John Morrison

Oppenheimer

Any show with John Heffernan in the lead is worth seeing, but despite his excellent performances, this is a play that somehow never quite gets into top gear.

Perhaps the ugly surroundings of the Vaudeville Theatre aren't ideal for this transfer by the RSC of Tom Morton-Smith's successful debut in Stratford.  But though the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the invention of the atomic bomb is a fascinating one, it never quite had me on the edge of my seat.

The story is told over a period of less than a decade, starting with Oppenheimer flirting with the Communist Party of the United States in the 1930s as a professor of physics at Berkeley, and climaxing with the explosion of two nuclear bombs over Japan in 1945.  It is competently told, searching for the drama in Oppenheimer's relations with his work colleagues, his army bosses and his women rather than in the high science of physics.

But the play is too long at three hours, there are far too many characters and too many short scenes; it strikes me as over-researched and under-imagined.  Director Angus Jackson and RSC Dramaturg Pippa Hill should have pressed the writer for more changes to simplify and deepen the play.  Oppenheimer's relations with his wife and other women help round out his enigmatic character, but they don't influence the main story.  In the plethora of scenes and characters, the key choices Oppenheimer makes and their effect on his state of mind fall out of focus.  And there's little in the way of subtext or dramatic irony for the audience to enjoy;  apart from general historical hindsight, there is nothing the audience gets to know that the characters on stage don't.  There are unnecessary musical interludes and short cameos for a ranting Nazi and for Albert Einstein, and towards the end of the play Oppenheimer himself vanishes, eclipsed by the story of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he had little to do with.

The play needs a wider historical perspective, less realism and more invention to become a great drama, despite the best efforts of Heffernan and his fellow actors.  Often I feel that historical dramas on stage and screen are under-researched and too quickly substitute fiction for fact -- The Imitation Game being a good example.  So I may be contradicting myself here;  but I think this play needs to cast off the factual baggage and reimagine Oppenheimer as a tragic figure on an operatic scale.

Carmen Disruption

I've been to see seven plays in the last ten days, more through coincidence than deliberate design. In six of those shows I enjoyed what I consider to be the essential quality of drama -- the interaction between characters.  This is the common factor that links Everyman, Measure for Measure, Clarion, A View From The Bridge, The Nether and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.

Number seven was a widely praised production of a new play in which there is no interaction between the characters, and I didn't enjoy it at all.  To be honest, Simon Stephens' Carmen Disruption at the Almeida bored the pants off me and I was desperately checking my watch to see when it would end.  The last time I got that feeling was my trip to Richmond in December to see Pomona.

Because reviewers I take seriously -- Michael Billington, Lyn Gardner and Susannah Clapp -- have all raved about this production, I've been trying to work out why they loved it and I hated it.  It's very loosely based on Bizet's Carmen, but the links are so tenuous that they extend no further than a few musical nods and the presence on stage of a real mezzo-soprano.  The Bizet has gone out with the bathwater, which scarcely matters to me.  I'm generally in favour of reinventing the classics, and Bizet, like Shakespeare, is big enough to look after himself.

Stephens' reinvention means that Carmen is a rent-boy (very well played by Jack Farthing), Micaela is a suicidal student, Escamillo is a dodgy global financier, and Don Jose is a female taxi driver.   The cast also includes a globe-trotting singer who jets around with her suitcase from one opera house to the next to sing Carmen.   At this point I should mention the presence of a gigantic dead bull at the front of the stage, its hooves facing the audience.  On the way in to the theatre we have to cross the stage and walk past it to our seats.

The problem with the play doesn't lie in the reinvention of the characters, still less in their gender-swapping.  Nor do I have any issue with breaking the artificial barrier between front-of-house and backstage.  The moment I started to ask 'Where's the beef?' was when it became clear to me that none of the characters was going to speak to each other, only directly to us.  To me, theatre is a triangle in which actors play to each other and to the audience.  Take away one side of that triangle, and you are left with a series of disconnected monologues.

Because the play's theme is alienation and disconnection, Stephens cannot allow any of his characters to interact.  This is a real dramatic problem, made worse by the fact that the individual monologues are mostly quite banal.  There's a lot of backstory and not much action, more tell than show.  I felt much the same about Stephens' play Harper Regan a few years ago -- isolation and alienation aren't easy to turn into drama.

