SPELLING BEE

or rather, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

17/2/11, Donmar

95 mins straight through. A preview (though we hadn't realised that and it was as polished and energetic as if it had been running for weeks). A familiar set-up to anyone who's seen the film documentary Spellbound: this was the fictional version, set to music and well-directed by Jame Lloyd

We thought it was great, though Billington in the Guardian evidently saw it when he was feeling especially dyspeptic (he called at "a flimsy vacuous diversion": http://tinyurl.com/5uw8dtf). The Indie caled it "a dippy, spirited mix of the genuinely funny and gratingly fake," which seemed fairer. It had its faults, It dragged a bit two-thirds of the way through, partly because everyone had to have their solo and some of the songs weren't as snappily-written or tuneful or well-sung. It was (being American) essentially a sentimental, feelgood affair beneath the superficial satirical bite. The music wasn't memorable. But in a small space like the Donmar a musical can't really fail if it's done with sufficient verve and panache and this had both.

We were in a school gym in Putnam County as six contestants lined up to compete for a place in the national finals. Children played by adults, plus a wonderful question-master, at once pompous, portentous and sleazy (Steve Pemberton unrecognisable in specs and sports jacket), the man charged with counselling and comforting the losers (a prisoner on community service dressed in a bright orange bee costume), and best of all the mistress of ceremonies, herself a former winner, now a real estate agent resplendent in blonde hair, electric blue miniskirt and jacket and high heels (Katherine Kingsley, superb).

There was some doubling as well, mainly in scenes representing the kids' parents. One frantic overachiever had two dads pushing her relentlessly. The lonely girl who pals up with the aggressive fat boy no-one likes (David Fynn) had a dad too busy to make it to the competition and a mum who'd gone off to find herself by the Ganges (sung rather movingly by Kingsley in a headscarf). There was also one ill-conceived intervention from Jesus.

The Donmar's regular bench seats had been stripped out and replaced with blue metal gym-style chairs. The back wall was hung with a huge Putnam County banner. And there was some audience participation, with four people invited to play contestants in the early part of the show and being gently ribbed while being given impossible words with silly definitions to spell. One man clearly wished he was somewhere else. One woman seemed to be enjoying it immensely but blew it when she couldn't spell "lachrymose". Another man played along marvellously and, when given an impossible word, delivered an impossible answer which was declared correct to much hilarity.

I always say I don't like musicals, but I liked this, just as I like Sondheim and most musicals produced at the Donmar. D said afterwards that in fact what I don't like is big West End musicals in big West End theatres, and she's probably right.

PASSION

11/10/10, Donmar

This is the production where a leading actor had to be hospitalised after one of the pistols used in the duelling scene and loaded with blanks shot something into his eye.

We've seen this before, at the Bridewell before it closed: a Stephen Sondheim piece about the corrosive power of unrequited passionate love, featuring his usual witty rhymes, psychologically intriguing lyrics and one tune (though it's a good one, and comes in numerous different versions). I remembered that much, but none of the details. D said she couldn't remember it at all... but then at the very start leant over to me and whispered "I DO remember this!" The first scene features the young lovers in a post-coital moment. In this production they were in fetching deshabille, he in longjohns (I think) she in a white basque-and-negligee affair. But at the Bridewell she, and possibly he, were completely naked. Strangely, I had forgotten this. D observed how hard it is to take someone's performance seriously when the first sight you've had of them is in the nude.

We are among a bunch of Italian soldiers garrisoning some godforsaken outpost. The colonel has brought his cousin (Elena Roger, tiny and fierce and wearing great smudges of dark make-up on her cheekbones -- she is Argentinian, they tell me, and made her name as Evita and as Piaf, which explains the accent) who suffers from "nerves" or some other chronic condition which leaves her bed-ridden. The new young subaltern (David Thaxton), leaving his lover (Scarlett Strallen) in Milan, is conventionally polite to the invalid who mistakes his overtures for those of a lover. The lover back home turns out to be married with a child and thus their love, so apparently all-consuming at the start, is in fact somewhat compromised. A meddling doctor (Allan Corduner -- he was Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy) makes matters worse by suggesting the young man appear to be in love with the invalid in the hopes of making her better. There is a flashback (she was once married to a cad who took all her money and then dumped her), there is the duel when the colonel cottons on to what's been happening; there is the souring of the original love affair when the young woman refuses to leave her husband for her lover because it will mean losing her child.

