John Morrison

She Stoops To Conquer

Directing your first classic English 18th century comedy in the unforgivingly vast surroundings of the Olivier theatre is a high hurdle to jump for a young director like Jamie Lloyd; and it's not made any easier when bloggers like me come along to a very early preview and start to pick holes in a production that hasn't quite got into top gear.

Lloyd, who has risen to prominence directing plays in the much smaller spaces of the Donmar and the Royal Court, rises to the challenge of the Olivier by sensibly framing most of the action in a defined space at the centre of the stage which serves as the drawing room of Squire Hardcastle's home, complete with burning log fire.  It's beautifully designed and costumed by Mark Thompson, and the acting at its best is excellent.  John Heffernan, whom I saw last year as an unforgettable Richard II in Bristol, oozes languid 18th century charm in the supporting role of Hastings, and is well partnered by Cush Jumbo as Constance. Katherine Kelly is superb as Kate Hardcastle, delivering a masterclass in sly high comedy and timing. She plays Kate not as a country ingenue but a mature and quite sophisticated woman who knows exactly what she wants.  Overall, however, there are too many variations in style, with some cast members like Sophie Thompson (Mrs Hardcastle) overplaying the comic effects and others too restrained.  Harry Hadden-Paton, despite his experience as a rioting toff in Laura Wade's Posh, doesn't quite convince as Marlow, the young upper-class twerp whose brazen confidence in seducing serving wenches evaporates into shyness when he meets a girl of his own class.  I much preferred his performance in Jessica Swale's excellent production of The Rivals at Southwark Playhouse in 2010.  In the scene where he meets the lovely Kate for the first time and is tongue-tied in embarrassment, Hadden-Paton makes Marlow such an imbecile that it is hard to see why Kate should actually fancy him.  When she swaps her clothes and pretends to be a barmaid, he again overplays the swaggering seducer. Kate remains in character as herself, even when dissembling, while Marlow I and Marlow II seem to be different people altogether.  Good comedy flows naturally from convincing characters, and this production is too eager to find the audience's funnybone without giving the characters time to develop.  David Fynn as Tony Lumpkin is by contrast a little too restrained (I started to wonder what James Corden might have made of this part) and doesn't quite get across his character's essential feature -- that his little grey cells tick over more slowly than those of everyone else on stage. He should be a beat behind everyone else.  Lumpkin thinks he's clever but he's actually extremely dim, as he proves when he hands over to his mother a letter which he can't read himself, thus giving away the elopment plan of Hastings and Constance.  

The best scenes in this production are very good, but overall the production isn't helped by its thumpety-thump musical score and ho-ho-ho dance interludes, all of which are designed to tell us we're watching a comedy.  It's the unnecessary equivalent of holding up a sign saying LAUGH NOW.  In fact this is the sort of play where it's quite safe to postpone the business of getting laughs until the play has got into its stride.  I think it's safe to say that with a few more performances, the show will tighten up and the comedy will start to flow more naturally as the talented cast gain confidence.

The Sea Plays

Four burly stokers, their shoulders streaked with sweat and dust, are shovelling coal against the flickering orange light of a furnace.  A ship's crew battles against a raging sea, twisting and turning giant iron bulkheads as water cascades over them. One man falls and has to be borne away on the shoulders of his fellows.

This is the stunning opening to three short plays by Eugene O'Neill in the Old Vic Tunnels and I have no doubt it will prove to be one of the most remarkable London fringe theatre productions of 2012.  O'Neill's Sea Plays are staged in a claustrophobic, dank, brick-lined, phantasmagoric space under Waterloo station which is one of the two most atmospheric venues in the capital (the other being Wilton's Music Hall).  It's not a suitable spot for light drawingroom comedy, but it's a perfect frame for the heightened naturalism and despair of O'Neill's seafaring dramas.  This is my second trip to the Tunnels, after seeing an excellent production of two early David Mamet plays in 2011.  On both occasions directors and designers have fully exploited the claustrophobic nature of the space to create a breathtaking theatrical experience.

