ajhlovestheatre

PASSION

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by James Lapine

Directed by Michael Strassen

Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester – until 5 June 2022

https://hopemilltheatre.co.uk/events/passion

“Love as pure as breath, as permanent as death, implacable as stone” – yep, Sondheim. While other, lesser, wordsmiths define love in terms of hearts, flowers and June moons, only Stephen Sondheim would equate it with mortality, finality, something hard and unyielding. Sure, there are lyrics in Passion that more conventionally celebrate the abandon and madness of amore (“love that fuses two into one, where we think the same thoughts, want the same things, live as one…”) but it’s that deep vein of rapturous despair that runs throughout and characterises Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1994 musical. It has seldom, if ever, been mined so richly and with such, well, passion as in Michael Strassen’s shattering new production. It’s sexy, dark and riveting.

Strassen and his world beating team also find the comedy and the heat in a piece that can sometimes come across as cold and lacking in humour. That is emphatically not the case here, where the dramatic stakes feel extraordinarily high, and the show plays out with a rare urgency and white hot intensity. Set in 19th century Italy, this tale of an older woman’s obsessive love for a dashing, emotionally conflicted soldier in a remote garrison town is fleshed out with an exquisite attention to detail, and an unerring balance between the melodramatic elements of the book and score, and the harsh realities of these people’s lives.

Sondheim’s music shimmers and soars, with a kind of soured romanticism that is at once enchanting and vaguely creepy. It seldom breaks out into full standalone numbers, dealing instead in a mixture of recitatives, tantalising snatches of heartmelting melodiousness and brief moments of operatic flamboyance. It may not be immediately accessible perhaps but it more than repays the effort we have to put in as audience members. Yshani Perinpanayagam’s superb five piece ensemble tempers the score’s delicacy with moments of genuine power (excellent orchestrations by Ed Zanders), and the singing throughout is thrilling. If Dan Sansom’s sound design is a bit overwhelming at times, the ominous background rumble is a fitting aural metaphor for the emotional turmoil at play throughout, and the sudden ear-splitting off stage screams of heroine (antiheroine?) Fosca unsettle and wrongfoot exactly as they should.

Ruthie Henshall is delivering some of her finest work to date in this complex, fascinating role. The way she vocally shapes ‘Loving You’, Fosca’s desperately sad yet steely declaration of her feelings for soldier Giorgio (“loving you’s not a choice, it’s who I am”) is a masterclass in acting through song, but it is her performance in the book scenes that may surprise audiences the most. Subtly subverting her innate charisma, she brings an almost classical depth to this conflicted, needy, melancholic woman, but finds a brittle, bitter lightness to some moments that rings entirely true. She’s as infuriating as she is pitiful, as though passing through life with several less layers of skin than other human beings.

There are multiple references throughout the text to Fosca’s extreme ugliness but, intriguingly, this production doesn’t go down the grotesque make up route (Henshall cuts a starkly beautiful figure whereas Donna Murphy and Maria Friedman were barely recognisable in the original Broadway and West End productions respectively) preferring instead to suggest that, at this point in history, being a lonely single woman over a certain age was “ugly” and hopeless enough, and that much of Fosca’s unattractiveness is both in her own head and in the role society has cast her.

This choice is borne out by having the equally lovely looking Danny Whitehead portray, hauntingly, the young Fosca in the nightmarish flashback sequence where Tim Walton’s striking Colonel (Fosca’s cousin) fills Giorgio in on the woman’s tragic past. The simultaneous looks of utter desolation on both Whitehead and Henshall’s faces upon realisation that Fosca’s been duped by Juan Jackson’s swaggering Count is pretty hard to forget.

If Fosca is confined by societal expectations as much as her own mental and physical ill health, Clara, the urbane married woman Giorgio is embroiled with in Milan, is equally trapped by her own sex and lack of independence. In Kelly Price’s revelatory performance, you watch the sunshine slowly drain out of the character as she realises that the other woman is far more of a rival than she imagined and that her less than complete commitment to Giorgio will never be enough for him. Price’s gorgeous, full-bodied soprano soars but it’s the layers and the truth in her acting that takes the breath away. This is the most satisfying and complex reading of the role that I’ve encountered: she’s profoundly sympathetic but with a real edge. Her final appearance, tear-soaked, on her knees, in a mirror image of a pleading Fosca from the first act, surrounded by fragments of a torn up final letter from the man she loves, however inappropriately, and contemplating a future devoid of passion, is supremely affecting.

Despite the external constraints on these women’s lives, Giorgio is as much of a victim as they are. There is a very telling moment where Fosca has coerced him into sharing her bed and while she caresses his face, Clara simultaneously hovers above, placing her hands on the top of his head: for a fleeting, chilling second that image conveys so much about the way that this man is being controlled and manipulated, even as it is a rare moment of table-turning in a particularly misogynistic time in history. Dean John-Wilson is a genuine, and marvellous, surprise in the role, capturing every note, colour and conflict of this fundamentally decent man, eager to please but caught between desire and duty, occasionally exploding into a rage that feels raw and authentic, and with a fatal undertow of a depression that may just be a match for that of Fosca. Musically and dramatically this is a flawless and fresh account of the role, all the more remarkable and unexpected when one considers that John-Wilson’s most high profile job to date was probably as Disney’s original West End Aladdin. This nuanced, intelligent performance deserves to open a whole new set of casting doors for him.

