BEST PRODUCTION:
Shakespeare and “early”
An unusual year, skewed so heavily to the RSC, in a year when the Globe / Wanamaker has virtually dropped out of the race. And yes, we saw nearly all of the Globe productions.
1 The Merry Wives of Windsor
Royal Shakespeare Company
Directed by Fiona Laird
Original rating: 5 stars
Patrick Troughton as Falstaff, Beth Cordingley as Mistress Ford
It’s a fine example of the RSC at its flat-out best. Up there with my other RSC comedy favourites of recent years … A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for The Nation; Love’s Labour’s Lost / Love’s Labour’s Won, As You Like It (with Pippa Nixon), Taming of The Shrew (with Lisa Dillon) and indeed the brilliant 2012 production of this same play. We watched (at full price) before press night. I’ll add ratings (see below), but before seeing them, I wonder how the press will take such broad comedy. I gave the 2012 RSC production five stars, and remember it in detail and fondly. This one is even better. We have already booked tickets for the RSC live broadcast.
2 Tartuffe, by Moliere
Adapted by Anil Gupta & Richard Pinto
Royal Shakespeare Company
Directed by Iqbal Khan
Original rating: 5 stars
Imran (Simon Nagra) with his guru, Tahir Taufiq Arsuf (Tartuffe) (Asif Khan)
This version is such a radical improvement that I don’t know whether to index it on this blog under “Moliere” or “Gupta and Pinto.” I’ll simply put it in twice. I bought the playtext – sold at half price at the RSC – and read it the morning after. I’m consciously going to avoid quoting specific lines. You have to hear them … OK, just one. The son is told he will be sent off to Pakistan, to Rawalpindi. ‘But I got tickets for Glastonbury!’ he protests. That’s the culture clash in a nutshell.
3 A Midsummer Nights Dream
Watermill Theatre, Newbury
Directed by Paul Hart
Original rating: 5 stars
Victoria Blunt as Bottom
This does everything so well that The Globe did so badly this time AND yet achieves the same aims. They include a deaf person. The difference is that while they have 50/50 gender balance here in the cast, it is NOT gender-blind. Puck is simply a woman. Philostrate is simply a woman. Bottom is addressed as she and her, and all is explained as the transformation to an ass obviously included the requisite male genitals. … Above all, this has a director (Paul Hart), and a costume designer and a lighting designer. The mathematics of casting for this must have been incredibly intricate. Everyone plays one to three named roles, but they also all have to be fairies, and they all have to sing, dance, and the major musicians among them have to be in the right place to play the found music. It must have been a gargantuan planning task.
4 Romeo & Juliet
Royal Shakespeare Company
Directed by Erica Whyman
Original rating: 5 stars
The Capulet party
The production is strong on urgency. Once the stars descended from on high and they got into the masked Capulet
partyrave, I realized that this was going to be an epic version of the play. They were dancing wildly, but most frantic and fastest of all with phenomenal energy was Juliet (Karen Fishwick). Conversations came out at the front, and the rest fell back in a line writhing to dance in ultra slow motion, as when Romeo and Juliet met and kissed … The balcony scene had a lot of humour in line interpretation and timing … I don’t think you can play it po-faced anymore.
5 Twelfth Night
The Young Vic
Conceived by Kwame Kewei-Arma and Shania Taub
Directed by Kwame Kewei-Arma and Oskar Eustis|
Original rating: 4 stars
L to R Feste (in red), Maria, Sir Toby, Malvolio with Breathe Right plaster, Sir Andrew (with cap)
This is a 90 minute musical adaptation, set before the Notting Hill Carnival, and featuring a community chorus of thirty. It was first performed in Central Park, New York in 2016. The Young Vic’s new director, Kwame Kewei-Armah starts off his regime with it. Much of the story is carried by song lyrics, which are not utilizing any Shakespeare lines. The bits of bard that remain in between are very short. There is an argument for completely updating those lines, but then the bits they kept are all transparent enough. The extended thrust stage and street set is brilliant, with a broken bit for emerging from water – it has a lifebuoy with Canal on it. The pub is called The Duke of Illyria. In this one you have to sing. Not choral. Lead. They all get one … What can we say about Gerard Carey’s Malvolio? At least two reviews declare he is the best they’ve seen … and the other contenders don’t sing, and he’s a magnificent singer with the best song, which he gets to reprise at the end. I doubt that we can remember well enough to say “the best” but I will say I haven’t seen better..