So far all very satisfactory. The bit I find hard to take because it's psychologically implausible, although I can see how it might have appealed to Sondheim or whoever wrote the original story as a perverse twist, is the fact that the young man really ends up in love with the invalid. Why?

An all-male chorus (it was both sexes, I think, in the Bridewell production) leading to some cross-dressing in the flashback sequence. A surprisingly substantial band tucked away in a little room in a corner of the Donmar balcony (from which the band leader emerges to take his bow).

THE PRINCE OF HOMBURG

10/08/10, Donmar

Heinreich von Kleist's piece about the conflict between duty and the individual, written at the height of early 19th century Romanticism... and controversially given a New Ending in this Donmar production.

The Prince of Homburg is the adopted son of the Elector of Brandenburg. It's the 1670s, and they are fighting the invading Swedes. At the Battle of Fehrbellin the Prince disobeys the Elector's direct orders not to attack with his cavalry until the Swedish army has been surrounded and cut off. The prince was distracted by love for his cousin at the pre-battle briefing. The battle is a victory, but not the total one the Elector had hoped for. He court martials the prince. The only possible sentence is death. It all shapes up as a fascinating clash between 18th century Enlightment ideas of order, rules and structure on the one hand, and the 19th century Romantic belief in the autonomy of the individual on the other.

So far so good. Ian McDiarmid suitably scary as the calculating martinet of an Elector; Siobhan Redmond extremely impressive as the Electress; Chris Cox an appealing prince; intelligent direction by Jonathan Munby who also did Life is a Dream (another play about a tyrannical monarch and imprisoned prince).

But then the play goes off the rails a little. There's a scene in which the prince leaves his prison on parole to beg for his stepmother's intervention and, having passed the grave opened for him on the way, finds his bravery deserting him and says he'll do anything to live. This scene proved so problematic for the 19th century that it was usually cut (the play wasn't produced until after von Kleist's death in any case) and you can see why. He dumps his girlfriend in order to live (she's promised to the Swedish king in a diplomatic marriage alliance). She tells him he's behaving badly. By the interval he's lost our sympathy and so has virtually everyone else in the play (the Elector because, having made his point, he refuses to do what everyone expects and pardon the boy, or at least commute the sentence).

An historical descendant of the Elector, of course, was the King of Prussia who forced his homosexual son, later Frederick the Great, as a boy to watch the execution of his lover, so rigidity bordering on mania clearly ran in the family.

Things pick up in the second half, with a lot of military coming and going, letters written and received, the girlfriend developing a quite unexpected capacity for decisive action, the Elector having to face down a mutiny from his officers and the prince finding himself once more when the Elector offers him a reprieve provided he can say the Elector acted wrongly (he can't, of course). There's a very fine scene indeed between the Elector and one of his veteran officers in which they debate what matters more in battle: victory or obedience to orders.

In von Kleist's original the prince is pardoned, having presumably learnt his lesson. The historical Prince of Homburg went on to live a long life. But in this version the Prince is executed as the Elector looks on from a balcony at the back of the stage and tries and fails to get his silent officers to join him in the triple "hail" we have come to know as the electorate's official military salute. The reference to the ultimate rise of Nazism, a bastardised child of Prussian militarism, is clear.

I'd forgotten (despite having read the reviews) until reading up on von Kleist and the play later that the ending had been changed. This one worked well dramatically and didn't bother me at the time: it gave the play a contempoary resonance it would otherwise have lacked. But how does this differ from 18th century rewritings and bowdlerisations of Shakespeare about which we're always so sniffy?

THE LATE MIDDLE CLASSES

14/07/10, Donmar

Revival of Simon Gray's 1999 play (which apparently never made it to the West End) about repression, prejudice and hypocrisy circa 1950. We are on an island connected to Portsmouth by a ferry, but not the Isle of Wight. I spent a good deal of time trying to work out which island. Was it Hayling? Was it a fictional island? There was a ferry in 1950, running to Portsmouth, but between the 1950s and the 1990s a bridge was built. Hayling has had a bridge since 1824 so it couldn't be there, I thought. In fact I think it must have been... but pointlessly worrying about the question proved thoroughly distracting.

A bright only child is being taught the piano by a mittel European emigre, who lives with his caricature of a mother. The child's parents are a dull, buttoned-up pathologist and his bright and brittle wife, unhappily coming to terms with a stifling middle class existence of indifferent tennis and dried eggs after the excitements of war work, and desperate for her son to get a scholarship to Westminster so the family can move to London.

