Theatre review: Summer 1954

The Browning Version is widely considered one of Terence Rattigan's masterpieces, but as a one-act play it seems to cause a lot of trouble for producers trying to pair it with something else as a double bill (Rattigan's own original choice of companion piece, Harlequinade, seems to be generally ruled out for being both too inferior and too big a shift in mood to work.) James Dacre's touring production Summer 1954 has mixed and matched it with a short from another of the playwright's double bills, Separate Tables, and so the new pairing opens at a Bournemouth hotel where most of the rooms are taken by semi-permanent residents. In Table Number Seven Siân Phillips plays the imperious Mrs Railton-Bell, who learns from the local paper that another resident, Major Pollock (Nathaniel Parker) isn't quite who he says he is.

Theatre review: Under Milk Wood

A collection of our more sprightly older actors populate Lyndsey Turner's production of Under Milk Wood, which reopens an Olivier Theatre that is wisely playing it safe, and staying in its temporary in-the-round configuration for the next few shows. And, after a year they probably spent shielding more carefully than most, I guess you could do worse as a high concept at the moment than a cast who've all had both their jabs. The reason for the high concept is that Dylan Thomas' beloved play for voices has been given a new framing device by writer Siân Owen, putting the action into the morning routine of a retirement home. After we've got to meet some of the staff and residents, Owain Jenkins (The Actor Michael Sheen) arrives unexpectedly in hopes of speaking to his father, whom he hasn't seen for a long time. So long that he doesn't realise Richard (Karl Johnson) has become almost non-verbal with dementia.

Theatre review: Les Blancs

It was left unfinished on playwright Lorraine Hansberry's death, but the National saw enough merit in Les Blancs to get adaptor Robert Nemiroff and director Yaël Farber to create a stageable version of this African epic: In an unspecified post-war, colonial African country, a European mission operates a very basic hospital. The influential pastor is unseen, off on some apparently regular trek into the jungle, but his blind wife Madame Neilsen (Siân Phillips) is there to meet American journalist Charlie Morris (Elliot Cowan,) there in search of the real story of a country whose decades of foreign rule have finally led to increasing black-on-white violence. Not satisfied with only getting the white side of the story, he focuses on a trio of brothers, all of whom are outsiders in some way, who've returned to the area for their father's funeral; particularly middle brother Tshembe (Danny Sapani,) who's spent years travelling the world and has a white wife in London.

Re-review: Cabaret

In a busy year for Kander & Ebb revivals this was always going to be the main event (especially with Chicago finally giving up the ghost.) Rufus Norris revisits his 2007 production of Cabaret, which returns to London with all its grotesquery intact, plus a couple of star names in the leads. With it being just over a month since I saw I Am A Camera, it's easy to spot some of the major changes Joe Masteroff made to John Van Druten's play and Christopher Isherwood's original stories - most notably the conflation of Isherwood's character with that of Clive Mortimer, so now the outsider's view of Berlin is provided by Clifford Bradshaw, an impoverished, bisexual American wannabe writer. There's also a gentler, more emotional storyline to the subplot where landlady Fräulein Schneider makes concessions to the rising Nazis for an easy life, as well as the creation of a new lead character as we see some of the Kit Kat Klub where Sally sings, and its enigmatic Emcee.

Theatre review: Lovesong

For the second night in a row I'm at a play featuring a long-married couple right at the end of the woman's life, which is a bit unfortunate as it's hard to take tonight's show entirely on its own merits. At least Frantic Assembly's Lovesong is the superior show by some way. Written by Abi Morgan, Lovesong shows us British dentist Billy and his librarian wife Maggie, who moved to small-town America about 40 years ago, alternating between those early days of their marriage and the final week as Maggie prepares for her death. Edward Bennett and Leanne Rowe play the young couple, Sam Cox and Siân Phillips their older selves. The action is kept pretty simple but stays interesting throughout, the younger duo creating their memories together, the older not always recalling them as they package up the belongings they've built up along the way. (One stark contrast with And No More Shall We Part is that here Maggie's decision to choose when she dies has been made and discussed offstage, Morgan's narrative more interested in presenting the whole picture of how this rounds off the couple's life, than in presenting the moral dilemmas.)

This being Frantic Assembly, directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett keep things visually interesting with sparingly-used projections and ventures into dance - though at times they jar, at others these movement sequences add much to the show's heart, and Carolyn Downing's sound design is hauntingly used. The performances are excellent as you'd expect, although knowing how good a comic actor Ed Bennett is, it always feels a bit of a waste seeing him in a straight drama.

The story is overshadowed by the couple's inability to have a child (I think the point of them having moved to America was to have them take a while to make friends, leaving them with only each other in the absence of a child) and once again there's suggestions of infidelity (though here it felt more organically integrated into their life story.) Jan was my theatre companion tonight and he felt the fact we largely saw them in difficult times was suggesting they'd had unhappy lives overall. I wouldn't agree, I thought the way the older couple were still going strong said that ultimately we were being shown a happy relationship. The unfortunate timing of another of my accidental "theme weeks" meant I was kept at a bit more of a distance than I might perhaps have been. No such problem for much of the audience, which despite the Lyric Hammersmith's usual high percentage of (well-behaved¹) school parties contained rather a lot of audible sobbing by the end.

Lovesong by Abi Morgan is booking until the 4th of February at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

¹except for the one girl in the row in front of us who I'm sure spent much more time looking at her phone's brightly glowing screen than at the stage