As the audience files its way through a dank corridor lined with barrels, boxes and maritime detritus, the stokers are framed under a brick archway like inhabitants of hell.  I love shows that come to life before the audience have even taken their seats -- Rupert Goold's site-specific Decade about 9/11, Ian Rickson's Hamlet at the Young Vic, or the African Macbeth which Max Stafford-Clark created at Wilton's a few years ago. 

O'Neill wrote these plays in 1916-17 at the start of his dramatic career;  Bound East For Cardiff, the first of the trilogy, premiered in a rickety wooden theatre perched over the waves in Provincetown.  A seaman lies in his bunk coughing blood, seriously injured after falling into the hold. It's the last half hour in the life of a man who knows he is going to die and end up in a watery grave.  The second play, In The Zone, shows a man falling victim to the wartime paranoia of his fellows who persuade themselves that he's a German spy trying to betray their ship, crossing the Atlantic with ammunition, to the prowling U-boats.  After the interval the final play, The Long Voyage Home, is set in a seedy Docklands bar where a Swedish sailor is drugged and kidnapped.  The plots are linear and predictable, but the writing crackles with tension and atmosphere;  O'Neill's use of popular speech sounds a bit hackneyed to us, but was revolutionary in its day. 

In an ensemble production like this one with a cast of sixteen, it's hard to single out individual actors, but Matthew Trevannion makes the most of the part of an Irish sailor who is the dying man's friend and confidant.  As the naive Swedish sailor, Raymond M Sage gives a memorable performance, well partnered by Amanda Boxer as the lady of the night who lures him to his doom.  Kenneth Hoyt, founder and artistic director for a decade of the Provincetown Repertory Theatre, directs all three plays with great assurance.  But the really outstanding work is done by the design team -- Van Santvoord (stage design), Emma Chapman (lighting) and Alex Baranowski (sound).  By the end, my timbers were thoroughly shivered -- whatever that means. 

 

Count Oederland

Nobody much under 40 will ever have heard of the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, although he was one of the big beasts of post-war German-language theatre and died only 20 years ago.  So it's heartening to see a first ever production in English of this play from 1951.  Graf Oederland was never a big success and the author rewrote it more than once, but it has lots of themes that resonate today -- an inexplicable motiveless murder, an underground armed rebellion, a mythical axeman who roams the land chopping off heads and a bourgeois social order that is crumbling away from inside.  There are echoes of Brecht and Buechner in this highly political play in twelve scenes, which seems to foreshadow a lot of late 20th century theatre while also tracing the impact of Nazism.

It starts with a public prosecutor pacing around in his bedroom in the small hours of the morning, obsessed by the case of a bank clerk who has murdered an office caretaker with an axe. The killing is motiveless but the prosecutor tells his wife: 'There are times when I understand him'.   The prosecutor disappears into thin air and re-emerges as the reincarnation of Count Oederland ('Wasteland'), a fairytale figure who goes around chopping heads.  The story has elements of a psychological mystery, of a social parable about the haves and the have-nots, and of a dark thriller. 

This production by the Cerberus company at the Arcola doesn't quite master all these registers. Director Christopher Loscher skilfully marshals a cast of eleven on a tiny angled white platform of a stage;  the style is abstract-minimalist, with white designer furniture, and doesn't convey the variety of locations.  The murderous axe is too tiny to become a dominant symbol, and the acting is uneven.  Evelyn Adams shines brightly in three different parts, while Jacob Trenerry is excellent as Dr Hahn.  I also liked Simon Norbury as the prosecutor and Natasha Alderslade as his wife.  But this is a flawed play, with characters that never get beyond the two-dimensional, despite the best efforts of the cast. 

The Art of Concealment

The tiny Jermyn Street Theatre is unusual among London's studio theatres in its location a few steps from Piccadilly Circus, and because of its atmosphere, which owes more to old-fashioned West End theatreland than your average slummy over-the-pub fringe venue.  Rather than serving up revivals of familiar classics, it concentrates on new plays and unjustly forgotten works.  It is the ideal venue for a biographical play about Terence Rattigan, who has swung back into fashion over the past two or three years as audiences and critics have rediscovered not just his talent for stagecraft and dialogue, but his insights into life's hidden emotional depths.

