The Marquise

by Noël Coward

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 27 June 2026

Philip Wilson directs Juliet Aubrey as the Marquise Eloise de Kestournel, Simon Shepherd as Raoul de Vriaac and Tristan Gemmill as Esteban el Duco de Santaguano ("saint guano" - really?) in Noël Coward's 1927 play The Marquise. Though originally set in 1735, and hence a social comedy about the French aristocracy of the ancient regime, this production from the Theatre Royal Windsor has updated the action by two centuries (with permission from the Coward estate) to reflect the upper-class social world of the 1930s.

In an elaborate Art Deco reception room in the country house of Raoul de Vriaac (a wonderful set designed by Colin Falconer), the engagement is announced between his daughter Adrienne (Eva O'Hara) and Miguel (Barnaby Tobias), the son of Raoul's close friend Esteban. The two older men spar off each other while the engaged couple excuse themselves to go onto the terrace; when they return they are eventually left alone, at which point they confess to each other that neither of them really wants to marry. It's the classic comedy situation of the bright youngsters setting themselves against parental pressure, but reversed in that they are hoping to avoid a marriage their respective fathers have set their hearts on.

Into this awkward situation the Marquise arrives, full of joie de vivre and mischief. She is an old flame of Raoul's (from before his marriage: he is now widowed) and her first question to the alarmed Raoul is "How is my child?". Another comic trope has arrived with enormous aplomb as the Marquise insinuates herself into the household and, on meeting Adrienne, she immediately proposes to help her.

Coward is obviously having wicked fun skewering pretension and the conventions of comedy plotting - there is a knowing butler and a sanctimonious chaplain to deal with as well. The Marquise is shamelessly manipulative and fabulously worldly-wise (there's a lovely joke that the furniture of the very à la mode setting is uncomfortable and far too dusty), and the stage seems set for a series of plots and counter-plots, since Jacques Rijar (Martin Carroll), the object of Adrienne's affections and the secretary of her father, has been sacked by the outraged Raoul when their secret has been revealed, and the hapless young man seems determined to flee "with honour".

But (to me and my companions at least) the bombshell that is dropped at the opening of the second half is completely unexpected and very funny: the havoc the Marquise can cause spreads ever wider, and even leads to the two old friends embarking on a preposterous duel, until all is resolved more or less to everyone's satisfaction.

The repartee was excellently handled, and the formalities of pastiche 18th-century courtly dialogue seemed absolutely to suit the brittle milieu of the 1930s, with only a few necessary adjustments to account for technological progress (the Marquise travels in a Bugatti rather than a coach - but it still breaks down conveniently). It was an unexpected pleasure to come across a little-known Coward play and to discover that it is as witty as his better-known works, with the usual undercurrent of seriousness and even a nagging uncertainty as to how to set one's moral compass in a changing world.

Cyrano de Bergerac

by Edmond Rostand

seen at the Noël Coward Theatre on 22 June 2026

Simon Evans directs Adrian Lester in the title role in a new version of Rostand's famous 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, an RSC production transferred from Stratford to the West End. The text has been adapted by Evans and Debris Stevenson. Susannah Fielding plays Roxanne, a childhood friend of Cyrano's with whom he is secretly in love, and Levi Brown plays Christian de Neuvillette, an untutored young soldier smitten by her, who asks Cyrano for help in wooing her.

The play has enormous energy due to the extrovert character of Cyrano, who defends his honour - his panache - on the slightest provocation, and sometimes seems to encourage unwary newcomers to annoy him. The opening scenes contain a dazzling example of his style in vanquishing a "foe". Intertwined with this exuberance is the love story in which Cyrano pours out his heart in the service of Christian's wooing, so that Roxane falls for the young soldier, who is sufficiently naive not to recognise his false position until fatefully late in the day.

The play (being French) was written in rhymed alexandrines, a form almost impossible to maintain convincingly in modern English. Part of the charm of this adaptation its its clever reconfiguring of the language, in which the sophisticated Cyrano and the often ditzy Roxanne often talk in rhyme, and the ridiculous Comte de Guiche (Scott Handy) spouts stilted platitudes in clunking verse, while others do not. Christian in particular speaks in a demotic Brummie accent that perfectly recasts his provincial origins for a modern British audience. The programme notes provide some interesting insights into how Evans and Stevenson went about adapting the play, taking some fascinating liberties with their material.

