Joseph Fiennes (Gareth Southgate). Photo: Marc Brenner

Dear England by James Graham – National Theatre: Olivier

James Graham’s eye for a story is legendary, and Dear England is the latest example of his ability to make theatre from current events that seem impossible to dramatise. In the case of Gareth Southgate’s England team, the subject of this play, surely we also already know all about it. How can there be new drama to uncover from the most scrutinised role in Britain apart, perhaps, from that of the Prime Minister? Graham, director Rupert Goold and movement directors Ellen Kane and Hans Landgoff conjure something surprisingly and engrossing, and succeed in holding a mirror up to society in a way that dramatists find exceedingly difficult to achieve.

Movement is the key to staging a story that revolves around games of football that can’t, essentially, be show. The England team are constantly moving, interacting, cutting shapes and reflecting the themes of togetherness and mutual support in their stage presence. It works brilliantly, to the extent that I entirely forgot we were in the often cavernous Olivier Theatre. Goold’s team conquers the space with aplomb, backed by a simple set from Es Devlin of neon circles that define the space, and lockers that loosen its configuration. The task of playing people who are both famous and very much alive is also tackled with aplomb. The cast is universally excellent, with special mentions for Adam Hugill, who has a lot of fun with Harry Kane’s infamously deadpan delivery; Gunnar Cauthery who plays a remarkable quartet of roles as Gary Lineker, Sven Goran Eriksson, Boris Johnson and Wayne Rooney; Sean Gilder, who plays Sam Allardyce, Fabio Capello and Physio Phil and showcases some smooth dance skills; and Kei Matsena as a sceptical Raheem Sterling. But everyone is good – Josh Barrow as Jordan Pickford, Ebenezer Gyau as Bukayo Saka, Ryan Whittle as Eric Dier, John Hodgkinson as Greg Clarke/Gianni Infantino/Matt Le Tissier, Lewis Shepherd as Delle Alli, Darragh Hand as Marcus Rashford. The ensemble is a pleasure to watch as they bring the spiky dressing room dynamics to life.

The stars of the show are Joseph Fiennes, who seems weirdly born to play Southgate. He is entirely convincing as the manager who wants to bring humanity, respect and shared feelings to the team as a way to reflect and enable a changing society. His trademark is sincerity, never able to quite forget his career defining England penalty miss, and Graham makes an intriguing case for him as an under-the-radar pioneer and something of a hero. He is supported in his work by psychologist Pippa Grange, fighting and overcoming sexism and doubt, a role for which Gina McKee is also perfect.

Graham treads a tightrope by fictionalising current lives, but he writes with responsibility and manages to deliver a drama that treats its subjects with respect, except the few that don’t deserve it. The only characters to come out of the play with their reputations reduced are former FA Chairman Greg Clarke, who resigned in 2020 after make a series of racist comments in, of all places, a DCMS Select Committee hearing, born-again conspiracy theorist Le Tissier and Sam Allardyce, who can have no complaints. Graham is clearly fascinated by the tensions of squaring a philosophy that winning is not everything with the pressure to win, which never goes away. Since Southgate adopted a different approach to high-level sport management, the England cricket team has taken up the same attitudes. It’s all about entertainment and if you trust yourself, the results will come. We will find out soon whether the media and the public will lose patience, or whether the revolution can be sustained.

Modest by Ellen Brammer, music by Rachel Barnes – Kiln Theatre, London

Middle Child, a confident and exciting ‘gig theatre’ group from Hull, bound into the Kiln Theatre with a highly entertaining piece of perked up history, performed by a drag cast. The story of Elizabeth Thompson, nearly the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy, is an intriguing piece of re-remembered history. Thompson’s Crimean War picture, ‘Roll Call’, was a public sensation at the RA’s 1874 Summer Exhibition, putting pressure on the Academy to formally recognise her. Several years of machinations followed but in 1879, following further public success despite the RA’s best efforts, she missed out on election by two votes.

