Going to the theatre

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The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster (Old Vic Theatre, London) April 30

In one of the better in-jokes in Tom Stoppard's screenplay for Shakespeare In Love, a street urchin feeding mice to a black cat tells the Bard his name and claims he was in a production of the Bard's gore-fest Titus Andronicus. With all the enthusiasm of a small boy chatting to a fireman, he tells Shakespeare that when he grows up he too wants to write plays that are red in tooth and claw. He is, of course, John Webster, purveyor of Jacobean tragedies which make the events of Macbeth look like a gentlemanly exchange of fisticuffs.

But the great thing about Webster is that, for all his reputation as the Quentin Tarantino of the English Renaissance, he was really a very good playwright and, like his greatest contemporary, something of a wizard at impregnating mere words with poetry and humanity and real feeling. In rehearsals, according to this production's assistant director, director Jamie Lloyd made it clear that the language - and not, by implication, the Kensington Gore - would be "the biggest thing in the room". It's an approach that has been rewarded in spades and, with the divine Eve Best in the title role, it's hard to imagine a better production: it's the sort of role she was born to play, with all that transparent open-heartedness she brings to everything she does.

Cultural historians will no doubt be pondering why, in late 2011 and early 2012, British theatre spontaneously succumbed to such a rash of Jacobean Tragedy and who knows, some of the lessons divined may even be true. But personally, it's this Duchess of Malfi I will take away from the unexpected glut.

[firehazard]

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster (Old Vic Theatre, London) April 30

In one of the better in-jokes in Tom Stoppard's screenplay for Shakespeare In Love, a street urchin feeding mice to a black cat tells the Bard his name and claims he was in a production of the Bard's gore-fest Titus Andronicus. With all the enthusiasm of a small boy chatting to a fireman, he tells Shakespeare that when he grows up he too wants to write plays that are red in tooth and claw. He is, of course, John Webster, purveyor of Jacobean tragedies which make the events of Macbeth look like a gentlemanly exchange of fisticuffs.

But the great thing about Webster is that, for all his reputation as the Quentin Tarantino of the English Renaissance, he was really a very good playwright and, like his greatest contemporary, something of a wizard at impregnating mere words with poetry and humanity and real feeling. In rehearsals, according to this production's assistant director, director Jamie Lloyd made it clear that the language - and not, by implication, the Kensington Gore - would be "the biggest thing in the room". It's an approach that has been rewarded in spades and, with the divine Eve Best in the title role, it's hard to imagine a better production: it's the sort of role she was born to play, with all that transparent open-heartedness she brings to everything she does.

Cultural historians will no doubt be pondering why, in late 2011 and early 2012, British theatre spontaneously succumbed to such a rash of Jacobean Tragedy and who knows, some of the lessons divined may even be true. But personally, it's this Duchess of Malfi I will take away from the unexpected glut.

Possibly the highlight of my stage career was being cast as Fifth Madman in a production of The Duchess of Malfi sometime in the late 1970s. It was a comparatively unusual choice of play in those days, as far as I remember, but I've had a love of it ever since. I'm guessing our production was not as good as the one reviewed here.

[CM]

Cultural historians will no doubt be pondering why, in late 2011 and early 2012, British theatre spontaneously succumbed to such a rash of Jacobean Tragedy and who knows, some of the lessons divined may even be true. But personally, it's this Duchess of Malfi I will take away from the unexpected glut.

A feast indeed. I also took in The Malcontent, The Spanish Tragedy and The Revengers Tragedy on the fringe. The Duchess blew The Whore and The Changeling out the water, I agree. Also a Midsummer Dream in Temple Hall and Fletcher's farcical sequel to Shsp's Taming Of The Shrew (Lion & Unicorn). The program dated it to 1609ish which made me wonder. Did Fletcher write it to get the Big Man's attention, coz right after that they started working together.

Saving up for Misterman.

