theatre

Henry V

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Alfred Enoch – photo by Johan Persson

Henry V by William Shakespeare – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Following their highly successful 2024 collaboration on Pericles, Joint Artistic Director Tamara Harvey and Alfred Enoch reunite for a Henry V that uses the same language of movement, from Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster and fight director Kate Waters. Lucy Osbourne’s costumes are medieval in inspiration, with a couture edge. Michael Elcock’s Dauphin wears silver trainers, but the foot soldiers on both sides are in dull colours, and one side is indistinguishable from the other. The mass of men suffer and die, regardless of allegiance. The glorification of war is constantly exposed in front of a wooden scaffolding set, also by Osbourne, against which attackers and defenders alike are slaughtered.

The war, which is the singular plot of what is an unusually simple play for Shakespeare, in terms of structure, cannot be escaped. Harvey brings in Henry IV’s deathbed speech to Hal, from Henry IV Part 2, at the start of the play in which the father advises the son “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days.” Alfred Enoch’s Henry V takes him at his word, and displays a messianic focus in pursuing what is revealed to be a tenuous claim to the French throne in the play’s opening exchange. There’s something of Tony Blair in Enoch’s smooth, polite and slightly innocent manner. He gives the impression that he is an entirely reasonable man, and his war is reasonable too, but the glint in his eye grows and, by the time he delivers the St. Crispin’s Day speech, he has morphed into a cult leader. Enoch is excellent, both likeable and unnerving in one of Shakespeare’s strangest roles.

The triumphalism traditionally read into the play seems very hollow in Harvey’s interpretation. Little of what Henry says that can be taken at face value and, when he alone, he gives a bitter, self-pitying pre-battle soliloquy in which he castigates his subjects for their lack of gratitude, bemoaning his position as “subject to the breath of every fool whose sense no more can feel but his own wringing.” At the end, the Chorus reveals the futility of achieved Henry did, explaining how his son will go on to lose it all.

Harvey’s production uses a coherent, well-cast ensemble, continuing a welcome trend under the new RSC leadership of powerful group dynamics on stage. There a no weak links, and the performers clearly fully understand the production’s direction, and are committed to it. Jamie Ballard plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, King of France and the soldier Williams in a tour de force of flexibility. Catrin Aaron is excellent and completely different as Mistress Quickly and the Queen of France. Micah Balfour’s Exeter is a lynchpin. Gender switched parts worked seamlessly, includoing Sophie McIntosh as the Duchess of Gloucester and Sarah Slimani as Mountjoy. Natalie Kimmerling’s Katherine is a strong presence, fully understanding the politics that sweep her into marriage. Emmanuel Olusanya as Bardolph, Ewan Wardrop as Nym and Tanvi Virmani as ‘The Girl’ (the Boy in the original) make a genuinely funny and seedy grouping with Paul Hunter’s Pistol. The latter is a joy to watch, setting an extremely high baseline for physical comedy, drawing other performers in his wake.

This Henry V is less obviously a response to current events than is sometimes the case in times of international crisis, but it provides a powerful, coherent warning against leaders who never doubt themselves, a lesson with wide application. Harvey continues to direct very high quality Shakespeare, and to build a broad company and a clear, fluid, modern performance style (with excellent verse speaking) which we can look forward to enjoying, all being well, for many years to come.

The Shitheads

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Jacoba Williams and Jonny Khan.

The Shitheads by Jack Nicholls – Royal Court Theatre, London

For starters, Jack Nicholls’ play The Shitheads is set in the Stone Age – specifically, the end of the Stone Age. I can only think of one other play with Stone Age scenes – Alistair McDowall’s The Glow, also staged at the Royal Court. It’s a bold and decisive approach from a writer who sent his work to the Royal Court on spec: they are staging submitted plays as part of their 70th anniversary season. Anna Reid has turned one end of the the Upstairs theatre into the interior of a cave with rock walls that are pretty convincing. It’s hard to make stage rocks that look real. But that’s only part of the setting. The play also uses puppets by Finn Caldwell, beginning with an elk hunting scene. The elk, real size, is operated War Horse style by two people, under puppetry captain Scarlet Wilderink. But this is definitely not War Horse. Nicholls creates a strange and thoroughly disturbing parable about inward-looking societies, fear of outsiders, resistance to change and violence which is entirely current.