6 The Duchess of Malfi
By John Webster
Royal Shakespeare Company
Directed by Maria Aberg
Original rating: 4 /5 stars
Joan Iyiola as The Duchess with dancers
All in all, a great RSC production. As in 2017, the Swan Theatre starts the year ahead of its larger sibling theatre next door. An odd thing, I always think “colour blindness” should be avoided for characters who are cast as close relatives. But it was only after placing the photos in this review that I actually noticed the incongruity of ethnicity for alleged “twins.” That’s how convincing they were. I’m very tempted to five stars … but all that blood really was OTT. But we have seen such great performances in such a vibrant, visceral setting. I don’t award half stars (though 4.5 is probably right) so … no … yes … no … yes!
7 The Country Wife
by William Wycherley
Directed by Jonathan Munby
Chichester Minerva Theatre
Original rating: 4 stars
Mrs Pinchwife is thrilled at the thought she has an admirer. Mr Pinchwife (John Hodgkinson) has realised he was daft to tell her.
I have a strong feeling that like recent Minerva productions (This House, Quiz, Fracked …) it will make its way to the West End for a longer run. The cast is as good as you can get in every role and Chichester’s track record in creating important productions that can move on is a possible attraction in accepting the jobs. I reckon that it will be better received with evening audiences at Chichester, and much better received if it gets to London. The production is urban and edgy (and there was a big interval exit rate at the matinee). It reminded me of older audiences reactions to Emma Rice’s regime at The Globe in 2016 and 2017. Modern dress, dynamic lighting, dance, loud music – I loved Horner appearing to operate a vinyl deck with LP on stage. There will be some who want the crinolines, satin dresses and elaborate wigs.
8 The Rivals
by Sheridan
Watermill Theatre, Newbury
Directed by Jonathan Humphreys
Original rating: 5 stars
L to R: Mrs Malaprop (Julia St John), Lydia Languish (Emma Denly), Jack Absolute(Ncuti Gatwa), Sir Anthony (Michael Thomas).
The play takes place in Bath in 1775, the year it was written. The set has been created with three or four layers of silky drapes. so that a different curtained area is always available to show scene changes. It’s simple and transportable (The Watermill does well with tours). It looks marvellous. The play has been heavily cut and a cast of twelve is played by eight actors. The cast is a great mix of experienced and young actors. Christopher Logan (Sir Lucius) has been a central part of The Globe company for several years. We have seen Michael Thomas (Sir Anthony) at the Old Vic and RSC and Julia St. John has a distinguished theatrical bio, plus for us she was in The Brittas Empire as Brittas’s deputy. It is one of the sitcom complete box sets with a special place on our shelves. Provincial theatre? You will not see a better cast than this at the RSC, Globe or the more fashionable London theatres. Let’s add that the best seats were £16.50 compared to £60 for the equivalent at the RSC or National. Even more in commercial West End theatre.
9 Tamburlaine
by Christopher Marlowe
Royal Shakespeare Company
Directed by Michael Boyd
Original rating: 4 stars
Tamburlaine has captured Zenocrate, Princess of Egypt (next to him). From R, Scythian Techelles (David Rubin), Zenocrate’s maid Anippe (Zainab Hassan), Zenocrate (Rosy McEwan), Tamburlaine, Ralph Davis as captured Median lord, Riad Richie as Scythan Usumcasane, Naveed Khan as Scythian. Salman Akhtar on the floor … he had an open book this afternoon which was funnier.
OK, you’ve scrolled past that astonishing cast list, and it takes the programme two whole pages to get a synopsis down … Marlowe originally wrote this as two plays, first Tamburlaine The Great, which became Part One, and then Part Two. Here they’re combined. You thought the character list in the Wars of The Roses was long? Think on. Twenty actors play over sixty roles. The best way to look at it is, Game of Thrones. No, I don’t know how the characters slot together and I’m not really bothered. I’ll focus on the guy in the middle and the action. And it aways looks fantastic.
10 Othello
Shakespeare’s Globe
Directed by Claire van Kampen
Original rating: 4 stars
Roderigo (Steffan Donnelly) and Iago (Mark Rylance)
It is all about Mark Rylance. It is an innovative, original and very funny re-thinking of who Iago is. He has what appears a bell-boy costume, but it must be a weird Italian regiment in concept. This is Iago as a major comic role. The trademark Rylance semi-stutter is at play and he sets the mood in his opening scene with Roderigo (Steffan Donnelly) by walking in wide circles around the whole stage at speed. The circling Iago is a motif, like a shark circling his prey throughout, though we the audience can see the fin above the water, but the swimmers cannot. He is the comical trickster, disarming enemies because he appears affable, and with the hesitant voice, ineffectual, but he is constantly plotting.