After about half an hour of this production, my attention started to wander and I began to focus on the dead bull.  I could see its hooves moving imperceptibly.  I looked more closely and wrote in my notebook: 'The bull is breathing!'  I began to hope it might suddenly rise up and chase the actors off stage, which would have been a terrific coup de theatre.  When nothing happened I started to feel rather sorry for the poor stagehand trapped inside, whose job turned out to be to release a flood of nasty bloody goo on to the stage in the last ten minutes.

Stephens' most successful piece of writing is his adaptation for the National Theatre of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I admired greatly.  The boy at the centre of the story is deeply alienated by his autistic personality, but his struggle to interact with the rest of the characters creates an utterly absorbing story. 

According to the programme notes, he seems to have got his original inspiration for Carmen Disruption from his complicated relationship with his iPhone. Like the author of Pomona, he is 'getting his anxieties out and putting them on the floor'.  His decision to use the Carmen story came later.  His other theme is Europe, and 'the extent to which European cities are coming to ghost or echo one another'.

Well, that's true to some extent.  If you spend your time in airports and four-star hotels, they're all the same.  But it's the writer's job to drill beneath the surface of that homogeneity and find what is specific. I don't mean local colour, which isn't essential for making good theatre.  I'm thinking here of the way Ivo van Hove ruthlessly strips away all details of time and place in his production of A View From The Bridge, leaving just the interaction between the characters.

In general I'm a big fan of the Almeida (not just because it's the only London theatre that invites bloggers to review its shows).  I like Rupert Goold's stop-at-nothing high-wire approach to making theatre, and the fact that he avoids the safe and easy options as artistic director.  He's right to keep posing questions about what makes a play into a play.  But if the future of stage drama is going to look like Carmen Disruption, then I won't be making that particular journey.  It's a load of dead bull.

 

Everyman

'Happy Fucking Birthday!' they shout as Everyman's friends and hangers-on surround him, whipping up an orgy of shots-and-coke-fuelled celebration.  The lights flash and the music is turned up to 11.  But this is the last happy moment in which Everyman can flaunt his money and his success as he turns 40.

As he awakes, abandoned by his friends, God comes to call in the shape of a cleaning lady with a mop and bucket.  Death is a cynical Irishman in a white protective suit.  Together they make clear that Everyman's time is up and he must present a reckoning of his past life.

So begins Carol Ann Duffy's highly individual version of the medieval morality play about man confronting his fate.  With the great Chiwetel Ejiofor playing the title role, this is the play the new National Theatre director Rufus Norris has chosen to direct himself to open his time in charge as Nicholas Hytner's successor.

Because our Poet Laureate is a dramatist as well as a poet, she knows what she is about. Duffy manages to stay faithful to the medieval story while giving it personal twists of her own.  Everyman's original biblical sins are joined by his guilt for trashing the planet through over-consumption.  Floods, storms and fire engulf the Olivier stage, thanks to the miracles of video.

With a crashing backdrop of light and sound, and a substantial menu of stage effects, Norris's production occasionally goes over the top.  I wondered how this production might have looked in a smaller, more intimate space than the giant circus tent of the Olivier theatre.  The cast is fully miked up, and the stage effects are bold. 

I found myself increasingly drawn towards Duffy's text, which mixes Anglo-Saxon four-letter words with some off-the-wall one-liners.  "Twenty six hours in labour, just to give birth to a lesbian!" exclaims Everyman's long-suffering mother when he pays a rare visit to his family.  There's a lot of compassion in this scene between Everyman and his sister, angry that she has been left to care for two infirm parents while her brother has made a fortune.   Mother has to drag an oxygen tank around with her, while Father has dementia.  Duffy's writing is always sharp but never cynical.  I kept on hearing lines that I wanted to scribble down and savour.

For a largely godless 21st century audience, the piety of the original morality play doesn't work;  we can all recognise Everyman when he shouts 'I'm somebody!' and we all know about greed, pride, gluttony and the emptiness of family and fellowship. But we can't all believe in God.  Duffy cleverly finesses this by writing an ending in which both believers and atheists can find what they are looking for.  'I think I have a soul,' Everyman says.  But then he realises he can't bet much on the outcome. 'You're a cunt,' he tells Death.

The programme for this show has two excellent essays explaining the medieval background to Everyman and looking at how Duffy has adapted it in her own way.  Does the text work as theatre?  Yes it does, though the high-octane and high-volume style of Norris's production may not suit everyone.

A View From The Bridge

Buying theatre tickets long before a show opens isn't an exact science, and sometimes I get it wrong. My biggest mistake recently was not to book ahead for what turned out to be the revival that swept all before it in the Olivier awards.  I had seen a very impressive production of A View From The Bridge in London starring Ken Stott not so long ago, and I decided to skip the Young Vic's version.  Like many people, I had never heard of Ivo van Hove the director.

