reviews

A Knock on the Roof

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Khawla Ibraheem. Photo (c) Alex Brenner.

A Knock on the Roof by Khawla Ibraheem – Royal Court Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

The significance of Khawla Ibraheem’s one-woman play about life in Gaza has only intensified since its runs at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe and off-Broadway. A Knock on the Roof is one of the starkest, most politically urgent pieces the Royal Court has staged for some time. The war in Gaza has put UK theatre in the spotlight, and not to its advantage. The cancellation by the Royal Exchange in Manchester of Stef O’Driscoll’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream over what have been described as ‘pro-Palestinian’ messages revealed a cultural fault line. It has fed into disputes involving leading industry figures and the Culture Secretary about theatre’s freedom to make political statements, especially on the Israel-Hamas conflict. The brutal events in Gaza have been notable by their absence from our stages, even as they dominate political discourse. In the midst of this, Khawla Ibraheem delivers a masterclass in political theatre. She communicates, with honesty, commitment, humour and self-awareness, the truth of life under siege in a war zone, where politics is not a choice but an all-consuming, everyday reality.

A Knock on the Roof, is both written and performed by Ibraheem. It is named after the tactic, adopted by the Israeli Defense Forces, of dropping a ‘small’ bomb on residential buildings as a five-minute warning to residents that a rocket is coming. Ibraheem plays Maryam, who has a young son, Noor, an aging mother and a husband studying abroad. Her daily existence includes keeping Noor out of the polluted sea, dealing with her mother’s nagging, and negotiating with an absent partner. It also involves escape drills. Maryam becomes obsessed with how far she can run in five minutes, and who or what she can carry, if the knock comes. She practices in the middle of the night, carrying a weighted bag to represent her son, hoping to get fitter, trying to create a scenario in which her family survives.

The constant, never-ending fear that attends Gazan life is both mesmerising and terrible. The concept of being on the alert 24 hours a day for a signal that death is imminent is a deeply distressing scenario, and also farcical. What would you really bring if you had just one bag? Would you choose clothes, or things that really matter to you? How far do you imagine you can run in 5 minutes? Which way would you go? And what if you miss the ‘knock’? The combination of the ordinary and extraordinary is excruciating, but Ibraheem also makes it funny. Her performance, committed, nuanced and physical, is a real success. She appears relaxed, hugging friends before the play starts, engaging in audience interaction, but she is laser-focused. Her writing is multi-layered, acknowledging absurdity as well as terror. We are entirely convinced as she describes what on the surface seems unrelatable, describing an extreme situation entirely in terms of human experience.

The play is also about more than the war, or the many previous wars – even Noor has already lived through two. Ibraheem writes about the frustration of being a woman in Gaza, with a child and husband neither of whom she really wanted, her studies and future curtailed. Her mother reinforces the social expectations that weigh her down, insisting she showers in a dress so she is not pulled naked from the rubble if the building is bombed. The focus is entirely on her performance. The stage is bare apart from a single chair, and settings are shown through light-touch back projections on the bare brick of the back wall – set designs by Frank J Oliva, and projection design by Hana S Kim. Director Oliver Butler developed the piece with Ibraheem, and together they conjure a place we find hard to comprehend from nothing with enormous skill. Ibraheem uses her body to communicate the sheer physical demands of survival in a war zone.

A Knock on the Roof is a significant show for a number of reasons. Staging such a stripped-back piece in the Royal Court’s main auditorium is a big and bold statement. Khawla Ibraheem is not only a significant talent, but a performer we need to hear from right now. And she blows away the fog of political argument and disinformation by showing what it is like to live in Gaza – something that, despite many months of press coverage, we still do not really know. The message she communicates is undeniable, that what happens to people is the only thing that matters. Away from slogans, this is surely the most meaningful lesson we can learn from disastrous conflict. If theatre cannot communicate this, it has no role; but by staging this show Artistic Director, David Byrne, makes it clear that he understands where the Royal Court’s power lies.

