Theatre review: The Constant Wife

Based on a W. Somerset Maugham play that's one year shy of celebrating its centenary, Laura Wade's The Constant Wife gives us a fun but complicated twist on the new, liberated women of the 1920s. Constance (understudy Jess Nesling*) has been married for 15 years, and remains perfectly happy with her husband. But John (Luke Norris) has been having an affair with her best friend Marie-Louise (Emma McDonald) for some time, something everyone but her seems to know about. Her mother Mrs Culver (Kate Burton) and sister Martha (Amy Morgan) disagree over whether to tell her, but things come to a head when Marie-Louise's husband Mortimer (Daniel Millar) finds out about the affair and confronts them. At which point Constance bends over backwards to disprove the truth, not because she doesn't believe it but because she knows all about it and wants to keep the lie going.

Theatre review: The Secret Life of Bees

Composer Duncan Sheik has developed quite the relationship with the Almeida, what with the premiere of American Psycho and the recent reimagining of Spring Awakening. It's the latter whose musical style immediately comes to mind as his latest show, written with Lynn Nottage (book) and Susan Birkenhead (lyrics) opens. This distinctive musical signature remains throughout, but with the addition of bluegrass, gospel and rock'n'roll flavours in keeping with the time and place of The Secret Life of Bees: In 1964 South Carolina, teenage Lily (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) feels ostracised by the rest of her town, because for reasons she doesn't like to discuss they blame her for the death of her mother, despite the fact that she was a small child at the time. So she's grateful for her family's maid Rosaleen (Abiona Omonua,) who's become her best friend.

Theatre review: The House of Shades

Anne-Marie Duff returns to the stage, bringing with her the usual trepidation over what her generally questionable taste in plays will serve up this time. Beth Steel's The House of Shades isn't among the dodgier shows I've seen Duff in (I made it to the end of this one,) but it does suggest that if you asked her if she wanted a side of subtlety with her political commentary, you'd get a firm "no thanks!" Blanche McIntyre directs a family saga of a Nottinghamshire mining town, spanning from 1965 to 2019 - from optimism about what the trade unions and the Labour Party could do to help the country, all the way to the fall of the "red wall." Duff plays Constance, who fled an abusive father in the only way available to a woman in her position: By marrying the first man who came along. But starting her own family with Alistair (Stuart McQuarrie) soon just turned into a different kind of trap.

Stage-to-screen review: Flowers for Mrs Harris

My latest virtual visit to a regional theatre is to one I've been to before in person, although not for a couple of years: Chichester Festival Theatre, and Daniel Evans' production of Flowers for Mrs Harris, which he transferred there in 2018 after a run at his previous job in Sheffield. Rachel Wagstaff (book) and Richard Taylor's (music & lyrics) musical is based on a novella by American author Paul Gallico better known as Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, which is perhaps a helpful indicator of the kind of salt-of-the-earth working-class image of a London charlady Ada Harris (Clare Burt) is. Widowed in the Second World War and childless, she has little in her life except making ends meet through the various ungrateful clients whose houses she cleans. She ploughs through stoically until one day she covers a friend's shift cleaning for a deluded minor aristocrat (Joanna Riding,) where she spots a Christian Dior dress and becomes determined to own one some day.

Theatre review: Orpheus Descending

We've had the unofficial Arthur Miller festival, now it looks from my diary of upcoming theatre trips like it's the turn of Tennesse Williams. Orpheus Descending seems to be regarded pretty firmly as mid-tier Williams but the Menier Chocolate Factory's production - co-produced with Theatr Clwyd, where it played before the current run and whose Artistic Director Tamara Harvey directs - goes all out to put it up there with the better-known of his brooding Southern Gothic tragedies. A veteran of the playwright's doomed heroes, Seth Numrich returns to the UK to play Valentine Xavier, a drifter who's made a living playing his guitar in bars since his teens, but as he turns 30 decides to try and settle down somewhere - whether or not he's actually hiding from the law is never quite clear. He ends up in a small Tennesse town where Vee Talbott (Carole Royle) takes him under her wing and suggests a job at the general store.

Theatre review: Quiz

My policy on making theatre trips to Chichester changed from "never" to "three times this year" in part thanks to each of the three shows feeling like they completed some kind of set: The decider was the chance to bookend a decade with different Ian McKellen performances of King Lear, but Sweet Bird of Youth made for a double bill of Tennesse Williams plays starring Brian J. Smith, and now the final show in Daniel Evans' first season in charge concludes a trio of new James Graham plays in 2017. Quiz is less obviously political than most of Graham's plays but you don't have to scratch too deep to find some of the wider themes that often come up in the playwright's work, particularly Privacy, about transparency in personal life, politics and the law; and whether the tendency towards leaving nothing secret in the name of full disclosure is in fact harming the chance of fair treatment behind closed doors. The reason this comes up is that Graham's creating a fictionalised version of a legal case considered to have become trial by media.

Theatre review: Richard III (Trafalgar Studios)

Jamie Lloyd opens the second season of Trafalgar Underwhelmed Transformed like the first, with a big-name star in a popular Shakespeare play. Martin Freeman is Richard III in a production that takes its visual cue from the other famous Winter of Discontent, and sets the action in the late 1970s. In a drab Government office, Edward VI (Paul McEwan) has won - so far - the War of the Roses, but his health is rapidly failing. He has an heir, but his youngest brother Richard (Freeman) fancies the crown for himself. His plots quickly despatch middle brother Clarence (Mark Meadows) and with Edward's death he gets himself installed as Lord Protector over the underage prince. With a gift for manipulation, no qualms about bumping off half the court, and a number of supporters hoping to get a slice of power if he succeeds, he soon steps over his nephews to claim the throne himself.