John Morrison

A Man of Good Hope

Isango Ensemble of Cape Town is a trailblazing company that has taken opera by the hand and led it into areas it never dreamed of.  From mediaeval mystery plays to Mozart's Magic Flute and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Mark Dornford-May and Pauline Malefane have created a series of sublime and innovative productions that are simultaneously rooted in South African culture and global in their universality.  Now they're back in London at the Young Vic with a show about a Somali refugee.  Look away now, Daily Mail.

Based on a book by South African author Jonny Steinberg, this is the life of Asad -- child refugee, orphan, hustler, migrant and shopkeeper -- and his long odyssey across Africa from Somalia to South Africa in search of a life and a place of safety.  It's told with extraordinary empathy, theatrical imagination, humour and skill, without ever lapsing into bathos or sentimentality.  Asad is played by several actors, including two small boys.  After seeing his mother killed in a fight between Somali clans, he is tossed from one humiliation to the next, losing everyone who is dear to him.  After Ethiopia and Kenya and a long journey south, he finally reaches South Africa, surviving largely because of the clan system.  Resented as a profiteer by black South Africans, his township shop selling break, milk, soap and other essentials gets trashed and destroyed until once again he is left with nothing.

There's nothing preachy about the way the story is told;  there have been plenty of shows about migrants recently, prompted by the arrival of war refugees in western Europe, but Asad's tale reminds us that the distinction between refugees and migrants seeking a better life is often an artificial one.  Asad works and grafts, but his reward is continuing violence and insecurity. 

Isango's style is to weave together some stunning operatic moments, notably those involving Pauline Malefane, with extraordinary vocal and dance ensemble movements that allow all members of the company to shine.  The feeling at the end is that the show only scratches the surface of their multiple talents.  Does the UK have a company of any kind that can display such stunning versatility?  I suspect not.

Amadeus at the National Theatre

This production is a triumphant success on every level, a revival of Peter Shaffer's classic play that subtly brings it into the modern era without violating its 18th century period context.  The acting is superb, and so is the music and the design.  Above all, it is a fantastic achievement for Michael Longhurst the young director in his first production in the Olivier theatre.

The Olivier stage, vast and unforgiving, is a challenge for any director, but especially for one whose reputation as a rising star in British theatre has been won in far smaller spaces such as the Royal Court and the Almeida.  Even Sir Richard Eyre confessed in his memoir of his time running the National that the theatre's biggest stage was a hard nut to crack.  Well, Longhurst has certainly cracked it in superb fashion.  I don't think I have every seen a production in the Olivier that made such good use of the space to create a seamless and flexible zone of theatrical magic.

One of the pitfalls for directors in the Olivier and the slightly smaller Lyttelton is the temptation to start with an ambitious conceptual stage design that leaves little room for improvisation and movement, and ends up by cramping the style of the actors.  Last year's As You Like It was a good example.  But Longhurst and his designer Chloe Lamford avoid this with a largely abstract and highly flexible design that bridges the gap between the 18th and 21st centuries.

Longhurst's masterstroke is to put the orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) on stage in modern dress and to use the Venticelli (also in modern dress) to link them to the action of the play, where the actors are in period costume.  Often I get irritated by the blurring of ancient and modern in historical drama, which can be a way for directors to have their cake and eat it.  But here the effect is to add a whole new dimension to Shaffer's play, bringing it into the modern world.

The first time I saw Amadeus was in the 1990s with David Suchet as Salieri and Michael Sheen as Mozart at the Old Vic.  To be honest, I can't remember too much about it, but I have a much better recollection of the Chichester Festival Theatre production two years ago with Rupert Everett and Joshua McGuire.  It was excellent, but Longhurst's reinvention of the play and use of live music explores new possibilities in Shaffer's work and lifts it to a new level.

