Henry IV, Donmar Warehouse

You come in via the back door. In this sort-of sequel to her all-female Julius Caesar at the Donmar, Phyllida Lloyd has retained the women’s prison setting. This extends to the way you enter the space. Having collected your tickets from a bar across the street the audience are made to file in up the back stairs while being brusquely instructed by ushers dressed as prison guards to turn our phones off or risk having them confiscated. Inside the lighting is stark and unforgiving, while the seating in the lower part of the theatre has been replaced with equally unforgiving grey plastic chairs. There are institutional posters on the walls and a few more guards dotted around the space. It’s the same flirting-with-immersive approach the Young Vic took to their Hamlet, but once the play proper begins there’s no further interaction.

The two parts of Henry IV have been whittled down to a taut two hours, the pace rarely flagging, the energy considerable, and as with Lloyd’s Julius Caesar there’s a framing device, the inmates performing a play within a play, which allows for a handful of moments when the performers drop out of ‘character’, mainly to swear or scrap with one another.

As a result there are times when there’s a sense that the underlying relationships between the women are being echoed in their onstage dynamics, though this isn’t explored all that much as an idea – we are never shown who these women are and what they mean to one another beyond the world of the play – it does, however, add a shading to certain exchanges, most notably when Ashley McGuire’s Falstaff makes a fart noise at the end of one of Harriet Walters’ most kingly speeches and Walters shoots her a stern reprimanding look.

And Walters is brilliantly kingly. There’s something majestic about her whole demeanour, contemplative, intelligent, quietly commanding, even in a shapeless grey tracksuit, a ratty dressing gown and a crown made of old Cola cans (As a result of having watched too much Oz at an impressionable age I was a bit worried about the presence of all this jagged metal, but most of the violence is dance-like, stylised and shank-free – until the last ragged battle between Hal and Hotspur).

In fact dance and music are central to Lloyd’s production; the whole thing is permeated with this idea that music has the power to lift people out of restrictive environments, to transport, to liberate. The cold grey brick of the back wall is frequently filled with light, star dappled, as the performers slide into song. Sharon Rooney’s Lady Percy has a particularly affecting moment, a gentle, lilting lament.

This is, let’s be clear, an inventive and exciting production, but as beautifully done as so much of it was, I couldn’t help feel that it tries to explain itself too much, to find ways of accounting for the fact that all these women are together on stage, instead of just revelling in it – because it is a thing worth revelling in. But I began to feel as if there was something almost apologetic in the prison setting. Both this and Julius Caesar have been produced in collaboration with Clean Break, a theatre company which works with women in the prison system, and this is great and commendable – and, yes, there’s a also logic to the institutional setting, in terms of the power play and the shifting allegiances and the absence of men. They definitely make the case for choosing this path, part of me just wishes – especially since this is the second time around for the concept – they didn’t feel the need to justify and contextualise the casting in this way – because, regardless of setting, the cast are amazing.

Alongside Walters, Jade Anouka’s Hotspur is a fucking force, with her red wedge of hair; she has this deliciously rangy, rolling performance style, light footed and limber, and – as her performance in Sabrina Mahfouz’s Chef showed – she has a strong poetic sense, there’s a musicality to her delivery. Cynthia Erivo is similarly physical in her performance, if more compact and contained. Like Kenard in The Wire, she’s tiny but you wouldn’t want to cross her. McGuire’s Falstaff is a wonderfully rumbling presence, using her superficial joviality as both a shield and a weapon, while Clare Dunne’s Hal is fiery but smart, clearly playing the long game

All that said, the rivalries and divisions – the Oz-like tribalism that only seems to surface towards the end – don’t feel all that well developed and it’s the tender moments that linger longest, like Rooney and Anouka’s embrace; their reluctance to let each other go.

And there’s something fascinating and timely about the ways in which the production prods at gender identity and its construction. The prison setting is part of this I guess – the shaved heads, the undercuts, the make-up free faces, the tracksuits and gym gear. Androgyny in various guises is part of the aesthetic – Walters’ face, as Henry, looks a little bit like Jeremy Irons crossed with Marlow Moss – which calls the attention to the weight our society places on women continuing to look feminine as they age. But she is never de-sexed by this, nor is there any ‘man-acting’, rather she and the rest of the cast get to probe the interplay between their masculine and feminine traits in ways not often given room to in the mainstream. Strength is a part of this. Because these women are strong. Really bloody strong. There’s this brilliant sequence in which Anouka, Erivo and Ann Ogbomo’s Worcester do a seemingly effortless series of acrobatic chin lifts and push ups and it’s such a pleasure to watch, this focus on women’s strength – physical as well as emotional – this display of power, untethered as it is to the cat-suits and slink of comic books or the acceptable athleticism of the sports world.

