The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

The words ‘Forsyte’ and ‘Saga’ have powerful connotations: the first with the late Bruce Forsyth, avuncular catch-phrase king of Saturday evening TV; the second with the kinds of interminable Norse epics beloved of JRR Tolkien; or, more recently, package holidays for the elderly. In short, this play’s title, though resonant, is scarcely enticing. Not having seen any of the TV incarnations of John Galsworthy’s nine-novel chronicle, I came to the RSC’s ambitious, two-part production anticipating some kind of decades-spanning period piece peopled by interchangeable, stiff-collared chaps with moustaches, and endless ladies in crinolines. Buttock- and brain-fatigue were due to set in at around the four-hour mark. But nothing could be further from the truth. Never mind Brucie: these Forsytes are playing their own traumatic intergeneration game. It’s spellbinding, tragic, redolent of an entire age, and yet at the same time deeply personal. The word that comes to mind is hamartia . Every GCSE ...

If there is such a thing as the afterlife, then Harold Pinter must be looking down from it now, and spluttering with rage. The master of the dramatic pause has been outdone. US wunderkind playwright Annie Baker doesn't just use pauses between sentences. She crafts silence into entire sections of mute dialogue, like an invisible sculptor. Baker forges silence into eloquent, internalised language. And in this practically perfect production, silence is golden. Every time the characters can’t think what to say, or feel inhibited from saying what is really on their minds, a humiliating stillness envelops the stage, populated by unspoken accusations they can’t bring themselves to utter. It’s amazing. Circle, Mirror, Transformation follows four participants and their teacher at a six-week Creative Drama course in Vermont, USA. Over a series of vignettes, we see them move from puzzlement at the awkward drama games teacher Marty makes them play, through frustration at how meaningless the g...