To call this a 'revival' is to understate the director's achievement in blending Shaffer's text, which is crammed with prescriptive stage directions, with his original musical choices, which shift at times into new dissonant patterns and rhythms created by composer and music director Simon Slater.  There's an unnerving moment when the familiar tunes of The Magic Flute become distorted.  Meanwhile the design suddenly changes too, with vulgar modernistic costumes suggesting that Mozart's mind is suffering just as much as his body.  But Longhurst doesn't pile it on ad nauseam -- he knows when to stop.

Adam Gillen, like Tom Hulce in the famous film version, plays Mozart just as Shaffer wrote him -- a potty-mouthed cackling genius, a character who cannot control his limbs or his mouth, who appears on the verge of Tourette's syndrome.  In the closing scenes Mozart approaches his own death reaching out in despair to Salieri, the man who has destroyed him, as his only benefactor. It's an unbearable piece of dramatic irony that savages the emotions.

Lucian Msamati is a perfect Salieri, conveying the character's darkness without making him a villain or a hypocrite.  In the final scenes, the tenderness he displays towards Mozart seems almost genuine, because his real battle is not with his musical rival but with God.  Mozart is in a way just the incidental victim of this struggle.  I have seen Msamati many times on stage, but this play reveals his range and depth as an actor.  He moves seamlessly beween dialogue with the audience, letting them into his secrets, and his interaction with the other characters, including the trusting Mozart.  And there is a range of other excellent performances, including Karla Crome as Mozart's wife Constanze and Tom Edden as the jovial monarch Joseph II.

This show displays the vast resources of the National Theatre to good effect, and is another tribute to the surefooted artistic choices of artistic director Rufus Norris, who is filling the giant shoes of his predecessor Nick Hytner in a way that many would have considered impossible.  For Msamati and for Longhurst, I feel the Olivier awards are beckoning.

Kenny Morgan

Back in June I was enthusiastic about the National Theatre's revival of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, with Helen McCrory as Hester Collyer.  Now I'm even more enthusiastic about the Arcola's production of the autobiographical play that Rattigan might have written if the taboos of the mid-20th century had allowed him to.

Mike Poulton's Kenny Morgan uses the structure and the characters of Rattigan's fictionalised drama to create a play that in some respects is actually better than the original.  Competing with Rattigan is a tough ask for anyone, but Poulton is an expert hand at adaptation, having created stage versions not only of The Canterbury Tales but also of Wolf Hall.   I understand why he's reluctant to use the word adaptation about this play, and it's certainly much more than a reheated version of Rattigan, but I give him huge credit for his creative borrowing from the original.

Kenny Morgan was a young actor who was Rattigan's unacknowledged lover and partner for several years, before leaving him for someone else.  Abandoned in his turn, he committed suicide in front of a gas fire.  Rattigan, writing at a time when homosexuality was illegal, as was suicide, changed Kenny into a woman and himself into a high court judge.  In Poulton's play these two characters are faultlessly played by Paul Keating and Simon Dutton, both superbly cast.  Alec Lennox, Morgan's bisexual lover, is played by Pierro Niel-Mee and the mysterious ex-doctor Ritter by George Irving.  They're all excellent, and so are Matthew Bulgo, Marlene Sidaway and Lowenna Melrose as the helpful neighbour, the nosy landlady and the girl with whom Alec has a quick fling while Kenny's back is turned.

The direction by Lucy Bailey is meticulous, restrained and pitch-perfect.  I have to confess that came as a surprise to me as I have vivid memories of her over-the-top versions of Titus Andronicus and Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe a few years ago.  The design by Robert Innes Hopkins is also simple and restrained, using the Arcola theatre's tiny stage to create a claustrophobic and squalid late 1940s interior in which the characters are imprisoned by gas pipes. 

Leaving aside the terrific performances, the sensitive direction and the intimacy of the set, I want to explore briefly how I think Poulton's play improves on Rattigan.  Firstly, it develops the minor characters, particularly Ritter the doctor, whose Jewishness becomes another painful faultline dividing him from the other characters.  The housekeeper Mrs Simpson (no, she's no relation to THAT Mrs Simpson) becomes a real person rather than a cliche, and so does the kindly neighbour Dafydd Lloyd.