There isn’t a weak link in the supporting company, each one of which reads as a fully realised character, from Charlie Waddell’s fresh-faced company cook to Adam Robert Lewis’s extravagantly vocalising Lieutenant and Steve Watts as a delightful trumpet playing Major. Ray Shell brings a compelling mixture of insinuation and kindness to the Doctor treating Fosca, and Tim Walton, for the first time in any production that I’ve seen, makes one realise how much the Colonel genuinely loves his cousin.

Elin Steele’s impressionistic designs are simple but gorgeous, an array of panels traversing the set to give a sense of almost filmic motion. Charlie Morgan Jones’s painterly lighting is another plus, transforming the limited space with an astonishing precision and mood manipulation.

Make no mistake, this is a world class Passion, and one which any Sondheim nut, or indeed anybody who wants to see a collection of remarkable talents at the top of their game, would be mad not to make the journey to Manchester for. One can only hope that it receives the further life it so richly deserves. I’ve seen five different versions -six, if you count the dvd of the original Broadway production- of this darkly intoxicating piece but have never been as gripped or ultimately as moved by it as I was here. Utterly brilliant. Loving it is not a choice, it is the only choice.

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s OKLAHOMA!

Music by Richard Rodgers

Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

Based on the play “Green Grow The Lilacs” by Lynn Riggs

Directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein

Young Vic – until 25 June 2022

https://www.youngvic.org/

Ah OKLAHOMA! That sunny, optimistic paean to community, New Frontier-ism and just good ole wholesome Americana. The original version (New York 1943, London 1947) transformed musical theatre with it’s use of songs to illuminate character and propel the plot forward, and in it’s creation of a ballet sequence to express subtext. A winning combination of tonal simplicity and artistic sophistication, it galvanised and comforted wan theatregoers in the wake of WW2, the songs became standards, and the film version further cemented it’s reputation as a classic. This is the sort of theatrical comfort food that post-pandemic, post-Brexit audiences facing spiralling bills and uncertainty about the future will be craving, right? A chance to kick back, relax and bask in the company of familiar characters and well-loved songs. Yes?

Er, well, not exactly. At least not in Daniel Fish’s sexed-up, pared-down version (co-directed for London by Jordan Fein), less a revival and more a full blown deconstruction of the original material, that is likely to infuriate as many people as it enchants. I first saw it at a matinee on Broadway in 2019 and suspected that my impression that it was more to be admired than enjoyed may have been influenced by the big Joe Allens lunch I’d had immediately beforehand (!) than any shortcomings in Fish’s bold reimagining, so I was keen to look at it again. In all honesty, my impression didn’t change that much re-encountering it at the Young Vic: it’s a remarkable, mould-breaking production by turns breathtaking and brilliant, but also at times perversely impenetrable. The score is given a Country & Western/Bluegrass makeover that only occasionally makes one long for the orchestral swell of yore, and the singing is sometimes a little ragged as befits the gritty, non-glamorous setting.

This Oklahoma! interrogates the whole concept of America as an inclusive Land of the Free, and the idea that community is a force for good takes a real battering: the marginalisation of Jud Fry, the misunderstood farmhand, has never been as powerful or brutal as it is here. In a heartbreaking performance, Patrick Vaill -one of two holdovers from the original cast- invests him with a childlike openness shading into alarming aggression. He is a haunting, haunted figure of tragic stature and not inconsiderable sympathy. Vaill is extraordinary. The so-called ‘hero’, Curly, on the other hand, in Arthur Darvill’s commendably brave reading, is a dead-eyed, manipulative chancer capable of turning on the charm for sure, but with a streak of ruthlessness that chills the blood. There’s a strong hint of homoeroticism in the cruel scene, usually played for at least some laughs but here in almost total darkness with the actors faces in night vision scope being filmed and projected onto the back wall, where Curly visits Jud in his living shack and tries to persuade him to commit suicide.

Anoushka Lucas’s Laurey is a fascinating combination of resignation, fury and fear, a far from uncomplicated heroine, and the music sits most exquisitely in her voice. The performance closest to the spirit of the original is perhaps Marisha Wallace’s sexy-as-hell, vocally thrilling Ado Annie. It’s a gift of a role anyway but Wallace gorgeously remints it, presenting a sexually voracious, fiery diva with an irresistible combination of fun and naivety. James Davis and Stavros Demetraki are terrific as the men understandably in her thrall.

The phenomenally successful Trevor Nunn version for the National in 1998 -with Maureen Lipman as an unusually spiky Aunt Eller and where Josefina Gabrielle’s beautifully melancholic, multi-layered Laurey was the perfect ying to the yang of Hugh Jackman’s confident, charismatic cowboy – found an unexpected darkness in the material that threw the joyous moments into glorious relief (the ‘Farmer And The Cowman’ section fair exploded with vitality all over the Olivier stage). But Fish goes darker here, many many tones darker. If Lipman’s Eller was tough, Liza Sadovy’s is pure granite, which makes perfect dramatic sense in this hardscrabble environment where guns seem easier to lay hands on than money. The constant use of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s names in all the branding might be a requirement of licensing from their estate but it’s also quite useful as a reminder for the uninitiated who might be under the misapprehension that they’re watching Sam Peckinpah’s or, Gawd help us all, Ivo van Hove’s Oklahoma.