MODERN
Didn’t Bath’s Ustinov Studio do well? Also, I wouldn’t put a cigarette paper between the first five. I listed the two new ones first just because they’re new.
1 The Watsons
By Laura Wade
Chichester Minerva Theatre
Directed by Samuel West
Original rating: 5 stars
Michael Billington gave it 5 stars. There is no higher praise. I’ll quote him:
I would seriously urge anyone planning to attend Laura Wade’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, The Watsons, to stop reading now since one of the play’s many pleasures is its capacity to endlessly take us by surprise. We go in expecting a literary exercise and come out having seen a philosophical comedy … Writers sometimes tell you that a character has the capacity to dictate events. Wade has seized on this tension between authorial control and imaginative freedom to create a stunning play.
2 A Very Very Very Dark Matter
By Martin McDonagh
The Bridge Theatre
Directed by Matthew Dunster
Original rating: 5 stars
Johnetta Eula’ Mae Ackles as Marjory, Jim Broadbent as Anderson
Phew! Five stars from me, four stars from Mr Billington and a couple of others,. then a bunch of critics went for the jugular. They hated it. I’d just say they failed to get it!
Where do you start to describe this play? It is theatre as a magical space, it’s an essay on what storytelling might be, and on what a story is, it’s a bizarre comedy, it’s a horror story. It’s absurd in a 60s way, it has echoes of Flann O’Brien and The Third Policeman. Weird stuff happens.
3 The Birthday Party
By Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter Theatre
Directed by Ian Rickson
Original rating: 5 stars
Goldberg (Steven Mangan), McCann (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), Stanley (Toby Jones)
The critics in 1958 could not take a play that did not dot the i’s and cross the t’s. We never learn who Goldberg and McCann represent, nor why they want to abduct Stanley. There are vague hints … he came to the guest house a year ago after he came into a small amount of money. Was he involved in criminal activity and cheated them? In Goldberg and Stanley’s tales of the past, Pinter is discussing the meaning of memory and how we recast our memories to suit our own visions of ourselves. A standard interpretation is that Stanley is the rebel, escaping conformity, and the two who appear to be gangsters represent the system, forcing Stanley into a grey suit, shirt and tie again before they whisk him off. I like enigma. Look at the pictures. Perfect cast. Great set. Assured direction. OK, five stars for me, the first of 2018.
4 The Lieutenant of Inishmore
By Martin McDonagh
Michael Grandage Company, West End
Directed by Michael Grandage
Original rating: 5 stars
Danny (Chris Whalley), Padraig (Aidan Turner) and Donny (Denis Conway)
The play takes place in 1993. We are in Donny’s cottage on the Island of Inishmore, and young Davey (Chris Walley) has arrived with a dead black cat, its brains dripping out. Donny (Denis Conway) believes Davey ran it over on his sister’s pink bicycle. Whatever, they’re in deep trouble for the cat belongs to Donny’s son Padraic (Aidan Turner). He has owned the cat for fifteen years and it’s the only thing Padraic loves. Padraic’s away in Ulster bombing chip shops and torturing. They decide to break it to him gently, by phoning to say the cat is merely poorly. Padraic, has just finished toenail removal and is interrupted while embarking on nipple removal on James, a drug dealer He is distraught and decides to hurry home. The drug dealer (Brian Martin) is strung upside down throughout a very funny scene. He would have been OK if he’d stuck to dealing only to Protestant school kids but he’d started dealing to Republican kids.
5 Jerusalem
by Jez Butterworth
The Watermill
Directed by Lisa Blair
Original rating: 5 stars
Great plays. They astonish the world on the first run, the original cast seems set in concrete. Could we imagine anyone else than Mark Rylance and Mackenzie Crook in the lead roles? It’s one of Michael Billington’s 101 Greatest Plays and he marked the revival with a list of 20 Best Plays Since Jerusalem. So we have to imagine new actors, because a “great play” has to have mileage. It has to work down the line with new directors, new actors. Someone has to have the courage to do it again, and I’m glad that the Watermill was the theatre that dared take on this magnificent play again, the first professional company to do so.