So it comes as a bit of a slap when the house-lights snap on at the end and the prison guards come back in to break up the performance. It feels like a reassertion of something that was thrillingly absent during the course of the play.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Coriolanus, Donmar Warehouse

Coriolanus is a man of the battlefield. War is a language he speaks with fluency. It is the way he has been raised. But what makes him such a potent force in a time of conflict, a fire-eyed, driven machine of a man, doesn’t translate to the political arena. And this proves his undoing.

Making his return to the Donmar stage, Tom Hiddleston revels in the knottiness and complexity of the character. He last performed here as Cassio in Michael Grandage’s Othello, in which he more than held his own alongside the magnetic, magnificent Chiwetel Ejiofor and in many ways eclipsed Ewan McGregor’s Iago. Now – following his Asgardian interlude – he confirms what a capable and engaging stage actor he can be; his performance is one of clarity but it’s also layered: he is proud, courageous, arrogant and vain all at the same time. It’s a very physical performance, he struts and grapples, simmers and winces, and yet he always keeps something back; he won’t give of himself to the people, won’t use his scars as trophies. He bristles at the position into which he has been pushed and fumes at the people in front of whom he must display himself and lay himself bare.

Josie Rourke’s production is an intensely corporeal one, all skin and sweat and blood. It contains some striking imagery: at one point Hiddleston stands before us green-garlanded with blood rivering his face like a red masque of death; later, as the adrenaline of battle dissipates, he flinches and grits his teeth as he bathes the blood of others from his ravaged body. The choreography of the early fight scenes is slick and physical – Coriolanus and his enemy hurl each other about the stage, dashing each other to the floor – but it’s almost too slick, and there are times when you find yourself marvelling at the technical effort involved, at the clank of cutlass on cutlass, at the force with which the punches appear to land, rather than feeling any sense of the rawness and mess of warfare. (Though, at least, when they finally cast their weapons aside and grapple on the floor you do get a glimpse of this).

The cast wear a mixture of leather breastplates and tight black jeans, with neckerchiefs tied at their throats and clothing which is intentionally asymmetric. They wouldn’t look entirely out of place hanging out with Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton in the subways of 1980s New York. Later the banished Coriolanus wears a cowl so precise in its raggedness that you can almost see the kiddie scissor marks. And, yes, there’s more than a dash of Loki the trickster in these later scenes, as he twists and infiltrates, smiling his enigmatic smile.

The supporting performances are also very strong. Coriolanus’ formidable mother Voluminia is the kind of woman who swells with pride at the thought of her son being wounded on the battlefield and Deborah Findlay gives a fittingly impassioned performance though she doesn’t have the ice-eyed majesty of Vanessa Redgrave, who played the role in the 2011 film (but, then, who does?). Mark Gatiss is soft-spoken and delicately paternal as Coriolanus’ advisor Menenius and the scene of his rejection is one of the play’s most moving, while Borgen’s Birgitte Hjort Sørensen does what she can with a role that says so much with silence, as the cast-aside wife.

The back wall of the stage is strewn with graffiti (of the actual, spray-painted kind) to which more is added digitally, the slogan “grain at our own price” multiplying and spreading as the soundtrack thumps and pounds. This feels like a misstep, a half-hearted way of insisting on the play’s ‘now-ness’ while also undermining it, and, much like the choice of costumes, making it feel oddly dated. The sense of hunger and want which underscores the text and its exploration of power and the reasons people lead don’t really need to be underlined quite so heavily.

In the end these things don’t really get in the way of what is an engaging production. Hiddleston is a compelling central figure and the visuals are very often memorable, but there’s a gloss and polish to it all, a sense of engineering which subtly undercuts its potency.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Weir, Donmar Warehouse

Conor McPherson’s 1997 play is one of words not actions. Stories are told, traded like currency; talk becomes an art form. The Weir is set in a rural Irish pub, beautifully evoked by designer Tom Scutt, a building of old stone wreathed in thin mist, with tatty rattan lampshades and walls the colour of old men’s thumbs.

The Guinness pump is on the fritz so garage-owner Jack is forced to grapple valiantly with the bottled stout. He’s one of a number of lonely souls who congregate nightly for a couple of pints and a ‘small one’ or two. Drinking with him is Brendan, the pub’s relatively young landlord, and Jim, the local handyman whose life revolves around his aging, fading Mammy. But the pattern of this particular evening is disrupted by the arrival of Finbar, a local businessman, who having flitted to the city, now sports a cream linen suit and an air of urban flash; he is accompanied by Valerie a “blow-in from Dublin” who has just bought a house in the area.

