FRANKENSTEIN

16/2/11, National (Olivier)

2 hrs (just under) straight through. Nick Dear's version, directed by Danny Boyle, designed by Mark Tildesley, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller boxing and coxing alternate nights as Frankenstein and his Creature. Seen at a preview with three more performances to go before the first of two opening nights.

First the positives. One is a great performance by Cumberbatch as the Creature; first seen emerging naked from a backlit semi-transparent womb-like structure, writhing, groaning and twitching, then gradually acquiring the capacity to walk, to feel pain and fear, and (under the tutelage of Karl Johnson's blind old man) to read, to think and to quote great chunks of Milton.

The other is a spectacular set by Tildesley, which features (among much else) an extraordinary array of lightbulbs across the roof of the theatre under a reflective sheet, which flash blindingly as the creature comes to life. Tildesley makes more extensive use of the Olivier revolve than anything I recall since His Dark Materials and at times seems positively profligate with its visual imagery and the budget. Early on, after the creature's emergence, when he has found a great red cloak to clothe his nakedness but is still wandering alone, a sort of railway engine shoots forwards, harshly backlit, along rails to the front of the stage, with huge cogwheels on top and half the cast hanging off it: they do some sort of dance, and then it withdraws never to be seen again. Likewise for the scene with the boy by Lake Geneva enormous slatted walkways were dropped vertically from the flies to be spread out across the stage with the aid of stagehands, only to be whisked up and away again a few minutes later. And (spoiler alert) I caught a reference to at least one great romantic painting, Fuseli's The Nightmare, as the Creature crouched on Frankenstein's bride's bed having murdered her. No visual trick nor expense was spared.

I wish I'd liked the rest of it better but I remained largely unmoved and unengaged. Jonny Lee Miller looked like Colin Firth's Mr Darcy but sounded hoarse. He appears very briefly at the start, running away appalled at the sight of his creation; then doesn't reappear for 40 minutes. The moral and philosophical punch of the play is packed into two or three scenes between Frankenstein and the Creature, and a couple more between Frankenstein and his fiance, as they debate the Creature's ambiguous moral status (an outcast abandoned by his creator and so deserving sympathy, and yet a murderer; a putative Adam who sees himself instead as Milton's Satan), and Frankenstein's right to play god. Those scenes failed to spark, but that may just be preview-itis.

I should say that D who knows Mary Shelley's original well liked it a lot and so did S, but A agreed with me that it was dull. The audience (loads of teenage girls) screamed satisfyingly when the Creature appeared suddenly and unexpectedly at one point, and

gave the show a standing ovation.

HAMLET

8/12/10, National (Olivier)

3 hrs 30 mins. Superfluous smoking alert.

Time Out's Caroline McGinn reckons Rory Kinnear's Hamlet was the best she's seen. Personally I'd rather be guided by the audience reaction: silence during some of the set-pieces (like the play) but a cannonade of coughing during the soliloquies. That to me suggests a decent production but a leading actor who, while perfectly intelligent and speaking the words in a way that enables one to follow his train of thought with beautiful clarity, lacks the necessary charisma.

A decent production (by Nick Hytner) but derivative: reminded me an awful lot of Greg Doran's similar modern dress production with David Tennant for the RSC last Christmas, especially the idea of surveillance (CCTV cameras in Doran's version, secret service operatives with earpieces in this).

David Calder strong as Polonius and the gravedigger. Ruth Negga the most convincing Ophelia I've ever seen -- I thought she was a genuine teenager but it turns out she's 30 or thereabouts and highly experienced. (She's also half-Irish, half-Ethiopian; Alex Lanipekun who plays Laertes is also mixed race' so presuambly this wasn't colour-blind casting but a suggestion that Polonius's late wife was black.) James Laurenson interesting but underpowered as the Ghost and the Player. Patrick Malahide definitely underpowered as a Machiavellian Claudius: a piece of very effective screen acting totally lost in the Olivier's vast spaces. Clare Higgins tottering about on a pair of very high heels playing Gertrude as a hard-bitten old party who's seen it all. (She was also very clearly miked, which in this theatre is a bonus, though I couldn't spot anyone else who was.)

The smoking? Hamlet lights up twice, the first time on his student-style mattress in a room full of piled up books... and takes no further puffs.

DANTON'S DEATH

31/8/10, National (Olivier)

1 hr 55 mins (no interval). Buchner's 1834 classic in a new version by Howard Brenton. Directed by Michael Grandage of the Donmar with Toby Stephens as Danton and Elliot Levey (very good) as Robespierre.

