The week in theatre: Britannicus Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera) The Haunting of Susan A | Theatre
When Jean Racine wrote Britannicus in 1669, he was ruled by the French classical notion that required a participate in to manifest in true time, in a single position, in the course of the study course of a day. But for a contemporary viewers, and even with the redoubtable Timberlake Wertenbaker as translator and adapter, Britannicus proves a static relatively than a vividly unfolding drama. Wertenbaker has shortened the text but is nevertheless necessarily concerned in stodgy catchup explanations that stall progress. Director Atri Banerjee does his ingenious very best to fulfill all challenges intrepidly, but until finally the ending, action is so scant that when Nero has a tantrum two-thirds of the way by way of, and relieves his feelings by hitting the business water cooler, it is a high stage. At worst, the experience of watching the enjoy is like driving with the handbrake on.
Britannicus is definitely Nero’s story: a day in the lifestyle of a despot. And there are some good performances listed here: William Robinson is excellently cast as the Roman emperor – he strolls about in white tracksuit bottoms, with bare toes, as if on a relaxed power trip. He has a way of gaslighting other individuals for laughs to underpin his own command freakery, and provided the sobriety elsewhere, you are grateful for the calculated enjoyment this affords. The play focuses on Nero’s romance with his tyrannical mother, Agrippina. Sirine Saba fiercely communicates her feeling of having been neglected by her son (Racine’s maternal electrical power engage in is in fascinating distinction to that other Roman pair: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Volumnia).
Britannicus’s role is slight, but Nathaniel Curtis (recently feted for Channel 4’s drama sequence It’s a Sin) delivers to Nero’s adoptive brother a light giant’s allure and proves plaintively outspoken. Shyvonne Ahmmad is excellent as his behrothed, Junia, a tiny figure in burgundy taffeta who has not long ago been abducted by Nero. Supplied an viewers with her beloved Britannicus, she exclaims: “I want to save you”, and equally her ft leave the floor as she jumps up to try to equivalent her lover’s height. Through her desperation, Ahmmad provides to the creation an urgently wanted psychological centre.
Rosanna Vize’s established is divertingly strange, with a detail from Paul Rubens’s Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf as its arresting backdrop – and an real stuffed wolf reclines on phase through. The ultimate wedding scene is impressively and correctly funereal. As a substitute of confetti, cinders drop steadily in front of a solitary graffitied title scrawled in black: NERO.
At the Park theatre, another title, in red capitals, hangs earlier mentioned the stage: TONY! It is a well timed second to be taking into consideration what tends to make a disastrous prime minister, and comedian Harry Hill and composer Steve Brown’s Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera) is a new, clean, multitasking musical, exuberantly directed by Peter Rowe. The established (designer Libby Watson) is in New Labour colours and the forged don black suits and scarlet ties. Blair is performed by Charlie Baker with participating cheesiness and an ingratiatingly asinine smile. What would make his general performance disarmingly hilarious is that he offers Blair as a dolt and not free of charge of self-doubt – a wannabe rock star who waddles about obsessed with Mick Jagger (whose surname he constantly will get wrong: Jaggers). Cherie (Holly Sumpton) is a risque floozy of whom Tone is distinctly afraid.
Do not assume refined political assessment listed here as Blair’s decade in ability is retraced – and be braced for weapons of mass destruction doubling as easy gags. But Hill is on to a little something, as this simple trade reveals: Tony: “The men and women like me, Gordon.” Gordon: “That’s due to the fact they really don’t know you.” Gary Trainor is place-on as brooding Gordon Brown, singing about macroeconomics. Howard Samuels is deliciously slippery and camp as Peter Mandelson, Rosie Strobel is a immensely musical Osama bin Laden and Madison Swan an entertainingly demure Princess Diana (“There have been a few of us in our relationship, seven if you depend all the blokes I received off with”). Steve Brown’s new music is hearty, mixed fare, from Sondheim to ragtime – and the closing variety, The Complete Globe Is Run By Assholes, is rousingly impressive.
With a ghost in the offing, there can be tiny question who to blame when the lighting rig abruptly proves to be unsafe, as it did the night I observed Mark Ravenhill’s limited and splendidly published new engage in The Haunting of Susan A. The complex hitch at the King’s Head, the place Ravenhill is co-inventive director, meant that the show, a two-hander, went ahead late, below an unflattering classroom glare. Ravenhill, who acts in the show, tried out to offset this with the help of a cellular cellular phone whenever he was plunged into darkness. But these troubles hardly signified in what turns out to be the tale of a house: a precise haunting in just a pub theatre that was once, it was intriguing to find out, a bare-knuckle private combating club.
The truly feel of the output, co-directed by Iman Qureshi, is of premeditated improvisation, of rehearsed spontaneity, as Suzanne Ahmet pretends (not completely convincingly) to be a random, protesting audience member who snatches Ravenhill’s narrative reins and goes on to tell, with wonderful urgency, the tale of a Victorian mom who tapped on the shoulders of actresses, attempting to look for assist she was doomed never ever to obtain. It is the most satisfying chiller – affecting as well – and very well well worth placing an hour aside to see.
Star rankings (out of 5)
Britannicus ★★
Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera) ★★★★
The Haunting of Susan A ★★★