In an effort to appeal to this stranger in their midst, a rare female presence (the alarmed response when she requests a glass of white wine is one of the production’s funniest moments), the men start to tell stories, to conjure a landscape steeped in myth and memory. There is talk of fairy roads, of strange nocturnal knockings, of still, staring figures spotted on stairs or in graveyards. They each relate their own small encounter with the uncanny, moments – whether frozen or fevered – when they seemed to glimpse something beyond.

These are stories, one senses, that have been trotted out often before, fetched up on dark nights, spun out over a succession of glasses of stout. In many ways they’re fairly pedestrian, nothing to truly prickle the skin. The pleasure’s more in the telling than the tale.

While the men start out trying to charm Valerie, and maybe even to tease her a bit, after a while their stories become less about local ghosts and more revealing of themselves and their regrets, wants and losses. It’s a subtle shift, so when Valerie, buoyed by such talk, begins to tell her own harrowing tale, the delicate balance of things is upset as she careens into a place of true pain and heartbreak. It pulls all the men up short but it doesn’t entirely capsize the night, instead this interloper is gently enfolded into their small world.

Josie Rourke’s production is also a delicate thing, an environment in which any one false note would ring loud. The performances are all measured and knit well together. Ardal O’Hanlan’s slightly dim Jim conveys a kind of baggy sadness while Dervla Kirwan’s Valerie moves from nervy, girly outsider to centre of attention, without ever letting the character get eaten up by grief; her performance is anchored and steady. The play’s true masterstroke is in not letting Valerie’s moment of revelation crown the night, instead it comes full circle, letting Brian Cox’s craggy bachelor Jack weave the last story, describing one tiny act, one small gesture of kindness in a time when he thought he was lost, and a chance he let slide through his fingers years ago but which nags at him still, the ghost on his shoulder, the thing he will have to carry throughout his days. While his first story is told for show, this last one comes from some deeper place: he gives it to her.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Novecento at Trafalgar Studios

The complex intertwining of music and myth inherent in the lives of so many famous jazz musicians of the past forms the heart of this second in the Donmar Warehouse’s season of plays of at the Trafalgar Studios, a monologue by Alessandro Baricco, Italian author of the fable-like Silk.

The prodigiously named Danny Boodmann T D Lemon Novecento was abandoned as a baby, left in a lemon crate aboard a transatlantic ocean liner. Named (in part) for the new century into which he was born, the foundling grows up on board the ship and never sets foot upon land. For him the ocean is home, bordered by docks and ports, while land is limitless and terrifying, land is the there-be-monsters place of nightmares.

Though he never receives a lesson, Novecento turns out to be a supremely gifted pianist, entertaining the passengers in steerage with his hypnotic music. He becomes the stuff of legend, as both an ocean-bound eccentric and a God-given jazz innovator; talk spreads far and wide about his music and people even travel in third class for the sole purpose of hearing him play.

Novecento’s story is narrated by his friend, the trumpeter Tim Tooney. His delivery is feverish and hip flask-fuelled as he relives the years they spent at sea together. Mark Bonnar’s performance is energetic and animated, sweaty and intense, and conveys a strong sense that this is a tale that has grown as it’s been retold (and retold and retold). There’s a loose-collared, bar room vibe to his narration that doesn’t detract from the magic but does underline it with doubt. The love for his friend and the hold that the past has on him have coloured his story and allowed it to fly.

This storytelling reaches its peak as Tooney describes a jazz duel between Novecento and the incredulous and over-confident Jelly Roll Morton, self-styled sire of jazz, with the two pianists trading increasingly complex riffs. There’s a similarly glorious moment where Tooney and Novocento ride a piano back and forth across the ship’s parquet ballroom floor during a storm, with Novecento playing the whole way. Only in the last twenty minutes or so does the writing lose its grip. The finale is baggy and melodramatic when compared to what has gone before.

Novecento’s phenomenal playing remains, of course, unheard, limited to Tooney's descriptions of its brilliance - his playing, we are told, is ‘impossible’, untethered to the ‘normal notes’ - but the production is not free of music, far from it - a dream-like lilt underscores the whole piece.

Paul Wills’ set, in its use of muted colours, feels in keeping with the Donmar’s familiar visual palette, while his use of riveted metal, dangling chains and copper piping evokes the clanking belly of the ship. Those rippling chains simultaneously give a sense of being on deck with the ocean beyond, a sense enhanced by Paul Keogan’s softly shifting lighting.

