Theatre Review of the Year(s)

So this is going to be an odd one. Theatres reopened in the early summer this year after being almost entirely shut since March 2020. I didn’t do a review of the year in 2020 because there was so little to choose from, and this year we only have six months; so, like an unscrupulous second-hand car salesman, I’ve cut-and-shut the two fragments of the years into one, so this is really a review of 2020-21 in theatre. I will admit that I’ve been to the theatre even since they reopened less often than I usually do. I’ve tended to avoid smaller theatres too, which skews the list. I’ve also not been able to travel so this is even more exclusively Londoncentric than usual. Also, towards the end of the year, several shows I’d booked for had to close because of Covid, some of which I suspect would have ended up in this list (most likely Best of Enemies by James Graham at the Young Vic).

And finally, I’ve not included streaming. I do think streaming is important but I still maintain that it’s not quite theatre - it’s a record of theatre or access to some aspects of theatre. I have very much enjoyed some theatre I’ve streamed (last year’s Crave from Chichester; this year’s Life is a Dream from the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh, for example), but if you’re not in the room, I don’t think you’re watching theatre: you’re just seeing what it looked like and what it sounded like. Don’t @ me.

I’ve come up with a list of the ten shows I liked the most in the nine months Ive been able to see theatre over the last two. years. Some things strike me from the list. It’s lighter on new writing than usual. This is partly because I’ve not been to some smaller theatres but also I feel like there’s a bit of a lull in new writing. There were some terrific things ‘bubbling under’ this list: I thought Alistair McDowall’s All if It (Royal Court, February 2020) was a superb piece of work, given a sensational performance by Kate O’Flynn, telling an unexceptional life story in one exceptional tumbling stream of words that feels like the theatrical equivalent of Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport. Ella Road’s Fair Play (Bush Theatre, December 2021) confirmed the promise shown in The Phlebotomist, in a touching, intense drama about athletics and friendship. I thought Kae Tempest’s Paradise was very strong (and said so at the time), partly because of the text (Tempest and Sophocles sharing the honours), and perhaps mostly because of Ian Rickson’s great production. Before Covid, I think the last live show I saw was Tim Crouch’s revision and performance of I, Cinna (Unicorn, February 2020), one of his wonderful Shakespeare monologues for children, which evoked the joys and mysteries of language and imagination and their complex intertwining with power. I read Rockets and Blue Lights back in Spring 2020 and thought it was a masterpiece, Winsome Pinnock’s greatest play (yet). I still think it is, but I have to admit I was disappointed by Miranda Cromwell’s production (National Theatre: Dorfman, September 2021), which felt too earnest, did not handle the different timelines well, and lacked some confidence in its theatrical language. I should say though that I saw a performance where one of the leads was ill and was replaced not by an understudy but another actor gamely reading in, which might have disrupted all manner of things. I would love to see this play again though.

There were new plays that misfired for me. I liked some of the ideas in Cordelia Lynn’s Love and Other Acts of Violence (Donmar, September 2021), but the writing felt undercooked, improvised and first-drafty, lacking much direction and with a tacked-on ending (a sudden lurch into meticulous realism that I’ve seen rather a lot in the last few years) that seemed more an act of dramaturgical desperation than anything that truly brought the play together. Al Smith’s Rare Earth Mettle (Royal Court, November 2021) also seemed a bit diffuse. The awful misjudgment of the main character name aside, this felt like another play that needed another couple of drafts, a fuller development process to find exactly what Al Smith wanted to do. I enjoyed Aleshea Harris Is God Is on the same stage while it was happening but it hasn’t stayed with me much, Ola Ince’s strong production perhaps overemphasising the flashy stylistics.

So many of the shows on this list are revivals and there are no experimental pieces. I didn’t get to the BAC or The Yard, for example, in either 2020 or 2021. And when I say revivals, I mean new productions of old plays. If I include plays coming back that I saw again, I’d probably put - at somewhat the opposite ends of things - Rattigan’s While the Sun Shines (Orange Tree, November 2021) and Lee-Jones’s Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner (Royal Court, June 2021), both of which I loved all over again after having seen them in 2019. There were some strong revivals that didn’t quite make this list. I think I could watch Cush Jumbo in anything and her performance as Hamlet (Young Vic, October 2021) was fascinating: brooding, angry, petulant but electrifying throughout. I wasn’t quite so sure of the rest of the casting and, frankly, it felt like everyone was acting in their own style, giving the whole production a ragged and disorganised feel. A Number (Bridge Theatre, February 2020) was crisp, powerful and beautiful, Polly Findlay locating the play in a vividly real world, materialised by Lizzie Clachan’s intelligent set and Peter Mumford’s evocative lighting, who also created the world for a terrific Far Away (Donmar, January 2020), directed by Lyndsey Turner who is about to direct another revival of A Number at the Old Vic.