So far, so worthy – but that’s not how Middle Child do things. Elizabeth, played by Emir Dineen, throws herself at the drama of her role in a flame dress, fabulously talented and absurdly self-centred. She fights a set of ludicrous RA fops gleefully played by LJ Parkinson, Fizz Sinclair and Isabel Adomakoh Young. Fizz also plays her suffragette-poet sister Alice, while Libra Teejay is both non-binary Bessie and Queen Victoria. Jackie Bardelang is Millais. They mash period dialogue with amusingly contemporary interludes (Queen Victoria on seeing the exhausted soldiers of ‘Roll Call’: “They are fucked!”). There are songs, by Rachel Barnes, including the RA Committee number ‘We Are Men’. Directed by Luke Skilbeck and Paul Smith, Modest is a riotous and completely contemporary evening, refusing to take anything seriously as a remarkably effective way to get the message across.

Photo: Harry Elletson

My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar by Valentina Andrade, Elizabeth Alvarado, Tommy Ross-Williams and Lucy Wray – Brixton House, London

The four women who perform ‘My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar’ take over the Brixton House stage in a wave of energy. All are Latinx (that’s the non-gender specific version of Latino/a) but from different backgrounds, living in South London and dealing with the lazy, ignorant and racist assumptions that come their way on a daily basis. But the show, created by four writers but based on the experiences of two of them – Valentina Andrade and Elizabeth Alvarado – is a celebration, and a reclaiming of narrative agency. Framed by ragged-edged, authentic scenes in which the performers discuss their experiences, to whoops of support from a large Latinx contingent in the audience, is a story of campaigners infiltrating an unnamed bank: evidently HSBC, prosecuted in 2011 for enabling Colombian and Mexican drug cartels to launder drug money on a huge scale. Characters pose as cleaners to obtain evidence of illegal transactions, while a family drama plays out between sisters.

The show is an engaging, sometimes wild ride. The simple but effective set, by Tomás Palmer, and lighting by Roberto Esquenazi Alkabes, cleverly delivers bedsits, cleaning cupboards and City office atriums. the four performers, Yanexi Enriquez, Cecilia Alfonso-Eaton, Pia Laborde-Noguez and Nathaly Sabino channel the energy of London’s young, increasingly visible Latinx community. What the script lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in its urgent need to tell stories that are only now bursting into theatres – with shows such as this, and Guido Garcia Lueches’ Playing Latinx. We can expect to see much more of this group of writers and performers, and the excitement, political insight and entertainment they bring to the stage.

My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey Through the First Folio – by Greg Doran

Review published by Plays International

Covid its aftermath felt like an era shift for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2020, for the first time since 1879, there was no summer season at Stratford-upon-Avon as theatre across the globe temporarily ceased to exist. It would take three years to return to a pre-pandemic programme. In the meantime, Artistic Director Gregory Doran had stepped down, following the death of his husband and the RSC’s lead actor, Sir Anthony Sher. In the circumstances, publishing a book is an achievement, but Doran’s account of his life in Shakespeare is more than that. It is an inspiring piece of writing that reveals Doran’s complete commitment to Stratford, Shakespeare and the stage, while remaining overwhelmingly modest. It leaves me thinking that we have underestimated a director, who should rank alongside the Stratford legends who first drew him into theatre.

Doran’s all-encompassing fascination with Shakespeare defines the book, and his career. As a Lancashire schoolboy, a trip to Stratford to see Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson role-swapping in ‘Richard II’ had him hooked for life, and he was soon playing Richard himself on the school stage and hitchhiking down the M6 to see shows. He joined the RSC as an actor in 1987, falling for Anthony Sher while playing opposite him in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, the start of a 28-year relationship. They married in 2005, on the first day civil partnerships between same sex couples became legal. While Sher became an acting legend, Doran soon  moved into directing. His first RSC show was his 1999 ‘Henry VIII’, and he went on to direct almost the entirety of Shakespeare’s First Folio (apart from ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’). The plays provide ‘My Shakespeare’ with its structure, as Doran devotes a chapter to each play from his first production, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in 1979, to his 2022 ‘Richard III’ with Arthur Hughes. He achieves several things at once, producing a fascinating memoir of a theatrical era, an extensive study of Shakespeare through textual analysis, and a moving account of his relationship with Sher. 

