The Oresteia

by Simon Stone after Aeschylus and others

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 6 August 2026

Christopher Nolan's recent film The Odyssey has garnered critical acclaim, but also reservations (some of which are justifiable) about "authenticity" and interpretation. However, re-imagining classic myth and drama is inevitable as performance practices change and cultural and societal norms evolve. Hence for the Bridge Theatre Simon Stone has written and directed an Oresteia for our times, and it is a far more radical venture than anything attempted by Nolan. The essential outline of the traditional story - the catastrophic implosion of the family of Agamemnon - is here presented as the travails of an extremely modern and dysfunctional family: the time lines are given as running from 2016 to 2026. (Interestingly, the last time versions of The Oresteia were given professionally in London was in 2015: see my reviews of the Almeida and Globe productions.)

It may be useful to list the cast with their classic correspondences (a courtesy omitted by the program):

Marie-Louise Parker    -    Montie             (Clytemnestra)

David Morissey            -    Christopher     (Agamemnon)

Tom Glyn-Carney         -    Augie              (Orestes)

Rosie Sheehy               -   Alice                (Electra), and briefly her twin Isobel (Iphigenia)

Lloyd Hutchinson         -    Melville            (Menelaus), and also Lester a police inspector

John Macmillan            -   Jerome             (Aegisthus)

Archie Madekwe          -    Lorenzo           (presumably Pylades, imagined as Jerome's son)  

Alyth Ross                    -    Jenny and Letitia

Rakhee Thakrar           -    Chandra           (Cassandra)

Even the Almeida's modern-placed production used the familiar names and entangled the familial disasters with statecraft, but Stone's adaptation eschews the public sphere almost entirely by placing the Middleton family at one remove from political power. The brothers Christopher and Melville run an arms company which is inevitably supplying weapons to unsavoury states, but Christopher's business woes are more personal in that he has been embezzling company funds. Isobel, the rebellious but indulged child, has fallen in with protesters, while Alice, more socially awkward, remains at home with Augie.

Domestic tensions are already running high in 2016 as the family prepares for the twins' twenty-first birthday celebrations, and over the succeeding decade the cycle of vengeful murders plays out, leaving the hapless Augie in a frenzied and traumatised state: in the absence of the gods and the turning away from civic involvement there is no place for the healing of his mental state by the establishment of communal judgement such as is presented in the final play by Aeschylus. Rather, Augie is apparently sectioned and still damagingly haunted by his past actions, in a manic state perhaps inspired by the character's predicament in Euripides's play Orestes.

The Almeida's production focussed intensely in its first act on the sacrifice of Iphigenia, an episode only referred to in Aeschylus, partly no doubt to bring the full horror of that episode to the minds of an audience which may no longer have been familiar with the tale. At the Bridge the first act shows the tensions in the family at the point when Isobel is still alive, but not present, but there is an increasing sense that a disaster is waiting to happen, since so much family discord cannot possibly be dissipated. As the years pass we are witnesses of the later developments (ie, the murders), though the events are not presented in chronological order. There is an element of withholding information for dramatic effect which runs the risk of turning the whole affair into a thriller. In the most extreme case we hear of Isobel's death and its traumatic effect on her surviving relatives long before we actually witness its circumstances, and it is not clear that what we see can really account for all that has followed.

Lizzie Clachan provides an extraordinary set - a series of rooms in the Middleton's Kentish house on two levels, all enclosed by vast glass windows to create a huge box, rotating slowly as needed to reveal the different rooms. It's a visual style used in previous productions by Stone (I have seen his Yerma and Phaedra), and it perfectly reflects the suffocating claustrophobia in modern family life. But it has its costs. Because of the enclosed space the actors are all miked, and this leads to an unfortunate flatness of tone and occasional jarring noises if two people are too close to one another (for instance, when hugging - a rare event in this appalling family). Another signature feature of Stone's direction, the tendency for many characters to speak at once, makes it even harder to concentrate on what is actually being said when everything is flattened electronically. While it might be claimed that this reflects the realities of social life when no-one is particularly interested in what anyone else is saying, it is an extremely disconcerting experience when witnessed on stage where one expects cues to focus one's attention. (This was also a problem with Phaedra only slightly mitigated here by being used more sparingly).