But what were the top ten? These are in alphabetical order. I couldn’t meaningfully put them in order.

1. Anything Goes (Barbican, August 2021)

   This was a production that was repeatedly postponed. I’d booked to see it in Spring 2020. I have seen several productions of this musical (including an exceptionally fine one directed by Daniel Evans at Sheffield in 2014). I adore this musical. It epitomises a belief of mine that musicals are sometimes at their most profound when they are most dumb. This is an exquisitely silly musical but its opportunities for pleasurable intensity, breathtaking virtuosity, and farce’s polymorphous subversion are everywhere in it. But all of that to say that I booked because I’ll probably always happily see a production of this musical, but didn’t think it would be all that special. I can still remember receiving the email which stated that the original lead had dropped out and that Reno Sweeney would therefore now be played by … Sutton Foster. It was like someone suddenly informing you that the painting you’ve got hanging in your garage is actually by Leonardo. And the production, a lively refit of the 2011 Broadway revival, is huge fun, conducted at enormous speed and, of course, with the legendary Sutton Foster, a decade older, but still all teeth, warmth, belting voice and lissom likeability. It was flawless: sheer pleasure from beginning to end.

2. Carousel (Regents Park Open-Air Theatre, August 2021)

   Anything Goes is a problematic musical; its original book and the 1987 rewrite has a racist subplot about two Chinamen. In this latest revival they have cleverly managed to make the racist elements recede so far as to be undetectable (at least, undetectable to me, and I was looking for them). Carousel is problematic because it appears to be a musical that excuses domestic violence. Julie and Billy have an on-off romance in the first half and then a violent, faithless marriage in the second (the violence and the faithlessness all on Billy’s side). But some aspects of the musical seem inclined to excuse male violence: ‘Something made him the way that he is / Whether he’s false or true,’ sings Julie, ‘And something gave him the things that are his / One of those things is you’. Is this a musical that tells a woman that you’re a husband’s possession and he can do what he likes to you? Julie’s attempt to comfort a friend who has been abandoned by her husband (the song ‘What’s the Use of Wond’rin’) is also clearly a note to self: ‘what’s the use of wond’rin’ / If he’s good or if he’s bad? / He’s your fella and you love him / That’s all there is to that’. But there’s a difference between a musical and a song, between a show and a character. Nick Cohen has recently written a piece on this point for the Guardian, pointing out how foolish it is to treat what a character says as what the author therefore believes. It would therefore be a mistake to assume that what Julie says is what the musical means. In fact, it would be a mistake to assume that what Julie says is what Julie believes. It seems perfectly possible - even likely - that we should think that her advice to Carrie is actually a desperate rationalisation of her own situation and that she knows what she’s saying is not finally right. This production by Timothy Sheader doesn’t attempt to soft-pedal or deny the problematic material; he confronts it head on. Relocating Carousel to a coastal town in North-East Britain, he has found a much less prettified version of the musical, where the meanness of life pervades everything, both giving Billy and Julie’s attraction for each other a charming quality but also offering a part-explanation - and not excuse - for Billy’s cruelty. And then in the second half as his violence manifests itself, it is the women who have the final word. In an afterlife scene, Billy is confronted with the reality of his actions and in a simple and effective sequence at the end, the stage revolves and only the female members of the cast remain facing the audience. It was beautifully cast too; there was a great moment when the matriarch Nettie comes on and starts singing and I thought ‘wow, who is that’ and checked the programme to find that it was the great Joanna Riding - who I saw thirty years ago creating the part of Julie for Nick Hytner’s production at the National.