For Stratford watchers, the book is essential. Doran packs it with insightful and often very funny anecdotes. He recalls being grilled by some humourless Americans about the appropriateness of presenting a play “where a husband drugs his wife and makes her submit to bestial intercourse with a donkey” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, naturally). He recalls the spell-binding moment when Sher, as Shylock, addressed his ‘pound of flesh’ speech to the apartheid South African cultural attaché, squirming inches away in his front row seat. He tells us how Michael Pennington agreed to replace Alan Bates in the title role of Timon of Athens at two weeks’ notice. We discover that when David Tennant’s Hamlet opened for booking at the Novello Theatre in 2008, selling out in 10 minutes, calls to the box office accounted for 10 per cent of the UK’s telephone network capacity. If you find this sort of theatrical detail fascinating, ‘My Shakespeare’ will keep you very happy.

Doran is not someone to blow his own trumpet. He is fully committed to his productions, but freely admits when he did not achieve what he wanted, or the press hated the result. He also acknowledges the company’s ups and downs. He experienced the near meltdown in the early 2000s when Adrian Noble pulled the company out of its permanent London base at the Barbican, before resigning. He too has received criticism for, amongst other things, the quality of new writing, the failure to reopen the RSC’s third theatre, The Other Place, and the lack of a strong cohort of Shakespearian directors to provide a succession plan. However, the pressures Doran has worked under have greatly limited his room for manoeuvre, especially the continued lack of a London base, a problem that probably has no solution. And he has delivered a roll call of great productions: Tennant in ‘Hamlet’, Patrick Steward and Harriet Walter’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Sher and Harriet Walter in ‘Macbeth’, Sher’s Falstaff and his King Lear, and impressive lesser Shakespeare’s including ‘Henry VIII’, ‘King John’ and ‘Timon of Athens’. The live-streamed rehearsals performances of the ‘Henry VI’ plays during the pandemic were brave, ground-breaking and fascinating.   

However, Doran does more than just account for his time at Stratford. He also provides us with a lifetime’s worth of textual analysis, packing the book with interpretation of the plays he directed. When he applied, successfully, for the Artistic Director job he set out to emphasise ‘Shakespeare’ in RSC, rather than the ‘Company’ of his predecessor, Michael Boyd. He begins rehearsals not with a read-through, but an exploration of the text as the cast paraphrases each other parts to understand what the play is saying. Doran delights in this process, and it becomes clear how much he is influenced by the RSC’s the company’s ‘grandparents’ as he describes them, director John Barton and voice coach Cicely Berry. There is no greater tribute than to say that much of the book reminds me of the live workshops Barton sometimes conducted, which were rigorous, rich, rewarding and unashamedly obsessed with the text.   

Doran will be succeeded at Stratford by the duo of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, both of whom have considerably less Shakespearian experience than him. This has led some to question whether the tradition of Barton and Berry, who essentially created the modern craft of Shakespearian performance, has ended. Doran says “I have one special hope: that all those who come after me at the RSC will maintain the discipline and craftsmanship that Shakespeare demands”. His legacy to the company must surely be to establish the words that Shakespeare wrote as the RSC’s core rationale. After all, as he points out, “In Shakespeare’s day you went to ‘hear’ a play.” 

Dickie Beau © Robin Fisher

Re-Member Me by Dickie Beau – Hampstead Theatre, London

Dickie Beau’s one-man show is an original, charming and clever project. The evening is presented as a theatrical history of, or meditation on, Hamlet and those who have played him. In fact, it is a more a queer history told through the medium of Hamlet. Beau, in full Chariots of Fire running gear plus rainbow headband, is a very appealing stage presence, drawing us into his research – a series of interviews with some of those who worked front and backstage at the National Theatre in 1989. The date is significant because it is when Daniel Day-Lewis dropped out of the lead role in Richard Eyre’s production of Hamlet, still a somewhat notorious theatrical event. But, while this remains well remembered, his replacement by Ian Charleson, of Chariots of Fire fame, who went on to give the performance of his life – perhaps the best Hamlet of them all – while suffering with AIDS and only months from death, seems to have faded from memory, Charleson was the first celebrity whose death was publicly acknowledged to have been caused by AIDS, and his Hamlet an unforgettable experience for those lucky enough to see him, and a social milestone.