Overall, after the disconcerting start, the production became more gripping as it settled into developing its plot rather than just introducing us rather bewilderingly to the characters. The cast was excellent, with a powerhouse performance by Marie-Louise Parker as Montie matched by David Morissey's already somewhat crushed Christopher and Tom Glynn-Carney's increasingly deranged Augie. Rosie Sheehy's Alice was an extraordinary study in social awkwardness and entirely credible resentment at being the non-favoured twin, reflecting Electra's degraded position in her mother's household after her father's death. There were cunning redeployments of Aeschylean themes and motifs: for example, Clytemnestra's blasphemous invitation to Agamemnon to walk on a purple carpet (which he finally agrees to) is transmuted to Montie's insistence that Christopher should eat some biscuits, wheedling in the face of his firm refusal since he is on a wellness diet. Providentially only Chandra, the Cassandra figure, eats the biscuits, which are poisoned, though they do not kill her. In the maelstrom of recrimination and revenge there was considerable scope for extremely mordant humour, an unexpected byproduct of the "relatable" setting. The character of Letitia (Augie's fiancée, not directly related to a classical forebear) was a fountain of modern entitlement.

I am increasingly unsure that the disrupted chronology, which required projected messages to inform us in which year various scenes belonged, really did the play any favours (a view shared by others with me). Sometimes these scenes looked as if they were flashbacks, and sometimes not, which added to the destabilising effect; it left Augie's final predicament unresolved, with Isobel's fate revealed as the last major scene even though it was almost the first thing to have happened. A dramatic ending when it could have been a dramatic beginning, it looked close to cheating. The material could certainly support a more straightforward presentation as its full power is not really dependant on cliffhangers.

It is exciting to see what directors and actors make of material that in its classic form is nearly 2500 years old; but for modernising I preferred the version presented by the Almeida.

 

A Midsummer Night's Dream

by William Shakespeare

seen at  the Bridge Theatre on 19 August 2025

This is a revival of Nicholas Hytner's hugely successful 2019 production of the play, with a new cast except for Puck, inimitably played by David Moorst: it is hard to imagine anyone else bringing his skills as an actor and acrobat to this interpretation of the part.

Even on a second viewing the production was well worth seeing, the modern interpolations as funny as before, and the stagecraft marvellous to behold. Though it may be suspected that the Bridge is 'marking time', having hugely extended its run of Guys and Dolls and then revived a past production, the move must be justified financially and the standards have by no means slipped.

See my review from 17 August 2019 for more details of how the play was conceived.

Richard II

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 27 February 2025

Nicholas Hytner directs Jonathan Bailey as the eponymous king with Royce Pierreson as Henry Bullingbroook (sic.) in a production designed by Bob Crowley and lit by Bruno Poet.

This is the fifth production of Richard II I have seen since beginning this blog and, true to form, it is quite different from all the others: proof, if any were needed, of the capacity for intelligent reinterpretation afforded by many of Shakespeare's greatest plays.

Performed on a long thrust stage initially bare, but with parts of the floor able to be sunk in order to set and remove furniture as required, the production is in modern dress, entirely subdued in greys and blacks. Stripped of the gorgeous medieval finery often used in honour of the Wilton diptych (which features a portrait of Richard II as a sacral king), all attention is on the language and on how the characters relate to one another in political and personal terms. The result is fascinating, the power plays surprisingly modern, and Richard's self-absorption entirely credible, rarely descending into self-pity.

Jonathan Bailey is a superb Richard, speaking the verse with unerring musicality, and he is surrounded by an excellent supporting cast even if none of the others quite rise to his level of delivery. Bullingbrook is something of a cipher, not obviously irritated with his cousin's theatrics in the deposition scene, but instead impassively prepared to indulge him. But he upholds his rights earlier in the play with conviction and hence gains the support he needs to press his claims and ultimately to become the new king.

Two of the major scenes involving women have been cut: the dialogue between John of Gaunt and his widowed sister-in-law the Duchess of Gloucester; and the famous "gardener" scene in which Queen Isabel overhears commoners discussing the disaster befalling her husband. This streamlines the play, and puts heightened emphasis on the poignant but brief scene in which Richard and Isabel are parted. The only other woman featured is the Duchess of York (Amanda Root); her frantic support for her errant young son Aumerle (Vinnie Heaven) is beautifully staged, providing some light relief from the increasing tension without tipping over into parody. (The Bishop of Carlisle here was female, the only concession to gender-blind casting, which in the modern context was effective.)

The staging was excellent; from the gallery to one side I never felt that I was being deprived of good views of the actors or being presented with a badly skewed vista of the production - indeed it would be interesting to see the play from the front as it were, to gauge whether there was a significantly different effect: in the deposition scene, conducted like a commission of enquiry or a court hearing, Bullingbrook sat for some time with his back to those sitting at the 'front', rendering him even more inscrutable at this point.

In the modern setting there were some clever adjustments. The joust between Bullingbrook and Thomas Mowbray is prepared for in all its formality, but rather than being a cumbersome affair in full armour (possibly on horseback) it is re-imagined as a bare-knuckled fight - bare-chested too - in a pit conveniently created in the versatile stage floor. The visceral rivalry between the two noblemen is thus given a macho physicality barely contained when Richard intervenes to stop the fight.