Director Roisin McBrinn, whose work this season was, in part, designed to showcase, knows how to handle a monologue, how to bring texture and pace to the text; she previously directed Mark O'Rowe’s ink-black triptych, Crestfall, at Theatre 503 and this piece achieves similar glimmers of intensity. Bonnar’s performance, while very big, very physical, in his gestures and delivery (clambering about on the set, hurling himself to the floor as he describes a storm) is also deceptively controlled. There’s a line that he observes and only on a couple of occasions does it feel as if he was overplaying things; again these moments were towards the end when the piece began to unravel and never quite righted itself.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Passion at the Donmar Warehouse

The Donmar Warehouse begins its celebrations of Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday with a staging of the composer’s 1994 musical, an emotionally complex piece based on the Italian film Passion D’Amore.

Giorgio (David Thaxton), a handsome young military officer, is in the midst of a consuming affair with Clara (Scarlett Strallen), a married Milanese woman, when he is posted to a remote mountain garrison.

Initially he finds this separation tortuous; he dreams of her and longs for her perfumed letters to arrive. Soon his gentle manner and bookish ways bring him to the attention of Fosca (Elena Roger), the colonel's invalid cousin. Being far from conventionally beautiful, a plain and sharp featured woman, Fosca has never been loved and her loneliness manifests itself in an intense burning for Giorgio. She throws herself at him both emotionally and, at times, physically. At first he is alarmed, repelled even, but there is something about the pureness and unbending quality of her love that comes to move him.

Elena Roger, returning to the Donmar following her Olivier Award-winning performance in Piaf, stands up to the challenge of playing a character as knotty as Fosca. She is at times both desperate and pathetic in the depth of her need, her emotions running out of control, yet Roger manages to balance out her character’s rather too frequent episodes of neurotic collapse with a clear-eyed pragmatism about the hand that life has dealt her.

Jamie Lloyd’s production brings an emotional potency to the piece while doing little to conceal quite how strange it is at times. There is something rather chilling and predatory about Fosca and the way she clings to Giorgio with an almost animal need. Her passion seems to have been building in her for years; it only took one kind deed to unlock it. Giorgio himself often appears to have very little to do with it so quickly and completely does she latch onto him.

Though Roger’s is the showier role, Thaxton is no less compelling as a man being slowly eroded by the heat of Fosca’s need. He does not shy away from showing how Giorgio’s acceptance of Fosca’s devotion comes at a considerable cost to him. Physically powerful in the opening scenes, he towers over the diminutive Roger but seems to shrink in stature as the story progresses, until finally he is left contorted and whimpering on the floor, broken.

Sondheim’s score lacks stand out numbers and is instead a work of layers and recurring motifs, its power slowly building. Lloyd’s production makes the most of the Donmar’s compact stage; the ensemble scenes are well handled, succinctly portraying the somewhat boorish atmosphere of the garrison, and it is strikingly designed, with a shimmering and beautiful set by Christopher Oram.

Yet there is something rather unsettling about the piece as a whole which Lloyd taps into and exploits; the abiding feeling is not one of love conquering insurmountable odds but something altogether darker and more ambiguous.

Reviewed for Theatermania

Polar Bears at the Donmar Warehouse

There’s an inherent difficulty in writing about mental illness. It’s something so profoundly internal, so ungraspable to those on the outside, that often it’s easier to depict the effect that a person’s behaviour has on those that love them rather than attempt to truly enter that person’s world. Mark Haddon’s dark, fractured debut play has moments of rawness and insight but it doesn’t quite avoid falling into familiar traps.

Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time took its readers inside the mind of a boy with Asperger’s, but, in his play, a certain distance is maintained between the audience and Kay, the central character, a young woman suffering from bipolar disorder.


Haddon’s play explores Kay’s relationship with both her mother and brother as well as with John, the man who will become her husband. John prides himself on being grounded and steady; he thinks he can keep Kay safe from herself, he sees himself as the person “holding her kite string.”

The play is intentionally unsettling. Time is a liquid thing and the scenes are shown out of order; some are clearly imaginary, events happening in Kay’s mind, but it is a strength of Jamie Lloyd’s production that it is never quite evident how much of what the play depicts is actually happening. From the macabre calm of the opening scene onwards, there is a potent, dreamlike quality to the staging that is intensified as the play progresses.

