King’s Manor, York

The York Mystery Plays (or York Waggon [sic] Plays) are a series of short medieval dramas re-enacting scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Regularly performed by the city’s guilds during the Middle Ages, they fell out of fashion in the late 16th century and lay dormant for 400 years until a revival for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Even then they didn’t do the plays in their original form, and they have only been performed as they are now from 1998, staged every four years. This year’s cycle explodes onto the streets of York, where it demonstrates exactly why performance has been missed so much since these plays were last staged, and why it matters.

The full York cycle contains 50 plays, of which only around ten are performed each time. The lead role is taken by the guilds, still a presence in York which remains, undoubtedly, the most medieval city in the country. This year, the Guild of Building ‘brought forth’ (as they put it) ‘The Creation to the Fifth Day’, The Gild of Freemen ‘The Fall of Adam and Eve’, The Company of Merchant Taylors ‘The Last Supper’, The Guild of Butchers ‘The Crucifixion of Christ’, The Guild of Media Arts and the Guild of Scriveners ‘The Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene in the Garden’ and the Company of Merchant Adventurers ‘The Last Judgement’. The full 2022 cycle was performed for a seated audience in the garden of King’s Manor, next to the art gallery, after working the city street. Guild members process in full regalia accompanied by the wagons on which performance take place. Each is accompanied by a group of musicians, known as ‘waits’, playing medieval instruments in full Tudor costume, who come not just from York, but across the country.

So far, so entertaining – but what makes the York Mysteries special is their complete, inherent inclusiveness. The plays really do belong to the people of York and everyone takes part, just as they do at some other long-standing communal pageants, for example the Lewes Bonfire parade. The Guilds work with multiple York organisations to bring forth the plays. ‘Adam and Eve’ is performed by 14-year olds from Vale of York School. ‘The Crucifixion’ – which features some daredevil physical work as a full-size cross is raised on a wagon using counterweights, with Christ already attached – is performed by members of the Riding Lights Acting Up company, with a range of disabilities. ‘Herod and the Three Kings’, the only play not involving a guild, is performed by the congregation of St. Luke’s Church who have been involved with the Mysteries from the start. The afternoon (the eight plays take four hours to present) is full of moments that show what this means to those involved, from the careful way a cast member cues in the actor playing Christ with a tap on the foot, to the presentation of honorary guild membership to the teacher who has directed the Vale of York production for years – with which she is clearly delighted.

The plays themselves are presented in varying styles, from a pop-up Creation which allows the Guild of Building to show off their cycloramic skills, to a Last Judgement described as “Art Deco meets dieselpunk” which has drumming archangels, Mad Max demons on stilts and musicians playing the last trumpet, which in this case are medieval and five feet long. The plays culminate with a substantial section of the audience being led through the gates of hell in an impromptu role as ‘the damned’. The performers whisper the instruction “kneel to the Lord God, if you can”. It is an intriguing combination of the extreme and the pragmatic.

The sight of a peasant woman sitting under a tree, texting, and an angel melting into the Saturday afternoon shopping crowd underlines the way these plays, full of people speaking medieval English as though it was a normal thing to do, are part of the way things work in York. At the conclusion, thanks were given to the director, Tom Straszewski who was somehow able to corral this impossible combination of ideas and performers into a coherent whole. True to the spirit of the occasion, he refused to emerge from the shadows where he stood watching, but he will have known that there is nothing quite like people coming together to make something unique happen, and then going back to their modern day lives as though nothing had happened. This is the perfect advertisement for theatre: an unpatronising ritual that assumes everyone has the capacity for the extraordinary, and in doing so unleashes it.

Rock by Chris Bush – Crucible Theatre, Sheffield

Chris Bush’s new play Rock is part of an exciting, ambitious and slightly deranged project to celebrate the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield’s 50th anniversary. Rock is performed alongside Paper and Scissors, by a shared cast, simultaneously in three theatres – the Crucible, the Studio and the Lyceum. While the first two share a building and the Lyceum is next door, it is still a feat of astonishing complexity and, as far as I know, unprecedented. The model is surely Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden, a pair of plays that share a cast and are performed simultaneously, but Bush goes one better. The first achievement, therefore, is that these plays work and that no-one seems out of breathe. Director Anthony Lau must take a great deal of credit simply for getting these works on stage.