The Art of Concealment by Giles Cole is subtitled The Life of Terence Rattigan and it is exactly that -- a dramatisation of his passage from handsome young Harrovian cricketer in the 1930s through dazzling success and failure to his final years when a new generation of theatrical writers -- Osborne, Wesker, Pinter and their successors -- had elbowed him aside.  Having struggled myself with writing a biographical play covering several decades of a man's life, I think Cole very nearly brings it off, though the play has a few flaws.  It has eight characters when six would probably have sufficed, and it occasionally lapses into repetition and cliche, with one or two scenes too many.

The author puts the dying Rattigan of the 1970s on stage to comment on the antics of his younger self, and the scenes where they are on stage together enable the play to cast away its naturalistic origins to good effect. Cole also brings on Aunt Edna, the fictional middle-aged theatregoer whom Rattigan invented as an argument against the post-war dramatists who he felt lacked old-fashioned craftsmanship.  Rattigan's nemesis, the star critic Kenneth Tynan, doesn't appear in person, but one of Rattigan's boyfriends reads his acid reviews.  Cole writes convincing scenes showing Rattigan with his parents, and suggests that his lifelong concealment of his sexuality owed much to the example of his father, whose diplomatic career ended in disgrace.  His adoring mother appears never to have quite grasped what was meant when her son was described as 'not a ladies' man';  there's an interesting contrast here with Noel Coward, whose equally adoring mother seems never to have had a problem with her son being homosexual.  Like Coward, Rattigan never 'came out' and it would be hopelessly anachronistic to suggest that he should have done so in an era when gay sex was illegal.  When in doubt, Rattigan put his career and reputation first, banishing his boyfriends back to the suburbs and keeping them away from his smart parties.  Cole dramatises well the fierce jealousies between the playwright's lovers and his gay theatrical friends.  'Rent boy!' snarls Rattigan's producer friend Freddie Gilmour (a fictional amalgam of several real people) at one of his boyfriends.

The story is well told, up to a point.  There are one or two key scenes in Rattigan's life which are under-exploited, such as his fateful decision to reject the idea of making the disgraced colonel in Separate Tables overtly gay in the American production of the play.  Cole also leaves out the hilarious story of how the Lord Chamberlain blocked a satire on Hitler which Rattigan co-wrote, on the grounds that the German embassy -- which was sent the script and invited to comment -- didn't appreciate it.  Cole's writing is a bit predictable, and falls well short of the bold imaginative poetry which Tom Stoppard achieved in The Invention of Love, a play on a similar theme which paired the young A E Housman with his older self.

The real problem is that while Rattigan the writer was a master of subtext, in Cole's play all the characters tend to say more or less exactly what they mean.  This is more than a stylistic shortcoming;  it robs the story of the kind of ambiguity that makes drama come alive.   When the older Rattigan talks to the audience about his younger self, he's telling the truth.  But this kind of monologue would be far more interesting if he were to tell a few lies.  I prefer plays that leave a greater element of doubt hanging in the air.  Characters who deceive themselves are more interesting than characters who deceive each other, and characters who attempt to deceive the audience are the most interesting of all.

Dominic Tighe is outstanding as the young Rattigan, and is well supported by Alistair Findlay as his older self.  Graham Pountney doubles as the playwright's father Frank and his camp friend Freddie, while Judy Buxton plays both the adoring mother and the steely Aunt Edna.  Christopher Morgan gives a nice understated performance as Rattigan's friend Cuthbert Worsley, while Daniel Bayle and Charlie Hollway are Rattigan's lovers Kenneth and Michael.   None of them fall short, and I'm sorry that the eighth member of the cast Benedict Salter, playing the young Rattigan's friend Tony Goldschmidt, has only a brief cameo appearance in the opening scene.

