Emmet Byrne, Killian Coyle and Dan Skinner in The Walworth Farce. Photo by Tristram Kenner.

The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh – Southwark Playhouse, London

It is more than 15 years since Enda Walsh’s play The Walworth Farce arrived in London and, like many big hits, the scale of its popularity then has been matched by the speed with which it has been forgotten. It is well due a revival, and the Southwark Playhouse’s revival, directed by Nicky Allpress is exciting. It is also the second play at the theatre’s freshly opened venue in the base of an Elephant and Castle tower block, the start of a much-delayed new era for the Playhouse. If the space provides capacity to examine the case for potential modern classics, it would be of great benefit to the London theatre scene.

The Walworth Farce is set in flat on the eponymous road, which begins outside the theatre’s front door. An Irish father, Dinny (Dan Skinner) and his two sons Blake (Killian Coyle) and Sean (Emmet Byrne) live together in circumstances which it soon becomes apparent are very weird indeed. Only Blake is allowed out, on strictly controlled supermarket trips, while Dinny forces the pair to join him in acting out an endless, absurdly involved ‘play’ which tells the story of their childhoods and their relationship to their revered mother, who is apparently at home in Cork. The play includes many characters, and requires constant role swapping and costume changes, but only Diddy ever wins the ‘acting cup’. They all play multiple characters at the same time, staging conversations with a different wig on each hand. It is ludicrous, funny, then sinister and, when supermarket cashier Hayley (Rachelle Diedericks) arrives to disrupt the routine, threatening to expose the absurdity of their behaviour.

The cast are excellent, and very hard working. The mechanics of the play, which are absurdly complex, are beautifully managed by the performers who have to constantly work together. Dan Skinner combines strutting menace with ludicrous self-delusion, and is exceptionally watchable. Byrne and Coyle are very convincing as brothers who are both connected and separated by their situation. On a neat, squalid set by Anisha Fields characters enter and exit via two large wardrobes during the play within the play, but when the actual front door opens the tone changes. Diedericks is enjoyable and funny as someone who has stumbled into a scenario way beyond her control.

The Walworth Farce is a very interesting play revisited from the perspective of the 2020s. The 2000s obsession with characters trapped in deeply unhealthy fantasy worlds, found in works by Jez Butterworth and Philip Ridley among others as well as Walsh, now seems a defining characteristic of the time. It seems to reflect the scale of change as the digital era arrived, not entirely acknowledged while it was happening. On the surface everything appeared to be the same, but underneath a collective mental breakdown was building. The characters in the Walworth Farce are paddling desperately to maintain their version of reality in the face of fear that, in the outside world, they may as well not exist. Walsh takes the tropes of the Irish play – storytelling, close families, obsession with appearances – and spins them into a wild parody which smashes the stereotypes for good, hacks apart the traditional dramatic structure and paves the way for the new forms of performance that were to come. It is not to be missed.

Photo by Johan Persson

Phaedra by Simon Stone from Euripides, Seneca and Racine – National Theatre (Lyttleton), London

Simon Stone’s rewriting of Phaedra is the latest of many reworkings. Each finds something that speaks to their time in the myth of Cretan princess who falls in love with her stepson and, when he rejects her, causes his death and her own. Stone, who has written and directed the National Theatre’s new version, makes an utterly convincing case that this is a play about things that concern us now. His production has all the confidence and clarity that comes from working with the Toneelgroep in Amsterdam, and is a thrilling experience.

The action takes place inside a glass box designed by Chloe Lamford, which at first seems to distance the audience from the action. However, it soon becomes apparent that this visual metaphor is the key to Stone’s interpretation. He shows us our society through the floor-to-ceiling windows that look down on our cities from new apartment blocks, as well as through our phones, putting everything is on display. His Phaedra is Helen (Janet McTeer), a shadow cabinet minister in an unspecified party, married to Hugo, an ambassador, with an older married daughter Isolde (Mackenzie Davis – making a remarkable stage debut) and a teenage son Declan (Archie Barnes). Their life is busy, high powered and wealthy. The opening scene shows us their family life, inside the box, as they gather for what we discover will be a meeting that upends all their lives. The energy and quality of Stone’s writing shines from the opening moments, as the family greet, tease, annoy and swirl around one another. Actors speak over one another in a way almost never seen on stage – perhaps only in work by Annie Baker – and we are completely convinced that what we are watching is absolutely real. Phaedra starts at top pace and never relents, whisking us through the arrival of the son of Helen’s former Moroccan lover, Sofiane (Assaad Bouab). He has come to see the woman who broke up his family decades before. In response, Helen’s family tear themselves apart.