Well, I have now. I should have trusted the judgment of Young Vic director David Lan, who brought van Hove to London.  I eventually caught up with the show this week in my local cinema, thanks to a repeat of the NT Live broadcast from Wyndham's theatre.  Reviewing Mark Strong's shattering performance as Eddie Carbone after he has won the Best Actor award is a bit like shipping coals to Newcastle, so I shall stick to a couple of observations about van Hove's direction.

His pared-down visual style strips away the realistic kitchen-sink depiction of 1940s waterfront New York and transforms the play into a universal Greek drama -- which is totally true to Arthur Miller's intention.  It seems to me that van Hove's method has a lot in common with the approach of another great director whose work I saw this week --  Cheek By Jowl's Declan Donnellan, who also concentrates on the acting and the text.

The other thing I learned from this production is the power that can be generated by slowing down the action. There's a scene in the middle of the play in which Eddie is making casual conversation with Marco about Sicily and the life of its impoverished fishermen.  That's the text, but this is a scene in which powerful emotions lurk in the subtext.  Van Hove slows the scene down to a pace that is almost unbearable, with long pauses that generate so much tension that it's almost impossible to watch.  Not many directors would take the deliberate risk of stretching the envelope quite so far.

The Nether

Better late than Nether, I suppose.  I finally caught up with this play in the last week of its run at the Duke of York's theatre long after it transferred from the Royal Court.  Like Mike Bartlett's Game, it's a production notable less for the quality of the writing than for the shape-shifting way it is staged. 

Es Devlin the designer has conjured up just the right imagery to suggest a virtual online world in which paedophiles can play out their fantasies in colour.   There's nothing remotely shocking or salacious on show, just middle-aged men who are circling around a pretty Victorian child in petticoats named Iris, played by a real 11-year-old, Perdita Hibbins.

The story is structured around an investigator named Morris (understudy Anna Martine) who is interrogating two men suspected of involvement in the darkest corners of the internet (now renamed the Nether).    Sims (Stanley Townsend) challenges her right to stop him running his business;  at first he wants to deny everything, but as the investigation probes further and realises he has been identified, he switches to a different justification.  He argues that the virtual world of internet paedophilia is a safety valve that provides a substitute for potential offenders against real children.

Not being familiar with the world of video games, Second Life and avatars, it took me until almost the end of the play to realise that the second man being interrogated, Doyle (David Beames) is suspected of 'being'  Iris.

The interrogation scenes take place downstage in monochrome, with just two characters seated either side of a plain table.  The drabness contrasts in Devlin's set with the bright and seductive online world where 'Papa' (the alter ego of Sims) holds sway as a jolly Victorian uncle figure.

American playwright Jennifer Haley knows exactly what she is describing, and her narrative is compelling;  in moral terms, however, this is a black-and-white story with not much ambiguity, and without any real dilemmas or choices that might challenge the audience's preconceptions or draw them into a sense of complicity as Bartlett does in Game. 

 

Measure for Measure in Russian

In the hands of Declan Donnellan as director, very little can go wrong.  I've been many times to the Barbican and elsewhere to see his Cheek By Jowl company perform Shakespeare, Chekhov and other classics in English and Russian, and never been disappointed.

Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod have a simple aesthetic, based on minimal stage sets (not surprising in a touring company), acute use of costume design, and meticulous attention to the text.  Most of the packed audience in the Barbican's Silk Street Theatre don't speak Russian, but it doesn't matter. Everything is absolutely clear as daylight.

There's a lot of movement in this production and the set is minimal;  against a soundtrack of clanging prison cell doors and metal walkways, the backstage is dominated by five large red cubes.  Perhaps there's a channel somewhere opening up to Kasimir Malevich?  Initially the actors ignore the cubes, and move around the stage in a cluster, endlessly forming and reforming themselves into new shapes.  They shift at a fast pace, almost running; they eyeball the audience, saying nothing; they crouch in silence and watch each other, they crawl around.  One character peels away, uncertainly -- the actor playing the Duke. When he tentatively raises an arm, the others imitate him.  Gradually we ease ourselves into the story of how the Duke, a man seemingly riddled by self-doubt, plans to step aside and disappear for a while.  With that silent prelude, it all makes sense.  He prefers watching to being watched.