You can see why Grandage wanted to do it. It's about politics, which clearly fascinates him (Camus' Caligula, von Kleist's Prince of Homburg), and about Romantic/tragic views of the individual, history, fate. It pits the extremist Robespierre, who equates virtue with terror, against the sensualist Danton, now sickened by revolutionary bloodshed (though whether that's on ideological grounds or because he's overhwelmed by Romantic ennui isn't entirely clear).

The ideas are interesting. Danton describes himself as an epicurean and wrestles with questions of how to find meaning in a world from which the revolutionaries have banished God; Robespierre and St Just are Maoists ahead of their time, committed to permanent revolution.

But it's just one damn speech after another, static and dramatically inert (despite the dramatic premise). Robespierre and Danton only have one scene together: there should have been more. I wanted the clash of ideas, not just their presentation, one after another, in ordered sequence.

The climactic scene of Danton's trial is a series of speeches. D is in the well of the court, holding the jurors spellbound before being silenced and bundled off. But Robespierre and St Just hold the high ground, literally, at the centre of a balcony which runs round the entire back of the curved set. We liked the set by Christopher Oram very much: stained wood, with several doors at ground level and the balcony, entered from either end, with shutters that could be opened and closed to reveal floor to ceiling windows.

There were some interesting interventions by the women: a prostitute near the start with whom Danton consorts and (am I remembering this correctly?) who tells him her sad life story; Danton's wife, who tries to save him and poisons him when she can't; and Camille Desmoulins' Lucille, who goes fetchingly mad in a white high-waisted dress.

WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN

7/5/10, National Theatre (Olivier)

Missed it. Had to work (election). D said 'twas very stylish, great costumes, Harriet Walter stunning, used the revolve very well, and the lighting. Nice band, bit screechy. They all died.

PHEDRE

29/7/09, National (Olivier)

Helen Mirren and Margaret Tyzack in Racine's tragedy. Missed it: was in Paris. D said it was another cracker.

Reviews here:

http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/event/106915/phedre

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jun/14/phedre-mirren-lyttelton-review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jun/12/phedre-theatre-review

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6471899.ece

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

24/6/09, National (Olivier)

Missed it. Had to work. Dammit. D said was extremely good. So did the Guardian, which called it a "wondrous revival":

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/may/29/theatre

I've never seen it, too, which just makes it more aggravating.

DEATH AND THE KING'S HORSEMAN

21/04/09, National (Olivier)

2hrs 20 mins. A big play (in all sorts of ways) by Wole Soyinka, about the clash of cultures in colonial Nigeria. Reviews were mixed: we thought it was a cracker.

I've left it too long (nearly three weeks) to write this up, so this is an impressionistic account.

Lots of movement and dance, combining the work of a Nigerian called Peter Badejo and the western choreographer Javier de Frutos. Especially liked the white folks' ball, with everyone in 18th century fancy dress and the numbers swelled by dancers bearing dummies on milkmaids' ... things (yokes?).

The principal setting an African market with loads of people, colourful costumes and an extraordinary central bit of set from which at one point long lines off which hung clothes were stretched out to the far corners of the set.

The colonial Brits were played by black actors in white face, in a neat reversal of the old convention that had black characters played by blacked-up whites: it worked well for the most part, not least because the colonial officer was played by Lucian Msamati, a wonderful actor we've also seen as Arturo Ui at the Lyric and in a top-notch play about Rwandan genocide at the West Yorkshire Playhouse called The Overwhelming. They are of course British actors, so the fact that they can do upper-class British accents should come as no surprise. Only one failed to convince: a young subaltern was far too thickset.

At the heart of the play was a nice ambiguity: a month after the king's death, on the day of his burial, the king's horseman is due to commit ritual suicide to escort him into the afterlife. But he doesn't. Is it because the Brits, appalled at the notion, have stepped in to foil him at the last moment? Or because he finds life (and his new wife, taken for the occasion) too appealing to leave? The question is left open.

At the play's tragic end, though, the horseman's son, sent off to London to train as a doctor, commits suicide in his place and the old man hangs himself.

Rufus Norris, the (white) director, apparently spent some years in Nigeria as a young child.

Claire Benedict, an actress I haven't always warmed to, played the part of the wise old woman with tremendous authority. Nonso Anozie (new to me) played the horseman with enormous relish.

The language was poetic, the accents quite thick and it took a while to get attuned to. But once attuned, it was rewarding.

ENGLAND PEOPLE VERY NICE

25/3/09, National (Olivier).

Blogspot lost my first version of this review so, in brief...

Controversial Richard Bean play, directed by Nick Hytner, about immigration. A sprawling play-within-a-play: inmates at an immigration centre put on a devised play about the successive waves of migrants who have arrived in Spitalfields/Brick Lane since the Huguenots. Could teach the Convicts' Opera a thing or two about use of framing: done with a light touch, at the start and finish (and briefly immediately before and after the interval), plus some jokes in the play itself which have been set up in the prologue and so are welcomed as old friends by the audience.

