A report produced by UK Theatre and its sister organisation SOLT (Society of London Theatre) found that the UK’s creative industries stand to lose about £1.4 billion per week during 2020, with more than 400,000 jobs at stake as a result. This research suggests that the UK’s creative sector will be hit harder than many others by the pandemic —and twice as hard as the wider economy. Theatre can’t survive without an audience and the economics of socially distanced audiences are not sustainable. The future of theatre is on a knife-edge and it is important that we all understand what is at stake.

I am perhaps better placed than some to comment on what the future might be like after lockdown if theatres like ours don’t survive. The Everyman and the Playhouse are roughly a mile apart and have very different histories. Liverpool is a city that has experienced more than its share of economic hardship and when I first arrived both theatres had been closed in recent history and/or were only able to receive work produced elsewhere. In 1999 Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council made the decision that they should be run as one organisation. In this way they could share staff and not compete with each other for audiences. Although neither theatre was fully closed for long, the effects on the theatrical landscape in Liverpool were profound and were still felt until recently.

Both the Everyman and the Playhouse in their day had had wonderful and rightly lauded youth theatres. When I arrived, the Playhouse studio was closed and it had no
official youth theatre. At the Everyman, a group of volunteers courageously tried to keep a tiny youth theatre going.

Theatre is part of an intricate ecosystem. Without a thriving youth theatre, you will see fewer fringe outfits evolving into the next Wise Children, the next Kneehigh—innovative, thrilling theatre companies. The Everyman and Playhouse youth theatres launched such actors as David Morrissey, Stephen Graham, the McGanns, Daniel Craig, Cathy Tyson, Ian Hart, and many more. In the performing arts, the UK punches well above its weight. Disrupt the eco-system at a regional level and watch your national and global talent pool shrink.

Three years ago a member of our youth theatre, Darci Shaw, played one of the younger sisters in my production of Fiddler on the Roof at the Everyman. She was only 15. Last year she played the young Judy Garland in Judy, starring Renée Zellweger. And YEP (Young Everyman and Playhouse) now has hundreds of members. As well as YEP actors, we have YEP producers, playwrights, technicians and directors.

The former UK Theatre executive director David Brownlee completed a report, just before lockdown, on how theatres have coped with austerity. Thirteen regional theatres contributed to it, including us. Brownlee says of regional theatres: “They are a partner and a leader in their broader artistic communities. They are major civic organisations working to improve places and lives . . . They change lives and they make lives worth living.”

Before lockdown our Playhouse, in partnership with Merseycare, was serving as a “Life Room” during the day, offering workshops for people recovering from addiction and mental health issues. It is one of many initiatives we have, often in partnership with education establishments, community centres and health providers, to use the skills associated with performance to improve the quality of life and skills of our many communities.

During lockdown we have been running many of these workshops with our communities via Zoom. Not to keep us busy—but because we are aware of how important they are to the people that experience them.

Looking around Europe, several of our neighbours recognise the importance of the performing arts in this holistic sense. Italy has invested €220 million to help sustain its industry. Germany has invested €1 billion in a fund to help cultural organisations reopen. Last month Spain’s culture minister unveiled a rescue package of extending credits and specialist finances worth €760 million alongside a €76 million fund to help them survive.

SOLT and UK Theatre have already issued a set of recommendations to our government including an emergency rescue fund, long-term loan, and a Cultural Investment Participation Scheme. We have written to our MPs and pray that Oliver Dowden, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, can make good his pledge to “look at what further support we can give theatres during this challenging time”. The “roadmap” he produced last week needs detail and a financial package attached, if it is to take us to a safe destination.

Closing a theatre means more than losing a venue in which to watch a show. It’s potentially the loss of the hub at the centre of the wheel. And though you can close a theatre in the blink of an eye, recreating its relationship with the wider theatre ecosystem and regaining the faith of its audiences can take years.

Prior to Covid-19, Liverpool had a burgeoning theatre scene which involved many more theatres, companies and artists than just the Everyman and Playhouse. We are a symbiotic family. More drama graduates and local artists are choosing to stay in Liverpool because there might be enough work for them here without moving to London (as they used to do in their droves). This talent retention is great for local theatres but it is also good for our associated industries of, say, restaurants, pubs and baby-sitters. And all of that is essential for a visitor economy such as Liverpool’s, founded on its cultural vibrancy. And so the wheel spins beautifully.

The future of theatre is essential for our cultural well-being locally and nationally but that is not to say that the future should be the same as the past.

This enforced pause has made many of us reflect on what our art form should look like in the future. How can we be more diverse, more inclusive, serve our artists and communities more equitably? We need to evolve. We need to make sure that everyone can benefit from all that we bring to our regions, our cities and our souls.

The post Theatre’s plague year appeared first on Standpoint.

However, a level of Elizabethan and Jacobean authenticity on which few had reckoned was that spring 2020 would see British theatres closed to restrain the spread of a plague, as last happened in 1608. Then, the state shut down the playhouses; now Boris Johnson’s government advised theatregoers to stay away, leaving producers little choice but to suspend performances. Health comes first, but it is regrettable that the medical crisis has reduced the run of one of the most powerful theatrical experiences since that last stage-closing contagion 412 years ago.

On Blueberry Hill, which reached London’s Trafalgar Studios via Dublin and New York, is by Sebastian Barry, an Irish writer who is an occasional dramatist but has a larger reputation as a novelist (The Secret Scripture, Days Without End).

His latest play entwines soliloquies from Christy, a lean, sweary plain-speaker, and PJ, a plump, poetic former trainee Catholic priest. They first speak from the bunks of what is clearly a prison bed, but it is not until near the end of the 100 minutes that they share the same light or interact. Irish theatrical memory monologues have to fight to drown out the powerful echo of Samuel Beckett’s mesmerising solos such as Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days. But Barry holds his own line by eschewing Beckettian timeless and placeless absurdism for a precise Irish topography and history closer to James Joyce’s streams of detail.

