Theatre review: Copenhagen

When Copenhagen was scheduled for a revival at Hampstead Theatre it probably felt like a timely choice because of the recent success of Farm Hall and the film Oppenheimer, but as invariably and depressingly seems to happen, current affairs have delivered another reason for Michael Frayn's play about nuclear physicists to feel topical. In the first six years of me writing this blog I could reliably catch Big Favourite Round These Parts Damien Molony on stage once a year, but he's been absent for nearly a decade before returning to play Werner Heisenberg, the leading nuclear physicist who led the German team attempting to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War. His other most famous accomplishment is the Uncertainty Principle, and the play centres on a historical mystery that even the participants seemed uncertain about, with both central figures giving conflicting accounts later in life.

Radio review: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

It's the couple of weeks of calm before the storm when London theatres gear up to grab the attention back from Edinburgh and all launch new shows at once. While they build up to that and I have a rare full week without theatre, as usual I'll top it up with radio and screen adaptations. A few years ago I listened to Radio 3's production of Lucy Prebble's The Effect, which starred Damien Molony and Pirate Jessie Buckley. It seems the two actors made the most of their time in the recording studio as at the same time they played Giovanni and Annabella, the incestuous brother and sister in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. In a play Pauline Harris' audio version sees as a twisted response to Romeo & Juliet, Giovanni seduces Annabella, and they begin an affair that soon leaves her pregnant.

Radio review: The Effect

Remember those old BBC sound effect albums? I don't recall there being a "hand job" effect on them but I guess Auntie really does have something for every occasion.

Although I listen to a fair bit of half-hour radio comedy I don't often get round to any full-length drama, but Lucy Prebble's 2012 play The Effect was one of my top shows of that year, and one that I still remember vividly; add a top voice cast for Abigail le Fleming's Radio 3 production and I couldn't resist revisiting it. Lorna (Christine Entwisle) is the doctor in charge of the intensive medical trial of a new antidepressant; she's suffered from depression herself, and is skeptical about the use of drugs to treat it, so she's concerned about the reaction two of the test subjects are having: Connie (Pirate Jessie Buckley) and Tristan (Damien Molony) appear to have fallen very quickly in love with each other. If the development is worrying for the medical team, it's even more so for the pair themselves, their emotions - particularly Connie's - bouncing between elation at a new love, and the horror that one of the strongest things they've ever felt might just be a side-effect.

Theatre review: King Lear (Minerva, Chichester)

Then shall the realm of Albion come to great confusion. Parklife!

Ten years ago I'd only ever seen one King Lear, because my first production had stuck with me so much I was afraid of seeing one I liked less and spoiling the memory. I'm now well into double figures, and what made me first break my own ban was the once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Ian McKellen, then pushing seventy, play the title role. Well I guess there's no such thing as once-in-a-lifetime, as McKellen was rumoured never to have been quite happy with that production and especially the cavernous venues it played. Now, pushing eighty but still at the top of his game, he gets another go in Chichester's intimate Minerva theatre. So there's something of the vanity project to making this such an exclusive event*, and it's almost a surprise - a great one - that Jonathan Munby's production is among the best I've seen, with a luxury cast including two Big Favourites Round These Parts as the warring Eds.

Theatre review: No Man's Land

If you're looking to cast a play about a pair of septuagenarian eccentrics you can't really go much starrier than the original theatrical bromance of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Sean Mathias' production of No Man's Land originated on Broadway where it played in repertory with the same team's Waiting for Godot, but it's taken its time coming back to the West End (via a short national tour.) Not that Harold Pinter is ever exactly an open book, but No Man's Land has a reputation for being particularly impenetrable: Hirst (SirPatStew) is a writer, a successful one with a large Hampstead house and a couple of assistants, but also a reclusive one who doesn't venture out much further than the pub. It's on the way back through Hampstead Heath one night that he encounters the much shabbier poet Spooner (Serena,) and invites him back to his drawing room to continue drinking into the night.

Theatre review: The Hard Problem

For Nicholas Hytner's final directing job as Artistic Director of the National, he gets one of the biggest-name writers alive to return to the stage after nine years' absence: Tom Stoppard returns to the ways academic theory interacts with people's real emotional landscapes, this time investigating the difference between the brain and the mind. We follow psychologist Hilary (Olivia Vinall) over a few years during which she keeps being troubled by the question of, if the brain is simply a collection of matter, what is consciousness, and how do we determine what has it? We first meet her as a student, and her tutor and on-off lover Spike (Big Favourite Round These Parts Damien Molony) has no doubt that the sense of self is one of many quirks of evolution, and is impatient at Hilary's more spiritual angle, that even takes in prayer. But when she gets a job with Leo (Jonathan Coy,) he encourages her interest in what is termed The Hard Problem.

