Belleville

by Amy Herzog

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 25 January 2018

Michael Longhurst directs Imogen Poots as Abby, James Norton as Zack, Malachi Kirby as Alioune and Faith Alabi as Amina in this one-act ply from 2011, receiving its first London production.

Zack and Abby are a young American couple renting a flat in Belleville, a suburb of Paris. Alioune, the landlord, and his wife Amina live downstairs with their two young children. The flat is not exactly seedy, but it is rather down at heel, and untidy. 

The Twilight Zone

devised by Anne Washburn from the TV series

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 20 Jauary 2018

Richard Jones directs a cast of ten in a clever adaptation of eight stories from the cult TV series The Twilight Zone (1959-64), with the set designed by Paul Steinberg and the costumes by Nicky Gillibrand. The actors play multiple parts in the stories, which are interwoven rather than being depicted consecutively, giving an added distancing effect to the already uncanny and often disturbing individual stories.

The original series consisted of independent dramas aimed at destabilising comfortable assumptions about the ways of the world, either through the irruption of the paranormal, or through alien invasions or other science-fiction motifs. This play opens with a classic gambit, travellers stranded in a bar due to a snow storm, with rumours of something uncanny, other than the storm, having occurred nearby. The twist is that the bus driver distinctly remembers that he six passengers originally boarded the bus, but there are seven stranded people in the bar - so one of them must be an alien. There follows a predictable series of arguments and defensive ploys as everyone bickers about what could be going on. The denouement is withheld until after several other stories have got underway, but it has a neat twist of its own.

Antony and Cleopatra

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 Iqbal Khan and features Josette Simon as Cleopatra, Antony Byrne as Mark Antony, Ben Allen as Octavius Caesar and Andre Woodall as Enobarbus. It is interesting, but in the event justified, that the characters common to both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra - namely, Antony himself and the other triumvirs Octavius and Lepidus - are played by different actors in the two productions, though many of the supporting cast appear in both.

Robert Innes Hopkins designed both productions, giving a sense of visual unity while expanding the palette, as it were, to include the Egyptian scenes, their general sensuousness signified by a large draped curtain to offset the sterner vertical and horizontal lines of Rome, and the occasional appearance of large cat statues. But, with a different director, even if the visual presentation was broadly related, the overall approach was inevitably different, most notably in the sound world in which the brass and percussion of the earlier play are here supplemented by (electric) guitar and saxaphone. 

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.

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.

Follies

by Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and James Goodman (book)

seen at the National Theatre (Olivier) on 19 December 2017

Dominic Cooke directs Imelda Staunton, Janie Dee, Philip Quast, Peter Forbes and many others in this revival of Sondheim's bittersweet 1971 musical in which the demolition of an old Broadway theatre brings a group of 'Weismann girls' to a reunion during which memories are evoked and life stories hinted at and regretted.

Impresario Weismann produced an annual variety show of 'Follies' between the wars (1918 to 1941); In 1971, with the impending demolition of his theatre, he hosts a reunion with eleven 'girls' and one 'boy' from his troupe, plus two husbands and some other guests (or staff). The older, and possibly wiser, characters are shadowed by their younger selves in full 'Follies' costumes.

Misalliance

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 14 December 2017

Paul Miller directs his third Shaw play at the ever-impressive Orange Tree Theatre (unfortunately I missed his The Philanderer though I saw Widowers' Houses in 2015). The new play fizzes with ideas and with almost absurd social situations, but the witticisms reveal unexpected truths and often surprisingly painful tensions, both between characters, and between the social roles people live by and their own (usually flattering) images they have of themselves.

In the hands of an excellent cast the now-unfashionable wordiness of Shaw is managed with great verve and dexterity; the speed of delivery is perhaps only possible in such an intimate space, but it certainly helps in preventing the play from being bogged down by its own verbiage. What lifts Shavian cleverness into something more probing is the deft revelations of depths of character beneath the surface brilliance of the dialogue. From the peculiar camp narcissism of Rhys Isaac-Jones's Bentley Summerhayes to the worldly-weariness of Simon Shepherd as his father Lord Summerhayes, from the brittle self-righteousness of Jordan Mifsúd's interloper to the bullying suavity of Luke Thallon's Joey Percival, we see people who can experience real pain, which their superficial behaviour can mask but not entirely conceal.