It is revealed that Kay’s father committed suicide when she was a girl and his father, in turn, was also mentally ill; Kay’s condition is talked about like a family curse, handed down through the generations, the flipside of her artistic talents (she dreams of illustrating children’s books) which she may have inherited from her mother. Both her mother and brother are deeply protective of her, but it is implied their protectiveness is in some ways damaging, keeping her dependent (her mother, living out in a lonely old house by a river, repeatedly asks for reassurance that Kay will never leave her). John, though initially besotted by her vibrancy, finds himself falling into the same patterns once the reality and relentlessness of her condition becomes apparent.

Jodhi May’s performance as Kay is well-judged, capturing both the extreme highs and lows of her illness; Haddon shows her sitting rain-soaked on the roof, wide-eyed with wonder about the possibility of other worlds and the idea of neutrinos streaming through her body. He also shows her foetal and fearful on the floor, terrified and sealed within her own dark sphere.

Paul Hilton captures the complexity of Kay’s brother Sandy, who dutifully sounds out her potential boyfriends for suitability but also perhaps envies his sister’s instability, especially as his childhood was equally marked by tragedy and yet he has managed to live a comparatively normal life. Celia Imrie also gives a strong performance as Kay’s mother, though, as written, her character is the least convincing. Her need to keep Kay close to her is juxtaposed with her confession of the relief she felt following her husband’s death, freeing her from the constant fear. In these moments of revelation the writing feels a little too blunt and controlled.

Richard Coyle’s genial John is the most ambiguous of the characters, but in making him an academic philosopher, Haddon too obviously makes him the mouthpiece for the play’s Big Questions about life and love and the inevitability of decay. This device somewhat limits him as a character.

Haddon clearly relishes the puzzle-like quality of the play and provides plenty of questions to be picked over but he’s also not immune to cliché. Kay explains the beauty and the pain of her condition via a lengthy fairy tale and, in a somewhat tonally misjudged scene, she converses with Jesus. The simple two-level set, designed by Soutra Gilmour, is effective, neatly echoing the split within Kay, but the ominous flickering lighting again seems a step too far into the familiar: mental illness by numbers.

This is a play that plants itself firmly in the mind, but it’s most effective when it’s stillest, when it allows its audience to catch a glimpse of Kay as a person rather than as a device, a conduit for narrative game-playing and philosophical debate.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Serenading Louie at the Donmar Warehouse

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Red at the Donmar Warehouse

John Logan’s play, Red, is more successful than most in translating the world of visual art to the stage and in achieving a workable balance between the said and the shown.

In order to explore the creative drive of the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko he employs a device that might have come across as rather mechanical were it not for the assured performances of the two actors. Logan’s play takes the form of a two-hander: a series of, often very one-sided conversations, between Rothko and his young assistant, played by Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne. It could all too easily have felt clunky and forced, but the production manages to avoid straying too far into the terrain of cliché.

It’s 1958 and Mark Rothko is at work on a series of paintings he has been commissioned to produce for the Four Seasons Restaurant of the Seagram Building. The play is set in Rothko’s Bowery studio where natural light has been banished and great, shimmering squares of red dominate the set. Rothko badgers and berates the younger man, lecturing him and dismissing his ideas - dismissing his existence. He talks constantly about art. There is no other. Art is everything. He expresses a hope that his paintings will put the wealthy diners off their dinner and eventually turns down the commission, returning the not inconsiderable fee.

Logan’s Rothko is a rather unsympathetic character. His capacious intellect and his consuming passion are coupled with a "titanic self-absorption." As written, he’s a bully and, at times, a bore. He takes pride in explaining how his generation of artists stomped on the cubists but then bristles at the thought of sharing gallery space with the emerging wave of pop artists. (The obligatory quip is made about Warhol’s work and the unlikelihood that anyone will care about it in the future).

Michael Grandage’s production grapples with one of the main hurdles in any play concerned with matters of art. Painting and sculpting – the processes of art – are not easy to stage in any plausible way (the charcoal sketch scene in The Pitmen Painters a notable exception). In a wonderfully physical scene, Grandage has Rothko and his assistant prep one of the large canvases, splashing red paint about the place until the floor looks - aptly as it turns out for the younger man' parents were stabbed to death - like a crime scene and their arms and faces are coated in the splatter of the of abattoir.

The performances go a good way to papering over the gaps and cracks in the writing. Alfred Molina, stocky and shaven-headed, is a necessarily dominant Rothko, bullish and aggressive, using his intellect as a weapon, yet not uncharismatic, not without charm. There is a bright flare of humanity and humour in him, though it’s often well hidden. Eddie Redmayne is the perfect foil to Molina. Wiry and wired, for much of the early part of the play he’s little more than a sounding board for Rothko’s tirades, but Redmanye has a way of responding with intelligence and fire, qualities evident even when he’s silent. Eventually he grows increasingly intolerant of Rothko’s indifference to him and his determination to be significant to the detriment of all else. He rebels, he bites back, and, in doing so, becomes the catalyst for Rothko’s rejection of the Seagram commission.