The evening is a succession of memorable scenes, powered by Stone’s direct, note perfect script and by a full house of fine performances. McTeer is every inch the queen bee politician, whose career always has to come before her family, who either serve her or struggle to escape. It is subtle, clever commentary on the psychological toll politics demands from women. Chahidi gives the performance of a lifetime as the cosmopolitan, loyal and funny companion squeezed out by the history within his family, and his messed up post-colonial identity. Bouab is sincere and devastating as Sofiane, who breaks apart the society his fins simply by his presence, letting the guilt flood out. Davis is very subtle as the daughter who can never please her mother, but can certainly hurt her. John MacMillan, as her husband Eric, is funny and touching as everything goes utterly wrong for him. Barnes is also great, as a teenager old enough to be cocky, young enough to be totally vulnerable.

The glass box situates the audience as voyeurs, gazing on as the increasingly brutal events play out. The more shocking the events become, the more public they are. An astonishing scene erupts at Helen’s birthday meal in a restaurant, next to tables of shell-shocked diners, as both Helen and Isolde reveal they are leaving their husbands for Sofiane, in front of both husbands, Sofiane himself, Declan and a friend (Omolara, played by an acerbic Akiya Henry). But what seems personal is every bit political, as the colonial power relations between France and Morocco, Britain, Nigeria and Iran all become directly relevant to how people relate to one another now. The play, unusually for a British production, is multi-lingual with sub-titled French, Arabic and Farsi spoken at various points. As well as being a thrilling evening of theatre, it is also a highly intelligent dissection of the nation we have become, arrogant enough to imagine we can separate ourselves from the rest of the world and engage with it only on our terms. It is also a very un-English production in the best way, and we should hope that the European influences of creators like Simon Stone continue to feed back onto our own stages, making them less insular and far more connected.

Katy Stephens as Titus and Kibong Tanji as Aaron – photo by Camilla Greenwell

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare – Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London

Published at Plays International.

Jude Christian’s new production of Shakespeare’s least reputable play, Titus Andronicus, has an all-female cast telling us immediately that perceptions of power will be tested to destruction. The presence of a guillotine on stage strongly suggests they will also be chopped up into little pieces. The last time the Globe Theatre produced Titus, Lucy Bailey delivered a famously blood-soaked production, with audience members stretchered insensible from the pit. Fifteen years on, there is sense that we need to think more about why we are still producing and watching this Gothic gore fest. Can Titus, dismissed for much of its history as a primitive potboiler unworthy of Shakespeare’s genius, really speak to our times, or should we just enjoy it for what it is. Christian’s production may not entirely answer these questions, but she gives the audience a very good time in the attempt.

Each half of the show starts and ends with songs, written for the show by cabaret duo Bourgeois & Maurice, which attempt to contextualise the play. Performed by an energetic cast with a thoroughly enjoyable chemistry, they are very funny. The opening number tells us to relax, “enjoy the bloodbath” and forget our own miserable lives. This seems a little apologetic, but the production tests how far this is really possible. Titus Andronicus is more folk tale – the nasty kind – than history, punctuated with rape, mutilation, murders aplenty and spectacular, gruesome revenge: as Bourgeois & Maurice put it, “Men killing men killing men killing women killing men killing men killing flies.” It cannot be taken entirely seriously, yet it certainly has something to say about men and power. The gender swapped cast opens up fresh interpretations, while giving a series of excellent performances.

