21 May 2020. La Traviata from ROH

This fabulous recording of Verdi's opera is the Richard Eyre ROH production, conducted by Antonio Pappano who seemed to enjoy it as much as the audience. The lead roles of Violetta and Alfredo were taken by Renee fleming and Joseph Calleja and sung and played brilliantly by them. All in all, a fairly dotty story but a real bonus to ameliorate lockdown. Thanks ROH!!

19 May 2020. Midnight your Time from the Donmar.

This is the first play I've seen produced under the strictures of Covd - consisting entirely of the video messages of a mother to her daughter, and lasting about thirty minutes. It cleverly told the story of the interfering mother whose, daughter had decided to communicate via the father, much to the mother's hurt and frustration. The mother, played brilliantly by Diana Quick, never really got it - that her controlling interference was pushing away her daughter further and further away.
There is not a great deal more to say - save that the play by Adam Brace and directed by Michael Longhurst seemed to capture most accurately the syndrome which it was addressing. Half an hour seemed about right as all that was to be said was said. 

30 April 2020. Die Entführung aus dem Serail from Glyndebourne

This production of a Mozart opera of which I was unaware transferred well and easily to the television. Full of pegs for the singers to display their talents, the plot is extremely simple - The young Spanish noblewoman Konstanze has been abducted by pirates together with her English maid Blonde, and Pedrillo, valet to her betrothed, Belmonte. Landing on the shores of Turkey, they have been sold as slaves to Pasha Selim. Originally a Spanish subject himself, he has become a ‘renegade’, a convert and prospered in Turkey. He has fallen in love with Konstanze. Pedrillo has smuggled letters out to his master and Belmonte has sailed from Spain to try to rescue them. The opera consists of scenes of Selim trying to woo (but never force himself upon) Konstanze while the hate figure, the overseer Osmin tries to bed Blonde, who is Pedrillo's girlfriend. Meanwhile, a rescue is planned with Osmin tricked into drinking spike wine by Pedrillo so that an escape can be effected. This succeeds but then fails and the escapees are thrown back on the mercy of Selim. In a feel good ending he spares them, despite Belmonte letting slip that his father was Selim's arch enemy.
This does not tax the brain, either in following the plot or thinking about it. However, it does definitely make for a relaxing couple of hours and Glyndebourne's production feels rich and lavish.  

14 April. Jane Eyre from National Theatre.

This excellent staging of the Jane Eyre story came courtesy of the National Theatre, It resulted from a collaboration between the NT and the Bristol Old Vic under the direction of Sally Cookson. To be honest, romantic fiction is not what I'd normally read, even if it is a classic but this staging of the story was both rivetting and ingenious in its use of a minimalist set and the way the story was brought to life. Injected with dashes of comedy (e.g., the playing of Rochester's dog by an actor), the play moved at a dashing pace with excellent acting by Nadia Clifford who played Jane and Tim Delap who was Rochester.

12 April 2020. It's true; it's true; it's true: Artemisia's Trial by Breach Theatre via National Gallery

The recording of this staging of a dramatisation of the 1612 trial of Agostino Tassi for the rape of the young painter Artemisia Gentileschi came via the National Gallery Website. Based on surviving court transcripts, Breach Theatre’s award-winning show brought the trial vividly to life with the all too familiar attempts at denouncing Artmisia as actually consenting to and enjoying the relationship with Tassi.
It was a very inventive staging that was also upsetting in its depiction of the betryal of trust by Tassi who was Artimisia's tutor and a friend of her father. Lasting only 75 minutes, it was an absorbing piece that will hopefully remain available on YouTube as it definitely bears re-viewing.

10 April 2020. Cyprus Avenue from Royal Court

This is an extremely clever play, managing to be alternatingly funny and harrowing. It is not for the faint hearted, being the tale of an Irish 'loyalist' who descends into a psychotic world where he sees the image of Gerry Adams in his grand-daughter and decides it is his duty to erase this menace from the world.
The acting by Stephen Rea was brilliant and this play definitely merits more than one viewing. For now that can be achieved via YouTube

