ajhlovestheatre

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

by Eugene O’Neill

directed by Jeremy Herrin

Wyndhams Theatre, London – until 8 June 2024

https://longdaysjourneylondon.com

When it’s done well, O’Neill’s lengthy family drama is a soaring, searing indictment of human frailty and the ties of guilt, blood and co-dependence that bind people together, and when it isn’t, Long Day’s Journey Into Night can seem like an endurance test for audience and actors alike, the title less a description and more a warning. At the moment, Jeremy Herrin’s intermittently riveting but somewhat hesitant revival falls between these two stools.

I say “at the moment” because in a couple of weeks I suspect this script and this cast will be up to full strength, but on press night there were too many moments when the staging and some performances felt curiously undercooked, as though they would have benefited from another week of previews to really get to grips with the epic, unforgiving poetic nature of this classic American text. There are already magnificent individual elements but they don’t, as yet, coalesce into greatness.

The Tyrone family of the play so closely mirrored O’Neill’s own family story (retired actor father, morphine-addicted mother, one son a drunkard, the other consumptive), that the writer stipulated that it should not be published until 25 years after his own death. Certainly there is a mastery of detail, and a juxtaposition of raw tragedy with often dark humour that has the unmistakable ring of authenticity. The portrayal of Mary Cavan Tyrone, the mother, played here as a wistful wraith with a tang of bracing narcissism by the tremendous Patricia Clarkson, is particularly multilayered, full of compassion but with an unflinching honesty about the fallout from this woman’s addiction and the devastating effect it has on her husband and sons.

Brian Cox’s patriarch, the roaring, hard-drinking actor James Tyrone, has flashes of brilliance. He’s irascible, comically self-dramatising and convincingly wracked with guilt. The extended second half scene with Laurie Kynaston’s magnetically suffering younger son is a masterpiece of boozy anecdotage and fudged filial emotion. He’s less secure though when delivering back-and-forth dialogue, and it’s not clear whether some of the line fluffs are character choices or genuine stumbles. His stage presence is formidable however and this is a performance that will hopefully develop into something richer and more memorable for the right reasons given time.

Opposite him, Clarkson suffers from a similar uncertainty at the beginning but grows in stature as Mary withers, disheveled, before our eyes. The ghost of the conceited but devout young beauty is present in this Mary’s haunted gaze, and in the chilling, lightning fast switches from bathos to imperiousness. Clarkson shows us simultaneously the helpless selfishness of the addict and the equally helpless love of a mother for her children. Clarkson is American acting royalty and there are multiple moments in this performance that demonstrate precisely why.

There’s fine work from Kynaston, and Daryl McCormack invests his dissolute older brother with an authentic rage and sense of lost control. Perhaps the most satisfying performance, and certainly the one that ignites the whole production with a welcome jolt of energy in her all-too-brief scenes, comes from Louisa Harland as the spiky, sassy Irish maid emboldened by the whisky an increasingly strung out Mary plies her with in an attempt to beat back the engulfing loneliness.

Everything about the production, from Lizzie Clachan’s design to Jack Knowles’s dim lighting and Tom Gibbons’s doomy sound design and music, is classy and muted, so as not to detract from the central protagonists and drama. The problem is that, currently, the core of the show isn’t potent or focused enough to sustain the punishing length…the second half alone runs at over 100 minutes. The uninitiated will likely still realise they’re in the presence of greatness, but for swathes of the evening the raw power of O’Neill’s mighty drama is as elusive as the fog metaphor that permeates the text. It’s worth seeing but, as yet, it’s not essential.

THE DIVINE MRS S

by April de Angelis

directed by Anna Mackmin

Hampstead Theatre, London – until 27 April 2024

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2024/the-divine-mrs-s/

With this imaginative, sometimes anachronistic, peep into the life of legendary 18th century actress Sarah Siddons, April de Angelis has created possibly the most quintessentially theatrical play since Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. Not that the two pieces are similar; if anything, The Divine Mrs S ends up closer in tone to Morgan Lloyd Malcolm‘s acclaimed Emilia with its grandstanding fury at the inequality between the sexes, but this is a play in love with the theatre, with its traditions, challenges and idiosyncrasies. It also recalls de Angelis’s own Playhouse Creatures from thirty years ago which looked at the assimilation of women into Restoration theatre.

Under Anna Mackmin’s direction, this is a richly enjoyable evening, fruity, epigrammatic and very very funny. There’s something Black Adder-ish about the relish with which de Angelis presents her dramatis personae of self-regarding, impassioned and frequently preposterous actors and their assorted hangers-on, and her vision of Siddons herself is brought to bewitching, eccentric life by an irresistible Rachael Stirling firing on all cylinders. The dialogue is played at a hell of a lick, although seldom at the expense of clarity, and has a heightened, declamatory style that matches de Angelis’s writing.

With her throaty voice, statuesque charisma and innate warmth, Stirling is the sort of talent plays are created for (just ask Mike Bartlett); I don’t know if this role was written especially for her, but it’s hard to imagine any other actress equalling her work here. She captures with precision and glee the self-aggrandising, mercurial nature of an old school theatre creature, somebody absolutely steeped in all things connected to the stage: the kind of woman prone to fainting fits, who can dismiss Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as “an experimental tragedy about a pie”, who can destroy a scatter cushion in a fit of fury then a split second later, in honeyed tones, request if her maid could repair it. It’s a gorgeous performance, revelling in its own artifice but rooted in truth.

