The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

by Bryony Lavery based on Philip Pullman's novel

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 29 December 2021

Nicholas Hynter directs this adaptation of the first volume of Philip Pullman's new Book of Dust trilogy set a dozen or so years earlier than the events in His Dark Materials. That first trilogy was adapted into two plays for the National Theatre in 2004, Nicholas Hytner also directing, and here his frequent collaborator, the set designer Bob Crowley, once again creates a compelling vision as the backdrop to an exciting story.

Two major characters from His Dark Materials, Lord Asriel (John Light) and Marisa Coulter (Ayesha Dharker) are prominent in this story too, and two minor characters in the Oxford of Lyra's world are more important in this story: Alice Parslow (Ella Dacres) and Dr Hannah Relf (Naomi Frederick). The most important new character in this play is twelve year old Malcolm Polstead (Samuel Creasey), son of the innkeper of the Trout at Godstow. He and Alice find themselves protecting the baby Lyra not only from the sinister forces of the Magisterium and the machinations of her mother Mrs Coulter, but also from a deeply unpleasant disgraced research fellow Gerard Bonneville (Nicholas James-Neal in the performance I attended) and a catastrophic flood, until the baby is safely delivered to the scholarly sanctuary of Jordan College, where she is safe for the next twelve years.

The book is dense with action and intrigue, and Pullman as usual confronts the evils associated with established and complacent religious organisations with often gut-wrenching candour - there is an especially creepy brotherhood created by Mrs Coulter among schoolboys which essentially recruits them as spies on their friends and parents, all too reminiscent of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution of Mao's China or the fanatic youth groups in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Malcolm's sturdy common sense and innate kindness cause him to recoil from what he sees as sneaking, but barely protects him from the bullying it encourages.

The adaptation inevitably streamlines the story but cleverly keeps in balance the twin themes of growing into the adult world with its confusions and perils, and the sheer resilience needed to carry out a mission central to any successful quest narrative. Adults are just guests in Malcolm's mother's pub as far as young Malcolm is concerned until he is swept into their often mysterious concerns. Alice is just the annoying teenage girl who works for his mother and teases him relentlessly until they each begin to appreciate the other during their adventure. Samuel Creasey and Ella Dacres, both young adults, convincingly portray much younger characters, and are ably supported by the other cast members.

Visually the production is astonishing, the use of video projections on a deep stage with moveable black flats allowing for immediate scene changes and an enveloping and  convincing flood. Considering that almost the entire second act centres around the headlong journey of a small canoe (La Belle Sauvage) down the River Thames from Oxford to Greenwich, it is remarkable that anyone should have considered trying to make a stage play at all, but the result is a triumphant success from a technical point of view. Of course, there is also the matter of the daemons, the external manifestation of  person's inner self, envisaged once again by an inspired use of puppetry, and providing an excellent means to voice the inner conflicts of the two youngsters.

Though the pace may have been a bit rushed at times, and the forward-looking hints at Lyra's future importance a bit too knowing, overall this was a good adaptation and a marvellous piece of theatre, welcomed by an enthusiastic audience of all ages. It was particularly gratifying to see children in the audience captivated by the spectacle and the story. It has been a long wait, since my ticket (and indeed the whole produciton) was deferred from December 2020 on account of the pandemic, the last and longest delay to a cultural event in my calendar.

Spring Awakening

by Steven Sater with music by Douglas Sheik based on Frank Wedekind's play

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 16 December 2021

Frank Wedekind's controversial 1891 play Frühlings Erwachen is the basis for this musical from 2006 now revived at the Almeida by Rupert Goold with a cast of thirteen excellent young actors headed by Laurie Kynaston as Melchior, Stuart Thompson as Moritz and Amara Okereke as Wendla, with two older actors (Catherine Cusack and Mark Lockyer) taking all the adult parts. 

The usual high-spirited depiction of teenagers favoured by Broadway musicals here meets a sobering and at times shocking exposition of the cruelties of late nineteenth century bourgeois life, in which the suffocating strictures of adult prejudice, unwillingness to communicate, and fateful self-interest combine to quench the spirits and in some cases the lives of young people hopelessly out of their depth and yet eager to explore their world and make it better. 

Miriam Buether's set is a series of steep steps with large perspex doors at the top near the bare bricks at the back of the Almeida stage. The effect is of groups of teenagers lounging on the tiers of a school sportsground, or studying in a classroom resembling a lecture hall, though other scenes (domestic interiors, countryside ramblings, visits to a cemetery) are equally well accommodated. The set also lends itself to snappy choreography by Lynne Page, as the young people vent their frustrations or express their joys; there is a particularly clever song in which the boys wonder about 'all that's known' to the background beat of Latin recitation.

The high spirits, the chafing at ignorance (particularly of sexual matters), the crushing burden of parental expectation, are all refracted through the songs, but there is no escaping the seriousness of the themes running through this piece. While the adults may be presented as caricatures, and thus dangerously near to figures of fun, their baleful influence causes mayhem and destruction in young lives. Wendle, after begging her mother to admit that storks do not bring babies, still knows nothing about the matter when she finally embraces Melchior. He in turn has written an essay to explain the facts of life to the insecure Moritz, which is later used as evidence of his depravity - but clearly he also is not really aware of the possible consequences of his actions until it is too late. These vignettes help to indicate the wider rottenness in a society in which hypocrisy breeds contempt and condemnation; the closeness of the teenage friends is no protection aganist the forces arraigned against them, while their ignorance can lead them into frightening experiments. The scene in which Wendle asks Melchior to hurt her so that she can try to understand how a friend suffering from parental abuse might feel is truly horrifying to witness.

An anthem to a 'purple summer' concludes the play, something which in a less fraught musical would be completely uplifting and affirmative. In this milieu there can only be cautious optimism, since there is no sign within the play that the adults can be seriously confronted or that society will show any kindness to those whom it deems are failures. 

It's an exciting production of a thought provoking play.