Katy Stephens, who feels like an underrated actor despite her central roles in the RSC’s 2000s history cycle, is excellent. She plays Titus as a fantastically deluded and dangerous character. A stooge for unscrupulous rulers, he has lost 22 of his own sons in the cause of Rome and ‘honour’, and soon murders another on stage for disrespecting the emperor. Asked to choose between Bassianus and Saturninus for the top job, he picks the latter – a comically ill-advised choice. Lucy McCormick’s Saturninus is a twitching, gurning psychopath and, in an extremely entertaining piece of acting, the most obvious baddie you could imagine. Titus slips into madness after his daughter, Lavinia, in the play’s most notorious scene, is raped and has her tongue and hands cut off. However, the madness does not bring the clarity one might expect, spurring him only to focus his killing skills on revenge, rather than his own family. Like Rome he a staggering corpse-in-waiting, with death the only logical end point for an autocratic, fascist society.

The staging hints strongly at a mental hospital. Co-designed by Rosie Elnile and Grace Venning, the set has palatial arches but a suspiciously clinical floor with easy-to-mop corners, while the cast wear what look like pyjamas, in teal, tangerine, aubergine and duck-egg blue. Watching the inmates puts us in an uncomfortably complicit position. Staging the absurd levels of violence is the biggest challenge in producing Titus, and Christian using a clever solution, specific to the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Theatre. Each character holds a candle, and when their life ends it is snuffed out – sometimes just like that, at other times under the guillotine or a steak hammer, or very slowly with a blowtorch or power tools. Saturninus dismembers one candle with his bare hands. This approach lacks the gore value of more direct physical violence, but is psychologically effective.

The production also asks us to rethink our assumptions about Aaron, ‘The Moor’. Kibong Tanji plays him as living up to the role assigned by a shamelessly racist Rome, as the play’s ultimate villain. He and his lover Tamora, the captured Goth queen played by Kirsten Foster, are as close as this play comes to characters we can understand as they take on the Romans at their own game, slaughtering with hesitation. However, the play’s ending is changed so that Aaron, who Shakespeare leaves to be buried alive, escapes with his baby, whom the Romans would have killed. However, its is Titus’ final acts that stick in the mind: the ritualised destruction of women in the play and their roles. He kills his own daughter Lavinia (a stunned Georgia Mae-Mayers), deeming her life worthless after the shame of her rape. And he feeds Tamora her own sons baked into a pile of pasties before killing her, symbolically destroying her motherhood.

Jude Christian shows us ways to think differently about the play, but her achievement is really the atmosphere she has generated in working with the cast. Performances are delightful to watch as the cast pull very obviously together. Playing Tamora’s sons Chiron and Demetrius, Mei Mei MacLeod and Mia Selway interact beautifully as a pair of twisted, constantly fighting teens. A special mention should be saved for Beau Holland, who plays eight different roles. Cut off early as Bassanius, she returns as a series of increasingly short-lived characters, announcing herself as a midwife, a clown and eventually a fly, all done away with shortly afterwards. She even plays both of Titus’s young sons at once, introduced without explanation, thrown into a pit and then framed for the Emperor’s murder. Her comedy makes a strength of the play’s absurdities, part of a cast who send us away as entertained as we are disturbed by the bloodfest, and by an energetic, clever and questioning production.  

Photo by Majasc Mikha Wajnrych

The Great He-Goat by Mossoux Bonté – The Place, London

Mossoux-Bonté’s two nights at The Place as part of the London International Mime Festival 2023 are sold out, which suggests connoisseurs of boundary-hopping Belgian physical theatre know what they are doing, because this company is astonishing. The show is set in the Black Goya gallery in the Prado Museum, Madrid. The cast as dressed as gallery attendants, and move together a group while becoming gradually infected by the demonic presence of Goya’s terrifying pictures. The show is a cavalcade of imagery bound together by fluid movement, dance and puppetry that combine to create an experience almost unlike anything else. The tableaux follow fast upon one another – the gallery staff beating a collective rhythm with the short sticks they carry, a young girl wielding flags and religious objects, the staff becoming more dishevelled, removing their uniform shirts to slap the floor in unison. They morph into Goya pictures – The Seductress who, disturbingly, is a man in a black veil, The Pilgrimage and, finally, the Witches Sabbath. The show climaxes with an attendant donning a pair of cardboard Satanic horns.