The theatricality of the piece is emphasised by frequent asides to the audience, and indeed there are zestful elements of pantomime in the behaviour of Cyrano's "gang" in the opening sunnier scenes. These provide a suitable contrast to the more serious developments as the men go off to war with its merciless consequences, while the final scene reaches a melancholy resolution. 

Adrian Lester's superb mastery of language and his physical bravado carry the play, all the while subtly allowing the character's fateful insecurity to flicker through the facade. All the flash and excitement creates a lifetime of missed opportunities for honesty, which leads Roxane to an explosion of anger fully justified by her friend's deceptions. 

It's a great revival, tempering the incipient sentimentality of the play's Romantic sheen with down-to-earth  stagecraft to great effect, using an utter;y different approach from the last version I saw six years ago.

Equus

by Peter Shaffer

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 20 June 2026

Lindsay Posner directs Toby Stephens as the psychiatrist Martin Dysart and Noah Valentine as the 17-year-old Alan Strang who has been referred to him after blinding six horses in the stables where he was working at weekends, in a revival of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus. Emma Cunniffe and Colin Mace play Alan's parents Dora and Frank, Amanda Abbington plays Heather Saloman the referring magistrate, and Bella Aubin plays Jill Mason, Alan's co-worker at the stables.

The horses, traditionally portrayed with eerie head-dresses and metal hooves, are here represented by six black-trousered bare-footed dancers, their torsos smeared with black body paint and their movements expertly choreographed by James Cousins to indicate equine presence. Yet Ed Mitchell as Nugget, the horse that attracts Alan's closest attention, invests a homoerotic frisson to their encounters, allowing us to appreciate more strongly the heady mixture of physical delight and religious fervour in Alan's private world of devotion, matched by his wild incantations and eventually uninhibited re-enactments of his catastrophe.

What struck me most forcibly at the beginning of this revival, in contrast to earlier versions that I have seen, is how significant Dysart's crisis of confidence in his professional and personal life is to the structure of the play. This was largely due to the interpretation offered by Toby Stephens, impassioned and increasingly desperate as he wrestles with his doubts and occasionally succumbs to Alan's wily manipulations. Though the play begins as if narrated by Dysart in retrospect, by the end it is hard to know whether his despairing acknowledgement that he may have destroyed the boy's spiritual life by his therapy work is addressed directly to the sleeping Alan, or is just the culmination of his recollected narrative.

In all this Toby Stephens, giving a superb performance, is matched by an equally assured and powerful performance by Noah Valentine, veering from the nervy twitching and restlessness of the newly convicted teenager, to the excitement of the young boy's first encounter with a horse (recollected in an early therapy session) and then reaching an impassioned climax as he re-enacts the rites of his worship of "Equus" as embodied in the adored horse Nugget. At the same time, once Alan unbends enough to engage with Dysart, he soon learns to play the psychiatrist's games and has no compunction in exploiting his position to needle and infuriate the supposed adult in the room. It's a brilliantly nuanced performance by the young actor. 

The conclusion to the first half of the play is an ecstatic evocation of the boy's fervour which seems impossible to match in the second act, but, amazingly, the final session in which Alan finally acknowledges what he has done (he had apparently remained silent during the court case that led to his referral) explodes in even more power as the full extent of his tortured confusion between sexual awakening and ritualised reverence for his equine god leads to the blinding. This is all enacted with fearless passion in which the distress of the horses is entangled with the frenzy of the boy in a blur of flashing lights and throbbing hoofbeats (lighting by Paul Pyant and sound by Adam Cork).

The intensity of the play is further enhanced by the intimacy of the theatre, much smaller than the other theatres in which I have seen productions. The celebrated 2007 revival with Daniel Radcliffe as Alan was in a conventional West End auditorium, inherently more distancing for all but the closest members of the audience, and, fine though it was, it suffered inevitably from its celebrity-related baggage, and perhaps a too-cerebral interpretation of Dysart by Richard Griffiths. The revival I saw in the Yvonne Arnaud theatre seven years ago (also very well done) was nowhere near as intense an experience as watching it in the small space offered by the Menier. (See also my review of 9th May 2019).

It's intriguing that Shaffer returned again and again to the framing device of a story recollected: the page boy Martin as a grizzled older man telling the story of the conquest of Peru in The Royal Hunt of the Sun; Dysart narrating a case history which shattered his life in Equus; the aged Salieri recalling the crushing impact of Mozart on his career in Amadeus. And he is also really interested in the dynamic of the irruption of a younger man of enigmatic quality in the life of an older man who is otherwise world-weary: the young god-king Atahualpa confronting the aged Pizarro; a deeply troubled teenager confounding a professional expert; a musical genius out-stripping a humdrum composer. In this production of Equus we see the confrontation at its most raw, and it is both a wonderful and a disturbing theatrical experience, enhanced here by two excellent leads, an assured supporting cast, and evocative choreography and staging.

