8 January 2016. Elizabeth at the Royal Opera House

I really enjoyed this run through of the loves of Elizabeth I, featuring Carlos Acosta as the various favourites and suitors. He seemed really to be enjoying the parts and so gave a lightness of touch to the whole ninety minutes.

The production seemed to me an excellent mix of dance, singing, acting and music – with very effective lighting thrown in for good measure. The dancers acted out their parts to words spoken and sung by others on stage and this all worked extremely well.

Needless to say, the end was greeted with great and deserved applause and I felt lucky to have been in the front row and so close to the action of this production.  

7 January 2016. Husbands and Sons at the National Theatre

I heard some people at the interval complaining that this was not what they had expected and that they were bored and depressed. I can see how this could be one’s reaction as the play essentially got the audience to look in on the lives of three families in a mining community where not a great deal happened until towards the end. The three families were all on stage in different areas all the time with the action generally fading in on one group and away from the others – there was not a great deal of connection between the families apart from being neighbours.

Anne-Marie Duff was striking as the mother in one family with her young son, a suitor and an abusive husband. The second family highlighted the father who got very drunk and his daughter and her best friend. The third grouping was a mother and two sons – one of whom was married but had also got a local girl pregnant.

Without going through the whole story line, we followed the lives of these families and everything wandered along – until towards the end when there was an accident in the pit, killing the husband of Anne-Marie Duff.

I really enjoyed watching in on these families and felt the storyline was enough to maintain my interest. However, it was rather in the ‘grim up North’ mould and on reflection, I am not so sure what the ‘takeaways’ were. Certainly the (absent) pit owners got a bad press – their greed having compromised safety and caused the accident. The play did, nevertheless, act as an excellent evocation of a bygone age – of tight knit communities where everyone knew everyone else’s business.

4 January 2016. Macbeth at The Young Vic

I must confess I did not really get on with this production. Reduced to two hours with no interval, I felt the pruning and modernising lost a good deal. Luckily I had read a detailed synopsis during the afternoon and so was able to identify the supporting characters; otherwise, I fear I would have been rather at sea. Somehow (or maybe it was me) the pruning seemed to lose the lines identifying the characters!

There were also innovations which seemed to me distracting. The witches were on stage a good deal of the time – sometimes as the witches but at other times as dancers. The murderers of Banquo  also seemed to be on stage more than they should be. The dancing itself did not really work for me and seemed to take time up that was already at a premium.

The stark set was, however, arresting – consisting of a receding ‘corridor’ in which all the action took place. Towards its end was an entrance that slid across the corridor, admitting and exiting characters. The acting of Macbeth and his wife was fine but I did not feel gripped by the psychology in the play. However, the reaction of MacDuff to the killing of his family stood out as did Macbeth’s mistaken belief in his invincibility towards the end and his demise was visually striking with the stream of blood making its way down the stage..

30 December 2015. Bull at the Young Vic

Only 50 minutes long - but that is probably as much as the audience could take. This is amazingly powerful and cringe-making. It centres upon three people from an office - two successful; one the identified 'loser'. The time has come to make a redundancy and by the time the boss arrives, the two have already so undermined and stitched up the one that the answer is obvious.

The action takes place in a boxing ring with two rows of the audience standing ringside. All is conducted under bright lighting and the ending is brilliant as the victim knocks down the water machine which then evacuates and turns the ring into a pool of some two inches of water with the victim lying motionless within it.

There are moments of humour at the start but by about halfway little laughter is heard. It is extremely well-acted and tough to watch. Towards the end the unrepentant female bully muses upon the evolutionary significance of bullying, it serving the tribe to get rid of characters/ characteristics that could jeopardise survival.

28 December 2015. wonder.land at the National Theatre

I am a fan of Alice in Wonderland and was looking forward to this production at the NT. I had assumed it was bringing the story in some way to the digital age but, other than that rather hazy expectations.

The exhibition outside the theatre itself was promising as was the stock in the shop. The exhibition made use of an array of digital technology to create virtual reality glasses and so on; the shop had huge and small hand-waving cats for sale as well as copies of Yayoi Kusama's beautiful illustrated version of the book.

The theatre production was, as one has grown to expect at the NT, fantastic. Accompanied by live music and with amazing digital projections, all looked good for a memorable evening. The problem, however, was the play itself. It centred upon a girl who was being bullied at school and was being brought up by a single parent - with a baby brother, mother and absent father who were all pure caricature. She got hold of an avatar that transported her from her 'real' world to one more to her liking and with some of the traditional Alice characters - The cheshire cat, Tweedle dum and tweedle dee, the March hare and so on. The biggest character, however, was the headteacher from her school inreality - a sort of cruella devill who morphed into the Red Queen.

The problem was that the fantasy story never developed at all - characters simply seemed to come and go. On the other hand, her 'real world' story did make progress - but of the most limited and obvious type - the hopeless dad saw his errors, reformed and reconciled with the mother.

So I felt we were left with a rather largely wasted opportunity - all that technology and production clothing a very insubstantial piece of work. you could tell that I was not alone - There was applause; but given the age of the audience (young), it was hardly rapturous.