Christy remembers that one of his sons “wasn’t like other boys in Monkstown Farm. He didn’t want to go see Finn Harps playing Bray Wanderers at the football.” PJ recalls that his mother had “this funny phrase she used, that something or other was as black as a giraffe’s tongue. I never heard another person say it, and I don’t even know if a giraffe’s tongue is black”.

From the moment the same name, “Pea-dar”, turns up, apparently casually, in consecutive sections from the men, we are desperate to know how they ended up as cellmates. It would be unfair to Barry’s dense and suspenseful concealment and revelation to say more than that the devastating explanation involves love, sex, death and Ireland’s deep and recent histories. Themes of lengthy revenges and epiphanic redemption allow the play to be taken as a metaphor for Irish enmities and fragile peace. However, in Jim Culleton’s production, it is, above all, an advertisement for theatre’s advantages over other fiction. Barry, as a fine novelist, is ideally placed to understand the differences between storytelling on page and stage, and luxuriates in them.

Niall Buggy’s Christy and David Ganly’s PJ acknowledge and engage with our reactions. The text’s numerous Roman Catholic references do not include the confessional box, but the theatre in effect becomes one as we listen in grave silence to lives gone wrong. No penitent, though, can ever have admitted their sins with the vocal range and nuance—from screaming rage to stunned silence beyond speech—that Buggy and Ganly bring to a play that demands almost telepathic collaboration while paradoxically behaving for most of the length as if alone on stage. With the stage run truncated, the BBC or Channel 4, must surely, as public service, record this astonishing show.

Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, just interrupted at the Duke of York’s, premiered in 1941, when a farce about a séance either distracted or consoled Londoners contemplating potential death from aerial bombing. Coward, who disliked theories that his light comedies were more serious than they seemed, insisted that the play succeeded because it took audience’s minds off the Second World War, and the latest revival could have had a similar effect in a differently apprehensive capital. But the best productions (including this one by Richard Eyre) bring out something deeper and darker about grief and hauntings, which we may guess to have drawn on Coward’s own experience of loss, and the singeing of new love by old flames.

The dramatist may also have been channelling guilt about recycling people into characters. Widowed novelist Charles Condomine, working on a book about a spiritualist, invites to dinner, for research purposes, Madame Arcati, a famous London medium who has retired to his English village.

Sexual politics are primitive—Charles ends up being spectre-pecked by his ex-wife, Elvira—but Eyre makes the supernatural moments nicely spooky, including an anachronistic yet enjoyable nod to The Exorcist. Blithe Spirit’s durability comes from offering a rare major role for older actresses. Angela Lansbury played it in the West End at 89, and a film version has just opened with the 85-year-old Judi Dench. Relatively a kid, at 61, Jennifer Saunders makes Arcati a hyperactive, tetchy eccentric, prone to belching and frantically fanning blouse or skirt to cool areas of sudden body heat. Her sheep-herding delivery and spread-legged stance, standing or seated, feel influenced by the late TV dog-whisperer, Barbara Woodhouse. A sign of these strange times was that the audience tangibly tensed during the elaborate rounds of hand-shaking common in mid-20th-century plays about the posh, Britons having been advised to knock elbows or bump shoes as a healthier greeting.

For one theatrical casualty of Covid-19, the fate was ironic. In The Upstart Crow (Gielgud Theatre), the risk of playgoing being banned, by pox or Puritans, is one of the trials faced by William Shakespeare in Ben Elton’s adaptation of his BBC sitcom. The father of English drama, played with charismatic exasperation by David Mitchell, also suffers creative drought, demanding daughters, and his life starting weirdly to mirror King Lear’s. The script is exuberant and rude (about new sensitivities around identity, among other things), but also learned about Shakespeare’s life and work, and Sean Foley’s physically and visually vivid production could lift spirits in a plague time. Elton should surely return this spin-off to its TV home.

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This 14th full-length play by Sir Tom Stoppard (a member of this magazine’s advisory board) consists of nine scenes set in Vienna. We meet, in 1899, two Austrian Jewish families as they celebrate the last Christmas (two members have “married out” to Catholics) of the 19th century. We take leave of those left in 1955, when an Anglicised, secularised descendant of the clan learns how many relatives perished in the Holocaust.

My reaction to Leopoldstadt was that it contains two of Stoppard’s greatest scenes. In one, Hermann Merz (magnetically played by Adrian Scarborough) challenges to a duel a soldier who has cuckolded him, but discovers that officers are barred from duelling with Jews, because (a shocking historical detail new to me) Jews have no honour to lose. The other stand-out stand-off is the climactic realisation by the English refugee of the extent to which the Jewish blood he has denied as part of his own identity has been spilled by Hitler.

These exchanges seem clearly to reflect the dramatist’s very belated discovery that his mother came from a Jewish Czech family, many of whom died in Auschwitz; after bringing her sons to England as refugees, she deliberately eradicated the past. This background makes Leopoldstadt a fascinating companion to Rock ’n’ Roll, which implicitly imagined a Tomas Straussler who remained in Czechoslovakia, rather than being reinvented as English schoolboy Tom Stoppard.

There’s also a lovely example of the underpinning by other literary works that are a Stoppard signature in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties, The Invention of Love, and The Real Thing. A character in Leopoldstadt is reading a manuscript copy of a play that a friend is struggling to get published because of prudery. Although never directly stated, this is clearly Reigen (later better known as La Ronde) by Arthur Schnitzler, which has a sexual encounter between a soldier and a woman that is deliberately mirrored by Stoppard.

