Theatre reviews

I am still shaking off the effects of my previous visit to this beautiful East End theatre, which is hosting a double bill of new work from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Adriano Shaplin’s stamina-sapping epic about the emergence of rationalist thought in Cromwell’s England took a very long time to say very little. Like a bad apple on a supermarket shelf, it prompted a question about RSC quality control: “How on earth did that one get through?”

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The best seasonal offering I’ve seen this - and any other - year is retold by Ben Power and director Melly Still with such invention, it’s like encountering the fairy tale for the first time.

Some say the macabre moments — just think how the sisters might make the slipper fit — are too disturbing for kids. But fairy tales are meant to scare. Still imbues her show with enough realism to convince and enough magic to transport her audience.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical, with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, has had the Watermill Theatre, Newbury treatment — which is to say a big show has been turned into a small one and populated with actors who double as musicians.

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It was Derek Jacobi’s tender and tragic Cyrano who first made me cry in a theatre. But in Shakespeare’s comedy his austere Malvolio is motivated much more by a yearning for status than the possibility of love.

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Although in Joe Orton’s 1966 comedy, Detective Truscott (David Haig) is willing to beat the hell out of anyone who gets in the way of his investigation — and for that matter, anyone who doesn’t — it is the police who get a right kicking from Orton’s wit.

It is no longer shocking to see a violent, corrupt, stupid cop on stage. But it is amazing that Sean Holmes’s precisely directed production of Orton’s subversive farce, which is so rooted in the ’60s, feels so precisely targeted at the current erosion of civil rights in this country.

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Now that she’s forsaken full-blown musicals, Maria Friedman is becoming the Queen of Cabaret. Unfussilly directed by David Babani, Friedman’s solo show is yet another West End transfer for his Menier Chocolate Factory.

The impeccable song book is drawn from such disparate composers as Sondheim and Kate Bush, each of which has been subtly rearranged. There is no classier show in the West End. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard the award-winning Friedman sing better.

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The dark hero in the musical by Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics), is the strapping fairground barker Billy Bigelow (Jeremiah James), a quick-tempered feckless dolt, prone to beating his trusting wife, Julie (Alexander Silber).

After killing himself during a botched robbery, heaven gives him a second chance at redemption. Back on earth, he hits his daughter who learns the lesson her mother has long known, that it is possible for someone to hit you hard and for it not to hurt at all. Really?

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A bad back not only caused David Tennant to withdraw from the press night of this RSC Hamlet — first seen in Stratford — but a hasty reshuffling of the pack. Fortinbrass became Lucianus; Lucianus became Gildenstern; Gildenstern played Laertes and Laertes, aka Edward Bennett, replaced Tennant in Shakespeare’s biggest and probably greatest role. So no pressure then, as director Gregory Doran said when he announced the changes to the audience.

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It could hardly be said that Trevor Nunn, whose illustrious career includes stints as artistic director of both the National Theatre and the RSC, needs a comeback. But make no mistake, after his previous musical — the awful Gone With the Wind (conspicuously absent from the list of Nunn productions in the programme biography for his latest offering) — Nunn needed this one.

And with this beautiful revival of Stephen Sondheim’s haunting homage to Ingmar Bergman’s film about lovers suspended in a twilight zone of Swedish nights and unfulfilling relationships, Nunn is back on form.

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Jasper Rees has joined the Toby Young brand of writing by turning himself into a show. Directed by Harry Burton, his one-man tale is set in post-divorce midlife crisis, the antidote to which is the French horn Rees blew as a boy. Jonathan Guy Lewis plays Rees, and the quirky characters he encounters on his way to redemption, with dishevelled charm.

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