The other thing is the puppetry, which adds a remarkable level of weirdness to the experience. Attendants move around the stage in groups of three, and it takes a long moment to realise that only two of them are human. The realism of the life-size puppets they manipulate with exceptional skill is enhanced lower face masks that also partly immobilise the faces of cast members. Using ingenious concealment with dark clothing, puppet limbs and other body parts are used to create the illusion of levitation and apparently impossible movement.

The Great He-Goat is inspiring and totally absorbing, reminding us if we needed it that Northern Europe, and Belgium is particular, has a vibrant performance culture that inhabits a parallel world to British text-based theatre (with honourable exceptions, not least Lost Dog). We really could do with more of what their best companies have to offer. Two nights is not enough.

Natasha Roland and Chloe Rice are New York-based performers, a two-person company who have made their way to Islington via a short but fêted run at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe which won them a coveted Fringe First award. Their unclassifiable show, And Then the Rodeo Burned Down, now has a well-deserved long booking at the King’s Head Theatre. They bring a strong sense of Edinburgh summer excitement to dark January London, with a boundary-dissolving show that combines physical theatre, writing and music to enchant and confound the audience. 

The tiny King’s Head stage is configured in the round with a lone star painted on the floor, the entirety of the set. Roland and Rice, in cowboy gear, are apparently part of a rodeo show, where Rice works as the Rodeo Comedian. Roland is her shadow, then the lead cowboy, then a horse. The rodeo is “the best place in the world” Rice keeps telling us, but the cowboy is an arrogant prick, the horse is trying to escape rodeo animal abuse, and she is put firmly in her place. Rice says she does not need a shadow, but Roland follows her around anyway, matching her gestures while taking a persistent interest in whether cowboys are allowed to kiss one another. The scenario is weird, like an acid-fuelled American nightmare with all the right pieces, but in the wrong order. A lighter keeps appearing, the lighting is blood red and the music is all about fire. Then the lights go out. The performers step out of their roles, and admit they have not thought the plot through and are short of the funds they need to finish. The construct collapses and we are left with the reality of fringe performers, struggling to make ends meet, personally, creatively and financially.

Roland and Rice are fine physical performers and, while the first half of the show leaves the audience hanging to some extent, their interaction is a joy to watch. They twirl, tumble and twist in perfect synchronicity, moving as one. Roland dogs Rice, matching her actions with eerie prescience, and great charm. Then, as the cowboy, she turns on the masculine arrogance which crackles through her cigarette, which embodies her rodeo status. Their skits have the feel of Laurel and Hardy silent comedy routines set loose in a western dreamscape. The show is punctuated with songs: Johnny Cash, Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton, whose ‘9 to 5’ bookends the evening. This is the key to some of what is going on. The rodeo is a microcosm of the unequal dynamics of the workplace, and the fringe stage in particular, where gender roles dictate what people can be, and how much power they are allowed. 

Gender is at the heart of the show, which features two queer female performers playing a series of men in stereotypical male roles, before unravelling their roles. With pretence finally stripped away Roland and Rice eventually play themselves, and their personal dynamic is real and delightful. As a stage couple, their interaction is the show’s greatest strength and the way they physically respond to one another is a pleasure to watch.  As themselves, they can build something that does not need permission from anyone. As Dolly puts it, “You’re just a step on the boss man’s ladder / but you got dreams he’ll never take away.” Roland and Rice never work out how to end the show, or whether the rodeo burned down at all, but they know where they left the lighter.   

Michael Hawkey as Hamlet. Photo by Charles Flint.

Hamlet by Lazarus Theatre Company – Southwark Playhouse (Borough)

Published at Plays International

Lazarus Theatre, and their artistic director Ricky Dukes, specialise in introducing classic plays to new audiences with younger performers. Over 16 years they have presented a remarkable range of shows, from Greek tragedy and Jacobean revenge to  Marlowe, Wilde, Brecht and, of course Shakespeare – but never Hamlet. Dukes admits to shying away from a play with such a weighty history until he found a way to think about it differently. Lazarus’ production at the Southwark Playhouse (Borough Road branch) strips the older generation from the play, leaving us with only the younger characters. Battered, used and confused, the play reveals how focusing on their experience can show us a familiar text in a new and disturbing light. Hamlet is, among many other things, a tale of an older generation destroying their successors to serve themselves.   