My caveat was that, after a quarter of a century has passed during the interval, the characters, like doctors or the loved ones of someone who has been in a long coma, deliver extended updates on what has been happening in Austrian politics and psychiatry, the fight for a Jewish homeland and American popular culture. In Travesties, a recent revival of which was the previous collaboration between Stoppard and director Patrick Marber, similar historical exposition is wittily handled through the device of a valet bringing a newspaper; in this play, the actors suddenly become newscasters. Stoppard has a record of significantly revising texts, subsequent editions often markedly different from the first published versions, and he and Marber might usefully look at these passages.

The above five paragraphs would have been my review. But my party included two Jewish Americans, several of whose forebears died in the Nazi camps. Leopoldstadt, they said, resembled the Holocaust Awareness Museum in a small American town—benignly intended but simplistically predicated on the assumption of an audience completely uneducated about Judaism. Speeches explaining Passover and circumcision seemed, they felt, to assume gentile viewers. Imagine, one friend said, a Jewish play that solemnly informed me of the Christmas significance of little baby Jesus.

The content and hostility of this response threw me, but I subsequently heard it from other Jewish theatre-goers. So it seems important, as an English Catholic who enjoyed seeing the play, and even more reading it, to report. Perhaps the problem is that Stoppard has generally written about subjects—moral philosophy in Jumpers, British-Russian exiles in The Coast of Utopia—on which he knows more than almost anyone in the audience. In this case, a significant percentage of theatre-goers will know more than him, and have longer experience of being Jewish.

As with the Austrian historical fill-in speeches, this is an issue of exposition, and, if the reaction of my friends proves more widespread, is perhaps something playwright and director should reconsider if Leopoldstadt is to take its place as top Stoppard, alongside Rosencrantz, Arcadia, Travesties, The Invention of Love, and the TV play Professional Foul.

Stoppard’s near-contemporary and rival for the title of greatest living English dramatist, Caryl Churchill, is simultaneously represented by a 20th anniversary revival of Far Away (Donmar Warehouse, London, until April 4).

This dystopian fable about an underground freedom movement in an unnamed state has a running time of barely 40 minutes, but achieves a sense of depth and darkness hugely disproportionate to this length.

Churchill’s governing metaphor of a factory making fancy-dress hats to be worn by prisoners in a sinister public parade is magnificently realised by Lyndsey Turner’s direction and Lizzie Clachan’s design. In a series of sight-gags slickly achieved by technology, the headgear grows ever more exotically preposterous between blackouts, before we see them sported by two dozen silent extras in something like a totalitarian Ascot.

The Churchill has four speaking parts, the Stoppard 37. Death of England (National Theatre, until March 7) has many, but all are voiced by a single actor. In this 100-minute monologue by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer (who also directs), Rafe Spall is Michael, a 39-year-old East Londoner, from whom we hear before, during and after the eulogy he delivers at his father’s funeral. In this explicitly post-Brexit England, dad may not be all that is dead.

Co-author Williams previously wrote fine plays about the cultural undersides of football (Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads) and boxing (Sucker Punch), and the potential in both sports for racism and redemption is key to Death of England. A final twist is audacious and warming, if implausible. Spall, with a verbal swagger and attack that make you hope the National has stockpiled gargle, interacts with the audience in spars both scripted and ad-libbed: “Oi, why you reading the programme? Cast list? There’s only one of us in it.”

The post Honour and courage appeared first on Standpoint.

The writer-director combinations of April De Angelis/Melly Still (for Ferrante) and Joel Horwood/Katy Rudd (for Gaiman) have each found a style as fluid as movies but with the special visual effects having to be magicked in front of us rather than added through months of computerised post-production. Hence the extraordinary thrill when an Italian beach town suddenly materialises in My Brilliant Friend, or, in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a world of demons and dark matter appears behind a suburban bedroom. (Gaiman’s story is a post-Hawking rewrite of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.)

One caveat: both shows feature rippled sheets representing sea, and puppets as non-human or inhuman characters, leading me to feel the need for a moratorium on these theatrical devices. In such visual spectaculars, actors can be overlooked, but Niamh Cusack further burnishes a fine career as the Ferrante surrogate Lenu, and Samuel Blenkin starts on what seems sure to be a shining path as the Gaiman stand-in.

By the first month of a new year, Christmas shows can feel anachronistic. But two of those with the longest runs are secularly enjoyable enough to offer continuing consolation until spring comes.

A show based on a book by David Walliams with songs by Robbie Williams was always going to sell tickets to their fan-bases, but The Boy in the Dress (RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon, until March 8) deserves to appeal far beyond—a charming parable about non-censorious self-expression, which even finds a way of making football work on stage.

A revival of The Boy Friend (Menier Chocolate Factory, until March 7), Sandy Wilson’s frothy 1954 musical comedy set at a Riviera finishing school, is stunningly sung (Janie Dee, Amara Okereke) and expertly pick-pocketed for every possible laugh (Adrian Edmondson). It would be a huge surprise if both do not land within London’s West End within twelve months.

At the turn of a year, any titular Dicks tend to be Whittington, but the hero of Teenage Dick (Donmar Warehouse, until February 1) is King Richard III, though now a 17-year-old student, Richard Gloucester, at an American high school called Roseland.

Perhaps because adolescent classrooms contain the closest contemporary equivalent to the strict hierarchies and political and sexual plotting of 17th-century court, schools often host Shakespeare updatings—The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, and Twelfth Night respectively becoming the campus movies 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), O (2001), and She’s the Man (2006).

Mike Lew, the young Chinese-American writer of Teenage Dick, clearly knows those predecessors, but has also acutely studied Shakespeare. The contemporary renaming is sharply smart, with King Edward IV reborn as Eddie Ivy, Roseland’s star football quarterback. Queen Margaret becomes prom queen Anne Margaret, although, at her age, has understandably not been widowed but dumped by a lover. The Dukes of Clarence and Buckingham are feminised as Clarissa Duke and Barbara “Buck” Buckingham, in an understandable attempt at gender re-balance.