2 April 2020. One man, two guvnors from National Theatre

This play benefited from fantastic acting, particularly from James Corden, and from the quality of production with a wonderful set etc. It is essentially a farce and so fundamentally either you like that sort of thing or you don't. However, even if you fall into the latter camp, the production and acting made it a rewarding way to spend a Covid evening.
At the outset, it is all slightly confusing, being the tale of a man who serves two people related by one having killed the brother of the other who is also the former's girlfriend. She seems perfectly happy with the killing and is now posing as her dead brother in order to collect a dowry from the father of the dead brother's girlfriend. It was really quite useful to have this as a stream rather than live theatre in order to consolidate the situation in my mind.
The first half involved James Corden apparently involving members of the audience and this worked very well. However, this technique was dropped in the second half which became a more conventional playing out of the contorted situation and its eventual resolution. To be honest, I found the second half lost my concentration a bit but, all in all, thank you National Theatre for putting this on as a contribution to the lockdown.

27 February 2020. Rough for Theatre II and Endgame at the Old Vic

The evening started with the comparatively brief (25 minutes) Rough for Theatre II. It is an extraordinary piece with a man standing motionless on a window ledge while two bureaucrats (Alan Cummings and Daniel Radcliffe) process his paperwork – testimonials etc that bear on his worth. It is bleak, so bleak, but funny and staged with precision.

The main item was Endgame with Cummings playing the always seated Hamm and Radcliffe the always standing Clow. Also with us are Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell, housed in a pair of wheelie bins. The staging was precise and Hamm spat his words out as poor Clow ran around obeying his wishes. His was a life of routine at the beck and call of his master. Nagg and Nell added a completely surreal element to what was already an unusual situation.

I enjoy Beckett’s words for their own sake, no matter what he is getting at and so it was with this evening. There are so many lines that seem to capture something about our human existence. If only I could remember them.

I didn’t feel this was an outstanding rendition of the play but cannot quite put my finger on the reason. It just did not electrify me nor, I felt, the rest of the capacity audience. Each of the actors was great and the production was clever but somehow it did not quite come together with a real bang. Nevertheless, I’m glad I went.

26 February 2020. The Visit at the National Theatre

Overall, I enjoyed this play but it certainly had its shortcomings. On the plus side, the acting by Lesley Manville was superb. She could easily have tipped into over-acting the way she went for it, but it always stayed the right side of that line as simply energetic, precise and withering. She plays the richest woman in the world, Claire Zachanassian, who at a ripe old age has returned to her home town of Slurry. It is a town down on its luck and hoping she’ll bail them out. Indeed she will – but at a price. She offers a billion dollars as long as the man who wronged her in her teens, Alfred Ill played by Hugo Weaving has his life ended. He regards the past as past but she fiercely nurses the grievance of having been made pregnant and then portrayed as an easy lay by Alfred and his witnesses all those years ago. Indeed, two of those who lied to attest they and others had fucked Claire (the play’s language) are on stage as a pair of castrated and blinded oddities.

So we are left to see how the town reacts to this bargain. On the face of it, there is outright rejection but in fact the billion proves too tempting. The problem is that this is all dragged out over three and a half hours (albeit with two intervals) and I think the real  criticism is that the town’s selling itself to the filthy lucre could have been so much more interestingly handled. There was no real sense of tension or of a psychological journey. This seems down to Tony Kushner’s re-writing of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s original play.

This was a lavish NT production with full use made of the Olivier’s facilities particularly the revolving stage as well as its budget for actors. We had a full stage including children who put on the After School Tumblers show for Claire. Despite this, the theatre was by no means full, perhaps because of the mixed reviews that complained of its length. For me, the performance by Lesley Manville made it worthwhile but I’d hate to catch it on a day when she was replaced by her understudy.  

25 February 2020. Dances at a Gathering and The Cellist at ROH

Originally sold as New Marston, new Scarlett, the latter was postponed and substituted by Dances at a Gathering, choreographed by Jerome Robbins. It is a very soothing, transporting 65 minutes  offering mainly pairs of dancers to display their talents to the piano music of Chopin. The various pieces are mainly abstract but with some a storyline clearly applies - e.g., a reluctant boyfriend. I'm not sure it is something that will linger in my mind for many weeks but it certainly provided a contrast with quotidien life.
The Cellist is the new work by Cathy Marston covering the life of Jacqueline du Pre (Lauren Cuthbertson). The incredibly clever innovation was having her cello represented by a dancer (Marcelino Sambe). This enabled a very moving portrayal of an eternal triangle between the musician, the cello and her husband (Matthew Ball). The 65 minutes of this piece passed quickly (more rapidly than the Dances I thought), and left me with a feeling of sadness - evoked by the cello anyway and magnified by the choreography.
Overall, this was a memorable evening and the dancers gained well-deserved applause, as did the pianist for the first piece and cellist for the second.