The cast has varying levels of experience, but all are at the start of their careers and some are making their professional debuts. Not least among these is Michael Hawkey, doing so in the role of Hamlet: rather like learning to drive by just closing your eyes and flooring it. Fortunately, director Dukes knows what he is doing. Hawkey is more than up to the challenge and, although the play is cut down to 95 minutes, he is in charge of the stage and his presence is persuasive and changeable. As the play begins he is a student from a wealthy background down from university (Wittenburg as Durham, perhaps), with a moneyed assurance that hardens into a dismissiveness towards others, especially Ophelia which, whether feigned or not, comes easily to him. At the same time there is comedy, with the players for example thoroughly unimpressed at being told how to do their jobs by a posh bloke, with Hawkey even hinting in the direction of the Duke of Sussex. His performance is moving because, as a young man with limited experience of life, he is so easily used by others while imagining he is in control.

Dukes’ experiment in restructuring Hamlet leaves us with a core selection of scenes that prove to be the keys to the play, in which younger characters deal with the consequences of the way their parents and rulers behave. It is an original and fascinating take on the play. The action opens with a therapy group, wearing matching blue jumpers and sitting in a circle of chairs, taking turns to explain their troubles. Without the oldies, the cast consists of Hamlet, Ophelia,  Laertes, Horatio, Marcellus, Barnarda [sic], Rozencrantz [sic], Gildenstern [sic] and the three players. Hamlet starts to tell his story, informed by a God-like voice off which occasionally speaks lines belonging to the older characters, that this is a ‘safe space’. It immediately becomes apparent that Elsinore is in fact an intimidating and brutal space. However, none of the characters that remain in the play are to blame for the bloody events that will see almost all of them dead before the play is over. It is their parents’ fault. 

The show, with a minimal setting by Sorcha Corcoran consisting mostly of plastic chairs, is full of inventive staging and moments that make great use of limited resources. The ghost of Hamlet’s father stalking through torch beams, face obscured by a full helmet, is genuinely alarming. Yorick’s skull is illuminated in a drinks fridge, possibly borrowed from the bar. The players deliver ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ with glee, wearing paper crowns and ruffs. The players scene takes on a new significance as, surprisingly, the First Player’s account of the death of Priam becomes the centrepoint of the play. Everything stops as she delivers her speech which, shorn of interjections from Polonius, becomes mesmerising in a way that I have never seen in a production of Hamlet. Partly a result of Dukes’ ingenious rebalancing of the play, it is also a tribute to Kalifa Taylor, whose performance as the First Player threatens to steal the play, and marks her out as someone to keep a close eye on. Lexine Lee as Ophelia, Sam Morris as Laertes and Kiera Murray as Barnarda and the Player Queen also stand out. 

There a couple of jarring moments where the text has been unhelpfully hacked. Hamlet is “not as mad as you think” rather than able to “tell a hawk from a handsaw”. When he hesitates over killing Claudius, saying “Now might I do it”, but not “pat”. There are also moments when a previous knowledge of the play is probably needed to fully appreciate what is going on, not least in the final scene where the duel sequence, minus Claudius and Gertrude, is a little hard to follow. However, these are minor criticisms of what is a fresh, clever and exciting production from a company who specialise in seeing things differently, and showing us how to look again at plays we think we already know.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare – Soho Place, London

As its best, As You Like It is a trip into a parallel world where everything seems easy yet every character confronts their own reality. This is very difficult to pull off, depending on group dynamics and audience faith in this group of people, despite their fantastical temporary existence in the Forest of Arden. Plenty of productions search fruitlessly for the magic, but Josie Rourke’s version at the new @sohoplace theatre makes it seems effortless. This is greatly helped by the delightful new space, designed by architects Haworth Tompkins as that rare thing – a theatre in the round. The entire audience sits within spitting distance of a stage with four entrance ramps, and a parquet floor in the middle of which sits a piano where Michael Bruce plays his own compositions throughout, frequently becoming an adjunct to the action that whirls around him. Robert Jones floor is partially dismantled as the play moves from court to forest, and the wildness of Arden spills over it.