The main example of diverse characterisation continues from the original. Richard Gloucester suffers discrimination for a disability, although Lew departs from Shakespeare in specifying (in the text published by Nick Hern Books) that no able-bodied actor should ever play the role. He also requests that “Buck” be cast, as written, as a wheelchair-user. In the London premiere, Daniel Monks, a hemiplegic, is Dick, with Ruth Madeley as Buck.

This physical authenticity brings an unusual peril to the fight scenes, in which it is impossible to know which moves are directed and which bodily dictated. Another tension for those familiar with Richard III is how Lew will find an equivalent to the astonishing psychopathic love scene (“Was ever woman in this humour wooed?”) where the demented pretender seduces his rival’s grieving ex. Cleverly, the tension becomes not how Anne Margaret can possibly succumb to a man who disgusts her, but how she will come up with a refusal that doesn’t sound bigoted. Richard plays cynically on her desire to seem “woke”.

Another American import that provocatively plays with the audience’s stereotypes and sensitivities is Fairview (Young Vic, until January 23). This Pulitzer Prize-winner by Jackie Sibblies Drury starts with an African-American family preparing for a birthday dinner. The scene lasts around half an hour, a significant length as the super-bright lighting and exaggerated acting and reactions increasingly suggest a sitcom episode. We then see everything again, the cast exactly reproducing the movements of their bodies and lips, but hear quite different voices, again indicating that the action is a show within a show.

Critics have been asked not to reveal what occurs during the last part, but suffice to say that it is a further reversal of expectations that takes a large part of the audience to a very unexpected place. I should also report that a significant number of keen theatre-goers I know, who went as ticket-buying civilians, were furious about this turn-over moment, feeling that it was both ideologically cheap and broke the contract of respect with paying customers.

The ambushes seem intended to make a point about the depiction and perception of minority ethnic people, especially in popular culture. Some critics suggested that Fairview was exaggerating the extent of a problem that is now diminishing. However, the white avalanche in this month’s BAFTA film nominations suggests that the play’s view is fair.

What struck me about both Fairview and Teenage Dick is that, while the drive in British theatre for greater diversity and sensitivity often tends towards virtuously stern work, American dramatists are finding ways of being progressive but also bold. (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, seen recently at the Donmar, is another example.) Woke theatre need not mean sleepy evenings.

The post Special affects appeared first on Standpoint.

Those two dramas of gender tension are re-explored for the era of #metoo in Royal Shakespeare Company revivals that are stopping over at the Barbican in London between their Stratford-on-Avon premieres and UK tours next year.

RSC artistic director Gregory Doran’s new version of Measure for Measure (until January 16) moves the play to Vienna in 1900, which feels a good fit as Sigmund Freud would have found fascinating case studies in its main male characters: Angelo, the substitute ruler, and the Duke who abdicated suddenly but comes back in the guise of a friar to spy on his successor. Eroticism and extinction—constant, and overlapping, Freudian concerns—are also central to a play in which Isabella, a novice nun, is offered a reprieve for her death-sentenced brother if she surrenders her virginity to Angelo.

This heightened resonance energises Doran’s staging. When Isabella warns Angelo that raping her will ruin his reputation, his sneering “Who will believe thee?” offers one of those moments of shock in Shakespeare when his lines, four centuries old, resonate today.

A post-Weinstein reading reduces the weight that Shakespeare gives to Isabella’s  virginity as a condition of faith, perhaps reflecting what an increasing number of scholars believe to have been his status as a closet Catholic in recently Protestant England. The horror of Lucy Phelps’s strong, bright Isabella at the sexual bargain feels less religious than feminist: a complex intellectual position for a nun now, still more at the time the production is set.

This interpretation, though, makes the sexual politics very timely, as do the politics of power. Although the dramatist had to be nuanced in the first play to negotiate the sensitivities of the Jacobean rather than Elizabethan court, he created, in the Duke and Angelo, survivingly recognisable archetypes of liberal and authoritarian leaders, both of whom deceive the people. Measure for Measure has become very popular in Russia during the Putin decades, perhaps because his manœuvres around the Russian constitution make him a rare actual example of a leader who, Duke-like, gives up power, then reclaims it. Although Sandy Grierson, as Angelo, looks somewhat Putinesque, Doran’s production offers more broadly applicable portraits of sinister disciplinarians and contradictory liberals. The combination of charm, bullshit and mystery in Anthony Byrne’s Duke does not match any specific politician, yet could be many.

But, despite its long topicalities, Measure for Measure is in other ways a problem play, especially in tone. Broad comedy—involving Elbow, an even more tedious Shakespearean comedy cop than Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing—alternates with not only the most brutal Shakespearean bed trick (one virgin swapped in the dark for another) but also a vicious head trick, in which one severed head impersonates another.

Doran and his visual collaborators (Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set is lit by Simon Spencer) deal with this by framing even the lightest moments sombrely. Looking influenced by the line about Vienna’s ruler being a “Duke of dark corners”, they create a court of shadows and mirrors, which sometimes become two-way, exposing surveillance and voyeurism. Continuing the signature of Doran’s RSC tenure, the verse is both clearly comprehended by the actors and comprehensible to the audience.

Whereas enlightenment about male-female relations has further empowered Measure for Measure, it has pretty much stymied The Taming of the Shrew (until January 18), which can now be performed only if some solution is found to a denouement in which laddish Petruchio and his mates hold a contest to find out who has the most submissive wife, which Katherine wins by symbolically placing her hand under her hubby’s foot.

A dystopian approach—an Elizabethan anticipation of The Handmaid’s Tale—might crack the final scene, but wrecks the rest of the text. Most recent directors and actors have dealt with this moment by suggesting that either Petruchio or Katherine intends the climactic metaphor of being downtrodden as a bitterly ironic commentary on the gender expectations of the society around them.