The Crucible’s ambition also generates an appropriate level of excitement around the anniversary of a an important regional theatre with a fine 1970s auditorium. Bush’s plays concern Sheffield: its declining manufacturing, the burgeoning redevelopment and gentrification of ex-industrial spaces, and the tensions caused by changing expectation. Rock is also about energy, and the central character Susie (Denise Black) uses the first law of thermodynamics as her reference point – that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. Her father, owner of the failing family scissor works in which all three plays are set, used it as his mantra, but Susie fights back against this and other social assumptions. She is now a faded music scene-ster whose 1980s heyday is over. Held back, partly by her gender, she wants to make something happen for younger generations by turning the factory into a music venue. This brings her into conflict with the factory manager, Omar (Guy Rhys), who thinks it has a future and her sister Faye (Samantha Power) and sister’s wife Mel (Natalie Casey), who plan to redevelop the site. These characters make strategic appearances in Rock but are, we surmise, the focus of the other two plays. Susie, with her frustrations and her thwarted energy, is the focus of Rock, and Denise Black does a very good job of holding the stage, effectively designed by Ben Stones as the cavernous interior of a disused factory.

Despite the careful structuring of themes, there is a sense at times that the action in Rock is being stretched, presumably while something else happens on a different stage. Without seeing all three plays, it is hard to know whether this is a problem in the other two but, despite the remarkable technical achievement of writing and staging the trilogy, it is not entirely obvious that the format serves the material best. There are moments when we would like to hear more from characters who stand and listen to Susie, including her old friend Leo (Andrew MacBean) and photographer Billy (Alastair Natkiel), and perhaps have their say in other scenes on nearby stages. The simultaneous events create a sense of missing out, which is almost unique in theatre which is specifically designed to show the audience the best bits. Rock begins like a farce, with a succession of misunderstandings, and this atmosphere occasionally revives (notably in the form of the two caricatured young singers, who give Generation Z a very bad name indeed). However, the mood seems inconsistent, and the farcical potential is never entirely followed through. Greater commitment to chaos would have been welcome.

Nevertheless, Chris Bush and the Crucible have created a theatrical landmark, an achievement that serves the Crucible’s radical reputation well, and sets a strong marker for the next decade and beyond. This is also the only play I can imagine watching from outside the theatre, tracking the frantic comings and goings between the new building and Lyceum, which must be a performance in themselves.

That Is Not Who I Am by Dave Davidson – Royal Court Theatre, London

(This review consists almost entirely of spoilers)

The nudge-nudge cover story for this play – that it’s the debut by someone who has worked in ‘the security industry’ for 38 years – is fairly transparent, and suspicions are confirmed when the Royal Court’s shop won’t sell you the text before the show starts. Immediately, surtitles confirm this is a ruse, and that the play being performed is actually Lucy Kirkwood’s new piece, ‘Rapture’. However, the misdirection doesn’t stop here. The surtitles claim that an injunction prevents the play from being openly performed because it concerns a real couple and contested events. This too is fictional, but Kirkwood and the Royal Court have gone to great lengths to build mystery around this show because it is concerned with the fate of a couple, Noah and Celeste, whose vague tendency towards conspiracy theories leads them down an increasingly dark path.

Rapture, or whatever the play is really called, has interesting overall intent, but doesn’t quite deliver on its promise. The central couple, with Sienna Kelly as Celeste and Jake Davies as Noah hit it off on a Guardian-style date, at which references to conspiracies such as chemtrails seem just asides. They move in together and have a baby but Noah, without a job, switches to earning a living from running a paranoid Youtube channel. Celeste, a nurse, is drawn in and soon they are refusing the COVID vaccine, becoming recluses and heading into a dead end. The two performers build a convincing sense of mounting disorientation, and the play works hard to undermine a single narrative. The third cast member, Priyanga Burford, plays Lucy Kirkwood, who frames the narrative, lurking on stage to provide explanatory context. (There is a surprise fourth cast member who appears at the very end, but revealing her identity is perhaps a spoiler too far, even for this play.) From Burford, we discover the couple were under surveillance for reasons that are unclear, and that the state may have played a role in their fate – a conspiracy that would justify their paranoia if it could ever be proved which, by definition, it cannot. Naomi Dawson set is rotated by stage hands, revealing the mechanisms behind society’s façade in a way reminiscent of the National Theatre’s 1990s production of J.B. Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’.

