Theatre review: Grace Pervades

Playing in the West End at the same time as one of his earlier plays that's starting to show its age, David Hare's latest one consciously harks back to an even older tradition of performance than Teeth'N'Smiles: Grace Pervades centres on the most celebrated actress of the Victorian theatre, Ellen Terry (Miranda Raison) and her longstanding professional and personal relationship with actor-manager Henry Irving (Rafe "Ralph" Fiennes.) The latter chose her as his leading lady when he was setting up his own theatre company, convincing her to come out of retirement after she'd decided she would never be as good an actress as her sister. But once they start working together it's Terry who has the bigger impact on him, helping an actor who was admired for his intensity but criticised for his stiffness, to find a style with more connection to castmates and audiences alike.

Theatre review: Teeth'N'Smiles

The ultimate accolade shouldn't be a gold record, it should be a golden hypodermic. Parklife!

David Hare's play with songs Teeth Apostrophe N Apostrophe Smiles, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1975, is set six years earlier in 1969, when disillusionment with rock music and the counterculture it spearheaded was starting to set in. Maggie Frisby and The Skins are a once-popular group on its last legs, doing tours around UK universities that barely cover their expenses - Rebecca Lucy Taylor Also Known As Self Esteem plays vocalist Maggie, with Michael Abubakar, Bill Caple, Samuel Jordan, Jojo Macari and Noah Weatherby as a band at various levels of frustration at the way their careers have turned out. Maggie is a former heroin addict, but while we're given no reason to doubt that she's given that up, she's still unapologetically and indisputably an alcoholic who may or may not perform on any given night - it's the shows she's really looking forward to that the band know to be most worried about.

Theatre review: Straight Line Crazy

Playwright David Hare, actor Ralph Fiennes and director Nicholas Hytner reunite at the Bridge Theatre where they last collaborated on Beat the Devil; that one was a monologue, and while Straight Line Crazy surrounds Fiennes with a large cast, it can sometimes feel just as much of a one-man show. Certainly the true story it tells, of a man whose influence changed the face of America's cities in the twentieth century, seems a fascinating one: Robert Moses (Fiennes) was an urban planner, although he hated the term because it implied a lot of theory, not action, and he was determined to get things done regardless of whether the people they impacted wanted them or not. In the first act we meet him in the 1920s, pushing through his plans for Long Island: A playground for the rich, he intends to open up its parks and beaches to the public of New York by building roads, giving them a break in the leisure time the workers are now starting to see as a right.

Theatre review: Beat the Devil

My first visit in nearly six months to an actual theatre for a live show takes me to the Bridge, and while there's a kind of minor triumph to a limited number of venues finding a way around social distancing to present shows despite the indifference of the powers that be, I was also acutely aware of being in the same place where I saw my 2019 Show of the Year: The large space with its seating capacity greatly reduced to allow distance between audience groups, standing in stark contrast to the heaving bodies at last year's Shakespearean party. I guess it would also have been nice if my first tentative venture back out into live theatre had been for some escapism from what's kept us apart all these months, but instead we're right in the thick of it as playwright David Hare came down with Covid-19 at the same time that a belated lockdown was introduced in the UK; Beat the Devil is his furious memoir of his time suffering from a "mediaeval" disease and the actions of those he squarely blames for his having contracted it.

Theatre review: Peter Gynt

The latest main-stage epic at the National is largely selling itself on the way it reunites the creatives from 2016 hit Young Chekhov on the Olivier stage - adaptor David Hare, director Jonathan Kent and star James McArdle. Building the whole show around the latter, Hare has transported Henrik Ibsen's weird social fantasy Peer Gynt to Scotland, although much of the mythology remains jarringly Nordic. Retitled Peter Gynt, it sees McArdle's title character starting out as a lovable fantasist, returning to Scotland from a war in which he's seemingly made a name for himself, except all his exploits start to sound suspiciously familiar to anyone who's seen any movies*. In reality, his biggest claim to fame is fighting mechanic Duncan (o hai, Lorne McFadyen,) but he gets the idea for a bigger stunt when he finds out his ex-girlfriend Ingrid (Caroline Deyga) has got together with Spudface (Martin Quinn) in his absence.