Why?  It was Goldschmidt, who was killed in World War Two, who was the co-author of Follow My Leader, which was written in 1938 but only got a licence from the Lord Chamberlain once the war was already under way.  Past its sell-by date, it arrived in the West End in January 1940 and limped along for 16 performances.  The play, archived in the Lord Chamberlain's files in the British Library, is pretty feeble but has one excellent joke;  when the Patriots Party in Moronia try to blow up the embassy of neighbouring Neurasthenia, they destroy the British embassy by mistake, whereupon the British ambassador apologises. 

 

Foxfinder

Foxes, like them or loathe them, are plentiful.  Exciting new plays are harder to find, though the tiny Finborough Theatre in Earls Court is always a good place to start looking.  Foxfinder by Dawn King is a tautly constructed 90-minute four-hander set in a half-familiar, half-strange rural England where foxes have been wiped out.

 Nobody sees them, or even their prints in the mud.  But the animal lives on as The Beast, a malign spectre which can ruin crops, poison dreams, lure children to their deaths and rip people to pieces with its claws. Into the isolated farmhouse of Samuel and Judith Covey comes William Bloor the Foxfinder, an intense 19-year-old on a mission to root out 'contamination'.  He's never actually seen a fox but has been indoctrinated against them since the day he was taken from his parents to an institute at the age of five and taught that 'England' is his mother.

It's a big ask for the audience to make the imaginative leap and swallow this tale of something nasty in the woodshed. And it's a tribute to the quality of Dawn King's writing that the play succeeds brilliantly on several levels.  It's intentionally vague about time and place;  the accents are West Country, but no towns are mentioned to give us a fix on our location.  The period and clothing is sort of 20th century -- there is food rationing in the cities -- but there are echoes that come from further in the past, such as the farmer's muzzle-loading weapon.  The traverse set is admirably sparse, furnished with just a single chair.  Despite some spooky music, the play's mounting tension owes everything to its excellent construction, which brings the drama to a tense and pacy climax.  The key to its believability lies in the finely drawn characters.  Gyuri Sarossy and Kirsty Besterman, playing the Coveys, are totally convincing in their portrayal of a couple hovering between belief and disbelief and battling forces which are more powerful than they are.  Becci Gemmell is Sarah their neighbour, also a victim of an Orwellian system of thought control.  Tom Byam Shaw radiates an extraordinary intensity as William, the black-garbed seeker of foxes, the fanatic whose faith suddenly starts to waver.  The wordy phrases he uses ('quintessentially') convey the essence of a youth whose Achilles heel is that he has no experience of real life;  one can see him as a Cromwellian Bible-basher mortifying his own flesh, an Islamic fundamentalist, a Jesuit footsoldier of the Inquisition, or a Stalinist young commissar sent to hunt down Trotskyite deviations on a collective farm where the quotas are not being met.  The play allows us to make our own connections and read into what is happening on stage exactly what we want. 

Dawn King's writing is reminiscent of David Harrower's Knives in Hens in its intensity;  it also brings to mind Jez Butterworth's The Night Heron, another play about religious fanaticism.  It doesn't quite have the Shakespearean richness of Butterworth's Jerusalem, but it inhabits some of the same territory in its questioning of the mythic roots of the English countryside.  To write a play about foxes which leaps over the sterile debates about banning foxhunting is a great achievement;  this is a play about belief and rationality, about delusion, manipulation, suggestion and betrayal, about fear and honesty, about the creation of imaginary demons and the temptations of the flesh. 'If we lose, England will starve,' William tells his hosts, warning of 'the spectre of starvation that haunts our land'.  At times he is like a father confessor in his questioning, at times like a doctor when he interrogates the couple about how and when they have sex.  At one moment he refers to Judith as 'my patient'.

This play has come to the Finborough as the centrepiece of a festival of new writing organised by Papatango, a group new to me. I believe the National Theatre also had a hand in the process.  It runs until 23 December but if there is any justice in theatreland it will transfer to a bigger space.  2011 has been a great year for theatrical revivals, but for me at least, a disappointing year for new plays -- until this one came along.  I have no idea if there are any tickets left, but do try to see it.