Richard himself speaks with authority but comes dangerously close to losing face as he interrupts the 'joust'. His fitness to rule is more seriously put into question for us in the scene with his favourites, who are lounging together and snorting cocaine, a very modern but all too plausible indication of their unfitness to govern the realm. They and Richard are obviously still high when visiting the dying John of Gaunt, so that the king's assumption of Gaunt's revenues is enacted in a drug-fuelled haze as the king lolls on the old man's vacated sickbed. Yet despite the hedonism, the king is for the moment still the king and none can gainsay him.

Richard in his last scene is contemplative and vulnerable. As part of the editing of the play for this production, his murderer was evidently Bagot (a former crony) rather than the named new character Exton, but nothing was made of this being a final example of betrayal. At least this was a more credible directorial choice than having Aumerle (a cousin of the two kings) perform the deed, as has been done elsewhere, something that would have been beneath him. Shockingly the corpse was presented to Henry IV in a body bag, undisclosed but a fateful reminder of the guilt which would overshadow the new king in the subsequent plays.

 

Straight Line Crazy

by David Hare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 19 May 2022

Nicholas Hytner directs Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses in David Hare's new play about the controversial and powerful New York urban planner whose projects were virtually unstoppable for nearly thirty years (1924 to 1963) despite increasing doubts about their efficacy or necessity. While proclaiming that his work was for the benefit of ordinary people he had no hesitation in destroying communities to implement his plans. Many of these areas were slums, but the relocations to outlying suburbs were nonetheless brutal. 

For many years Moses had the support of the New York State Governor Al Smith (Danny Webb) though the play suggests that Smith often (or always) felt outwitted by Moses. He also demanded absolute loyalty to his wishes and plans from his staff, here represented by Ariel Porter (Samuel Barnett) and Finnuala Connell (Siobhán Cullen). By the end of his effective career these two had devoted their lives to him and were practically burnt out; finally Finnuala resigns but Moses is incapable of understanding her reasons for doing so, or of realising that the new middle class activism already awakening in the 1950s is too strong even for him.

As a portrait of a masterful man in the early stages of his career (the first half of the play) and later as he fails to recognise the changed times and the increasing power of the forces opposing him (the second half) Straight Line Crazy offers an intriguing and often thrilling character study, brilliantly embodied in Ralph Fiennes's performance. The man is always restless, opinionated, certain of the correctness of his views both in the matter of town planning and in how to manipulate weaker people; Fiennes prowls around the stage barely able to contain his energy while his underlings learn to live and work with this force of nature, whether thrilled or appalled by his vision. 

This has to rank as one of Hare's better plays, and the production does it magnificent justice.

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.

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.

Theatre in Lockdown: The 'Dream'

For those who may be interested, the Bridge Theatre's recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I reviewed on 17 August 2019 and again as a cinema relay on 17 October 2019, is being made available from today (25 June 2020) at 7 pm British Summer Time for seven days, through the National At Home free streaming service provided by the National Theatre.

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home

Highly recommended - I shall be watching it again myself.

A Number

by Caryl Churchill

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 26 February 2019

Polly Findlay directs Roger Allam as Salter (the father) and Colin Morgan as Michael, B1 and B2 (the sons) in a new production designed by Lizzie Clachan of Caryl Churchill's 2002 play concerning a man who, it transpires, has arranged for his son to be cloned, but is unaware of how many 'copies' were made.

In an ordinary slightly rumpled living room, an insecure son confronts his father, having just discovered that he not unique (though he hasn't actually met any of his 'twins'). Salter's immediate reaction is to stall and to muse about suing whoever is responsible, though he eventually has to admit that he condoned 'a single' cloning, and that the boy is not the first son. Unsurprisingly, the boy, already fragile, is very discomposed, rocked by the realisation that much of his family story is a fiction.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (again)

by William Shakespeare

seen by live streaming from the Bridge Theatre on 17 October 2019

Having so much enjoyed the production in August (see my review of 17 August 2019) I felt sure a second viewing in the cinema would not go amiss - this was actually a repeat of the original live streaming, also broadcast in August, as the production run has now finished.

It was a great pleasure to see this inventive and engaging production again. In this case, there were benefits to be gained from camera close-ups and varying points of view, though occasionally the editor's choices of shots were frustrating. But the pleasure of seeing some of the details in the performances of the actors more than outweighed the disadvantages of filming a live show. In particular, the roguishness of Puck, the gleeful pleasure Titania took in her machinations, and the besottedness of Oberon gained from a closer look at their facial expressions, while Theseus's initial intransigence was chillingly conveyed just by the intensity of his narrowed gaze at Hermia.