One of the flaws in Rattigan's play is that it fails to explain what holds Hester back from returning to a comfortable life with her ex-husband when her lover walks out.  She doesn't seem to have a clear motive for saying no to his generous appeals to come back.  Poulton's reworking of the story into a gay love triangle not only restores the historical truth, but more importantly, gives Kenny a clear reason for his reluctance to return to the swanky surroundings of Rattigan's flat in Albany.  Rattigan's public life and his private life are separated by an impenetrable firewall, and he tells Kenny firmly that his own flat will still be out of bounds -- just in case the playwright's mother comes to call.  Kenny will have to return to his former role as what he bitterly calls a 'collectible' in a smaller flat elsewhere in the building.  It's the thought of being 'locked away in the attic' that he cannot bear.  Rattigan's tamer heterosexual version of the story seems to me much weaker;  Hester, if she returned to her husband, would not risk being locked away in any attic.  But we shouldn't blame Rattigan for conforming to the harsh reality of the Lord Chamberlain's censorship.

I've been to see quite a few plays at the Arcola, some good, some indifferent and some in between, but this one is probably the best I have seen.  Now on its second run, it is deservedly selling out. I expect in future years theatres will start to programme The Deep Blue Sea and Kenny Morgan together, with a single cast. 

 

The Tempest at the Donmar King's Cross

The Tempest completes director Phyllida Lloyd's impressive trilogy of all-female productions, which began with Julius Caesar in 2012 and continued with Henry IV .  Harriet Walter (previously Brutus and Henry IV) is once again in the lead as Prospero, with Jade Anouka (previously Hotspur) as Ariel.   The move from the tiny Donmar theatre in Covent Garden to the much larger four-sided King's Cross Theatre, a temporary structure, means the actors are now miked up, but otherwise the production loses nothing in intimacy and power.

The framework is once again a women's prison, but in this third play Shakespeare's story seems to come alive and transcend its setting in a way that the other two did not.  The Tempest is not just about power, violence and manipulation; it's a many-layered story about love and reconciliation as well, with moments of tenderness that Lloyd and her designer Bunny Christie manage to develop in original ways.

From the moment Walter introduces herself as a lifer named Hannah, we are simultaneously inside the metallic cage of a prison and inside Prospero's cell.  I had never realised before how much Shakespeare's text plays around with the concepts of freedom and imprisonment.  The essential insight is that Prospero is both prisoner and jailer, an ambiguity which Walter, with her long Shakespearean experience, exploits to the full.   'My liberty' is what Ariel desires most, and so does Prospero, but the ruler of the island can only achieve it by renouncing his magic powers.  This is one of the reasons why The Tempest is a much more subtle and rewarding play than Julius Caesar.

Lloyd's production runs just under two hours, with a few cuts and some slight additions to the text.  The opening storm scene is delivered briefly as a deafening soundscape of prison noise.  Prison warders interrupt the action.  Caliban is a bag lady, trailing plastic rubbish, for whom no prospect of freedom is in sight. Ferdinand (Sheila Atim) and Miranda (Leah Harvey) form a touching same-sex couple, and the moment their betrothal celebrations are suddenly interrupted with 'Our revels now are ended' turns into the climax of the play, with some breathtaking and original design moments. The most poignant twist comes at the very end, when Prospero/Hannah remains incarcerated while Ariel and the others shed their drab prison tracksuits and are set free.

Having recently seen Matthew Dunster's Imogen , somewhat out of place at Shakespeare's Globe,  I feel there are interesting comparisons to be drawn.  Both productions are innovative reinventions of late Shakespeare plays, which successfully transplant his stories into 2016.  For lovers of dramatic irony, there are some important differences between the two plays.  In Imogen/Cymbeline, the audience mostly knows what is going on, while the characters blunder around in ignorance.  In The Tempest, it is Prospero who knows what is happening and controls it through Ariel, while the audience is usually a step behind.

