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    ‘Prima Facie’ and ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Win Big at the Olivier Awards

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    The Jodie Comer-starring legal drama won best new play at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys and an adaptation of ‘Totoro’ won six gongs — the most of any production.“Prima Facie,” a Broadway-bound play about a lawyer who represents men accused of assault, then is herself sexually assaulted, was the big winner on Sunday at the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The one-woman show, starring Jodie Comer and written by Suzie Miller, was named best new play during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Comer was also named best actress for her performance at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theater.The awards come just days before “Prima Facie,” and Comer, transfer to New York. The show is scheduled to begin previews at the Golden Theater on Apr. 11.Its success at the Olivier Awards was perhaps unsurprising given that “Prima Facie” was a critical and commercial hit in London during its run last year. Matt Wolf, reviewing the play for The New York Times, said that Comer took a big risk making her West End debut in an “emotionally fraught solo play.” But, he added, “there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.”“Prima Facie” beat stiff competition to the best new play title, including Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird” at the Gielgud Theater; “Patriots” at the Almeida — a timely look at President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy” at the Royal Court, a tale of six young Black men in group therapy.Comer accepted her award, thanking “the sisterhood” who worked on the show, then giving a message to viewers online. “To any kids who haven’t been to drama school, who can’t afford to go to drama school, who’ve been rejected from drama school — don’t let anybody tell you that it is impossible,” she said.Although it won one of the night’s most coveted awards, “Prima Facie” was not the only big winner. “My Neighbour Totoro,” an adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animated film, at the Barbican Theater in London, won six gongs — the most of any production — including best entertainment or comedy play, and the best director award for Phelim McDermott.The show, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, was a crowd-pleaser in London partly thanks to featuring several giant, fantastical puppets — including a furry Catbus that is part motor vehicle, part feline. Dominic Cavendish, reviewing the play in The Daily Telegraph, said those puppets were “worth the price of admission alone.”Other major winners included Paul Mescal, the Irish star, who was named best actor for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater.Matt Wolf, in a review for The New York Times, wrote that “Mescal brings both swagger and sensitivity to the role, in the process stepping out of the long shadow cast over this part by its stage and screen originator, Marlon Brando.”The best new musical award went to “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” a show at the National Theater in London about the intertwined lives of the residents of a housing complex. It triumphed over several higher-profile titles including “Tammy Faye,” about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, featuring music by Elton John. More

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      Review: Praise the Lord for ‘Tammy Faye’

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      A new musical about the life of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, composed by Elton John, makes spectacular entertainment from a righteous subject.LONDON — Praise the lord for “Tammy Faye,” the new musical that opened Wednesday at London’s Almeida Theater. Telling the unlikely story — for the English stage at least — of the American televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, the show has a heart as big as the title character’s bouffant hairdo, and runs through Dec. 3.Rupert Goold’s vigorous production is also an increasing London rarity: a musical with an original score at a time when most repackage existing hits. That the composer is Elton John has only intensified interest in a project that also includes the Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears as lyricist and the prolific playwright James Graham as book writer. John’s most recent musical, “The Devil Wears Prada,” ran aground in Chicago over the summer, so it’s a relief to report that “Tammy Faye” is, for the most part, spectacularly entertaining, even if it could do with some trims and the toning down of a few tasteless sections.And when the astonishing Katie Brayben in the title role seizes center stage to rock out