[philipchevron]

The Sunshine Boys by Neil Simon (Savoy Theatre, London) in previews, May 2, opens May 17

Lewis and Clark, Neil Simon's cantankerous pair of vaudeville old-timers making an apparently reluctant comeback, were something of a composite of real-life comic double acts, with their material based on Smith and Dale, and their personal animosity based largely on the perpetual bickering of Ziegfeld stars Gallagher and Shean [Shean was Al Schoenberg, uncle of the Marx Brothers, vaudeville ethnicity being a somewhat fluid entity as immigrant Irish, Jewish ("Dutch") and German performers crossed demographics in order to optimise their audience appeal] and perhaps Weber and Fields, but Simon surely also utilised his experience as a TV scriptwriter for Milton Berle, Phil Silvers etc, the final generation of true vaudevillians. In any event, it is a play written by a man compelled to memorialise a great era of not just American theatre but social history too. The play is full of the sort of detail you can't get from just the research. The original 1972 Broadway production, starring Jack Albertson and the great Sam Levene apparently set the bar high for subsequent incarnations.

Indeed, part of the pleasure - and sometimes disappointment - in anticipating any production of the play is in imagining what the billed stars will bring to the play and how they might interract with each other. I saw the 1997 Broadway revival with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, every bit as dynamic as you might expect, and of course Walter Matthau and George Burns are forever enshrined in the terrific 1975 movie, while a 1995 TVM starring Woody Allen and Peter Falk doesn't quite work: the performers are perhaps a tad too knowing about their subject and anyway, we're already over-familiar with a kvetching Allen. But the announcement that Richard Griffiths and Danny DeVito would star in what I believe is the first ever West End production seemed almost too good to be true - the physical contrast between the two actors is already funny.

At the moment, in previews, that is more or less the case, though they are nothing like as comically contrasted as you might expect. But I'm pretty sure they'll get there by opening night. For the moment, little flashes of the double-act to be are already peeking through, especially from Griffiths who, because he has less of a comic "persona" than DeVito, has less baggage to cushion any risks. Obviously this production is ultimately aimed at Broadway, by which time it is likely that this pair will appear to have been together for 43 years, just like Lewis and Clark.

[peterchrisp]

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster (Old Vic Theatre, London) April 30

Cultural historians will no doubt be pondering why, in late 2011 and early 2012, British theatre spontaneously succumbed to such a rash of Jacobean Tragedy.

I've been enjoying James Shapiro's BBC4 series, The King and the Playwright, about Shakespeare's Jacobean plays - explaining why things got so dark in the early 1600s.

Brighton Festival kicks off this weekend - looking forward to Dreamthinkspeak's The Rest is Silence - a reinvention of Hamlet in a Shoreham warehouse. Their very first production, in 1999, was a version of Hamlet in the Gardner Arts Centre. As audience members we were cast as guests at the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude, and given wine and wedding cake - always a good start to a show! The next one was Orpheus, in which audience members were taken to the underworld by hearse. Later they took over the Theatre Royal and turned it into Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment - complete with a vodka den in the basement. And two years ago they recreated the Cherry Orchard in a big disused Co-op building.

The Rest is Silence will be at the Riverside later this year.

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Mary Shelley by Helen Edmundson (Playhouse, Nottingham) May 3

Ms Edmundson and Shared Experience's director Polly Teale are not the first people to be enthralled by the story of the 18-year old Frankenstein creator and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they are unlikely to be the last. All the same, she seems uniquely suited to their house style, full of movement and imagination and classic heroines of a former age. So it's a pity that too much is crammed into an episodic chronology which, if unavoidable to some extent - it was an eventful and extraordinary life - to allow the play to settle most where it needs to. Edmundson makes a strong case that Dr Frankenstein and his monster are literary manifestations of the relationship between free-spirit Mary Shelley and the family she grew up in, notably her feminist mother who died giving birth to her and her political philosopher father, a sort of left-leaning Ayn Rand unable, like Rand, to remain constant to his own radical ideas in his own life. Shelley's parents were indeed celebrated liberals and it is through his visit of homage to papa, William Godwin, that Percy Shelley first meets young Mary. Edmundson argues, with some force, that the roots of Frankenstein are very much in this complex if loving family itself, but she puts too much flesh on the monster's bones to keep her case clear. Shame, Shared Experience's brisk Anna Karenina remains one of the last two decade's most memorable theatrical pieces, so essentialism is not a new challenge to them.

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Wonderful Town
Music by Leonard Bernstein, Book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
(Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield) May 5

Why oh why oh why-oh
Why did I ever leave Ohio?