24 February 2020. Pass Over at the Kiln

This new play by Antoinette Nwandu received a good review in the FT and so I made a booking. I was surprised at how easy it was to get a ticket and how many empty seats there were on the night. This seemed a shame as it is a very interesting play, excellently acted and staged.
The two central characters, Moses (Paapa Essiedu) and Kitch (Gershwyn Eustache jnr) spend the days and nights sparring with each other in a way that feels endlessly repetitive - the playwright makes clear its roots in Becket's Godot. The focus of their attention is the Police (po-pos) who pick upon and humiliate black men like them. Their day is interrupted by the arrival of Mister - a white preppy young man who has lost his way to his mother. There follows an interchange punctuated by misunderstandings (e.g., the young man's name is Master), after which he departs.The same actor re-appears as a policeman (ossifer) and the play proceeds to it's grim conclusion with the re-appearnce of Mister who denies all knowledge of encountering the two men earlier, draws a gun and shoots Moses dead.
This was a sobering 80 minutes, brilliantly acted and I ended up buying the text to re-visit some of the subtleties I felt I had probably missed along the way.

20 February 2020. Nora: A Doll's House at the Young Vic

I really liked this clever production which split Nora's role into three. One was from 1918 whose undoing was a loan agreement; the second was 1968 who had a credit card debt and the third was contemporary with a payday loan. They had the deportment of their eras but their issues were the same. So too was the essential attitude of the controlling husband - played by just the one Luke Norris. Whilst his diction altered to suit the era, his controlling and essentially unsympathetic attitude remained the same - both to his wife and to his employee who was to be made redundant at Christmas time.
The synchronisation between the three Nora's coming in and out of role and also adopting the role of the friend was faultless, and also not a distraction. I found the whole 105 minutes engaging and I was gripped to see the story unfold. The critics were united in their three stars which seemed to me ungenerous.

19 February 2020. Acosta Danza Up Close at ROH

This evening at the Linbury with the dancers of Carlos Acosta's company lived up to its name in the intimate setting of the Linbury. From my seat in Row D the dancers seemed a towering presence with the very effective lighting that was employed.
The evening consisted of five pieces as follows:
El cruce sobre el Niagara. Two male dancers, the one taking a few minutes to cross to the other and then dancing together to the music of Messiaen. Dressed only in thongs, this was arresting imagery.
Impronta. This piece for a solo female concluded the first half of the evening. It was brief and felt a bit like an exhibition piece.
Soledad. This very clear story of a love-hate couple opened the second half. It had its amusements but seemed a bit obvious to me.
Mundo Interpretado. I like this quite abstract piece for six dancers. I'm not sure why the reviews I read took against it but there we are.
Two. This solo by Costa himself rounded off the evening. The lighting was incredible, putting him into a tube with the trace of his limbs moving almost as if they had lights attached.

11 February 2020. Far Away at the Donmar

This Caryl Churchill play certainly forces the audience to puzzle out what exactly is going on. It starts out fairly straightforwardly with a child coming downstairs in the middle of the night to her Aunt and telling her about the scene of violence she has witnessed outside in the farmyard. We surmise she is staying with the Aunt and Uncle to escape a war going on. She is sworn to secrecy by the Aunt and we move with an enormous jolt to the next scene. Here we are in a workshop with two people making hats - a man and a woman. The woman is new to it and we are left wondering is this the girl grown up? They are very elaborate/ theatrical, Ascot-like hats and we see their two creations in various stages of assembly. Next we switch to the most arresting scene of the evening - a parade of prisoners in prison garb but also wearing hats, including the two we have seen being made. This is an extraordinary scene, with a concentration camp resonance to it. The prisoners are arrayed on a dual-layered platform before, we learn, being burned with their hats - except for the winning hat which goes to a museum. This time the winner is the creation of the woman in the workshop.
We then switch scenes again completely and have two woman and a man (query aunt, niece and uncle) discussing the progress of the world at war in which animal species and objects of nature (rivers etc) have taken sides (the elephants are with the Dutch). It is on this surreal note that the play, seemingly abruptly, ends. As usual, some in the audience start clapping before drawing breath, which is a shame because I felt it needed a pause to collect one's thoughts. Anyway, the acting was excellent and deserved more whole-hearted applause than it got from an audience somewhat puzzled and shocked. Equally, the direction by Lyndsey Turner and particularly the design by Lizzie Clachan made this a 45 minutes to remember. It had an Orwellian quality to it and transported us to a world where humans were still living their lives but against an extraordinary backdrop of war. Or, that's what I thought.

