Theatre Reviews

William Congreve’s The Way of the World, which premiered in 1700, is the last and generally considered the greatest of the Restoration comedies. The callous and cynical plot is so complicated that few have been able to follow it. James Macdonald’s elegant production at Donmar Warehouse is notable for its diction and treating Congreve’s incomparable prose with the utmost respect. The witty lovers laying down their conditions for marriage is the high-water mark: Let us be very strange and well bred. Let us be as strange as if we had been marry’d a great while; and as well bred as if we were not marry’d at all.
Haydn Gwynne, playing the great comic role of Lady Wishfort, a crumbling superannuated widow, gets lots of laughs, especially when she is practising rising from a chaise longue.
American playwright Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance at National Theatre is about gay men living in New York today and their inheritance is AIDS. The two-part epic, unnecessarily long, was inspired. not as you might expect by Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, but by E M Forster’s novel, Howards End. Witty and poignant, it is brilliantly directed by Stephen Daldry and excellently acted by a fine cast of English and American actors
David Haigh’s Pressure a Park Theatre tells a little known World War 2 story. The scheduled date for the Allied D Day landing was Monday June the 5th, 1944. But there was one major problem: the uncertainty of the British weather. General Eisenhower turned to two Allied meteorologists for reassurance. 350,000 lives were at stake and the meteorologists couldn’t agree. The pressure was enormous.
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James Graham in Quiz at Noel Coward Theatre mixes fact and fictional imagination to retell the story of the coughing major millionaire scandal, which caught the public imagination in a big way in 2003. Major Ingram was accused of cheating on the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? quiz programme. Graham is not primarily interested in whether Ingram was guilty or innocent. What actually motivated him to write the play was that he wanted to explore “the curious overlapping of light entertainment and criminal justice” and the dangers that it brings.
William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, which premiered in 1675, is one of the funniest comedies of the Restoration era. It is also one of the filthiest and its sexual explicitness kept it off the stage from nearly 200 years. The revival at Southwark Playhouse is so well directed by Luke Fredericks, so well acted and so well designed by Stewart Charlesworth that I quickly got over my initial disappointment that the play was being set in the 1920s rather than the 1670s. The characters’ asides to the audience, excellently timed, are particularly effective.
Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, co-artistic directors of Cheek by Jowl, normally work in Russian and English. Their touring production of Pericles is the first time they have produced Shakespeare in the French language. Pericles is in hospital and in a coma. The action remains in the ward and in his dreams throughout. The big disappointment is that it is very difficult to know what is going. Some day somebody will turn the play into a spectacular Broadway musical. There’s plenty of opportunity for music, singing, choreography, lavish scenery and costumes and spectacular effects.

Caroline, Or Change at Hampstead Theatre is an adult musical for adult audiences. The subject matter is race relations between African-American and American Jews in 1963, the year of President Kennedy’s assassination and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. The book and lyrics are by Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. Jeanine Tesori’s melodious score embraces a wide range of idioms and the show is entirely sung-through.

Caroline (Sharon D Clarke, excellent), a black woman, a single mother, works for a middle-class Jewish family in Louisiana She spends most of her working day in the basement and earns a pittance. Caroline becomes surrogate mother to her boss’s 8-year-old son (Charlie Gallagher, excellent) who one day by mistake leaves a 20 dollar bill in his trousers which she is to wash and there is an almighty row when she says she is going to keep it.

Clarke is a superb singer and actress and the musical is emotionally deeply involving. The good news is that Michael Longhurst’s production is transferring to the West End in the autumn.

The Abbey Theatre in Dublin invited Sean Holmes to direct Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 2016, the 100th anniversary of the Easter Uprising. The production now comes to Lyric Hammersmith with many of the original cast. The play offers a slice of Dublin tenement life and a reminder that far more people died of malnutrition and consumption than were killed in the war.

On the fourth night of the premiere at The Abbey Theatre in 1926 there were riots. The audience did not like the unflattering portrayal of the Irish as cowards, braggarts, looters and windbags and thought O’Casey was ridiculing the men who had died during the Uprising.

The fine ensemble is headed by Niall Buggy, very funny and perfect casting for the irritated Peter Flynn. But the play loses much of its impact when it is not staged in its correct period. I wish Holmes had given his production the full 1916 reality in clothes and settings. What we see on stage looks like a rehearsal room before the first full dress rehearsal.

Laurie Sansom directs a new version of Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spiderwoman by Jose Rivera and Allan Baker at Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre. It is a story of loneliness, compassion and humanity.