The hilarious comedy of Bottom especially among the Rude Mechanicals, and the weirdness of Puck, whose curling toes seemed to have a life of their own, were wonderfully in evidence in one of the great productions of this play.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 17 August 2019

Nicholas Hytner directs Oliver Chris as Oberon and Theseus and Gwendoline Christie as Titania and Hippolyta in an inventive restaging of this perennially favourite play, with David Moorst as Puck and Hammed Animashaun as Bottom. The production is designed by Bunny Christie.

As with last year's production of Julius Caesar (reviewed on both 27 January and 27 March 2018) the Bridge has been transformed into a theatre in the round with a central pit area where audience members can stand and be moved around by stewards as various parts of the floor rise to become acting spaces. There is no need for a crowd as such in this play, so there is less immediate involvement than in the other play, but the mere presence of so many people 'in the way' underscores the confusions the mere mortals undergo as they enter the forest outside Athens.

A German Life

by Christopher Hampton

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 8 April 2019

Maggie Smith plays Brunhilde Pomsel in this dramatic monologue directed by Jonathan Kent and designed by Anna Fleischle. It is 'drawn from the life and testimony' of Brunhilde Pomsel and based on a film of the same name, constructed from 30 hours of interviews with her and released in 2016.

An elderly lady in a bland flat reminisces about her life - Pomsel had just turned 106 when she died in 2017. At first there are some ripples of knowing laughter in the audience, expecting perhaps another Maggie Smith performance of an eccentric woman with a wandering mind. But this is no elderly lady in a van causing havoc in the life of Alan Bennett. On the contrary, this is someone determined to remember what she can, and to speak frankly with courteous apologies when she gets sidetracked or absently loses her thread. Her story soon commands rapt attention, and the laughter when it comes is in response to barbed wit, or to uncomfortable observations which may sometimes be too near the bone.

My Name is Lucy Barton

by Elizabeth Strout adapted by Rona Munro

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 4 February 2019

Laura Linney stars in Richard Eyre's production of this play adapted from Elizabeth Strout's novel of the same name. She had a very successful run at the Bridge last year, which was sold out before I felt motivated to see it, and so has agreed to a short revival this year.

It's a demanding 90-minute monologue in which Lucy's story, and her reflections on the nature of story telling and the need to recognise what one's own story is, is revealed as she recalls the nine weeks she had to spend in hospital after an appendectomy, and the difficult reunion between herself and her mother who decided to visit her in the hospital (a first visit from rural Illinois to New York).

Nightfall

by Barney Norris

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 10th May 2018

Laurie Sansom directs Ophelia Lovibond a Lou, Sion Daniel Young as Ryan, Ukweli Roach as Pete and Claire Skinner as Jenny in this new play about a Hampshire farming family (Jenny and her children Lou and Ryan) still numbed by the loss of the husband and father; Pete is a friend of Ryan's from their early schooldays, subsequently romantically involved with Lou.

The scene (designed by Rae Smith) is the yard space outside the farmhouse - neither the ground nor the house is particularly attractive, subverting the cosy urban view of idyllic pastoral life. In fact, a gigantic oil pipe snakes across the stage, providing both an image of rural despoliation and the trigger for the expression of dangerous tensions between all he characters - the play opens with Pete and Ryan installing a hosepipe to divert some of the oil into the farm's fuel tank without Jenny's approval.

Julius Caesar (again)

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 27 March 2018

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

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

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

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

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 27 January 2018

Nicholas Hytner directs Ben Whishaw as Brutus, Michelle Fairley as Cassius, David Morissey as Mark Antony and David Calder as Julius Caesar in a modern dress production designed by Bunny Christie.

It was a risk to attend two productions of the same play within three weeks, especially a play which runs the risk of being comparatively flat in its second half - all too often the machinations of the civil war unleashed by Caesar's death fail to match the power of the assassination plot and Mark Antony's great funeral oration. However, the risk was more than justified - this production is so different from the RSC's, and so exciting in its own terms, that there was no fatigue in watching it.

Young Marx

by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 20 December 2017

Nicholas Hytner directs Rory Kinnear as Karl Marx, Nancy Carroll as Jenny von Westphalen, Oliver Chris as Friedrich Engels and Laura Elphinstone as Helene Dumuth in this inaugural production of the Bridge Theatre situated in one of the new developments on the south-west side of Tower Bridge.

The play concentrates on the early years of Marx's life in London when he and his wife Jenny and four children (in the play, only two) and Helene Dumuth were living in a two-room flat in Dean Street Soho. Though some events have been 're-arranged' so that they can appear within this setting and time frame, the scenes presented in the play are essentially 'true', though at the same time the playwrights have noticed the farcical elements of the situation and have consequently emphasised Marx's larrikin nature as a young man.