The star of the show is, unusually, Celia, played by deaf actor Rose Ayling-Ellis. Supported by subtitles at circle level, she signs her part and delivers a performance of great charm. Her presence, far from seeming an add-on, is integral to Rourke’s interpretation. Not only does she sign with Rosalind (Leah Harvey), but so do other members to one another as everyone tries to communicate across the voids created by love – unrequited, confused, or unacknowledged. Celia is the sensible one, signing her bafflement at Rosalind’s increasingly bizarre plans to court Orlando (Alfred Enoch), while Harvey’s Rosalind is unmoored by love, fully committed to the fantasy forest existence. Harvey’s gender identity – her biography specifies the pronouns ‘they/them’ – adds a further layer of ambiguity to the gender swapped drama, which seems relevant to our times in way that were not apparent until recently.

Jacques is cast in a conventional gender swap, with Martha Plimpton playing her with a beautifully weighted combination of charm, cynicism and sadness. Tom Mison’s Touchstone is also a triumph, a clumsy, loveable jester in real fool’s garments. Alfred Enoch as Orlando takes on a world he does not understand with amusing sang-froid. But it is the entire ensemble who generate the energy required to suspend our disbelief, working together in a way that makes us want to be part of their gang. Rourke’s production makes it clearer than any I have seen that Arden is a place of experimentation, where young people can try out the limits of their sexuality and discover what they truly want, without the consequences that come from being trapped in a hierarchical court system. Everyone is set free and, punctuated by most of Shakespeare’s best songs, the audience leaves feeling that they have travelled without moving an inch, and ended up somewhere entirely different.

Ruination by Lost Dog – Linbury Theatre, Covent Garden

In the basement Linbury Theatre we have chosen, as Hades himself points out, to visit the underworld rather than The Nutcracker, taking place upstairs on the main Royal Opera House stage. What kind of people, he enquiries, watch a show called Ruination rather than a Christmas classic? Fortunately, there is no doubt about the best place to be – Ruination is a multi-layered, multi-talented triumph, a challenging, funny and spectacular piece of dance-music-theatre that defies classification in the best way. Lost Dog specialise in story-telling that turns our assumptions on their head in a number of ways. They take stories we think we know – as in Juliet and Romeo and A Tale of Two Cities, and show them to be something else entirely. And they use dance as the basis for story-telling, combining movement with narrative theatre and much else beside in a way that remains exceptional and unchallenged on the British stage.

Ruination is the story of Medea, set up as a trial in the underworld. Medea, her ex-husband Jason, their two sons, and Jason’s second wife Glauce are all dead, and in the realm of Hades, played by Jean-Daniel Broussé as flamboyant impresario, with his wife Persephone (Anna-Kay Gayle). The show finds time to question the myth of Persephone’s imprisonment in the underworld which, as she herself points out, involved her kidnapping (she claims she was snatched by Hades in a white van). However, their main role is to host the newly arrived dead, who find themselves in a bureaucracy where forms need to be filled, Lethe drunk from a water cooler, and the journey to heaven or hell embarked upon. Jason, Greek hero who seems to have died in a drunken accident, asks for Medea to be place on trial for the murder of her children and of Glauce, opening up a dissection of the Medea story. Was she, could she, have committed the worst crime of all – and what part did Jason’s behaviour play in what happened? Who does the version that we know really belong to?

Ruination makes us think hard about why we believe what we are told by the mythmakers who control the cultural narrative. If that sounds worthy, it is anything but. Director Ben Duke, co-founder of Lost Dog, treats us to an astonishingly rich staging, his resources augmented by collaboration with the Royal Ballet. The dance is remarkable, each piece a stand out, from Jason (a charismatic Liam Francis) awaking from the dead and learning, spasmodically, to walk again; to the skeleton dance from Ray Harryhausen’s animation; to Medea (a disarmingly open Hannah Shepherd) rubbing ointment over (almost) all of Jason’s naked body; to Aeetes (Miguel Altunaga) Medea’s deeply sinister father, dancing with his daughter; to a final scene in which Medea is born aloft, like a crucifixion, as she struggles in vain to swim the waters of the Charon to reach her dead sons, in limbo.