A Good House

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Photo by Camilla Greenwell

A Good House by Amy Jephta – Royal Court Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

The set for A Good House starts empty, a bare stage surrounded by a strip of light which looks like an arena designed for combat. The set, by Ultz, transforms into a series of interiors over the course of the evening, as the living rooms of three different homes. Each scene is changed by the cast as they build their own interiors, carefully constructed to build or hide racial and social identity. These houses, it turns out, are battlegrounds.

Amy Jeptha’s tense, funny satire is set on a new-build estate called Stillwater, somewhere in South Africa. In an echo of Harold Pinter’s ‘A Slight Ache’, a mute but menacing presence is enough to explode the conventions holding a fragile social consensus together. With Pinter it was a matchseller in the street outside; in ‘A Good House’ it is a shack, erected overnight on waste ground by unseen hands. It is visible from the sitting room belonging to young couple Chris (Scott Sparrow) and Jess (Robyn Rainsford), and seems to them to jeopardise their entire way of life. Attempts to form a ‘neighbourhood watch’ to deal with the perceived threat strips the covers off everyone’s assumptions about race, threat and social status – and about their most intimate relationships.

Jeptha’s writing is highly skilled and very funny, even as it lays middle-class South African society open. The young couple and the shack become a catalyst for an excruciatingly polite war of words between white couple Andrew (Kair Luke Brummer) and Lynette (Olivia Darnley) and black couple Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa) and Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko). The cast give highly entertainingly, finely calibrated performances. Brummer is hilariously tense as he tries to avoid saying the wrong thing, while sounding like a racist every time he opens his mouth. Darnley is equally amusing as a social manipulator not nearly as clever as she imagines. Jeptha mercilessly caricatures white hypocrisy, but also insecurity: Rainsford’s Jess quivers with the effort of maintaining her place on the social ladder, and Sparrow, as her partner Chris, descends into meltdown over his perceived social inferiority. 

However, the focus of the play in on Bonolo and Sihle. A financially successful black couple, they find themselves forced to choose between defending middle-class privilege, or the rights of the unseen shack dwellers. This opens up rifts in their relationship. Bonolo openly questions Andrew and Lynette’s motives, while besuited executive Sihle tries to keep the peace, and not make trouble: yet it is Sihle who grew up in poverty while, as he puts it, the activist Bonolo was always ‘bouji as fuck’. Khayisa and Mazibuko give excellent performances as a couple who love one another, but whose personal lives cannot be separated from the political choices engulfing them. There are a couple of remarkable cut-away scenes, as the tensely polite living room chat pauses and the pair give way to their real feelings about their neighbours, rolling around on the carpet helpless with laughter.

‘A Good House’ is a quality drama, directed with vision and control by Nancy Medina. Jeptha’s writing is honed and precise, exposing the tensions of a society where everything that matters goes unsaid. Her drama involves an intruder disrupting a supposedly cosy social setting, a classic theatrical scenario, but the play feels right up to the minute. The cosiness is superficial, and the self-interest entirely transparent, with characters such as Andrew principally concerned about ‘optics’. Everything and everybody feels closer to the edge than ever before, but ‘A Good House’ is also riotously funny. It is a fine production on every level.

The Importance of Being Earnest

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Photo by Marc Brenner

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde – National Theatre: Lyttleton, London

In Max Webster’s new production intentions clear are from the opening moments. The play begins with a dance sequence. Ncuti Gatwa, playing Algernon, drapes himself over a grand piano wearing a shocking pink ballgown, split to reveal boxer shorts underneath. It sends an unambiguous message that this will not be The Importance of Being Earnest we have become familiar with, but a high camp, high glitter entertainment… and much more beside. Webster opens the play up to a much-need re-examination. One of the best known and loved – and overquoted – plays in the repertoire is reclaimed as the brutal social critique it has been all along.