The high camp comic histrionics (of which Stirling is a total mistress, as evidenced by her equally scenery-chomping turn in Bartlett’s modern day Restoration riff Scandaltown at the Lyric Hammersmith a few years ago), is underpinned by a subtle melancholy. When she mourns the loss of her children, it’s painfully real. She’s by turns passionate then withering, and if the lightning quick changes in mood sometimes mean that we’re not always sure which emotions are entirely real, then neither does Siddons. In a further stroke of ingenuity, in the sections where we see Siddons on stage acting, Stirling and Mackmin make clear that she is an extraordinary talent, head and shoulders above the people surrounding her.

Dominic Rowan matches Stirling with a performance of brilliantly wrought bombast and sweaty desperation as Sarah’s actor-manager brother John Philip Kemble, acutely aware that his sister is the far greater talent, exasperated by her yet also in her thrall. A terrible actor (Kemble, not Rowan), such power as he has over the wiser, better women surrounding him is by the happy accident of being born male.

These women are formidable: Sadie Shimmin is a tart joy both as a censorious theatre aficionado and as a messy comic actress, Anushka Chakravarti makes something delightful and oddly touching out of Patti, Siddon’s maid-cum-dresser and Eva Feiler dextrously juggles a quintet of roles, excelling particularly as a female playwright running the gamut from triumph to despair as her work is recognised then discarded.

Gareth Snook gets some fabulous comic mileage out of a trio of faintly ridiculous men, although the performance would benefit from a greater differentiation between each.

There are points in the second half when the characters start to sound a bit like mouthpieces for opposing views rather than people, despite the stellar efforts of the cast. That the play has strong fire in its belly is a wonderful and essential thing, it’s just a shame that the writing suffers when the anger rears up. Also, there’s a near-rape of Sarah’s beloved Patti by Kemble that is pretty much glossed over.

Despite this, the play does a fine job of balancing the campy fun (of which there is a lot) with serious, necessary points about the social and professional inequalities between women and men. de Angelis makes Siddons a vivid, specific figure but ends the play enshrining her as a sort of theatrical everywoman pioneer walking into a spotlight that could be on any stage, illuminating any actress who has trodden the boards. It’s a powerful moment, beautifully lit by Mark Henderson on Lez Brotherston’s attractively chaotic playhouse set.

The Divine Mrs S is predominantly a rollicking comedy for people who love all things stagey, full of specialised references and in-jokes (the way brother and sister react every time the title of the Scottish Play comes up is hysterical), but it has a satisfyingly serious core, and writing that is a little patchy but frequently soars. Even if the rest of the cast weren’t as good as they are, it would still be worth catching for the divine Ms S (S for Stirling).

WHAT IF THEY ATE THE BABY?

written and performed by Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland

Kings Head Theatre, London – until 7 April 2024

https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/what-if-they-ate-the-baby

New York based multi-disciplinary performers Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland caused a sensation at the 2022 Edinburgh Festival with their Beckett meets hoedown mini extravaganza And Then The Rodeo Burnt Down, which subsequently played a short London season last year at the Kings Head Theatre’s original home on Upper Street. Now the fearless but weirdly charming are twosome are back with their latest, this time at the NEW Kings Head and playing in rep with their acclaimed earlier show. What If They Ate The Baby? feels slightly more immediately accessible than it’s sister show perhaps but shares the same weirdly haunting mixture of unease and delight.

It feels like Pinter filtered through a prism composed of pop art, commedia dell’arte and Doris Day. Rice and Roland play 1950s all American housewives, perky, poised but with clownish and queer overtones. What begins as a send-up of perfect Wisteria Lane-ish suburban lives (the returning of an empty casserole dish sparks a jagged ballet of suppressed aggression and one-upmanship) devolves into a fascinating examination of the extremes of emotion, despair and frustration that can lurk under an apparently civilised surface. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny but with edges of wildness and melancholia that trouble and intrigue.

This -the 1950s- being the era of the McCarthy witch hunts, the show also suggests life under surveillance, as the women obliquely refer to a neighbour who’s been taken away for questioning. It isn’t belaboured but it’s quietly powerful, speaking equally to our own time, a point underlined by the frenetic, jagged dances performed at intervals to contemporary(ish) hip hop and disco. It also lends a frisson of urgency to the women’s covert sexual relationship, and even intimations of cannibalism.

Roland and Rice are sensational: athletic, wry, specific, and able to turn on a dime between kookie cuteness, smiling passive aggression and what looks like genuine fear. At the outset, Roland is sweet, almost puppyish and Rice is more sassy and sophisticated but they switch up attitudes and moods with every change of lighting. They’re clowns, they’re dancers, they’re bloody good actresses and they are charming agitators with a healthily iconoclastic theatrical vision.

There are moments during the hour long performance where it’s not entirely clear what they’re getting at, and anybody who likes linear storytelling and conventional play-making might find this frustrating. Ultimately though, it’s adventurous and playful, confrontational but also deeply charming. I really liked its scattershot unruliness and moments of surprising delicacy. Highly original, and well worth a look.