Christopher Oram’s set, warmly lit by Neil Austin, recreates Rothko’s studio: cavernous and concrete-walled, spattered and practical, complete with the pulleys the artist used to manoeuvre his large canvases into place.

Logan’s play is undoubtedly a polished piece, composed with care; but while it’s neither as cumbersome as Timberlake Wertenbaker’s recent The Line (a play about Edgar Degas and Suzanne Valadon), nor as overwrought as Dea Loher’s Land Without Words, which also channelled Rothko, it’s just too neat a package - it’s an essay on art given flesh and voice, but though Molina and Redmayne do much to counter this, the play leaves the heart and the gut largely untroubled.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Excuses and Edinburgh

I have been rather quiet of late due to combination of having to complete some Dull but Necessary Other Work and because I was playing host and tour guide to my young cousin from Bijeljina (and trying not to tut like an elderly aunt whenever he opened up his second packet of cigarettes of the day or used me as a human windbreaker in order to light said cigarettes).

I am also in the process of readying myself for Edinburgh. Any tips on what to see/what to pack/what to expect/suitable reading material will be gratefully received.

My review of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar is now up on Theatermania.

Piaf at the Donmar

Hurrah! I am all moved in! I am now a resident of Balham, in a proper house with stairs and a garden and everything. I also ache muchly from all the lifting and shifting. But it was worth it. And it wasn’t nearly as stressful as it could have been due to some incredibly helpful and generous friends.

I have not had much time for theatre this past week, not had much time for anything else in fact. I did however have tickets for Piaf at the Donmar Warehouse which I had been looking forward to and which I enjoyed hugely, despite the fact that Elena Roger’s performance totally eclipsed the play itself. Her performance was genuinely captivating; good enough, I thought, to make one overlook the fact that Pam Gems’ play was a rather spindly thing. Anyway I have blogged about it over here, so I won’t repeat myself. Besides I have to go and run round my garden some more like an overexcited three-year-old, making happy noises.

The Chalk Garden at the Donmar

Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden is a deceptive thing. In its opening minutes at least, it feels highly familiar; it has a whiff of regional rep about it, crisp and English and scented with crème de menthe, but beneath this gentle surface, dark things swirl like eels underwater.

Miss Madrigal sits facing away from the audience, straight-backed and silent in her blue suit. This taciturn woman has answered an advert for a governess placed by the mistress of the house, Mrs St Maugham; she turns out to be the only serious contender, the other applicants having turned up only to have a nose around the house, to fill their days.

Miss Madrigal enters a strange world. There are three generations of women in the family, all troubled. The elderly Mrs St Maugham has a touch of the dragon about her, an echo of Lady Bracknell; even at the time of writing she was very much a woman from a previous age, a relic in blue taffeta. Her daughter Olivia is absent, overseas, having remarried after the death of her husband, so Mrs St Maugham has been left in charge of the young granddaughter, Laurel, a spirited sixteen year old prone to setting fire to things and fond of screaming, a girl “in love with her own misfortune,” as Miss Madrigal astutely points out.

Both the play and the household are dominated by women. The only male presence is that of Maitland the manservant, nerves worn down to the nub, who frequently but impotently threatens to hand in his notice. He served five years in prison as a conscientious objector and has developed a fascination with trials and murder cases that Laurel shares with him. They are in thrall to an unseen ancient butler Pinkbell, who, though confined to bed, occasionally dials down to the main house, like a crabby, short-tempered god to make his displeasure felt on various matters, mainly pertaining to the garden. The house is built on chalk and, though much has been planted, little will flourish in the hostile soil.

Miss Madrigal slides with ease into this eccentric world, weighted with her own ways and tendencies, burdened with a murky past that Laurel is determined to get to the bottom of; to the inquisitive young girl with a taste for the macabre, this odd companion of hers, who she affectionately calls the ‘boss’, is a mystery waiting to be unpicked. But it takes the return of Laurel’s mother Olivia and the arrival of a judge with whom Mrs St Maugham has long been friends, for Miss Madrigal's secrets to come to the surface.