The cast are all very watchable and convincing, at ease in their strange, compelling roles. The protagonist Clare is played by Jacoba Williams, a young woman venturing outside the cave where her father Adrian, played by Peter Clements, dictates the world view. Her sister Lisa, played by Annabel Smith, seems innocent but is capable of upending everything. Then a strange arrives – first a hunter, Greg (Jonny Khan), then his wife Danielle (Ami Tredera) who comes looking for him with their baby. The latter is the play’s other puppet, and possibly the most sinister thing in the whole evening. There’s competition for this: the cave is decorated with flesh and bones and the cave dwellers’ deceased mother is in a pit, along with discarded animal carcasses. Cannibalism features. Clare, asked why she lives in a cave, says “Because we’re very lucky” – but things are changing. The people they described as ‘Shitheads’ roam from place to place for better food and climate, and they’re leaving for good as the weather changes. The cave dwellers are doomed, but that may not convince them to change.

Directed by David Byrne, The Shitheads is a riot. The play, written in deliberately contemporary language, is very funny in a Martin MacDonagh, black comedy style. The idea of Stone Age characters called Adrian or Danielle is, in itself, very funny. The scenario also carries echoes of Enda Walsh – plays such as Walworth Road, where a closeted family group creates bizarre rituals to keep the outside world away. Nicholls is a clever and exciting writer, and this collaboration with a Royal Court on a high has all the excitement of the dramas that originally made the theatre’s name. It shows us ourselves in totally unexpected, entirely recognisabel ways, and providing gripping , unclassifiable entertainment while doing so.

Lost Atoms

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Anna Sinclair Robinson and Joe Layton. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Lost Atoms by Anna Jordan – Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Published at Plays International

Lost Atoms, written by Anna Jordan, is the 30th anniversary production for Frantic Assembly, who are a staple of the UK’s 21st century touring scene. Led throughout by Scott Graham, the company is known for making movement the core of their expression, and devising their own method entwining the text and the physical. The Frantic Method has been very influential, shaping a performance style that is very distinctively of our time. Frantic have achieved a great deal, applying their approach to classic text and new writing with equal success. It is all the more impressive that their world is smaller touring venues rather than the big commercial or subsidised theatres, where experimental work that challenges audiences is needed most. It is entirely appropriate that Lost Atoms is a co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, the Curve in Leicester and the Mayflower, Southampton.

For their anniversary tour they have chosen a new play by Jordan who, since her last play in 2018, has been working on television series such as One Day for Netflix. Lost Atoms is about ordinary living, and what that really entails. A couple meet, get together and go through experiences related to pregnancy which are both common, and unforgettably traumatic. There is a cast of just two: Joe Layton plays Robbie, and Anna Sinclair Robinson plays Jess. Their meeting involves coffee shop wifi, and they get together through a series of chances, gradually working out how much they like each other. They encounter each other’s families, and all they bring – cleverly staged through one-sided conversations. Then Jess gets pregnant. It is impossible to discuss the plot without giving too much away, but what follows tests their relationship to the limits.

There are remarkable similarities with Luke Norris’ play Guess How Much I Love You?, currently playing at the Royal Court, which also has a cast of two, and concerns a relationship beset by pregnancy trauma. However, under Scott Graham’s direction the style of Lost Atoms is very different. Layton and Sinclair Robinson use Andrezj Goulding’s set – a bank of filing cabinets – like a climbing wall. Drawers pull out to become seats, steps, even a toilet, but they also act as drawers, containing props but also memories. A massive slab, looking disturbingly like the door to an ancient tomb, flips up to form a bed, angling the couple towards the audience in mid-air. The physicality of the performers is, at times, mesmerising. They are frequently performing while horizontal, or suspended at gravity-defying angles. They move in relation to one another throughout, expressing the closeness and distance of an intimate relationship through their bodies as much as their words.

The story is told in flashback, as Jess and Robbie explain what happened to them for the benefit, it seems, of the audience. It takes time to get going and the first half, which shows us their developing relationship, tells us less than the second. The performers become more convincing as the stress mounts, and they move away from the sometimes exaggerated naivety of their initial personas. Lost Atoms truly draws the audience in when it starts to explore what happens to people behind closed doors, in cold NHS consulting rooms and tiny flats. We think we know what life is about, but human drama is at its most extreme in everyday settings, just out of sight. Frantic Assembly’s production showcases the strengths of their work, with complete physical commitment to storytelling. Actors do things you may never have seen on a stage before, but which seem strangely natural. Conventional theatre can seem static in comparison.

Guess How Much I Love You?

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Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo. Photo by Johan Persson.