HARRY CLARKE

by David Cale

directed by Leigh Silverman

Ambassadors Theatre, London – until 11 May 2024

https://harryclarketheplay.com

It takes guts for any actor to undertake a role that requires not one but two specific foreign (to them) accents then perform that role on a high profile stage in the country from which said accents originate. Billy Crudup is not just any actor though. He’s a magnetic Puck-ish stage presence, and a brilliant technician, able to turn on a dime between charmingly quirky and utterly chilling. Furthermore, David Cale’s delicious monologue – equal parts confessional, thriller and comedy of social embarrassment – gives him a get-out clause in the event of the accents being poor (which they’re not).

A success on both American coasts, Leigh Silverman’s exquisitely judged production possibly plays even better in London than it did in NYC or LA. That’s less because USA-based writer Cale was born and raised here, but more because it’s about a small town American who, in a bid to distance himself from his dysfunctional upbringing, adopts a fey upper crust Brit accent, which fools everyone that crosses his path into thinking that he is in fact English. The script is peppered with frequently hilarious and sometimes quite erroneous assumptions about England and Englishness that shed further light on the character and has the West End audience whooping with merriment.

Crudup’s Philip Brugglestein is a mass of neuroses -not surprising when we learn of his turbulent relationship with his father- and a bit of a loner. However, Philip has another persona, one he turns on as a coping and shielding mechanism, and this Harry Clarke is everything he is not. Harry’s a cheeky, charming Cockney with a refreshing disregard for social and sexual mores. When Philip ‘becomes’ Harry he becomes more confident, more attractive, more comfortable in his own skin, and more outrageous.

Watching Crudup morph between Brugglestein’s dual personalities is both unsettling and a joyous reminder of the possibilities of theatre. He also, with just an adjustment of stance, voice and head position, turns himself into the various members of a stonkingly rich Jewish family Harry gets Philip embroiled with. It’s a complete tour de force, and already one of the strongest contenders for the performance of the year.

Silverman’s direction, unobtrusive but potent, supports him every step of the way; the changes in mood and pace are startlingly well managed, except for a couple of moments where the speed of delivery is such that it takes a moment to catch up with which character is which, particularly the American ones. Alexander Dodge’s scenic design, Alan C Edwards’ lighting and Bart Fasbender’s sound are all deceptively sophisticated, complementing the text, transforming mood and rhythm, and always ensuring that their star is right at the heart of any given moment, exactly where he should be, regardless of who he’s portraying.

Some of Cale’s storytelling is perhaps a little contrived, and the writing, sharp, funny and poignant as it is, is undoubtedly elevated by the central performance. It’s hard to talk about the actual plot without giving too much away, but suffice it to say that there is a poisonous, unexpected tang to the delightful sweetness and hilarity in this tale of a fractured personality, and on the night I saw it, much of the front stalls reacted with audible shock. When the dark shadows creep in, the manipulation of information and audience reaction is really skilful.

All in all, Harry Clarke is a cracking eighty minutes of theatre: compact, enlightening and hugely entertaining. I loved it.

WILD ABOUT YOU – in Concert

Music and Lyrics by Chilina Kennedy

Book by Eric Holmes

directed by Nick Winston

Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London – 25 & 26 March 2024

https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/wild-about-you-a-new-musical-in-concert/

Based on Broadway singer/actress/songwriter Chilina Kennedy’s 2015 album, Wild About You is an edgy but generic folk-rock musical receiving its world premiere here in a concert version, ahead of a planned developmental run “during the 2024-25 season” according to the shows website? In all honesty, this isn’t a concert version at all, but a fully staged realisation of a show that is clearly still in need of quite a lot of work.

The piece was previously workshopped with two separate titles (Without Her and Call it Love) and watching Eric Holmes’s script unfold, it isn’t particularly obvious why this third title was alighted on, beyond the fact that it’s the title of one of the more striking songs. Wild About You isn’t essentially a love story, or at least not in the traditional sense, and nor is it particularly wild, although some of the music rocks out a bit. It centres on amnesiac Olivia (Rachel Tucker) who at the beginning is in hospital trying to piece together her extraordinarily messy romantic and family history, with the help of a smart-talking nurse (Todrick Hall, all “yasss gurl” attitude and comic asides) who has clocked off his shift but is fascinated by our heroine’s plight.

Tucker has one of the rangiest powerhouse voices in the business, and Kennedy’s songs certainly give it a work out. The score is a relentless succession of big, bombastic moments, moderately tuneful but all pitched at such a level of fevered emotionalism that the overall effect is more exhausting than exhilarating. Tucker is ill-served by Holmes’s book which serves up probably the most self absorbed musical theatre heroine since Norma Desmond, who Tucker recently and stunningly played on Nicole Scherzinger’s nights off over at the Savoy. She doesn’t get to shine nearly so brightly here, albeit through no fault of her own.

Olivia is a sexually careless, emotionally incontinent mess with whom people seem to fall in love for no very intelligible reason. Any charm she has is due to Tucker’s innate likability rather than any indications from the head-turningly inconsistent writing. She spends most of the show looking tense in a petticoat, with her shoulders hunched, arms stiff and fists clenched; it’s particularly frustrating when you’re aware of what this fine artist is capable of.