Going far beyond such verbal inverted commas, Justin Audibert’s production radically inverts the casting. It is now not Petruchio who sets out to marry by any means the toxic spinster Katherine, but Petruchia, played with enjoyable ladette extravagance by Claire Price. The target she aims to seduce and subdue is a notorious Paduan bachelor, played by Joseph Arkley, although he retains the name Katherine and nick-name Kate.

This peculiar baptism is a metrical necessity. The fashion for gender-swap casting is made for Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays, where transition can be achieved with a change of final vowel: Petruchio’s rival suitors Hortensio and Lucio here compete with Petruchia as Hortensia and Lucia. Similarly, “he”/“she” and “his”/“hers” can be rotated without violence to the syllabic rhythm. But, while Kate might be masculinised to “Cato” in a prose drama, here it would not only break the rhythmic discipline, but kill the many rhymes with “mate”. So the production must have a boy called Katherine.

Audibert’s ingenious implication is that Signora Baptista so wanted daughters that she named and raised her sons as female, and this, helped by Arkley wearing his hair long, seems plausible enough. Freud helps this Shrew almost as much as he does the Measure.

Against my fears, the casting works as an insight rather than a gimmick. The hooped skirts are so long and heavy that the women seem to glide like Daleks, bringing laughs, but the humour turns progressively cruel and dark. A comic dystopia in which men are under women’s whim and whip exposes the misogynistic horror of The Taming of the Shrew we used to see. A script that had become unplayable is saved. The RSC is on powerful form.

The post Pulling the trigger appeared first on Standpoint.

The Watsons, which premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre, unfolds in a very familiar Austen setting. The spirited heroine, Emma, is the youngest daughter of an impoverished clergyman. She was sent off at an early age to be raised by a rich aunt who has re-married and disposed of her. Now aged 19, she’s returned almost like a stranger to the family home where her father is on his deathbed. It’s quickly established that Emma and her sisters must get married asap. Once their father dies, they will no longer have a roof over their heads and will be forced to move in with their boorish brother and his dreadful, social- climbing wife.

The play opens with Emma at home getting ready for a dance at the Assembly room. It will be her first introduction to local society. The party guests arrive through multiple doors at the back of the stage transforming the drawing room into a dance floor. They include the wealthy merchant class, a trio of attractive army officers, the local clergy and finally the Osbornes, the grandest family in town, who are titled and live in a castle. By the end of the evening, Emma has three possible suitors: a handsome cad, an earnest vicar, and a wealthy but ill-mannered aristocrat. The big question for anyone attempting to finish Jane Austen’s story is: which one will Emma choose?

By her own admission, Laura Wade—who wrote Posh, the play about the Cameron and Johnson generation’s jolly japes at Oxford with the Bullingdon Club—spent almost a decade trying to adapt and complete The Watsons. On more than one occasion the manuscript was consigned to the proverbial desk drawer before being taken out and re-written, again and again. It was worth the wait: the result is a faultless piece of comic writing, perfectly pitched, each line of dialogue smoothed and polished like a gemstone.

The 19-strong cast is deftly directed by Samuel West, who happens to be the playwright’s husband. The play manages to transition between a number of different styles—from drawing room drama to bedroom farce and Brechtian alienation techniques—without any awkward moments. Like an automatic car: you are not aware of the gears changing.

The dilemma of “what will Emma do next?” is solved by the writer making herself a character in her own play, a sort of Doctor Who-like time-traveller in 18th-century England. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Laura tries to explain to the assembled ladies in bonnets that they have been created out of the imagination of a certain Jane Austen and by way of proof pulls out a £10 note from her pocket with the novelist’s portrait on it.

The revelation that she is not real but a character leads Emma into an existential crisis with endless comic possibilities. I was reminded of Jim Carrey’s character in the satirical, sci-fi film, The Truman Show, who discovers that his entire life is a sham and he is in fact the unsuspecting star of a reality TV show. Laura, the playwright character, makes reference to Pirandello’s absurdist comedy Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which six characters storm in from the back of the stage demanding to see the author who has left them “unfinished”.

Laura states that her mission in The Watsons is to rescue Austen’s characters from a perpetual literary limbo. Unfortunately, the characters don’t want to be dictated to by the author and start demanding their rights. They have a lively debate about the nature of society and what it means to be human, referencing Hobbes’s “state of nature” and Rousseau’s social contract, arguments that would have been familiar to an educated person in Austen’s era.

Wade displays a Stoppardian quality in her ability to play on words, to parody and to create a convincing intellectual hinterland. She is also extremely funny. During the interval I reflected to my companion that The Watsons provided a welcome diversion to the endless debate about Brexit. My analysis proved a little premature, as in the second act the characters demand “to take back control” from the author, causing a huge roar of laughter. The Watsons, notable for its fidelity to the original text, will appeal to a general audience as well as devoted Austen fans. If it doesn’t get a successful West End transfer and a nationwide tour, I’ll eat my bonnet.

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Some current playwrights, though, willingly surrender supremacy. Martin Crimp, debbie tucker green (she uses lower case letters) and Caryl Churchill often offer bald speech, with no characters, setting or action specified. I’ve seen productions of Crimp’s The Treatment and Churchill’s Love and Information that were entirely different in tale and detail.

This outsourcing of story-telling to directors and actors, though, is taken to an apogee of creative freedom by Alice Birch’s [BLANK]. Extending experiments with fluidity of meaning in her earlier plays, Anatomy of a Suicide (2017) and Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again (2014), Birch offers 100 scenes, from which theatres are invited to choose as many as they want. Whereas the average play-text is poetry-thin, the published text of [BLANK] runs to a novel-fat 516 pages.

Maria Aberg has picked 30 fragments for her production at the Donmar Warehouse (until November 30). Unlike some recent work of Churchill, whom Birch acknowledges as a mentor, the scenes are not completely free of context. Emerging from workshops with the Clean Break company, which gives theatrical rehab to current and former prisoners, the sketches trace clear themes of transgression, addiction, incarceration and redemption.

