Top Hat, Aldwych Theatre, London’s West End, May 2012

If you like a frothy musical with lots of dancing, and numbers like Cheek to Cheek by Irving Berlin, this is for you.

Tom Chambers and ensemble, all images Brinkhoff and Mogenburg

It’s the early 1930s and an American dancer named Jerry Travers has come to London to star in a show produced by wealthy Horace Hardwick. A tap dance routine he performs in his hotel room awakens the lovely Dale Tremont. She treats him with disdain, but he falls for her and spares no effort to bring her round. All would be well, but a case of mistaken identity carries the affair off to Venice.

Tom Chambers and Summer Strallen

There are funny lines aplenty, often inspired by the ridiculous Horace Hardwick, ”A man is incomplete before he’s married. After that he’s finished”. This may not seem very witty when written down, but delivered in a Bob Hope kind of way by a string-bean version of Henry Higgins, it’s funny. Martin Ball gave a fine performance as Hardwick, and talking of string-beans, Stephen Boswell was wonderful as his man, Bates. Vivien Parry carried off the role of Hardwick’s wife with great panache, delivering some superb lines, but the main plaudits must go to Summer Strallen as Dale Tremont: super stage presence and wonderful dancing — she was great.

Tom Chambers starred as Jerry Travers, giving him great charm, and his playful pas-de-deux with the hat stand in Act I was a delight. Super ensemble dancing by the company to choreography by Bill Deamer, and the sets by Hildegard Bechtler were glorious. Lovely costumes by Jon Morrell and good lighting by Peter Mumford. The story line is a bit thin, but Matthew White has directed a hugely appealing show that never flags for a minute, and left the audience with a sense of euphoria.

Booking available until 26 January 2013 — for details click here.

The Damnation of Faust, English National Opera, ENO, London Coliseum, May 2011

This is ostensibly a French opera sung in English, though it’s not really an opera but a légende dramatique by Hector Berlioz — a musical and vocal canvas on which a clever director can paint his own picture. And this is exactly what Terry Gilliam does by turning the whole thing into a history about the rise of Nazism in Germany from World War I to its expression in the violent anti-Semitism of 1930s and eventually the death camps of World War II.

Faust and Mephistopheles in the cube, all images Tristram Kenton

It all starts with a spoken prologue by Mephistopheles in which he talks about the desire to unlock the secrets of life saying, “there will always be a Faust”. Referring to a struggle, he then intones “My struggle translates in German as Mein Kampf“. This obvious reference to Hitler out of the way, he then seats himself stage left as Faust with his spiky orange hair hikes in the mountains carrying a massive cubical burden from which he opens out a large chalk-board replete with mathematical mumbo jumbo. He then meets Teutonic figures from German myth, but this is all just prologue, and as we watch Gilliam’s story unfold we are presented with one clever stage idea after another. For example towards the end, when Faust and Mephistopheles ride off on black horses to save Marguerite — who in this production has been transported to one of the death camps — they ride a World War II motorbike and sidecar, appearing to race across the front of the stage as the night-time scenery flashes past behind them. In the meantime we have been presented with high and low points from German history in the 1930s: the callous brutality of the brown shirts, the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin with Leni Reifenstahl’s wonderful moving images of divers, the yellow stars for Jews, the horror of Kristallnacht in November 1938, and the transportation of Jews to concentration camps.

The journey to save Marguerite

In case this all seems too much, Gilliam dilutes it with comedy and choreographic invention worthy of a musical, as the blond athletes move in formation and sing in Latin, and the brown shirts perform at one point as if in an operetta. Peter Hoare’s Faust, with his high tenor voice, is costumed as one of them, but always with that frightful orange hair, looking rather like the dog-man he portrayed so well in the ENO’s Dog’s Heart late last year. Christopher Purves by contrast was a commanding Mephistopheles with his sonorous baritone and superb stage presence, and Christine Rice was a beautifully voiced Marguerite. The relatively small part of the student Brander, another brown shirt, was well sung by Nicholas Folwell. Musically this was wonderful, with inspired playing by the orchestra under the direction of Edward Gardner.