The first half is a bit like Next To Normal but with added lesbianism as she tries to sort her head out in a hospital setting, while wailing, riffing and generally singing everything to the absolute max, leading her husband and a male and female lover up the romantic garden path, and getting pregnant. In act two she basically turns into a female version of Billy Bigelow from Carousel as she tries to influence her now grown up son from the other side of the grave.

We never find out what she dies of. Belting maybe? Anyway, the gear change between the two acts is bewildering. The first half is whimsical (Olivia is prone to making ‘Bad Day Boxes’ filled with things to cheer up loved ones when they’re feeling blue), then angsty and a little abrasive, while the second seems to be going for the tear ducts, yet we haven’t been invested enough in the characters to be moved by their plight. It’s comes at you with a numbing welter-load of unearned emotion and much of the dialogue wouldn’t sound out of place in one of the trashier US daytime soaps.

Hall crops up in drag after the interval as a comically opinionated “heavenly friend” figure, and Olivia’s son Billy (Jamie Muscato, singing up a storm but given insufficient material to create anything but a clichéd character) goes on a journey of self discovery. Meanwhile, the adults glower and swear at each other. Olivia’s final moment, warbling “I will always be here” from behind a wall of frosted glass, her face pressed up against it and her palms splayed, feels more like a threat than a promise, the chilly uplighting giving Tucker the unfortunate appearance of something from a horror film, surely not the intended effect.

It’s hard to see what attracted Will & Grace’s Eric McCormack to this strange piece for his West End debut, but he gives it his creditable all as Michael, Olivia’s bewildered, religious husband, although his singing isn’t really up to the standard of that of his colleagues. Oliver Tompsett sounds sensational as his love rival and has sufficient stage presence to almost cover up that the role is so weakly written as to barely be there. Hall is often hilarious, sometimes distractingly so, but the only performer that really rises above the material is Tori Allen-Martin as Jessica, the artist friend who falls for Olivia. A natural comic with an extraordinary emotional availability and a gorgeous voice, Allen-Martin is mesmerising, and makes Jessica’s story arc mostly convincing, despite the writing.

The songs are well-crafted but start to sound a little samey, and still feel like a record album on stage rather than a true theatrical score. Nick Winston’s production is in decent shape given the weaknesses of the book but feels dwarfed in the cavernous Drury Lane auditorium. A show on this scale’s natural home is somewhere like the larger houses at Southwark Playhouse rather than one of the grandest auditoriums in the country.

It’s still very much a work-in-progress, and much of that work needs to be focussing on making the heroine funnier, more relatable. The religious overtones, mostly connected to McCormack’s character, are intriguing but are currently a bit of a red herring, and I’m not sure the lurch into celestial sitcom at the top of the second half really works. The bizarre scene and duet where a high-as-a-kite Billy sees his dead Mom also needs a drastic rethink. As it is, Wild About You consists of a bunch of very talented singer-actors struggling with an incoherent, derivative book and a challenging but only intermittently soaring set of songs.

FAITH HEALER

by Brian Friel

Directed by Rachel O’Riordan

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London – until 13 April 2024

https://lyric.co.uk/whats-on/shows/

There’s something magical about Faith Healer, Brian Friel’s quartet of interconnected monologues of dislocation, faith and heartbreak. This is the fourth London revival in about thirty years, and it seems that every time this story of a travelling showman who may or may not have the power to heal, and the two lost souls he enriches and destroys, arrives with new colours, fresh insights and the transformative power of truly great storytelling. Rachel O’Riordan’s newest iteration for the Lyric Hammersmith is a searing piece of theatrical alchemy that showcases a trio of magnificent actors at the top of their games, and mines Friel’s poetic yet brutal text for every ounce of its truth, grief, rueful humour and eerie fascination.

The play is as elliptical as it’s compulsive, leaving audience members full of questions about the veracity of the different versions of the same story we’ve just witnessed but winded by the potency of Friel’s creation, and, certainly in this flawless new production, dazzled by the sheer craft on display. The four scenes actually feel more like confessionals than monologues, the names of the remote villages where faith healer Frank Hardy toured to ply his trade running through the text like a mantra or incantation, as Hardy or his neglected wife Grace feverishly, doggedly recite them in a bid to keep panic and darkness at bay. Friel’s language is at once conversational and evocative, with little explosions of shock detonated at points by a memory or anecdote.

O’Riordan and her peerless trio of actors (Declan Conlon, Justine Mitchell, Nick Holder) calibrate all this perfectly. Every gesture, every vocal intonation and facial tic tells a story of a pain inflicted or remembered, of a memory or inconvenient truth quashed. That intense, exquisite detail is matched by Paul Keogan’s lighting and Anna Clock’s soundscape, which repeatedly offer minute but telling adjustments and effects prompted by the text. It’s incredibly subtle but infinitely rich, like the haunted echos of past trauma manifested in sound and light.

Colin Richmond’s spare but impactful set design reveals more and more of itself as the characters do, starting as an abstract jumble of chairs and a tattered banner but ending up as an exposed, distressed wall, just as Frank stands before us with so many of his illusions and fantasies about himself exploded and debunked. Conlon captures his hard drinking charisma, while also suggesting a dead-eyed self protection, callousness even, that chills, and demonstrates simultaneously how this slippery figure captures hearts and imaginations, and will always survive at all costs. He’s seductive, magnetic…and potentially lethal.

