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.