The mother was Helen McCrory, utterly believable in her frustration and sometimes outrageous behaviour and in her complex relationship with her son ("Do you love me?" "Of course I do, Mummy." "Why?" "Because you're my mother." "Couldn't you have found another reason?").
The father (and the adult son, returning to see his old music teacher at the start and finish of the play) was Peter Sullivan, new to us, buttoned up to the point of speaking in a barely audible monotone which annoyed me for a while but then paid generous comic dividends in the scene in which he tried to tell his son the facts of life (and never managed to, interrupting himself time and again until finally managing to blurt out the word "masturbation", at which point he's interrupted by his wife).

The teacher was Robert Glenister, his mother Eleanor Bron. I'm not sure who played the boy (there are three actors rotating in the part) but he was jolly good. The plot revolves around the teacher's evident sexual longing for the boy which he seems commendably to repress. Their relationship is platonic. But when they fail to return on time from a trip to London the worst is feared, the father goes round to see the teacher's mother, and disaster follows. The parents assume the teacher and his mother are Jewish, something the mother denies in outraged but futile terms. It is clear from what the boy says that nothing reprehensible happened. But it's also clear from what the mother tells the boy's father that there has been trouble in the past and mother and son have been forced to move more than once.

One of the play's great frissons comes when the teacher returns to confront the angry father who shouts at him: "you.... Jew!" One expected "pervert".

Well acted (though Eleanor Bron may have overdone the hand waving and cakes), neatly skewering not only 1950s hypocrisy but also our modern discomfort with the problem of paedophilia. Beautifully ambiguous. And simply staged, a grand piano on a revolve signifying changes of scene between the family's front room and the music teacher's, with a few chairs and tables.

POLAR BEARS

5/4/10, Donmar

Another dud from the Donmar, though we were seeing a late preview. Mark Haddon's theatrical debut, he of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. That was about autism, this was about bipolar disorder.

A (who has experience of bipolar disorder in the family) liked it a lot. She evidently recognised something truthful in the fractured narrative, the vaguely hallucinatory succession of disconnected scenes and Jodhi May's performance as Kay: bouncing, funny, confident one minute, howling convincingly with distress and hatred the next.

The performance was good, but the play itself was all over the place. The chronology was deliberately jumbled and badly signposted. It began and ended with the central character's death, which was fine; but as matters proceeded she was sometimes a child, sometimes an adult, sometimes married, sometimes not. Her mother was alive, her mother was dead, her mother was alive again. At one point she was pregnant, but no child apparently resulted. There seemed no logic to this, though perhaps A would say there is no logic to bipolarity. The problem was that without clearer signposting we were adrift and, frankly, a bit bored. And there were too many long speeches.

Worst of all was the character of Jesus. First he appeared as Jesus, long hair, beard, flowing white robes, glossing his career for the modern and sceptical Kay. Maybe he was a figment of her imagination. Maybe he was a fellow-inmate in the loony bin. Who could tell? Then he appeared as one of her ex-boyfriends, re-encountered when she went awol from her marriage; a weekend of reputedly great sex ensured. Then he appeared to give a lecture on the process by which the human body decomposes (dragging on by way of illustration a "body" wrapped in polythene sheeting). And your point?

The other characters were conventional. There was Kay; her husband John (Richard Coyle, rather touching), who loved her but was ultimately driven to despair by her impossibility; her shit of a brother (Paul Hilton) and a her widowed mother (Celia Imrie, a bit shaky still). Mother was widowed and, beneath her posh exterior, needy: father had hanged himself when they were children. There was a vivid description by the brother of finding his body and remembering only that he'd wet himself and his bowels had opened.

There were some nice touches. In the first scene John announces to the horrified brother that he has killed Kay and hidden her body in the cellar. John you assume is the madman, the brother represents outraged decency. By the end you see why John was driven to it and the brother is revealed as distinctly iffy. Kay is fascinated by polar bears and remembers a visit to Svalbard (real or imagined?). In one early scene she chatters excitedly into her mobile claiming she's in Oslo. Is she really? No way of knowing.

The set consisted of a bare stage, a back wall of sliding glass panels with a corridor behind it and a walkway above (they had to get down rather clumsily by a ladder). Kay was (wanted to be?) a children's writer and at one stage sheets of paper came tumbling from the ceiling to lie scattered around the stage for the rest of the play. She tried to set fire to them at one point.