Wife Grace and manager Teddy are the principal victims of this bewitching toxicity, and Mitchell and Holder give multi-layered, riveting accounts of these fascinating characters, whose respective stories cast both light and shade on Frank. There are few finer actresses working in British or Irish theatre right now than Mitchell: in last year’s National Theatre Dancing at Lughnasa revival she found notes and colours in Kate, the most uptight, closed-off of Friel’s Mundy sisters, that I’d never seen before. She is revelatory once again here; this Grace is so dreadfully damaged yet possessed of a wry self awareness, bitter humour, and sudden shards of incandescent fury that pin you to your seat. When she breaks open, it’s devastating. This is a beautiful, unforgettable performance.

Holder’s Teddy is another creation that stuns by stealth. Initially he comes across like an old school Music Hall vaudevillian, calling everyone “dear heart” and nailing hilarious stories of the outlandishly tawdry acts he’s managed… but Holder gives him an unsettling edge of aggression alongside the bonhomie and camp raconteuring. He’s tremendous company but you feel that it could all turn sour at any moment. Holder is an extraordinary stage creature, flamboyant but sensitive and he builds his monologue to an electrifying climax.

The way O’Riordan juxtaposes stillness and motion is exemplary, the focus and tension never wavering. There is a compassion and humanity to the way these broken people are depicted that enriches the soul even as it hurts the heart. A modern classic is illuminated and reinvigorated. Theatre doesn’t get much better than this. Spellbinding.

NYE

by Tim Price

Directed by Rufus Norris

National Theatre/Olivier, London – until 11 May 2024

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/nye/

then Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff – 18 May to 1 June 2024

https://www.wmc.org.uk/en/whats-on/2024/nye

The National Theatre and the Wales Millennium Centre collaborating on a stage life of Aneurin Bevan, the fiery Welsh politician central to the setting up of the NHS, seems like a marriage made in theatrical heaven. There are indeed moments where Tim Price’s script and Rufus Norris’s showy, shouty production achieve true greatness, but they are tempered by too many sequences and choices that prove bewildering rather than brilliant.

As the story is told in flashback from Bevan’s death bed in one of the hospitals helped to fund and revitalise, Michael Sheen’s Nye (short for Aneurin) spends the entire show in pyjamas. In a similar vein, Vicki Mortimer’s spare, wide set, which, like much of the blocking of the actors, looks better suited to the more traditional playing area of Cardiff’s premiere house than the open stage of the Olivier, is informed by the green, draw-along curtains of hospital wards, at one point configuring at different levels to create an approximation to the interior of the House of Commons.

That striking image aside, the look of the production is austere, ugly even, with a reliance on projections that often sees the hard-working Sheen bellowing at gigantic monochrome pre-recorded figures. Office desks caper around like bumper cars, hospital beds tilt and spin, actors perform Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams’s cumbersome choreography, all adding to an overall impression of Nye being more of a pageant than a play, especially given the sketchiness of the characterisations. Many of the people seem more like figures in a cartoon than fully fleshed out human beings.

There’s even a full scale production number, where Sheen (in excellent voice) leads the company in a rousing but bizarre rendition of the Judy Garland classic ‘Get Happy’. I’m all for inserting big numbers into plays (Stranger Things The First Shadow has one that is an absolute stunner) but this feels unnecessary, and a little like it’s trivialising something as important as the inauguration of the National Health Service. When not providing an incidental chorus line, the supporting cast also pop up as a series of Kafka-esque politicians and even a rugby scrum, which isn’t inappropriate given the Welsh setting.

There’s a cloying vein of sentimentality in Price’s writing (“I’ll take care of all of you” cries Nye into the void as he cradles his miner father who’s expiring of black lung disease, and the staging of Bevan’s own death is staged with such over-choreographed portentousness that it robs the moment of authentic emotional power) and the gear changes in tone and emphasis never feel smooth. The razzmatazz sits uneasily alongside the cold, hard information, such as the fact that only four thousand doctors originally voted to work in the NHS against the forty thousand who didn’t.

Nye is at its most stirring, persuasive and indeed timely when the principal character is expounding on the importance of free health care for all. Sheen brilliantly captures the passionate orator and the eccentric egotism that seem to have characterised Bevan. The play also serves as a timely reminder that well behaved people don’t necessarily achieve as much as their more disruptive counterparts, and suggests that Bevan’s commitment to the greater good was at least in part to his failure to step up for his immediate family (Kezrena James finds real power in his disappointed sister’s admonishments, and doubles nicely as a kindly nurse awestruck at her high profile patient). This Nye is wayward, charming and often exasperating. Sharon Small is sharp but warm as his life partner Jennie Lee who put her own political ambitions aside to support Bevan, and Roger Evans is equally fine as Archie Lush, the childhood friend who became a lifetime constant.

Most of the rest of the acting is bold and non-specific, not surprising since the majority of the cast are given mere sketches and caricatures to work with. Tony Jayawardena’s uncanny Winston Churchill is a notable and impressive exception to this though, cutting a familiar figure but so multi-faceted and playful that it transcends impersonation. There’s also a delightful irony in having an actor of global majority heritage playing a well documented racist. Jayawardena gives him more charm than he probably deserves.