Two men share a prison cell in Buenos Aires during the dictatorship. The play is about their relationship: they have nothing in common and are seemingly incompatible. Molina (Samuel Barnett) is a homosexual window-dresser. Valentin (Declan Bennett) is a Marxist freedom fighter. Molina lives in a fantasy world of bad movies which he loves to embroider in the retelling. In Sansom’s production, as he speaks, the fantasies are projected in silhouette on to the concrete walls of the prison, a totally unnecessary and distracting addition.

The 1985 film works better than the present play. In the film there is brilliant parody of a terrible French resistance movie which is hilarious in its own right and at the very end we actually see what happens which is far more exciting than having it reported.

The actors, nevertheless, hold the attention. Barnet has the showier role and gives his best performance since he acted Posner in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys.

Tennessee Williams’ elegiac and heartbreaking Summer and Smoke, a story of loneliness and unrequited love, which premiered in 1948, is, in the light of his later work, unexpectedly gentle and delicate. Rebecca Frecknall’s clever production at Almeida Theatre is a rare and major revival.

A minister’s daughter has loved the boy next door since they were children. She is a product of 19th century Puritanism; bound by the codes of behaviour expected of a refined young lady and has grown up sexually repressed. She has artistic and intellectual interests. He is into drinking, gambling and harlotry. This allegorical drama, representing a conflict between Body and Soul, gets terrific performances from Patsy Ferran and Matthew Needham

Ingmar Bergman’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece Fanny & Alexander, released in 1982, was his very last film and is so accessible that it doesn’t feel like a Bergman film at all. The story chronicles a year (1910) in the lives of a Swedish family. A father dies unexpectedly and his widow (Catherine Walker) marries a brutal Bishop (Kevin Doyle) who abuses her son (Misha Hadley). Max Weber’s 3 hour 30 minute production at The Old Vic has a tremendous sweep. Do not be put off by the length. Such is the excellence of script, direction, design and cast, headed by Penelope Wilton, it doesn’t feel that long at all.

Gore Vidal’s The Best Man at Playhouse Theatre, starring Martin Shaw and Jeff Fahey, is a 1960 American period piece which doesn’t date. How far are the contestants in the race for Presidency willing to go? Vidal, political commentator, prolific novelist and essayist, famed for his epigrammatic wit, was born into a political family and stood for office twice. He wrote his drama with the authority of an insider who knew at first-hand about the mud-throwing, the corrupt deals and the blackmail which went on. Jack Shepherd as an ex-President steals every scene he is in.

Emma Rice’s adaptation and production of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter at Empire Cinema is one of the very best things she has ever done. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard have been sent up rotten so often that to act Coward nowadays absolutely straight without any whiff of parody is incredibly difficult. Rice’s expressionistic approach uses film footage skilfully. Hugely enjoyable, it is never a travesty but something quite original. Jim Sturgeon and Isabel Pollen mange the Coward idiom deftly: the diction, the pre-war middle-class Englishness and the understatement is flawless.

In Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy at Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, a 35-year-old astrophysicist (Jonathan Broadbent), comes home for his father’s funeral, to find that his mother (Belinda Lang) has quickly come to terms with his death and is about to marry her lover (Paul Bradley), a breezy vulgarian. The witty script and the first-rate acting are going to give audiences a lot of pleasure. Selina Cadell, all aflutter, is hilarious

W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin at Jermyn Street Theatre is a curiosity, a highbrow undergraduate frolic, written in verse in 1935, combining cartoonish satire, German cabaret and communist propaganda. It was a wake-up call to the rise of Fascism in Germany and Britain and the censor didn’t like it one bit and demanded cuts.

THE YORK REALIST, Peter Gill’s beautifully understated sad drama at Donmar Theatre, is totally confident in its kitchen-sink realism and unafraid to move at a slow pace. Premiered in 2002, it is a perfect companion piece for the working class plays of D H Lawrence, which Gill famously directed.

A young, middle-class, assistant director (Jonathan Bailey), working on the York Mystery Plays in York, falls in love with a member of the amateur cast, a local farm labourer (Ben Batt). It is the clash of class, culture and geography which keep them apart; neither man is prepared to uproot and relocate. The relationship with the mother (Lesley Nicol) is also perfectly gauged and there is a delightful scene when the whole family comes home, having just been to the Mystery plays, and are so excited by what they have seen. Robert Hastie’s production matches Gill’s meticulous detail and the emotional tension is sustained throughout by the excellent subtle acting.

