The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

When people say ‘Musical’ the first thing that comes to mind is a big-budget production like Starlight Express or Wicked . You might think that the BT Studio, with its minuscule performing area and basic facilities, is the last place to mount such a massive venture. And you’d be right. But there is such a thing as parlour music. And First Aid is a ‘parlour musical’. It follows the gossamer-light story of Sophie and her new maybe-boyfriend Simon, as they go on a date and end up in hospital with a broken nose. Barnaby O’Brien’s girl-meets-boy-meets-A&E-dept rom-com is an insouciant, irrepressible, warm-hearted joy. Deep and meaningful this most definitely is not. It’s as light as a feather souffle and as witty as early Tim Rice. Although set very much in the present day, and replete with modern references, there’s something appealingly old-fashioned about the genre that O’Brien has tapped into here, harking back to Ivor Novello and P.G. Wodehouse. The rhymes and jokes are more impo...

In a week when a new Romeo and Juliet opens in New York with the words, ‘How y’all doin’?’, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that there is still room for an old-fashioned, doublet ‘n’ hose Shakespeare production. But this isn’t it. Tim Carroll’s stately, static, but ultimately stumbling, production looks at first sight like a throwback to the theatre of Gielgud and Wolfit, with an open-plan, expressionist set, statuesque blocking, and knee-length breeches that look like they’ve been inflated with a bicycle pump. However, this production is anything but traditional. It’s peppered with ideas that could be seen by some as excitingly experimental, and by others as embarrassingly ill-conceived. Squashing the entire cast into a rectangular block of bodies while they recite a Latin chant is a confrontational opening, but it seems to go nowhere. Staging sword-fights by having characters stand stock-still, on opposite sides of the stage, not looking at each other, while poking their swo...

Patrick Marber seems to have turned to his Jewishness relatively late in his career, and now it’s pouring out in an anxiety-ridden flood. Leopoldstadt addressed the generational trauma of the Holocaust, and it was followed by Nachtland , a play about siblings arguing over a painting that might be by Hitler. This November he is directing Mel Brooks’s musical adaptation of The Producers (signature tune Springtime for Hitler ), and now he brings us What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank at the Marylebone Theatre. This isn’t the Jewishness of tsitsit and synagogue. It’s the kind that comes from inherited pain, guilt and survival, echoing from parent to child in the buffeting decades, and leavened, unlike the bread of affliction, by one of the finest comic minds of our generation. But maybe the Jewishness has always been there. The first time I ever saw Marber on stage, in 1984, he was performing  The Yiddish Rap ('Rap, shmap, the Yiddish Rap, call it a bagel, never a bap...

How does one go about staging a thousand-page Russian novel? How does one make comedy out of a classic known for its heaviness? How does one stage it in the second week of Michaelmas? Director James Hunter provides the answers to all the above in ‘Anna Karenina Komedy’. Immediately, and to be frank, paradoxically, stressing its confused genre identity, this production tinges Tolstoy’s classic – in which we read of Anna’s downfall as she indulges a love affair with the dashing Count Vronsky – with the dramatic aspects of panto and heavy bedroom comedy. Anna (Martha Gathercole) was excellent in her performance as the adulterous wife and psychologically torn noblewoman, demonstrating remarkable skill in imbuing seriousness with comedy effortlessly. Gathercole also co-ordinated the costumes for the production, which, while school uniform-y in places (one character wore a scholar’s gown), was generally successful in achieving a ‘historical’ feel. Anna’s love interest, Vronsky (Elliot ...

David Edgar is the modern Cassandra – an apocalyptic analogy for a dramatist who, in the flesh, is the most diffident and charming gentleman you could hope to meet. But in his plays he has always stood as truth-teller to the political upheavals of our times, fated, like Cassandra, to be heard but not heeded. In The Shape of the Table (1990) and Pentecost (1995) he focused on Eastern Europe and the end of Communism, and in true Edgar style he told those stories by interweaving the private lives of his characters with the public turmoil they were going through. With The New Real , Edgar is back in Eastern Europe, in a semi-fictional former Soviet state. The focus this time is on the disastrous election meddling of American political strategists – mercenaries willing to use their superhuman PR skills to catapult to power any politician willing to pay. Steering a country to democracy or dictatorship becomes, for them, more a game of office politics than international diplomacy. The two c...

This review was written for The Reviews Hub, and appears on their website . Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 family drama A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a Black woman to run on Broadway. Now 65 years old, do its themes still feel current, or is that raisin looking a bit wrinkled? This is a play about Black freedom and aspirations, thwarted by a system mired in racism. Tinuke Craig’s production for Headlong spends a while hunting for relevance, but when it finds it, the drama snaps into focus, the issues feel both present and prescient, and the passion and anger fuelling this seminal piece of Americana roar with pain. But it’s never a tract. Hansberry’s characters are three-dimensional, believable, flawed, and as full of repressed yearning as any scene from Chekhov. Walter Lee (played with burning energy by Solomon Israel), gullible and chauvinist, is as much the author of his own tragedy as his oppressors are. Each member of the family, and their circle of friends, represents a di...