Although everyone will deny it diplomatically, the production has the authentic taste and smell of Putin's Russia. This is particularly true when Angelo, the insignificant bespectacled bureaucrat to whom the Duke entrusts his realm, takes over. Andrei Kuzichev is a delight to watch as he fiddles with his glasses, neatly dealing with the papers in the red folder on his desk.  The scenes between Angelo and Isabella (Anna Khalilulina), demurely clad in her nun's habit as she pleads for her brother's life, are magnificent.  Angelo's real motive for wanting to have his wicked way with Isabella is his lust for power for its own sake; there's no sexual chemistry between the two of them.

The play's climax is brilliantly imagined and the audience feels invited to participate. As the Duke returns to an official welcome, Angelo himself picks tiny specks of dirt off the carpet.  It's all an elaborate charade, but the Duke is no longer the uncertain figure he was at the start of the play.  Having seen what's really going on disguised as a monk, he manipulates Angelo into confessing his guilt.  When the Duke declares he wants to marry Isabella, she is shocked rather than pleased.  True to her character, she makes a pretence of dancing with him, but her mind is clearly not following her body.

Measure for Measure is a dark play about arbitrary rule which makes a lot more sense in Elizabethan England or in modern Russia than in our own more sedate political landscape.  The acting, even in the minor parts, is first class, and the overall effect is mesmerising.  Shakespeare translated into Russian acquires a different meaning, and some words such as provokator have a real contemporary punch.  Guilt, innocence, sin, lust, redemption, punishment, justice, law -- all these terms slightly change their meaning between English and Russian, opening up new ways to understand what Shakespeare wrote.  Donnellan's staging is absolutely clear, but language, as always, is ambiguous.

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

While many theatres are staging election-related plays in the next three weeks, the National Theatre has shown a flash of genius by reviving a work that confronts all the big questions which politicians have failed to put on the campaign agenda for May 7.

Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, originally staged at the Royal Court in 1975, delves into the history of the Civil War to ask how we are governed and how wealth is shared.  No play could be more relevant to the 2015 general election. 

The fact that the National's new director Rufus Norris has picked a play about political and economic equality to launch his reign as the new monarch of the South Bank may not be surprising.  A modest revival of this half-forgotten work might have slotted neatly into one of the theatre's smaller spaces as a respectful nod to one of our greatest living playwrights.

Instead this text-based piece, much of it quoting directly from contemporary 17th century archives, has been given a gloriously operatic large-scale production in the Lyttelton.  Director Lyndsey Turner and designer Es Devlin (the team responsible for the hit play Chimerica) have created a visually stunning production which starts the post-Hytner era on a note of bold ambition.

Later in the season Norris has programmed a revival of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, which like Churchill's play originated in research-based workshops at the Royal Court led by the great Max Stafford-Clark.

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire was originally written for six actors, no set, and a handful of chairs.  I saw a small-scale National Theatre touring production in the 1990s which followed this pattern, and I remember going away rather underwhelmed.  But in this production the curtain opens on a breathtaking scene -- a giant table laden with a feast for gluttons, an outsize roast pig as its centrepiece.  Seated around the table are the placeholders of Charles I's ancien regime, tucking in to a grand banquet.  As the play progresses, the banquet is removed and the table becomes a bare wooden stage.  After the interval, the boards are removed to reveal bare earth. Men start to dig the soil.  The costumes are a blend of the 17th century and the present, and also hint at crucial periods in between -- the 19th century Chartists and the 20th century Jarrow march.  A visual mashup of different periods can be a perilous idea, but here designer Soutra Gilmour hits the target.

The cast of around 20 is reinforced by more than 40 actors from the National's Community Company. The result transforms the play into a spectacle, but one in which Churchill's text and the individual stories of her characters never get lost. In fact the director and designer manage to enhance the meaning of Churchill's carefully written words.  I'm normally the first to criticise over-elaborate sets which overpower the actors, but the Turner-Devlin team knows how and when to keep it simple. They have created a set on which the actors' individual performances shine through.

The use of a large ensemble scales the play up into something that its original creators probably never envisaged 40 years ago.  But it works, because the political and economic questions the play raises are more urgent than ever.

In the 1640s, the gap between rich and poor is getting wider.  Equality has become a dirty word.  Outsiders, scroungers and benefit cheats are being blamed.  'Have you been told you get something for nothing here?' a Justice of the Peace asks a homeless vagrant before ordering her to return to her birthplace.  Are we in 1640 or in 2015?