Very funny, though much of the humour comes from shameless use of stereotypes. The Huguenots are all frightfully elegant; the Irish keep pigs in their rooms and breed with their siblings; the Jews are all revolutionary socialists and anarchists; the Bangladeshis invent chicken tikka masala.

Dramatic tension flagged towards the end of the first act, in the Jewish section, when posh Ruth (whose daddy owns the docks) foments working class revolution; and there was a frisson towards the end when today's Islamic extremists are mocked (in the shape of a radical girl who speaks in rhyming rap and a mad mullah with two hooks for hands). That seemed harder to take than the earlier sections. Is that because it's always difficult to see today's bogeymen as ultimately harmless, as it is possible to see their predecessors? Or because unlike previous waves of immigrants -- who within a generation or two are seen to have melded with the existing inhabitants and become thorough-going cockneys, suspicious in their turn of the next wave of new arrivals -- this lot seem less willing to reach an accommodation with their host society?

There are lots of running gags. A barmaid (Sophie Stanton, who starts each section with an explosive "fackin' Irish..." or whatever), a pub landlord (Fred Ridgeway, who fills in the barmaid's "wossnames" with erudite glosses) and a customer (Trevor Laird, "I got them Jews upstairs from me...") who comment chorus-like on proceedings. A young couple (Sacha Dhawan and Michelle Terry) who embark on doomed Romeo & Juliet style romances between incomer and existing inhabitant. A thug, Hugo, who knifes one of the newcomers. Etc etc.

Simple set, designed by Mark Thompson: a blank wall full of doors and windows, one section of which moves forward to form the bar. Great use of animations (by Pete Bishop) projected onto the wall, which sketch in historical developments. Music from a live four-piece who double as immigration centre warders in the first scene.

EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR

14/2/09, Olivier.

1hr 5 mins. Very good: witty, pointed, music and spoken word beautifully integrated and likewise movement and dance. Arguably a rather slight piece and dated... except that totalitarian regimes and unjust incarceration remain a feature of the modern world, and it's quite possible some poor souls are locked up as lunatics merely for expressing political opposition to the regime.

Toby Jones, Joseph Millson as the two Ivanovs incarcerated in a lunatic asylum circa 1977. The former a madman who believes he can hear an imaginary orchestra playing; the latter a dissident, perfectly sane, who will be released once he admits he's mad (because only a madman would take on the Soviet state).

We, of course, can see and hear the orchestra which in this production occupied the Olivier revolve, across which a white path zigzagged from an entrance at the rear through the orchestra, past the desk representing the doctor's office, down to the two lunatics' prison (sorry, hospital) beds at the front.

Before it started it was clear the revolve would, um, revolve because the orchestra's seats were carefully arranged within it but I couldn't see how that was possible without breaking up the zigzag pathway. Answer: it turned a partial circle periodically, breaking the pattern decisively and disturbingly, only returning to its starting position and re-establishing the pattern at the very end. Clever.

Also before it started I counted the band and counted the names of the players listed and they didn't tally. Why became clear later. The doctor, a keen amateur violinist, emerged from the orchestra. And so, during one musical interlude, did a bunch of dancers: one of the French horns stripped off his white tie and tails to reveal the dark green shirt and tie of a militiaman or prison warder and began manhandling a lady violinist, and so on. Surely a Tom Morris touch (he co-directed with Felix Barrett).

Andre Previn's music was sort of sub-Shostakovich, noisy at times, highly coloured and written at times to counterpoint the words; Stoppard's text typically dry and witty, delighting in logical absurdities, but by itself rather slight, little more than an extended sketch.

As well as the prisoner-patients we saw sane Ivanov's son, and his conformist schoolteacher. Ivanov goes on hunger strike (it worked in the KGB prison in which he was incarcerated previously), his son is despatched to persuade him to relent. He won't. The impasse is eventually resolved by a deus ex machina in the shape of a KGB colonel (in a ridiculously wide military cap) who strides on and, apparently wilfully and deliberately confusing the two inmates, asks sane Ivanov if he hears an orchestra, asks mad Ivanov if he thinks innocent people are ever imprisoned in lunatic asylums and, getting satisfactory answers from each, orders their release. Thus giving the authorities the last laugh.

D adds: The ending was especially effective. The musicians left the stage one by one while the music played (evidently on tape by this stage). The son pushed Dad in a wheelchair out of the hospital and along the white tiled winding road, all the way back to home/inifinity/the outside through overturned chairs and music stands. As the stage darkened before this short final scene I saw two pieces of set fall and was wondering what was happening, and then the lights went up revealing this very deep (as far as the back wall?), film-like reflection or projection of the path disappearing way off into the distance.