Theatre review: The Oresteia

By now I think we can take it as read that Simon Stone's adaptations of classic texts will actually be devised riffs vaguely inspired by a general theme, that share little with the original other than the title. I've had some very different responses to them over the years, and I suspect I like them in inverse proportion to how well I know the classic versions. And regular readers of this blog will both recall that I know Aeschylus' version of The Oresteia very well. Stone's version opens in 2016, in Lizzie Clachan's revolving glass house, where a privileged family are preparing for a 21st birthday party for their twin daughters. We know they're privileged because Christopher (David Morrissey) is genuinely annoyed with his cousin Jerome (John Macmillan) for buying several cases of Bollinger champagne for the party. Because it's too cheap.

Theatre review: The Lady from the Sea

Simon Stone is known for his versions of classic plays, that are sometimes not so much loose adaptations as tangentially connected to the originals at best, and I've found the results very mixed in the past. For The Lady from the Sea he strikes a better balance though, in something with very distinct and current themes but a structure and basis that still feels recognisably by Henrik Ibsen. Five years ago celebrated neuroscientist Edward (Andrew Lincoln) lost his first wife to suicide, and is still dealing with the fallout with their two daughters Asa (Gracie Oddie-James,) a gay postgraduate student who's secretly saving up for a PhD at Yale by opening an OnlyFans, and blunt, brooding teenager Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike.) Egg has managed to move on and find some stability in his life though, with his second marriage to the younger Ellida (Alicia Vikander.)

Theatre review: Phaedra

Australian writer-director Simon Stone's calling card appears to be classical adaptations that keep the original title but very little else; at least his take on Phaedra, after a couple of hours that are unrecognisable even as radical adaptation of the original myth, end up in a place that deals with the same kind of actions and consequences. The play is credited as being "after Euripides, Seneca and Racine." I haven't seen the Seneca version because nobody stages Seneca, but there's certainly no initial link to the story told in the other two. Helen (Janet McTeer) is a high-profile opposition MP, her husband Hugo (Paul Chahidi) a diplomat who grew up in Britain after his parents fled the Iranian Revolution. As a family they don't seem too big on boundaries, and if Helen is going to develop a fixation on a younger man, the initial candidate seems to be her son-in-law Eric (John Macmillan,) with whom she has an awkwardly flirtatious relationship.

Radio review: The Octoroon

So I guess I'm rounding out 2021 in the same way I started it, making up for a lack of live theatre with screen and radio alternatives. A few years ago American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins scored a hit with An Octoroon, his deconstruction of problematic Victorian melodrama The Octoroon. The play worked in its own right but like, I would imagine, most people, I went into it unfamiliar with what it was deconstructing. It's one thing when the source material is Hamlet, but when it's a play whose then-radical sympathy for black lives now comes across as deeply patronising, it's not exactly revived much. So once again Radio 3 provides an alternative, with a 2013 production in which Mark Ravenhill adapted Dion Boucicault's 1859 play set on a Louisiana cotton plantation, where George (Trevor White) has returned to claim his inheritance.

Theatre review: Pinter Two - The Lover / The Collection

Jamie Lloyd’s Pinter at the Pinter season continues with a double bill that he’s directed before, in this same theatre ten years ago when it was still called the Comedy. If Pinter One was bleak and timeless, Pinter Two is more broadly comic, while Soutra Gilmour’s design places it firmly in the early 1960s when the one-acters were both written. In The Lover a cheesily domestic married couple prepare for their day; Richard (John MacMillan) is off to work, wishing Sarah (Hayley Squires) a fun afternoon with her regular lover. He’s not jealous – it would be hypocritical, since he’ll be taking the same afternoon off to spend with a whore. After the interval comes The Collection in which the same actors play another married couple, whose complex sex life takes in unsuspecting outsiders when James (MacMillan) barges into Bill’s (Russell Tovey) house and accuses him of sleeping with his wife.

Stage-to-screen review: King Lear (BBC & Amazon)

Anthony Hopkins played King Lear in his fifties, in a National Theatre production so famously derided he ended up retiring from the stage. Now 80, he still can’t be tempted back to the theatre but Richard Eyre has tempted him back to Shakespeare and to a role he’s now the exact same age as. A BBC and Amazon co-production, Eyre’s TV version sets King Lear in an alternate present day where Britain is still ruled by the monarchy from its seat in the Tower of London, where Lear invites his three daughters to share out the ruling of his kingdom. Goneril (Emma Thompson) and Regan (Emily Watson) stick to the script and dole out rote flattery, but Cordelia (Florence Pugh) attempts a more casual response which backfires. She finds herself exiled while her older sisters share the kingdom – and the responsibility of caring for an increasingly unpredictable and dangerous father.

Theatre review: Killer

In the second of two Philip Ridley plays running in rep underneath Shoreditch Town Hall, Jamie Lloyd returns as director and Soutra Gilmour as designer, but the creatives who have the most obvious impact are sound designers Ben & Max Ringham and George Dennis. Killer is a collection of three monologues, each with a grisly theme as the title (and the fact that it's Ridley) suggests, performed by John MacMillan in the dingy basement rooms. It's a promenade piece that opens with the audience sitting in a circle, facing away from MacMillan in the middle; the lights go out and he narrates a young teenager's fascination with a new gang who - reminding me of the far-right party in Moonfleece - embrace a fascist style and a philosophy based around preparing for an inevitable apocalypse. When the narrator tries to join the gang they have a brutal way of initiating him.

Theatre review: The Homecoming

Jamie Lloyd has dropped the "Trafalgar Transformed" branding but he still returns to Trafalgar Studio 1 for his third season of plays; and after the first season's The Hothouse, both Harold Pinter and John Simm are back on the menu with The Homecoming. Somewhere in a dodgy corner of East London is the house where Teddy (Gary Kemp) grew up; he left six years ago, just about keeping in touch enough to let his father Max (Ron Cook) know that he's moved to an American university to teach philosophy. What he neglected to tell his family was that just before he left he got married; so his return in the middle of the night is a surprise but an even bigger one is his wife Ruth (Gemma Chan.) The menacing, aggressively macho environment is one Teddy soon regrets returning to. But far from feeling threatened, Ruth actually seems to thrive in her new surroundings.

Theatre review: Children's Children

When I'm stuck on how to start a review, a brief overview of the play is the usual standby, but that's not very useful when I have no idea what the play in question is meant to be. Fortunately, during the third act of Matthew Dunster's Children's Children, when the characters all started shouting at each other in a kitchen after a funeral, I figured it out: It's a soap opera. Michael (Ensemble^TM alumnus Darrell D'Silva) is a cheesy TV presenter with a hit Saturday night game show. He's known best friend Gordon (Trevor Fox) and Gordon's wife Sally (Sally Rogers) since drama school, but the latter pair have never had much success as actors. Now in middle age, Gordon's situation has got so bad that he has to beg his wealthy friend for money. By the second act, Gordon and Sally have pretty much moved into Michael's summer house in Dorset, not telling him that their daughter Effie (Emily Berrington,) her husband Castro (John MacMillan) and their new baby are also living there. But this time it's Michael who'll be in dire straits and needing his friends' support.