Broadway legend George Abbott was born in 1887 in New York state, began performing on Broadway in 1913, moved to writing in 1925 and began producing and/or directing the following year, continuing throughout his long life. He directed his final show aged 100 and died 8 years later. Universally addressed as "Mister Abbott" even by his most regular co-workers, Abbott is best remembered as the preeminent theatre director of the so-called Golden Age of Broadway musicals. Not by any means the best and certainly not the most original, but he was usually the most reliable: "a George Abbott show" was as close to a guarantee of success as you could hope for in the heyday of the American Dream. There remains a certain artlessness about his work - much of it brutally marshalls the competing egos of stars and composers and choreographers and bends them to his own more powerful will but, unlike Hal Prince, who started out working for him as a Stage Manager, he was not interested in Musicals as an artform. He was interested only in Hit Musicals and ironically, in the American dynamic that makes the collision - or better still the happy coexistence - of art and commerce one of the defining factors of the nation, this makes Abbott a culturally important historical figure whether he cares or not.

Wonderful Town has so many Abbott characteristics it's awe-inspiring just to watch them float by. The most singular one is the treatment of the central female role, a plain would-be writer from Ohio who moves to New York City with her prettier younger sis, who wants to be in showbiz. The plot is almost entirely inconsequential and the only signal thing about the setting is that it's in the Bohemian consort of Greenwich Village in 1935, a location that had yet to star in a Broadway show by 1954 but which, in terms of texture and content, you would be forgiven for mistaking for the Village in, well, 1954. That was not the sort of consistency of purpose Abbott wasted much time on. So. The elder sister role in this musical could be tailor-made for Rosalind Russell if only Ros could sing, right? But Rosalind Russell had no business imposing her singing voice on the public, none whatever. In fact, later in the 1950s, when Russell went on to infuriate Ethel Merman by insisting on doing the movie version of Gypsy [Russell's hubby had secured the movie rights], her vocals were dubbed by a session singer, though some stories insist that as Russell's own vocals were first recorded so that Lisa Kirk (the dubber) had a template to work from in the sound process, Ros went to her grave believing she had sung all the numbers in Gypsy . That's how tone deaf she was: only Lucille Ball caused composers of musicals worse nightmares. But people trusted George Abbott to make this sort of thing work on stage, among them Russell herself who was, at heart, aware of her limitations as a singing actor on stage if not in motion pictures.

And that's how, at Mister Abbott's request, Leonard Bernstein, one of America's greatest musicians of all time, came to write music which would be performed by a wise-cracking foghorn. Russell's numbers have a disarmingly limited and simplistic vocal range and emotional depth which make Gertrude Lawrence in The King And I sound like Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale by contrast. Russell even had enough professional self-awareness to refuse a love ballad, and her romantic material, such as it is [even Ros Russell had to Get The Guy in a Broadway show] was shifted ingeniously to a third party, the more musical younger sister, often found - classic Abbott, this - singing to Russell's paramour in a kind of "this is what she feels about you, you great big lug" strategy. See, I told you Mister Abbott would make it work! Russell shrewdly contented herself with a couple of showstopping production numbers, one involving the Conga and the other a skit on Greenwich Village hepness which manages to be both square and cool, not least because it anticipates so much of West Side Story. And "Ohio", the sisters' duet, well within Ros's croaking range, is charming.

But then, much of the music is sublime. Though the show itself is instantly forgettable, much of Bernstein's music is not. Ten years on from his Broadway debut with On The Town but a few years short of his two great stage works, Candide and West Side, it's endlessly fascinating to hear how much of mature Bernstein was already in place in 1954. And how he makes the kind of musical choices he develops and advances in WSS and those he does not is a masterclass in itself. But most importantly, he makes choices which must have put Ms Russell in the best light possible, as befits a star. And that, as George Abbott knew and as Bernstein clearly understood, is what makes the American Musical such a unique form. You give Broadway folks lemons, they're unlikely to spurn the chance to make lemonade. Bernstein would do better and, with the help of Messrs Shakespeare and Voltaire, have better plots too, but he never again sounded quite so wide-eyed, so optimistic.

Interestingly, Connie Fisher, who really can sing, as she showed in the Julie Andrews/Mary Martin role in the recent London Palladium production of The Sound of Music , is cast in the foghorn role and I suppose it's a mark of her range that she is able to make these conditions work for her too without appearing to hanker for a top B flat.