Sheen’s magnetic central performance holds the whole unwieldy piece together, and finds an energy and focus that compels, despite the sometimes uninspired writing. Judged as a play, Nye is, in all honesty, a bit of a mess and Norris’s overlong staging, although often inventive, doesn’t make it all coalesce, but the energy of the cast and the sheer potency of the themes ensure that it still packs a punch.

KING LEAR

by William Shakespeare

directed by Yaël Farber

Almeida Theatre, London – until 30 March 2024

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/king-lear/

Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy gets a haunting, multicultural makeover in South African director Yaël Farber’s uncompromising yet ethereal new production for the Almeida. As with her James McArdle-Saorsie Ronan Macbeth at this venue in 2021, Farber isn’t afraid of a lengthy duration, and this Lear clocks in at the full three and a half hours. But similarly to that iteration of The Scottish Play, the running time feels necessary to build the shuddering suspense and tense, forbidding atmosphere. There is a current of electricity, aurally actualised by Max Perryment’s omnipresent thrum of piano and violin music, running throughout the entire performance that ensures a long evening is a consistently engrossing one.

Farber and her designers Merle Hensel (set), Camilla Dely (costumes), and Lee Curran (lighting) have created a strikingly dark world for the play where the trappings of sophisticated living (spirits are gulped from expensive-looking glass as a singsong happens around an upright piano, Regan appears in silk pajamas, a Habitat style floor lamp illuminates the blinding of Gloucester) exist right next to scatterings of muddy earth, the skeleton head of an impala, and lots and lots of blood. It has the classic hallmarks of a Farber production: earthy, elemental, touched by her native Africa though not necessarily set there.

Although the time and place is unspecified, the collective visual clues are potent and familiar: Danny Sapani’s Lear first comes on like some tinpot military dictator bellowing into a microphone in his powder blue suit; when he and Gloria Obianyo’s Cordelia are captured, the sacks over their heads and the grimy boiler suits recall the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. ‘Poor Tom’’s dwelling is reminiscent of the tent cities that seemingly spring up under every railway arch in major cities, and there’s the terror of modern warfare in the deafening explosions and overheard whirring of helicopters in the battle scenes. The sound design by Peter Rice is unsettling and highly effective throughout. Also worth a mention is the fight direction by Kate Waters which feels dangerous and desperate.

The performances are all strong, and in some cases revelatory. The downfall of this Lear is less to do with age than collapsing mental health. In the first scene he is frighteningly unpredictable, his violent rage at what he perceives Cordelia’s public betrayal comes out of nowhere although it feels entirely organic, and the body language of his three daughters suggests a lifetime of verbal abuse and bullying. Sapani’s bullish, dynamic King seems to know that he is only one setback away from completely losing the plot, and the way he hits the line “o fool I shall go mad” as he exits after a final showdown with his two older daughters isn’t a cry of despair so much as a statement of resignation, as though he always knew this moment would come. When fully mentally untethered, this Lear becomes bitterly funny, and while it’s not a sympathetic reading of the role, it’s a memorable one. You can’t take your eyes off him, nor off his Fool, whom molasses-voiced Clarke Peters turns into a knowing, elegant, magnetic truth teller, more regal than the actual King.

Obinayo’s equally unconventional Cordelia might be a chip off the old block. About as far removed from the cosseted princess she’s often portrayed as, she’s a contained young woman who becomes an alarmingly aggressive soldier. The contrast between her and Akiya Henry and Faith Omole as Goneril and Regan is huge. A side effect of such a volatile Lear is that it humanises the “bad” daughters, at least at first. The way Henry’s tiny, glamorous older sister recoils from Lear’s fury is painful to watch, and when she cradles her sisters (Cordelia when she’s rejected, and Regan when she’s dying) she suggests a warmth and humanity that is allowed to curdle. Regan appears similarly traumatised (the way Lear awkwardly forces this grown woman on to his knee then refuses to let her go even as he rages, is plain horrible) but the blinding of Gloucester (appropriately distressing, and skilfully managed) seems to unleash something in her. Omole makes chillingly credible the transformation from beautiful marionette to snarling panther.

Fra Fee’s sexually irresponsible, hipsterish, Ulster-accented Edmund, resembling Game of Thrones-era Kit Harington, is simultaneously louche and fierce, as ruthless as he’s charming. Opposite him, his half brother Edgar might initially seem a bit colourless, but Matthew Tennyson turns him into a wraith with a welter of open-hearted compassion, and the scenes between ‘Poor Tom’ and the newly blinded Gloucester (Michael Gould, excellent) have seldom been so moving. Hugo Bolton is a hilariously prissy Oswald, and Alec Newman’s staunch Kent also makes a strong impression, convincingly moving from flinty toughness to emotionally broken by the play’s shattering conclusion.

It’s often starkly stunning to look at, the overriding visual image being of figures materialising out of the gloom into pools of murky light, their faces often hard to make out. as befits a world where people’s motivations and allegiances are never fully known and can be subject to change in the blink of an eye. The infamous storm scene is brilliantly done with booming sound effects, and billowing and shaking of the chain mail strands that run the height and length of the set, it’s authentically frightening, and definitely not an environment into which any normal person would release an unprotected aged parent.