at the close of both acts, you can feel the intimate Almeida transformed into the sort of pulsating arena that Tammy Faye would surely love. “Show me mercy, open your hand,” she sings, letting rip in one of several impassioned numbers, “Empty Hands,” that comes from the gut. I was right there with her, as I was in the comparable “If You Came to See Me Cry” near the end, in which Tammy Faye reflects on her legacy from heaven. (Where else?)We know she’s headed there right from the start. The show begins with the revelation that Tammy Faye has colon cancer, and a sexually explicit joke that comes after the diagnosis indicates that this won’t exactly be family fare.We then turn back the decades to chart her progression from her modest Minnesota origins to a wealthy televisual messiah with a hotline to God. “If I hadn’t lived it,” she says, “I wouldn’t believe it.”Bunny Christie’s deliberately antiseptic set consists of a back wall of TV screens that allows for a recreation of the Praise the Lord satellite network that Tammy Faye and her first husband, Jim Bakker (the Broadway star Andrew Rannells, making a firm-voiced London debut), founded in the 1970s. Her second husband, Roe Messner, is never mentioned.Brayben, left, and others in “Tammy Faye.” Brayben displays such fervor and commitment in the title role that you fall under her sway.Marc Brenner John’s score throughout is a savvy amalgam of country twang and rousing pop-rock ensemble numbers. The musical, as expected, has campy fun with its subject, but doesn’t condescend, and Graham’s canny script always places the Bakkers in the historical context of a larger conservative movement whose presence is felt to this day. We note the importance at the time of Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart, three men in the couple’s orbit who are presented as meanspirited foils of sorts to Tammy Faye’s worldview; Tammy Faye, by contrast, is all smiles and eyelashes, and Brayben communicates her generosity of spirit with ease.The show’s prevailing villain is Jerry Falwell (a sonorous Zubin Varla), who looks on in loathing at the Bakkers and is given more brooding solo numbers than the musical really needs: One would be enough. Falwell becomes the resident Iago of the piece, a rival consumed by envy who has no time for Tammy Faye’s tolerance of gay people.The second act dramatizes Tammy Faye’s famous 1985 interview with Steve Pieters (Ashley Campbell) the gay pastor and AIDS patient who finds in her a celebrity soul mate. (Love, Tammy Faye reports, gets many more mentions in the Bible than hate: 489 vs. 89, by her tally). It also charts the breakdown of the Bakkers’ blissful domestic life, when it was revealed that Jim had had a sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a church secretary, and was also sentenced to 45 years in prison for fraud.“Tammy Faye” is Goold’s third show this season on the stage of the Almeida, a theater he runs, after a coronavirus pandemic-delayed “Spring Awakening” and “Patriots,” a play about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Boris Berezovsky, an exiled Russian oligarch, that transfers to the West End next year. Goold and the choreographer Lynne Page have assembled a splendidly drilled ensemble that writhes and snakes across the stage in collective ecstasy. The show also hints at the fickle nature of that same crowd, who at one revealing moment turn on the couple in fury.Through it all, Brayben displays such fervor and commitment in the title role that you fall under the sway not just of Tammy Faye, but of a performer giving her career-enhancing all to a part that Brayben was born — Tammy Faye would surely say destined — to play.Tammy FayeThrough Dec. 3 at the Almeida Theater in London; almeida.co.uk. More

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      ‘Oresteia’ Review: A Mother’s Grief, Underestimated

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      Anastasia Hille is riveting as Klytemnestra in Robert Icke’s production of “Oresteia” at the Park Avenue Armory.Before the first domino of their tragedies falls, before murder begets murder begets murder, they are an enchanting family: the mother, Klytemnestra, warm and easy with her two little ones gathered close around her; the father, Agamemnon, suave in public but playful the instant he walks through the door at the end of the day.In their cozy contemporary sanctuary of a home, they seem so absolutely normal. These people love one another. The boy, Orestes, has never been a good sleeper, but when his bad dreams come, his parents are there to comfort him. And Iphigenia, his sister, is a darling in a citrus-orange dress. Though she is young enough that she totes her long-eared plush bunny everywhere, she is old enough, and smart enough, that she’s already a moral thinker. When the family has venison for dinner, she cannot bear the thought of eating a deer.