Guess How Much I Love You? by Luke Norris – Royal Court Theatre

The first show in the Royal Court’s much-anticipated 70th anniversary season sets high standards. Luke Norris’s new play is a two-hander, with a brief appearance by a third performer, set in cramped interior spaces, but it fills the main stage effortlessly. It concerns a couple, played by Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, going through the emotional pressures that come with trying to have a baby. It is difficult to write about the plot of ‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ without giving key events away, but it is fair to say that things do not go as they had planned. The play has an intensity to it with is rarely seen on stage. Played in the corners of a series of rooms – their flat, a hospital room, a doctor’s examination room – there is both a claustrophobia and an ordinariness to their experiences, especially as Grace Smart’s sets make these corners just a little tighter than ninety degrees. The walls are closing in on them.

The pair, unnamed, are ordinary too, but Norris’s writing pulls apart what ordinary means. The initial tensions in their relationship – for example over whether porn is exploitative or not – hint at Sheehy’s resentment of the role she is already playing, as she waits, pregnant, mid-ultrasound. As events spiral, the pair are faced with impossible moral choices and the way they treat each other becomes brutal in a deeply uncomfortable way. There is more than a hint of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ about the deep levels of love/hate played out on stage in scenes which seem too private for us to be watching. However, there is more emotional truth in the play than in Edward Albee. Although they say the most appalling things, it is entirely believable that people in their situation would react the way they do. The horror of living has rarely been exposed so honestly.

Jeremy Herrin’s direction brings out two very powerful pieces acting from Aramayo and Sheehy. He is patient, defensive, desperate and unable to cope. She is a ball of grief and pure anger. Rosie Sheehy will surely be in the running for awards for her performance, which is simply extraordinary. She is incredibly vulnerable in her deep distress, and there are a couple of moments when she completely lets go, with speeches that are difficult to hear and impossible to turn away from. Her commitment is total.

‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ is a lean and brilliant play, with an unwavering focus on the nature of love, what happens when it goes wrong, and how people really behave in a crisis. Norris also weaves in themes of religion and gender roles in a way that feels natural. There is a particular moment in the play that makes the audience’s hearts drop as though they were an express lift, but the entire evening is an unrelentingly intense experience. A play which pushes the capacity of theatre to communicate to its limits is the perfect start to the year for the Royal Court.

Twelfth Night

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Michael Grady-Hall, Gwyneth Keyworth and Samuel West. Photos by Helen Murray.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare – Barbican Theatre, London

Prasanna Puwanarajah’s production of Twelfth Night is a fascinating combination of genuinely funny comedy, and the underlying darkness that hangs over the play. There’s greater emphasis on the comedy though than in many productions, driven by the central figure of Feste, played with great presence by Michael Grady-Hall. He opens the evening, descending on a wire playing a guitar and singing, and takes a prominent role as intermediary between the stage and the audience. His post-interval audience interaction – an extended game of catch – goes on much longer than most performers could get away with, but no-one resents it. Dressed like a bumble bee in one of James Cotterill’s entertaining costumes, he performs a number of impressive physical turns but also spans the melancholy elements of the play, bringing tears to the eye with his performance of the play’s songs.

The production has a strong cast, offering distinctive interpretations. Gwyneth Keyworth’s Viola is no-nonsense, but rapidly flustered at the idea of dressing as a boy. Daniel Monks brings a certain incel quality to an Orsino with an edge. Joplin Sibtain’s Toby Belch is a tragic figure destroyed by alcohol, tall and lurching like a 1970s French House drunk. Danielle Henry makes Maria the character in the play you would actually want to spend time with, sharp and human. Freema Agyeman was off the night I saw the play and, annoyingly, her excellent understudy as Olivia was not identified, either in the theatre or through my subsequent enquiry to the RSC press office.

Sam West’s masterful Malvolio adds complete assurance to the production. He is one of those performers whose presence makes the audience relax, ready to sit back and enjoy his skills. He takes the character from chippy to hilarious – a ludicrous cross-gartered scene – to alarmingly vengeful, as though it was a natural character arc. Played against James Cotterill’s surreal giant church organ set, Puwanarajah delivers a show that fully understands of the humour and complexity of this strange but irresistible play.

The Line of Beauty

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Photo by Johan Persson.

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst adapted by Jack Holden – Almeida Theatre, London

Alan Hollinghurst’s much-loved novel, The Line of Beauty, won the Booker Prize in 2004. Looking back to the rise of Conservative politics in 1980s Britain, and the parallel AIDS crisis, it explored gay life and consciousness through the eyes of ingenue Nick Guest, who learns a lot in a short space of time. Now, adapted by Jack Holden and directed by Michael Grandage, it reappears two decades later on the Almeida stage.

