Theatre Reviews

Simon Gray’s spy thriller, which closed early in 1995 when Stephen Fry had a breakdown and suddenly exited the production, is successfully revived by Ed Hall. 44-year-old spy and traitor George Blake, sentenced to imprisonment for 42 years, was sprung from Wormwood Scrubs in 1961 by 32-year-old Sean Bourke, an Irish petty criminal. Bourke, invited to join Blake in Moscow; found he was not allowed to return home to Ireland. But it was not the KGB who was keeping him. It was Blake who didn’t want him to go home. Spies betray people. They can’t break the habit. Blake comes across in Geoffrey Streatfeild’s performance as a much weaker character than the cruel double agent he was in real life. Emmet Byrne’s Bourke is a much more affectionate, sympathetic and likeable person. Blake is still alive, aged 95, and living in Moscow.

It is ridiculous that the only play of J M Barrie that is regularly revived is Peter Pan. Dear Brutus, which many think his masterpiece, is about a group of people being given a second chance and Barrie observes the pain, comedy and farce that self-knowledge can bring Strange things are liable to happen on Midsummer Night. Her ladyship finds herself having an impassioned affair with the butler A philandering egoist is not sure whether it is his wife he loves or his mistress. All three end up behaving like the juvenile lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Barrie has always enjoyed mixing the real and the fantasy world. The most poignant scene comes when an alcoholic artist, unhappily married and childless, has a vision of the daughter he never had. Jonathan O’Boyle’s production at Southwark Playhouse is sensitively acted.

Bernard Shaw’s plays are often criticized for being all talk and no action. But who cares when the talk is so brilliant and such fun. Misalliance, directed by Paul Miller and excellently acted, is a witty, freewheeling debate about the impossible gulf between parents and children, the parents emerging just as foolish as their offspring, though much nicer. A Polish acrobat drops in – literally, her aeroplane having crashed into the conservatory. She drives all the men crazy. A young clerk also turns up, waving a revolver, wanting to revenge his mother’s shame and vent his socialism. Strongly recommended.

Conan Doyle, you will remember, got fed up writing about Sherlock Holmes and killed him off and he would have remained at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls had it not been for American actor-playwright William Gillette deciding he wanted to act the most famous detective in the world on stage . There have been well over 300 adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories in the theatre, cinema, television and radio. There has been a musical and even a ballet. Sherlock Holmes on ice is eagerly awaited.

At Jermyn Street Theatre there is a hilarious spoof of The Hound of the Baskerville by Steven Canny and John Nicholson for three versatile comic actors who, directed ny Lotte Wakeham, play 14 characters and do all the costume changes and all the silly business at incredible speed. The comic timing of Shaun Chambers, Max Hutchinson and Simon Kane, verbally, physically and facially, is spot on.

At Charles Dickens’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1888 the Very Reverend Dean Stanley preached that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was the finest Christmas Sermon in the English language. Matthew Warchus’s in-the-round production at The Young Vic with Rhys Ifans as Scrooge is a fresh and constant delight, thanks mainly to the carol and hymn singing, the ringing of hand-bells and the music of Christopher Nightingale There is a magical moment when snowflakes fall from the ceiling on to the audience and, amazingly, leave not a trace behind.

Finborough Theatre, revives two famous plays, which has not been seen in years, an invaluable service to all those interested in theatre history. Jerome K Jerome is known today only as the author of that classic comic novel Three Men in a Boat but in 1908 he had a huge box-office success with his modern morality play, The Passing of The Third Floor Back, which is set in a third-rate boarding house in Bloomsbury. A Stranger, a Christ-like personage, arrives and converts the sinful lodgers by appealing to their better selves and praising them for the good qualities they did not know they had. Jonny Kelly’ directs a first-rate ensemble and Lizzie Faber’s gentle harp playing is very much part of the revival’s success.

Also set in 1908 is Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, which is about Russian immigrants in New York and is a paean to American brotherhood. A pious Jewish father is shocked that his son (Stefffan Cennydd, excellent) should want to marry a gentile. His fiancée’s father is horrified his daughter (Whoopie van Ramm) should want to marry a Jew. He sees Jews as vermin and wants to stamp them out. The casting of Peter Marinker as both fathers is a masterstroke

Liwaa Yazji’s play describes life in Syria under a dictatorship. 16-year-olds, forced to enlist, are being slaughtered in the civil war. The government offers a mountain goat for the family of each martyr. The satire is at its best when the TV presenter is on stage. “What a heart-warming sight to see the village full of goats,” she gushes. There are 17 scenes, far too many and too many poorly acted. What Yazji has to say would be far better said in a documentary?