Three Kingdoms

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Written by English playwright Simon Stephens, directed by German Sebastian Nübling of Munich Kammerspiele and designed by Ene-Liis Semper of the Estonian Teater NO99 as part of World Stages London, this international collaboration is full of surprises right from the start when the gentle crooning of a slender man dressed all in white gives way to a Scotland Yard interrogation.

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The severed head of a young woman, a prostitute, has been found washed up on the banks of the Thames and DI Ignatius Stone and DS Charlie Lee decide to follow the trail from London, to Germany to Estonia, uncovering corruption, vice and the darkest side of the sex industry as they hunt out the perpetrators of the crime. But it’s not the story that intrigues (that rather loses its way, along with Ferdy Roberts’ Charlie who inexplicably disappears) but the manner in which it’s told.

Nübling has his agile cast slipping through cracks in walls, flying through windows and arriving in suitcases – not to mention strapping on outsize dildos. It’s too long, often brutal, frequently over-indulgent and certainly not for the easily offended – but the sheer physicality of this surreal production, the committed performances (including Nicolas Tennant as the sweaty DI floundering in a foreign country where he doesn’t speak the language, a nimble, cross-dressing Risto Kübar and Steven Sharf’s unhinged German policeman) make this a flawed but fascinating nightmare of a journey.

Until 19th May | £12.50- £35.00  Lyric Hammersmith, King Street, W6 0QL  Tube | Hammersmith lyric.co.uk

Love, Love, Love

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Easy, perhaps, for nineteen year olds with a comfortable grant to be seduced by the Beatles’ lyrics into believing that all you need is love.

But times change and in Mike Bartlett’s bitingly funny, hugely watchable three act play (directed by James Grieve), those free spirits of the late 60’s have-it-all generation are still putting themselves first almost half a century later. They suffer in their self-inflicted, discontented way, but the real casualties are their children who, even in their thirties, can’t afford a home of their own.

Victoria Hamilton is on knockout form as Sandra, first seen as a stoned dolly bird student who turns her attentions from Sam Troughton’s solid, straitlaced Henry to his younger Oxford undergrad brother Kenneth (Ben Miles, also excellent), then in 1990 as a forty-something mum of two teenage kids (Claire Foy’s Rose and George Rainsford’s Jamie) and too busy with her own affairs to turn up in time for Rose’s violin concert. The more placid Kenneth can’t even remember how old his daughter actually is.

Fast forward another couple of decades, and Jamie is a disconnected adult more in tune with his iPhone apps than other human beings, and Rose is full of resentment for her baby-boomer parents who, even when retired, refuse to grow old - or to realise that it takes more than self-centred love, love, love to change the world. Go see.

Until 2nd June (£10 - £28)  Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS  royalcourttheatre.com

South Downs / The Browning Version

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 Commissioned as a companion piece to Terence Rattigan’s 1948 one act The Browning Version, David Hare’s short new play South Downs is also set in a boys’ public school, but takes place in 1962, around the time he himself attended a similar institution.

Enjoyable, amusing and well-acted though it is, it can’t match the power of the older work, but, in its brief scenes, Jeremy Herrin’s production establishes a rule-regulated atmosphere in which a precocious 14 year old scholarship boy (excellent Alex Lawther) feels alienated from peers and staff by both his lower middleclass background and his awkward personality. Help is at hand, however, from an unlikely source – the widowed actress mother (Anna Chancellor) of a popular prefect who offers cake and understanding to accompany her son’s tried and tested advice to just play the game.



Rattigan’s classic remains as poignant as ever – an astute study of a pernickety, unpopular master Andrew Crocker-Harris whose unfaithful wife (Chancellor again) treats him with cruel scorn and whose career never matched his scholastic abilities. Facing even greater humiliation on the eve of his final day, this desiccated human being finds his emptions uncontrollably released by a pupil’s unexpected act of kindness. Slightly stooped and dry as chalk dust, Nicholas Farrell is devastatingly moving as the desiccated “Crock” in Angus Jackson’s classy production which richly deserves its transfer from Chichester.