10 February 2020 Poet in da corner at Royal Court

This was a high-energy 70 minutes as the story of Debris Stevenson unfolded, told through the vehicle of Dizzee Rascal's music - particularly the album Boy in da corner. The story itself is thought provoking - she is a girl growing up in east London with mormon parents, who by the time the story is told has become a teacher of poetry. As a white girl, she is accused by her old friend SS Vyper (Jammz) of appropriating his stuff and failing to acknowledge its provenance. So we have both the tale of her upbringing and her relationship with her childhood friends (both the specific case and the more general white-black relationship) to think about. All this with the innovative vehicle of grime music in a theatre located in perhaps the most prosperous and privileged London neighborhood.
The more I reflect on it, the more positive I feel, joining the raft of recommending reviewers from the 2018 original and this revival.

8 February 2020. Aisha and Abhaya at the Linbury

This was a visually stunning event that started as a film and turned to dance after about quarter of an hour before reverting briefly to film towards the end. The film by Kibwe Tavares showed two refugees washed up on an island - fully dressed and seemingly with a magical box - a memory box. It was beautiful if somewhat confusing (or as the ROH put it, fantastical) to watch, projected across the full size of the front of the stage. Gradually, the group of Rambert dancers was revealed and they took over the action. The choreography by Sharon Eyal was extraordinary and to me felt like looking at movement with a strobe - yet there was no strobe. After about 45 minutes the film came back - projected on the rear of the stage and the dancers left. This revealed a gunman killing the girls' grandmother, thereby explaining their fleeing.
The critics reviews were generally an unfavourable two stars, based on the lack of cohesion between the dance and film. This seemed a fair point but each of the two inputs - plus the music by Ori Lichtik and GAIKA - was sufficiently extraordinary to make it a very worthwhile 65 minutes.
The ROH website had a comprehensive synopsis of the piece that explained how the dance and film knitted together with the same characters but this was far from obvious without such explanation.

10 January 2020. Fairview at the Young Vic

This was an extraordinary theatrical event which tipped into the surreal in the third and final section. It all starts off ordinary enough as a somewhat tense woman prepares for her mother's birthday party, ending up fainting with the pressure. After this half hour, the action is repeated silently with the sound over of pundits discussing what race they'd choose to be. Gradually this commentary morphs entirely into the pundits commentating (mainly in derogatory terms) on what the family are doing. Then finally is the surreal bit as the brother, daughter's friend and granny make their appearance. Finally we end up with the mainly white audience invited to come on stage and see things from the black actors' viewpoint.
I certainly felt the impact of an extraordinary 90 minutes but I cannot claim to have got fully the messages that were being conveyed by Jackie Sibblies Drury. The reviews were generally good for this sellout production directed by Nadia Latif. The fact that the play won the Pullitzer prize added to the hype and certainly the creativity made this one to see.

7 January 2020. As you like it at the Barbican

I'm afraid I did not really get on with this RSC production. It seemed gimmicky and to end up a bit of a mess. Somehow, the flow of the play got lost and I felt we ended up with isolated scenes. I did not think the sudden transformation at the end of Act One to our observing the backstage worked - quite the opposite; it was lost on me. Equally the rather silly bits of audience participation seemed a distraction.  Some of the acting was good, in particular Lucy Phelps as Rosalind but on the other hand Sophie Stanton's delivery of the 'all the world's a stage' and seven ages masterpiece felt very underpowered.
All in all, this felt like an irritating waste of time and money - so different from the National's production four years ago. My biggest beef is that all the distractions completely caused me to lose the thread of the story. The only positives for me were some of the acting and the extraordinary giant figure that emerged and served as a backdrop for the final scenes. That was, to be fair, amazing and rather beautiful.