For the National Theatre to stage Oscar Wilde’s best known play is a balancing act. It’s a sure audience pleaser, which is why every amateur group in the country has done it at some point, but there needs to be a reason to give it a major new production. Webster delivers this triumphantly, and his show is a revelation. The play has an excellent, highly entertainingly and disruptive cast. Gatwa is suave, shameless and very funny, with a commanding stage presence and a knack for comedy. He is matched with Hugh Skinner’s apparently more vulnerable Jack Worthing, constantly struggling to match his mental self image. The ingenue Cecily Cardew is played by Eliza Scanlen who channels Miranda Richardson to fine effect. And the excellent Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ is very funny as Gwendolen, teetering throughout between comic social propriety and crotch-grabbing sexual meltdown. Richard Cant and Amanda Lawrence, as Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism, deliver supporting performances of an exceptionally high calibre, while Julian Bleach has fun as two butlers: the scary Merriman and his derelict country counterpart, Lane.

However, every production of ‘…Earnest’ pivots on its Lady Bracknell. The part has become an old-fashioned star turn, somewhat divorced from the play itself. It is mystifying that Wilde has become so cosy, as though his annihilation by the society who had fêted him happened to someone else. ‘…Earnest’ is packed with bitter social recrimination fed to the audience in sugared pills. Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell undoes all that. Casting actors of colour in the key roles challenges some assumptions, and Clarke’s forbidding, stereotypical Caribbean matriarch works perfectly for the part. Wearing dramatic costumes combining western and Afro-Caribbean styles, by Rae Smith, she puts up a fierce resistance to her daughter’s wishes, but we gradually realise that this a façade relates directly to her origins. The key moments in the play are when she reveals that she had no money before she married Lord Bracknell; and when she discovers that Jack is very wealthy, and becomes suddenly supportive of his marriage to Gwendolen. She knows what it means to have nothing, and what it takes to stay afloat when you don’t belong. She can compete with any of the great Lady Bracknells, but her performance reinvents the part.

The entire play is explicitly about dissembling and façades. Nobody says what they mean, while revealing what they really think. We see clearly from Webster’s production that no-one can afford to be who they actually are. Wilde certainly couldn’t. But he devised a way to say things in a way that allowed his plays to become accepted and mainstream, all the while presenting an unequivocal condemnation of the British social order. Gatwa’s Algernon is certainly not a straightforwardly heterosexual character, but neither is anyone else. Algernon and Jack seem as interested in each other as their fiancees, and so do Celia and Gwendolen. Webster stages a spectacular pile-on in which they all seem on the brink of engaging in a foursome. On Rae Smith’s slightly psychedelic sets, reality is heightened and pushed to the brink of absurdity, which is where the truth lies. The show is as funny and entertaining as any production of the play, but it shows us what’s been lying in plain sight. Wilde deserves to be fully understood, and his work given the freedom of interpretation it could never receive at the time, and that has eluded it since. The evening ends with a masque dance, with all the characters in feathers and frills. It is a moment of joy, releasing us from the terrifying constraints of a world that forces everyone to pretend in order to survive.

Dr. Strangelove

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Steve Coogan and Giles Terera. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

Dr. Strangelove by Armando Ianucci and Sean Foley – Noël Coward Theatre, London

Sean Foley and Armando Ianucci have adapted Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 satire, Dr. Strangelove, for the stage, powered by the willingness of Steve Coogan to go one better than Peter Sellers, and play four parts (Sellers bailed on Major TJ Kong, who was played instead by Slim Pickens). The concept of staging the film is attention-grabbing, and the issues it satirising more current than they’ve been for decades. However, it is not ultimately clear why this story needs to be on the stage. The adaptation, , and Sean Foley’s direction, are very faithful to the film apart than the odd update such as a acknowledgment that the cast is almost entirely male, which does not change the fact it is still almost entirely male. Part of the problem is that it is less a story than a series of set-piece scenes, which work well on film and less well on stage. The film is oddly set-bound, which may have made it seem suited for theatre, but somehow the show never quite takes off.