6 The Whale
by Samuel D. Hunter
Ustinov Studio
Bath Theatre Royal
Directed by Laurence Boswell
Original rating: 5 stars
The play is intriguing, the cast is more so. Charlie is a gay, 600 pound (or 42 stone) online AmLit tutor (no, his students have never seen him) dealing with the basics at the lowest level. AmLit 101. The Great Gatsby. Moby Dick. Song of Myselfby Walt Whitman. The stuff you have to teach. And I have. His students make inane comments on the classics (very funny too) though Whitman might be a tad esoteric for a British audience … not that he’s unknown, but they wouldn’t have been made to read him in school so might get less of the humour … The play is divided into 5 days. The backdrop rises to reveal projected sea waves to mark each day from Monday to Friday, because after Monday, his only friend, Liz, a nurse, predicts he will not survive the week. Given two hours without an interval, I wondered if waves and wave sounds were a good idea but no one felt compelled to pee.
7 Hamilton
By Lin-Manuel Miranda
London production
Directed by Thomas Kail
Original rating: 5 stars
You’ve read all those five star reviews, some saying the London production is even better than the US original. This far along the show’s lengthy progress (and it will go on and on) you wonder about freshness, and cast changes …There were a lot of Americans in the audience, a lot of people who knew every song. People want to see it again. It got an instant 100% standing ovation, a given in the USA, but still a great accolade in London. Of course it’s five star, but I have reservations. Maybe a 4.99 star then. For a British audience the story of the Revolutionary War and founding of the USA is not that transparent. T
8 Hogarth’s Progress: double bill
The Art of Success + The Taste of The Town
by Nick Dear
Rose Theatre, Kingston
Directed by Anthony Banks
Original rating: 4 stars
Horace Walpole (Ian Hallard) and Hogarth (Keith Allen)
The Taste of The Town is quite different in nature to The Art of Success. There’s more comedy dialogue, less activity and it feels smoother and more conventional. The set relies almost entirely on projected images, without the screen revolving to reveal bedrooms as in The Art of Success. In the interval, I was standing next to a group of four who were agreeing they enjoyed it more than the earlier play. We did too, though there was less of the (admirable) theatricality of the first play, set changing and action. It was lighter, smoother, also slighter, but funnier.
9 Home I’m Darling
by Laura Wade
National Theatre
Directed by Tamara Harvey
Original rating: 4 stars
The play starts as a domestic idyll in Judy and Johnny’s 1950s home with all the furniture. Judy, the domestic goddess, even takes the top off Johnny’s boiled egg for him. As my companion noted waiting for the play to start, and Judy’s mother says in the script later on, The Fifties didn’t even look like this in the Fifties. It is the 1950s Ideal Home Exhibition house. As we later discover, every part of it has been meticulously curated by Judy from eBay purchases. They even drove from Welwyn Garden City to Sunderland to get the ancient fridge. Our realization dawns when Johnny sets off to work, trilby on his head, and Judy produces her laptop computer from a drawer and starts tapping away. It’s all happening now.
10 Switzerland
By Joanna Murray-Smith
Ustinov Studio
Bath Theatre Royal
Directed by Lucy Bailey
Original rating: 4 stars
Phyllis Logan as Patricia Highsmith Calum Finlay as Edward Ridgeway
It’s 1995. Highsmith is a recluse in Switzerland and an editor has been sent from her New York publisher to persuade her to sign a contract for another “Mr Ripley” murder mystery. It enables her to rail against New York editors and to demand the supplies she’d asked for, such as notebooks, Campbell’s mushroom soup and a mirror polished knife. She’s widely and thoroughly racist and highly irascible and curmudgeonly. She’s also funny. She hates black people, she says. The young editor corrects her to “African-American.” No, it’s not just African-Americans she hates, its all black people, she replies. She hates Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. She really hates publishers and editors and we transpire that the last one sent over is still suffering a nervous breakdown after waking in the night with her knife at his throat.
WORST PLAYS
In the WORST categories, Shakespeare’s Globe has no rivals this year. The only ratings are for Restaurant and OTHELLO, but that’s entirely down to Mark Rylance.
AS YOU LIKE IT is not only the worst Shakespeare I’ve seen in years, but totally misguided … male Rosalind, deaf and dumb Celia. Terrible costume. No director. Awful. Far worse than any school’s production.
Apparently, HAMLET with Michelle Terry as the Prince was far, far worse. Both were “director-less”. LOVE’S LABOURS LOST, EYAM, MACBETH were all poor. I know three people who walked out of HAMLET. We read about it and declined to go – losing our “best seat” tickets. See TIME OUT for “real people” reviews rather than sycophantic critic reviews. I still fail to see why the big newspaper critics are failing to go for Michele Terry’s dreadful regime as artistic director. Probably guilt at knocking Emma Rice so unjustly. Huge acclaim for such a poor MACBETH at The Wanamaker.
