Women and Troy

by David Stuttard after Euripides

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildfords on 27 July 2025

David Stuttard created these dramatic readings from Euripides's tragedy The Trojan Women, supplemented by some speeches from Andromache and his reconstructions of the lost Alexandros, partly in response to the 9-11 attacks in 2001: the notion of the passengers on the planes being trapped inside a vehicle reminded him, he said, of the warriors in the wooden horse, though the analogy is by no means exact. However, the theme of the brutality and inhumanity of war remains all too relevant today.

The readings, given by Siân Phillips as Hekabe (Hecuba) and Rachel Donovan speaking variously as Athene, Cassandra, Andromache and Helen, reveal the complex web of fate whereby the infant Trojan prince Alexandros (the other name for Paris) was sent to be exposed on the slopes of Mount Ida to forestall a prophecy that he would ruin the city of Troy, but instead was found and raised by kindly shepherds. Later, having received Helen of Sparta as a reward (or bribe) for judging Aphrodite to be the fairest of the three goddesses Athene, Aphrodite and Hera, he did indeed ruin the city.

The action of The Trojan Women takes place soon after the fall of the city as the female members of the royal family face enslavement and degradation; Hekabe reels under successive blows of bad news, in particular the callous murder of her young grandson Astyanax (the son of Hector and Andromache), thrown from the city walls by the victorious Greeks in case he should grow up to be a threat to them.

Even presented as 'dramatic readings' from two lecterns the story is compelling and the grief and despair raw and intense. The two actors switched from deep identification with their characters to detached commentary, and in the Q and A session afterwards remarked that in some ways it was easier to be 'reading' rather than 'declaiming' or acting in a full production, because it allowed for these shifts and removed the problems of staging, costuming and movement: all was dependent on the poetry, which was admirably translated and adapted.

The readings lasted only an hour or so but the grim tale was vividly presented. In the week that I saw this performance, not directly referred to but nevertheless clear in my mind as I listened to Hekabe mourn over the broken body her little grandson, were the photographs of the children starving in Gaza. The ghastliness of war, and the ease with which its perpetrators justify any barbarity they choose to inflict on one another, has hardly changed in 2500 years.

The Comedy of Errors

by William Shakespeare 

and

A Company of Rascals

by Phil Porter

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 24 and 25 July 2025 

The Guildford Shakespeare Company has created a fascinating double bill directed by Joanna Read and designed by Neil Irish, whereby a new play by Phil Porter, A Company of Rascals, is entwined round Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. After a scene-setting prologue which takes place on the banks of the River Wey outside the theatre, the Comedy is enacted in the main auditorium. Audiences for both plays see the new prologue and the Comedy's first scene, after which those seeing Rascals leave the auditorium and are taken to three different locations nearby to watch what the characters of the Comedy are imagined to be doing when they are not on stage; the two audiences are reintegrated for the final scene of the Comedy in which "all is revealed".

Shakespeare's play involves proliferating misunderstandings when two sets of identical twins, each separated in infancy due to a complicated shipwreck, are continually mistaken for each other not only by the residents of Ephesus where one of each pair lives as master and servant, but also by each other, because the other pair (also a master and servant) have arrived unexpectedly in town. By an improbable sleight of hand, which can't be called into question without destroying the whole basis of the farce, each master has retained the name Antipholus, and each servant the name Dromio, and each named twin dresses alike, thus allowing all the mistakes (or errors) to occur until finally all four are on stage together - and even then there is still room for confusion. 

The new play, set variously in the Centaur Inn (where the visitors have chosen to stay), in Doctor Pinch's premises, and in the Porpentine (where the resident Antipholus has dined when unable to enter his own house), capitalises on the mistaken identities wherever possible, but also follows the progress of the golden chain commissioned by the Ephesian Antipholus through many more hands than merely the goldsmith and the visiting Antipholus as seen in the Comedy, and also follows the continuing misfortunes of Egeon, the elderly Syracusan merchant arrested at the beginning of the play. Where the Comedy relies on chance meetings and displays of verbal wit, Rascals introduces madcap physical comedy with swapped bags, outright chicanery, and bravura charlatanry.

The cast of twelve expertly manages to perform both plays at once (though the audience of course can only see one of them at a time), aided in the case of Comedy by some extended pauses between scenes which are gloriously filled with 1960s pop songs (it's a modern-dress production). Cleverly, the new play focusses more on the minor characters of the Comedy, giving particular prominence to the jailer, and ludicrously making him the twin brother of Doctor Pinch to explain cast doubling, and introducing a few new characters to fill out the town scene.