Theatre review: The Body of an American

The Gate's "These American Lives" season concludes with a piece of verbatim theatre that looks at the work of a war photographer and the effect this kind of life has on a person's mind. The Body of an American explains its title early on, with one of the more graphic of the images to be projected onto the theatre's walls over the course of the evening: Canadian photographer Paul Watson's photo from Mogadishu, of a dead American soldier who'd been almost stripped by a baying crowd about to tear it apart as some sort of grim trophy. The photo was credited in part for America's withdrawal from Somalia, but Paul feels haunted by the man whose death was at the centre of it. Playwright Dan O’Brien is fascinated by the effect on the man behind the camera and contacts Paul to propose writing this play about him, but the photographer proves elusive.

Theatre review: If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep

Anders Lustgarten is a full-time activist whose last play saw the BNP field an Asian candidate at the Finborough in time for the last election. Now that we know what actually happened in that election, he turns his attention to the politics of austerity. And the Royal Court Downstairs stage goes austere as well, with a production without décor for If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep. The short play opens with a cabal of politicians, bankers and business leaders proposing the monetisation of society's downfall: Private companies will be responsible for crime prevention, and if the figures drop their bonds will pay out. But market forces have their own rules, and soon those who control the jails, hospitals and energy suppliers are betting short: The worse things get, the bigger their profits.

Theatre review: Travelling Light

Only a few months after the rather good The Last of the Duchess, another new play from Nicholas Wright, Travelling Light. Or, as I couldn't help thinking of it, Cinematographer on the Roof, since it sees Antony Sher channel his inner Tevye. Sometime in 1930s Hollywood, film-maker Maurice Montgomery (Paul Jesson) looks back on the early days of cinema when he was still called Motl Mendl, a minor journalist trapped in the almost-entirely Jewish village of his birth, in an unnamed part of Eastern Europe. (Christopher became rather fixated with figuring out the precise geographical location and was planning to scour the programme for clues. I was happy to accept that the story's fable-like nature meant the location was deliberately nebulous.) There, as he tells it, he more or less single-handedly created the motion picture industry.

One of the reasons I was keen to see this was because Motl is played by Damien Molony, who (as of the 5th of February) will be the new male lead in one of my favourite TV shows, Being Human. Fortunately he makes for a strong lead, his character is something of an amoral charmer which Molony pulls off very well. On a shallow note he's also pretty easy on the eye, and when his bare legs appear in a couple of scenes, that's not a bad thing. Nice toes too. What? It's a thing. The supporting cast is strong although Sher comes uncomfortably close to caricature. The real problem is the play itself. Wright's conceit is to play out the story of movies in microcosm in this little village. So Motl is the fractious director, Jacob (Sher,) the local mill owner who bankrolls the films represents the producers and Anna (Lauren O'Neil,) the girl they both have their eye on, the starlet. A small group of locals asked for their opinion become the first focus group, and soon everyone starts to stick their oar in. It's a simple conceit, too simple to carry a two-and-a-half hour play. By halfway through the first act we've got the idea, by the second act it's been stretched well past breaking point. Jesson looks awkward in the half-hearted framing device, his occasional, unnecessary interruptions of the action by wandering in through a back door are pretty twee. It also leads to a very problematic ending: I fully appreciate that the end is a reference to the convoluted twists in exactly the kind of melodrama these film-makers were producing; but irony only takes you so far and this is the ham-fisted ending we're left with.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of amusing moments of gentle humour. But gentle is just it, Travelling Light is a pretty slight piece that feels lost on the Lyttelton stage. I found it a really odd choice of play for the National to be staging, with Nicholas Hytner himself directing. Funnily enough Christopher had the exact opposite comment, that he found it typical, light post-Christmas National fare. At the interval, though we both saw flaws and upsides to the play, Christopher seemed slightly more positive about it. By the end though we were pretty much in agreement that this was an idea that might just about carry a one-act play, but ran out of steam in a full-length one.

Travelling Light by Nicholas Wright is booking in repertory until the 6th of March at the National Theatre's Lyttelton; then touring to Salford, Leeds, Aylesbury and Newcastle.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.