3. Death of England (National Theatre: Dorfman, February 2020; Olivier: October 2020; Sky Arts, November 2021)

   I think the theatre has a very important role in reflecting our world back to us, interrogating our world and us, asking who we are now? Nowhere was this more richly done in 2020-21 than in the trilogy of plays by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer that explored national identity in Brexit Britain. In fact, it asked those questions quite literally, particularly in the first part, in which Rafe Spall as Michael engages with the audience in a freewheeling, emotional, adventurous monologue that was hard to watch, partly because I never knew when Michael would directly involve me and partly because I could feel the play testing my complacencies, my prejudices, my pieties. The second play, Delroy, opened and closed almost simultaneously, a cruel victim of Covid, but fortunately filmed by the National - so I’ve broken my ban on streaming for this one. Michael Balogun took over this part late but he makes it is as the titular Delroy, whose confident swagger is undermined by a cruel humiliation at the hands of the police and finds his confident place within British culture and all of his personal relationships unravelling. I haven’t yet seen the third TV part, but this is a ferocious, complex and painful portrait of British racial politics in the 2020s.

4. Leopoldstadt (Wyndham’s Theatre, February 2020)

   This opened to breathless reviews just before the first lockdown (remember the first lockdown?) but I didn’t get to see it until the theatres reopened this summer. I wrote about it, also rather breathlessly, and I suppose there was a little question in my mind whether I’d been so dazzled by it that I might have overrated it. But no, looking back many months later, I still think it may be Stoppard’s best play, a superb fusion of history play, family play, and a play of ideas. From the opening image of a Star of David being placed onto a Christmas Tree to the final scenes in which the innumerable (but actually numerable) forgotten return to be remembered it is a breathtaking experience, once of the great plays of the century.

5. Maryland (Royal Court Upstairs, October 2021)

   Stoppard’s play is, of course, the culmination of a lifetime of work, a carefully and brilliantly constructed play, that is grand in its vision. By contrast, Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland was written at speed, white hot with anger, in the aftermath of the trial of the policeman who killed Sarah Everard and the outrageous police suppression of a peaceful vigil to protest these acts. All the women in Kirkwood’s short play are called Mary and one character recalls that his father, when seeing his mother, also Mary, lost in thought, would say dismissively that she was off in ‘Maryland’. It’s a keynote for this play which is about the way our culture seems to dismiss the thoughts and experiences of women - because we (and by ‘we’, I mean we men) seem unable to face the systematic violent suppression of women that goes on around us and, sometimes, at our hands. It was rough and it was raw and there’s a twist in the story that felt a bit clunky to me but who fucking cares about that? This play was an event, a shout of rage, but also a smart, often wickedly funny, piece of work that was doing exactly what the Court should be doing, interrupting the schedules to respond to who we are. It was excoriating and shaming and moving. (My original blog here.)

6. Nora (Young Vic, February 2020)

   The first of two Naturalistic classics, given brilliant contemporary twists. It’s interesting to me that Naturalism, despite innumerable critiques, has re-emerged as one of the key ways we are choosing to understanding ourselves, from the Brexity Rosmersholm in 2019 to Kieran Hurley’s rewrite of An Enemy of the People in 2021 for the National Theatre of Scotland. Stef Smith’s clever rewrite of A Doll’s House is not really an attempt to critique or comment on Ibsen’s play; it’s just an extension of it, an amplification of what was so radical and challenging about that play 150 years ago. The play has been updated several times before (by Zinnie Harris, Clare Booth Luce, Rebecca Gilman and countless others) but this one places the action in three time periods across the last hundred years but, switching between them, tells a smoothly continuous story while noting that women’s roles may change but patriarchy seems stronger than ever, and, rather daringly, suggesting that our contemporary Nora might have a harder time after leaving than any of the others.. It’s beautifully handled, the parts rotating elegantly with each time jump, Elizabeth Freestone keeping the action going with the intensity of a thriller on Tom Piper’s clever open set. When I watched it at the Young Vic, the young audience gasped at some of the plot turns of a 150-year-old play, which is as it should be.

7. Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (Orange Tree, September 2021)

   I’d never seen the play before so was thrilled by Diane Page’s clear, brutal, heart-rending production that did not compromise the horror of the play’s anatomisation of injustice while still finding a rigorous and profound intellectual and emotion shape to the evening. Shaq Taylor and Scarlett Brookes were wonderful as the arrested pair. The design (set, sound, lights) was persistently inventive. The play moves from the deeply personal to the crudely, brutally exposed public, then back to the most personal feelings, ending in a breathtaking address to God. The structure of splintered, achronological, deliberately disorienting, but in the company’s hands we were never confused about our confusion; we were led with emotional care through this shattering experience. It confirms to me what I’ve felt for a few years now that the Orange Tree has become quietly one of the most risk-taking, dynamic theatres in Britain. (My original blog here.)