Fortuitously I saw Comedy first and Rascals second, which I think is probably the most satisfactory order: the new play enriches the older even in retrospect, and its fast-paced double-dealings and general context require familiarity with the Comedy for maximum effect. The two together made for a really enjoyable theatrical experience.  

Anna Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy adapted by Phillip Breen

seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 21 June 2025

Phillip Breen, who has adapted Tolstoy's novel for the stage, directs Natalie Dormer as Anna, Tomiwa Edun as her husband Karenin, Jonnie Broadbent as her brother Stiva, Naomi Sheldon as his wife Dolly, Shalisha James-Davis as Dolly's sister Kitty, David Oakes as Levin (eventually Kitty's husband) and Seamus Dilate as Vronsky, with whom Anna has a passionate affair in this staging of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina.

All those relationships, together with Russian patronymics and nicknames, famously cause complications for non-Russian readers, but are perhaps easier to keep in mind when embodied by actors on the stage (who dispense with the patronymics almost entirely); there are a number of minor characters as well. The novel examines three fraught marriages, the trajectories of which are interleaved; the play remains surprisingly faithful to this structure rather than taking the easier but less satisfactory option of focussing attention only on Anna. This does make for an intense experience which runs the risk of being too long-winded, but it also allows for the famous opening sentence of the novel - "All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion" (in the 1954 translation by Rosemary Edmonds) - to be fully demonstrated.

The Oblonsky marriage is under constant strain because of Stiva's serial infidelities and Dolly's exhaustion from child-bearing; the Karenin marriage is stretched to breaking point by Anna's grand passion for Vronsky and her husband's intransigence; in contrast, the Levin marriage, delayed by misunderstandings and almost sabotaged by Levin's tactless revelations about his past, seems set to be solid even though it will be always be volatile as husband and wife strive to accommodate and understand one another.

This was a fine cast and a well-designed production with a versatile set (designer Max Jones), but it did not always convince. The main problem, perhaps inherited from the book itself, is that Vronsky does not come across as the heart-breaker he needs to be: there was insufficient emphasis on Kitty's crush on him, or on his caddishness at abandoning her, so that the impact of Anna's presence at the ball where the family expected him to propose to Kitty was not as traumatic as it should have been. Then, in turn, there was no real spark between Anna and Vronsky to justify the grand passion, though the later stages of their affair, when the social pressured crowding them in upon themselves laid bare the paucity of their inner resources, was very well handled.

In a fluid staging which included simulated train journeys and a finely imagined journey by carriage during which Dolly vented her frustrations while an impassive coachman concentrated on driving, and mercifully refrained from offering any peasant wisdom at the end, Anna's final desperate act was somehow not made fully clear. I knew what she had done, because I have read the book and seen other adaptations, but I wonder whether someone completely new to the story would have been certain about what was shown. These two events perhaps indicate the weakness of an otherwise successful adaptation: Dolly's outburst just too modern, consisting almost entirely of expletives, and Anna's demise the victim of too-clever stagecraft.

1536

by Ava Pickett

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 4 June 2025

With characters named Anna and Jane, and with the year of Ann Boleyn's downfall and execution as its title, one might have expected Ava Pickett's play 1536 (here expertly directed by Lyndsey Turner) to be yet another work appealing to our apparently inexhaustible fascination with Tudor history. But Anna (Siena Kelly) and Jane (Liv Hill) and their friend Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) are young women in a village in Essex, a place which considers Colchester, let alone London, to be too far away to provide anything except distant and late-arriving news. What they hear about the disgraced queen profoundly disturbs them, but they are at the same time aware that more may well have happened in the time it has taken for the news to reach them; that what sounds like an impossible rift in the right way of the world may well have already been resolved.

In the meantime Anna pursues her wanton ways, for the most part blithely unaware that her reputation is being tarnished, while Jane prepares to follow her father's bidding into an arranged marriage with Richard (Adam Hugill) - the man currently infatuated with Anna. Mariella, slowly assuaging her own heartbreak over William (Angus Cooper) who has also married for social advantage in the village, is apprenticed to the midwife and hopes her work will see her through, even though she does not like it.