6 January 2020. A Kind of People at the Royal Court

This thought-provoking play at the Royal Court was excellently acted and deserved the applause it received. Essentially, it represented a challenge to the white majority in the audience to ponder the  biases and sense of superiority which lie endemic in our unconscious templates for viewing people and situations.
We have two friends and colleagues - one black (Gary) and the other white (Mark) - who work as white goods repairmen.  In the opening act, it's Mark birthday which he is celebrating in Gary and his wife's (Nicky) flat. Also there are Gary's sister, Karen, and their Asian friends Mo and Anjum.
Things take a rapid dive when Victoria, the boss of Gary and Mark who has tagged along gets drunk and betrays her patronising and racist attitudes, demanding that Gary teaches her to dance like a black woman and patting his head in the process.
Everyone is appalled and she is bundled into a taxi. However, the incident weighs on Gary's mind and he confronts Victoria back at work, fully supported by his friend Mark. Victoria is keen to brush it off as too many drinks and denies any prejudice. However, her attitudes are again under the spotlight when Gary fails to get a promotion to team-leader event though he is apparently better qualified than the white candidate who is successful. This incident provokes a crisis and unfolding of Gary's world. Gary quits work much to the anxiety of Nicky who is worried about the implications for their rent and the future of their three children. She adds fuel to Gary's fire by going round to see if she can broker a reconciliation with Victoria. This ends in failure and when it is leaked by Mark it serves as a bitter blow to Gary who decides to walk out of his marriage.
In a twist which seemed less plausible, Mark now makes a move on Nicky which she firmly rejects and puts an end to their friendship. However, the incident leads us to question the genuineness of his professed friendship towards Gary. Nicky's tensions reach a boiling point which she vents on their young son who has a habit of urinating on his school uniform. Karen steps in and takes the children to her house and we have Nicky in a state of well-acted breakdown, followed by a final scene of her reconciling with Gary.
All in all, it was a riveting 95 minutes and one which conveyed very clearly the black perspective of the prejudices they perceive in society - even down to his wife's attitude that she needs to step in and sort things out. Of course, this isn't all necessarily due to race but the play shows the logic of the perception.
It is a well-constructed play with all the characters adding depth. Mo and Anjum's role is particularly interesting. They are a minority but they seem to have better adapted to playing the system - They rent a flat near a good school as their Plan B should their not particularly gifted son fail the 11+. He is being co-tutored with Gary and Nicky's boy. Both boys fail, Gary and Nicky's by a couple of decimal points. Unfortunately, they have no Plan B and the friendship with Mo and Anjum comes to a halt at this event, with Nicky disgusted by their gaming the system.
The acting, direction and set were all great and this was a very worthwhile evening I thought.

3 January 2020. SnowFlake at the Kiln

This was a seemingly straightforward play by Mike Bartlett, pointing out the destructiveness of power relationships and of belittling remarks.
The first act features a solo as the 43 year old widowered Dad, Andy, rehearses and prepares for the showing up of his estranged daughter at a Christmastime reunion he has planned in the neutral territory of the village hall. Natalie arrives, ostensibly to collect some plates for an event. She works the conversation around to Andy's reason for being there and starts advising him on the best approach - to listen and apologise. She is trying to point out that perhaps he has never really listened to his daughter of given her views proper respect. He dismisses his behaviours as normal family banter and ends up rowing with Natalie at which point the estranged daughter Maya shows up. We now realise that Maya and Natalie are in a relationship and Natalie was trying to smooth the ground for a reconciliation between Maya and her father because the rift is causing trouble to the two women's relationship.
Essentially, the action then involves Andy coming to see the insidious effect that his power play had had on his daughter. He had never got out of treating her as a child and she was sick of not having her voice heard and being treated as always of secondary importance. In particular, he had a condescending attitude that made fun of her ideas, in a subtle way putting them down. Even the protest is itself the subject of mockery - you're a snowflake. This could be seen as controlling behaviour but the play seemed to have it as thoughtless habit. Either way,  we had a powerful illustration of how destructive this dynamic can be.
Some of the reviews seemed to focus on the substance of what these generations fought over and in particular that he voted for Brexit while Maya did not. However, to me it was far less the detail of the topics but the way in which the father treated his daughter's views that mattered and was the take-away from the evening.
Excellently acted, the play ends with a rather trite reconciliation between everyone - but then it is a Christmas play.