While the Sun Shines

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 29 November 2021

Paul Miller directs a revival of one of the Orange Tree's most successful productions, Terence Rattigan's farce While the Sun Shines, first seen in 2019. Four of the original cast reprise their roles - Paul Labey as the Earl of Harpenden, John Hudson as his manservant Horton, Michael Lumsden as his prospective father-in-law the Duke of Ayr & Stirling, and Jordan Mifsúd as the French Lieutenant Colbert - while three new cast members take the other roles - Rebecca Collingwood as the Earl's fiancée Lady Elizabeth Randall, Sophie Khan Levy as Mabel Crum (an independent woman of considerable acuity), and Conor Glean as the American Lieutenant Mulvaney.

It's a great pleasure to see again this entertaining production of an intricately plotted play in which the surface confusions and rivalries, which could have been merely superficial nonsense, unexpectedly reveal deeper truths about the workings of society and the pitfalls of over-hasty presumptions about how people will behave. There is something Shavian about the twists and turns by which the characters navigate the perils of social expectation and personal happiness.

See also my review of the original production at 

https://nicholasatthetheatre.blogspot.com/2019/06/while-sun-shines.html#more

The Mirror and the Light

by Hilary Mantel and Ben Miles

seen at the Gielgud Theatre on 17 November 2021

This Royal Shakespeae Comany production, directed by Jeremy Herrin, is an adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novel of the same name, the third in her account of the life and career of Thomas Cromwell. The first two novels had been adapted by Mike Poulton for the RSC in 2014 (before I began my blog). Ben Miles as Cromwell and Nathaniel Parker as Henry VIII reprise their roles from the earlier plays, and are both excellent.

The novel is long (by far the longest of the three) and complex, as the final two years of Cromwell's life were full of intrigue and interest. Mantel also imagined his interior life, with many episodes of recollection from his boyhood and youth elaborating on scenes glimpsed in the early parts of Wolf Hall (the first book). Most of the introspection has perforce been stripped out, though glanced at in the play by the occasional appearance of Cromwell's father Walter and his principal mentor Cardinal Wolsey as ghostly figures, an idea that seems at times rather too camp to be effective.

The political struggles are wisely and competently simplified to concentrate on the demise of Henry's third queen Jane Seymour and the negotiations for the fourth marriage to Anna of Cleves. Famously this foundered on the king's displeasure at actually meeting his bride, but Mantel mischievously proposes that she also was less than enamoured at the unheralded arrival of a rather overbearing and by this time physically less than attracitve man. All this was well played in a versatile setting designed by Christopher Oram (inherited directly from the previous adaptations).

I have read the novel recently, and felt that this added some richness to the experience of watching the play, since some fleeting references resonated with my memories of the more extended treatment in the book. The play (and the book) suffer from a lack of tension since the outcome is hardly unknown; this inevitalby reduces the suspense. Of course, one could say the same thing about Shakespeare's history plays, though the plays in the more mature tetralogy (Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V) are arguably more memorable for the investigation of character than for mere historical information. I am not sure that these Cromwell plays will prove of such long-lasting interest. There was, for example, no attempt to revive the first two plays to coincide with the arrival of this last part, though maybe such an ambitious project would have been considered were it not for the deleterious effects of the pandemic on theatrical life.

Love and Other Acts of Violence

by Cordelia Lynn

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 28 October 2021

Elayce Ismail directs Tom Mothersdale and Abigail Weinstock in a new play by Cordelia Lynn, designed by Basia Bińkowska and lit by Joshua Pharo, the first production in the theatre since the renovation works which were fortuitously undertaken during the enforced closures of the recent lockdowns.

Love and Other Acts of Violence charts a stormy relationship between an unnamed man and woman, he a poet and she a physicist, who meet at a party, become partners, split for a while after a searing quarrel, and get together again. Their first encounter is unpromising, the man allowing the general noise of the party to excuse his overbearing encroachment on the woman's space and to amplify a typically masculine penchant for over-explaining things. The woman is poised and reserved, ironically amused, but eventually tired of the presumption. Even so, a casual hook-up develops into a more long-lasting liaison.

The tortuous misunderstandings between two adults with strong senses of their own independence form a frutiful subject for many modern plays, but the familiar tensions are given an added twist of urgency here by an uneasy sense that the society in which these two people live (presumably our society) is shifting away from comfortable certainties about personal and intellectual freedom towards something more sinister. The man has always been an activist; his insistent 'mansplaining' at the beginning is full of political jargon and well-worn catchphrases. It takes far longer - perhaps too long - for the woman, coccooned in a university research lab, to realise that his analysis has been broadly correct. She recounts a chilling discussion with her head of department that seems at first sight just a bureaucratic absurdity, but which carries unmistakably totalitarian overtones.

Simmering underneath is a minefield set by historical events the two are poorly aware of. In a purely accidental way the two discover that their forebears hailed from a city with a dark and contentious past, a city with differing names depending on one's viewpoint: Lemburg, Lviv or Lwow. She, from a Jewish background, is uneasily aware of the ramifications. He, of Polish extraction, idly wonders whether their ancestors might have known one another, but she says decisively that it would be better if they had not.

The increasing threat of the contemporary situation is linked in an unexpected epilogue with a glimpse at the disaster that befell her family in the pogrom of 1919. Until this point the entire play had been performed on a bare wooden stage surrounded by gravel and ash, with an equally featureless wooden ceiling suspended above. This ceiling is winched down to reveal a domestic interior in which a terrified young woman attempts to warn her father (Richard Katz) of the approaching Polish troops while he reminisces about the stability of life in the shtetl the family abandoned a generation before; only she survives while a confused Polish man grapples with the horror he has helped to inflict on her family. It is an unusual insight to imagine that the casually anti-semitic young man might be as traumatised by events as the obvious victim. The young peole here are clearly the ancestors of the man and woman in the present.

Abigail Weinstock and Tom Mothersdale chart the rocky relationship with skill, dependent entirely on the text since the play is uncluttered by scenery or props until the epilogue. The markers of the wider situation are presented unfussily, and therefore do not seem at all heavy-handed, allowing for the the all-too-common turbulences of a contemporary relationship to become fraught with historical resonances even as the characters remain largely oblivious of them. The woman admits to an overpowering fear of bearing children, beyond anything the man can imagine, but it is left to us to draw conclusions about why she should feel this way.