Noises Off at the Old Vic

Forget Copenhagen. Come to that, you can forget Hamlet and King Lear as well.  Noises Off is not just Michael Frayn's masterpiece but possibly the best play ever written.  It is the Mount Everest of farce, so splendid that once you have climbed it there is nowhere else to go.  After running for years in the 1980s, it had a second revival in the 1990s at the National Theatre, which also had a long life in the West End and on tour.  Now it's been given another whirl at the Old Vic, directed by Linday Posner, and it proves to be as funny as ever. 

With Celia Imrie as the immortal sardine-carrier Mrs Clackett (a much better part than Cleopatra, in my view), it's tempting to say nothing could possibly go wrong with this production. After all, the text has been endlessly polished and rewritten by Frayn and the director of the NT production Jeremy Sams. But that would be to forget just how difficult it is to take the lines and the stage directions and reassemble them into a three-dimensional sequence of actions that has the audience rolling in the aisles.  The laugh lines in this show are unpredictable;  I was the prompter for a highly memorable amateur production of this play a few years ago, and I can testify to the fact that audiences vary enormously in their reactions; they all laugh, but at entirely different moments.  Given that unpredictability, and the fact that the Old Vic show was still in previews when I saw it, I think it may still have a little way to travel until the cast adjust their timing to secure maximum comic effect.  But it's still VERY good.  Michael Frayn's stroke of genius is to move the characters out of the traditional domestic setting where wives and husbands plot against each other, and into the theatre, where actors plot to deceive the audience that what they are doing is real in a nightly battle not just with slippery sardines and doors that fail to open and close, but also with each other.

While Celia Imrie as the old theatrical trouper Dotty, Janie Dee is terrific as bossy Belinda, the backstage head girl who keeps the fictional cast of Frayn's dodgy play-within-a-play ploughing ahead from Weston-super-Mare onwards.  Robert Glenister as Lloyd the director, Jamie Glover as Garry, Jonathan Coy as the hapless Freddie and Karl Johnson as the veteran thespian Selsdon all know exactly how to extract maximum comedy while acting with a straight face.  Amy Nuttall as the sexy-but-dim Brooke and Aisling Loftus as the hapless ASM Poppy don't quite bring the same level of comic flair to their parts -- at least not yet.  The key to making Brooke funny is to imitate what Mark Rylance did in Boeing-Boeing -- always be half a second behind the rest of the cast. 

After Act Two, in which the backstage mayhem seems to reach a climax, it can be difficult to maintain the comedy in Act Three, when the production of the play-within-a-play finally collapses in chaos.  But there's no anticlimax in this production.  Everyone should go and see this play, not just for a good night out but because farce is a great theatrical genre that often seems to be on life support.  Who has the writing skills to follow Frayn in this great tradition?   Richard Bean's clever makeover of Goldoni's comedy into the NT's current hit One Man, Two Guvnors shows that the art of sending audiences into paroxysms of laughter isn't quite dead.  Some may find Bean's play funnier; but if I was forced to take one of these two plays to a desert island, I think I would choose the Frayn.

 

The Comedy of Errors -- Is YOUR Identity At Risk?

Dear Friend

My name is Antipholus of Syracuse.  I am the manager of Syracuse Commercial Bank, with private business interest in the following sectors: Real Estate, Tobacco, Gold Dust, Oil and Gas.  I am writing to seek a trustworthy HONEST person to assist in the noble transfer of US 7,500,000,000 (SEVEN MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLARS).  This is the sum I have placed in a SUSPENSE ACCOUNT during a visit to Ephesus.  Unfortunately I was mugged in an alleyway shortly after leaving the Porcupine Hotel by a gang with a knife placed at my throat and all my tickets, bank cards and cellphone were taken.  I am worried that my identity has been stolen.  I am impelled to request your assistance to authorise the transfer of my blocked funds into your account. I intend to part 30% of the funds to you.  There are no risks involved in this.  I will appreciate your response to my private email address.