The menfolk are occasional presences in what is a tense but cunningly localised drama of conflicting desires and social oppression. Anna appears to be in control of her life, and she often treats the bland and none-too-bright Jane with amused contempt even though they are supposed to be firm friends. Jane herself, seeking utterly naive at first, shows an unpleasantly ruthless streak under pressure, as the mild-mannered so often do. Mariella is less amenable to this treatment and more aware of the danger Anna is courting; their personalities and attitudes make for a powerful microcosm of late medieval society as it impinged on womenfolk, while the news of the catastrophe enveloping Queen Ann acts as a counterpoint to the development of these women's "small" and (of course) undocumented lives.

The action takes place in the fields outside the village. The set, designed by Max Jones, is a field of wild grasses, very suitable for the illicit assignations Anna so enjoys, and for conducting female gossip away from the unwelcome attentions of fathers and husbands (until the men come looking for the women). Since the Almeida has no proscenium, the set is visible from the moment one enters the auditorium, and it is framed at the front by a huge rectangle of thin neon light, almost like the border of a giant cinema screen. The wildness of the Essex countryside immediately destroys any expectation that this is going to be a play about court life, and the modern earthiness of the language only reinforces the point that we are dealing with articulate but essentially unlettered folk. But, as news percolates that the queen has been executed, local events put the three friends in danger: their prospects for surviving in a relentlessly patriarchal world are completely uncertain. The resonances with the modern world are all too clear: who will be believed? Is it safer to strike out or to bow to one's fate?

In Praise of Love

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 30 May 2025

Amelia Sears directs Dominic Rowan as Sebastian Cruttwell, Claire Price as Lydia Crutwell, Daniel Abelson as Mark Walters and Joe Edgar as Joey Crutwell in a revival of Rattigan's 1973 play in which British reserve is taken to extraordinary lengths as the married couple Lydia and Sebastian try to protect one another from knowledge which each thinks will devastate the other.

Sebastian Cruttwell, exaggerating his pose as a curmudgeonly leftie theatre critic, appears abominably cavalier with his wife, expecting her to see to his every need and to solve the most trivial domestic problems (such as switching on the heater, or plugging in a desk lamp, when he complains the they do not work). Lydia, therefore, is convinced that he would be unable to function without her, despite the fact that he seems to treat her with casual contempt. Rattigan excels at scenes of domestic disharmony in which more is plainly going on than the surface dialogue admits; here are two people, married for twenty-eight years, who seem on the verge of being at loggerheads in the style of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - but we don 't have to wait till the end of the play to understand what is at stake: Lydia soon confides in her friend Mark what she is doing. The surprise comes later, when Sebastian also risks a confidential conversation with the same friend, who thus has too much information to know what to do for the best.

Unwittingly caught in this tense situation is the young Joey, infuriating his father by working for the Liberal Party, and aspiring to be a dramatist, very aware of his father's disdain but still all-too-easily hurt by it, and even aware of his mother's tendency to manipulate him, but helpless to avoid it. There is much impassioned talk about the importance of honesty even as both parents are concealing feelings and knowledge in the most brazen way.

I am trying to account for the subtleties in this play without giving away the plot details; suffice it to say that Rattigan's skill in dramatising these sorts of situations, pregnant with undercurrents that cannot be resolved in the way current fashion dictates - or even with the tentative glimmer of hope that flickers at the end of Albee's celebrated play - is undiminished, and the cast in this revival rise to the challenge of portraying these flawed well-meaning people with great success. There is a rapprochement between Joey and his father, even though Sebastian still cannot explain to his son why he has missed a crucial chance to see the boy's first television play - love may be praised as much as honesty, but the practice of it remains hard work and is often compromised.

 

The Government Inspector

by Nikolai Gogol

seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 17 May 2025

Gregory Doran directs a new version of Gogol's famous play by Phil Porter, with a large ensemble cast (how profligate with actors older playwrights were! - twenty-four named characters and unnamed sundries.)

A marvellous set, designed by Francis O'Connor, gives the impression of a nineteenth-centruy provincial Russian (or Ukrainian) town, with cupolas and steep roofs silhouetted like a child's overgrown box of wooden building blocks, while also representing the cluttered office of the beleaguered mayor. The local worthies are in a sudden panic having heard that a government inspector is about to arrive, probably incognito: their venality might well be exposed. Their mounting unease is brilliantly counterpointed by the extraordinary comings and goings of a local police officer who skids across the floor in paroxysms of enthusiasm.