In Laura Jellinek and Grace Laubacher’s immersive design, the Young Vic, like the Circle In The Square on Broadway previously and Brooklyn’s St Anne’s Warehouse before that, has been transformed into a community hall set up for a celebration somewhere in rural, present day America. A monochrome mural suggests the wide open plains outside, trestle tables sit atop a plain hardboard floor, guns line the walls, and the whole thing is lit harshly, as though there is nowhere to hide. The house lights never dim except for moments when the whole space is plunged into discombobulating darkness. The costumes are deliberately low budget and low key. The gingham dresses traditionalists might expect to see make a sort-of appearance in the box social scenes of the second act but they seem tawdry and garish, as though commenting mockingly on audience expectations of what Oklahoma! is supposed to look like.

In one of the biggest departures from the original, Laurey’s famous Dream Ballet has been transformed into a solo dance, shrouded in dry ice and half of it in pitch darkness with, once again, live-filmed images projected onto the back wall. It’s menacing, athletic, nightmarish… and Rodgers’s music is distorted into a sort of deafening Progressive Rock. Marie-Astrid Mence, diminutive and dynamic, delivers John Heginbotham’s splayed fingered, angular limbed choreography, pitched somewhere between horseplay and eroticism, with authentic commitment. At one point, a dozen or so cowboy boots drop from the flies, presumably to signify male upon female oppression (the constant references to women “belonging to” men in the script really rankle in a modern setting, which is of course the point), but the whole section may prove too esoteric for many.

At times aggressively ugly and only intermittently uplifting, this is inevitably not going to be everybody’s idea of what they want from this particular musical. It’s worth noting though that Fish and collaborators don’t alter a single line of dialogue or note of music, they simply repoint almost everything to sometimes devastating effect. The cover-up surrounding Jud’s murder at the end is grimly pragmatic and leads into a final, blood-spattered blast of the (usually) celebratory title song (“we know we belong to the land / and the land we belong to is grand”) where the increasingly traumatised and desperate body language and expressions on the faces of the characters, suggests that their lives will never be the same again. Fish and Fein have succeeded in making this show seem even more tragic than Carousel, which is something of an achievement. I love a “dark” musical and, watching this, vacillated between feeling it was reminiscent of the Emperor’s New Clothes, and then being pinned to the back of my seat with astonishment at the audacity and sheer ingenuity of what they’ve achieved.

Love it or hate it, this is one of the main talking points of theatrical London right now.

LA BOHÈME

Score by Giacomo Puccini

New English libretto by David Eaton and Philip Lee

Original concept by Adam Spreadbury-Maher and David Eaton

Musical Direction by David Eaton

Directed by Mark Ravenhill

Kings Head Theatre – until 28th May 2022

https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/la-bohme

If you imagined that Jonathan Larson’s RENT was the last word in giving a radical overhaul to this operatic masterpiece then think again. In fact, former Kings Head artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher already made bold updates to Puccini’s bittersweet portrait of tragic lives in the Parisian artistic quarter with his 2009 version for the now defunct Cock Tavern in Kilburn, garnering awards and a West End transfer as it reimagined the struggling bohemians in a hip but grungy contemporary London.

This edition though, libretto by Philip Lee and musical director David Eaton based on an original concept by Spreadbury-Maher and Eaton, and first seen pre-pandemic in a shorter form as part of a double bill entitled Opera Undone, goes even further in adapting the beloved staple of opera houses around the globe. Here, the seamstress heroine, she of the tiny frozen hand, is Lucas (nicknamed Mimi), a HIV+ gay man with a drug problem and a job flogging fragrance in Libertys, who meets lovelorn poet Rodolfo (now Robin, struggling to write his masterpiece on a battered-looking iPad) on Grindr, and fiery secondary couple Musetta and Marcello have become Marissa and Marcus who shop at Lidl and address each other in the saltiest of language when having a row.

All other characters are cut, and director Mark Ravenhill has distanced this version even further from the original by having the whole thing played at as a sort of last gasp fever dream in Lucas’s head just as he dies in a medical emergency room with all the other performers clad in hospital scrubs throughout as they embody figures from Mimi’s gritty, intermittently unhappy past. Anybody in search of old school sentimentality and lush orchestral swell will be sorely disappointed (Eaton plays the score, quite beautifully, on an upright keyboard at the side of the stage). The concept-cum-framing device of the hospital setting takes a while to get used to, and slightly muddies the water in terms of the storytelling.

Some of the blocking is awkward: the Kings Head stage is tiny but this production makes it feel smaller still by using just a square space in the centre of it, which works brilliantly when the four performers are simulating being in a crowded Nags Head pub on Christmas Eve, but seems perversely limiting the rest of the time. Also, Ravenhill has Philip Lee as Mimi facing upstage for the entire final section as he’s dying in front of Daniel Koek’s ardent Robin, which makes any emotional connection virtually impossible from an audience point-of-view.