Duke seamlessly blends movement with story-telling, but he also uses music to create atmosphere in ways that are truly memorable. Steve Reich’s Clapping Music accompanies Jason’s fateful transgression with Glauce (Maya Carroll). Yshani Perinpanayagam sings Radiohead’s Pyramid Song in his eerie counter-tenor, like something from a Peter Greenway film. Louis Armstrong’s version of Mack the Knife plays alongside a staccato conga of the dead. And the show ends with the heart-stopping voice of Sheree Dubois, singing George’ Harrison’s song Isn’t It a Pity. Every scene is a showstopper.

Ruination is inventive and sophisticated, and it is funny and moving. It is probably Lost Dog’s best show yet, but their resumé is increasingly full of work that carves a new path for performance. Ben Duke treats his audiences with respect, delivering shows that respond to the hyper-aware 21st century by avoiding easy routes. Instead, he plays gleefully with our expectations, and gives us stories that reflect our times and can make us laugh and gasp in the same breath.

Giles Terera as Othello. Image by Myah Jeffers.

Othello by William Shakespeare – National Theatre: Lyttleton, London

The scene is set before the plays begins by projections of theatre posters which cover Chloe Lamford’s amphitheatre set – the production history of Othello since the 19th century. None of these versions had a black director, and Clint Dyer’s new National Theatre production is the first time this has happened in Britain. Dyer, the NT’s Deputy Director, redefines the play for our times, not by imposing interpretation from above but by revealing meaning within Shakespeare’s words. Like all the best Shakespearean accounts, he makes his interpretation seem obvious. How could we not have seen it like this before?

Giles Terera’s refined Othello seems aloof at first, separating himself from the oppressive Venetian world around him. It soon becomes clear this is his protection from a society that accepts his military skills and, in return, gives him contempt and worse. The Duke of Venice’s entourage, in fact almost everyone in the play, is in black-shirt uniforms and go about wielding burning torches, like an incipient lynch mob. Paul Hilton’s twisted, sadistic Iago is a military man through and through, a sergeant major who embodies the attitudes of the system he serves. In his military moustached, he bears a striking resemblance to Enoch Powell, played upon in the first scene when he puts on a West Midlands accent as he leads a baying mob to the Duke’s door. He is also an arrogant wife-beater (Tanya Franks’ Emilia appears with a bruise across one cheek) and con-man, his mouth constantly curdling into a sneer. But, in targeting Othello he is simply putting the culture of Venice into action.

The sense of a world closing in upon Othello is very effectively enhanced by Dyer’s use of the case a black-clad chorus, who sit in tiered rows around the stage, physically amplifying and reflecting the mood – twitching their heads in unison as Othello wrestles with what Iago has told him, or marching around the rim of the set in a torch-bearing procession. Their presence focuses the sense that Othello is allowed to exist only so he can, when it becomes necessary, be destroyed. Dyer also makes it clearer than any production I have seen before that Othello, although he imagines otherwise, can have no free will in a society that despises him for the colour of his skin. Until Iago unleashes his grim plot, he is the only character who soliloquises to the audience. As soon as he feeds Othello his story, the latter begins to speak directly to us as well, as though performing under Iago’s control.

Hilton is excellent, and so is Terera as a powerful but sympathetic Othello, fighting against himself and his inability to see things for what they really are. The other stand-out performance is Rosy McEwen’s Desdemona. She is self-possessed, witty and in no respect a victim, which makes what happens to her all the more heart-rending. Her angry cry of “These men! These men!” is the play’s emotional climax. Othello is never a cheerful play but this is production is exceptionally dark, both in look and mood, and that seems the only way to understand it. Shakespeare, somehow, gave us a brutal account of the way societal racism destroys everyone in its path, a message that has lost none of its relevance. Dyer’s version is harsh and revelatory.