A right wing populist, a master manipulator of the media, he appears to be immune to the long accepted norms of professional behaviour. Foul-mouthed and a bully, but backed by an oligarch, he rides roughshod over those who play by the old rules, truth, like everything else, merely transactional. “What’s in it for me?” is the only question worth the breath.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before…
"How can we sleep for grief?", asks the brilliant and agitated Thomasina Coverly (the dazzling Isis Hainsworth) during the first act of Arcadia, a question that will come to haunt this magisterial play as it moves towards its simultaneously ravishing, and emotionally ravaging, end. Many of us asked ourselves that very question last November when the author died in the run-up to the Hampstead Theatre opening of Indian Ink, the play of his whose 1995 premiere followed Arcadia by two years.
From his sickbed, after a nervous breakdown during basic training for the army, the 18-year-old Noel Coward started churning out plays, many of which were never staged. The Rat Trap, finished in 1918, had a 12-night run in 1926 at the Everyman in Hampstead, but Coward was in the US at the time and never saw the production. You wonder what his older self would have made of it.
New writing takes many forms: this is one of the glories of contemporary British performance. One of these is the shared narrative, a style pioneered decades ago by Irish playwrights such as Brian Friel and Conor McPherson, which involves several straight-to-the-audience narrators telling a story directly. Unlike the naturalism of mainstream theatre, this method allows for a rapid delivery of events and feelings.
Tim Crouch is one of our great theatrical alchemists. Most famously – in his conceptual show An Oak Tree – he creates a portrait of grief in which each night an actor who’s never seen the script before plays a grieving father who believes that his daughter has metamorphosed into an oak tree. What’s so extraordinary about the piece is the way that Crouch breaks down any factor that might seem to contribute to authentic emotion, carefully pointing up the show’s anomalies until the story itself grabs by us the throat.
Spanning centuries, cultures and an ocean, Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo’s new musical, Ballad Lines (say it fast and it sounds like Blood Lines) has the epic scope a big show demands. It also has an intimacy, a specificity, that may prove, for some, an issue and for others, a liberation, a chance to be seen on stage for once.
When it comes to the proletariat taking matters into their own hands, the British working class does not have many spectacular victories to celebrate. There are glorious defeats of course, eg the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the Miners' Strike of 1984, the Stop The War protest of 2003. Even the broader coalition who marched to support a second EU referendum in 2018 made little impact, though it was a nice day out, with nice people and nice food, to be fair.
This year the Royal Court is 70 years old. Yes, it’s that long since this premiere new writing venue staged its opening season, whose third play was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a drama which redefined British theatre. The current celebratory year kicks off with Guess How Much I Love You?, by Luke Norris, whose debut Goodbye to All That was successfully staged here in 2012.
Scottie Fitzgerald, the sole offspring of F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, swigs from a hip flask where she shouldn’t (she inherited the transgression gene). She’s in the room that harbours her parents’ cluttered archive, and soon she conjures their ghosts who tell us the story of their lives.
On a motorcycle, you have to slow down once you get that sinking feeling that there’s an accident on the road up ahead. Even if you’re not rubbernecking yourself, you don’t want to be going at full tilt in close proximity to those who are. I made an effort not to look past the sirens and flashing lights towards the wreckage, but sometimes it was unavoidable.