Coogan is accomplished and highly professional in all four roles: frightfully posh English officer Captain Mandrake; US President Muffley, trying to be reasonable in the face of insanity; Major TJ Kong, perhaps his best role, the gung-ho, bomb-riding B52 pilot with a strange attitude to women; and Dr. Strangelove, wheelchair-bound not-very-ex-Nazi scientist. The play is, inevitably, mostly focussed on him – and the substitution of lookalikes with their backs to the audience while Coogan changes into another costume quickly become distracting. There is also the sense that Coogan never really lets it all out. His performances seem controlled and script-bound, and the moment when he unleashes the madness never arrives.

There is limited space for other cast members to shine, and indeed there appear to be several senior military figures who spend much of the show sitting around the War Room table, never speaking. However, John Hopkins has a lot of fun cast, slightly surprisingly, as the mad General Ripper, who launches a nuclear assault on Russia without permission. His performance has an unpredictable edge to it that is lacking elsewhere, and his conspiracy-theory fuelled spiral seems alarming current. Giles Terrera has fun as General Turgidson, cheerleader for ‘pretaliation’ against the Soviets, but he can’t animate the War Room scenes on his own.

Hildegard Bechtler’s set recreates the look of the film very well, but inevitable involves filling the stage with large immovable objects, notably the giant oval War Room table, and the cockpit of a B52. This does not aid the production’s fluidity. Nor does the fact that the large back-projection is invisible to the substantial section of the audience in the balcony, and has to be replicated on very small tv screens. In fact, the Noël Coward Theatre seems the wrong place for this show, which is too constrained on its tight proscenium stage. It would have worked much better in the Olivier.

The characters, conversations and events of Dr. Strangelove are terrifying close to real life. Much of the film is a documentary in disguise, dramatising the insane thinking of senior US military figures such as Curtis Le May and Thomas Powers, who actively encouraged a nuclear conflict in which they were quite willing, as General Turgison says, for 20 million American to die, as long as even more Russians were killed. The revived nuclear threat following the invasion of Ukraine makes this satire both timely, and as important now as it was then. It is just a shame that the stage version delivers more of a tribute show than a rebirth.

Big Finish

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Photo by Rosie Powell

Big Finish by Figs in Wigs – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Published at Plays International

As Figs in Wigs point out, it takes a lot of development and rehearsal to create this level of chaos. ‘Big Finish’ is about endings: humanity hitting a climate iceberg, theatre driving over a funding cliff, the company doing its final show. The five Figs have built a career which is, in many ways enviable. They are highly respected in the fringe theatre scene if, as they note, they have never actually won a prize. After ten shows, starting out in the queer cabaret scene and graduating to the heights of Battersea Arts Centre’s Grand Hall, Figs are respected and beloved. They also have a total of £5,000 in their bank account, and run a game of musical beach towels to decide who gets paid each night. If there is no money or future in theatre, why do they keep coming back?

The Figs – Ray Gammon, Suzanna Hurst, Sarah Moore, Rachel Porter and Alice Roots – are experts in controlled stupidity, very silly things taken very seriously, which are not nearly as silly as they would like us to think. Their performance style is sometimes reminiscent of contemporaries such as Sh!t Theatre, which whom they share a home-made aesthetic. This includes building sets and costumes from whatever they can afford. Crab costumes, for example, are red bike helmets, puffa jackets and skirts made from plastic sheets. The setting is blue PVC and silver foil ducting. They read a last will and testament, which bequeaths all the detritus from past shows to the UK’s great venues, attempting to save it from landfill.

This is where Figs really come into their own. Behind a consistent front of incompetence, they deliver a comprehensive state of the nation report on the performing arts and on radical expression, filtered through their own experience. Their conclusions are not encouraging. Who would choose theatre in a country that not only fails to support its own cultural heritage, but treats it as the enemy, and making a living is not options. Figs stage a succession of hilarious set pieces as they work through their, and our, futures. A Kraftwerk-esque crab dance takes creatures who adapt to survive climate disaster and turns them into symbols for performers who want to escape the arts, but cannot. A crab bucket has no lid, because the crabs keep each other inside. Online prop purchasing comes to the fore again when the Figs, golf wear and dinosaur masks, manoeuvre a golf buggy precariously around the stage. They become a string quartet who scrape out the Titanic theme, very badly, over and over, sitting on weird exo-skeleton stools, strapped to their legs.