8. Uncle Vanya (Harold Pinter Theatre, January 2020)

   I said in my review of Paradise that I think we are at risk of underrating Ian Rickson. He is an extraordinary director. After his superb Rosmersholm in 2019, he moved onto Chekhov and this was exquisite. A very strong, lively, speakable new version by Conor McPherson, a fascinating and intriguing set by Rae Smith, lit exquisitely by Bruno Poet, and a faultless cast let by Toby Jones, as a kind of Basil Fawltyish Vanya, a portrait of desperate and comic frustration; Rosalind Eleazar’s Yelena was a revelation both of this part and this actress; the production built Astrov’s wish to protect the woodlands into something more ecological, which some critics seemed to find an imposition but seemed to me wholly rooted in the play. Rickson’s production handled perfectly that characteristic Chekhovian simultaneity of laughter and pain and the production was another whose life was horribly shortened by Covid, though fortunately filmed by the BBC, with Roger Allam stepping in suavely in place of Ciaran Hinds’s hilariously appalling Serebryakov.

9. The Welkin (National: Lyttelton, January 2020)

   Lucy Kirkwood’s second play in this list, though in fact the plays were almost two years apart. But this is sensational. It is, for the most part, a one-location jury-room play, with an almost entirely female cast, let by the superb and fascinatingly contrasting Maxine Peake and Ria Zmitrowicz. It’s a history play yet it felt, at a couple of key moments, a play about the failures in our own current democracy. But it was also about women and justice and class and it was gripping as a thriller, given a superb production by the brilliant James Macdonald. Lucy Kirkwood’s script, though, oh my, it’s wonderful. Caryl Churchill is an influence on so many writers but one of the ways she is so clearly an influence on Kirkwood (and other writers like, for example, Moira Buffini) is that she does not repeat herself. If we didn’t know the authors, would anyone spot that Chimerica was written by the same person as The Children? Or Mosquitoes by the same person as The Welkin? And what is so remarkable is how fully realised each of these modes and genres seem to be in her hands. Kirkwood is, for me, right at the forefront of the writers who, if I see a new play off theirs announced, make my heart beat a little faster. The great sadness of this production is that it was brutally curtailed by Covid and they didn’t even get a chance to NT Live! it, so if you missed it, you really missed it. (I still wonder if the National might bring it back but that hope may be forlorn.) It’s almost certainly the show I most adored on this list.

10. What If If Only (Royal Court, October 2021)

    I said that Caryl Churchill’s influence is everywhere, but she was also here herself, with a new, short play, beautifully directed (again) by James Macdonald, who allowed John Heffernan (the male lead - who also did the honours in Maryland above) to deliver his opening monologue sir quietly that we all leaned in, breath held, as this strange, funny and cryptic story unfolded. The play gave us a recently-bereaved man, desperate to be able to communicate with his dead love who finds her, suddenly returning, and the complications begin from there. What did it mean? I don’t know. It felt tremendously evocative of things we have all been feeling I guess: loss, longing, confusion. But loss of what? Longing for what? Confusion about what? The returning love (played by the incomparable Linda Basset) seems not quite to be who she once was and to have multiple aspects to her. At times I wondered if Churchill was joining us in mourning possible futures, personal and political, perhaps the recession of any confidence we might have that another world is possible. The wit and intelligence, the laughter and complexity, the richness of language and the depth of feeling that this performance accomplished - in barely twenty minutes - is remarkable. It is encouraging for any creative person to see Churchill and Stoppard, both firmly in their eighties, writing at the peak of their powers.

    It’s a pretty good list. These are ten shows I’d have been delighted to see in any year but I did feel there wasn’t a ‘long tail’. This was only about nine months of theatre and, as I say, my theatregoing has been more mainstream for mainly Covid, but some family, reasons. There are many shows I am looking forward to next year. There are the shows I have been looking forward to that were Covid-cancelled, but I also look forward to seeing how the theatre will start to reflect on the convulsive trauma that this pandemic has caused us and through which we are still living. I’m not sure I want a lot of ‘Covid drama’ but there will be those shows, maybe set in another century, with a cast of well-wrought characters and a vigorous plot that draws us in, in which we suddenly realise, oh, this is obliquely, metaphorically, richly and imaginatively about the nightmare we have all been living. I can’t wait to understand our times through theatre again.