The Broken Heart

by John Ford

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 24 March 2015

Directed by Caroline Steinbeis with Brian Ferguson as Orgilus, Amy Morgan as Penthea, Sarah MacRae as Calantha, Owen Teale as Bassanes, and Luke Thompson as Ithocles.

The play is set in Sparta, with references to the gods, Delphi and oracles to underline its pre-Christian milieu. The word 'spartan' evokes notions of stoicism and self-denial as ideal character traits; the modern connotations of frugality and austerity arise as the consequence of rigorous personal self-control, not as mere descriptions of the physical or economic environment. Thus there is an atmosphere of self-denial and self-control assumed to essential aspects of civic virtue, and this permeates and poisons the relationships in the play.

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

filmed live performance from the Royal Exchange, Manchester, seen 23 March 2015

Directed for the stage by Sarah Frankcom and for the screen by Margaret Williams, this production featured Maxine Peake as Hamlet with John Shrapnel as Claudius and the Ghost, Barbara Marten as Gertrude and Katie West as Ophelia.

The Manchester Royal Exchange theatre is in the round, providing an intimate and potentially claustrophobic space to play out an intense and emotionally charged production of 'Hamlet'. Interest inevitably focusses on Maxine Peake, a woman playing the main character. With close-cut pale blond hair, she can look both boyish and beautiful, but the question of the character's age is left ambiguous. Around this Hamlet, both Ophelia and Laertes are young while Horatio is a youngish man with greying hair; Gertrude is not a young woman at all, and Claudius is in late middle age at best. As for Peake's characterisation, her Hamlet is intelligent, volatile, generous to the trustworthy (Horatio and Marcella), and increasingly cold to the mercenary. She has a tendency to display anger at the outside world and Hamlet's own self-disgust by shouting, a trait which has diminishing returns and which runs the risk of being merely histrionic rather than nuanced. All in all, though, it is a powerful and commanding performance.

Closer

by Patrick Marber

seen at the Donmar Warehouse 19 March 2015

This is the first London professional revival of Patrick Marber's 1997 play, sanctioned by the playwright. Directed by David Leveaux it features Rufus Sewell as Larry, Nancy Carroll as Anna, Olver Chris as Dan and Rachel Redford as Alice, with the set designed by Bunny Christie and the lighting by Hugh Vanstone.

The characters meet by chance or in the course of their working lives; at first Alice and Dan are together after an accidental meeting resulting from a traffic injury. Anna and Larry become interested in one another, having met as a consequence of an extraordinary (and theatrically famous) internet chat session in which Anna was impersonated by Dan. But Dan also falls for Anna; Larry eventually takes up with Alice; finally all have gone their separate ways and no-one is happy. The headlong sense of entitlement and an uneasy sense that one should be 'honest' no matter the cost means that most of the professions of love are basically self-centred and the idea of day-to-day commitment comes a sorry last in anyone's priorities. 

Game

by Mike Bartlett

seen at the Almeida Theatre 17 March 2015

This play, if nothing else, shows the astonishing versatility of Mike Bartlett's dramatic imagination. Where 'King Charles III' reinvented the Shakespearean history play to interrogate a constitutional crisis in the near future, with its characters rendered surprisingly serious by their blank verse utterances, 'Game' lasts barely an hour and pitches the audience collusively into the murky world of video games and voyeurism.

Love's Labour's Won - or - Much Ado About Nothing

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 5 March 2015

This production, provocatively retitled 'Love's Labour's Won' to underscore its relation t 'Love's Labour's Lost', is directed by Christpoher Luscombe with Edward Bennett as Benedick and Michelle Terry as Beatrice. It is set just after the First World War ostensibly in Charlecote Park, again to draw parallels to the earlier play.

The same production team is responsible for both plays; at the opening of this one there are hospital beds and nurses, but this soon gives way to the lighter-hearted mood of relief that ushered in the Twenties. Once again Nigel Hess's music evokes the era, with a concluding ragtime-like dance number.

Man and Superman

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) 4 March 2015

This production is directed by Simon Godwin with Ralph Fiennes as John Tanner, Indira Varma as Ann Whitefield, Nicholas le Prevost as Roebuck Ramsden and Tim McMullen as Mendoza. Though the text has been edited, the performance includes the third act dream/discussion known as 'Don Juan in Hell'.

The design by Christopher Oram wittily refers to the Edwardian era in which the play was published (1903) and first performed (1905) while enclosing the stage in a cloudy perspex box through which light is suffused in varying colours. For the scene in Hell the perspex walls are almost all that is present, glowing white to underscore Shaw's paradoxical views on lightness and darkness, hell and heaven. But there are quirky anachronisms all the more effective for being unexplained - the play opens with a Desert Island Discs episode featuring John Tanner, and later, although he has an old fashioned open topped sports car, and a chauffeur (as required by the text), he also receives text messages on a smartphone.

Boa

by Clara Brennan

seen at Trafalgar Studios Two on 3 March 2015

This is a two-handed play starring Harriet Walter as Boa, a British dancer and choreographer, and Guy Paul as her husband Louis, an American war journalist. It is directed by Hannah Price.

In the extremely intimate space of the Trafalgar Studio's second theatre a couple reflect on their lives together, charting the history of a long relationship in a mixture of reminiscence and re-enactment that is wise, reflective, at times amusing and at times deeply sad.