SERENADING LOUIE

17/3/10, Donmar

2 hrs 15 mns. A rare dud from the Donmar. Well-acted, intelligently directed, but in the end an awkward mixture of too much talk with a sudden and brutal ending. Oh, and the characters are deeply unsympathetic.

Suburban Chicago, c 1970. A suburban living room, furnished in the latest style, which doubles as the (clearly identical) living room of two affluent couples. One is a lawyer, Carl (or was it Alex?), driven, stressed out, unable any longer to talk to his wife; she sits at home all day longing for a child or goes out shopping; the other, Alex (or was it Carl?) is an alcoholic property developer whose wife (Geraldine Somerville, v good) is having an affair with one of Alex/Carl's nerdish colleagues.

The boys were at college together and spend some time reminiscing. There are oblique references to Vietnam, to long-haired trouble-makers, to drugs (which the lawyer seems readily able to score) etc etc. All the characters seem overwhelmed by suburban ennui and bitterness (even the driven lawyer), about which they talk a lot. A great deal of drinking goes on and a lot of smoking. At one point towards the end the lawyer, having packed his wife off to bed, takes a pipe out of a drawer and puffs on it.

It emerges that the lawyer has been mooning around (almost certainly not actually having an affair) with a 17 year old. And at the end the property developer shoots his wife, his daughter and himself (off stage). Charles Spencer in his Telegraph review of Eigengrau called the eye-gouging scene towards the end "dramatically unearned", and I know what he meant: this shooting, too, was dramatically unearned.

S say it was a cross between Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Alan Ayckbourn without the jokes.

But Somerville was excellent as a world-weary cynic, contemptuous of her husband and with a nice line in put-downs (none of which I can now remember); and the A-line mini-dresses were lovely.

Jason O'Mara, who played the alcoholic, was in the US version of Life on Mars; Jason Butler Harner too is a gen-you-wine American, so at least the accents were authentic.

Written by Lanford Wilson, a much-admired American playwright of the late 20th century whose work we have never seen before and which, on this showing, has not aged well.

The title remains a complete mystery. Who was Louie? Who was serenading him? And how? Or with what? And why? Who knows? Who cares?

LIFE IS A DREAM

11/11/09, Donmar

A late 17th century classic by the prolific Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderon de la Barca, cleverly adapted and English-ed by Helen Edmundson, who also adapted War and Peace and Mill on the Floss for Shared Experience and Coram Boy for the National.

Shakespeare it ain't. It's schematic, lacks psychological verisimilitude and labours under a plot with more sudden reversals than a learner driver's three-point turn. It's hard for a modern audience to comprehend some of the things that motivate the characters, notably a highly-developed sense of honour (which at the end results in the heroine marrying a man she clearly loathes simply because he dumped her for someone else and thus impugned her honour), a strong sense of the innate superiority of those of noble birth, a belief in fate and prophecy, and a religious notion that life is only a dream from which we awake to the reality of heaven or hell. They're all ideas present in Shakespeare, but part of the fun in his plays is the way he explores, questions and even subverts these ideas. Calderon just seems to accept them wholesale. From my limited exposure to French tragedy of this period I'd say there's also something (French polish? Intellectual and formal coherence?) that they have but C lacks.

Shakespeare comes to mind because there were lots of Shakespearian echoes (which may partly have been down to the translation: Ms E very good at writing convincing cod-Shakespeare), especially echoes of the Tempest. As in several of the references to dreams, and in the central character's reaction when he first sees a woman (cf Miranda, "O brave new world..."). And in the sage or mage-like father and king (a kind of misguided Prospero) who imprisons his son Sigismundo in a tower because his horoscope says he's going to turn out a wrong 'un.

The core of the piece is the way Sigismundo reacts when he's first let out and put on the throne: like a savage, uncivilised, untaught, a beast. He's reimprisoned and then freed a second time, when he proves to have learnt from his earlier experience and behaves with the requisite nobility, sense of justice etc etc. That did have some (though not much) psychological truth, though it's a pretty bleak view of man compared with the later Enlightenment notion of the noble savage. (Calderon was a priest, which may explain some of this.)