The concept has a couple of other built-in issues: the melodramatic excess of some of the more extreme moments are harder to pull off in a contemporary setting, and the music dictates acting choices that can sometimes come across as stilted or slow-moving. This isn’t the fault of the performers or the director, but can prove a little frustrating to watch at times.

Despite these caveats, there’s still much to savour here. For starters, there’s the humour -particularly with regards to the histrionics and jealousy of Marcus and Musetta- which has way more bite and sparkle than in a conventional version; Matt Kellett and Grace Nyandoro bring real dynamism and sexual chemistry to these roles, while also achieving glorious vocal performances. The singing throughout, as one would hope in an opera, thrills the blood, and it’s impossible to overstate how wonderful it is to hear voices of this calibre at such close quarters. Daniel Koek’s golden, ringing tenor contrasts pleasingly with Philip Lee’s lovely, but more vulnerable, maturer sound, and when they sing together it’s utterly magnificent.

If I was left less emotionally wrung out than I would have hoped, there are undeniable merits in bringing this story bang up-to-date. Not one for purists perhaps, or anybody who thinks that innovation in opera should stop with the ENO, but a treat for anybody who wants to hear Puccini’s swooningly gorgeous music stripped right back but still sung with authentic heat and passion.

PRIMA FACIE

By Suzie Miller

Directed by Justin Martin

Harold Pinter Theatre – until 18 June 2022

https://primafacieplay.com/ticket-information/

The term ‘prima facie’ means “accepted as correct until proven otherwise” and it’s a fitting title for this harrowing but galvanising monologue in which an incandescent Jodie Comer portrays an ambitious criminal barrister whose life is transformed when she is the victim of sexual assault.

When we first encounter Tessa, she’s supremely confident in her stellar abilities not just in the court room but in life generally, having taken the Oxbridge route out of a working class background, and revelling in the fact that she’s one of three graduates who statistically forge a career in law (the others fall by the wayside). She’s funny, cocky, likeable, she swaggers, shaking her blonde mane like a lioness…..there is a troubling downside though and that is a willingness to discredit a rape victim’s story in order to win a case, her reasoning being that a stronger defence lawyer would have prevented this from happening. To say that this assertion comes back to haunt her is an understatement. Author Suzie Miller was a lawyer in Australia (the play won awards when it premiered there, with a different lead actress, in 2019) so understands both the mechanics of the legal system, and the inherent theatricality of the court room performance.

The script has been seamlessly anglicised (Tessa now hails from Liverpool, as does Comer, and works in chambers in London) and is an accomplished piece of storytelling. It does almost abandon any attempt at coherent drama by the end, as Tessa becomes less a character in her own right and more an understandably outraged mouthpiece at the gender inequalities within the legal system, wondering aloud if female victims of sex crimes can ever receive truly impartial justice in a set-up that sometimes seems exclusively set up to protect the interest of men. Director Justin Martin raises the house lights at this point, as though to indict us all, and while it is undeniably powerful, that’s largely because of Comer’s transfixing delivery.

The earlier sections of Miller’s script work better from a theatrical point-of-view, drawing a witty, vivid picture of successful urban young lives contrasting with the hardscrabble existence from which Tess hails. Martin’s staging – played out on Miriam Buether’s sombre setting of heavy wooden desks and towering, casefile filled bookshelves that miraculously disappear – is dynamic, leavened by flashes of light and the ongoing thrum of music and sound ranging from exciting to increasingly oppressive (Rebecca Lucy Taylor – composer, Ben & Max Ringham – sound design). All of this theatrical artifice throws the starkness of the second part – and the brokenness of Tessa herself following the sexual assault, which is described in uncompromising but never exploitative detail – into a sharp relief. Despite the flaws, it is heartening to see accessible popular writing that takes on a very important subject without ever one trivialising it. The night I saw it, the audience were breathing as one.

It’s a tremendous piece of theatre, explosively angry and richly detailed. The big news though, and why tickets sold out ahead of even the first preview, is the West End debut of Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer. She is utterly magnificent, not so much acting the script as living it, morphing with complete conviction and precision into various figures in Tessa’s life – her straightforward Mum, work colleagues ranging from the suave to the flakey, a combative then kindly cab driver – she hits not a single false note. Her transformation from strong, capable, driven young barrister to a woman so bowed that she can barely put one foot in front of another, to a fascinating, flawed combination of the two by the end, is literally breathtaking. There is a section, while making a police statement, that she delivers directly to camera as it then gets projected to the back wall of the set, and the look in her eyes, the facial tics, the clenched mouth….it’s unforgettable. She’s unforgettable.

THE STRAW CHAIR

by Sue Glover

Directed by Polly Creed

Finborough Theatre – until 14 May 2022

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-straw-chair/

It has taken some 34 years for Sue Glover’s strange but rather wonderful treatment of the legend of Lady Rachel Grange to reach London, having premiered in Edinburgh in the late 1980s. In fact it is a tale so strange that it could only be true, although Glover filters the real woman’s story through the fictional figures of a rigidly devout priest and his spirited, questioning young wife, newly arrived on the remote Outer Hebridean island to which Lady Rachel has been unwillingly banished by her hypocritical Jacobite-sympathising husband.