Aberg’s imagining draws out sub-plots including a mother’s reunion, during a house burglary, with a daughter who is selling sex to buy drugs. In other strands, a woman gives birth in jail, and a victim of serial domestic violence insists to a sceptical friend that she has finally chosen well. Thirteen of the cast of 16—with especially energetic and flexible contributions from Zainab Hasan, Jemima Rooper, Thusitha Jayasundera and Lucy Edkins—feature in the longest section, which burns through 67 pages. A dinner party with dark twists, it resembles Mike Leigh’s 1977 play Abigail’s Party, rewritten to accommodate the plant-based food, cocaine-taking, and same-sex couples that are more a feature of middle-class entertaining today.

DIY novels, asking the reader to make their own sense from chapters stacked randomly in a box, proved a brief 1960s fashion. More sensibly delegating narrative to a director, the make-your-own-play movement looks to have greater longevity, especially if as vividly visualised and acted as [BLANK]. It will be intriguing to see what other productions do with these scenes, or some of the 70 unused ones.        

The ghost of Henrik Ibsen, if haunting British theatres, might be perplexed to find his plays taking so many vacations from the late 19th-century Scandinavia where he left them.

So far this year, Calcutta was the setting for Tanika Gupta’s A Doll’s House (Lyric Hammersmith); Ibsen’s folkloric protagonist Peer Gynt became 21st-century citizen Peter Gynt in David Hare’s National Theatre version; Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s An Enemy of the People (Nottingham Playhouse) made the male lead female and looked like an episode of The Killing. At Chichester, Hedda Gabler kept her gender, but as a modern mother, in Cordelia Lynn’s Hedda Tesman. Now, Ghosts travels from 1881 Norway to present-day India and translates into When the Crows Visit by Anupama Chandrasekhar at London’s Kiln Theatre (until November 30).

As an Ibsen obsessive, I have seen all five, and they expose a paradox. Ibsen is so popular—the next-most-staged as well as second-greatest playwright after Shakespeare—because of themes that have not only retained, but increased, their relevance. An Enemy of the People involves whistle-blowing and political mob intolerance; A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler dramatise restrictions on female self-expression that shamefully still exist; Ghosts turns, long pre-DNA, on inherited traits and euthanasia.

But, if old plays already contain such topicalities, what is gained from modernising them? It is surely more striking to see people being feminist or anti-corporate in the 1880s than pursuing the same values now.

In Chandrasekhar’s When the Crows Visit, Ibsen’s trope of inherited venereal disease becomes a family pattern of male sexual violence, which is a plausible substitution. But the hypocritically moralistic Pastor Manders, one of Ibsen’s most vivid characters, becomes, less interestingly, a corrupt cop. Oddly, this version of Ghosts is in one sense less contemporary than the original, jettisoning its prescient examination of mercy-killing, even though Ibsen’s final scenes plead to be set in a Swiss Dignitas clinic. Indhu Rubasingham directs with her customary dash and atmosphere (including ominous shadows of giant crows), but 2019’s quintet of Ibsen translocations have collectively suggested that his plays move less once moved.

This is a frustrating time of year for seekers of serious theatre, with productions bumped off at November’s end to make way for the pantos and Santa-shows. As a result, there’s only another fortnight to see the productions above, and just a week for The Antipodes (Dorfman, National Theatre).

Get there if you can because the dramatist, 38-year-old Annie Baker, is a startlingly original voice. Two previous plays seen at the National, The Flick and John, established the Baker recipe of long, slow exploration of off-beat settings—a failing art-house cinema, a B&B near an American Civil War site—with characters who alternate sharp short comic repartee with torrential monologues that may be true or tactical. For unnervingly long spells, there may be no speech or even people on stage.

The Antipodes features dressed-down creative types in a grimly minimalist boardroom, brain-storming what might be a box-set, movie, ad campaign, even a political party. They suspect the solution may involve some kind of “monsters”, but there are typically Baker-vague hints that something monstrous is heading for the office.

If you like plays to have a take-away message, there’s one here about the stories we tell ourselves and others to impose order on the world. More importantly, though, Baker continues to rethink theatrical storytelling: structurally, linguistically, visually—and thrillingly.

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I was reminded of this story as I watched Simon Woods’s Hansard at the National Theatre (until November 25). The curtain opens on a large Cotswold kitchen with a cream-coloured Aga, wooden refectory table, fireplace and Roberts radio. Moments later, a Tory MP played by Alex Jennings, bursts through the door announcing that he’s home for the weekend. What follows is an 80-minute verbal tennis match between him and his left-leaning wife, Diana, played by Lindsay Duncan. It’s witty and barbed, a homage to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, relocated to Middle England.

Hansard is set in 1988 but the arguments feel contemporary. That’s because the great Brexit divide isn’t really about the European Union, it’s about values. One imagines similar scenes playing out in the home of Jo Johnson before he resigned from his brother’s cabinet (he is married to Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman). Hansard’s fictional Tory MP, Robin Hesketh, is an old Etonian and a junior minister in the Thatcher government. His wife is furious with him because he has just voted in favour of the Section 28 clause in the Local Government Act, banning schools from promoting the acceptability of homosexuality. What angered her even more was listening to him defend the policy on Radio 4’s Any Questions.

Diana Hesketh accuses her husband and his party of pandering to the base instincts and prejudices of the British public. He hits back with: “In 20 years, no one in this country will be allowed to be a white hetrosexual male!”, at which point the man next to me in the stalls muttered “Hear, hear.” Gazing around at a the predominantly white, middle-class, middle-aged audience, I felt as if the playwright had put a huge mirror on the National Theatre stage. We were watching ourselves.