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WORLD SNOOKER CHAMPIONSHIP (Crucible, Sheffield)

Friday 4 May: Semi Final 2 (Session 2 of 4): Ronnie O'Sullivan v Matthew Stevens
Friday 4 May: Semi Final 1 (Session 3 of 4): Ali Carter v Stephen Maguire
Saturday 5 May: Semi Final 2 (Session 3 of 4): Ronnie O'Sullivan v Matthew Stevens
Saturday 5 May: Semi Final 2 (Session 4 of 4): Ronnie O'Sullivan v Matthew Stevens

Not much music in this, but it's about the only thing it lacks. The passion, skill, brainpower, wit, mindfuckery, cunning and human drama are all present and correct. This year, Ali Carter's Crohn's disease, Stephen Hendry's retirement and Ronnie O'Sullivan's return to the form of his life have all competed for plot prominence and today, in a late if not entirely surprising cliffhanger - O'Sullivan likes to set the publicity agenda - we learn that Ronnie, if he wins this World Championship for the fourth time, may also retire.

Which would be a cruel shame. Even during the frequent spells in the past when Ronnie had put his head on backwards that day, nobody could touch him for entertainment value. Before every session, the MC, Rob Walker, once again reminds us that Ronnie is "the most naturally gifted player the game has ever seen" and, hackneyed though that is and however much it carries within it the unspoken admonishment "shame about the psyche", it remains true. When the Rocket is in his own personal zone, as he has been for the past two weeks, not only does his pinpoint play put a smile on your face, but all somehow feels well with the world at large. Order has been located in the midst of chaos, geometry's claim to godliness appeased.

I don't think Ronnie could have a more deserving or more formidable opponent this year than Ali Carter who, like Ronnie, appears to arrive at the table with his own personal narrative streaming underneath. I hope it goes to 18-17. I'll be back Monday to see Snooker history made, one way or another.

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Einstein On The Beach
by Philip Glass (composer), Robert Wilson (director/designer), Lucinda Childs (choreography), Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson, Lucinda Childs (texts) (Barbican Theatre, London) May 6

"As Einstein On The Beach is performed without intermission, the audience is invited to leave and re-enter the auditorium quietly as desired."

As desired. Einstein On The Beach welcomes, nay, demands, audience responsibility at a whole new level. It is billed as five hours long without intermission and though, in the event, it turns out to be 40 minutes shorter than that, I already know I'm not the only one in the sold-out auditorium who has factored into this information a painless escape, should it prove necessary. I had, after all, been unable to face the second half of Glass's Ghandi opera at the Coli a few years back and disappeared under cover of the intermission crush bar. But the remarkable thing is, not only are the Barbican lobbies during Einstein conspicuously lacking in refugees, most people seem reluctant to tear themselves away for even the important things. Before the show starts, I have promised myself, at the very least, a couple of bathroom breaks, perhaps even a spot of lunch, but three hours in, only the forces of nature oblige me to vacate my seat for a short while.

But then, audience responsibility is, in part, what Einstein On The Beach is all about. Do not seek answers to "why is that woman in the middle of the stage looking so intently through that telescope while engaged in repetitive physical movements?" Rather, ask yourself what do you think she might be doing? Isn't she eloquently graceful? And why you are so curious to know anyway? Does it say on your ticket's conditions of sale that Mr Glass and cohorts undertake to provide the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything or your money back? (I check just in case: it doesn't.)

And this matters because it is so often an issue that infuriates me, that failure of imagination, a determination to be passively "entertained", something we no longer expect even of good television. I occasionally visit the sort of online theatrical chat forums where lazy, reactionary theatregoers are never happy until they can report that a "plot" or at the very least "narrative" had an identifiable beginning middle and end, that a character's "journey" was an abiding concern of theirs, where the authors' failure to make us "care" about the adopted son who first appears in the second act dragged up as his own sister is endlessly tutted over, and a debate ensues over whether the director and/or writer should ever be allowed to set foot in a theatre again, given their manifest neglect in providing some form of "redemption" for the all-drinking, all-dancing, all-whoring Archbishop before the final curtain falls.

What is it about? It's about five hours, though apparently it might only be four hours and twenty minutes. But please feel free at any time to wash your hands or take a dump or whatever else it is that you audience types do with your free time. Just don't bother us, we've got a show to put on here.