After six years of enjoying The Globe so much, we will be voting with our feet. We will not renew our membership.
BEST ACTOR
‘m not going to number the best actor awards. The first is my number one. The rest are all fantastic.
This was near impossible. I was very tempted by Ryan Pidgen, flooring the critics in
Me & My Girl in Chichester as the understudy. Then Ash Hunter is merely “the alternative Hamilton” and stunned us. In the end, I went for Jasper Brittan because the role of Rooster in Jerusalem is SO identified with Mark Rylance’s original, that he deserves extra points for not only daring to do it, but then doing it differently.
Jasper Brittan – Jerusalem
Jasper Brittan in “Jerusalem”
Jasper Britton takes the role of Rooster Byron. Wisely, he makes it his own, Rooster in Biker waistcoat, black nail varnish and Yamaha T-shirt, and he does not try to follow Mark Rylance’s interpretation. We were in the Watermill front row, into full charisma of Jasper Britton’s performance, whereas we’d seen Mark Rylance from way back at the awful Apollo Theatre. There was an aspect that’s hard to define. When Mark Rylance did it, everything was reflected through him, so towering was the performance. Jasper Britton also seizes the part, but is somehow more democratic. Everyone has great lines in this play, every character. With Rylance it was watching his reaction to their lines. Britton never stops acting and reacting, but, this is hard to put, while doing so, he never steals the scene from someone else’s great story. I realized that the great lines were much more evenly distributed than when I first saw it. He’s fiercer, maybe more wrecked, but less weird.
Aidan Turner – Lieutenant of Inishmore
Padraig (Aidan Turner) and Mairead (Charlie Murphy)
Grandage is partial to a star name, and this features Aidan Turner from Poldark in the role of Padraic, too mad and too violent for the IRA, so now in the INLA (Irish National Liberation Army). Poldark was the most popular TV drama production of 2015, and 2016 and Turner received the TV Impact Award. Given the fuss newspapers make over his bare chest every time Ross Poldark wades through the Cornish surf, I’m surprised he keeps his shirt on here. Notably there were far more women than men in the audience. He was also the dwarf Kili in The Hobbit trilogy.
Ash Hunter – Hamilton
Ash Hunter as Hamilton (backstage photo)
They have alternative leads as Alexander Hamilton. The reviews in London were for Jamaal Westman. We saw Ash Hunter. Why they need two Hamiltons, but one Burr and one Lafayette / Jefferson escapes me. I’d say all three are as physically demanding. Perhaps Hamilton is more emotionally demanding, and Ash Hunter proved exceptional in the more emotional second part. It was a totally compelling performance, and he rose in stature as more pain came into Hamilton’s private life. His face is magnificently expressive. Both he and Rachelle Ann Go as his wife were genuinely moving after the death of his son Philip in a duel, which his own later duel was to mirror. Hunter also gets across the exhaustion of the hardest working Secretary of the Treasury, as well as the seducer’s glint in the eye. Hamilton was also distinguished in founding an American tradition, the senior politician getting caught with his pants down, and that’s one that runs and runs.
Ryan Pidgen – Me & My Girl
Just as in the plot of a fantasy musical, the star was ill on Press Night on Monday and unable to perform. Matt Lucas, in the lead role of Bill Snibson, had voice issues and was replaced by Ryan Pidgen (who normally plays Bob Barking) at very short notice who got a “frenzied” standing ovation at the end. Ryan Pidgen had not rehearsed in the role with the company, and his greater height was an issue. We saw it on Wednesday, and Matt Lucas was expected to return. Having read the reviews we were in a quandary. Who would we rather see? Pidgen after all has an extensive career history in singing and dancing in stage musicals, and Lucas doesn’t. Matt Lucas was still indisposed so it was Ryan Pidgen – understandably on a two show matinee day (let alone the World Cup semi-final). Pidgen was brilliant, singing, dancing, catching people mid-air, doing elaborate routines with his cloak. There was not a single hint that this was an understudy at work. No one is going to feel short-changed.
Shuler Hensley- The Whale
Charlie (Shuler Hensley
Not many critics made the trip to Bath. It’s a shame. Shuler Hensley is a hugely acclaimed American actor with good reason. He’s unmissable.
