Candida

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 28 November 2019

Paul Miller directs Martin Hutson as the Rev James Mavor Morell, Claire Lams as his wife Candida, Michael Simkins as his father-in-law Mr Burgess, Sarah Middleton as Miss Proserpine Garnett ('Prossey'), his secretary, Kwaku Mills as the Rev Alexander Mill, his curate, and Joseph Potter as Mr Eugene Marchbanks, an 18-year-old poet who is also a family friend. This is Paul Miller's fourth revival of an early Shaw play in the last five years; I've seen two others and this, like them, is excellent.

The Bay at Nice

by David Hare

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 13 April 2019

Richard Eyre directs Penelope Wilton as Valentina Nrovka, Ophelia Lovibond as her daughter Sophia, David Rintoul as Sophia's lover Peter and Martin Hutson as an assistant curator at the Hermitage in this play about authenticating a possible Matisse painting left to the museum by an emigre aristocrat, entwined with the difficult relationship between mother and daughter.

The situation is rather artificial, Sophia having thought that the occasion of her mother's invitation to the museum to see the painting might be the occasion for announcing her intention to leave her husband and children and live with the much older and widowed Peter, for which she needs funds for the divorce proceedings. This allows us to see Valentina from a number of different angles - impatient with museums, dismissive of much modern art, contemptuous of modern ideas of freedom and self-fulfilment, and therefore extremely abrasive with her daughter. Behind this steely exterior, expressed in well-turned speeches of frightening social and moral put-downs (rather like Lady Bracknell in deadly earnest) is a history of repressed anguish and unacknowledged disappointment - Valentina was a gay young thing in Paris, a model and possibly lover of Matisse, shut out by the Master's admission that he had no time for love, and determined, with a baby to look after, to return to Russia to give order and structure to her life no matter the cost.

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 6 January 2018

Part of the RSC's Rome MMXVII season, this play is directed by Angus Jackson and features Alex Waldmann as Brutus, Martin Hutson as Cassius, Andrew Woodall as Julius Caesar, James Corrigan as Mark Antony and Jon Tarcy as Octavius Caesar.

The setting is notionally Classical (columns, and a foreboding statue of a lion mauling a horse, feature at the back of the stage in the first half, rather than any realistic evocation of sites such as the theatre of Pompey where Caesar's assassination actually took place; rough indications of open landscape for the second half - designer Robert Innes Hopkins); the costumes also feature togas and tunics, but also very un-Roman red calf-length trousers.

This helps establish the historical background, and allows for very fine visual effects when, for example, the conspirators move from being a group of symmetrically placed almost-statues to a mob of baying assassins. It also gives added effect to Julius Caesar's stately arrogance, while allowing us to see the human frailty it is meant to conceal (a certain elderly deafness as well as hints of the epilepsy referred to by Cassius). Andrew Woodall shows us the arrogance of the man who evidently will not need much more persuading to become a king.

Taken at Midnight

by Mark Hayhurst

seen at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 12 February 2015

This play, transferred to London from Chichester, concerns the attempts of Irmgard Litten (Penelope Wilton) to obtain the release of her lawyer son Hans (Martin Hutson) from 'protective custody' - that is, effective imprisonment - in various German concentration camps from 1933 until his suicide in Dachau in 1937. Hans Litten had earlier (in 1931) issued a sub-poena to Adolf Hitler to appear in a trial of four Brownshirts (members of the SA), a humiliation not forgotten when the Nazis came to power. (The play is based on Irmgard Litten's own memoirs.)