Einstein On The Beach belongs to that area of art wherein the art is primarily about itself and is not offering a coatpeg on which to pin a storyline or dramatic arc. Its form is its content. Philip Glass is quite helpful: "It's autodidactic. You learn how to see it by seeing it. The piece teaches you how to watch it. The piece teaches you how to hear it. It's a state of attention. In that sense, it's a form of psychiatry. It's radically different from the way we look at logic. It doesn't need any course to be given on it - it's probably better not to have one. Don't forget that one of our writers, Christopher Knowles, was a brilliant young man [he was 14 when he helped create Einstein in 1974] who was autistic." And indeed Knowles's contribution is one of the jewels of the opera. Robert Wilson, when he first encountered Chris, bucked the trend on such matters, refusing to see Autism as innately problematic. It does such a massive disservice to hundreds of thousands of people to adjudge their brain processes as damaged, rather than just alternative. Knowles's use of English is often an unalloyed pleasure, revelling unfettered in the sound and rhythm and repetition of words and their relation to each other. Intriguingly, one of the sections of text which particularly delighted me, when I later tried to find it in the printed libretto, did not appear to be there. I'm sure it was, but it was the context, the dynamic, that had made the words dance and infused, in their proximity, a vitality that was beyond "meaning". Knowles got there by logorithms, I by open ears, but the artifact is the same and the result, presumably, equipleasurable.

And the reason the texts are so central here is because of what they tell us about the compatible artistic goals of Wilson's theatrical vision and Glass's musical structures. Glass now eschews the term "minimalism" to describe his work, though he seems resigned to being ever-burdened with it. It's a journalist's word, he says, a soundbite to describe a process that is essentially not susceptible to description. Because very often, most of the time, indeed, Glass's music is the very opposite of "minimalist". All-encompassing, though still inaccurate, would be closer to the truth. What Philip Glass's Einstein On The Beach music resembles most of all is nothing less than Random Variation, of the Darwin/Dawkins kind. Even when it appears not actually to do so, it is grinding away underneath, a beautiful swan borne elegantly on furiously paddling webbed feet. And then, every now and then, it shifts almost imperceptibly into a new gear or time sig which gladdens your spirit, even if you know how it's done.. It makes the surprisingly frequent passages of lyricism in the score all the more tender when they do glide by. Only Wagner's opening bars of The Ring Cycle more dramatically evoke Evolution itself.

Einstein? On the Beach? Yes and yes, the former as a virtuouso solo violinist [great minds are seldom great at just one thing] and in Wilson's steampunk sets respectively, though if you care about such things, and I do, the original title was apparently Einstein On The Beach At Wall Street, revealing the opera's "concept" to be about as relevant to its resulting effect as a porcelain urinal would be to Marcel Duchamp. Vital but secondary.

Einstein On The Beach is the sort of work now routinely described as "seminal", though in fact the implied outcome of that term, that it had offspring, is less than accurate. Glass and Wilson both point out that 37 years after its premiere, it remains unique in the theatre. Amazingly, this is its UK premiere (it's a costly bugger and has massive technical demands) and very welcome it is too. Its world tour passes through Toronto, Brooklyn, Berkeley, Mexico City, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, should you find yourself in the vicinity of the world between now and March 2013.

[philipchevron]

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Catherine Spoors (book/lyrics), Stephen Williams (music/additional lyrics)
(Playhouse, Nottingham) preview May 8, opens May 9

Sillitoe's novel gets its second stage adaptation in as many months, this time with music. If you must turn SNASM into a musical, and I can see no real reason why you must, it might as well have a score and dialect book and lyrics that are idiomatically right for the East Midlands in the late 1950s. And the Spoors/Williams collaboration gets major Brownie points for that alone. There are no generic pub rave-ups, ersatz "rock and roll" songs and grim-up-north colliery bands; instead, there is a demanding score which entirely bypasses easy listening. This would be a greater achievement, however, if so much of this musicalization did not baffle more than it surprises. It's never entirely clear what purpose the score is meant to serve. Though evidently conceived with the purest of motives, its delivery comes with frequent question marks. Even a courageous and atypical score of a musical can still be bad and even an idiomatic approach to lyrics can be poorly executed. Perplexingly, some "songs" are about one line long. Elsewhere, repetition of a single thought or slogan is the order of the day. You can't help but feel, if you're feeling generous, that this was a deliberate artistic choice that somehow did not translate in rehearsal. And therein lies the other problem. The show is appallingly directed and badly underrehearsed. But I can't say I'm not glad I saw it.