“It’s a little dead body,” she says.Is this the deer whose killing so angered the goddess Artemis that she stilled the winds on which Agamemnon’s warships depend? Robert Icke’s fraught and gripping “Oresteia,” an emotionally harrowing retelling of Aeschylus’ trilogy at the Park Avenue Armory, doesn’t get bogged down in such background details of ancient mythology.What matters is the excruciating ransom that Agamemnon, a military commander and a great believer in prophecies, thinks he has to pay to get the winds blowing again so he can be victorious in war. He must murder Iphigenia, his curious, trusting, doted-on daughter who wants nothing to do with killing deer and has nothing to do with waging war.“By his hand alone,” the prophecy reads. “The child is the price. Fair winds.”Her innocent life, ended irrevocably, in exchange for maybe — if her father’s faith in the gods and the counsel of serious men is not misplaced — achieving his political objectives. Not, of course, that her mother has been consulted in this, let alone Iphigenia herself.“If she doesn’t feel pain,” Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, says, arguing in favor of snuffing out his niece, “and it is a civilized procedure, and it is the clear and greater good, then who are the victims?”What is the value of the life of a girl? What is the value of her mother’s clawing grief and bottomless rage at her child’s murder? And how, exactly, has Klytemnestra come off so badly through the ages for her revenge killing of Agamemnon — as if she were singularly evil and crazed while he was simply a decent guy in a difficult position, who’d made the tough call that his own daughter was expendable?Hille and Angus Wright in Robert Icke’s production, which originated at the Almeida Theater in London in 2015.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTold in four acts over three and a half hours, this “Oresteia” is about grief so deep it settles into the soul and metastasizes into a need for bloody vengeance, whose result in turn becomes a cause of more fresh grief. If you’d wondered what unites “Oresteia” thematically with “Hamlet,” Icke’s other thrilling production running in repertory at the Armory this summer, there it is — two plays in which murders leave survivors bereft and homicidal, and in which one generation of a family suffers the treachery of another. But whereas “Hamlet” centers the title character, this re-centered “Oresteia” is concerned principally not with Orestes, the son, but rather with Klytemnestra, his haunted mother.“This whole thing,” she tells Iphigenia’s ghost as it flits through the house, “this whole thing is about you.”When this production by the Armory and the Almeida Theater was first announced, it was meant to star Lia Williams as Klytemnestra, reprising the role she had played in London, but an injury forced her to leave the show before previews began.Anastasia Hille is the Armory’s Klytemnestra, and she is magnificent in an incandescent, utterly sympathetic interpretation so riveting that you would do well to spend the entire first intermission watching Klytemnestra simply sit onstage, in a stupor of grief that ages her by the next act. Hille will win plenty of partisans over to Team Klytemnestra — even as the play would also like to draw its audience’s attention to the needless, cyclical horror of murder and revenge, and the self-righteous delusion that just one more death will even the score for good.In the terrifyingly real depiction of a loving marriage that’s destroyed before our eyes, Hille is matched every inch by Angus Wright as Agamemnon. After Klytemnestra realizes that he plans to murder Iphigenia (beautifully played at the performance I saw by Alexis Rae Forlenza, one of two young actors who share the role), the fight they have is so brutal and raw that you may recall its dynamics from the most damaging domestic argument you’ve ever had.“This is about a person who came from us, who would never have lived if we hadn’t loved each other,” Klytemnestra says, pleading her daughter’s case in the hope that her husband will hear reason. “What you are destroying is us, doing something that will overwhelm our history, a single action which if you bring it down on us will obliterate the whole story which precedes it.”Tia Bannon, foreground left, and Luke Treadaway, with, background from left: Elyana Faith Randolph, Angus Wright and Hille.