The newspaper reviews I have read find the ambition of the play laudable but the structure a disappointment. Clearly, however, the playwright did not intend to write just another romantic comedy, or just another variation of Constellations, and I found the play powerful partly because it delibertely pulled back from the intensely personal to explore the wider picture.

Rice

by Michele Lee

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 21 October 2021

Matthew Xia (artistic director of the Actors Touring Company) directs Zainab Hasan as Nisha and Sarah Lam as Yvette in a production designed by Hyemi Shin of Michele Lee's intriguing play Rice, a co-production by the Orange Tree Theatre and the Actors Touring Copany.

Nisha is an ambitious executive in an Australian company hoping to take over the management of India's distribution of rice (the 'public distribution system' or PDS). Yvette is an older Hmong woman who is a cleaner in the Melbourne office where Nisha works. Their initial encounters are extremely abrasive, but gradually a friendship develops, buffeted though it is by each woman's personal and business problems. During the course of the play we see the pressures confronting these two women through family expectation - Yvette has always been denigrated by her family, and has a particularly unsympathetic daughter, while Nisha struggles to make her mark in the masculine world of big business, taking risks which rebound against her and dealing with condescending assumptions about her connections to India (she is presumably Australian-born). Intriguingly, it is not only the men in her business who are ruthless: her liaison with a feamle official in an Indian government department is fraught with power plays and proves quite poisonous.

In an aseptic white set - white floor, white office desk and attachments, a white sunken space which acts as a sluice for water used in cleaning - the story of the business project is played out, but vertiginously the two actors take on other roles to show what happens, and the scene moves seamlessly from Nisha's office to other spaces in Melbourne and various sites in India. We also see Yvette's awkward struggle to protect her daughter from prosecution for a principled assault on the CEO of a polluting company. 

At times the transformations of character take place at great speed, but with carefully managed inflections of accent and characteristic stances and movements we are almost always clear about whom we are seeing and where we are. The accents are perhaps a little overdone at times (the Eastern European manager of the cleaning contractors is rather too much of a caricature, and the Australian accents are valiant but clearly not native), but the overall effect successfully opens out the different cut-throat worlds in which these two women have to navigate their lives.

As a corrective to the predominantly male-dominated interpretations of the business world Rice is an important piece of work; with no men actually on stage we see more clearly Nisha's frustrations and sense the almost impersonal oppression a woman can so often feel with powerful men calling the shots, often acting behind her back while being patronising to her face. Likewise, Yvette, though used to a lifetime of men in her family defining her place and her character, here has a chance to exhibit her resilience and her anger. Zainab Hasan and Sarah Lam show a dazzling technical skill in bringing this remarkable text to life.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 7 October 2021

Yaël Farber directs James McArdle in the title role and Saoirse Ronan as Lady Macbeth in a compelling production of one of Shakespeare's more difficult plays to stage. The potent brew of notorious witches, prophecies that come true because they are known about, and others that come true with cruel twists, combined with violent action and unsympathetic protagonists all too often leads to overblown or unbalanced results on stage. Here at the Almeida the pitfalls are avoided, and the director has made some interesting adjustments to the text to create a stark vision of inexorable catastrophe.

What to do with the language? The Scottish court spoke with Scottish accents: only the witches, Lady Macduff and the children did not. This worked surprisingly well once the ear had adjusted to it; Shakespearean cadences resonate just as easily in these voices as in 'received pronunciation'.

What to do with the witches? The presumed mindset of the original audience is no longer available to us, and indeed these witches in particular with their incantatory rhymes have become so stereotypical that they can seem like a joke. Farber has renamed them 'Wyrd Sisters' (having noticed that they are named 'Weird Sisters' in the folio cast list), and the programme notes draw attention to the many manifestations of three women guarding, creating or spinning Fate (Anglo-Saxon 'wyrd') in European myths. Thus there are no old crones cackling over a disgusting cauldron. Instead three enigmatic women, almost serene in their dispassionate presence, may be seen not only when they appear to Macbeth and Banquo, and later to Macbeth alone; they are also visible as silent observers of the outworking of Fate at many other moments during the play - possibly at all moments, though there is a good deal of mist billowing about which makes the back wall of the stage invisible at times.

What to do with the violent action? Macbeth is a bloody play, with unpleasant murders both off and on stage. There were two perspex screens often moved about the stage demarcating inner and outer spaces (part of a brilliant set design by Soutra Gilmour). A director might easily have splashed them copiously with blood starting with the execution of the rebel Thane of Cawdor near the beginning of the play; the murder of Duncan might even have been mimed behind a screen with further opportunity for spraying blood. In this production matters were more restrained, and all the more disquieting for that. At the opening tableau the whole cast gathered on stage to a persistent thrum of a low musical note above which a single cello line wavered. An attendant woman brought on a wheelbarrow full of boots and upended it, then carefully placed them at the front of the stage. A soldier washed himself from a bucket, but what he daubed over himself was blood, since a blood-soaked messenger brings the news of victory to Duncan. Similarly, bloodstains were always restricted only to the bodies of actors - either Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after the murder of Duncan, or Banquo when he appears as a ghost - and not used at all elsewhere, even during the on-stage murders. This made the deaths of Lady Macduff  and her two sons all the more chilling, especially as one child was dragged screaming from a hiding place and the lady herself was ultimately dispatched in a tub of water.

What to do with the disintegration of Lady Macbeth towards the end of the play? Lady Macbeth is a driving force in the first half of the play, but increasingly cut off from her husband's plans and inner torment once he has become king. Then, at the end, there is the famous sleepwalking scene, with little to prepare us for it. Farber has created a daring visualisation of  the trauma precipitating this downfall. She has Lady Macbeth bring the advice to Lady Macduff that she should flee with her children, and then still be present to witness the murders. It is preposterous on a realistic level, but psychologically extremely acute, and Saoirse Ronan utterly convinces in showing the trembling panic of an unwilling witnes to such babarity. Naked ambition in the abstract, so forcefully embraced by this woman at the beginning of this play, here confronts the horror of its consequences on real lives, and the strain is too much: a brilliant stroke.