Bagnold’s play debuted on Broadway in 1955 and was staged in London the following year where, despite its country house setting, even Kenneth Tynan was impressed. This may be because of its undercurrent of melancholy and madness, a constant presence beneath the quick, witty comic dialogue. Michael Grandage’s excellently judged revival brings all this out. It is a beautifully staged and sublimely acted production. Penelope Wilton is wonderful as the cryptic Miss Madrigal, stoic, sensible, but not without emotion – indeed she forges quite a bond with the young girl – and is very receptive to her environment; there is a sense of pain in her past but she keeps it under a lid.

Margaret Tyzack is equally brilliant as the formidable Mrs St Maugham. Her timing is immaculate and her way with an icy put down or comic line is exemplary. (“One is not at one’s best through mahogany,” she observes after declining to hold a conversation through a closed door). There is also more than a touch of cruelty under all the lace and pearls, a capacity to hurt, she does not like being challenged and can be quite cutting in her comments.

The young Felicity Jones, as Laurel, also impresses, the picture of precociousness and youthful passion, she is both a older than her years and yet still a child in need of love and affection. Peter McKintosh’s detailed summer-house set with its grey, rain-smeared windows gives the production a strong sense of time and place.

As a whole, the production rarely puts a foot wrong. While it brings forth the wit and sparkle of Bagnold’s writing and revels in each finely-honed line, it also finds a greater resonance in the play, these lost people find hope and happiness – or the capacity for it – in one another and, the audience too, is left moved and uplifted by the end.

Review transplanted, once again, from musicOMH.com due to lack of time and an overflow of Other Things. I will just mention the minor kerfuffle that occurred just before the start of the play, when a member of the audience had to be dissuaded from actually sitting on the stage itself - I think she was trying to get a better view of things. When she was informed that people, as a rule, tended to sit in their seats and not on the stage, she looked rather peeved and, I noted, did not return after the interval.

Lucky Man

And so to the Donmar, with a party that included the West End Whingers and Cityslicker, for a preview of The Man Who Had All The Luck - which, we were forewarned by the posters, is a ‘fable by Arthur Miller.’

(Maybe it’s my inner cynic but when I see the words fable or parable used in relation to a play it usually sets alarm bells ringing).

David is a young mechanic with plans to marry childhood sweetheart Hester. He’s not particularly talented or intelligent, but he’s a nice enough guy, and for some reason fortune seems to smile on him. Though he has no formal training his repair business is doing well and his girlfriend’s hostile and controlling dad, a major impediment to their marriage, is conveniently taken out of the picture. Later when David buys a gas station, a motorway is, soon after, built alongside it. So, while his friends and brother contend with the various knocks and disappointments of their lives, everything appears to go right for David, to the point where he starts to feel that fate owes him a catastrophe. Indeed, he becomes completely fixated with this idea of himself as ‘lucky’, to the point where he is unable to derive any pleasure from the good things that life has given him.

The first half is unusually short and, as we gathered at the bar in the interval, we were unsure as to where the play was going (particularly in regards to a mysterious Austrian character who fortuitously shows up at David’s garage at 4am and helps him fix a car; we suspected he may be angelic or somehow supernatural in origin, though this turned out not to be the case). After the play we were still somewhat hazy as to what it all meant but we knew an awful lot more about mink farming and, should we ever encounter black spots in mink feed, we’ll know just what to do. (In the later stages of the play David invests in a mink farm – a high risk venture).

Over the inevitable post-play bottle of red in a nearby pub we decided that the overall message has something to do with the fact that good deeds and good fortune don’t necessarily go hand in hand and that ‘luck’ is arbitrary and flexible concept; if you think of yourself as lucky you can become so. To David his luck becomes his curse, he becomes frozen, waiting for something to give – though in the end, common sense and a cautious character play as much of a part in David’s fortunes as his luck.

Regardless of what the whole thing may have meant, the notion of luck and chance and of some folks unaccountably having an easy ride of it in life, was pleasingly underlined by the fact that Jeffrey Archer was sitting prominently, smugly some might say, in the middle of the front row throughout.

Andrew and I had less luck however when we tried to sneak down from our perch in the circle to snag some empty stalls seats, as some other lucky sods beat us to it.

Put Out The Light

So then. Othello, Donmar Warehouse. You know the story. Sell-out run, tickets swapping hands for sky-high sums on eBay, and so forth and so on. There’s been more than enough words devoted to all that. To the point where it seems almost in danger of overshadowing the production itself. Which is a shame, as this is a completely enthralling production, even if it is rather conventionally staged.