 

Travesties

Tom Stoppard was in the audience for last night's preview of his 1974 play Travesties, and I thought he looked as delighted as the rest of us.  Patrick Marber's revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory of one of his funniest plays fizzes from start to finish like a glass of champagne, or possible hock and seltzer. It's a triumph, led by Tom Hollander in the role of Henry Carr, the role created by John Wood in the original production by the RSC.

I didn't see that one, but I remember the 1993 RSC revival at the Barbican by Adrian Noble, with Antony Sher in the title role.  Like old Henry Carr, my memories are fuzzy and I didn't write a theatre blog back then, but I remember being dazzled by Stoppard's verbal and intellectual ingenuity.  I'm still a huge fan of his writing, which has brought me a whole series of magical experiences, ever since I saw the original production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in the late 1960s. 

For those who don't know the play, it is based on the slenderest of factual premises -- that James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara were all knocking around neutral Zurich at the height of World War One, though not necessarily at the same time.  The one historical fact is that Joyce, business manager of an English theatre company in Zurich which staged Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, got involved in a lawsuit with an Englishman named Henry Carr concerning ticket sales and a pair of trousers.

Stoppard's play is a surreal comic fantasy in which the elderly Henry Carr reminisces about his imaginary encounters with Joyce, Lenin and Tzara.  The dialogue is a sustained pastiche of Wilde's most famous comedy, but the play is far more than a frothy comic mixture.  Stoppard has a serious argument to make about the nature of art and the artist, pitting Joyce against Tzara. 

Marber has assembled a terrific cast, with Hollander outstanding.  Clare Foster as Cecily, Freddie Fox as Tzara, Tim Wallers as the butler Bennett, Amy Morgan as Gwendolen and Peter McDonald as Joyce are all very funny indeed.  Forbes Masson as Lenin and Sarah Quist as his wife negotiate their way successfully through dialogue in Russian, but the writing doesn't give them much to chew on. Lenin's part is a collection of political speeches rather than a character, and he stands outside the main action.

One of the joys of this production for Stoppard fans is Marber's interview with the playwright in the programme.  Tongue in cheek, he quizzes Stoppard like a new member of a writing group, asking 'What colour ink do you use?'  Stoppard replies: 'Blue black. Unlined paper, of course.'  Marber is of course no mean writer himself, and I vividly remember a production of his Dealer's Choice at the Menier nearly a decade ago.  The interview reveals that Stoppard's real sympathy is with Joyce, rather than Tzara (no surprise there) but it also highlights the extent to which this is a play about time and memory.  Like his late and great contemporary Harold Pinter, Stoppard is writing about the unreliability of the way we remember what happened in our own lives. 

I get the feeling that for a younger generation of writers today, Stoppard is seen as rather old hat -- perhaps more so than Pinter.  That's a serious mistake.  There's a lot for any writer to learn from in Stoppard's early plays, not just in his exuberant use of language and his intellectual gymnastics.  Marber is also a brilliant theatrical technician, and his fast-paced version of the play will re-establish its status as a classic.

Imogen

Over-amplified and over-lit, this version of Shakespeare's Cymbeline at the Globe continues artistic director Emma Rice's demolition of the theatre's founding concept and the work of her two predecessors.  It is hard to see what more she can do to trash the original ideas of Sam Wanamaker unless she takes his bronze bust out of the foyer and throws it into the Thames like Cloten's severed head.

