Eclipse

by John Morton

seen at the Minerva Theatre Chichester on 23 May 2026

John Morton directs his own play which receives its world premiere here. The daughter Sarah (Sarah Parish) and son Jonathan (Rupert Penry-Jones) of the terminally ill Edward are at his house on the last day of his life They are afflicted by various types of inadequacy while attempting to deal with their impending loss. Inevitably in such a fraught situation they must also contend with the help or hindrance of others including Sarah's husband Graham (Paul Thornley), Jonathan's former partner Nell (Mariam Haque), and sundry palliative care and medical staff. 

The classic dramatic unities of time, action and place could prove disastrously restrictive when applied to the contemporary world of dizzying mobility and complex inter-relations, but in John Morton's hands they are triumphantly vindicated. There is a cluttered kitchen in an old Devon rectory adjoining a luxuriant garden; with the medical crisis developing the coming and going of the professionals is utterly credible while cleverly marking the passage of time (the care workers are managing day and night shifts); and the decline of the unseen Edward binds together all the behaviour of the characters we see.

Given the formality of the dramatic design what is astonishing about Eclipse is the dialogue, which is expertly suffused with the ordinary hesitations and misdirections of speech so rarely seen on stage. Long habits of dominance, irritation, tactlessness and indecision clash more by what is not said - what is almost unsayable in such highly charged circumstances - than by self-revealing expository set pieces, and the result is utterly compelling. Such speech mannerisms are fiendishly difficult to manage, though Morton has form as his three highly acclaimed TV series Twenty Twelve, W1A, and more recently Twenty Twenty-Six testify. It turns out that what was employed satirically on TV can be equally successful in depicting both festering family dynamics, and professional efficiency, somehow making the difficult experience of confronting, and even witnessing, a death profound without being melodramatic.

Simon Higlett's design is a stunning piece of naturalism, while the cast is uniformly excellent, even the minor roles adding to the ambience and freighted with their own personalities. One of my companions who had worked in palliative care remarked that the characterisations and strategies of the care workers were astonishingly accurate. The gradual move from social comedy to far more sober seriousness was achieved with consummate skill: a fine ensemble doing the playwright-director proud.

The Waves

adapted by Flora Wilson Brown from Virginia Woolf's novel

seen at the Jermyn Street Theatre on 18 May 2026

Júlia Levai directs Archie Backhouse as Louis, Breffni Holahan as Susan, Pedro Leandro as Neville, Syakira Moeladi as Jinny, Tom Varey as Bernard and Ria Zmitrowicz as Rhoda in Flora Wilson Brown's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves.

The novel, a series of intertwined monologues by the six characters, was described once by the author as a "playpoem". It follows the lives of six close friends from early childhood - one of their first memories is of witnessing a solar eclipse "before lessons" - to late middle age. Although the children have their first schooling together, the boys and girls are soon separated, and in their adult lives they go their separate ways, though occasionally some or all of them are together again. A seventh character, Perceval, whom the boys meet at their school and who is never presented directly, becomes really important to all of them, and his death in his mid-twenties in India is a crushing blow, particularly to the love-lorn Neville.

In 2006 Katie Mitchell directed a memorable version of this novel at the then Cottesloe Theatre (now the Dorfman), using her trademark technique of having the actors film themselves as they performed the play; the complication of simultaneously watching the acting, watching the extraordinarily detailed manipulation of props, and watching the filmed result caught something of the intricate narrative structure of the original novel. It was dazzling, but required intellectual alertness to appreciate.

At the Jermyn Street theatre a far simpler approach, using a totally bare stage with silvered walls, created a more headlong atmosphere of life rushing by, with the six characters narrating their lives - their inner thoughts and misgivings - as well as talking to one another, moving from the breathless enthusiasms of childhood through the awkward excitements of adolescence to the inevitable disillusionments of adulthood. As time passed one or another of them would carve graffiti into the silvered walls; by this stage in the run the walls were covered in the marks made during previous performances.

In this tiny theatre - there are only 70 seats - and with minimal props, the six actors created the world of the novel, and marked the passage of the years, with exemplary skill, the children believably growing into the very different adults they become, constrained by class and temperament but always supportive of one another insofar as their developing personalities would allow. The two great emotional catastrophes in their experiences - the deaths of Perceval and Rhoda - were wrenchingly poignant in this fine production.

 

The Importance of Being Oscar

by Micheál Mac Liommóir

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 16 May 2026

Mike Fentiman directs Alastair Whatley in Micheál Mac Liommóir's dramatic monologue about the career of Oscar Wilde. This was first devised and performed by Mac Liommóir in 1960, and he performed the piece about 1300 times over the next fifteen years, adjusting it as new facts came to light about Wilde.

In the current production Mac Liommóir's voice is heard briefly at the beginning, and delivering the final Wildean anecdote in a quiet whisper at the end, but otherwise Whatley is on stage alone on a raised disc with a halo-like light angled behind him. In the first half he sketches in Wilde's early life and his high-profile career in London, culminating in a bravura performance of the famous interview between Lady Bracknell and John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest. (Curiously, Simon Callow's reminiscence of hearing Mac Liommóir's recitation on LPs refers to a rendition of the closing scene of The Picture of Dorian Grey, but though the novel was referred to it was not extensively quoted in this performance.) 

The second half of the piece deals with the catastrophic court cases, the humiliations of the sentencing and the journey to Reading gaol (during which Wilde was identified on the platform at Clapham Junction wearing prison clothes and was spat at and vilified by the crowd), the harshness of the prison sentence and Wilde's decline and death after his release.

Although the whole point of this play is that the actor should be talking about Oscar Wilde rather than impersonating him, the first half was rather too discursive, too full of biographical details with only cursory direct quotations. But the second half included lengthy recitations from The Ballad of Reading Gaol (a long poem) and excerpts from De Profundis, the letter Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison (the full letter takes up 85 pages in my edition of Wilde's complete works). The recitation of poetry is immediately more dramatic than the recitation of facts, but the prose of De Profundis was a sheer delight to listen to even as Wilde circles round the awful truth that object of his affection is quite simply not worthy of him. The opening statement of the letter, that he has heard nothing from Bosie in two years of imprisonment, is a shock which no amount of beautifully wrought prose about the calamity of their relationship can quite obscure.

On a practical level I do not think that Whatley was well served by the acoustics of the theatre - a problem I have noticed before. Although his voice was at times amplified, this was erratic, making it hard at times to follow everything that was said. Even though the rhetorical skill of De Profundis made it possible to guess correctly what some of the too-quiet words must have been, this was an unfortunate technical blemish on what was a fascinating and at times moving evening.

The Authenticator

by Winsome Pinnock

seen at the National Theatre (Dorfman) on 25 April 2026

Miranda Cromwell directs Rakie Ayola as Abi, Cherrelle Skeete as Marva and Sylvestra Le Touzel as Fen in a short play in which Abi and her research assistant Marva are invited by Fen, the inheritor of a family estate, to authenticate some diaries she has discovered in a chest, which may relate to her abolitionist ancestor, a Jamaican plantation owner.

The estate is run down - gloriously indicated by Jon Bausor's inventive set, which even contrives a spooky dungeon revealed by the cunning use of a concealed stairway in the floor - and the academics, being Black, have vested interests in the project which may compromise their professional protocols, especially when it seems that the writer of the diaries may have treated slaves badly, and that the family has continued with racist attitudes down to the present day. Yet despite these weighty themes there is much humour in the piece as Pinnock sets about skewering both landed pretensions (Fen's background is belied by her plummy accent) and the clichés of haunted house mysteries with a deft touch occasionally marred by coincidences which are a little too convenient.