All I can say is that Antipholus should have consulted TripAdvisor before checking in to the Porcupine Hotel, a sleazy place frequented by tarts, pimps, scammers, dealers, transvestites, leather boys and off-duty policemen. Personally, after seeing this play at the National Theatre, I shall give Ephesus a wide berth in future and stick to Bognor Regis.  Director Dominic Cooke and designer Bunny Christie have clearly made the trip to Ephesus and got back safely with their wallets, but I doubt if too many audience members will want to follow them. 

Shakespeare's early comedy of mistaken identities and lost twins is often played as a light-hearted romp, but the great thing about this production is that Cooke finds a much darker dimension in the story.  Ephesus becomes the dodgiest of dodgy world cities, ruled by a duke who is just another cockney  gangster in a camel hair coat. Its sleaziness has a surreal, nightmarish quality, a world of spells and witchcraft.   It's not a place for tourists, and certainly not for naive travellers from Syracuse like Antipholus (Lenny Henry) and his servant Dromio (Lucian Msamati).  Ephesus is more than just an edgy destination; it's a nasty blend of first and third world, somewhere between London and Lagos, or possible Naples or Barcelona. How can a wife fail to tell the difference between her husband and his twin brother?  How can a master not tell his own servant from someone else's?  Well, the short answer is that both servants are wearing Arsenal shirts.  The longer explanation is that human beings are endlessly credulous, particularly under stress.  One of my friends knows a highly educated man who sent thousands of pounds to Nigeria on the basis of an email scam;  the more he was fleeced, the more solid his belief that the scam was genuine and the greater his level of denial.  That's the paranoid psychological logic of Shakespeare's play.  There is no deliberate deception in this play, only self-deception, which is dramatically far more interesting.

Before Antipholus takes out his tourist map, the tale of his father, the arrested merchant Egeon, about how he became separated from his wife and twin sons is acted out in spectacular mime up and down Christie's towering three-storey set.  This rams home the importance of the divided family at the centre of the play, and makes the final scene when they are reunited a real emotional moment. The dark visions of this production don't destroy the essentially comic nature of the plot, and there's a very funny chase scene in the second half.  I saw an early preview, and I'm happy to bet that this production will get much funnier as it it gets into its stride.  In upper part of the circle, every word from this highly experienced cast is audible and crystal clear in its projection -- something that not every production in the Olivier achieves.  The experienced cast are all excellent;  Henry and Msamati don't double up as Antipholus and Dromio, leaving the Ephesus half of the twins to be played by Chris Jarman and Daniel Poyser.  Claudie Blakley and Michelle Terry play Adriana and her sister Luciana as a pair of Essex girl fashionistas, teetering on high heels.  Joseph Mydell as Egeon also stands out.  At first I was worried that Christie's complex set design might overwhelm the actors, but it doesn't happen.  For Dominic Cooke, hopping across the Thames from his day job running the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, this is a third hit in a row after Clybourne Park and Chicken Soup with Barley.  The only part that doesn't quite work is the music; the four street musicians look fine but don't sound all that great.  I think they would be better employed on stage doing shell games with dice and cardboard boxes like the Balkan petty criminals who fleece tourists on Westminster Bridge.

 

The Swallowing Dark

This new play by Lizzie Nunnery at Theatre 503 in Battersea is a taut 80-minute two-hander about a Zimbabwean refugee and his female caseworker, which was first produced at the Liverpool Playhouse Studio.  Wil Johnson as Canaan and Allyson Ava-Brown as Martha generate crackling tension right from the first scene when she breaks the news to him that his temporary leave to remain has run out and his case is being reviewed.  As their relationship unfolds over a period of a few weeks it emerges that the stories he is telling about his own life have gaps -- but are they significant ones?  Martha the social worker says she just wants the truth, but her own life also has its complications in the shape of a 15-year-old brother who is roaming the streets getting caught up in violence. 

The action takes place in a shabby anonymous interview room with strip lights, a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet.  In fact these two characters are meeting first in Canaan's home and then in Martha's, but the featureless setting helps the play take a couple of steps away from its realistic roots.  The writing is well structured, with short scenes interrupted by dreams and flashbacks in which Ava-Brown is transformed into Canaan's dead wife Nomsa. 