[Heather]

Mary Shelley by Helen Edmundson (Playhouse, Nottingham) May 3

Ms Edmundson and Shared Experience's director Polly Teale are not the first people to be enthralled by the story of the 18-year old Frankenstein creator and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they are unlikely to be the last. All the same, she seems uniquely suited to their house style, full of movement and imagination and classic heroines of a former age. So it's a pity that too much is crammed into an episodic chronology which, if unavoidable to some extent - it was an eventful and extraordinary life - to allow the play to settle most where it needs to. Edmundson makes a strong case that Dr Frankenstein and his monster are literary manifestations of the relationship between free-spirit Mary Shelley and the family she grew up in, notably her feminist mother who died giving birth to her and her political philosopher father, a sort of left-leaning Ayn Rand unable, like Rand, to remain constant to his own radical ideas in his own life. Shelley's parents were indeed celebrated liberals and it is through his visit of homage to papa, William Godwin, that Percy Shelley first meets young Mary. Edmundson argues, with some force, that the roots of Frankenstein are very much in this complex if loving family itself, but she puts too much flesh on the monster's bones to keep her case clear. Shame, Shared Experience's brisk Anna Karenina remains one of the last two decade's most memorable theatrical pieces, so essentialism is not a new challenge to them.

Mary Shelley,
Liverpool Playhouse.
Saturday 12th May 2012, 2pm.

I liked it. Although a little bit dramatic in parts it was easy to follow and I thought it was one of the better shows I've seen so far this year.

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The House Keeper by Morna Regan (Project Arts Centre, Dublin) May 12

I will not pretend it's a perfect play - the plot device alone of keeping two children locked in the car outside for hours hovers like a massive 800lb gorilla for the duration - but I think I liked it more than local critics appeared to all the same.

In the current recession, a desperate New York woman who has lost everything - her job, her house, her peace of mind and now, it seems, her children, who social services want to reallocate to a woman with a future - breaks into the large Brownstone of a wealthy and slightly eccentric old widow she has known by sight for many years and demands accomodation for herself and her boys. But she has usurped a more complicated domestic arrangement than she first believes. Played out like a series of cruel and sinister games between the three central characters, The House Keeper once or twice slips into melodrama but is, for the most part, a creditable and absorbing tale from the underside of the 2008 financial crisis, elevated greatly by making the actual wheels and cogs of that crisis part of its own dramaturgy. Rough Magic's Lynne Parker directs with clarity and wit but it's the three performers - Ingrid Craigie, Cathy Belton and Robert O'Mahoney - who make it memorable.

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Alice In Funderland by Phillip McMahon (book, lyrics) and Raymond Scannell (music) (Abbey Theatre, Dublin) May 12

Now this is a formidable undertaking - a new musical from the Abbey. Given that the last two, based on Lennox Robinson's play Drama at Innish and the James Stephens novel The Charwoman's Daughter respectively, were 37 years ago and 29 years ago (or "more than 20 years ago" as the Abbey's own publicity puts it, hoping to deflate the size of the oversight), the Abbey is in no position to be claiming musicals as part of its "tradition". And in fairness, they know this and have developed Alice with the energetic and imaginative independent theatre company THISISPOPBABY, who provided one of the highlights of last year's Dublin Theatre Festival with Mark O'Halloran's immersive/site specific Trade. Welcome though this is, it still says something deeply shocking and insular about Ireland's "national" theatre that in a country as noted for its music as its literature, the company does not, in itself, have the resources, confidence or personnel to stage music theatre.

A few years ago, I had a musical, at a fairly advanced stage in its development, turned down by the Abbey and it was an instructive experience. The material moved swiftly from hand to hand within the organisation like a game of pass-the-parcel until it stopped at the theatre's resident Dramaturg. I had one quite lengthy, helpful and worthwhile telephone discussion with the (since departed) Dramaturg who offered genuinely considered observations on the work but he was in the bizarre position of "working with me" on something the Abbey had no intention of commissioning me to finish - the Literary Manager as sop - while I was in the even stranger position of possessing the superior erudition and musical chops that made anything he offered outside the limits of the text no more valuable than my Aunt Agatha's staunchly loyal support. The Abbey Theatre did not, in other words, have anyone on its staff qualified to evaluate the musical merits of the work.