As they say, it takes a lot of work to create such barely controlled anarchy. The show culminates in two fabulously silly and clever scenes. The Figs are interviewed by a ‘professor’ who turns out to be the real thing: Jen Harvie, Professor of Contemporary Theatre, their real-life tutor at Queen Mary’s. Reality and performance become indistinguishable as she conducts a hilariously awkward interrogation of their careers. Then, the company performs a final, absurd, contemporary dance sequence in wetsuits, sliding all over the foamy floor, elbows in faces.

If ‘ Big Finish’ is Figs in Wigs’ final show, it is a triumph. They wear their physical performance skills, strange creative imaginations and complete commitment very lightly, but they are clever, original and hugely entertaining. It probably isn’t their farewell because, as they say, how else can they make a difference. But work like theirs, which is precisely what we need in times of unanswered questions and uncertain futures, is under threat like never before. ‘Big Finish’ is the first production in Battersea Arts Centre’s 50th anniversary season, and the perfect show to illustrate what South London’s most essential venue is about, and why it matters. In their Grand Hall, Figs in Wigs are remaking theatre in their own image, and it is fun, generous, surreal and brilliant.

Player Kings

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Player Kings by William Shakespeare, adapated by Robert Icke – New Wimbledon Theatre, London

Warming up for the West End, Sir Ian McKellen’s appearance as Falstaff in Robert Icke’s compressed Henry IVs created real excitement on a Wimbledon Friday night. Some actors seem fated to play the fat knight, Michael Gambon or Desmond Barritt for example, while for others, notably Antony Sher, the role comes as a surprise to both actor and audience. McKellen is in the latter category. As they await his first entrance, everyone is silently wondering whether such a lean, vulpine actor can really carry off a fat suit. Of course he can. McKellen is the UK’s greatest living actor, and his decision to take on a demanding role at a stage in his life and career when he can do what he pleases, is a gift to us all.

McKellen’s decision to work with Robert Icke is a canny one. Icke is in demand as a reimaginer of the classic, and he has taken the radical, but entirely logical, decision to combine Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 into a single play. Althought it’s the kind of thing John Barton used to get up to at the RSC, this type of heavey editing has fallen out of fashion. But anyone who has seen the two plays in full will have experienced a slump in Part 2, when repetition seems to set in. Icke’s edits strip the plays back, to largely good effect, keeping all the best bits but cutting back on scenes such as Northumberland’s follow-up rebellion, and Pistol’s lengthy rants. The downside is a four-hour running time, but the production is very well-paced and the evening speeds by, a real achievement with the first half alone 2 hours long.

Hildegard Bechtler’s set is simple – two curtains that pull across the width of the stage – but good for switching between echoing court and cosy tavern. Other than the text changes, Icke’s production is clear and direct, giving text and performers room to breathe. The exception is an amusing staging of Falstaff’s confrontation with the Lord Chief Justice (Joseph Mydell) following the Battle of Shrewsbury. Falstaff, in a wheelchair and looking like Captain Tom, is accosted at a drinks reception in his honour, from which he methodically steals all the booze. McKellen is backed by a strong cast, including the dignified Mydell. Richard Coyle’s King Henry is a troubled man who is clearly ill from the start, and knows how little he has achieved. Toheeb Jimoh is a posh boy Hal, who seems motivated by cynical self-entertainment. The play is driven by his parade of schemes to humiliate Falstaff, but we see a glimpse of his real self in his alarming intense reaction to trying on his father’s crown.