This is one probably the most compulsive reading of this brutal play that I’ve ever seen. It’s raw, sexy, shocking and leaves you with the taste of blood and earth in your mouth. It feels modern but not in a gimmicky way and never at the expense of the poetry or the story. Tremendous and troubling.

STANDING AT THE SKYS EDGE

Book by Chris Bush

Music and Lyrics by Richard Hawley

Directed by Robert Hastie

Gillian Lynne Theatre, London – booking until 3 August 2024

https://www.skysedgemusical.com

Since garnering rave reviews at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, and subsequently here in London at the National last year where it was a total sell out, Standing At The Skys Edge has won the Olivier Award for Best Musical. Watching it again in its belated West End transfer at the Gillian Lynne, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that this won’t be the only such accolade it picks up. In Robert Hastie’s complex but clear staging, it remains something very special: a ballsy, blousy, lyrical blast of a show that raises the roof and breaks the heart. It has transferred impeccably, with some substantial but very successful recasting, although this time, moved and impressed as I was, its record album origins felt more obvious and the sense that the beautifully crafted songs by Richard Hawley comment upon and stand outside the action rather than propel it forward is more pronounced.

Although more sophisticated in execution, Standing At The Skys Edge has a similar open-hearted ebullience as perennial favourite Blood Brothers and deserves to achieve a similar longevity. Chris Bush and Richard Hawley’s epic creation also recalls the inspired Conor McPherson-Bob Dylan tearfest Girl From The North Country with it’s employment of pre-existing songs to complement and comment upon a searingly effective script.

Bush’s mastery of a trio of female-centric stories, set in the same flat on the infamous Sheffield Park Hill estate but decades apart, is enthralling. Rose and Harry (Rachael Wooding and Joel Harper-Jackson replacing Robert Lonsdale) are a young couple moving into the brand new dwelling in the 1960s, full of optimism and overjoyed at having escaped the slums. Then there’s the family of Liberian refugees who move in during the 1980s (Baker Mukasa returning to his original role, now joined by Sharlene Hector and Elizabeth Ayodele) when the estate has become rundown and plagued with crime; the modern tranche of the story sees affluent Londoner Poppy (Laura Pitt-Pulford) relocating to the now-redeveloped area and nursing a broken heart. In clean, intelligent strokes, with salty, realistic dialogue, refreshing humour and a brace of vivid characters, Bush’s terrific text embraces community, social change, migration and gentrification, with a bracing theatricality.

It’s ambitious but galvanising and accessible in Hastie’s capable hands. If it’s sometimes reminiscent of soap opera, that’s only because it’s so compulsive and relatable, and how much and how deeply we come to care about these characters. There’s a running theme between the stories, which I won’t spoil here (though there is a clue from the outset in Ben Stones’s starkly imposing set design) but it carries a massive emotional wallop when the realisation dawns, and feels like the hallmark of truly great storytelling. There is a scene near the end, which refracts an exchange of dialogue from early in act one through what we have since discovered, and which is one of the most breathtakingly brutal and ingenious examples of turning a moment on its head, that I can remember, and it’s heartbreakingly played by Ayodele, who is flintier but no less effective than her predecessor as the appropriately named Joy, and Samuel Jordan, already terrific during the previous run but even better now.

Hawley’s songs, some of which originated on a 2012 concept album, range from achingly lovely to real bangers. There’s a lot of light and shade, and a variety of popular music genres, but the predominant sounds tend to be shimmering, strings-heavy impressionism then thundering, portentous rock. It’s more attractive than memorable perhaps but it works tremendously well as theatre music. Watching it a second time, I do wonder if it could afford to lose a couple of solos and some of the extraneous dances, especially in the second half.

Anybody who still subscribes to the hackneyed cliché that “real” acting seldom happens in musicals needs to see this though, the acting right across the company is outstanding. Watching the sunshine drain out of Rachael Wooding’s adorable, tough-but-tender Rose, her contended family unit decimated by the destruction of the steel industry where her husband previously flourished, is deeply painful. Wooding’s beautiful portrayal is warm, open, and, crucially, unsentimental which makes it all the more moving. The way both she ages as the story progresses is a masterclass, aided in no small measure by intelligent costume and wig design. Opposite her, Harper-Jackson manages the descent from ardour to despair with extraordinary delicacy.

Laura Pitt-Pulford, in another gem of a performance, invests lovelorn, conflicted Poppy with an endearing daffiness that makes more sense for her story arc than her more grounded predecessor and she sings like a dream. Lauryn Redding is a wonderful addition to the cast as a messy, mouthy, deeply lovable lesbian with a strong political conscience and a propensity to enter every social situation like a bull in a china shop. She’s utterly captivating and hilarious, and when she describes herself as “a lot” you totally believe her. There isn’t a weak link in the supporting cast either, with an especially invaluable contribution from newcomer Mel Lowe as a narrator whose connection to the central storyline is only revealed later in the show. Mukasa continues to carve out an unexpectedly joyous showstopper from the number he leads.

Hastie’s staging is laser sharp, negotiating the gear changes from tender family moments to rioting and much in between, with real flair. His work is augmented by Lynne Page’s expressive, if over-used choreography, which invests “real” people with an unusual grace, while remaining grounded in a gritty naturalism. Ben Stones’s towering set looks suitably monumental on the new stage, and is stunningly lit by Mark Henderson.