Beau’s role in bringing this ignored history to the stage is as an interpreter, not least because he is a lip-sync artist. He takes this obscure stage technique and makes it sing, sliding effortlessly into the words and personalities of interviewees including a hilarious John Gielgud, and Day Lewis’s dresser. The way he channels long-departed characters is almost spooky, and deeply impressive. His interview material is full of insights, including the dresser slipping the cloak from Day Lewis’s shoulders as he weeps in his dressing room to give to a white-faced Jeremy Northam, going on halfway through the show. The one-night only production of ‘Bent’ staged to launch Stonewall, with a heroic performance from an ailing Charleson, is recreated from the memories of those who were present.

The structure of the show lacks a little clarity. A significant amount is pre-recorded and shown on screens, where four Beaus voice conversations about Charleson’s Hamlet between characters including Richard Eyre, Ian McKellen and Sean Matthias. While these play, Beau himself seems wasted as he rearranges the stage, while the screen has similarly to be kept occupied when he is performing live. The Hampstead Theatre’s broad stage is not the ideal setting for a show that would set a smaller venue alight. But it is hard to hold this against a show that manages to be so likeable and funny while performing an important service in educating a new generation about recent history, so quickly forgotten. But Beau, who voices ‘Withnail and I’s Uncle Monty to acknowledge that he “will never play the Dane” should put himself front and centre even more, performing live. He may not be Hamlet, but the audience loves him.

Lenny Henry. Photo by Tristram Kenton.

August in England by Lenny Henry – Bush Theatre, London

August in England is Sir Lenny Henry’s first play, a one man show which he also performs. As August Henderson, who arrived in London from Jamaica with his mother at the age of eight, he has no difficulty winning the audience over. It’s no surprise that Henry is a charismatic performer, but keeping an audience engaged and entertained for 90 minutes is not easy. To be debuting as a writer/performer at the age of 64 marks an impressive next chapter in a career that continues to fascinate. He just keeps on getting better. The story he tells, of a life threatened by the Windrush scandal, in which the Government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy deported and attempted to deport hundreds of Commonwealth citizens who had lived in the UK for decades. August is a victim, receiving demands from Capita to demonstrate his citizenship, setting impossible levels of proof, and finally being wrestled to the ground on his doorstep by immigration enforcement officers.

This part of the story comes at the very end. The majority of the play is August’s life story, growing up in the Black Country as Henry himself did. His story is funny and engaging, and Henry communicates powerfully with the audience, many of whom clearly recognise his descriptions of Caribbean family life in Britain in the 1960s and 70s. Henry is funny, and the play includes a significant amount of punchline-based material. Every anecdote is rounded off with a joke. These, while amusing, at times undermine the urgent underlying drama, especially during the denouement when August’s arrest involves an exploding shed, an uncomfortable injection of farce just as the play reaches its emotional peak. The Windrush events are also relegated to the very end of the evening. While we have great sympathy with August by that point, knowing his full life story, the balance does not seem quite right.

However, August in England is a high quality entertainment that also packs an emotional punch. August’s personal travails are raw and entirely believable, and when Henry finally breaks down it is truly upsetting. Co-directors Lynette Linton and Daniel Bailey end the show with a series of short video interviews with real Windrush victims, which opens the show up, taking it beyond social history and showing us the brutal and disgraceful reality. The ‘hostile environment’ continues to shame the UK, and Henry plays an important part in revealing the human cost of inhuman government policy.

Photo by Daniel Seiffert

Hate Radio by Milo Rau – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Milo Rau’s Hate Radio takes us into the heart of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when Hutus rose up following the assassination of the President, and slaughtered their Tutsi neighbours using whatever they could lay their hands on. Thirty years on it remains one of humanity’s darkest episodes. As a character in the play notes, it is not just that ordinary people – a priest’s son for example – became enthusiastic murderers, but that they went to extraordinary lengths to torture, rape and mutilate their victims. Up to 662,000 people died.