Kirkwood’s ambition is admirable and the evening is absorbing in parts but frustrating in others. The fake author and title seems a step too far, more of an in-joke than a contribution to a play that aspires to investigate a modern condition. Similarly, the bugging of the couple which Burford as Kirkwood cannot entirely explain, also plays like a slightly flippant explanation of the playwright’s omnipotent knowledge. Similarly, having Burford on stage as the writer is amusing, but undermines the impacts of the story she tells. These meta-narrative, pseudo-documentary elements deflect from a tragic story, on the whole believable, of ordinary people who look for explanations of what is wrong with the world, and are destroyed by their search – a narrative for our times.

Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth – Apollo Theatre, London

Jerusalem is a big deal. Beginning life at the Royal Court in 2009, it became the most fêted new play of the century, and took off to the extent that Mark Rylance’s performance as John ‘Rooster’ Byron is routinely described as the greatest of our times. So why had I not seen it before its return this summer, with Rylance and Mackenzie Crook reprising their roles? It has many things I appreciate in theatre – an examination of Englishness, rural weirdness and retooled folk culture being three of them. But, after the Royal Court run sold out, it transferred to the Apollo Theatre, one of Shaftesbury Avenue’s Victorian auditoriums which I always find diminish the experience of watching anything, however good, so I avoided it. And then, lured by a similar buzz, I saw Jez Butterworth’s follow-up, The Ferryman, in just such a theatre and hated it to a degree I was not expecting. So I went to see the revived Jerusalem to see if it provided a different perspective on Butterworth’s work. I enjoyed it much more than The Ferryman, but it’s a play with some major problems too.

On the upside, Mark Rylance is remarkable. He undergoes the kind of physical transformation Olivier was famed for, sticking out his chest and cocking his back like a rooster, strutting with a spliff in his mouth. He is very funny, at his best in exchanges with the excellent Mackenzie Crook as Ginger. He is also lost and desperate, a man who’s running out of drugs and dodges. And there is a remarkable moment when he asks Dawn, the mother of his child, who tries to get him to face up to his approaching eviction, to look into his eyes. What she sees there convinces her she needn’t worry – whether it’s the ancient giant he claims to have met near a Little Chef on the A338, or just the depth of his determination. Rooster as a character is very morally ambiguous indeed – selling drugs, ignoring his own young son, using women, living in a fantasy world, and making amusing anecdotes of incidents that are, in reality, grim. This complexity gives Rylance a great deal to play with. The character of Rooster was apparently based on Mickey Lay, of Pewsey in Wiltshire, who spent a lot of time in its many pubs (including The Moonrakers, referenced in the play). Trumping anything Butterworth could invent, he died of a heart attack in 2014, waiting for it to open.

Crook is great too. Jerusalem seemed to launch him into a new, fertile phase of his career leading on to The Detectorists and Worzel Gummidge, two minor tv masterpieces, each examining the pastoral underbelly in different ways. He is a thoroughly likeable, but somewhat tragic figure, deluding himself and doomed to be pushed away by Rooster, for his own good. He is the most sympathetic rogue imaginable.

The set by Ultz is a sight to behold. It’s hard to imagine real trees looking more convincing than the full sized grove filling the stage while the detritus scattered around Rooster’s caravan, from sports car seats to the flag of Wessex, is fascinating in itself.

The play is a riot at times – almost literally when Rooster’s friends form a barricade behind his abandoned sofa and convince themselves they will rampage through the town and burn the ‘new estate’. When the group dynamics click on stage, it works exceptionally well. Ian Rickson, directing, manages the chaos with an expert hand.