Adapting novels as plays can be a thankless task, especially when they’re well known, but Holden does a good job in not allowing the book to kill the drama. Covering the period between the Conservative victories at the 1983 and 1987 elections, the play dramatises the collision of personal and political from the perspective of Nick, played engagingly by Jasper Talbot and his experiences in love, and while lodging with the family of a Conservative MP. Performances are universally strong, and Grandage’s production is very tightly delivered. Alistair Nwachukwu gives a standout performance as Nick’s first lover Leo, charming, clever and vulnerable. Arty Froushan, as cocaine-snorting playboy Wani, Charles Edwards as smooth, fatherly MP Gerald Fedden, Robert Portal’s menacing Badger, and Ellie Bamber as bipolar Cat Fedden are all excellent performances. Hannah Morrish channels the demeanour of Fergie in a way that is both hilarious and disturbing. Doreene Blackstock, as Leo’s mother, and Claudia Harrison as Gerald’s wife are also very strong, but their roles are rather limited – a problem with both book and play. The staging is sumptuous – sets and costumes by Christopher Oram – who has clearly delighted in recreating and subtley parodying the high society 1980s with its odd combination of frumpiness and glamour.

Some of the more literary aspects of the book get a bit lost in the dramatisation, such as the thematic significance of Henry James and of the ogee, a shape which swings both ways. What is more significant is how much of a period piece the play feels. Hollinghurst was writing about a period 20 years earlier, a time now approaching half a century from the present day. The key issues of the time – homophobia, social conservatism, privilege and the devastation wrought by AIDS should not be forgotten, but are not undiscussed. The play offers a highly professional and entirely entertaining evening, but it is unclear exactly why this novel needs to be staged at this particular moment.

Cyrano de Bergerac

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Photo by Marc Brenner.

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond de Rostand – Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Simon Evans’ production of Cyrano is a very convincing and enjoyable account of a play which stands up well to re-examination. Evans has also adapted the play, with Debris Stevenson, giving the language a contemporary flavour without undermining the period setting, in a fantasy 17th century France. The play is held aloft by an exceptionally strong case who bring a notable level of star wattage to the stage. Adrian Lester, as Cyrano, exudes leading man skill and control, to the extent that at times he reminds us of Derek Jacobi, who triumphed in the role at the RSC for Terry Hands in the early 1980s, and at others of Simon Russell Beale. Cyrano is a part that requires a dashing, confident, yet vulnerable performance, and Lester provides this with apparent ease. He is brash in the tavern scenes, charming with Roxanne, conflicted with love rival Christian and, in the play’s final scene, when he drops the letter he is reading, supposedly the last missive of the dead Christian, and recites it to Roxanne from memory, devastating. Up until this point the play has been hugely entertaining, but it is this culminating encounter which makes it something special. The play’s emotional weight all builds to this moment of revelation, as Roxanne realises he has loved her all along, and Cyrano realises the same. There is not a dry eye in the house.

Lester’s triumphant performance helps create the conditions for the whole cast to shine brightly. Susannah Fielding, as Roxanne, is exemplary – riding a wave of breezy, charming detachment until her emotions catch up with her. Her outrage at discovering she has been deceived by Cyrano all along unleashes a fascinating cascade of conflicting impulses. Levi Brown is excellent as a casuallly insulting Christian de Neuvillette, cocky and doomed. Scott Handy’s Comte de Guiche is very funny, appearing to belong to a parallel aristocratic world where nothing quite makes sense to him. And Greer Dale-Foulkes makes Abigail, Roxanne’s companion, a very amusing comic adjunct to the action.

Performed on Grace Smart’s sets of torn posters, worn plaster and red velvet curtains, the play fills the Swan stage as though written for it. Evan’s has conjured a hit, somewhat old-fashioned – in a good way because it successfully revives a classic for a new generation without significantly remaking the play. It’s a significant achievement, and makes for a very satisfying evening watching very good actors show us their skills.