A wastrel passing through the town is mistaken for the inspector; from being threatened with starvation for not having paid his bills at the inn, Khlestakov is suddenly showered with favour and money, and he is soon in a position to flirt with both the wife and the daughter of the mayor, and he is more than willing to accept, and then to demand, favours from all and sundry.

This farcical indictment of petty corruption and unbridled opportunism is great fun to watch, though its mechanics are occasionally a bit creaky. The local jealousies and snobberies are nicely observed; the classic master/servant relationship is wonderfully elaborated between Khlestakov and the hapless but worldly-wise Osip; the imperious wife and put-upon daughter of the mayor provide a study of domestic tension; and there is a good deal of physical comedy making excellent use of Chichester's thrust stage, including a spectacular pratfall through a skylight into Khlestakov's garret room in the hostelry.

Khlestakiv makes his getaway apparently unscathed, and far richer than he was when he arrived, while the town worthies are about to be confronted by the real inspector ....

Ben and Imo

by Mark Ravenhill

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 8 May 2025

Erica Whyman directs Samuel Barnett as Benjamin Britten and Victoria Yeates as Imogen Holst in a production transferred from the RSC's Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon of Mark Ravenhill's new play exploring the beginning of the long working relationship between the composer and his 'musical assistant'.

Imogen Holst, the daughter of the composer Gustav Holst, famously denigrated her own skills as a composer, and spent her life dedicated to the idea that music should be available to all, and that all who wanted to should participate in it. She encouraged music-making among evacuees in the West Country during the Second World War, taught at Dartington Hall for nine years, and was encouraged to go to Aldeburgh in 1952 to assist Benjamin Britten while he composed Gloriana, an opera commissioned by the new Arts Council to be performed at the Coronation Gala on 8 June 1953. Britten had agreed to the commission (out of a sense of duty, it is claimed in this play), but never found composing as easy as it had been when he was a teenager, and he resented the interference of others outside his immediate circle. 

Holst arrived in Aldeburgh with virtually no luggage and rented a room above a shop, intending to stay for less than a year. She spent the rest of her life based there, dying in 1984. She not only assisted Britten in the preparation of the opera, but continued to work with him for more than a decade afterwards (despite strains in their relationship) and was a significant contributor to the success of the annual Aldeburgh Festival until she retired in 1977.

The two personalities, so very different from each other, make for an intense two-handed play. Samuel Barnett captures Britten's curious mixture of arrogance, self-assurance and neediness, while Victoria Yeates portrays Holst's free-spiritedness and verve while hinting at the insecurities and loneliness which they mask. Inevitably, under the pressure of the commission, sparks fly despite her admiration for his genius and his resentful realisation that he needs someone like her to help with his work. In an explosion of anger Britten delivers some staggeringly cruel blows; the devastated Holst nevertheless stays, but with a steely announcement that she will neither forget nor forgive. 

The working relationship which brought Ben and Imo together is given its due without descending into too much technical explanation (it is never made entirely clear what Imo spends all her time doing, though there are hints of how careful she has to be not to tread on Ben's professional toes). In the meantime the personal relationship is revealed to be complex: sometimes workmanlike, sometimes extremely playful, sometimes warm, and yet at times quite abusive. What I found fascinating was that for all Britten's defensive cruelties and childish tantrums, Holst, though battered, kept rising to the occasion due to the force of her own character and her profound belief in the value of what she was doing. The personal cost to her may have been high, but she was determined not to let it crush her.

On a purely contingent level, the performance was remarkable for two unwanted interruptions. Soon after it began someone's phone rang (despite clear requests to ensure that such a thing would not happen), and Victoria Yeates, in her imperious Imo voice, asked for it to be dealt with: quite bizarre to hear a person supposedly in 1952 address such a modern irritation. Then a few minutes later the whole performance was suspended for the best part of ten minutes while a technical problem with the sound (I think) was addressed - although it may have been that the revolve was not working since it only turned when the performance resumed. The professionalism of the two actors in these trying circumstances was exemplary.

The play was originally performed on a thrust stage; here, with the audience on all four sides of the acting space, an adjustment had been made by the designer Sutra Gilmour, whereby Ben's piano was on a revolve in the centre, which periodically turned 90 degrees so that the actors could plausibly face in different directions during the performance. This in turn meant that all the static furniture - a music-score carrel, a standing lamp, a small trolley, a small bookcase and an armchair - had to be moved appropriately by the two actors. It was very well done.