The millennarian promise of 'Heaven on Earth' becomes a search to replace hierarchy and deference to authority with individual moral conscience;  submission to one's betters turns into a radical search for representative democracy. The Putney debates hinge on whether that democracy should be equally open to all.  In the words of the Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainborough, 'Every man in England ought not to be exempted from the choice of those who are to make laws for him to live under, and for him, for aught I know, to lose his life by.'  But the men of property win out.  As the play progresses, the radical impulses of the English revolution are stifled, the men of Parliament move smoothly into the estates of the dispossessed Royalists, and the poor end up disenfranchised and cheated of their birthright.

At this point I shall own up to being the author 15 years ago of a fat tome on constitutional reform. Writing it, I came to the same conclusion as Caryl Churchill -- that the promise of democracy in Britain has largely remained just a promise.  Economic inequality has grown since she wrote this seminal play, and so has political inequality.  Our current election campaign doesn't tackle this agenda.  Politicians prefer to muddle through. As the unreformed British state staggers on into an uncertain future, with Scotland drifting towards the exit, politicians bicker over trivialities while the real problems of how we are governed are swept under the carpet.  Abolish first-past-the-post voting?  Elect the second chamber? Don't look to our current politicians to raise these big questions.  Labour has always seen constitutional reform as a second-order issue, fit only for anoraks; the Conservatives told us in 2010 that the UK political system was 'broken' but then blocked all attempts to change it; and the Liberal Democrats, having comprehensively bungled their big opportunity to push through political reform as part of a coalition government, would now rather talk about anything else.  The price of their inactivity will be the Scots withdrawing from a system which clearly no longer works for them.

The Light Shining in Buckinghamshire shines on all of us.

   

Clarion

Do any of these headlines ring a bell? 

HORROR AS IMMIGRANTS BARBECUE LLAMA AT PETTING ZOO

WHITES IN MINORITY BY 2020

NOW PAEDOPHILES IN BURQUAS STALK OUR KIDS

WHITE SUICIDE BOMBER IN BLACKBURN MOSQUE HORROR

Welcome to the rancid world of the Clarion, the declining tabloid newspaper at the centre of Mark Jagasia's excellent and very funny new play at the Arcola theatre.  Non-journalists may think the playwright has made it all up, but I can assure you the story he tells is based on reality. Has anyone looked at the Daily Express recently?  Mark Jagasia once worked there, and he knows the culture. His play has a ring of truth about it, which struck me when I first heard it read at Player-Playwrights in 2013.

At the centre is the monstrous editor Morris Honeyspoon, running the editorial conference with a brazen mixture of bullying and humiliation, his Roman helmet in front of him.  At his side is legendary foreign correspondent Verity Stokes, a veteran of countless foreign conflicts, whose career is now on a booze-fuelled downward slide.  There's a bone-headed news editor named Albert, a perky young intern called Pritti who is scheming to get on the staff, and a conflicted young Immigration Correspondent who is writing an intellectual novel in his spare time.

The obvious benchmark for this play is Richard Bean's Great Britain, which the National Theatre staged last year.  This was also a very funny demolition of British tabloid journalism, but told with a broad comic brush and a big cast of characters.  Clarion is tighter, more intimate and more focused in its plotting, and its take on what really goes on in the newsroom is much sharper, with a tragic dimension that Bean's play never approaches.  It makes clear that lousy journalism can cost lives, but it doesn't just sneer from the outside.  Even these editorial incompetents are preferable to the prospect of a journalistic future based entirely on celebrity gossip and the whims of proprietors.

Verity Stokes is played with superb insight, empathy and skill by triple Olivier award winner Claire Higgins; ever since I saw her as Vincent van Gogh's landlady in Vincent in Brixton, she has been one of my favourite stage actresses, and her performance is the best I have seen anywhere this year.  Greg Hicks, an actor with a stage record that is second to none with the RSC and the National Theatre, turns Honeyspoon into more than just a dull-witted buffoon.  He undoubtedly has a screw loose somewhere, but lurking behind his manic behaviour and bullying is a sharp intelligence.  Hicks isn't normally known as a comic actor, though I remember seeing him give a very funny performance as Dr Caius in an RSC production of The Merry Wives of Windsor more than a decade ago.  Here his gifts are turned to brilliant effect, though after seeing the play in a very early preview I feel that his portrayal of Honeyspoon is still developing.