Orchestrating the killing from an office building in the capital, Kigali, was RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) a pro-Hutu radio station which denounced Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ and broadcast details of their whereabouts so vigilantes could find and kill them. Rau’s play sets the scene with filmed testimony from four genoicide survivors, whose accounts are jaw-droppingly terrible. Then we are in the studio, during an hour-long show with three hosts and their MC/link man, which plays out in real time. We hear the relentless pushing of hatred, the repetition of racial slurs, the historical propaganda and the lies. It is like verbatim theatre, replaying real life events in all its ordinariness and horror. It is relentless and chilling – and extraordinary. It is impossible to turn away for a moment.

The three presenters are real characters: Kantano Habimamba (Diogène Ntarindwa), Valérie Bemeriki (Olga Mouak) and Georges Ruggiu (Sébastien Foucault), all now either in prison or vanished, presumed dead. Their interplay is hosts is horribly convincing, and their voices (the play is in French and Kinyarwanda, with subtitles) pound into our heads through the headphones we wear, making the show seem both intimate and separate, just as real radio does. Some of the moments that stay in the mind pass without comment such as when Kantano, as he was known, takes off his jacket revealing that he the gun strapped to his business shirt. Or they are heart-stopping, especially when the radio show goes to a song, each track played in full. Nirvana’s ‘Rape Me’, complete with enthusiastic drumming from the presenters, is almost impossible to bear. The way Kantano dances wildly in his suit to Reel 2 Reel’s ‘I Like to Move It’ encapsulates the frenzy of killing. And the show’s sign-off song, Joe Dassin’s ‘Le Dernier Slow’, is staggeringly sinister and intensely sad. Hate Radio is a stunning piece of theatre, showing us utter evil in all its ordinariness, and delivering a timely warning. If it happened then, it can happen again.

After the Act: A Section 28 Musical by Breach Theatre – New Diorama Theatre, London

The New Diorama’s Intervention 01, a season with no shows during the second half of 2022 is over. Its aim was to take stock post-Covid, regain excitement, and focus resources on building ambitious work that would not otherwise get staged. On paper, it was a bold and forward thinking, but the test lies in the quality of the work that comes out of the process. Breach Theatre’s After The Act strongly suggests this was an artistically inspired move. Their musical about Section 28 – legislation passed 35 years ago by Margaret Thatcher’s government banning “the promotion of homosexuality” in schools – is a wild, moving, engaged and essential piece of theatre. It tells audiences to look much harder at their assumptions about the supposedly progressive society they live in, and does so from the throes of a brilliantly unhinged party.

Co-writers Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett have devised a verbatim / musical / agitprop / physical theatre with strong echoes of Tammy Faye and the film Blue Jean, but with an identity all of its own. Directed by Billy Barrett the four performers, including Ellice Stevens as well as Tike Mu’tamir, EM Williams and Zachary Willis put on a high energy show. Their movement and physical occupation of the stage is beautifully choreographed, as they create the show’s all-action atmosphere by impersonating an entire dance troupe. The music, played live by composer and musical director Frew and by Ellie Showering, is synth-driven, catchy and entirely appropriate to a show about the 1980s, without entering the realms of pastiche.

While the music is highly entertaining, the show’s power comes from the sophistication of its writing, which draws on deep analysis of the circumstances around the Section 28 controversy. It’s safe to say this the first time anyone has put former Manchester City Council leader Graham Stringer’s protest rally address to music, still less the grimly bigoted Parliamentary speeches made by Conservative MPs Elaine Kellett-Bowman and Jill Knight in support of the bill. The clause stated that a local authority should not “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” It is a shocking piece of hate that had serious consequences for some and gave rise to iconic cultural moments. The ‘invasion’ of BBC News studios by protestors is very entertainingly staged, Nicholas Witchell and Sue Lawley still gaining plaudits today for the way they dealt with those awful lesbians. The accounts of the two women who abseiled into the House of Lords debate on the bill are funny and moving. Breach Theatre also cleverly stage scenes from the pages of Danish children’s book ‘Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin’, which became a lightning rod for the fear and hatred that exploded from the bill’s supporters.