Revisiting Sky’s Edge I found myself more taken with Chris Bush’s ingenious, emotionally charged storytelling than the score perhaps, but it still soars, and remains one of the finest things on any current London stage. Vital, haunting music theatre, magnificently staged and performed, it’s supposed to be a limited run but one can’t help feeling this will end up being a permanent West End fixture. It certainly deserves to be.

THE HUMAN BODY

by Lucy Kirkwood

directed by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee

Donmar Warehouse, London – until 13 April 2024

https://www.donmarwarehouse.com

Lucy Kirkwood certainly doesn’t shy away from tackling huge themes in her plays. Her 2013 Olivier winner Chimerica looked at the fractious relationship between the USA and China, The Children (2016) dealt with a post-apocalyptic way of living and in 2017 her National Theatre hit Mosquitoes spun a story of sisters through an examination of experimental physics. Now, with her richly enjoyable new play The Human Body she takes on the birth of the NHS. It’s slightly ironic that this should be premiering at the Donmar just as Nye, the National’s stage life of NHS founder Aneurin Bevan, is previewing on the other side of the river. It’s a lengthy but rewarding evening.

Once again Kirkwood explores an ambitious subject through the relatable experiences of regular people caught up in something bigger than they are, in this case the marital disenchantment of one Iris Elcock, a tireless post war middle aged wife and mother who is also a GP and an aspiring MP. Countless present day women will identify when she confides to a friend that she feels that on a daily basis she’s doing a hundred little things but not getting any of them right. She’s a superb, strong, multi-layered creation. In a performance of outstanding delicacy and truth, Keeley Hawes invests her with a credible combination of crisp efficiency and reassuring warmth, but brilliantly suggests passion and melancholy beneath the elegant surface.

That passion comes to the fore when she holds forth on the importance of health care for all (the play may be set in the late 1940s but it’s relevance to today is occasionally breathtaking) with the forceful conviction of a zealot. By contrast, the hurt and humiliation when she’s rejected by her war veteran husband, also a doctor (superb Tom Goodman-Hill, in one of numerous roles) is palpable. Hawes makes kind compelling, and fuses it seamlessly with the intriguing spikiness, born of frustration and stiff upper lipped despair, that Kirkwood has given Iris at certain moments in the script. She is a magnetic lynchpin for the sprawling but fascinating drama surrounding her.

That drama doesn’t just stop with Iris’s marital misery and political ambitions, nor the impending inauguration of the NHS, all of which is handled with commendable flair and urgency. Kirkwood also manufactures for Iris an illicit romance, with a film star, played with an insouciant, grizzled charm by Jack Davenport, who she meets by chance on a train and unlocks in her “the rapture of living”, as he puts it. The parallels with Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter, which is referenced in the script, are inescapable then further underlined by the use of black-and-white live filming.

Simultaneously viewing actors live on stage, and in real time on a big screen above them is very much having a theatrical resurgence right now (my first memory of a version of it is from the opening Requiem sequence of Hal Prince’s original Evita staging). Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom’s work here is no less impressive and sophisticated than what they were recently awarded for in the Jamie Lloyd Sunset Boulevard but whether it really adds anything in this instance is a question. Certainly it underlines the relationship to the aforementioned Noël Coward screen saga of middle aged romance on trains, and it allows us to appreciate finesse and subtlety in the performances, particularly from Hawes and Davenport both of whom have luminous screen as well as stage presences, but it doesn’t necessarily enhance the play itself, except on a superficial but admittedly exciting level.

The acting throughout is wonderful, walking the fine line of appealing to modern audiences, while at the same time capturing the clipped understatement that characterises the way people spoke and behaved in the middle of the last century, or at least as we today perceive them. Hawes and Davenport couldn’t be better, but the range and skill of the other three actors who play umpteen other roles apiece (this is effectively an epic play done on a minuscule scale) is astonishing. Goodman-Hill, Siobhàn Redmond and Pearl Mackie are effectively doing an acting marathon every night here, and they never hit a false note as a series of colleagues, rivals, patients and relatives. Tremendous work.

There’s an invaluable contribution too from the hardworking stage crew, essential yet unobtrusive, who are part of the action of Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee’s busy but oil smooth staging, fully visible as they hand props to actors and shift furniture and lights on Fly Davis’s bare, perpetually revolving stage. Technically brilliant as the production is, it never clarifies whether some of the storytelling clichés (amongst others, a posh frock reveal, sudden lengthy speeches that spring from nowhere like arias and feel inorganic, and a moment of discovery of infidelity that could have come straight out of a hackneyed romance) are weaknesses in the script or a deliberate homage to B-movies of yore. The muted palette of Davis’s design and Joshua Pharo’s lighting would suggest the latter. The contrasts between middle and working classes is portrayed effectively if without much subtlety.

Where the play is most successful is that it makes you care deeply about its flawed but ultimately admirable heroine and the things that she cares about. The last couple of minutes, which I won’t spoil here, may well have you reaching for hankies, and Hawes is heartrending but never sentimental. Kirkwood has made an angry play but also an articulate and deeply humane one. I wasn’t fully convinced by the golden age of cinema redux approach perhaps but the majority of the writing is very fine, and there’s no denying that this is a grand, engrossing time in the theatre.