Bog Witch

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Photo by Lucy Powell

Bog Witch by Bryony Kimmings – Soho Theatre, Walthamstow

Bryony Kimmings’s last show was in 2018, in a different era. Her disturbingly personal and raw shows made her a 2010s fringe star. Her unpredictable, apparently chaotic style proved highly influential on the style of alternative theatre performers. Now she’s back with her first show since having a son, separating from her partner (Tim Grayman, well known to audiences from their joint show, Fake it ‘til you Make it), and moving to the countryside with a man called Will. Bog Witch unpicks this experience. To some extent it is classic Kimmings. She is disconcertingly direct, about herself and the way she feels, tells rude jokes, and wears ludicrous costumes. She is a very engaging performer, always undercutting herself with double takes at her own explanations. The audience loves her, and there is a very welcoming atmosphere in the vast, gleaming, newly refurbished Walthamstow branch of the Soho Theatre.

However, Bog Witch does not deliver the energy levels of previous Kimmings work. The size of the venue does not help. Beautiful although it is, the new venue is much larger than any comparable fringe venue and there is a sense that this show would have worked better in a more intimate space, more suited to Kimmings confessional style. Working (for the first time?) with a co-director, Francesca Murray-Fuentes, Kimmings works hard to occupy the cavernous stage, using everything from a long white backcloth to an epic witch costume, rustic paraphernalia and an amusing ‘burning at the stake’ tableau. However, the work to achieve this detracts from the show, with Kimmings often engaged in moving props around.

There is also a lack of the wildness and abandon apparently promised by the title. Bog Witch is a controlled show, which threatens to flatline at a couple of points in the second half (not that there is an interval, despite the near 2-hour running time). The themes she is addressing are very grown-up – depression, miscarriage, social compromise, climate responsibility. She (her performance persona, that is) seems changed by her experiences of getting older and having to compromise more, with some of her edges rubbed away. We have to buy into her changed self to stay involved in the show. The story of redemption she has to tell lacks excitement at times, and the audience-participation finale is somewhat flat. Although watching Kimmings on stage is always a good use of time, this is not the most driven or electrifying of her shows.

Entertaining Mr Sloane

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Jordan Stephens, Daniel Cerqueira and Tamzin Outhwaite. Photo by Ellie Kurttz.

Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton – Young Vic, London

Joe Orton’s 1964 play is revived, 60 years on, in a production by Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall. She stages in in the round, on a carpeted living room podium surrounded by a tidal wave of detritus, which also hangs above the stage. Orton sets the play in a house perched beside a rubbish dump, and in Peter McKintosh’s set this consists of abandoned prams, furniture, buckets – the remains of collapsed domesticity. The play is a farce gone badly wrong, highly confrontational and very controversial when first staged. Over the years, it’s meaning has changed significantly. Orton was writing the thin veneer of respectability that hid the unmentionable lives of queer people, and a swell of sexual desires that were not acknowledged. Now, these elements of the play seems less remarkable than the social assumptions that are unwittingly revealed. Passing references to sexual predation in children’s homes and scout troupes, casual racism and the staggering sexism which drives the evening’s climax are somewhat jaw dropping. There’s a distinct sense that this play is no longer what we imagined it to be.

The cast play Orton’s scabrous dialogue with a slightly strangled formality which emphasises the sense that we are spying on a very different time. Tamzin Outhwaite is compelling as Kath, equal parts calculating and naïve in her pursuit of the new, sexy lodger Sloane (Jordan Stephens). This is Stephens (Rizzle Kicks) first professional stage role and, although he is enjoyably self-satisfied he lacks the air of menace that is essential to the role. Sloane has to appear a threat, who could destroy everyone around him, but he seems more a passive object of lust for Kath and her brother Ed, played by Daniel Cerqueira with a deliciously upright campness. His failure to conceal his excitement when he first encounters Sloane, asking him “Do you wear… leather?” is very funny. Their elderly father, Kemp (Christopher Fairbank) is impressively dilapidated and seedy, like Eric Sykes if bitter experience had displaced his sense of humour.

The first act is a highly entertaining competition between brother and sister for the same man. It’s the second half when things start to fall apart. Entertaining Mr Sloane bears a resemblance to Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, staged in 2023 at the Young Vic on a similarly furnished set. A disruptor arrives in an apparently settled household, opens up the cracks and realigns the sexual relations. However, Pinter is a much more subtle writer, implying but rarely confirming what’s going on beneath the surface. Orton makes everything very explicit, which provides diminishing returns. Pulling this off requires more comic energy than this production can muster. The final scenes, where Orton has Ed and Sloane brutally humiliate Kathy, come across as nasty rather than subversive. Although she gets her comeback, the verbal and physical violence is unpleasantly one-sided. Orton seems to be enjoying himself, which makes for very uncomfortable viewing. The audience is left with a sense that this revival reveals the flaws in the play, and that it’s time may have passed.