Samuel Edward-Cook makes Hotspur a shaven-headed force of nature, and then channels a similar energy as Pistol, a clever piece of double casting. Justice Shallow is delightfully played by Robin Soans, while James Garnon is both a trouble-making Worcester and Shallow’s cousin Silence, who turns out to have a remarkable drunken singing voice. Clare Perkins makes Mistress Quickly London, and very real. Annette McLaughlin’s Warwick has hints of Theresa May, Mark Monero’s Peto is a real chancer, with no choice but to live on his wits, and Geoffrey Freshwater was born to play Bardolph.

The cast is strong, and the evening is not all about Falstaff, but he provides the plays with a deep, complex centre. McKellen, in flat cap, cravat and leather jacket, is dressed for a different era, which offers a key to his interpretation. His Falstaff is a seasoned villain, used to being top of the heap – but he has become lazy and, above all, old. Falstaff is losing his powers, and as the play progresses starts to realise that he is past it, and his time is coming. Each of Hal’s humiliations, which he shrugs off to amuse his followers, cuts deeper. He keeps being found out, and his life of sitting in the pub being deferred to is coming to and end. McKellen makes it clear that Falstaff is an aristocrat slumming it, like Hal, but far past the point of return. He is vicious and doesn’t hesitate to exploit weakness, but he is also loveable and, his physical weakness – trying and failing to rise from his tavern seat, as Mistress Quickly rushes to support him – is a heart-stopping moment, as is the final rejection scene, when he choses continued self-delusion over facing the truth. Icke incorporates his death scene from Henry V, just as Orson Welles did in ‘Chimes at Midnight’, which works well.

McKellen’s performance is a triumph – both physically menacing and vulnerable, charming and nasty – a multi-layered interpretation certainly as good as anyone who has played the role in recent memory. Icke’s production doesn’t reinvent the play with the brilliance of his Hamlet, but provides much more than a vehicle for McKellen, spawning a world that allows his performance to flourish. It’s an evening to cherish.

Dear Octopus

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Photo by Marc Brenner.

Dear Octopus by Dodie Smith – National Theatre: Lyttleton, London

While ‘I Capture the Castle’ remains much-loved, Dodie Smith’s stage work is rarely revived. Emily Burns’ production at the Lyttleton demonstrates why, but also shows the value in revisiting a play that is very old-fashioned, but is also dominated by excellent parts for women. The play, set during a weekend reunion of the Randolph family for the golden wedding of Dora (Lindsay Duncan) and Charles (Malcolm Sinclair), is on many levels very uneventful. People resolve sometimes fraught relationships, with the shadow of the First World War, and the death of eldest son Peter, in the background, and the subsequent, unexplained death of Nora, one of twins. The play was written in 1938, but only the cccasional radio broadcasts hints at the war to come. It is all about personal relationships, and about social ones too – although, Smith was not really concerned with the power balance in an upper-middle class household enabled by servants.

Frankie Bradshaw’s set flies in huge chunks of wall and staircase to create hall, dining room and nursery in a house that is substantial in every respect. There are also real fire burning in grates, a very impressive effect. Also substantial is Lindsay Duncan’s performance as the matriarch, a proper tour-de-force. Early in the play, she is domineering, constantly ordering everyone off to do jobs for her, but her charm and sincerity is never in doubt either, lending full credibility to her reconciliation scenes with her daughter Cynthia, a troubled Bethan Cullinane. The cast is the show’s strongest suite, with a host of excellent performances. Malcolm Sinclair is tender, and very convincingly devoted to his wife, as Charles. However, here are no weak cast members. The ensemble relationship is what makes the show. The family relationships require a diagram to unpick, but Bessie Carter as ‘companion’ Fenny, Kate Fahy as reprobate elder aunty, Belle, Billy Howle as brother Nicholas and Amy Morgan as sister Margery are all highly watchable.