What to do about Macbeth? Make him passionate, ambitious, uncertain about murder at the beginning but plausibly easy with the idea as his obsessions take control, completely unaware of the irony (and foolishness) in his determination to connive at the fulfilment of prophecy when it is to his advantage but to attempt to outwit it when it is detrimental. Make the famous lines of despair at the news of his wife's death deply felt, not just cynical world-weariness. Give the part to James McArdle who conveys initial doubts over murdering Duncan, horror at the deed, abject terror at the appearance of Banquo's ghost and steely resolve to fight to the last, with equal skill and authority.

What do do about the Porter defusing the tension of the murder scene with long disquisitions about equivocation, a subject of no interest to a modern audience? Dispense with him completely, along with the more lurid witches' hocus pocus. In fact a number of other scenes were streamlined or omitted, making for sharper emphasis and an unremitting atmosphere of tension. I am not sure, but I think I even missed the explicit instruction for soldiers to disguise their numbers by cutting branches from the trees at Burnham Wood (a vital point in destabilising Macbeth's self-assurance, which was cunningly foreshadowed by the procession of Banquo's heirs presented to an anguished Macbeh during his final encounter with the Wyrd Sisters). There was no evocation of the holy stability of the English realm under Edward the Confessor to contrast with the dire state of Scotland or the peculiar defensiveness of prince Malcolm when Macduff confronts him. 

There was no final speech by the new king after the death of the tyrant Macbeth. Instead, the surviving cast gathered again in almost the same positions as at the beginning; the wheelbarrow of boots appeaed, and one of the three Wyrd Sisters pronouned once more the opening question: 'When shall we three meet again?'. Malcolm was in the spotlight rather than Duncan, but Fate, evidently, is cyclical.

Leopoldstadt

by Tom Stoppard

seen at Wyndham's Theatre on 16 September 2021

Patrick Marber directs a large cast (twenty-five adults and several children) in Tom Stoppard's new play concerning the fate of two extended Jewish families in Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century. There ae major scenes in 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938 and 1955, and four generations of the Merz and Jakobovicz families are on stage at various times.

At the turn of the century the families are well off and slightly contemptuous of their humbler beginnings and any reminders of more traditional Jews from the easern provinces of the empire (they don't actualy live in Leopoldstadt which was by then a popular Jewish enclave in Vienna: one senses they find it beneath their dignity). Hermann in particular sees great possibilities in joining the bourgeois establishment, apparently prepared to overlook the snide anti-semitism surrounding him until it is too glaring even for him. Later, of course, in 1938, as the Nazis take over Austria, any such accommodation is impossible, and in the coda to the play the fate of almost all the family members is intoned in a bleak account of their deaths.

Stoppard's own experience of fleeing Czechoslovakia in 1938 as an infant and eventually being brought up as an English schoolboy with his stepfather's surname willingly adopted and for many years unaware of his wider family's story is represented in the play by a young man similarly naive in 1955, but this is determinedly not a play specifically about the Straussler family. Unfortunately all too many experienced similar aspirations of integration followed by brutal tragedy, and it is perhaps more salutary that Stoppard chose to portray a fictional exemplum of the fate of so many, rather than a documentary drama of an historical case. 

By shifting the location from his own family's provinical Bohemia to the imagined families' cosmopolitan Vienna, and evoking a wide ranging cast of businessmen, doctors and professors, matriarchs and young women eager for more than domesticity, all enmeshed in a comfortable and sociable setting, he easily blends sharp reminders of prejudice with dazzling explorations of intellectual pursuits (especially mathematics) and also with socal comedy and Jewish humour - the scenes in 1924 revolve around an almost farcical conflict between various family members over whether the new-born male should be circumcised, with a typical Stoppardian riff on mistaken identity when a visiting business associate is mistaken for the surgeon invited to perform the rite.

The families could be seen as turning a blind eye to danger for too long - but who did not? The collapse of security in 1938 is a chilling interruption to 'normal' life. After scenes of domestic tension amidst family solidarity, almost the stuff of any comfortable family-oriented drama, the arrival of thugs self-appointed as official bureaucrats to dispossess the family of their apartment, all the while spouting vile terms of abuse, is sickening. The fact that very little overt physical violence is needed renders the ultimate peril all the more frightening.

Marshalling a large cast and exploring a multi-generational story is a huge challenge for playwright, director and actors alike. Stoppard's decades of experience with paradox, coincidence and wit here enable him to create memorable vignettes which underpin a rich milieu: we may wish we had time to explore some of these in more detail, but we have to be satisfied with just the small hints we are given. Yet it is one of these apparently incidental scenes in 1938 which triggers the poignant connection in 1955 between the young Englishman and the embittered Austrian survivor when hitherto their utterly different experiences threatened to leave them cold to each other: a quiet and subtle masterstroke in a play of panoramic ambition.

Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act

by Athol Fugard

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 9 September 2021

Diane Page, this year's winner of the JMK Award for new directors, directs Athol Fugard's play from 1972 concerning an affair between a librarian Frieda Joubert (Scarlett Brookes) and a schoolteacher Errol Philander (Shaq Taylor) which falls foul of race relations legislation in apartheid South Africa because she is white and he is not.

The affair is of necessity clandestine, both because of the colour bar and because Errol has a wife and children. Consequently there are any number of tensions between the two, whose needs and passions conflict with fear, uncertainty and suspicion. As Errol and Frieda circle round a huge sunken pit in the centre of the stage, and only occasionally meet in it, they voice their anxieties; each tries to hold on to the joy of their relationship as it threatens to crumble under pressure. The whole stage floor is a matt black, and the circular pit has no sharp edges: the ground just slopes into the wall of the pit, making their circling round it look perilously like water swirlng round a drain. The pit is, of course, of no use as a hiding place when a police raid led by Detective Sergeant J du Prez (Richard Sutton) leads to their arrest and interrogation. Niall McKeever's set achieves both a sense of limbo and an underlying threat.