Michael Luton says his production of Picnic at Hanging Rock at Barbican Theatre is about Englishness versus Australia. In 1900 three girls and a teacher on an expedition disappeared and were never found. So entrenched is the story in Australia’s collective mind that many people believe it actually happened. It didn’t. It is fiction and the fiction has become a potent and unsettling myth. The clever, inventive, highly theatrical production is nothing like the film. The script is a series of intriguing, almost sculptured scenes, punctuated by pitch-black black-outs and a churning soundscape.

A 10-year-old girl has been abducted, abused and killed by a serial killer; but it takes the police 20 years to find him and the girl’s body. Bryony Lavery’s multi-award-winning psychological thriller, Frozen at Theatre Royal, Haymarket, is about retribution, remorse and redemption, written in a series of monologues and only very occasionally in duologues. Is the unrepentant paedophile (Jason Watkins, truly creepy) evil or sick? Should the grieving mother (Suranne Jones), bent on revenge, forgive him or should he be made to suffer?

Colin Higgins’s Harold and Maude is the story of an 18-year-old boy’s love for a 79-year old woman. At Charing Cross Theatre Thom Southerland attempts something charming by adding music, which is played by the supporting cast, seven actor-musicians. The stage version is never as good as the 1971 cult movie. The screenplay has been watered down and lost its social, political and sexual edge. The surreal setting and the posturing musicians have turned it into one of those 1930s French romantic poetic fantasies Jean Giraudoux used to write. The fake suicides are no longer as funny and the specious philosophising can be squirm-making. Maude is played by Sheila Hancock, who has just celebrated her 85th birthday and is totally at ease with the whimsy. Bill Milner is Harold.
Derek Jarman celebrated Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 with a low-budget, outrageous, misogynous, punk movie, Jubilee, in which Queen Elizabeth I had a vision of what had happened to her kingdom 400 years later. Young and old punks may enjoy the stage adaptation at Lyric, Hammersmith, but only if they leave their critical faculties at home. The production is messy, often incomprehensible, badly acted and there is a lot of unnecessary nudity.

Eugene O’Neill is America’s greatest playwright and LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT at Wyndham’s Theatre is his greatest play, an act of exorcism, written in tears and blood, and so autobiographical that he didn’t want it published until 25 years after his death. It is, perhaps, the most painful and acrimonious of all 20th century dramas. Written with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for his family, O’Neill didn’t want it performed ever. Fortunately, his wishes were ignored.

Thirty-six years of marriage is concertinaed into one long day. The Tyrone family cannot forget and they cannot forgive. They blame each other, for what they are: miser, morphine-addict, wastrel, and consumptive. The bitterness is in every word they utter. The knife is turned in the same wound over and over again. The play’s great weakness – its garrulousness, its inordinate length, and its endless repetitions – is paradoxically its greatest strength. Richard Eyre directs an excellent cast: Jeremy Irons, Lesley Manville (superb), Matthew Beard and Rory Keenan

Christopher Wheeldon at Royal Opera House has turned Shakespeare’s THE WINTER’S TALE into a ballet. The pastoral scenes in the second act with dancing shepherds and their lasses are perfect for the divertissements a classical ballet audience expects. Bob Crowley has designed a beautiful tree. The dancing is exuberant. The costumes are colourful. Sarah Lamb as Perdita and Vadim Muntagirov as Florizel are a tender kissing couple. It is all so bright and jolly, a huge contrast to what has gone before.

The story begins in sombre mood. King Leontes (a paranoid, contorted Ryioichi Hirano), suddenly and totally irrationally, believes his wife, Hermione (an elegant, serene Lauren Cuthbertson), has committed adultery with his best friend, Polixenes (Matthew Ball) and become pregnant by him. His paranoia, second only to Othello’s, drives him to insanity, brilliantly caught in the writhing choreography and Joby Talbot’s dramatic music, a perfect equivalent for Shakespeare’s tortured and sometimes unintelligible verse.

Sarah Burgess in DRY POWDER at Hampstead Theatre takes a barbed look at capitalism and corporate social responsibility. The finance is high and the morality is low. Initially, I had difficulty with the financial jargon, but, surprisingly, found it didn’t matter and was totally held by the acting and the interplay between the actors. Tom Riley is stylish. The production is smart and business-like; the dynamics work a treat.