The rest of the cast -- Jim Bywater as Albert the news editor, Laura Smithers as Pritti the trainee, and Ryan Wichert as Josh the hapless immigration reporter, are all terrific.  I haven't mentioned Peter Bourke as the unctuous emissary of the Clarion's owner, a Cypriot tax exile named Benny, and John Atterbury who plays a splendid cameo as Dickie, the resident astrologer.  All these characters have real depth.  The writing is pitch-perfect, with lots of one-liners that are bang on target. Arcola artistic director Mehmet Ergen's production deserves a long run and a transfer to a bigger theatre.  It can only get funnier and more topical as the general election gets closer.

Lampedusa

Today's reports of hundreds of migrants drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa lend a horrifying topicality to Anders Lustgarten's new play at the Soho Theatre.  But while applauding the author's skill and empathy in highlighting the issue, I don't find it convincing as a piece of theatre.

Lustgarten has written two parallel monologues. Stefano (Ferdy Roberts) is an Italian fisherman whose job is to fish bodies out of the Mediterranean, while Denise (Louise Mai Newberry) is a debt collector for a payday loan company in provincial England.  Both of them feel a combination of hostility and sympathy for those on the receiving end of what they do, and end up discovering fragments of human generosity and hope amid the wretchedness.  Each of them is a victim of a complex predicament, doing morally questionable jobs that nobody else will take, and each has a story to tell that builds up to a climax.

Unfortunately the form of the play doesn't match up to the content;  while the actors hit the right notes, they seem to speak for most of the time with a single authorial voice, not the voice of their characters.  Stefano the fisherman is too eloquent and literary, speaking of 'rocks dusted with peach and apricot'.  The play is essentially a pair of short stories whose real home is on the radio, not in the theatre, because there is very little to persuade the audience to keep its eyes open.  I closed mine for long stretches, and I don't think I missed much.

This verdict may seem a little harsh, given the praise that other reviewers have showered on the play.  But I think I found more real drama last night when I spent an evening listening to five short stories at the monthly meeting of Liars' League.  Some short stories are best approached on the page, but in the hands of skilled actors, others come to life in performance as theatrical monologues.  All of the five stories I heard last night were well written and well read by professional actors.  Two of the five came fully to life as theatre, capturing my visual attention and not letting it go for a second.  By comparison, Lampedusa feels to me to be an essentially literary exercise which is packed with insight and convincing journalistic detail, but which never hits any dramatic sparks off the audience.

The Cutting of the Cloth

I'm tempted to call this production at Southwark Playhouse a revival, but it isn't.  It's the world premiere of an unperformed play by Michael Hastings, who died in 2011.  While the play has obvious flaws, it has been given a meticulous production by Two's Company which turns it into an engrossing evening.

The play recreates the atmosphere of a West End bespoke tailoring shop in the early 1950s, or rather the basement in Dover Street where the tailors work.  Between the benches and the vintage irons and sewing machines, the five characters gradually emerge.  Eventually it becomes clear this is a family, divided not just by the way they work in the present but by events that have happened in the past.

The set by Alex Marker and the direction by Tricia Thorns are impeccable in their recreation of the period.  The senior tailor is Polish-born Spijak (Andy de la Tour), who sews every stitch by hand, sitting cross-legged on his workbench.  His foil is the younger Eric (Paul Rider), who works twice as fast on a sewing machine and earns twice the money.  The air crackles with barbed repartee that turns out to be far more than just workplace banter.  It emerges that Eric's dead sister was married to Spijak, who worked her into an early grave.  Spijak may be a perfectionist in his work, but he is also a heavy drinker and a bulllying tyrant in the workplace, as his young apprentice Maurice (James El-Sharawy) learns to his cost.  The two tailor's assistants Sydie (Alexis Caley) and Iris (Abigail Thaw) are the 'kippers' whose gender dooms them to perpetual second class status.

The great virtue of Hastings' play is the ear for speech and the mastery of the arcane vocabulary of the bespoke tailoring world, where sucess and failure hang literally by a thread.  The audience finds itself peering behind a curtain into a mysterious lost social world, as remote as freemasonry.  What the play lacks is a strong plot, and despite the progress of time not very much happens.  It doesn't have the wider feel for a social and political context which Wesker and Osborne brought to their plays, nor does it have Rattigan's subtle sense of subtext.

Though most of the characters are Jewish, Hastings seems to have shied away from exploring the issue of what it means to be Jewish in Britain in the way that Wesker did in Chicken Soup With Barley.  This is a first and foremost a workplace drama of a recognisable kind, though I feel it doesn't match up to Wesker's The Kitchen, or Richard Bean's more recent Toast.  The acting is excellent, though I couldn't help wondering whether Antony Sher might have found greater depths of pathos in the role of Spijak.