)David Troughton – Merry Wives of Windsor
I’ve said in previous reviews that the plum acting part is Master Ford (Vince Leigh), but with David Troughton as the best Falstaff I have ever seen there is no question that as Queen Elizabeth had intended, Falstaff is the male star. Troughton comes into this from playing the title role in Titus Andronicus and Gloucester to Sher’s King Lear. He has always been a superb comic actor also, and we still take A Very Peculiar Practice out of the DVD box to watch him as Dr Bob Buzzard from time to time. It was prescient in showing the GP as businessman. Best bits here might be Falstaff’s audience swim (you have to see it), or trying to get in the wheelie bin, or hiding under the bed, or mincing across stage as the Fat Woman of Brentwood (with a borrowed Dick Emery bit that had tears down my face). The original is the Witch / Fat Woman of Brentford, but Brentwood is in Essex.
David Troughton as Falstaff
Jim Broadbent – A Very Very Very Dark Matter
Jim Broadbent as Hans Christian Anderson
Jim Broadbent portrays all this, with Anderson as cheery, self-absorbed, insensitive, almost autistic. He is dressed as might be the Wizard of Oz or Willy Wonka … the 19th century booster. He takes everything literally, at face value. No imagination nor empathy … but in his attic (alter ego) he has a captive Congolese Pygmy woman in that swinging box, who really creates the stories he takes credit for. For many fiction writers, sometimes characters and stories seem to come from nowhere and have a self-propelling life of their own. Margery, as he calls her, failing to remember her African name, is the source, imprisoned in a box, enslaved. A Muse? Maybe his anima or female side? One he treats with sadistic cruelty too. A very very very dark matter.
Asif Khan – Tartuffe
Amira (Sasha Benar) with Tartuffe (Asif Khan)
The holy man with a hard on, the religious guru / lecher, is an ongoing dramatic character. Moliere was not the first or last to write about it, though he nails it best of all. Think of the popes with mistresses, the uptight pious would-be-rapist, Angelo, in Measure for Measure, the cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi, or the film Elmer Gantry, or The Beatles with The Maharishi (they left when he started groping the girls), or the various American evangelists caught with their pants down. Tartuffe, or here Tahir Yaufiq Arsuf, is also a hypocrite and an imposter. The play’s construction keeps him off stage for a full two acts too, so we know what he is before we see him.
Keith Allen – The Taste of The Town
David Garrick (Mark Umbers) and William Hogarth (Keith Allen)
Keith Allen as William Hogarth will be as good a lead role (5 stars) as we see this year, and Ian Hallard’s Walpole is as good a comic supporting role too (also *****).
Stephen Mangan – The Birthday Party
Stephen Mangan as Goldberg in The Birthday Party
The cast are brilliant throughout. Mangan, so often the cheerful lovable curly-headed chap, as in Bertie Wooster, is genuinely scary here with his slicked down Brycreemed hair. The huge smile and white teeth become menacing in the extreme. His voice sounds completely different too. When he sticks his tongue out, I was sure at first it must be a special effect, but Mangan seems to have an extraordinarily long tongue. The effect is reptilian. His name is Nat, we think, but in his childhood reminisces he becomes Shimmy, then Benny. There are so many great lines … he gave his wife a lovely funeral.
BEST ACTRESS
Michelle Bonnard – Tartuffe
Michelle Bonnard as Darina, the stroppy Bosnian cleaner in Tartuffe
Darina is an excellent modernization, and her role is expanded to bookend the play in both halves, and act as narrator and link, and to interact wth the audience. It’s almost the lead female role, certainly the co-lead role, and Michelle Bonnard delivers one of the funniest performances this year. The thing is Bosnians are also Muslims, as she explains, but she’s tough and feminist. She can contrast with poor Mariam (Zainab Hasan) who has a degree in Women’s Studies, but can’t stand up to her dad. The character also allows racist comments: she can’t be a Muslim because she’s not brown!
Beth Cordingley & Rebecca Lacey- Merry Wives of Windsor
Mistress Ford (Beth Cordingley) realizes her love letter is the same as Mistress Page’s (Rebecca Lacey)
The Merry Wives themselves are the female stars of course. The double act of Mistress Ford (Beth Cordingley) and Mistress Page (Rebecca Lacey) is unforgettable, I loved their “over-acting” shouting for Falstaff to overhear, and their mirrored gestures. Mistress Ford’s superb figure made perfect sense of Falstaff’s obsession. The costumes were a brilliant contrast … dressing gowns for the pool scene.