With it’s historical setting and heightened language, there are times when Glover’s script feels like a rediscovered gem from much further back than the 1980s (the actual Lady Grange died in 1745), although it’s overarching themes of powerful men silencing female voices and assuming government over what women do with their own bodies could not feel more grimly relevant than it does in this of all weeks. So then, The Straw Chair is as much a howl of outrage as it is a historical drama, and, in Polly Creed’s haunting, impressively accomplished staging, suffused with ethereally lovely Gaelic folk music, it’s an uncommonly eloquent and tragic howl.

Leading the company is Siobhan Redmond as the Lady herself in a glorious humdinger of a performance. She suggests a dancing, glancing bawdy wit as well as a deep vein of loneliness and melancholy; when she talks about the brutal way she has been treated, it’s with an understandable fury and an equally understandable wash of self-pity, especially when she’s in her cups (the real Rachel had a love of the bottle and a penchant for turning up, pre-banishment, drunk and disorderly at her husband’s Royal Mile dwelling). Redmond brilliantly captures every nuance of this compelling, wayward, wronged woman, born out of her time. She’s both victim and aggressor, by turns imperious then desperate, elegant yet wild, and Redmond etches her firmly, searingly on the memory.

Equally fine is Rori Hawthorn as Isabel, the painfully inexperienced wife who undergoes something of a physical, spiritual and moral transformation in the inclement surroundings of this barely habitable island. Intense and watchful, it’s a beautifully realised, emotionally intelligent performance. If Finlay Bain initially reads as a little too young and uncomplicated opposite her, he gains gravitas and conviction as he too undergoes something of a sea change in attitude. Jenny Lee delivers lovely supporting work as Lady Rachel’s garrulous companion.

Alex Marker’s sparse set, in tandem with the atmospheric lighting and sound designs (Jonathan Chan and Anna Short respectively), do wonders in transforming the Finborough’s tiny space into the remote, sea-blasted environment of St Kilda, where there are more puffins than people. The technical elements are aided immeasurably by Glover’s knottily verbose, quasi-poetic text, and the other worldly vocals of Hawthorn who also serves as music director.

It takes the script a while to find it’s dramatic momentum, not really until deep into the second half, but it’s never less than entirely watchable. The final image – of Lady Grange standing defiant, as she reads aloud a letter requesting rescue, that she hopes will get smuggled off an island she herself will never escape – is an unsettling one that lingers long in the mind afterwards. It’s a wonderful thing that Glover, Creed and team are keeping her memory alive in this captivating production. That her story still feels so horribly relevant is less of a cause for celebration.

THE BURNT CITY

Created by Punchdrunk in collaboration with the Company

Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle

One Cartridge Place, Woolwich, London – booking until 4 December 2022

https://onecartridgeplace.com/theburntcity/?utm_source=punchdrunk.com&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=TheBurntCity

You never forget your first Punchdrunk. Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle’s epoch-making shows have transformed expectations of what immersive, site-specific theatre can achieve, in terms of scale, production values, all-encompassing design and attention to detail, and audience engagement. To experience one – you can’t just watch a Punchdrunk production, not least because you’ll be on your feet and on the move pretty much the whole time – is to go on a complete sensory journey, one where you decide which story arcs and characters to observe and follow, which of the stunningly realised sets to explore, and to be utterly transported. With The Burnt City, their biggest show to date, they take on Greek myth, although the aesthetic is anachronistic: boho chic meets old school Hollywood glamour meets monochrome starkness: there’s not a floaty tunic in sight, although there is a fair bit of blood and gore.

Part of the fun comes at the end, seeing the disorientation of audience members/participants removing their masks and readjusting to being back in the “real” world, as opposed to the elaborately curated one the Punchdrunk collective have manifested. For the uninitiated: everybody is provided with a rigid, bone-white mask for the duration, and the effect is curiously liberating while at the same time impeding peripheral vision and spatial awareness in ways that some may find discomfiting. Indeed, one of the enduring images I’ve taken away from each Punchdrunk show I’ve been to, is of distant flotillas of these pearlescent white masks moving at speed through the gloom as a host of audience members pursue their chosen character to a different part of the vast space and the next instalment of that particular plot strand.

Linear storytelling isn’t the point in a show that is much an art installation with live performers as it is a piece of theatre. Each gargantuan production tends to be a distillation of it’s source material (their last big London project, 2014’s The Drowned Man, performed across multiple transformed floors of a disused Paddington post office was inspired by Buchner’s Woyzeck, while their ongoing NYC long runner Sleep No More is a riff on Macbeth, turning a dilapidated Manhattan warehouse into an elegant but demonically possessed 1930’s hotel) rather than a straightforward adaptation. As each show is virtually wordless (the Punchdrunk language is an intoxicating combination of atmosphere, music, mime and modern dance), it may be worth doing a bit of research on the background before you set out. I certainly found myself wishing I’d boned up on Greek drama, specifically Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Euripides’s Hecuba which are the basis for The Burnt City, the first show to be housed in Punchdrunk’s new HQ, a pair of former military arsenal buildings near the Thames.