This is not a play in which love triumphs over adversity. The two lovers are brim full of insecurities deriving from their personalities as much as their political and social situations. Lyrical outbursts vie with the pain arising from the need for concealment, and though this need is obvious it also leads to feelings of guilt and inadequacy. The wider issues of desperate poverty in the townships and intense bigotry in the privileged white areas create plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding. In a mere seventy minutes a whole crushing environment is evoked through conversation, monologue, and the chilling impersonality of the official police report which is delivered with startling venom.

Scarlett Brookes and Shaq Taylor portray two people involved with one another yet always beset by wariness of their predicament and even mutual suspicion. Though neither disavows their relationship under pressure, there is little sense that it could ever survive the rigour of public exposure. It is a salutary reminder that more is at play in the world than struggles for personal fulfilment, and that social oppression can be frighteningly strong. 

This particular piece must be grounded in its historical context to make sense, and therefore the cast adopted fairly strong South African accents. Occasionally this made it hard to catch everything that was said, even in the intimate context of the Orange Tree, and it perhaps ran the risk of giving the audience the consolation of thinking 'that was then, that was there'. Unfortunately for many it is no consolation at all. The cruelties of South African apartheid may have disappeared, but racial prejudice and oppression are still rife; the play has not lost its force or relevance.

Bach & Sons

by Nina Raine

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 1 September 2021

Nicholas Hytner directs Simon Russell Beale as Johann Sebastian Bach with Pandora Colin as his first wife Maria Barbara, Racheal Ofori as his second wife Anna Magdalena, Ruth Lass as Maria's sister Katerina, Douggie McMeekin as Wilhelm Friedrich, Samuel Blenkin as Carl Philip Emanuel, one of four boys as Johann Gottfried Bernhard, and Pravessh Rana as Frederick the Great of Prussia in a new play by Nina Raine. 

The Bridge Theatre has been configured as a thrust stage for this production, with a set designed by Vicki Mortimer inluding moveable truckles to bring on and remove various rooms (offices, bedrooms, court salons), and dominated by a cascade of inverted harpsichords suspended above the acting area. All this emphasises the supreme importance of music in the Bach household, and it is hardly surprising that the play concentrates on the dynamics of a family springing from noted musicians in the past, with a genius father hoping to instil musicianship in his sons for the future.

Inevitably there are tensions, with the two elder brothers vying for their father's approval, and suffering from his implacable honesty, which leads him to criticise their attempts at composition ruthlessly.,He sees it as teaching without fear or favour, whereas the boys find it an intolerable strain. In the background Gottfried the youngest is already showing precocious signs of talent, while their mother frets at her husband's intransigence and tries to suppress feelings of jealousy as a young soprano enters the orbit of the family, and her sister Katerina devotedly keeps house. 

Despite the exuberance of young boys both revelling in and fearing their father's attention, and the delight they take in groaning at oft-repeated family anecdotes (the long walk their father took to visit Buxtehude, for example) or hearing a new example of his cussedness with authority, there is an underlying melancholy in the household, since illness and mortality are not far away and several siblings have already died in infancy. The first half of the play concludes with the poignant death of their mother, the boys' anguish that their father was away on business throughout her protracted illness, and their incredulity that within barely a year he announces to them his plan to marry Anna Magdalena.

In the second half the boys have grown up, Wilhelm seeking to avoid the burden of his father's expectations through drink, Carl closed in by the pain of always feeling second best even as he makes a career for himself in the creepy atmosphere of the Prussian court, and Gottfried studying elsewhere to be a lawyer. In Leipzig Bach continues his irascible interactions with bureaucrats and is scornfully impatient with the quality of the musicians and singers who perform - or misperform - his work, while Anna Magdalena has her own catalogue of sorrows with numerous infants now buried. When J S Bach visits the Prussian court, the meeting with Frederick the Great is stilted and difficult, made somehow more uneasy by Frederick's willingness to foment the strain he perceives between father and son.

It is always a pleasure to see Simon Russell Beale portray a character of intelligence and passion. He manages to convey some of the intricacies of compositional technique with complete conviction so that they seem almost straightforward, while also showing us a man whose self-confidence and prickliness hide the scars of a difficult childhood and the sheer slog of making music to order while believing it to be of supreme importance. 

However, the play does have problems. There is always a difficulty in making drama about acknowledged genius, especially when exposition is needed to set the scene. Famously Peter Shaffer's Amadeus resolved this by using Salieri as a hugely biassed narrator to explicate Mozart's life. In Bach & Sons the composer's career, and the tensions in his family life, are presented without a filter of this sort, and so all the informaton we need to make sense of the situation has to proceed through dialogue. Unfortunately this tends to dissipate the dramatic tension.

Furthermore the time frames are imprecise, and in the interests of dramatic compression they are in fact seriously misleading. I had difficulty in the opening scenes in determining how old the two older boys were meant to be. We were told that Gottfried (the youngest) is three and is kept awake by his father relentlessly trying out musical ideas on the harpsichord, so when he appears later as a young boy at times carried around by his older brothers we may assume some time has passed and he is perhaps by then five. As the actors are young men, I assumed they were playing teenagers, and I kept provisionally lowering their ages in my mind as the style of their conversation (with plenty of references to 'Mummy') indicated their youth. On the other hand in a crucial scene before their mother becomes ill, Carl accuses Wilhelm of having alcohol on his breath (in adult life he did drink), which most easily implies mid adolescence at the earliest. In fact, Wilhelm was ten, Carl six and Gottfried five when their mother died. Also, their aunt died nine years later, but in the play she is portrayed as welcoming Carl to the family home in Leipzig at the time of his father's death sme twenty years later. The creepily camp Frederick of Prussia appears to be giving Bach the first news of Gottfried's untimely death in the guise of offering condolences, but their meeting took place in 1747 and Gottfried died in 1739.