Theatre review: The Red Barn

After his transatlantic success in Ivo van Hove's A View From The Bridge, Mark Strong returns to the stage to work with a director who's always shown van Hove's influence in his work; but in Robert Icke's first production at the National, it's a legendary film rather than stage director who immediately comes to mind. David Hare's new play The Red Barn is an adaptation of crime writer Georges Simenon's novel La Main, taking place in the winter of 1968-69 in New England, where lawyer Donald Dodd (Strong) and his wife Ingrid (Hope Davis) have their friends Mona (Elizabeth Debicki) and Ray (Nigel Whitmey) visiting. On the way back from a party they get caught in a blizzard, and only three of them make it back to the house: Despite Donald going back out to search for him, Ray is never seen alive again. Although the storm causes a number of deaths, Donald's jittery behaviour makes this one seem particularly suspicious.

Theatre review: Young Chekhov - The Seagull

Last year's big one-day, three-play marathon, The Wars of the Roses, followed Shakespeare's rarely-performed Henry VI plays with the much-loved and frequently revived Richard III. So too this year when it's Anton Chekhov's turn, and after the very obscure Platonov and fairly rare Ivanov, Young Chekhov at the National takes us up to his first big hit, and my personal favourite, The Seagull, in the same theatre where I first saw the play. Tom Pye's set for the whole trilogy has, as far as possible, avoided the usual stuffy drawing rooms and, taking it's cue from Chekhov's love of a disappearing natural world, been dominated by dead trees and shallow waters. This water has colonised even more of the stage for the finale, with all of the upstage area now a lake, through which characters sometimes wade to make a dramatic entrance.

Theatre review: Young Chekhov - Ivanov

This may be Young Chekhov but it's already time for a midlife crisis play in the middle section of Jonathan Kent's productions of David Hare's translations. Ivanov (Geoffrey Streatfeild) is 35 and depressed, feeling trapped in his home with consumptive wife Anna Petrovna (a completely different Anna Petrovna but again played by Nina Sosanya, showing range as she goes from educated woman to completely dependent on her husband's attention,) and his bombastic uncle Count Shabyelski (Peter Egan, from the 1980s.) As with the characters in Platonov, property doesn't always come with the money to maintain it, and Ivanov is hugely in debt to the two women who between them control the town's finances. Ivanov begins an affair with Sasha (Olivia Vinall,) daughter of his main creditor.

Theatre review: Young Chekhov - Platonov

Another theatrical marathon day as a trio of productions originally seen in Chichester come to the Olivier. Jonathan Kent directs David Hare translations of Anton Chekhov's early work, grouped together and played either individually or in one day as Young Chekhov. First up is the playwright's first, unfinished full-length play Platonov, in which a rural community deal with twin obsessions of sex and money - too much of one and not enough of the other. Cash is thin on the ground for the upper-class widow Anna Petrovna (Nina Sosanya,) who's running her late husband's estate entirely on loans from local loan shark Shcherbuk (David Verey,) but she's still a young woman and the wealthy Porfiri (Jonathan Coy) has proposed. But Anna only has eyes for the same man all the other local women do.

Theatre review: The Master Builder

Ralph Fiennes is The Master Bator Builder in another of Ibsen's looks at a failing marriage with a tragic backstory. He plays Halvard Solness, a self-taught architect whose popularity over the last decade has driven every other local architect out of business, including the now-ailing Knut Brovik (James Laurenson.) Solness employs Knut's son Ragnar (Martin Hutson) as an apprentice, deliberately holding him back as he recognises a talent who could replace him in turn. As his career has thrived, Solness' family has suffered - a house fire that kickstarted his career also led to the death of his twin sons; his wife Aline (Linda Emond) has never recovered, not helped by her husband's (probably well-deserved) reputation as a womanizer. Although he protests there's nothing going on between him and his smitten assistant, Ragnar's fiancée Kaja (Charlie Cameron,) he's certainly fond of leading her on.