The sets by Hildgard Bechtler ranged from open air romanticism of a style to suit Der Freischütz, to utilitarian buildings and their interiors, all superbly lit by Peter Mumford. Good costumes by Katrina Lindsay and clever video designs by Finn Ross helped make this a remarkable staging, yet I feel discomforted by the huge range of production ideas, and wonder if it isn’t all a bit self-indulgent.

Faust and Marguerite fearing crowds outside

Of course, as a musical creation by Berlioz this is not exactly an opera, but more like a cantata, and it failed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1846 during its first performances. Only in 1893 was it successfully staged in Monte Carlo, and now Terry Gilliam has created it anew, using Berlioz’s wonderful music to tell the story of where German Romanticism and idealism took a badly wrong turn, leading to one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century.

Performances continue until June 7 — for more details click here.

Cause Célèbre, The Old Vic, London, March 2011

A young man kills his lover’s husband in a fit of jealousy. Should he hang? This is 1935 when the death penalty was mandatory for a murder conviction of this sort but the public was unduly sympathetic because the wife, Alma had carried on with him under her husband’s roof, and presumably wanted her husband, Francis Rattenbury out of the way. He was not an altogether nice man — after leaving his first wife he had the heat and lights turned off in their home, and flaunted his affair with his future second wife, the 27-year old Alma Pakenham.

The husband’s nasty streak is, however, not the point in this Rattigan play, which deals with the illicit relationship between Alma and her chauffeur, along with the court case, a cause célèbre in 1935. This frames everything towards the end, allowing us to see what really happened. Times have changed, of course, but the public’s prurient interest in personal scandal is timeless, and well expressed in this, Rattigan’s last play.

Anne-Marie Duff, photos by Johan Persson

Anne-Marie Duff as Alma Rattenbury was utterly convincing as a charmingly batty woman who lived life to the full. She probably wasn’t very bright, saying in court that she had no sex with her husband because, “the flesh was willing but the spirit was weak”, but then her lover was none too bright either, thinking he could get off by claiming to be on cocaine. The brightest person in the play is probably O’Connor the barrister, brilliantly played by Nicholas Jones. Add to that Niamh Cusack as Edith Davenport, portraying a fiercely judgemental woman who became the leader of the jury, and Lucy Robinson as her friend Stella Morrison, who takes a large, ultimately losing bet on the outcome, and here was the germ of a superb cast. Ms. Robinson’s cut glass accent was absolutely of the time, and Niamh Cusack was convincingly earnest in her possessive relationship with her son, her strict avoidance of her estranged husband, and her jury role as a key player in the verdict. These wonderful actors allowed Anne-Marie Duff to carry off the role of the adorable and infuriating Alma with tremendous spirit.

Niamh Cusack with Simon Chandler as her estranged husband

At the time of these events, Alma was 39 and her lover was 18, though in this production he looked older than that. The large age difference was one of the things that shocked the public, who saw her as the dominant partner. But as Rattigan’s Alma points out to the judge, it’s the younger person who has control in this situation. Thirty-nine can be a desperate age for some women, and had the age difference been the other way, the home secretary might not have intervened after the sentence. As it was the young chauffeur lived “a quiet life” until he died in 2000, aged 83.

The director, Thea Sharrock was also responsible for the National Theatre’s excellent revival of Rattigan’s After the Dance last year, and here again we have a fine production with designs by Hildegard Bechtler. I loved the lighting by Bruno Poet, which at times brought various characters from darkness to light, and vice versa — this was particularly good during the court scenes because the Old Vic is a cavernous theatre with a huge stage, and the lighting helped to create a useful intimacy.

The play runs until June 11 — for more information, click here for more details on the Old Vic’s website.

After the Dance, National Theatre, NT Lyttelton, June 2010

“I love you, now change” is not a line in this play, but the young Helen lives this cliché, and at first seems to make it believable. Within a month she’s fallen in love with David Scott-Fowler and manages to get him to stop the drinking that’s destroying his liver. Her determined superficiality shatters her fiancé Peter Scott-Fowler, upends David’s 12 year marriage, and destroys his wife Joan. While these people wear the masks of gaiety and jest, and seem almost to have become their masks, reality persists beneath the surface, and the only person to fully comprehend it is John Reid, who lives with David and Joan in their spacious London flat as a self-confessed court jester, with a strong penchant for the drinks tray.

