Humble Boy

by Charlotte Jones

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre on 29 March 2018

Paul Miller directs this first London-based revival of Charlotte Jones's 2001 play, featuring Jonathan Broadbent as Felix Humble, Belinda Lang as his mother Flora Humble, Selina Cadell as Mercy Lott, Christopher Ravenscroft as Jim, Paul Bradley as George Pye and Rebekah Hinds as his daughter Rosie Pye. The production is designed by Simon Daw.

The play concerns Felix, a potentially brilliant astrophysicist, returning home for his father's funeral and being faced with his poisonous mother, now interested in marrying George Pye. Life is further complicated by the fact some seven years earlier, Felix had had an affair with George's daughter Rosie; only now does he discover that Rosie's seven year old daughter is named Felicity 'after his father'.

Julius Caesar (again)

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 27 March 2018

Having so much enjoyed Nicholas Hytner's modern dress production of this play in January from a gallery seat, I decided that I just had to see it again as a promenader, milling about in the central acting area and being moved hither and yon by the stage crew (fully accoutred with headsets and security vests) as the demands of the staging required different rostra to be raised and lowered.

I'm extremely glad that I went again to see the play from this more involved perspective. Not only was it an excellent opportunity to see the actors from a closer position; it was also exciting to realise how cleverly the play had been streamlined for an uninterrupted two-hour running time, and to appreciate the logistical brilliance of the whole enterprise. 

The cast were even more impressive at close quarters - the intense intellectualism of Ben Whishaw's Brutus, the steely determination of Michelle Fairley's Cassius, the passionate energy of David Morissey's Mark Antony, were all powerfully rendered, while the crowd scenes were wonderfully managed so that we promenaders were part of the action but rarely required actually to do anything so vital that our inexperience would imperil the result. By this I mean that, for example, the crowd's cheering as Caesar progressed was almost entirely pre-recorded, so that our contributions (if made at all) supplemented the effect but did not create it. The most definite thing required of us, apart from keeping out of the way of the rostra and the stage crew's manipulation of furniture, was to crouch down in self-protection in the aftermath of the assassination, just as a crowd would be ordered to with the threat of armed assassins whose program was unknown. Where individual members of the crowd were needed to call out or to react specifically to the major characters, members of the cast were always on hand amongst us to deliver the goods.

It's a great production well worth its second view.

Lady Windermere's Fan

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville Theatre on 20 March 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some associated works; this is the second major production (after A Woman of No Importance). Kathy Burke directs Grace Molony as Lady Windermere, Joshua James as Lord Windermere, Samantha Spiro as Mrs Erlynne and Jennifer Saunders as the Duchess of Berwick.

Wilde uses the conventions of a melodrama to skewer social pretensions and at the same time to criticise unthinking adherence to moral absolutes. Mrs Erlynne is the catalyst for a crisis in the Windermere marriage. But most of the crisis is played out according to the mores of the time - the wife virtuous and condemnatory of social and ethical impropriety, the husband floundering in his attempts to do what's best in a situation where his natural presumption of masculine authority collides with his entrapment in blackmail. Curiously, although the audience is soon aware of the secret causing all the mayhem, Lady Windermere remains oblivious and some other major deceptions are also not unmasked.