The Tempest

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 13 June 2026

Richard Eyre directs Kenneth Branagh as Prospero with Ruby Stokes as Miranda, Amara Okereke as Ariel, Ashley Zhangazha as Caliban and Fred Woodley Evans as Ferdinand in a production designed by Bob Crowley.

A previous RSC production featuring a famous actor returning to the fold (Simon Russell Beale) made a point of using sophisticated computer technology to enhance the magical aspects of Prospero's island (see my review from 19 July 2017). In this new production, with Kenneth Branagh acting for the RSC again after many years, the stage is almost completely bare, with a large slightly raised circular platform; a backcloth allows for projections of a storm, and more tranquil island sunlight, and it is occasionally opened to reveal a further cloth put to similar uses.

The opening storm is thrillingly evoked with projected rain in a wild gale, and waves apparently surging on the stage floor, while the circular platform tilts alarmingly. A directorial decision has been made to have Prospero appear quietly before all this starts, donning mage-like robes and taking up a wand to create the storm, more like the conductor of an orchestra, since the wand was essentially a conductor's baton. Should we not be led to believe that the storm is real, until we discover with Miranda in the second scene that it has been confected by her father? It's just a little awkward to have Prospero so relentlessly visible during the storm when attention should be fully on the hapless ship's crew and passengers.

Branagh's Prospero, though almost entirely in control of all he surveys, is not particularly dictatorial; the long conversation with Miranda was without the emotional tension it sometimes has, allowing for a more genial father-daughter relationship. He has more steeliness in relation to Ariel when she provokes him, and to Caliban who is always provocative, and he pursues his plan of vengeance methodically until the moment when he (to the surprise of the three sinful men, and perhaps himself) offers forgiveness. The overall effect, though of course Branagh has a masterful command of verse-speaking, is somewhat muted in comparison with more volatile interpretations of the character in other productions.

The burgeoning love between Miranda and Ferdinand is nicely played out, and Ferdinand looks suitably sweat-bound after carrying logs for hours in the island's heat. Fred Woodley Evans did not quite have the bearing of a prince, but he was an engaging young man struck suddenly with love for a dazzling young woman.

Stephano and Trinculo representing the low-life of the court were suitably sozzled and clownish, but Caliban's initial subservience to them perhaps strained credulity since he was not portrayed as an almost inarticulate monster. This production chose instead to emphasise that Caliban had in fact been deprived of what he may legitimately have thought of as his inheritance by the arrival of the more powerful Prospero (though this can't be a matter of simple colonialism or enslavement, since Caliban and his mother were also arrivals on the island, not natives of it).

Ariel was continually airborne as befits her name; this required Amara Okereke to be attached to a trapeze-like mechanism on which she swooped into view and disappeared again at the highest level of the stage. This was effective to begin with, but ran the risk of seeming too mechanical a device when used throughout the performance. Ariel's wary respect for Prospero, and his wary affection for the spirit, were poignantly expressed on several occasions when she reached down and he reached up so that their hands almost touched.

The relations between Prospero, Ariel and Caliban are mysterious, and there is plenty of scope for interpreting them in different ways. Here, the matter of Ariel's freedom was given a most unusual twist: as Prospero finally freed the spirit she was released from her trapeze and put her feet on the ground - where she did not know how to walk: freedom, it seemed, would be quite a challenge. As far as Caliban is concerned, the most derogatory references to him by Prospero were cut, and the character always had a certain quiet dignity.

There was more: the great Epilogue speech is usually given directly to the audience as Proposer begs for his own freedom to depart and claims that it is dependent on the audience's applause - the character almost disappearing as the actor breaks the fourth wall. Here, Branagh almost exclusively addressed Ariel and Caliban, asking for their indulgence, and he left them alone on the stage, regarding each other in silence, wondering what to make of their "brave new world" - an extraordinary conclusion to a thought-provoking production.

I was not convinced by every aspect of Eyre's and Branagh's work on this play, but it is a salutary reminder that The Tempest is no straightforward drama. It's the sixth time I have posted a review of the play, and on each occasion there are new insights to ponder.