What made the show were the performances, especially Dominic West as Sigismondo, slouching in ill-fitting court dress on the throne, part idiot child, part monster. He's in The Wire on TV, apparently, though we saw him in Rock'n'Roll at the Royal Court. David Horovitch was excellent as Clotaldo, Sigismundo's jailer, father of the spurned Rosaura and principal exponent of the theory of honour: we saw him in The Misanthrope at the National. He's especially good at taking the lines and unpicking them to deliver them thoughtfully, intelligently, illuminatingly: almost in the Simon Russell Beale class. And Kate Fleetwood was fiery and sympathetic as the unfortunate Rosaura.

Direction by Jonathan Munby (he did the RSC Canterbury Tales): much of the intelligent excavation of the text must be down to him. Design minimal: the odd throne, breast plate, period costume and prisoner's shackles attached to the Donmar's back wall.

An interesting period piece, as well done as it could be. We shall not be revisiting the work of Calderon.

Natasha went the following night (I'd managed to buy two lots of tickets, a pair of which she took). She thought the play absurd and David Horovitch sounded like Rupert Bear.

DEMETOS

23/4/09, Donmar

Missed it. Had to work. Athol Fugard play starring Jonathan Pryce. The girls were not impressed. Sounded a rather boring piece of work. Pryce played the part as if he had Parkinson's. S said it could only be a matter of time before he played Lear.

MADAME DE SADE

9/04/09, Donmar at Wyndhams

An elaborate and wordy defence of sado-masochism by Yukio Mishima, whose credentials for writing it include his later ritual suicide. Starring, of all people, Judy Dench and Rosamund Pike (whom I think of as rather virginal, but who has apparently played a Bond villainess, as well as Jane Bennett in Pride & Prejudice and is considered "hot" in certain quarters).

What were the Donmar thinking of? And what did the audience (elderly Dench fans, Donmar loyalists, foreign tourists) make of it?

Three scenes, 18 years apart, from 1772 to 1790 and the onset of the French Revolution. Mme de ade (Pike) and her mother (Dench) discuss her reprobate husband, who is always in and out of prison and never seen, along with her sister (Fiona Button, who reminded me of a former colleague who insisted on playing the ingenue well into middle age), servant and two acquaintances (one, a female roue, played with thigh-slapping relish and fine comic timing by Frances Barber).

The frocks were gorgeous. The set was a chilly stateroom in some mansion, the walls silver, onto which were projected at certain moments images (blood, the moon, snow-covered branches): a nice touch. From time to time the women would recall some vivid memory, at which point their voices would echo and the stage would fill with appropriate sounds. You couldn't fault the production, by Michael Grandage. The performances were fine: S said she thought Pike was "just saying the words" much of the time, but I thought that judgement harsh because they were all just saying the words at least part of the time, with the exception of Barber and the servant (who had little to say).

The problem was the play. Mishima tries to explain the inexplicable, and to justify it. Sado-masochism is irrational and (literally) perverse: that there are people who are drawn to it is unarguable, but that the attraction can be explained through rayional discourse is asking too much. Mishima of course fails, taking refuge in flights of unconvincing rhetoric and rather chilly dialogue. He throws in a few (positively 18th century) dramatic twists in token acknowledgement that this is a play, not an essay, but they do not convince (at the start of one act Mme de Sade's sister runs on with a letter announcing that de Sade has been pardoned by royal warrant; several minutes into the scene it then transpires that the letter is months old; a little while longer and it emerges that de Sade was rearrested immediately, of all of which his wife has of course been ignorant; so we get three sets of reactions from her, the first two on false dramatic pretences).

But it got us talking afterwards. S confided that she'd tried to read the Story of O and failed, and could not understand these poor, benighted women. (I have read it, and I can't understand the women either, but that doesn't mean I don't find the whole subject fascinating.)

We stood in the street discussing why de Sade in his day was considered as big a threat to the social order as the Revolution, with which he was quite erroneously identified (the Revolution had a positive prospectus until it went off the rails with Robespierre, who was perhaps a sadist; de Sade had no manifesto except his own perverse pleasure). And we talked of other representations of de Sade, in the Marat Sade and in the film Quills, where he was played by Geoffrey Rush and made palatable according to A because Rush is so charming. And we discussed Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which had something in common with Madame de Sade (period, frocks, a lot of talking) but succeeded far better according to S because of the erotic charge in the stage version between Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan.

So maybe this play wasn't such a turkey after all.

TWELFTH NIGHT

4/3/09, Donmar at Wyndhams.