Certain moments from the stories – Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to appease the Gods of War, Clytemnestra’s revenge and her dalliance with Aegisthus – are fairly clear but there are times when it’s pretty impossible to work out what’s going on. Plus if you stay in one spot for too long you’ll experience the same sections more than once, as though on a loop. There’s a danger of FOMO setting in – it’s impossible to take the whole thing in on one visit – also a sense of ennui and disbelief that you’ve just spent minutes watching somebody make a cup of tea or a soldier climb a ladder in slo mo, or witnessed a plastic-clad pair cavort with what looks like offal. Whether or not that bothers you depends on the extent to which you surrender to the overall Punchdrunk vision. If it all takes itself very seriously, well, Greek Tragedy was never a barrel of laughs.

Technically, it is astounding: from Stephen Dobbie’s doomy, overwhelming score, drawing on everything from trance to Charleston to a lush Hans Zimmer-like orchestral swell, to David Israel Reynoso’s costume designs and the gorgeous, if occasionally too dim, lighting (by FragmentNine, Ben Donoghoe and Felix Barrett), everything pretty much takes the breath away. Maxine Doyle choreographs and her jagged, adrenalised creations for the humans in distress contrast tellingly with the fluid, other-worldly dynamism of the Fates, plus it’s an authentic thrill to experience dance at such close quarters. The cast are a sinewy, sexy bunch, with presence and athleticism to spare, but they rotate parts so, unless you’re a clued-up regular, you don’t know who you’re watching in which role.

Designers Felix Barrett, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns have divided the vast area into two very specific worlds. Greece is austerely, chillingly magnificent: on a mezzanine, Agamemnon’s Mycenae palace combines brutality and luxury while below a wide open space suggests a battlefield and wasteland, with massive wrought iron structures scattered about like the prows of abandoned ships, and the two levels are connected by an epic staircase, the like of which hasn’t seen so much action since Sunset Boulevard. By contrast, Troy is a funky, grungy, densely packed neon-edged city, full of weird but colourful shops, bars, hotels, and a kind of desperate, apocalyptic energy. There’s even a night club, complete with fully stocked bar, where a glorious Black diva belts out a version of New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’. There is an all-pervasive sense though, in the astonishingly detailed installations and tableaux vivants, of urban lives being abandoned in a panic, and of grim resignation from the humans left behind to face an oncoming storm of the Greek invasion, and it’s hard not to contextualise this with the current events in Ukraine.

If I came away from The Burnt City impressed rather than moved, I am still, a day later, haunted by individual images: Iphigenia’s broken body splayed across the top of a gantry, a pile of bones in front of a makeshift altar, Agamemnon processing up the epic staircase in a never-ending blood red cloak, or the ghostly contortions of the nearly naked company processing oh so slowly back down it at the conclusion before exploding into a whirringly cyclonic, trance-like ritualistic circular dance as snow falls from above. Shatteringly powerful moments sit next to sections that are frustratingly elliptical. The best approach is to let it just wash over you…and wear comfy shoes. Punchdrunk are back, and it’s epic.

RABBIT HOLE

by David Lindsay-Abaire

Directed by Lawrence Carmichael

Union Theatre – until 1 May 2022

https://uniontheatre.savoysystems.co.uk/UnionTheatre.dll/TSelectItems.waSelectItemsPrompt.TcsWebMenuItem_836.TcsWebTab_837.TcsProgramme_442959

Premiered in New York in 2006 with a cast headed by Sex And The City’s Cynthia Nixon and including the estimable Tyne Daly, David Lindsay-Abaire’s robust yet delicate piece, which considers the fall out from a child’s death, is a compelling tragicomedy. Depicting the multiple ways we deal with grief, it has biting humour, wisdom, and, over and above everything else, a love of flawed humanity that elevates a witty, clear-eyed script into something with real resonance.

A movie version starring Nicole Kidman was seen in 2011 followed five years later by the Edward Hall-helmed UK staging at Hampstead Theatre featuring a heartrending Claire Skinner. Good as that iteration was, Lawrence Carmichael’s intelligent, emotionally astute new production feels more vivid and urgent. If it’s more stylised – Ethan Cheek’s striking living room/kitchen set demonstrates that from the outset, with every prop, fitting and furnishing washed a delicate white, the only flashes of colour coming from anything child-related, such as a kid’s book, the baby clothes bereaved mother so lovingly folds away, or the tumble of toys suspended above, at once a torment and a comfort to the grieving parents, and note the awkward angles the furniture’s placed at, as though a metaphor for the fractured relationships – it is also more imaginatively theatrical. This theatricality, though subtle, adds a welcome extra layer of interest to a script that, although beautifully turned and commendably unsentimental, sometimes threatens to read and sound like a low-key screenplay rather than a full-blooded stage property.

Becca and Howie lost their four year old son ten months ago, in a freak driving accident involving teenager Jason, who now reaches out to make tentative contact. Becca’s irresponsible younger sister Izzy has accidentally fallen pregnant, and their own mother Nat is on hand to offer a suitably jaundiced, wine-soaked commentary. Actually, Lindsay-Abaire’s script is richer and more complex than that shorthand description might suggest, featuring a fascinating, borderline antagonistic tension between Howie and his sister-in-law, and a subtle suggestion that Nat sometimes feels socially inferior to her fiscally successful older daughter. Emma Vansittart exquisitely suggests the conflict between maternal affection and garrulous resentment, despite having an innate elegance that seems slightly at odds with the character as written.