The show boldly switches mood several times. Verbatim-style scenes, including accounts of the experiences of a teenager bullied for being gay and a teacher forced to hide her real self, are powerful and make the arguments against Section 28 by themselves. The clause was only repealed in 2003, showing our society had not progressed nearly as far as people imagined by the early 21st century. Importantly, Breach also makes the link with current debates around Trans rights explicit, pointing out that it remains fundamentally wrong to tell someone they must change who they are. Unfortunately, this message remains as urgent today as it did in 1988. The show is full of invention, variety and sophistication. It is a tribute to the New Diorama’s leadership that they have found a way to support and enable work this good. After the Act is Breach’s best work to date, and an exciting leap forward for a company who have always promised much.

Julius D’Silva, Archie Backhouse, Forbes Masson, Alan Cox, Daniel Boyd and David Yelland. Photo: Alex Brenner

Farm Hall by Katherine Moar – Jermyn Street Theatre, London

After the Nazi defeat in 1945, the Allies flew ten of Germany’s leading nuclear scientists to the UK. They were interned at a farmhouse in Godmanchester, near Cambridge, for six months while their conversations were recorded to discover how close the Nazis had come to producing an atom bomb. While in captivity they heard the news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs which, as holders of Nobel prizes for significant advances in nuclear technology, they had helped to enable. In January 1946 they were all released, and returned to their academic careers in Germany.

This scenario is a ready-made play, a situation where some of the greatest scientific minds of their time are confronted with the consequences of their personal and political actions. The transcripts of the Farm Hall recordings were published in the 1990s, and other plays have been produced using their contents. However, Katherine Moar’s play, which has its first full production at the Jermyn Street Theatre, makes good use of the material to create a compelling drama, in which a large cast is handled well.

Only six of the scientists are represented on stage, a sensible decision which gives each character enough room to develop. Moar boldly holds off discussing the war or nuclear weapons for several scenes, during which the men stage amateur drama, play games, bicker and try not to discuss what really matters. Reality intrudes when a newspaper reports the Soviet capture of parts of East Germany, where Bagge (Archie Backhouse)’s wife lives. The social tensions emerge between characters, and then the political ones. Support for Hitler varies among the group from disengagement (Heisenberg) to clear support (Diebner) and regret that the bomb was not built in time for Germany to use it.

The performers are an excellent group of actors, who play convincingly off one another. Julius D’Silva’s Diebner is awkward and unsociable, but likeable too, a portrait of man who convinced himself that the Nazis were essential to his career. So, in a way, did Heisenberg who Alan Cox plays with an ability to separate himself from the everyday that is both disarming and sinister. He charms his way around his leadership of Hitler’s nuclear weapons programme, leaving enough doubt about whether or not he deliberately worked to stop the bomb being made. Backhouse’s working class Bagge, a wired young man, has most to lose while his friend Weizsäcker (Daniel Boyd) is privileged and connected. Forbes Masson is the most likeable of the group as Hahne, the man who discovered nuclear fission and feels the weight of what he imagines could be 300,000 deaths at Hiroshima. David Yelland’s older Von Laue is difficult and prickly, and the most anti-Nazi of the lot.

Director Stephen Unwin manages the show effectively. He somehow makes the Jermyn Street Theatre’s tiny stage seem like a spacious living room, with plenty of room for all. Designer Ceci Calf’s dilapidated interior with semi-stripped William Morris wallpaper is very atmospheric, and neatly represents the end of a pre-war world. The heart of the play is a prolonged pause, as the cast waits for the 9pm radio bulletin with news of Hiroshima. They listen to Home Service light classical music as the minutes tick down, knowing that nothing will be the same once the clock strikes. There are no clear moral lessons from Moar’s play – the scientists did what they did through fear, expediency, selfishness and a desire to pretend everything was ok, much as people have always acted and always will. Only this time, the consequences were far greater than anything humans had encountered before.