I like the sophisticated combination of sound, lighting, stage action and projection which director Paul Robinson and designer Alex Eales use to show Martha listening to her recording of her interview with Canaan and agonising over whether he has told the full truth or not about his past.   The two-hander is a very difficult theatrical genre because it makes it hard to give the audience a variation in perspective on the characters.  If you only have characters A and B to play with, you lose the opportunity for character C to come on and say or do something that one of the characters shares with the audience but the other character doesn't know about.  Nunnery half-solves this problem with the use of flashbacks and direct speeches to the audience, but not completely.  At 80 minutes the play has a slight feeling of being less than complete, with the characters setting off on a mutual journey that may change their lives, but not reaching a real resolution.  Both Martha and Canaan are shaped by their respective backstories, but Martha's isn't quite strong enough to provide balance.  I wonder whether the writer might have been bolder in exploring the hints of mutual attraction between the two protagonists as well as their relationship with violence.  When the play came to an end, I was hoping for more. 

Racine's Britannicus

Coming face to face with Racine four decades after writing essays about his plays is like bumping into a difficult old acquaintance from university and being pleasantly surprised.  The man turns out to be a lot more fun than I ever imagined he was back in the late 1960s.  Actually, I always found Racine interesting, but it's hard to appreciate what a gifted dramatist he is without seeing his works on stage.

This production in the atmospheric surroundings of Wilton's Music Hall is the work of director Irina Brown and playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, who have between them created one of those high-value, low-budget shows that exemplify everything that is best in London's off-West End theatre.  Seating the audience on what is normally the stage of this decaying East End music hall allows the audience to look down from the raked seating on to the actors.  Wertenbaker has shunned the fashion for updated 'versions' of foreign language plays, sticking very closely to the text.  There's a slight awkwardness in some of the phrasing, but the formality of Racine's language comes across well.  The modern setting and costumes fit well in a design which sticks to the French classical tradition. In other words, it's fairly minimalist.  Sian Thomas is terrific as the Roman matriarch Agrippina, desperate to prevent her offspring Nero from casting her off.  Nero (Matthew Needham) is a young man with pyschopathic tendencies who turns out to be more ruthless than his seductive mother.  Britannicus is his victim, but also Agrippina's.  It's a brutal story of lust and power, put together with wonderful dramatic skill.  Racine's ability to structure a plot is second to none, and Thomas seizes the opportunity to remind us that he writes really juicy parts for women.  This production, for my money, is just as good as the memorable Phedre which starred Helen Mirren at the National a year or two back.  It's well cast and well acted, and lasts just 100 minutes with no interval.

Mike Bartlett's 13

I was really looking forward to this, after enjoying Earthquakes in London by the same author on the National Theatre's Cottesloe stage.  But I left at the interval -- something I rarely do -- out of sheer boredom.  This is not so much a state-of-the-nation play as a state-of-the-world play peopled by a long cast of mostly unmemorable characters, none of whom have the chance to develop any depth in the first half of the play.  Bartlett's structure of short scenes, none longer than a few minutes, doesn't work for me. It may suit people who like listening to the Archers. It's not the fault of the actors (I like Trysan Gravelle in particular as a soapbox Messiah) nor of the director Theo Sharrock, of whose work I am a devotee.  Designer Tom Scutt uses a large black semi-transparent cube and the revolve to good effect, but the Olivier stage is an unforgiving place for writers. Its sheer size punishes banal writing and two-dimensional characters like these, all of whom seem to be suffering from the same undefined malaise involving bad dreams at night.   The play aims to be topical, but isn't.  In the background is not the reality of 2011 and the euro debt crisis, but the idea of a British prime minister getting sucked into an American invasion of Iran.  I was told the play gets better after the interval, but I couldn't manage to care enough about any of the characters on stage to wait and find out.  Perhaps I was still suffering from the deep impression of seeing Wesker's The Kitchen on the same stage a week ago.  That play also had a large cast of characters, but managed to blend them into a coherent ensemble. Mike Bartlett is a very talented writer, but I feel this play is too large and too diffuse.