The acting throughout is impressive, and even if the American accents sometimes waver, the laser-sharp precision of the emotion seldom does. Julia Papp and Kim Hardy are utterly riveting as a broken couple who still love each other but are in utter turmoil, and there’s sensitive work from Max Pemberton as the kid who unwittingly engineered their tragedy and is desperate to make some sort of reparation. Ty Glaser’s wild card sister Izzy is funny, unsettling and just flat-out terrific.

Lindsay-Abaire is probably best known in this country as the book writer for the musical version of Shrek, although Good People, his coruscating examination of the gulf between urban Chicagoan haves and have-nots was a hit in it’s UK premiere starring Imelda Staunton. In all honesty, Rabbit Hole is the slightly inferior play, less robust and universal, but Carmichael’s engrossing production makes a very strong case for it here and provides a genuinely satisfying night in the theatre. Recommended.

SCANDALTOWN

By Mike Bartlett

Directed by Rachel O’Riordan

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre – until 14 May 2022

https://lyric.co.uk/shows/scandaltown/#performances

Because simultaneously having a starry revival of your early play selling out nightly in the West End (Cock featuring Jonathan Bailey) and a barnstorming neo-Shakespearean Trump fantasia wowing them at the Old Vic (The 47th) apparently isn’t enough, Mike Bartlett now gives us a contemporary riff on Restoration Comedy. And it’s quite delicious. We knew he was brilliant but with this third piece to come to a major London venue in ‘22, he displays yet another facet to his virtuosity while staking a claim to be as prolific as Alan Ayckbourn or Noël Coward at the height of their popularity.

This dazzling modern day Restoration-style romp, set in a heightened but appallingly recognisable London obsessed with image and status, proves, in Rachel O’Riordan’s crackerjack production, to be a triumphant fusion of style AND substance, each of those attributes taking it in turns to seize the upper hand. Restoration Comedy came about when theatres reopened in the 1600s following an eighteen year shut down by the Puritans, so it feels like an appropriate genre for Bartlett to remint as theatres now come back to life after being shut down by the pandemic.

Like Vanbrugh, Wycherley and Etherege before him, Bartlett holds a satirical, sometimes grotesque mirror up to the fashions and fads of the time he lives in. Scandaltown encompasses hedonism, virtue signalling, and the power of social media, but all couched in elegant, erudite language suddenly shot through with moments of almost breathtaking crudity. It’s often blissfully funny and, just occasionally, a little bit troubling.

The plot is as convoluted as one might expect from historical examples of the genre -social climbing, mistaken identity, thwarted love, shameful pasts, it’s all here- but with a refreshing, frequently delightful spin as pounding dance beats sit alongside high comedy. The shallowness of fashionable urban living, the venality of the Tories and the glorification of financial gain over almost everything else are sent up rotten but the laughter oftentimes threatens to turn bitter. Act one explodes like a firecracker and is followed by a slightly anti-climactic second half: the granular writing is still fine but the requirement to neatly tie up all the disparate plot strands means that a certain ennui kicks in. Act one is tight, where act two feels baggy.

If, on press night, some of the younger cast members weren’t fully on top of the heightened style of delivery, that will undoubtedly come as the run progresses, and even now they’re buoyed up by the effervescence of O’Riordan’s staging which so perfectly captures the energy and attitude of the milieu. Good Teeth’s set design isn’t particularly attractive but succeeds in marrying together the painted flats and drops of historical theatre with a bit of modernist flashy, while Kinnetia Isidore’s costumes are imaginative and gorgeous.

As estranged, contrasting siblings Phoebe and Jack Virtue, she high of mind and low of tolerance, he pretty much the other way round, Cecilia Appiah and Matthew Broome are entrancing. Richard Goulding is uproariously funny as Matt Eton (“the Secretary of State for Procurement”), a bisexual Tory turncoat forever looking for cheap thrills to spice up his tediously privileged existence. Thomas Josling does lovely work as an honourable innocent whose first exposure to high society goes in a very different direction from what he’d expected.

Best of all, there’s a thrilling Rachael Stirling as the gloriously monikered Lady Susan Climber, a sexually voracious diva in designer togs, desperate to stay relevant but unable to resist the lure of hard cash or indeed hard young male flesh. Seldom has Stirling looked or sounded quite so uncannily like her mother (the late, great Dame Diana Rigg) as she does here, but this is an authentic star performance all of her own. She’s screamingly camp but never at the ultimate expense of dramatic truth, and helplessly, irresistibly funny. Her merciless sniping at Henry Everett’s comically pitiful manservant (a direct descendant of One Man Two Guvnor’s ancient waiter Alfie, who was in turn a stock commedia dell’arte figure) is a source of utter, nasty joy, and her horrified/jubilant realisation that she has just mistakenly slept with a man decades her junior rather than the sweaty Tory power player she was prepared to put up with, is one of the most marvellous things on any current London stage.