As this is Dodie Smith, there is also a clutch of clever and amusing children – three of them, played by a rotating cast of young actors. These are very demanding parts, requiring performers who can really mix it with the adults and, along with the size of the cast, presumably one of the reasons this play is rarely seen. Smith’s ability to charm, and to conjure up the kind of family which, despite their troubles, you want to be part of, is unrivalled. Her social milieu is a lost world, which dominated the inter-war stage and now often seems unrecognisable. However, ‘Dear Octopus’, despite being sometimes preachy on the subject, shows family dynamics in a way that still speaks to us. And Smith writes about women with a skill that is entirely natural, yet highly unusual. This is very much the kind of play that the National Theatre exists to re-examine – technically demanding, unfashionable, but with qualities missed before that we can now value .

Double Feature

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Joanna Vanderham & Ian McNeice. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

Rowan Polonski and Jonathan Hyde. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

Double Feature by John Logan – Hampstead Theatre, London

John Logan’s new play reanimates two moments of cinema history, taking us behind the scenes to the discussions that ended careers, in very different ways. The play opens with a man in a hat and cloak sweeping, Gothically, into a comfortable cottage. It is Vincent Price (Jonathan Hyde), and he is meeting Michael Reeves (Rowon Polonski), young, brilliant and doomed film director during the shooting of Witchfinder General. Soon, we realise that this time period, 1968, is woven with another, around four years earlier. Onto the same set step Alfred Hitchcock (Ian McNeice) and Tippi Hedren (Joanna Vanderham). Now we are in Hitchcock’s cottage on the Universal lot, during the filming of ‘Marnie’. The relationships between the two pairs are very different. Hitchcock is a sexual predator, offering stardom in exchange for giving him what he wants. And he always gets what he wants. Hedren is his creation, a model he made into a film star, and she fully understands the power Hitchcock has over he. Meanwhile, Reeves has no power and can only beg Price not to walk out on his film and, it turns out, persuade him he is for real. Price looks impressive, but his performance style is hopelessly out of date and the work has dried up.

Logan has written a very enjoyable play that raises multiple questions about reputations and the way we imagine people, as well as the creative process. He also pulls off some technically demanding effects, writing scenes that overlap between the two timelines, sharing moments of dialogue. Jonathan Kent, directing, delivers a production of undeniable quality, and Anthony Ward’s hyper-realist set is richly imagined, even allowing space for Jonathan Hyde to demonstrate Price’s cooking skills by whipping up some pasta in real time.

Ultimately the success or otherwise of ‘Double Feature’ depends on the play’s overriding vision and logic, and on the performances. On the former, it does not quite deliver. It is clear that Logan is very interested in the two relationships he portrays, and in the film history around them. Hitchcock’s poisonous relationship with Hedren has only been fully revealed in the last few years, and is certainly worthy of exploration. Meanwhile, Reeves short career (he died of a drug overdose at the age of 25), and his unlikely encounter with Price, is a fascinating topic. Despite his undoubted writing skills, it is never entirely clear why Logan has chosen to interweave these two subjects, other than as contrasting examples of creative connection. Really, they seem like two short plays that could just as easily have remained separate.

However, where ‘Double Feature’ really delivers is in its cast. Admittedly, Rowon Polonski, while an excellent awkward young man in a hurry, perhaps lacks enough of the underlying darkness that is surely part of Reeves persona. However, the scene in which he persuades Price to stop hamming up his performance is a brilliant moment, as we suddenly hear the voice that makes ‘Witchfinder General’ so chilling. As Price, Jonathan Hyde is a real pleasure to watch, both flamboyant and entirely real, explaining touchingly how he wears make-up to maintain the illusion as he ages.

Joanna Vanderham is entirely convincing, both playing the role of a Hitchcock blonde, and unravelling her fears and anxieties, before finally tells Hitch what she thinks of him. And Ian McNeice is both delightful and thoroughly nasty as Hitchcock himself, obsessing over everything from oysters to luncheon meat, and gradually making his sinister side more and more apparent. By the end it is clear that Hedren’s film career is over, and she will not play another lead – and that’s the way she wants it. Meanwhile, Price will go out on a career high, having finally found a film he really wants to make. There is plenty on offer here to entertain and to inform.