On the downside, at three hours it really is too long. With an event-light plot, the running time is an indulgence and the pace sags considerably at various points, including during the final act when the dramatic urgency traditionally picks up. Butterworth seems to be putting off the inevitable resolution (or lack of resolution) which is flagged from the very first scene, when council officers arrive to serve an eviction notice, because the play has to end before the police move in.

The female characters are very limited: two identikit teenagers getting drunk, another dressed as a fairy, and Rooster’s ex-partner Dawn. The impressive Indra Ové makes a great deal of her one real scene, during which Rooster suddenly seems like a wrecker of lives rather than an eccentric. And then there is Wesley’s offstage, nagging wife – a stereotype apparently still alive and kicking. This is at best a missed opportunity and, at worst, regressive writing that will only continue to date this play.

Rooster’s friends are intended, at least in part, to be funny but sometimes what we’re supposed to be laughing at really isn’t amusing. They lech over ‘slappers’, and hold stereotype rural views. Davey doesn’t see the point of going anywhere beyond Wiltshire, and explains how he read about a murder in the paper and realised he didn’t care, because it happened in Wales. The likeability of Rooster’s hangers on is skin-deep, but so is their believability as characters – especially in the first act, when the writing resembles sketch comedy more than stage drama, and they seem like small town types there for us to laugh at. We’re expected to laugh along with their little England views and indulge their destructive behaviour.

I was also troubled by the liberal use of the term ‘gyppo’, by sympathetic and hostile characters alike. It was highly offensive in 2009 and still is. I don’t think Butterworth would consider normalising any other racial slight in the same way. I’m not sure the play can be staged again without edits, which should probably have been made before this run.

However, despite its defects Jerusalem has a performance from Mark Rylance which really lives up to its billing. He, on his own, is reason enough to see the play… if you can get a ticket.

Girl on an Altar by Marina Carr – Kiln Theatre, London

The story of Clytemnestra, whose husband Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter Iphigenia on an altar, slitting her throat with an obsidian knife, as a sacrifice for a wind to carry the Greek ships to Troy, is usually seen from his point of view, at least initially. Marina Carr’s new play retells the story by jumping further forward in the events of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. She begins with the unfathomable act of a father killing his own 10-year old daughter, told from Clytemnestra’s point of view, and focuses on the aftermath. The queen tears her dying daughter from Agamemnon’s arms and, ten years later, he returns victorious to face the consequences of his actions. In Annabelle Comyn’s production, designed by Tom Piper, the world is reduced to the raw materials of Greek myth – blood, wine, and plundered gold – which highlight the eternal, modern question of whether some acts can never be forgiven.

The production is exceptional, riveting the audience to the detail of a marital relationship poisoned beyond repair. Yet, despite what has happened, Clytemnestra still loves Agamemnon while also hating him. Meanwhile, he says “I would do anything to have your good opinion again.” Played by David Walmsley, he is a bullock of a man, all muscle and menace, with tattoo reading “Human error” and the manner of a Liverpudlian crime boss. There is no doubt that killing his daughter was as much about gaining precedence over rival king Achilles in the eyes of the Greek soldiers. Clytemnestra is played by Eileen Walsh as a proud woman – strong, mature, and broken. Her agonised behaviour as she wrestles with a situation that will never be resolved without more killing are a study in mental disintegration. Both actors are excellent, as are the rest of the cast: Nina Bowers as Cassandra, young and all knowing, against her will; Daoni Broni as preening love rival Aegisthus; Kate Stanley Brennan as Cilissa, an Amazonian sidelined as a former slave; and Jim Findley as doomed elder statesmen Tyndareus.

Carr has produced a beautiful piece of writing that lays bare the deep flaws in men’s hearts (and it is the men, rather than the women, who steer the world around them into chaos), and the appalling consequences of arrogance and the pursuit of money and power. She does so, unusually, through a constantly shifting narrative perspectives. Much of the play involves characters, sometimes mid-scene, turning to the audience to explain what is happening from their perspective. Potentially an alienating device, Carr uses it with great skill to ensure the audience is constantly implicated at the heart of the story, compelled to watch in horror and fascination. The play ends with wine – thrown brutally in Clytemnestra’s face and over some of the front row – and a gush of blood that draws gasps from the audience as its soaks the clean, white bedsheets. An exceptional piece of theatre, Girl on an Altar remakes a story that is part of Western cultural heritage, with deceptive ease, as though it could have happened yesterday.