Lesley Manville, Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Lesley Manville as Mary
Lesley Manville plays the mother, Mary. Her award winning descent into alcohol-sodden in Mike Leigh’s Another Year was a great performance. She does descents superbly, here twitching and repetitive in finely controlled degrees depending on Mary’s last morphine hit. O’Neill writes her part best of all, I feel, with the nervy repetition and going over the same problems and greivances. On the other hand, the power of the text is her repetition … and that is, er, repetitive. She is obsessed with her hair (the constant itchiness of addiction), her arthritic hands and her sons.
Elizabeth McGovern – God of Carnage, Bath
Veronica (Elizabeth McGovern) and Annette (Amanda Abbington)
This cast triumph. They have no worries whatsoever on the comparison score (with the film version). They are as good, and because live theatre is such a different thing, and because it was accented for more comedy, I enjoyed the stage version more. Veronica is American. I hope it won’t offend my American readers, but her accents works so well at making her seem more PC, more concerned with bringing justice and resolution, but also in being more priggish and judgemental. As the family rows develop, it also allows Michael to imitate her accent to annoy.
Phyllis Logan – Switzerland
Phyllis Logan
We have two great performances … and two people speaking without much action has to be REALLY good to keep me interested. It is REALLy good. We knew Phyllis Logan was superb already. Calum Finlay was a revelation. As we said afterwards, Phyllis Logan has an uphill job too, as we are so imprinted with the basic kindness of her character “Mrs Hughes” in Downton Abbey. She succeeds.
Katherine Parkinson – Home, I’m Darling
Katherine Parkinson
As we discover in a flashback start to Act Two, the whole 1950s lifestyle came to Judy three years earlier when she was offered redundancy pay. She loved the style and mood of the 1950s, a reaction to her commune late-hippy upbringing. There are beautiful touches throughout as when she explains to her friend Fran that you can use lemon juice for cleaning taps. That’s a fact she discovered on the internet
Joan Iyiola – Duchess of Malfi
Joan Iyiola as the Duchess gives a powerful performance. She sounds authoritative with a rich voice, and looks marvellous. Early on she has an Afro wig that makes you think of a soul singer diva with charisma. She’s sensual when she wants to be with her chosen new spouse (she is a widow), Antonio, her steward.
Susannah Fielding, Country Wife
Susannah Fielding as Marjory Pinchwife watching TV
The first half has too little of Susannah Fielding’s wide-eyed Mummerset Mrs Pinchwife, and the second half, when she comes to the fore is far funnier. Being forced to compose a “go away” letter to Horner, then changing it to a “come here” letter is the best part of the play … well, given Susannah Fielding and John Hodgkinson performing it, how could it not be marvellous?
Victoria Blunt – A Midsummer Nights Dream, Watermill
The Rude Mechanicals: Victoria Blunt as Bottom, centre
Victoria Blunt was Bottom in brown overalls. No one is going to complain about a female version. She was very funny, and as throughout the production, much livelier than I’ve seen it played. This is a young cast with boundless energy.
Clare Burt- Miss Littlewood, RSC
The staging is fluid and superb. It breaks the fourth wall twice, very funny, right at the start. No plot spoilers! We have Joan Littlewood (Clare Burt) with her distinctive cap. She stands outside the play, though gives directions and watches the action throughout … except for a couple of scenes of her past life that she declines to watch. At points, she awards the “cap” to other company members, who then become “Joan.” They even have arguments amongst the cast when Joan Littlewood decides to change the current “Joan” by offering the hat to another actor … as directors do. Later we may see multiple “Joans” on stage performing together. Basically the hat passed to older actresses as the time ticks away. A total of seven Joans.
SUPPORT ACTOR
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor – Birthday Party
Vaughan-Lawlor is superb. So contained, stiff, at attention, smart but wired and liable to erupt at any second. When he does it’s an electric martial arts stance. Clearly he is the sidekick, anxious to be told if they’re doing the same as usual or something different. Not that we’re told. The Northern Irish accent helps.
Chris Whalley- The Lieutenant of Inishmore (Davey)
Chris Whalley as Davey
Scott Karim – The Country Wife
Harcourt (Ashley Zhangazha) and Sparkish (Scott Karim)
Phil Daniels – A Very Very Very Dark Matter
Phil Daniels as Charles Dickens
Tim Samuels- Merry Wives
Tim Samuels (left) as Justice Shallow
Oliver Ford-Davies- The Chalk Garden, Chichester
Oliver Ford-Davies as The Judge.