This is the third new Shakespeare production on the Globe stage in Rice's opening season, and like the two that went before, it marks a sharp break with the work of Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole, who stuck to Wanamaker's vision of a Shakespearean theatre with a minimum of lighting and natural acoustic sound.  The difference may seem purely technical, but it isn't.  I've been a regular groundling at the Globe since it opened in the late 1990s, and something magical has been lost.  Rice's installation of heavy duty sound and lighting has destroyed the shared space previously enjoyed by actors and audiences and the unique complicity between the groundlings and great actors such as Eve Best, Roger Allam and Rylance.  Instead, we have the same 'fourth wall' as in any indoor theatre, dividing performers and spectators and destroying any feedback between them.  

I regret having to put the boot into Matthew Dunster's production of Imogen, because in many ways it is excellent;  it's just in the wrong place.  Were I to see it on an indoor stage at the National or in Stratford, I would give it high marks.  The director has successfully found a coherent modern vision for a difficult play, much as Rupert Goold did for the RSC when he moved the Merchant of Venice to Las Vegas.

Retitling the play as Imogen makes perfect sense, and so does the interpretation of the leading character's story.  Imogen is a young woman adrift in a misogynistic and violent gang culture led by men.  Drugs are ever-present, and the Britons and the Romans are rival street gangs, fighting with knives.  The play opens with cocaine-snorting on an industrial scale, and with Imogen being tossed around like a plaything.  Cymbeline and his queen run a black-clad drug empire, while the Romans, wearing white, are trying to muscle in on their territory.  Everyone wears branded sports gear and blingy jewellery, with some slight variations;  the doltish Cloten has a red England soccer shirt, and the exiled Belisarius and his adopted sons wear shabby camouflage in their rural Welsh hideout -- a cannabis farm.

Hip-hop isn't my thing, but the movement and dance in this production fit perfectly into Dunster's vision.  There's little room for lyricism, however, and it is no accident that the play's most famous lament 'Fear no more the heat of the sun' is heavily cut back.  There is some very assured acting, especially from Matthew Needham as Giacomo.  I also liked Joshua Lacey as Cloten, a part which Rylance once played himself on the same stage a decade and a half ago.  Maddy Hill plays Imogen as a tough street kid with her own streak of violence, who is quite capable of pulling Cloten by the hair and hitting back. This Imogen is a tough survivor but doesn't give much sense of the character's internal conflicts and dilemmas.

Cymbeline is a strange example of Shakespeare's pastoral-comical-historical-tragical style, mixing up the genres in a way that modern audiences find hard to swallow.  This production successfully gets round that problem by imposing its own vision.  Some of the text gets mangled, there's quite a lot of rewriting, and I don't like the way most of the actors are miked up.  But the show is far better than Rice's 'school disco' version of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the peculiar Irish-themed Taming of the Shrew that occupied the stage earlier this summer.

Emma Rice clearly thinks the original aspiration dreamed up by Sam Wanamaker of an authentic Shakespearean theatre that would build a unique relationship between audience and actors is nonsense;  Shakespeare is a broad church and she is entitled to her views, but it is a mystery to me why the Globe board has allowed her to get away with it.

 

Diary of a Madman

Al Smith's play, now at the Gate Theatre, garnered a raft of good reviews at the Traverse in Edinburgh in August, and it's easy to see why.  It's a very loose adaptation of a short story by Nikolai Gogol about a man losing his identity and his connection with reality, from which it retains the idea of a talking dog, but not much else.  Instead of St Petersburg, we're a short train ride from Edinburgh Haymarket station and the man who is falling apart is no longer the civil servant Poprishchin but Pop Sheeran, the man whose lifetime task is to paint the Forth Bridge annually.

Liam Brennan, whom I fondly remember as Duke Orsino in two exquisite productions of Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe, gives a terrific performance as Pop, whose Scottish identity as a hereditary bridge painter is undermined by a number of worrying developments.  There's a new paint which could make him redundant;  the bridge itself has been bought by investors in the Gulf; and the polite young English graduate student Matthew who arrives to stay in his son's bedroom and test the new paint is having sex with his 17-year-old daughter.