The Father and the Assassin by Anupama Chandrasekhar – National Theatre: Olivier, London

Anupama Chandrasekhar’s new play about Nathuram Godse, the man who murdered – assassinated – Mohandas Gandhi in 1948, is an alarmingly current piece of work, but you wouldn’t know that from watching it. Directed by Indhu Rubasingham and designed by Rajha Shakiry, it is an impressive production that fills the always-tricky spaces of the Olivier Theatre with action and a sense of history. The history is also, at times a problem. The play traces Godse’s life from his childhood, of which little is known other than the arresting fact that his parents brought him up as a girl, believing the male line to be cursed after three older brothers died. Later, he became a follower of Gandhi, and his doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violent protest. However, when the 1947 partition of India led to the deaths of possibly 2 million people, Godse and his friend Narayan Apte, by now followers of Hindu nationalist leader Vinayak Savarkar, blamed Gandhi and shot him dead. It wasn’t their first attempt. They had failed 10 days earlier, but Gandhi, who appeared to almost invite death, continued to refuse security.

this complex story is told on Shakiry’s vast, ramped revolve set and woven cotton backdrop, which could be an early 1970s RSC design. It covers nearly forty years in the growth of the independence movement under Gandhi’s inspired leadership alongside Nehru and Jinnah. It is a history lesson, and there are periods where it seems the drama is telling rather than showing us what happened. The first half seems a little thin, filled out with fictionalised scenes dramatising Godse’s childhood. When the drama includes interactions between characters who seem real and whose responses we can’t predict, it delivers more of a punch. The performances are a delight. Paul Bazely’s Gandhi is a triumph, transforming incrementally from the younger, less familiar man of the 1910s to the stopped, unmistakable figure who became an international icon. He makes us believe entirely in him. Shubham Saraf, as Godse, is entitled and attention seeking. He controls the history as it takes place around him with a flick of the hand, stopping the action when it isn’t telling the story he wants until he finds that events are no longer in his control. Ayesha Darka as Aai, a fictional character from his childhood, takes the story from him. Sagar Arya, as Savarkar, is a strong portrayal of a thoroughly unpleasant character, while Marc Elliott’s Pandit Nehru and Irvine Iqbal’s Mohammed Jinnah work hard to become more than necessary historical figures. Nadeem Islam stands out as a school watchman who falls fouls of the British. He charmingly conjures his seven children through gestures as a long line, decreasing in size. Ankur Bahi is also engaging, both as Godse’s childhood friend and as the amusingly camp tailor for whom he works.

However, there is a limit to how much value we can gain from a play that tells an important story – the atrocities committed by the British in India and the terrifying consequences of partition being not nearly well enough known – but only in a partial way. No explanation is really offered for the 1947 death toll, the causes of which are complex as with any civil war. The decision to focus on Godse is controversial. His reputation has, astonishingly, been on the rise in the Hindu nationalist atmosphere of Narendra Modhi’s India. This may provide a justification for reexamining him, and showing him to be what he was: deluded, inadequate and inconsequential. However, without background reading the significance and possibly the point of this play is easily missed. Instead, it is not obvious that we need a play to show us that a pair of notorious killers were, indeed, not pleasant people. Nor is it clear why the men who took Gandhi’s voice from him deserve to have their own given back to them.

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare – Globe Theatre, London

Published in Plays International

The memory of repeated lockdowns may be fading now, but the return to normality is a work in progress. The Globe’s main, outdoor theatre has not staged shows with a full audience since the summer of 2019, so the opening of its summer season with Lucy Bailey’s production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ feels like an occasion. There is a full house and a buzz of expectation among the groundlings, who make this space such a distinctive experience. Fortunately, the Globe is ready with a show that is judged just right: a cathartic release of collective energy, and a fine account of one of Shakespeare’s most purely enjoyable plays.