As an old Etonian, Simon Woods knows of what he speaks. A former actor, this is his first play and it is an assured debut. The characters feel authentic and in less than an hour and a half he takes the audience on a journey from comedy to tragedy with economy and a high degree of emotional intelligence. My quibbles: there’s a twist at the end which feels like an overly abrupt gear shift and a tendency to play to the gallery. At one point, Diana Hesketh remarks how mystified she is by “the insatiable desire of the people of this country to be fucked by an Old Etonian”. This got a roar of laughter; but it felt almost too easy.

In pure theatrical terms, Hansard lacks the verve and imagination of Lucy Prebble’s A Very Expensive Poison which opened in the same week at the Old Vic. Based on a book by a Guardian journalist, Luke Harding, it is about the poisoning of the ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. In the hands of a lesser playwright, this could be fairly heavy going. But Prebble grasps both the complex politics and the absurdity of an otherwise tragic tale with a tone that shifts with the speed of a rotating disco ball. The hapless Kremlin hitmen are a burlesque comedy duo, Putin is a Bond villain who harangues the audience from the sidelines, while oligarch Boris
Berezovsky grasps the microphone and croons maudlin Russian ballads. Thrown into the mix are dance-sequences and life-sized Spitting Image puppets of Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Brezhnev. If you enjoyed Lucy Prebble’s Enron, you will love this.

It is hard these days for any play to compete with the real drama unfolding in Westminster. On the day Boris Johnson lost his first vote as prime minister, Radio 4’s Front Row reviewed the day’s proceedings in Parliament as if it were a play. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s lounging posture was deemed worthy of Oscar Wilde. One critic wondered if Winston Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames, could come back as a ghost to Boris Johnson’s Hamlet while another retorted that it was like watching a bunch of posh sixth-formers perform a bad school play with over-acting and knockabout panto villainy.

The ancient Greeks were the first to understand the importance of theatre as a way of understanding the thorny political and social issues of the day. And in plays such as Julius Caesar and King Lear, Shakespeare identified the sweet spot in drama as the intersection between personal and the political. Take that away, and you are left with empty agitprop. For many years we had to make do with David Hare explaining the State of the Nation on stage at the National Theatre. It is encouraging to see a new generation of British playwrights including Lucy Prebble, Simon Woods, Mike Bartlett (Charles III) and James Graham (This House) taking on the challenge.

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Hickson is a dramatist who has grabbed attention (and young audiences) with work weaving small-scale personal stories into the grand flow of world events and ideologies. Oil covered a century and a half of the impact of the discovery of oil as one of the driving forces of modern capitalism, and The Writer brilliantly deployed the comic device of a new plastic-wrapped sofa as havoc-causer between a hipster couple divided about caving to the domestic order.

It’s refreshing to see a new-generation talent range a bit further than the patriarchy-and-capitalism set menu and, in Anna, Hickson has chosen a time when the Berlin Wall is up and not coming down again for decades—or ever, as far as the cast gathered for a celebration of a factory promotion are concerned.  The Prague Spring is about to be quashed, the chic Maoists of the Left Bank are about to have their noisy moment in Paris. But one of the oddities of East Germany was that it was both connected to Western Europe, by dint of language and partial access to Western television denied to other satellite states, and yet more obviously cut-off than any other by a fortified border and efficiently repressive system.

Hans (Paul Bazely) and Anna Weber (Phoebe Fox) are gathered in their nicely-designed Plattenbau flat in East Berlin, part of the rising generation of the German Democratic Republic doing pretty well from the system. Her foxy red dress  is from the Exquisit label (the one and only provider of modest luxury). He has been promoted to be the new “head of section” and is, of course, a Party member. It’s the time of which Christa Wolf writes in The Quest for Christa T when an alternative to Western Germany still appears possible, not least because many doubters have headed West before the Wall went up in 1961 and the launch of Sputnik seems to put Soviet technology ahead of America. “The new world, it was really there—and not just in our heads.”

The evening takes a frosty turn when an elderly neighbour, Elena, apparently nursing a grudge about her “disappeared” husband losing his senior role at the factory is part of a political clear-out that has benefited her hosts. Revelations follow thick and fast, declared and hidden loyalties collide as alcohol dilutes the formalities.

All of this we observe through headphones—“binaural” sound in the tech-jargon, via which the dialogue and effects appear to travel through our heads in an unsettling way. That experience makes the play, at just over an hour, feel far longer in intensity: we watch the action in the flat as     voyeurs, screened off by a glass partition.

Technically, this is top-notch by the brothers Max and Ben Ringham, who have created enticing sound designs for Betrayal and Tartuffe this season. Everything is experienced aurally from Anna’s point of view: conversations fade in and out of earshot as they would at a messy party (and this one gets quite spectacularly messy).

When Christian (Max Bennett), Hans’s boss, arrives, Anna is reminded of a childhood friend who betrayed her when the Russians swept into Berlin in 1945 and a wave of rapes and crimes of retribution was visited on the defeated Germans. It’s a reminder than in terms of the German century, the Swinging Sixties are not so far away at all from the horror of the Trummerzeit—the era of rubble from which the enforced state socialism of East Germany emerged. Even its national anthem is entitled “Arisen from Ruins” and in this world of cracked mirrors and time-shifted loyalties, the truth, when it finally emerges, is genuinely surprising.

Hickson says of the production that you can “hear communism” in it. That is not quite true—the vernacular is always more contemporary British than 1960s (not least because the spoken language of the GDR at the time was heavily influenced by its Soviet masters, which is hard to re-create without parody). But you can hear the fear that is the concomitant of state socialism enforced by a security-obsessed state, with mere humans as the victims—and the perpetrators.

Economic stress at a different time and place is the subject of Sweat, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning take on the woes of the American working class, at London’s Gielgud for a limited run to late July. Nottage is living proof that you can make riveting drama out of the tension between capital and labour. Her cast of workers in Reading, Pennsylvania, meets in a ramshackle bar against a set of rusting girders to hash out disaffections and a bitter divide over whether to accept cuts in wages to keep their local steel tubing plant going.