Harold Pinter, Panton Street, SW1Y 4DN Tube: Piccadilly Circus Until 21st July (£15 - £49.50)
BrowningVersion.com

Einstein on the Beach

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Four acts, pushing five hours’ running time, no interval but with the audience encouraged to “enter and exit at liberty”- small wonder perhaps that Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s 1976 opera hasn’t been performed for twenty years.

Ground-breaking in its time, its non-narrative form still challenges with its use of powerful recurrent images and often impenetrable poetic reflection to pinpoint moments in the life of the renowned theoretical physicist, seen here as a young boy throwing paper aeroplanes and a wild-haired solo violinist seated on a yellow chair.

Now reconstructed by its three original co-collaborators, it’s certainly not an easy ride. The slowly evolving tableaux of the main scenes are framed and punctuated by shorter but equally obscure and reiterative “knee plays” and at times the sheer repetition of this UK premiere seems interminable.

But there are also moments of such pure unearthly beauty (when the human voice becomes a musical instrument of immense subtlety, or the musicians of the Philip Glass Ensemble create phrases of almost unbearably plangency) that one is seduced all over again by his minimalist score.

And then there’s Lucinda Childs’ gloriously swooping choreography – showcased in two extended sections – in which her seemingly tireless dancers cross and recross the stage as light as swirling sycamore seeds with their arms outstretched or, hands by their sides, skip buoyantly across our field of vision in mesmerising patterns one hopes will never end.

Barbican , Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
Tube: Barbican
Until May 13
£35 - £125barbican.org.uk

Written on the Heart

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Sparked by a conference on the impact and legacy of the King James Bible held four years ago, David Edgar’s erudite new play is obviously well-researched but, though admirable in many ways, makes for rather dry theatre.

All the elements necessary for an entertaining and educative drama are there, but it’s really only in an imagined encounter between Oliver Ford Davies’ anguished Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Ely and the ghost of William Tyndale, who illegally translated the bible into accessible English (and was burnt at the stake for his heretic efforts) that the dialogue really crackles.

Elsewhere, there are effective touches as Edgar takes us from 1610 (with clerics and scholars arguing over the appropriate choice of “flock” or “fold”, “congregation” or “church”) back to 1536 as Stephen Boxer’s impassioned Tyndale faces execution in a Flanders cell, then forward fifty years to the smashing of ornamental stained glass windows in Yorkshire in 1586 before returning to its London starting point.

Gregory Doran’s production makes clear the potentially perilous changes in religious attitudes which accompanied each change in monarch, but it really helps to do your homework – or know your history – if you’re going to get the most out of this intelligent but ultimately rather worthy drama.

Until 21st July | £22.50- £47.50  Duchess, Catherine Street, WC2B 5LA  Tube | Covent Garden/ Charing Cross
nimaxtheatres.com

His Greatness

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I’m not quite sure why, having devoted several paragraphs of a programme note to his relationship with the works of Tennessee Williams, Canadian Daniel MacIvor then insists that his short drama isn’t a play about the great American writer - especially as it’s impossible to ignore the similarities from the moment the unnamed Playwright begins to speak in a Southern drawl.

Set in a Vancouver hotel room in 1980, it covers the day before and morning after the premiere of a production considerably revised by The Playwright since its disastrous reception in London. Dependant on drugs, drink and the ministrations of The Assistant (a former lover and muse turned nursemaid, secretary and protective guardian) to get him through, he’s abusive and blustering, insecure and demanding – a sad relic of former greatness – but still susceptible to the physical charms of the rather dumb $120 a night hustler (Toby Wharton), hired as eye candy for the opening night and eager to swop his LA porn star ambitions for a stage role written just for him.

The bitchy exchanges between The Assistant (Russell Bentley) and The Playwright (Matthew Marsh) are well handled, as are the power games played by the three protagonists. And although there’s more than a stylistic nod to Tennessee’s own works, you’re unlikely to come away with a great deal more insight into the man himself.

Until 19th May | £12-£16  Finborough | Finborough Road, SW10 9ED  Tube | Earl’s Court  finboroughtheatre.co.uk

A Tale of Two Cities

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He may be a bit longwinded, but you can usually count on Charles Dickens to spin a decent yarn. So although this new musical based on his 1859 historical novel has “budget” written all over it, it still makes for an entertaining night out.