Theatre review: The Moderate Soprano

A strong cast headed by Roger Allam and Future Dame Nancy Carroll struggles to make David Hare's latest play feel like the finished article. A former chemistry teacher at Eton, John Christie (Allam in an embarrassingly ill-fitting bald cap) was a 50-year-old virgin when he went to the opera and fell for The Moderate Soprano. A barrage of gifts began the wealthy eccentric's courtship of the much younger woman, and eventually convinced Audrey (Carroll) to marry him and settle in his country home in Sussex. Today the name Glyndebourne is synonymous with opera but in 1934 the idea of building a small opera house in the grounds was the latest of Christie's bizarre grand schemes, his plan for an annual season a thinly-disguised showcase for his wife's modest talents. A Wagner fan, Christie looked to Germany for his creatives, and with the rise of Hitler some big names had found themselves out of favour with the Nazi regime.

Theatre review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Rufus Norris' final directing job at the National before he takes over as its artistic director, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's typical of what's to come from a director who's always had a very global perspective. The part of the world we're taken to by David Hare's play, based on the non-fiction book by Katherine Boo, is the Annawadi slum outside Mumbai, near its ever-expanding airport. On the other side are a number of luxury hotels, their guests shielded from the poverty by advertising billboards offering, among other things, "a beautiful forever." While India's economy booms, the residents of Annawadi are at the bottom of the food chain: The neighbourhood's chief industry is collecting and sorting litter, so it can be sold on for recycling. And even in this business rivalries cause a lot of animosity, as the Husain family's fast turnaround is leaving less work for others.

Theatre review: The Vertical Hour

Like Skylight, David Hare's The Vertical Hour sees him pit political ideologies against each other in the middle of a complicated personal relationship, in a conversation that runs on well into the night. In this 2006 play though, the political subject - the Iraq War - is made clear from the outset. Nadia (Thusitha Jayasundera) used to be a war correspondent, but after her time in Sarajevo moved back to America, settling at Yale as a politics lecturer. The play is bookended by seminars with two of her students (Cameron Cuffe, Pepter Lunkuse,) who like many have a degree of undisguised contempt for her support of the "liberation" of Iraq. Her views are so high-profile she's been invited to advise George W. Bush in person, and she can't escape discussion of the subject even when she goes on holiday with her English boyfriend Philip (Finlay Robertson) to meet his (now-divorced) parents.

Theatre review: Skylight

Two people whose lives are going in opposite directions met and, for a few years, were very important to each other. In David Hare's Skylight they meet again a few years later for a night dealing with unfinished business. From humble beginnings Tom (Bill Nighy) opened a restaurant that became a chain and a thriving business, and he uses his wealth ostentatiously: He's chauffeur-driven everywhere, has a luxurious new house and enjoys giving extravagant gifts to friends and family. Kyra (Carey Mulligan) is a young woman who works long hours teaching in a rough East London school, and lives in a grubby council flat a long bus commute from work. A few years back she worked in Tom's business, as well as having a long-standing affair with the older man. Although her relationship to his family, it turns out, was a bit more complex than that.

Theatre review: The Judas Kiss

"Why on earth did you do it?" One of the programme notes, written by his grandson Merlin Holland, asks one of the biggest questions about the trials of Oscar Wilde: He instigated the whole thing with a libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry's accusation of being a "somdomite" (sic) knowing all along it was not only true but easily proved. This is one of the two main questions tackled by David Hare in his play The Judas Kiss, which is revived by Neil Armfield at Hampstead Theatre prior to a tour. The second central mystery concerns the other man at the centre of the trials, the Marquess' son Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas: Why did Wilde not only keep coming back to, but willingly allow his life to be ruined because of a young man who (in Hare's interpretation at least) seems to have had no redeeming features whatsoever?

Theatre review: South Downs and The Browning Version

Last year's Chichester season continues to become this year's West End season, as for the 2011 Terence Rattigan centenary they commissioned David Hare to write a companion piece to perhaps Rattigan's best-loved work, The Browning Version. Both plays are set in public schools, which Tom Scutt's set translates into polished wooden floors that fade into a dusty distance: Echoing perhaps the obscurity the characters think the institutions will fall into, as South Downs is set in the 1960s, when there was a genuine belief that public schools might be abolished. Hare's play, directed by Jeremy Herrin, plays first in the double bill, and shows us life from the point of view of the students. In particular one student, John Blakemore (Alex Lawther,) who isn't particularly popular at his High Church of England school. When he defends his best friend in class, his status as an outsider is only confirmed but Blakemore's search for answers continues, however much it aggravates his classmates.