David with Helen

In the end it is John who tells David the truth about himself that kills the incipient marriage to Helen, and returns him to his former life, now as a widower. In the meantime we are treated to superb acting. Adrian Scarborough is brilliant as John, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll are entirely convincing as the ever cool David and his wife Joan, who loves him but gaily pretends to be just as cool, so as not to bore him. Faye Castelow portrays Helen as a bossy little ingénue, and John Hefferman is a rather edgy Peter, who tries to take life seriously, but doesn’t quite succeed.

David playing Avalon for Joan

What I loved about this fine production by Thea Sharrock, apart from the spacious and elegant designs by Hildegard Bechtler, was the music. Certainly the play features the 1920s foxtrot ‘Avalon’ towards the end of each act, but the melody was pinched from Puccini, albeit in a disguised form, and in this production we also hear the original. For those who know it, this is powerfully suggestive because it’s the music behind E lucevan le stelle from the opera Tosca. Cavaradossi sings it before he dies, knowing that these are his last moments, and it was played here just before Joan goes out to the balcony on her own, never to return, and again at the end when David decides to return to the drinking that will destroy him.

This riveting play by Terence Rattigan had the misfortune to open in June 1939, shortly before war was declared, and when the country’s mood rapidly changed it was taken off. So it failed to enjoy a good run, and Rattigan left it out of the collected plays he published in 1953. It’s been somewhat ignored for that reason, but this production and cast do it full justice, and I recommend booking tickets before word gets out.

Performances continue until August 11^th — for details click here.

Arcadia, Duke of York’s Theatre, June 2009

This Tom Stoppard play cleverly juxtaposes the modern world with the early nineteenth century, and in particular modern literary scholarship and mathematics with the earlier emphasis on literary creativity, classical study and scientific enquiry. In the early period we have a very clever girl of 16 named Thomasina, played by Jessica Cave, and her tutor Septimus Hodge, wittily played by Dan Stevens, along with a poet, and others. These early nineteenth century characters are juxtaposed in the modern world by a dreadful literary academic named Bernard Nightingale, played by Neil Pearson, along with an author named Hannah, wittily played by Samantha Bond, and a clever but rather intense mathematician named Valentine, very ably portrayed by Ed Stoppard.

Hannah is doing a book about the history of the Derbyshire country estate where all the action takes place, and Bernard visits with questions about Byron staying there in the early nineteenth century, and some slightly daft and ultimately irrelevant ideas about was going on at the time. While Bernard and Hannah plumb the past, those in the past enquire about the future. Thomasina hits on the idea of the second law of thermodynamics to explain the arrow of time, whose direction is entirely absent from Newton’s laws of motion, which are the same going backwards or forwards. As she points out, you can stir jam into a rice pudding, but you can’t stir it out again, and the three laws of Thermodynamics have often been wittily stated as: you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game. The second law says that available energy gradually becomes unavailable, so that in the long run everything will be at ‘room temperature’ and the universe will die out. Thomasina also discusses mathematics with her tutor, and devises an iterated algorithm that Valentine, in the modern world with his Apple laptop, is able to use to create beautiful shapes of nature.

The ability to make this into theatre is Stoppard’s genius, and while the main passion is intellectual, he sprinkles sex into both periods. The women are keen for some fun, and in the early period a poet’s wife, whom we never see on stage, along with Lady Croom, elegantly played by Nancy Carroll, breathe sexual allure into the proceedings. In the modern world Hannah shows desire for the dreadful Bernard, and the young Chloë Coverly, charmingly played by Lucy Griffiths, shows a bright interest in things sexual as did her earlier incarnation as Thomasina, who starts the play off by asking her tutor what carnal embrace means. In the end she desires more than words from her tutor, but when she goes to bed with papers and a candle we realise this is where her room goes up in flames and her genius is lost forever.

This revival is by David Leveaux, with sets and lighting by Hildegard Bechtler and Paul Anderson, but on the Duke of York’s stage it is unfortunately more cramped than when I saw it at the National in 1993, and the impression of extensive gardens behind the house is lost. The acting was very good, though I would have preferred more charm from Jessica Cave as Thomasina, whose high-pitched voice resonated sharpness, while Neil Pearson could have made Bernard less obnoxious and more smugly clever, which may have kept things in better balance. But Samantha Bond, Ed Stoppard and Dan Stevens were a delight to watch.