Dramatic licence is of course just that, and one hardly registers the historical distortions that are rife in Shakespeare's plays, but the curious mixture of careful and wilful chronology exhibited here is at times distracting. The various themes of the play - the potentially toxic experience of having a genius for a father and teacher combined; the crushing blows of multiple pregnancies followed too soon by child burials; the enigma of a composer of sublime music who is a difficult man to live with - jostle for attention but do not enttirely cohere to make a great play.

Singin' in the Rain

 based on the MGM film

seen at Sadlers Wells on 28 August 2021

Jonathan Church directs Adam Cooper as Don Lockwood, Charlotte Gooch as Kathy Selden, Kevin Clifton as Cosmo Brown and Faye Tozer as Lina Lamont in the stage adaptation of the famous MGM film starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor and Jean Hagen.

The story, an affectionate look at the transformation of the movie industry from silent to sound, inevitably appears somewhat more thin on stage, where the flimsiness of the characters is more exposed, but the chief attractions are the musical numbers, and these receive exhilarating treatment by the principals and the supporting chorus. The slapstick energy of 'Make 'em Laugh', with its dizzying use of cinematic tricks, cannot quite be matched on stage, but the delirious title song gets the full treatment, with Adam Cooper gleefully kicking up as much spray as possible from a stage drenched in huge amounts of rainwater. It is clearly wise not to be sitting in the front few rows of the stalls. The staging as a whole made excellent use of an all-purpose set designed by Simon Higlett with lighting by Tim Mitchell, creating many different locatons both interior and exterior with the minimum of fuss.

The thankless role of Lina Lamont, the rather bitchy actress whose voice and elocution desperately need the attention of a Professor Henry Higgins, but whose impossible vowels remain unchanged to the end, is given a wistful song in an attempt to increase her prominence, but this has the unfortunate effect of emphasising that she is little more than the butt of a joke which looks increasingly insensitive. This only goes to show that musicals of this vintage are almost impossible to redeem if one tries to impose modern sensibilities on them. Far better just to go with the flow, get sprayed with rainwater if one is close enough, and enjoy the show as sheer entertainment. 

Paradise

by Kae Tempest

seen at the National Theatre (Olivier) on 26 August 2021

Kae Tempest has transformed Philoctetes by Sophocles into a modern setting in which the titular hero is abandoned, wounded, but with an unerring bow which allows him to forage for food, on an island ironically called Paradise, shared with a chorus of women who live in some sort of refugee camp or staging post for possible release to another country, if only they had the correct papers for travel.

Odysseus, the wily captain, and Neoptolemus, the naive and impressionable son of Achilles, arrive on a mission to persude or compel Philoctetes to join them, since a prophecy has declared that the long war they are involved in cannot be won without him and his bow. Philoctetes is less than willing, his suppurating wound torturing him, and his sense of betrayal (it was Odysseus who abandoned him on the island) festering into suspicion and anger after years of brooding.

So much, so Sophocles, but in modern dress, with references to papers, immigration, refugee status, and the unchanging heartbreak of women who lose men in war, much is also different (the chorus in Philoctetes are sailors accompanying the warriors, not women trapped on the island). Also, although the talismanic bow and the disposition of Achilles' famed armour are still discussed, the soldiers speak in an entirely modern way clearly referencing styles in the British Army - Odysseus the clipped oficer type, Neoptolemus the raw but enthusiastic recruit, Philoctetes the broadest cockney imaginable. The women are very Caribbean in their sensibility, including an older wise woman who speaks, or rather almost sings, in an incantatory style. 

The original play pits youthful integrity against cynical worldliness, with the hapless Philoctetes hoping against hope that Neoptolemus is not trying to trick him and constantly appealing to the young man's sense of honor, Odysseus briskly trading on his naivety, and the young man torn between duty and honour, leading to an impasse so finely balanced that only the intervention of a god (the deified hero Heracles) can resolve the problem by instructing his erstwhile companion to swallow his pride and anger and go with the other two to Troy. In Paradise, by contrast, there is a neat twist forcing the play to suggest a cycle of wounded exiles rather than a resolution of the ethical dilemma - it's a clever idea.

Elsewhere the new playwright's interventions are less successful. The weird incantations are not always easy to follow, and at a critical moment Philoctetes delivers an excoriating speech about blighted patriotism, ugly colonialism and the generally despicble state of the nation to which Odysseus demands he be loyal, which for all its passionate anger seriously interrupts the flow of the drama. It was simply too much propaganda, the character suddenly a mouthpiece for the author.

Perhaps the most startling thing about the production (directed by Ian Rickson and designed by Rae Smith) is the fact that the whole cast (not just the chorus) was female. Anastasia Hille played Odysseus, Lesley Sharp Philoctetes, and Gloria Obianyo Philoctetes. Yet there was no sense that these were female soldiers; masculine pronoun still abound in the text and masculine body language and attitudes confront us everywhere on stage. It makes for an invigorating interpretation of a play that is almost two and half thousand years old, a difficult play in itself not always perfectly presented in its new guise, but nonetheless an intriguing and in many ways timely experience.

Constellations 3 and 4

by Nick Payne

seen at the Vaudeville Theatre on 14 August 2021

The third and fourth pairings in Michael Longhurst's revival of Constellations for the Donmar began performing at the start of the month. In the afternoon I saw Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O'Dowd, while in the evening I saw Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey, the play having been reconfigured for them (mainly by changing names) so that it is about a gay couple.

What astonished me about the afternoon performance was the lightness of touch brought to the piece by the two actors. Chris O'Dowd is perhaps best known as a comic actor, though he gave a remarkable performance as Lenny in Of Mice and Men on Broadway a few years ago (see my review of 20 November 2015). On the other hand I have only seen Anna Maxwell Martin in serious mode, most notably excelling in the difficult part of Esther Summerson in the BBC's 2005 adaptation of Bleak House. She brought an infectious line of self-deprecating humour to the part of Marianne in Constellations, with the most wonderful giggling laughter that could turn in a moment to a heartrending groan of despair. With Chris O'Dowd as a foil the two told the dizzying story of the relationship between Roland and Marianne as a roller-coaster ride between flirtatious humour and almost inarticulate distress: it was really impressive.