The themes are awfully familiar—rage against the Nafta trade agreement, tensions and a sense of lost hope for the American working class. But to her credit Nottage, an African-American dramatist who had previously written about the lives of low-paid seamstresses, clocked all of this before her peers in American liberal theatreworld woke up to the political Krakatoa of Donald Trump.

Martha Plimpton is Tracey, who hails from a family of craftsmen and can imagine nothing worse than getting up in the morning “and having nowhere to go” as unemployment looms. Clare Perkins plays her friend Cynthia, who is black and gets the management job on the understanding of a deal that save the workforce but lowers their living standards and status. That rift unleashes racial disharmony—and ultimately an act of violence (as with Anna, this is a spoiler-free review).

Between the imperious delusions of Marxism-Leninism and the drumbeat of Trumpism in America’s heartlands, these two classy plays cover the ideological waterfront with verve and skill.

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Death of a Salesman is, on the face of it, a simple, poignant story of inevitable decline. Willy Loman’s travelling salesman is so wholly in hock to the American dream of material advancement that his sanity and life hang in the balance when its edges crumble and he faces the truth of being a dime a dozen victim of Schumpeterian creative destruction in the selling trade.

In many  ways, Miller is a victim of his own success, with works wilting forlornly on the school syllabus, reduced to quotable chunks and thematic treatments. A deathless line on Willy and Linda Loman’s marriage from one grade-saving website reads, flatly, “Linda understands that Willy has issues.” He most certainly does—and the enchantment and darkness of the play lie in the way that his slipping grasp on reality brings past and present into conflict and blurs identity between the dream and the waking, the living and dead. Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s adept production has a mainly black cast, headed by Wendell Pierce, a towering, large-bellied soul who gives a physical performance of real vigour and pathos.

Pierce is a stalwart of Broadway (where this production is surely headed) and a fine screen actor (Selma, The Wire, and extra points if you spotted him as Meghan Markle’s doting dad in Suits). Sharon D. Clarke as Linda soothes her “troubled” other half with gospel songs and chides her erratic offspring for their inability to indulge a lost soul: “He’s just a little boat, looking for a harbour.”

Refocusing the play on a black family is done with a light but meaningful touch. When Willy confronts his unfeeling boss, Howard, we see the man flinch away from him and Willy instantly abase himself: a gesture which acquires echoes of past oppression, as well as Willy’s desperation. Ben, his fantasy projection of business success, is a white-suited parody of African-American bling, like Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess.

Miller’s original world is, of course, white 1940s Brooklyn, embodied in his unsentimental neighbour Charley (Trevor Cooper). But Willie’s refusal to take the lifeline Charley offers in the form of a menial but steady job becomes more sharply delineated here as a last, misguided act of racial dignity.

In Anna Fleischle’s set, the Loman house is artfully deconstructed to reflect the demise within—doors, window-frames and 1940s light fittings float at angles in the air. It’s all a beautiful piece of theatrecraft, in which scenes of Willy’s memories, enhanced by delusion, are choreographed like slow ballet, under the intense musical direction of Femi Temowo. Arinzé Kene is strident Biff, the son who suffers most from his father’s combination of overweening attention and emotional neglect. Martins Imhangbe plays the feckless Happy, inheriting his father’s philandering streak and defending his tattered dream at the graveside.

The commonplace turmoil of a dissolving family turns through Miller’s deft pen into a story of fallen angels. Where Willy mistakenly conflates affection with success, Charley sees that money is its own measure. The rapping beat of Miller’s prose is still a joy to hear: “Who liked J.P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath, he’d look like a butcher. But with his pockets on, he was very well liked.”

Sharon D. Clarke makes Linda a less imploring figure than in many productions: a seer in her own house. The famous speech—“I don’t say he’s a great man, but he’s a human being . . . so attention must be finally paid to such a person”—is delivered as a demand, not a plea. Either way, in Miller’s pitiless world, it falls on deaf ears.

Death wishes and the battle of ideologies are at the heart of Rosmersholm, Henrik Ibsen’s intense late play and a summation of many of his preoccupations, from the energy and destructiveness of the radical urge to the incompatibility of romantic longing and political engagement. Ian Rickson’s production at the Duke or York’s theatre is set in one room in Rosmersholm, a grand house of rain-streaked windows and as many unhappy ghosts as you can fit into a provincial Norwegian estate where “the children don’t cry and nobody laughs”.

Johannes Rosmer (a brooding Tom Burke) is a pastor who lives in unconsummated desire with his late wife’s friend Rebecca (Hayley Atwell) until an impending election brings moments of reckoning. Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation bristles with messages about the weaknesses of the electoral process, inequality and the power of the press (the manipulative motivations of newspapers in Rosmersholm make contemporary tabloids look saintly). Giles Terera (Hamilton) is the lofty Kroll, a perpetually cross conservative seeking to dissuade his old friend from defecting to the radical party. Conservatives and radicals alike are flawed in their self-belief. Mortensgaard (Jake Fairbrother) is the reformist newspaper editor, denouncing the sway of “the few at the expense of the many” but cynically quick to ditch Rosmer once he realises that a clergyman who has renounced his faith is a liability to the cause.

Comic relief lurks in the shadows, with the servants watching the ideological tergiversations of their masters with a wary eye. Peter Wight gives us a show-stealing turn as a boozy lefty lecturer who returns to torment his former pupil, only to realise that when his moment arrives he has “absolutely nothing to say”. The watermill wheel, under which Rosmer’s suicidal wife Beata met her death, turns outside the window and we can guess what fate awaits the thwarted near-lovers. Alongside the revelations of incest, deceit, sexual frustration and the strains of progress and reaction, it is the Norwegian option with little hope of success. “No more gloom and doom” was most certainly not the election slogan of Rosmersholm.

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