Directors tend to emphasise the shade in ‘Much Ado’, sometimes at the expense of the light, but perhaps the mood is changing. Roy Alexander Weise’s recent Royal Shakespeare Company production used futurist fantasy, and Bailey handles the off-stage conflict with a light touch. Set in a post-World War II Messina, Joanna Parker’s designs turn the Globe’s stage into an ivy-hung loggia, with lawns suitably worn from a summer’s use. It is an idyllic refuge. With war so prominent in the news over the last three months, Bailey credits the audience with the ability to imagine what is not shown, while appreciating the brief refuge from hostilities the play provides. Don Pedro, Benedict and Claudio, returning from war, arrive in a world run by women, who seem to be getting on fine without them. We see Lucy Phelps’ Beatrice and Nadi Kemp-Sayfi’s Hero joking with the gender-swapped Leonata (Katy Stephens) and Antonia (Joanne Howarth) and their household, before the advent of Don Pedro (Ferdy Roberts) and his friends trigger an explosion of sexual tension. Soon, Phelps is sparring with Benedict (Ralph Davis), while Don Pedro sets up Claudio (Patrick Osbourne) with Hero. Within a few scenes the pair are engaged to be married, although Hero has not uttered a word. Her lines come later, when everything begins to unravel, but the sense that the power has shifted away from the women is clear.

The cast work together with an infectious enthusiasm and an ease for which Bailey must take a great deal of credit. The relationship between Leonata and Antonia is a delight to watch, as they snip at each other in sisterly fashion – sometimes literally, as Joanne Howarth wields a pair of shears – before singing a duet together in a moment that begins as comic, but becomes surprisingly moving. Stephens’ captivating performance reinvents the role completely. Ferdy Roberts’ Don Pedro is authoritative and a little bit silly in equal measure. The play’s comic Keystone cops scenes can be hard to handle, but the comic scenes are very funny. George Fouracres comes into his own as Dogberry. He struggle to maintain his focus, apparently on the verge of zoning out as though he had taken something potent before heading out to work that morning – Captain Mainwaring on Fentanyl. When he lurches towards the pit on his bicycle and crowd surfs his way off stage, the audience laughs all the harder in their alarm at what he might do next. The action is sound-tracked by four women playing accordions, who lounge on the lawns, perch on garden seats and are sometimes drawn into the action.

The performances of Phelps and Davis as the central pair, Beatrice and Benedict, are nuanced and highly entertaining. Phelps shows her range with a level of physical comedy in complete contrast to her buttoned-up Isabella in the RSC’s 2019 ‘Measure for Measure’. Clever and cool in the first scenes, she quickly loses her composure and behaves with a spectacular clumsiness. She is hilarious eavesdropping on Leonata, while becoming hopelessly entangled in a badminton net, but her klutz-like tendencies also make sense of her sudden request that Benedict should kill Claudio, which she blurts out in a moment of uncontrollable emotion. Davis, as Benedict, is similarly accomplished – funny and charming, one of the lads, but capable of stepping away and seeing more clearly than any of his friends. His eavesdropping scene is a delightful piece of physical comedy, blazing a chaotic trail across the stage.

The dark elements of the play seem less important than the comedy. Don John (Oliver Huband), the bastard brother bent on evil deeds, is a pantomime villain – a stock role essential to create the jeopardy that prefigures a happy ending. And there definitely is a happy ending. The show sweeps the audience along with it, the performers soaking up the energy from the pit. Bailey has done an excellent job providing entertainment, but her production takes the play seriously too. She gives the cast space to fully inhabit their roles and to bring out the best in one another, and she never feels the need to patronise the audience. Her production is that rare thing, a Shakespearian comedy that makes everyone laugh without try too hard. It is the perfect play for a summer’s evening by the Thames, and a welcome reminder of why the Globe remains a venue like no other.