In the final version of the production, Emanuel (Manny), played by Omari Douglas, and Roland, played by Russell Tovey, brought a new dynamic to the play; Manny's flirtatiousness had a slightly camp edge, while Roland, older and more cautious, was an excellent partner (the actors are 27 and 39 respectively). The brilliance of the play at exploring the pressures of creating and maintaining a relationship, and the emotional costs involved when external factors intervene, was by no means compromised by its reconfiguration for two men to take the parts.

Inevitably, with the chance to see four versions of the same play in a relatively short period of time, there is the temptation to assert a preference. All four casts performed well, and it was fascinating to enjoy four quite different approaches to the same text - another sign of the play's inherent strength is that it can sustain such varieties of emphasis. I heard two members of the afternoon audience remark that they could not imagine seeing another cast perform it, and I think that for me, too, Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O'Dowd gave the most satisfying interpretation - but it would be easy to imagine that other people would choose a different pair as their favourite.

Last Easter

by Bryony Lavery

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre (Richmond) on 15 July 2021

Tinuke Craig directs this revival of Bryony Lavery's 2007 play Last Easter, in which June (Naana Agyei-Ampadu), a lighting designer, is diagnosed with terminal secondary breast cancer and is supported by her three friends drag artist Gash (Peter Caulfield), property manager Leah (Jodie Jacobs) and actor Joy (Ellie Piercy).

June is the often still centre of a maelstrom of displacement activity by her panicked friends, particularly in the first half of the play when Gash and Leah propose a trip to a villa in France which just happens to be close to Lourdes, and then the three decide to reduce shared costs by inviting Joy along as a fourth - Joy who is alarmingly self-obsessed and still reeling from the suicide of a boyfriend. To add to the larkiness generated by Gash and Leah within the narratvie of the play, there are frequent comments made directly to various members of the audience, including apologies that June's occasionally deep introspection is dramatically exceedingly uninteresting to watch.

The trip to France is a bit of a wacky road trip; the visit to Lourdes a mixture of horror at its insitutionalised commercialism of the unwell and humour at the prospect of a lapsed Catholic, a Jewess, a Buddhist and the quietly sceptical June actually gaining any benefit from being there. At times it seems that the play is trying to cover too many bases at once - farce, pathos, meta-theatricality, the loyalty of friends under extreme emotional pressure. In the second half, as the issue of assisted suicide is addressed, a deeper seriousness invades the stage in which the hilarity of inappropriate speech and gesture is more successfully integrated into a poignant and difficult circumstance.

The cast acquit themselves with infectious energy, skilfully managing the swerves of the play's style. Moments of solidarity and affection jostle with impatience, pain and disillusionment in a way which acknowledges that life is often raw, messy and painful, while there are also episodes of merry excitement and even quiet enjoyment. Not only is June enthralled by the light in a painting by Caravaggio; she also enjoys just being. It's fascinating that a play celebrating a fair degree of brashness nevertheless gives due weight to these quieter moments as well.

After Life

by Jack Thorne

seen at the National Theatre (Dorfman) on 8 July 2021

Jack Thorne has adapted this play from a 1998 Japanese film of the same name (at least in English: 'Wonderful Life' or 'Wandafuru Raifu' in Japanese) which was devised by Hirokazu Kore-Eda. The play is directed by Jeremy Herrin with the set and costumes designed by Bunny Christie, and it features a cast of twelve: five 'guides' and seven 'guided' with some of these seven doubling up in ancillary roles. It is presented by the National Theatre in conjunction with Headlong Theatre.

The action takes place over one week in a facility where guides are assigned to the recently dead to encourage them to identify a memory from their lives which they are happy to take with them (to the exclusion of all other memories) into eternity. The guided have three days to decide on their memory, after which the team of guides will reconstruct and film the memory for the onward journey, which must take place before the end of the week. On Sundays the staff tidy up and prepare for the next week's arrivals on Monday.

For some the memory to be chosen is fairly obvious, but a teenage girl is somewhat put out to discover that her choice (a visit to Disneyland) is all too common for her age group; eventually she chooses something more personal. But should she have discovered this? The knowledge came from one of the guides, despite the fact that guides should only be facilitators; the apprentice guide (Millicent Wong) has yet to learn the constraints of the job.

For others, making a choice is extremely difficult; a young man (Olatunji Ayofe) is shocked to discover he is not in a place of judgement, and he prevaricates. An older man(Togo Igawa), perhaps playfully given the same forename as the director of the film, feels his life has been too much on an even keel for him to make a valid choice. The guide assigned to each case tries to encourage reflection without forcing the issue.

There is something rather haphazard about the whole arrangement, brought to the fore when a couple of the memories are reenacted. The stage manager - or would it be production designer? - is frustrated  in re-creating a memory for a young pilot who was happiest flying a Cessna through clouds - the props department can only provide the wrong sort of plane. Equally, there are difficulties in arranging for the right quantity of cherry blossom to fall for the childish memory of an idyllic spring afternoon.

Jack Thorne's adaptation skilfully blends a number of characters from the film and makes clear through dialogue what was achieved in the film by indirection and voiceovers. While there is a lightheartedness about the presentation of some of the memories, an older lady Beatrice Killick (June Watson) reveals a deeply affecting life story when she is finally able to acknowledge the emotional cost of her experience. Likewise the interaction between the older man Hirokazu Mochizuki and his guide (Luke Thallon, giving an excellent performance) leads unexpectiedly to an extraordinary and moving resolution for them both while at the same time revealing to us more of the workings of the facility. The guides, while trying to be professional and discreet, have their own stories after all, which can all too easily impinge on their assignments.