So it's no surprise that in 2012, they claim only developmental and fraternal support on THISISPOPBABY's postmodern vision of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland and, while the Abbey cannot be faulted either for its commitment to the project or its generosity of budget, the project ultimately fails because there was nobody to yell stop at a critical phase: the show is twice as long as it needs to be and has, frankly, no second act. Let there be no misunderstanding - the show has been a massive commercial hit for the Abbey and it would surprise me greatly not to see a swift revival over the Christmas holiday season, but everyone jumped the shark here after the sublime first act highlight which finds the wonderfully exuberant Alice (Sarah Greene) and "The Gay" (the Brian Dowling/Graham Norton model has rapidly become its own stereotype of The Irish Gay in recent years, but Paul Reid manages to transcend it with a note of tenderness and vulnerability) singing a touching duet from a rooftop in Dublin [I think it may be Liberty Hall, a particularly tall building] from which Alice and The Gay rescue each other from despair.

Alice In Funderland, when it goes against the run of play in this manner, scores some genuinely terrific theatrical moments, but more often, the weird postmodern stew of irony, camp, Celtic Tiger satire, adult Pantomime [naturally, the Queen of Hearts is a transvesite or, more accurately, a Dame, as nobody is seriously pretending actual female impersonation], colloquial Dublinisms (only Alice is, fittingly, a real outsider in this world - she's from Cork) and an electropop musical score that mostly passed me by - this style does not lend itself well to either narrative or subtext - and hit home only in its quieter moments, merely feels a bit overdone, a tad undisciplined. This is most frequently manifested in the Book, which too often relies on crass humour at the expense of any more transcendent passages it might otherwise accumulate. Crass humour may be the show's way of declaring its rejection of the elitist wit and language synonymous with the Irish National Theatre at its most subversive, but too often it also kills off any nobler subtextual purposes you sense the musical also wants to reach.

It would be idiotic not to welcome the Queering of Irish theatre as a welcome development and all credit to THISISPOPBABY for its commitment to exploring this from multiple angles - Alice In Funderland has next to nothing in common with Trade apart from a desire to dig under the country's dirty fingernails - and you will certainly find me among the cheerleaders celebrating how far the country, and the Abbey, has come in the years that separate Senator William Butler Yeats from current Abbey artistic director Senator Fiach McConghaill. But sometimes, just stating that journey on the mainstage is not enough.

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Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Stephen Sondheim (music & lyrics), Hugh Wheeler (book) (Festival Theatre, Chichester)

Seen in previews, September 29, opens October 6.

After a rocky start in 1979, usually attributed, probably correctly, to orginal director Hal Prince's attempt to burden the production with an additional layer of meaning, adding the political and social consequences of the Industrial Revolution to the original tale of revenge, Sweeney Todd has gone on to have one of the most successful afterlives of all the Sondheim shows. What's remarkable is that, absent the tilt of Prince's unbalancing concept, it has gone on to be one of his most versatile too, and has been successfully presented in degrees of scale ranging from chamber versions apparently set in Bethlehem Hospital (with the score played by the actor-inmates including, memorably, Patti LuPone on the tuba and triangle!) to full scale Covent Garden and Met versions. It's even been an iffy Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie.

Though I've been privileged to see many of these variations, along with some less successful attempts too, I can't say I've ever seen one quite as thrilling, fluid, absorbing and dramatically coherent as Jonathan Kent's new version at Chichester. Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton are a just about perfect as Sweeney and Mrs Lovett, roles that, by now, appear to offer as many options to actors as Macbeth and his Lady wife have always done, and of the supporting cast, James McConville as Toby merits special mention.

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Stephen Sondheim (music & lyrics), Hugh Wheeler (book) (Adelphi Theatre, London) May 16

Somewhere on the journey from Chichester to The Strand (a five minute walk from Fleet Street itself) this Sweeney Todd has only grown in stature and power. What the show loses in the transfer to a traditional proscenium arch house it makes up for in the theatre's Art-Deco architecture, which contrasts beautifully and appropriately with the grim broken-windows aesthetic of this updated 1930s-era production. But most notable of all, Imelda Staunton's performance as Nellie Lovett must now be considered an all-time-great reading. She finds layers of feeling and meaning in almost every note, word and gesture, simultaneously, if incidentally, fixing focus on how supremely and masterfully economical Sondheim's musical dramaturgy actually is here, nothing wasted, nothing superfluous.