The combination of all these hammer blows sends Pop into a spin, despite the efforts of his wife Mavra (a name borrowed from Gogol's story).  But his mental decline may just as well be the result of breathing in paint fumes for 25 years.  Pop starts hearing the voice of the dog Greyfriars Bobby and then imagines himself as a tartan Braveheart defending his beloved bridge from the English.

Smith is a talented and versatile playwright, whose two-hander Harrogate about a father-daughter relationship will be revived at the Royal Court next month.  This play also features a father-daughter conflict, as one of Pop's main fears is that Matthew will supplant him as the sexually active man of the house.  The dialogue is rich and funny enough to make the play's initial premise totally believable, and director Christopher Haydon finds neat solutions to the play's balance between realism and fantasy.  I particularly liked the performances of Louise McMenemy as Pop's daughter Sophie and Lois Chimimba as her teenage friend Mel.

The playwright takes well-aimed potshots at some Scottish icons, not just the Forth Bridge (designed by an Englishman) and Greyfriars Bobby, the dog who pined over his master's grave and is immortalised by a statue.  Scottish nationalists without a sense of humour probably won't see the jokes, although Smith's implied suggestion that the desire for Scottish independence is fuelled only by historical nostalgia is far too simple. 

The script, with its jokes about Tom Hiddleston and Nicola Sturgeon, has a little too much of the feel of a play written for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016 to have a long shelf life ahead of it.  It succeeds brilliantly in front of a London audience but if I had to declare a preference, I would pick Harrogate, which is less topical and far more unsettling.

Burning Doors

Belarus Free Theatre has been established in exile in the UK for more than a decade, but their uncompromising work makes few easy concessions to charm a fickle British theatre audience.  Sometimes punishingly violent, it straddles the boundary between the safe space of conventional drama and the risky territory of performance art.  For anyone raised on Bennett, Stoppard and Pinter, this show demands a jump in perception.  The bruises and bodily fluids are as real as in a performance by Marina Abramovic.

Burning Doors, written and directed by Nicolai Khalezin, is nonetheless a direct attempt to raise awareness here of the repression suffered by creative artists who directly challenge the Kremlin in Vladimir Putin's Russia.  Maria Alyokhina, one half of the Pussy Riot duo, joins the cast to act out the story of her two years in a prison camp after her punk rock group's famous 40-second performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012.  Burning Doors is a reference to one of the actions of St Petersburg artist Pyotr Pavlensky, who set fire to the doors of Russia's security police HQ, the Lubyanka, for which he was arrested and fined.  His actionist art uses his own body as a canvas;  he has sewed his mouth up with thread and nailed his scrotum to the ground in Moscow's Red Square.

Before my trip to the Soho Theatre last night I knew about Pussy Riot and about Pavlensky, but was completely unfamiliar with the third artist whose incarceration is the theme of the last and most punishingly physical part of the show.  Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director from Russian-occupied Crimea, is serving a 20-year sentence in Siberia on charges of 'terrorism' which his supporters say are entirely false.

Khalezin uses a dazzling array of theatrical techniques including mime and movement.  In the scenes of torture and mistreatment, his eight performers aren't acting;  the kicks and punches delivered to the hooded persioner are real and painful.  Health and safety give way to physical suffering as naked and half-naked bound bodies dangle from ropes, clash like demented wrestlers and collapse perspiring on the stage. From my seat in the front row, I found it a gruelling experience.

Luckily the pace varies;  there are a couple of conventional sketches featuring two male Kremlin officials wondering how to deal with these pesky half-lunatic artists who have taken them on.  Their conversation in a toilet in the bowels of the Kremlin, framed by a bombastic double-headed eagle, comes to a halt with a plaintive shout when they discover that somebody has failed to supply any toilet paper.

Khalezin and his team know how to breach the fourth wall at moments when the audience least expects it;  suddenly Alyokhina is seated behind a table with a moderator, playing herself and inviting live questions from the audience in English.  At one point I lost my pen to a particularly powerful lunge by an actor into the audience's space.  At another moment scraps of black clothing are thrown into the audience.