Story, set, musical accompaniment (just a pair of pianists – more than adequate - tucked away in the corners of the stage) have all been stripped down, with director Paul Nicholas relying on a handful of chairs and upturned barrels to conjure up Paris and London around the time of the French Revolution.

Told in flashback, Steven David Horwich and David Soames’ filleted adaptation reveals the complicated history behind the decision of world-weary, former inebriate English barrister Sydney Carton (a bland Michael Howe) to choose death in order to save a French aristocrat from the guillotine. The emphasis is more on the central love story than the politics of the time, with incidents crucial to the plot slipped in so swiftly that blink and you’d miss them.

Jonathan Ansell makes for a very wimpish Charles Darnay (hard to believe he’d get the girl) though there’s more life in the smaller roles - a crusty old bachelor banker enchanted by a little girl’s charms and Carton’s lovesick fellow barrister at least have distinct personalities. And the revolutionary Madame Defarge, knitting needles and a remarkably long scarf in hand, is fanatically impassioned in her demand for death to all aristos.

But much of the time, Nicholas gives his cast little to do but stand and deliver, and some of the lyrics really shouldn’t have reached a paying public. Still, two hundred years after his birth, Dickens storytelling skill wins through in this cut-price cousin of Les Mis.

Charing Cross Theatre, The Arches, Villiers Street, WC2N 6NL Until12th May (£24.50 - £29.50)  ataleoftwocitiesthemusical.com

Wild Swans

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World Stages London kicks off with Alexandra Wood’s adaptation of Jung Chang’s highly personal, landmark account of political change in China. Directed by Sacha Wares, this co-production between the Young Vic, American Repertory Theater and Actors Touring Company condenses the hundreds of pages of her 1991 book into less than 90 minutes running time.

Much of that is taken up, intentionally, by labour intensive scene changes and the acting is uneven. Yet her story (which follows three generations of Chinese women from 1948 -1978) is gripping and the sets remarkable as earth gives way to propaganda posters, and endless paddy fields to the bustle of the city.

At the centre is Chang’s mother De-Hong (Ka-Ling Cheung) who, in contrast to her own mother (once the privileged concubine of a warlord) espouses Communism and marries a principled man whose uncompromising behaviour leads to hardship, imprisonment and conflict within the family when he feels compelled to question Mao’s regime, no matter what the consequences.

One leaves the theatre with a strong sense of the personal cost of China’s cultural and political upheaval in the not so distant past – and even more with the feeling that (if, like me, you haven’t already read it) it would be well worth immersing oneself in Chang’s multi-million copy selling original.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ  Tube: Southwark / Waterloo Until May 13 (£10 - £29.50) youngvic.org

Reunion

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Following hard on the heels of “An Instinct for Kindness,” (Chris Larner’s moving, factual account of his ex-wife’s final trip to Dignitas) John Caine’s short, fictional two-hander focusses on two people facing a similar situation but keeps the action firmly within the confines of their kitchen. 

Two years previously, former solicitor Raymond was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given perhaps three years to live. Now, at the age of sixty, confined to a motorised wheelchair and with only limited mobility in his hand and his neck, he’s had enough and wants to end it. Friends have all but stopped visiting, and their daughter, too, no longer makes the effort to drop by.

Antonia is worn down with the daily routine of dealing with soiled sheets and the preparation of the liquid meals her husband can only consume through a straw. But she isn’t yet ready to let to go - and her Catholic beliefs can’t be countered by Raymond’s legal arguments.

Real life husband and wife Peter Guinness and Roberta Taylor convince as the long-married couple facing the ultimate decision as they remember their early days together – his frustration boiling over into anger at his progressively helpless, hopeless state, her resentment at past hurts coming to the surface.

It’s a dreadful situation for both of them, and one which will doubtless become increasingly common as the population ages and medical intervention enables – or compels – more and more people to carry on living when their bodies are giving up.

Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1Y 6ST (020 7287 2875) Tube: Piccadilly Circus Until May 5 (£18)jermynstreettheatre.co.uk