The film, which I have watched again before writing this review, must have nuances connected with Japanese attitudes towards death which may well escape an anglophone viewer (there are, for example, some references to unfamilar devotional ceremonies). The play wisely concentrates on 'domesticating' the workings of the facility and imbuing some of the characters concerned with a more familiar Englishness: for example Beatrice Killick is very recognisably a type of stalwart no-nonsense Northern woman and her reminiscences of a dance hall where she danced with her brother easily evoke the bygone focus of social life in provincial towns. 

It is a great pleasure to see an intriguing but probably little known film transformed into an equally beguiling play.

Constellations 1 and 2

by Nick Payne

seen at the Vaudeville Theatre on 3 July 2021

Michael Longhurst revives Nick Payne's play, this time on behalf of the Donmar Warehouse where he is now artistic director, though in a West End theatre since the Donmar itself is currently undergoing a major renovation.

The play is well suited to the current situation in terms of its technical requirements, in that there are only two actors involved, with a small technical team to back them up; also, at only 70 minutes in length, it places a fairly minimal threat in terms of gathering strangers in an interior space for a prolonged period. Many of the seats in the theatre are in any case unoccupied due to current government restrictions.

The beguiling investigation of memory, its significance and fickleness, is further emphaised in this revival by the decision to use four separate casts to play the protagonists. On this occasion I saw Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker in the afternoon performance, and Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah in the evening performance.

Visually the production is the same as I recall seeing in 2015 (see my review of 24 June 2015 for my account of the play itself and the way it challenges the audience's expectation of following a straightforward narrative). The interest here, therefore, resides in watching two completely different pairs of people interpret the play on the same day: an older couple followed by a younger couple. Inevitably one assumes that the opening scenes in which Ronnie and Marianne tentatively get to know one another are played out with a different hinterland in each case: the nerves of older people making a connection which may or may not be comfortable being fraught, one supposes, with past possibly disappointing experience, whereas the nerves of the younger pair may only arise from inexperience. These contrasting possibilities cast very different lights on what follows.

I felt that there was a drawback with Zoe Wanamaker and Peter Capaldi. They are both distinguished actors, but their styles are also very distinctive, and in a play with so little material pointers - a stage full of balloons, for exanple, rather than any representation of a recognisable space - it is hard to distance onself from the knowledge of who the actors are. Their personal mannerisms are simply too prominent at times. Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah are not (yet) so well known, though Sheila Atim has an immensely striking physical presence. It seemed to me that the younger pair had an easier time with establishing the flirtatiousness of the two characters, whereas with the older actors the same scenes came across more as social comedy or world-weariness. Consequently I found the second performance more convincing.

The play revels in repeating scenes with slight variations of dialogue, creating multiple ways of understanding what might be happening or what is going unsaid. It is even more fascinating to watch two such different performances in quick succession, allowing even more resonances to reverberate in the mind.

Shaw Shorts

 by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 24 June 2020

Two short plays by Bernard Shaw, How He Lied to Her Husband (written in 1904 as a curtain raiser to Man of Destiny) and Overruled (written in 1912 for an evening of short pieces by various playwrights) herald the welcome return of live theatre with a small audience to this wonderful theatre in Richmond. 

Paul Miller, the artistic director of the Orange Tree, has form in reviving the classics of British drama, not least several scintillating productions of plays by Shaw. Here, two pieces rarely performed because they are so short - and because the idea of a 'curtain raiser' would probably be incomprehensible to a modern audience and unthinkable financially - are given the chance to remind us of Shaw's brilliant use of an absurd situation to expose the hypocrisies of social convention.

In How He Lied to Her Husband Henry Apjohn (Joe Bolland) has written sonnets in praise of Aurora Bompas (Dorothea Myer-Bennett). She has mislaid them, sure that her sister-in-law has purloined them and will show her husband Teddy (Jordan Mifsúd). In just a few turns of dialogue the dreamy romanticism that allows Henry to idolise Aurora is skewered by the curious mixture of carelessness and worldly wisdom exhibited by Aurora. The moment when social reality really begins to collide with high-flown sentiment is wonderfully managed by the shift of the lovers from using their christian names to using their formal titles ('Mr Apjohn', 'Mrs Bompas'), a social nicety with almost no practical force nowadays, but one which Shaw's unerring instinct for dramatic shorthand can still bring into play for an attentive audience. 

Masculine pretensions are further skewered by the arrival of Teddy Bompas. Has he seen the poems? Will he be outraged? Who will prevail in a fistfight? He is more angry when Apjohn attempts to deny that the sonnets were written to his wife than when he finally confesses that they have been - though the anger may be entirely confected. The suggestion that his wife is not worth writing love poems to is far more wounding than the threat of a love affair disrupting his marriage. It is brillint anarchic stuff, perfectly suited to a thirty minute exposition.

In Overruled Gregory Lunn (Alex Bhat) and Mrs Juno (Hara Yannas) have been conducting a shipboard romance - but Lunn is appalled to discover that he has mistaken Mrs Juno for a widow. With a ridiculous yelp he squawks that he has broken a sacred promise to his mother never to flirt with a married woman. Voices which each recognises as their respective spouses cause a flurry of alarm, but it transpires that Sibthorpe Juno (Jordan Mifsúd) and Mrs Lunn (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) have also been romancing on a cruise liner travelling in the opposite direction around the world. When the two couples meet, the ladies almost immediately form an urbane alliance (one thinks of Gwendolen and Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest) while the men desperately try to catch up with the unconventional possibilities of the situation. Shaw subtly indicates his own sympathies by allowing the wives to use the christian names of their husbands (one of them quite ridiculous) but withholding those of the women, thus buttressing them with a subtle authority. Once again, further development is superfluous.

It is so refreshing to see the conventions of 'mere' social comedy used so adroitly to raise issues as serious as the double standards between male and female propriety, the tiresomeness of male presumptions of superiority, and the innate common sense in women's negotiation of the social niceties. Even in a stripped down acting space, with half the seats removed from around the stage and an audience necessarily distanced from one another and facemasked, Shaw's provocative and whimsical humour, wonderfully embodied in this fine cast, still produces a welcome tonic and a challenge to the way we think and behave.

On the cultural front, Shaw and the Orange Tree 2 : pandemic 0