The Japanese were out in force at the Barbican Theatre to see director and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s comic book spectacle PLUTO, which takes its inspiration from Osamu Tezuka, the Japanese Manga artist. The story about robots and humans co-existing is uninvolving but the co-ordination between actors, dancers, scenery and the graphics projected on seven panels, which are constantly being moved into different shapes, is very impressive.

Alan Ayckbourn admits THE DIVIDE at The Old Vic is not a play. “It’s a strange sort of piece,” he says. “It’s a narrative for voices” set in a dystopian future when heterosexual marriages are forbidden and children are produced by artificial insemination only. Erin Doherty does a remarkable job, holding Annabel Bolton’s production together. But even when cut from six hours to 3 hours and 50 minutes, it is still far too long and loses the audience in the second

At Bridge Theatre you can stand or you can sit for Nicholas Hytner’s in-the-round, promenade production of JULIUS CAESAR, one of the best political thrillers ever written. It is always topical and will continue to be pertinent as long as there are dictators, bloody coups and rampaging crowds.

The play’s popularity in the UK began with Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s spectacular production designed by Alma Tadema in 1898. Nowadays theatre managers can no longer afford the huge crowds Tree could command.

Hytner gets the paying public to be the crowd and it is their constant presence which gives his production its immediacy and urgency; and this is particularly so when we get to the assassination, the speeches in the forum, the murder of Cinna, the poet and the battle scenes. The excitement is visceral. The audience ducks when the shooting begins.

There is a strong cast. Ben Whishaw is an intellectual Brutus; politically naive and totally inexperienced in warfare, he makes three fatal decisions. David Morrissey’s Antony is a blunt man who can easily whip up the fickle, gullible crowd to mutiny. David Calder reveals the dictator Caesar is the moment he is challenged

The critics back in 1958 gave THE BIRTHDAY PARTY such a hammering at its London premiere that it closed the same week it opened. Theatre critic Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times came to its rescue: “I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays and say that Mr. Pinter possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.”

Stanley (Toby Jones), a former concert party pianist, who lives in a seedy seaside boarding house, is visited by two sinister men, who interrogate, humiliate and brainwash him before carting him off in a black limousine. We never find out what Stanley has done; nor do we learn who his tormentors are. They behave as if they were two hit men in a B movie; but they could just as easily be two malevolent male nurses taking Stanley back to the asylum. The line of demarcation between those who are to be locked up and those who do the locking up is thin.

One of the main pleasures of Ian Rickson’s excellently cast production at Harold Pinter Theatre is listening to Stephen Mangan delivering the idiosyncratic non-sequiteur phraseology with such confident relish.

Dominic Dromgoole’s year-long celebration of Oscar Wilde at Vaudeville Theatre continues with LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN, an attack on Victorian hypocrisy, which had its premiere in 1892. Wilde was going to call the play “A Good Woman” until his mother said the title was too mawkish and nobody could possibly be interested in a play about a good woman. The amazing thing about the dialogue is how often it anticipates Wilde’s own spectacular fall two years later. Sadly, there is so much miscasting and inadequate acting and misdirection by Kathy Burke that the audience fails to take the melodrama seriously enough.

Annie Baker has been quoted as saying she wants to reassess what a play is, a worthy aim; but JOHN, a 3 hour 20 minute mystery drama, set in a B&B in Gettysburg, will, I suspect, prove too obtuse, too long, and too slow for National Theatre audiences.

At the National Theatre the 1976 Sidney Lumet/PaddyChayefsky film Network has been adapted for the stage by Lee Hall and its impact has not diminished one jot. The script is a biting satire on the corruptive power of TV and Big Business. The dangers have not gone away. “We are not in the business of morality,” explains a chief executive whose only concerns are the ratings and the money they will bring in.

Bryan Cranston, best known to UK audiences for Breaking Bad, is very convincing as Howard Beale, veteran anchorman, who has a spectacular breakdown on air and threatens to kill himself in a week’s time. The TV Company’s immediate response is to sack him; but when they find he has actually boosted ratings they then want him to deliver more demented diatribes.

Beale turns prophet and messiah and rouses the nation to hysteria, easily persuading viewers to get off their backsides and go the window and yell, “I am mad as hell and I am not gonna take this any more!” Cranston even gets the National Theatre audience to shout out. Ivo Van Hove’s two-hour production has tremendous energy and pace and ranks amongst his very best work. The chaos is brilliantly marshalled.