First up, there's Ewan McGregor playing Iago, who Charles Spencer and others were so mean about. I genuinely wonder if he perhaps had an attack of the jitters on the night the press were in, because he had ample charisma when I saw him, at last Thursday’s matinee. Yes, he was probably a tad too inscrutable in the role and it was difficult to gauge his motivations, but there was something appealingly sly and underhand about his performance. As an actor, he has charm and presence, but he can also switch it off if he chooses, can blend into the background; he’s not a starry actor – and I suspect that disappoints people.

However McGregor could probably turn cartwheels in the background if he wanted and it would still be Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance that made the greatest impact on the audience. Again, many words have already been written about his nuanced and sympathetic take on the role – and most of them are on the money. He is strong and dignified, yet vulnerable – a man out of place. He makes each line come alive and does so with a skill that is considerable yet not showily so.

Kelly Reilly’s performance as Desdemona, on the other hand, has proved as divisive as McGregor’s. And while she is rather girlish and fluttery in earlier scenes, after the interval she seemed to bloom in the role. Having spent most the evening cinched and uplifted in a beautiful dress (made, according to the programme, by someone with the too-delicious-to-be-true name of Elspeth Threadgold), she is slowly and poignantly stripped of her corsets and stockings by Emilia, until she is clad only in a shapeless, white nightgown. I found this scene incredibly moving, and by the end she looked so vulnerable, so exposed, ready to give herself to her husband in what proved to be a particularly effective death scene. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve been to a production this year that had my so physically gripped. I was edged forward in my seat, silently pleading with Othello to listen to her, to heed her protestations of innocence. I wasn’t alone either; I could hear the breath catching in the throat of the girl in the seat beside me, feel the tension radiating from her. Incidently, she had queued for her ticket on the day and found the experience fun, if a little tiring, and - judging by her enraptured response - more than worth it.

Indeed, there's an interesting and increasingly demented debate going on about the ticket situation on the GU blog after Peter Bradshaw commented that such a production should be filmed to make it accessible to all.

Matinees And Musicals

I do like matinees. There’s something rather illicit and exciting about doing during the day what one normally does in the evening (intensified considerably if it happens to be a midweek matinee).

I have a whole other routine with matinees as well, facilitated by the welcome lack of post-work dash – I potter, I dawdle, I browse, I caffeinate myself in an agreeably lingering fashion, and arrive at the theatre with ample time to spare and not breathless and watch-wary and flustered as is often the case in the evening. I used to see a lot more matinees when I lived out in the Surrey suburbs, and a journey into town required a long, crawling train journey, but now, well, my day job precludes daytime cultural activities during the week, and my weekends tend to be eaten up by stuff.

So I was looking forward to seeing Saturday afternoon’s staging of Parade at the Donmar Warehouse. I knew it wasn’t likely to be the cheeriest of things, but I’d enjoyed Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years when it played at the Menier Chocolate Factory last year and was eager to see how you could possibly tackle such a grim subject in song.

Parade is set in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early years of the 20th century. On Confederate Memorial Day, a 13 year old girl is found raped and murdered in the pencil factory where she worked. Suspicion falls on the factory superintendent, Leo Frank, a Jewish man from Brooklyn, an outsider in every sense. He is arrested, tried and sentenced to death. According to the play, a hysteria built up around his case, with several other girls who worked in his factory accusing him of inappropriate behaviour. The police also found an eye witness (an African American former convict) to testify to his guilt. Eventually however his sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. Perhaps predictably, this does not go down well with the local community, who are eager to blame someone for the girl’s death, and they exert a 'justice' of their own – the kind of justice that involves hoods with eye-holes and a long length of rope.

So, there you go. Frothy it is not. It is however very well done. Bertie Carvel is simply superb as Frank, all anxious and twitchy; cold, nervy and somewhat prim. Lara Pulver was also excellent as Frank’s wife Lucille, but I found her character harder to get a handle on, her total devotion and abundant stoic dignity was a little too neat for my liking. Going on what I remember of Five Years, I don’t think Brown does women very well. Frank is such an intriguing, ambiguous figure and Lucille just seemed a bit flat in comparison.

There is much to admire about this production: vocal performances (though I thought the pretty blonde chap in the cheesy civil war prologue was a little shaky), choreography - everything is very well done. There’s just something about the whole enterprise that didn’t sit very well with me. It’s not that musicals need to be all fluff and uplift (indeed those are the shows I usually avoid), but in the case of this complex story, I think I would actually have preferred a more conventional dramatic approach.

Interesting critical split on this one too, with Michael Billington applauding its eloquence and Christopher Hart getting all squeamish about the subject matter - I think I fall somewhere in between (I’d much rather this than Wicked any day), still, it was relief to emerge after two-and-a-bit hours of such darkness to find it still daylight outside.