that apply for determining first service in a tennis match; on this occasion Nina Hoss lost the call so Cate Blanchett could choose the roles and she chose to play Clytemnestra and Alma. Whether this ploy is in some way "fixed" so that a reasonable alteration of role playing can take place is an uncertain point; it will apparently not be possible consult the box office in order to arrange to see two performances with a guarantee that the roles will be reversed.

On a strikingly bare set designed by Magda Willi, consisting of a steep series of white stone steps covering the full width of the Lyttleton stage and leading apparently nowhere, and with a stainless steel hammer centrally placed and spotlit, the play Electra begins with Electra crawling up towards the hammer groaning in grief and anger, her desperate desire to avenge her father's murder unassuaged for years due to the absence of her brother Orestes. Her sister's appeals to reason appal and disgust her. When Clytemnestra appears the dreadful tangle of familial love, anger, hatred and resentment threatens to boil over: both women are implacable in their self-righteous justifications. 

In the absence of an actor taking the part of Orestes, the recognition scene between brother and sister is dispensed with, and Electra in some sense becomes Orestes, or assumes his character, in order to despatch Aegisthus when he arrives thinking to hear news of Orestes's death: unlike the formal arrangements of a Greek tragedy, the murder takes place on stage (and in a further departure from Sophocles, his death occurs before that of Clytemnestra). When "Orestes" confronts Clytemnestra (a scene drawn more from Aeschylus's version of the story) we might expect further butchery - but it is at this point that Electra inexplicably flees the stage through the auditorium; a curtain descends as if to deal with an unforeseen emergency and we are at the interval.

In Persona, the actress Elisabeth has been silent for some time, and her doctor assigns the nurse Alma to look after her; eventually they go to live in a seaside cottage, an arrangement which the doctor hopes will be restorative. But Elisabeth remains silent, while Alma talks and talks and talks. Elisabeth's features are projected from a hand-held video camera onto a large screen so that we can see that her perpetual silence is given subtle nuances by the smallest fleeting expressions on her face: it is a masterful piece of acting and a surprisingly resilient foil to the nurse's prolonged and at times desperate chatter as Alma deploys increasingly frantic methods to get Elisabeth to talk: only a direct physical threat leads to a distressed cry of alarm.

Is this juxtaposition a success? There are complex factors at work. We see actors choosing their parts in front of us, but then their performances are so intense and convincing that we perhaps "forget", in the usual way of audiences, that we are watching people who are acting, and we immerse ourselves in the presented dilemmas of the characters they are portraying. Then the performance inexplicably stops, and we never go back to it: we do not see the second murder nor do we have any idea of the consequences of this particular matricide (an issue not addressed in any surviving play by Sophocles, though it is the subject of surviving plays by Aeschylus and Euripides). Instead we see an intense and increasingly unhealthy relationship between a patient and her nurse, a reminder at one level that we are concerned with the trauma of an actress who was playing Electra when she fled the stage. But now we are watching an actress playing a traumatised actress, and another actress playing an increasingly vulnerable nurse.

Although the ostensible link between the two parts is that the actress we saw playing Electra did indeed leave the stage precipitously, and throughout the Persona section is almost entirely silent, there is perhaps a subliminal connection relating to the issue of trauma. For the Greeks, the Electra story was one episode in a blood feud within the Mycenaean royal family which lasted for generations, and clearly the character of Orestes suffers what we would call trauma in killing his mother, depicted in the form of the Furies pursuing him - and it is noteworthy that he is totally trapped since his father's murder cries out for vengeance, but so too does his mother's murder. Clearly there are traumas in Persona - Elisabeth's silence is a traumatic response, and Alma too has deeply repressed feelings, some of which are articulated in her long monologues. The questions of childbearing and maternal affection are raised both by Clytemnestra in Electra (famously she dreams of having given birth to a serpent when bearing Orestes) and by Alma in Persona (as she attempts to imagine Elisabeth's reasons for tearing her child's photograph in two) and these parts are taken by the same actress.

It's an intense experience: Greek tragedy is by its nature intense, and so too are most of Bergman's films, this one not the least. The two parts, though derived from theatrical and filmic works from centuries apart, do nevertheless make for a compelling if strange unity. Some of the power undoubtedly comes from the format which forces us to recognise that acting is taking place - and superb acting at that. Deep human emotions are being explored, but the theatricality of the process is being highlighted at the same time instead of being taken for granted, which is unusual but stimulating.