Adaptations of the novels of Victor Hugo (1802-1885) have always been able to fill opera houses, theatres and cinemas. Think of the continuing success of Rigoletto, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Grinning Man at Trafalgar Studios is based on L’homme qui rit, published in 1869. The hero is Grinpayne whose face was slashed from ear to ear when he was an orphaned child and left him with a grotesque grimace. What is special about this dark musical is not the story, nor the music, but Tom Morris’s staging which mixes grand guignol, freak show, circus cart, pantomime and puppets.

Also at Trafalgar Studios is Australian playwright Tom Murphy’s Strangers in Between. There is a remarkable performance by Roly Botha as an unhappy 16-year-old country lad who runs away to Sydney and is befriended by two gays. Botha begins on such a high neurotic note, verbally and physically, that I wondered if he would be able to keep it up for the whole performance. He did so most successfully.

Steven Berkoff’s East, “an elegy to the East End and its energetic waste,” is a series of self-indulgent, overlong monologues. The expletive-ridden and raucous script is a dexterous mixture of cockney argot and high-flown mock Shakespearian verse. “The acting has to be loose and smacking of danger,” said Berkoff. At King’s Head Theatre James Craze and Jack Condon are particularly impressive and one of the high spots is their mimed motorbike ride. Condon becomes the motorbike, revving and changing gear, and Craze rides him using Condon’s arms as handlebars.

English National Ballet is touring Roland Petit’s existential masterpiece Le Jeune Homme at La Mort, a highly dramatic short one-act ballet, which caused a sensation at its Paris premiere in 1946. The libretto is by Jean Cocteau and the music is Bach’s Passacaglia. Charismatic Ivan Vasiliev brings enormous emotional and physical power to the young man who is driven to suicide by his faithless and cruel lover who turns out to be Death.

Cinderella has been a popular pantomime since 1830. But given a choice how would you prefer to see it performed? As a ballet to a score by Prokofiev? An opera by Rossini? A musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein? An animated cartoon by Walt Disney? A film by Kenneth Branagh?

A lot of people will be opting for Matthew Bourne’s ballet and spectacle, designed by Lez Brotherston, at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. It is set during the height of the London Blitz in 1940. It’s a great pity that the pre-recorded Prokofiev has been deliberately over-amplified to create a cinematic surround sound. I felt like Gulliver did when he was listening to an orchestra in Brobdingnag.

Bourne loves movies and there are references to A Matter of Life and Death, Waterloo Road and Brief Encounter. The wicked stepmother is modelled on Joan Crawford. She is so wicked she tries to smother Cinders.

Bourne stretches a two act ballet to three acts. There’s too much meaningless dancing for dancing’s sake in the Café de Paris. Ashley Shaw and Andrew Monaghan’s high spot is when Cinderella dances with a tailor’s dummy, which is transformed into her Prince.

Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are two quite separate plays; but if you see them as a double-bill, at a matinee and evening performance at the Barbican as part of the RSC’s Roman Season, it is even more of a shock to see what has happened to Mark Antony. The triple pillar of the world has been transformed into a strumpet’s fool, so infatuated that he neglects duty and honour. In Julius Caesar, Antony is the charismatic, athletic young man, who is a brilliant orator. In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony is an old ruffian and he has aged so much that the role has to be played by another actor.

The most famous lovers in history, insanely jealous of each other and long past their sell-by dates, bungle everything. Antony even bungles his own death; and then lives long enough to learn that Cleopatra is not dead but merely wished to find out what he would do if he heard she were.

Titus Andronicus, the least performed of all Shakespeare’s plays, dismissed by Ben Jonson as “blood and thunder”, was extremely popular in its day. The action, based on Seneca and Ovid, has no historical foundation and is an unremitting cycle of sensational and grotesque atrocities. The pièce de resistance is the dinner party at which Titus (dressed as a chef) serves up the flesh of the two young men, rapists of his daughter, in a pie he has baked specially for their mother. The bloodbath dinner party is so over-the-top that all an audience can do is laugh in self-defence. The extra¬ordinary thing, however, is that alongside all the sick-making barbarity there should be so much fine poetry.

In Amy Herzog’s so-so Belleville at Donmar James Norton and Imogen Potts play an American couple, who are living in an apartment in a bohemian Paris suburb and wishing they had never married. There are various options such as eviction, separation, divorce, go home to daddy, commit suicide or murder. The audience gets worried when she starts cutting her toe nails with a large kitchen knife.