The one with Derek Jacobi as Malvolio. Missed it: had to work. D went with G and J and said it was excellent: funny, well-cast, Jacobi reminded her of Frankie Howerd (going a little over the top perhaps?), Indira Varma as Olivia very beautiful and very witty, Toby Belch and Aguecheek respectively short and fat and tall and thin, as required, in linen suits. Viola played by the understudy: a bit shouty to start but then settled down well. D was particularly impressed by the set (a series of louvred doors the entire height of the stage and a wooden deck-like floor) and the lighting. No furniture or props but for the odd letter and a chaise longue (briefly) at the start and a beach-style wind-break. When the doors opened the lighting suggested a beach. It was full: a very responsibe audience.

THE FAMILY REUNION

30/12/08, Donmar

2hrs 30 (?). T.S. Eliot’s peculiar hybrid of drawing room whodunnit-cum-Greek tragedy given a Rolls Royce revival by the Donmar.

A mouthwatering cast. Penelope Wilton as Agatha, the sister who escaped to become principal of a women’s college at Oxford. Sam West as Harry, the son who returns eight years after his marriage to an unsuitable woman he has probably murdered, tormented by the Furies. Una Stubbs and Anna Carteret as the other sisters, small-minded, stupid, beautifully-dressed in 1940s upper-upper-middle fashion who, with their equally pompous, stupid and conventional husbands (William Gaunt and another chap whose name and face I didn’t recognise) also supplied the occasional Greek chorus-style interludes, speaking in unison. Gemma Jones as the eldest sister and manipulative lady of the house. There was even a tiny part for Christopher Benjamin, as a country doctor and old family friend – this was a play that had fun with many of the well-made play’s theatrical clichés, which also included a comic police sergeant, a couple of wise domestics and a remarkable amount of plot. The set included a massive fireplace, a huge mock-Tudor mullioned window, a number of rather cold-looking chairs and, in the second act, a large dining table with candles which were, don't you know, blown out at the end.

Most of the time the verse was not obtrusive. It forced the cast to speak in a deliberate fashion, but possible no more deliberate than one would have heard on stage in the 1940s in a conventional drama. It allowed for surprisingly naturalistic exchanges, sometimes quite funny. It also, of course, allowed for non-naturalistic elements such as the choruses and the intense metaphysical debates between Harry and Agatha and Harry and Mary (an Agatha-in-training who clearly fancies Harry). And for Eliot anoraks there were numerous riffs echoing things elsewhere in his poetry: the cruelty of spring (cf opening of The Waste Land); the door into the rose garden (cf the opening of Burnt Norton); the confusing business of time present, time past and time future (cf ditto).

Much of the superficial plot was perfectly straightforward, with the brooding materfamilias intent on luring Harry back to run the house and estate from which he has clearly been running away (pursued by Furies that only he is aware of but has been unable to see until he returns home – or so it seems… It turns out that his manservant has seen them all along, and Agatha and Mary become aware of them during the course of their exchanges with him). There is no father, so this might be Oedipal – but it turns out the father had left after an affair with Agatha, after which his wife had kept him hanging around in a loveless marriage, long enough to father two more sons as well as Harry.

The bits I didn’t understand (but then Harry kept saying “you don’t understand”, so maybe that was OK) were the metaphysical exchanges in which Harry becomes fully aware of his situation, finds hope in hopelessness, has some kind of epiphany, resolves to go off and do good works etc etc. Dense enough on the page, probably, but almost impossible to follow on stage.

The Furies appeared twice – three little boys in cream shirts and shorts carrying butterfly nets, and a female fairy-like figure in a long white dress we may assume was Harry's ex-wife. The boys entered through the audience and crossed the stage diagonally, looking menacing; the ex-wife appeared (and rapidly disappeared) at the window in a coup de theatre. They represented the lost childhood of Harry and his brothers, A thought. They were appropriately unsettling, though in the original production according to a quote from Eliot in the programme note they proved hard to embody convincingly. In this production much was done with lighting – bathing different parts of the stage in pools of light for the choruses etc. There were also by the end small heaps of sand in various corners of the stage, which I'd completely failed to notice from our seats right round at the side: A said sand had been trickling intermittently onto them from the flies during the action.

If I have a beef it was that Eliot showed a worrying tendency (a bit like his contemporary and fellow Anglo-Catholic Charles Williams) to delight in the physical embodiment of the supernatural, which is never very convincing. Much better leave everything unstated and implied.

Agatha, I discover, was the saint whose breasts were cut off. Now what should one make of that?