Greg Barnett, Miss Littlewood, RSC
The Wanderer’s Lament. Greg Barnett as Jimmie Miller (aka Ewan MacColl). Amanda Hadingue accompanying on violin
Oscar Baterham -The Whale
Ellie (Rosie Sheey) and Elder Thomas (Oscar Batterham)
Darrell de Silva – Don Carlos, Nuffield City, Southampton
Darrell d’Silva as Phillip II. The Leonine mane is the star of the entire show.
Ian Hallard – The Taste of The Town, Hogarth’s Progress
SUPPORT ACTRESS
Katie Brittain – Merry Wives, The hostess
Rosie Sheehy – (Ellie) The Whale
The 17 year old daughter, Ellie arrives. Charlie hasn’t seen her since he left her mother when she was two (and went off with his boyfriend). Ellie is an amazing creation by Rosie Sheehy here. The teenager from hell. She finds him, the smell, the apartment disgusting. It is a very powerful performance.
Charlie Murphy – The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Ruby Bentall- Hogarth’s Progress,
Hogarth (Keith Allen) and Nancy (Ruby Bentall)
Sheila Atim – Othello
Sheila Atim as Emilia, Andre Holland as Othello
Amanda Root, The Chalk Garden, Chichester
Eva Feiler A Midsummer Nights Dream, Watermill
Puck (Eva Feiller) with magic tricks
Jennifer Saunders – Lady Windermere’s Fan, Vaudeville Oscar Wilde Season
The Duchess of Berwick (Jennifer Saunders) and Lady Windermere (Grace Molony)
Zoe Wanamaker, The Birthday Party
Meg (Zoe Wanamaker) and Stanley (Toby Jones)
Johnetta Eula’ Mae Ackles – A Very Very Very Dark Matter
Amanda Hadingue, Miss Littlewood
Amanda Hadingue’s turn as Joan+
DIRECTOR
Fiona Laird- Merry Wives of Windsor
SET DESIGN
1st =) Lez Brotherton – Merry Wives of Windsor
1st =) Robert Jones – Twelfth Night
BEST THEATRE
It’s between The Swan at the RSC (which had a consistently good year) and The Watermill at Newbury. For a tiny theatre, the Watermill gets three “best” entries. No question, then, in 2018 it’s The Watermill.
The Watermill at Newbury is one of the great secrets of provincial theatre. It’s in a tiny hamlet, Bagnor, but only a very short distance from the A34 / M4 junction making it a comfortable drive from Reading, Oxford, Swindon, Basingstoke and Winchester. We drove from Poole. The people ahead of us going in had driven from London. Newbury has a train station, though you’d need a short taxi ride … The thing is, in recent weeks we saw two mediocre productions at The National Theatre in London (Absolute Hell, Macbeth). An abysmal production of As You Like It at The Globe, and a mediocre Macbeth at the RSC. Ten years ago, when we were busier, our theatre was South central … we could get to Chichester, Southampton, Poole, Bath, Salisbury and Newbury without much effort. In the last six or seven years, we have expanded much more to London and Stratford. Stratford rarely lets you down. However, we’ve seen some rough stuff in major London productions. In the last month, we have seen superb productions at Chichester, Bath and Newbury (twice at Newbury … The Rivals was also first rate). I’m sure the same would be true in the North. Suddenly the expense and effort of London-centric theatre seems less rewarding. I used to say “there’s equally good stuff out of London.” In 2018, there’s BETTER stuff out of London.
BEST THEATRE LOOS
Chichester Festival Theatre, as ever. The Bridge and National Theatre try hard but still come second best.
BEST SEATS
The Bridge Theatre. There is a compromise between great rake (The Minerva, Chichester) meaning zero foot room under the row in front and having a decent rake AND foot room. The Bridge wins.
BEST THEATRE RESTAURANT
The Swan retains top place. Thankfully the 2018 decline at The Globe has not affected the restaurant. It wins on food (pre-theatre 3 course meals), service … always fast and friendly and the fabulous view of St Pauls. Our favourite restaurant of all (not just “theatre.”)
1 The Swan at The Globe
2 The Rooftop at the RSC
3 The Brasserie at Chichester
BEST PROGRAMME
Tartuffe- Royal Shakespeare Company
A must buy. You get an essay in the context of Moliere’s play in the 1660s, plus an essay on charismatic imams in Islam, an interview with the writers and a very funny essay on Muslim Birmingham by Shazia Mirza, and an essay on the music by composer Sarah Sayeed.