Abigail by Stephen Gillard and Laura Turner – The Space, Isle of Dogs, London

‘Abigail’, a new play by Stephen Gillard and Laura Turner, explores what may have happened to Abigail Williams who, as a child, was a protagonist in the Salem Witch Trials. Probably 12 years old, she led accusations of witchcraft against members of her household that resulted in the execution or death in prison of 20 people. Abigail, whose character was established by Arthur Miller in his Salem play ‘The Crucible’, left town with her friend Mercy Lewis as the consequences of her actions became apparent. She then disappeared from history, apart from a solitary report that she had become a prostitute in Boston. Gillard and Turner (who also plays the lead) run with this idea, imagining how Mercy and Abigail might have faired in 1690s Boston. Their ingenious concept provides a platform to explore the position of women in a 17th century Massachusetts city, and of bisexual women in particular.

Historically, Abigail admitted during the trials to dancing in the woods with other women, notably her cousin Betty and Tituba, her family’s slave. The play explores her sexual relationship with another woman – Solvi (Sophie Jane Corner) – who Abigail subsequently betrays. She is haunted by Solvi throughout the play, while seeking adventure in Boston. She and Mercy are hopelessly naive, and are almost immediately lured into a brothel and the clutches of a pimp, Jack (James Green), who manipulates them effortlessly. The only friend they find is Milly (Sarah Isbell), an older sex worker, hardened to abuse and violence, but with an underlying sympathy for the girls’ situation and an attraction to Abigail. The latter, however, has a debt to repay to Solvi, and events lead her to a decision that could redeem and destroy her.

‘Abigail’ is a dark play, that doesn’t shy from exploring the truly grim things that could easily happen to young women without protectors. Gin features heavily, as does laudanum in a surprisingly early appearance for a drug better known for its popularity from the 18th century onwards. So does violence and rape, which is unflinchingly depicted on stage in a production also directed by Stephen Gillard. For women, Salem provided just a glimpse of the harsh life that awaited them in the New World, but ‘Abigail’ is concerned with more than the horrors of the past. It aims to reveal secret, inner lives that could not be expressed publicly, and that can only exist for us through creative acts of reimagination and performance, such as this. In doing so, it brings the far away world of 17th century Massachusetts into our own world, revealing lessons hidden beyond official records.

The imagination of the authors and the commitment of Fury Theatre should be commended, as should The Space, a delightful venue on the Isle of Dogs, for staging experimental work and allowing young performers and writers to find their feet. Companies such as Fury, led by women who question assumptions about the way stories have been told, and show how they can be retold differently and inclusively, are essential to the future of the stage – keeping theatre moving, evolving and speaking to us.

Julian Spooner and Matt Wells are Rhum + Clay, previously responsible for the successful War of the Worlds, which was also staged at the New Diorama. As part of its impressive commitment to companies developing new, experimental work the theatre hosts the pair again as part of their 10^th anniversary season (accompanied, as are all the shows in this season, by free pizza). Project Dictator aims to explore performance under authoritarian regimes, but it seems that Spooner and Wells with co-director Hamish Macdougall, have not succeeded in pulling their well-intentioned ideas together to create a coherent show.

Project Dictator by Rhum + Clay – New Diorama Theatre, London

Project Dictator consists of two sections, that feel like sketches that have not yet developed into anything more. The show starts with the pair performing a ‘play that goes wrong’-style skit, with a pompous, do-gooding politician who’s subjugated sidekick rebels, and starts ordering him around, dressed as a comedy dictator. He then turns his attention on the audience, asking for allegiance and then demanding traitors are identified. It’s all very broad. Just as darker implications of the performer-audience relationship are starting to emerge, it ends, and the second half begins. This time, the pair are mime artists forced to perform manic sketches by an unseen voice. When they resist, one is dragged off and apparently beaten.

Although Rhum + Clay have spoken to performers in other countries to understand their experience of oppressive regimes, but this material has not obviously made its way onto the stage. While the performers are skilled and committed, the show seems lightweight, which is unfortunate in the context of the subject matter, and its purpose is not clear. Still, not all experiments succeed, and no doubt the company will find its mojo again before long, with support from essential conduits for new stage work like the New Diorama.