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.