[philipchevron]

Posh by Laura Wade (Royal Court Theatre, London) Seen April 14, 2010

It is no secret that politicians frequently spend their college days in secret and elite drinking societies in which the bonds of a future Establishment are forged. In the USA, there is, of course, the infamous Skull and Bones Society. But in the UK, Oxford University's Bullingdon Club has long been the crucible of only the most privileged and the most conservative of young bloods - those males who Margaret Thatcher considered "one of us" though she herself, as a female, would not have been granted membership. In our own time, neither Boris Johnson's fond recall of "Bullers" or David Cameron's "embarrassment" about his Bullingdon Club past or George Osborne's defiant loyalty to the club alters the fact that here are the people who, after May 6, could once again be running Britain.

Even under media scrutiny, Bullingdon remains a sketchy, foggy entity. What does seem clear is that its members' sense of entitlement and their resentment of the - ostensibly - more meritocratic society over which they aspire to rule has remained unaltered by the new model caring sharing Conservative Party David "call me Dave" Cameron would have us believe he is leading. The documented activities - marathon drinking sessions in hired rooms which are then soundly thrashed, a large cash payment to the landlord covering the extensive damages - have rather obscured what it is that draws these people together. Laura Wade's new play means to blow the roof off that, on the grounds that if they won't tell us what they're up to, we'll just have to make informed guesses.

Posh ensures that the Court's resurgence as a bastion of state-of-the-nation plays continues. Though it lacks the poetry of a Jerusalem, almost the sight of these ten rich kids yomping up a storm, dressed in their silly 18th century uniforms and wigs is a radical enough piece of theatre in itself, as it reminds you how infrequently we ever see this dark corner of the British Imperial Elite in our culture - a couple of references in Evelyn Waugh perhaps, but nothing that makes it to the newstands unless a line is crossed - rape, large scale drug abuse, a minor Royal in Nazi fancy dress, that kind of thing. For the most part, Wade's play is convincing, because although she does not shirk from portraying the appalling sense of entitlement these men carry with them, neither is she silent on what might be considered their righteous indignation at the mediocre society that has supplanted them, the sheer inoffensiveness and stupidity of a bland middle class.

In the end though, her play does make its own damning judgement on the Bullingdon Club [called the Riot or Ryott Club in the play]: even the bonds that tie these men together for life in fraternal pursuit of their own ideal of a just society - basically, one in which they are top dog - are fraudulent. When the collective gets into a spot of bother in the course of the play, one which cannot be swept under the Axminster or bought off, they do not hesitate to put their own preservation before their avowed loyalty, and they easily throw their most obnoxious member to the wolves. In a final scene, however, this black sheep is, in turn, cultivated by the establishment mandarins further up the aristocratic food chain. The implication is clear - a would-be Prime Minister is being groomed.

Perhaps the former New Labour leader Tony Blair's greatest crime - greater even than his complicity in the Iraq War - was that he rendered his party indistinguishable from these goons.

Posh by Laura Wade (Duke of York's Theatre, London) May 16

The West End transfer of the Royal Court's "Bullers" play is less succesful, for rather disconcerting reasons. If, in the storied environs of Sloane Square, Ms Wade's fictionalised account of David Cameron, Gideon "George" Osborne and Boris Johnson in their chinless-posh-boys-go-apeshit college mileu, dripping with the condescenscion and entitlement of an ancient Ruling Class attempting to claw back its natural right to rule the Empire, was unambiguously satirical of the Eton Rifflers while simultaneously shining a welcome theatrical spotlight on the all-too-secretive infant playpen of the traditional Tory establishment, such connections cannot be taken for granted in the more populist West End.

I swear I spent the first act seated among a clutch of braying Henrys who saw only jolly japes - familiar from their own youth? - where insidious power plays were the playwright's intent. Thinking ahead, I wondered at which point, if ever, the guffaws might turn to dust in their mouths as the boys' behaviour inexorably piled up into a steaming pile of inexcusable and inhuman "pranks" perpetrated on the hard-working ordinary people in the play, a narrative important to Wade's intended condemnation of how adult Tory contempt for other Britons has tenacious and time-honoured roots. But I bottled it. It was so unbearable that I had to move, after the intermission, as far away from them as possible.

None of which is the fault of the excellent cast, mostly transported intact from the Royal Court, led by the indispensable Leo Bill.