Like it’s characters, Scandaltown is flawed but mainly fabulous. Also like most of them, it’s deeply endearing, often rapturously amusing, and a lot of fun to spend the night with.

SAD

by Victoria Willing

Directed by Marie McCarthy

Omnibus Theatre – until 30 April 2022

https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/sad/

The title of Victoria Willing’d fanciful state-of-the-nation tragicomedy could refer to a number of things: Gloria (Debra Baker) has Seasonal Affective Disorder and has retreated to her loft following the death of her mother, to the bewilderment of her husband Graham (Kevin N Golding), her friend Magda (Isabella Urbanowicz) is desperately lonely and is contemplating moving back to Eastern Europe following a burglary, the world at large is in a hell of a mess….Happy this play and these characters ain’t.

Willing’s script is actually sharply funny at times, finding a sort of gallows humour in the miseries and tediousness of day-to-day life, and it’s certainly never dull. For a ninety minute, interval-free piece, it is however over-stuffed with ideas and suffers from an uncertainty of tone that proves frustrating. Starting out as a black comedy, it then appears to fire off in umpteen different directions -kitchen sink drama, memory play, bedroom farce. melodramatic potboiler, and ultimately a touch of apocalyptic surrealism- but without ever fully committing to any of them.

Ideas are floated then almost immediately abandoned…nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the character of Daniel, the neighbour Gloria has casual sex with: an upwardly mobile housing officer with a predatory streak, strained family relationships and a slightly bizarre fixation on material things, one minute he is propositioning Magda when she goes to see him in connection with moving house following the break-in, and the next he is coldly dismissing her. Later he goes from conciliatory to aggressive with Graham in the blink of an eye. There is no character arc here, just a series of contrasting attitudes that barely make sense when patched together. It says much for the skill of Lucas Hare in the role that he makes this inconsistent character highly watchable, and he fully commits to the bewildering array of moods and tones Willing has laid upon him.

Baker and Golding do strong, if overly shouty, work as the miserable central couple, although their constant slanging matches as the play wears on become increasingly tedious, illuminating little about the characters and their issues, but that is an issue with the writing rather than the actors. Urbanowicz really shines as caustic, watchful Magda, the kind of woman you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of, but a kind and staunch friend with a certain wicked deadpan humour.

Alys Whitehead’s cluttered attic set, complete with sloping roof and skylight is a thing of ramshackle wonder and it’s beautifully lit by Alex Thomas. Marie McCarthy’s direction can’t rein in the contradictions of the text but does a creditable job of making most of the moments work in and of themselves. Ultimately though, this feels less like a coherent play and more a series of thematic non sequiturs. The idea of hibernating away from the horrors of modern living is an interesting, valid one, perhaps more so now than ever, but more clarity of vision, tone and intention would improve this piece immeasurably.

BRAM STOKER’s DRACULA

Adapted and performed by James Gaddas

Directed by Pip Minnithorpe

Richmond Theatre – seen on 27 March 2022 – also touring

https://www.draculatheplay.com/

There have been numerous screen and stage versions of the Dracula legend over the decades, including a couple of musicals ranging from the misconceived to the riotously camp, but James Gaddas’s one man play proves an original, and splendidly theatrical, take. Gaddas mines the well known tale of the blood-sucking, permanently undead Count for all it’s gothic horror but parallels it effectively with a modern sort-of detective story.

Initially it looks as though we’re going to be in for a quietly engrossing lecture as Gaddas bounds on to introduce himself, taking up position behind a lectern, all spritely energy, actorly bonhomie and gently self-deprecating humour. He makes reference to his extensive popular TV work and describes being approached to front a documentary examining the discovery of a journal by Dracula author Bram Stoker that suggests that the vampiric saga is not at all a work of fiction and was only presented as such because the reality would have been too unsettling for general consumption.

Gaddas’s own text neatly mixes the portentous, heightened language of Stoker with an engaging, matter-of-fact reportage of his visit to the Count’s Romanian castle with a research team. The switching between the two stories could be a little better delineated perhaps. The modern strand of the storytelling takes an unsettling turn as members of this team variously meet grisly ends, suggesting that there are much darker forces at play. This reaches it’s apotheosis in a spinetingling finale, the details of which I’m not going to reveal here, that marries audience complicity, some essential plot points from pretty much every Dracula adaptation, and the same sort of inventive theatricality that has kept a show like The Woman In Black running in the West End for decades. Your rational mind will tell you that this is (probably) just a preposterous tall tale, but for these brief, delicious moments, it’s hard not to feel a lurch of pure terror.

A gifted character actor and raconteur, Gaddas is a personable stage presence, his relatability a major factor in drawing the audience in. He proves impressively adept at going from chummy affability to deep distress to almost unimaginable malevolence and back again, and Pip Minnithorpe’s enjoyable, well paced production repeatedly blurs the line between real life and fanciful fiction. Actor-author and director are aided immeasurably by an uneasy, occasionally blood curdling soundscape and film score-like music courtesy of Jeremy Swift. Matthew Karmios’s lighting and John Bulleid’s illusions are simple but very effective.

All in all, this is a mostly cracking piece of storytelling and a fine addition to the often neglected genre of theatrical horror. Nice, nasty fun.