In this rich reservoir of theatrical techniques, there are one or two things that look a bit old hat to a western audience.  The use of a hand-held torch to illuminate a face in darkness is a stage trick I first saw in Yuri Lyubimov's productions at the Moscow Taganka theatre back in the 1970s.  The writhing and pulsating bodies recall the pioneering 'body art' of American theatre and performance pioneers in the 1960s.   It's visually powerful stuff, and obvious why one of the artists from whom Khalezin  has drawn inspiration is Egon Schiele.

There are literary antecedents as well, with a nod to Michel Foucault's writings on prison and punishment, and a much bigger debt to Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov.  Dostoyevsky's riveting psychological account of a man sentenced to execution in Tsarist Russia and then suddenly reprieved at the last moment was based on his own experience, and would be very familiar to a sophisticated Russian audience.  There are times in this production where the words and the devised actions that go with them seem to be running on parallel tracks rather than coming together.

Alyokhina, like her Pussy Riot partner Nadya Tolokonnikova, comes across as a very smart and media-savvy performer, balancing the conflicting demands of political activism and art with sophistication and skill.  Khalezin's other actors, knocking each other over like ninepins and glistening with sweat, convey the physical brutality of the new Russia rather than its psychology. Human rights are everybody's business, though both Mr Putin and the current UK government seem to share the opposite view.

Antony Sher as Lear

Lear's cavalier division of his kingdom into three ranks with David Cameron's ill-thought referendum on EU membership as an example of catastrophic decision-making.  Both moves are followed by political breakdown and a lot of stabbing in the back, not just between political factions but within their ranks.  There are many kinds of blindness, and RSC Director Gregory Doran explores all of them in this breathtaking production of Shakespeare's greatest play.  Of course we know what happens in King Lear, while the drama of Brexit is still only in Act One. I suspect there will be more betrayals and more dead bodies before it's over.

Most of this production's impact comes from Antony Sher's superb portrayal of Lear, who begins the play as a pagan god, wrapped in gold-buckled fleeces and framed in a gold transparent box.  That Sher mesmerises as Lear in this new production for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford will hardly come as a surprise.  His mental and physical decline is evident as his layers of clothing are peeled away.  Sher has the knack of slowing down his delivery at key moments, weighing every word of Shakespeare's text as if it is going to be his last.  When he appeals to the gods to curse Goneril and make her barren, he lifts his eyes heavenwards like a priest performing a sacrament.  By the end, he is a frail figure clad in white undergarments, essentially non-violent, almost a victim of the events he has himself set in train.

Simon Russell Beale's Lear at the National Theatre in 2014, directed by Sam Mendes, was equally powerful, but very different -- a barking and violent modern dictator stripped of any sympathetic qualities.  Doran keeps the production set firmly in a pre-modern pagan world, with one or two key design touches that link it to our own world.  Sometimes the RSC's elaborate stage design resources can overwhelm its productions, which explains why six years ago I didn't much enjoy David Farr's version of Lear, the last time the play was performed in Stratford.   Doran's version, however, is visually clear, especially in its use of Niki Turner's stage designs.  Doran openly acknowledges that the glass box in which Lear first appears, and the glass box in which Gloucester is blinded, are inspired by Francis Bacon paintings.  I also detected a debt to Grigory Kozintsev's famous black and white Russian film of King Lear, in which the old king, wrapped in furs, is surrounded by beggars in rags.

This production, like the Mendes one at the NT, is generous in its scale and brings dozens of badly behaved knights on stage to disrupt Goneril's household with Lear's encouragement.  Nobody deserves to be sent packing quite as much as this boorish old man and his rowdy escort.  In the storm scene, Sher's Lear is still defiant, appearing like a grand Old Testament prophet on a mountaintop.  But by the second half of the play, as his madness takes hold, he almost begins to win our sympathy.

Sher is well backed up by experienced RSC veterans David Troughton as Gloucester, Graham Turner as the Fool (a part once played by Sher), and Antony Byrne as Kent.  But the standout performances for me come from Papa Essiedu (recently a triumphant Hamlet) as Edmund and Oliver Johnstone as Edgar.  Johnstone conveys in a way many actors cannot the strained artificiality of Edgar's disguise as Poor Tom, so that we never lose sight of the fact that he is Gloucester's son.  Essiedu is a deliciously cynical Edmund who forges a link of complicity with the audience.

Newcomer Natalie Simpson gives a straightforward interpretation of Cordelia, one of Shakespeare's most underwritten parts, but at the preview performance I found her at times barely audible.  One day I would like to see Cordelia played as an awkward stroppy teenager, whose refusal to declare her love for her father might make a lot more sense than it does in most productions of the play if it is motivated by a 'whatever' feeling of rebellion against a world that has deprived her of her mother.

Footnote:  I'm not a huge fan of Stratford's Shakespeare tourist attractions, but there's a new one that is very much worth a visit.  The timbered Guild Hall and grammar school in Church Street has recently been opened to visitors, and it means that anyone can now enter the room where Shakespeare learned his 'little Latin and less Greek'.  To sit on a bench in the room where Shakespeare studied for the 16th century equivalent of Latin O-level and first encountered Ovid is a genuinely moving trip into the past.

Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe

Director Iqbal Khan has delivered a Macbeth packed with good acting and exciting ideas, but one whose impact is for me fatally undermined by the Globe's new policy of heavy reliance on artificial lighting and amplified sound.

This is the third Shakespeare production under the overall leadership of Emma Rice, who has scrapped the Globe's previous unique policy of bringing audiences closer to the style of Shakespeare's original performances, with an absolute minimum of lighting and no artificial sound.  The result is to re-erect the barriers between stage and audience that her predecessors Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole had dismantled.  While the Globe previously offered a style of Shakespearean performance unlike any other, creating a unique shared sense of complicity between audience and actors, it's now reliant on the usual box of sound and lighting tricks found in any theatre. The audience isn't required to use its imagination because the lighting and sound designer does the work for them.

WIthin those limitations, which I admit are more important to me as a longtime fan of the theatre than to the average customer on the South Bank, this is a production that has plenty of good points.  Iqbal's inventive use of the witches, integrating them in the play's action and having their words sung by soloist Laura Moody, successfully addresses the play's use of the supernatural, which is hard to get over to a modern audience.  The music by Jocelyn Pook is highly atmospheric, though at times too loud when the actors (who are thankfully not amplified) are speaking.

Tara Fitzgerald and Ray Fearon play Mr and Mrs Macbeth with an erotic sparkle that brings Shakespeare's ambitious power couple to life. Fitzgerald is particularly good at handling Lady Macbeth's slow disintegration, so that her descent into madness comes as no surprise.  Fearon is always impressive and commands the stage, though he doesn't quite convey the quiet despair that lurks behind the Thane's bravado as he pursues his descent into murder and mayhem.   Newcomer Jacob Fortune-Lloyd is a particularly strong Macduff, and the final fight scene is very well done.

Scenically, the production is full of bold and spooky ideas and designs, including masks and puppets, which occasionally tip over into grand guignol.  As so often with Shakespearean productions at the Globe and elsewhere, the costumes are a mish-mash of old and 21st century styles that don't blend together into a coherent whole. The themes of childlessness, child murder and heredity are ever-present in this play because of Macbeth's obsession with the prediction by the weird sisters that Banquo's issue will rule Scotland one day.  'Might there be a real child after all?' Khan asks in a programme interview. The director brings in a small child to several scenes to heat-stopping effect, but it is never quite clear if this boy is really a fully alive Macbeth junior, or just a ghost.  I like ambiguity on stage, but this seems to me more a case of the director trying to have his cake and eat it.