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy the end of their fight, the current of intimacy that ran between them for years is shut off. They are for all intents and purposes exes, effective immediately, with any further emotional access denied. Which, in the bruised and intricate psychic honesty of this play, does not mean the love has entirely vanished.On a set by Hildegard Bechtler so chic it looks like what you’d get if Norman Foster and Richard Serra retrofitted an ancient castle, “Oresteia” seeks to implicate us in its patterns of needless destruction: Whenever the lights come up on the auditorium, we’re reflected in the set’s long glass wall.The show is peppered with tiny oddities and puzzlements that become clear, mostly, at the end. Slight spoiler: The reason that the grown-up Orestes (Luke Treadaway) watches much of the action from outside the periphery of the house is that he is immersed in a court proceeding, to determine his guilt in the murder of his mother. His memory is often uncertain. The woman questioning him (Kirsty Rider) doesn’t really buy that his other sister Electra (Tia Bannon), who conspired with him to kill Klytemnestra, even existed. The text hints that maybe she didn’t. There is a whiff of mystery about it all.But the tragedy of it is paramount — one set in motion by superstitious men who took it on faith that the life of a little girl didn’t matter, and who never stopped to think that her mother would counterattack.OresteiaThrough Aug. 13 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Putin, Chekhov and the Theater of Despair

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      In London, a new play about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a revival of “The Seagull” explore undercurrents of pain.LONDON — There’s a chill in the air at the Almeida Theater, notwithstanding the record-breaking heat here. That drop in temperature comes from the coolly unnerving “Patriots,” a new drama whose look at power politics in Russia over the last quarter-century induces a shiver at despotism’s rise.The gripping production, directed by Rupert Goold, runs through Aug. 20.Written by Peter Morgan (“The Crown,” “Frost/Nixon”), “Patriots” surveys the sad, shortened life of Boris Berezovsky, the brainiac billionaire who died in 2013, age 67, in political exile in London. An inquest into Berezovsky’s mysterious death returned an unusual “open verdict,” but on this occasion, it is unequivocally presented as a suicide: The play ends with this balding man, bereft of authority, preparing to end his life.An academic whiz-turned-oligarch who expedited the rise of the younger Vladimir V. Putin, Berezovsky later fell out with the onetime ally who enlarged his power base, according to the play, with promises of “liberalizing Russia,” yet proceeded to do anything but.Morgan introduces Berezovsky, age 9, as a math prodigy whose mother hoped he might become a doctor. (A gleaming-eyed Tom Hollander plays the role throughout.) From there, we move forward 40 years to find Berezovsky an integral member of Russia’s moneyed elite welcoming to his office an obsequious Putin, then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.“Respected Mr. Berezovsky,” says an initially indrawn, ferret-like Putin, “one would have to live on another planet not to know you!” But it isn’t long before Putin has changed his tune, and his tone, as he rises from prime minister to president and consolidates power around himself. In one notably effective wordless scene, Putin tries out poses in front of a mirror to see which makes him look most impressive. His earlier hesitancy has given way to a man in love with his own heroism.Berezovsky looks on at so dramatic a change in character appalled, urging the former K.G.B. operative to “know your place.” But Putin by this point simply won’t be sidelined. And besides, reasons Putin, why hold your enemies close when they can just as easily be destroyed?Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots.”Marc BrennerGoold, the director, dealt with a different headline-maker at the Old Vic this spring in “The 47th,” which imagined Donald J. Trump in the run-up to the next presidential election. Goold is in better company this time: “Patriots” is a richer, less fanciful play, with grim resonances for today. Although Morgan rightly leaves it to the audience to make the connection, you can draw a line between the glorious empire Putin yearns for in the play and his ongoing attack on Ukraine.In one of the performances of the year, Will Keen, as the Russian leader, astonishes throughout, bringing his character to agitated, unpredictable life. His early fawning in Berezovsky’s presence gives way to an icy rejection that finds its fullest expression when his onetime mentor writes as a fellow patriot requesting permission to come home to Russia. Putin dictates a reply, then tells his secretary to rip the letter up: Berezovsky, Putin concludes, “is not worth it.”Hollander impresses, too, as he did in a dazzling star turn in “Travesties,” which won the actor a 2018 Tony nomination — two talky plays requiring an actor at home with reams of language. His character is both a quick-tempered womanizer, and too naïve to realize the young Putin’s potential for authoritarian misrule.Widening the play’s scope yet further is the Russian president’s friend, the oligarch Roman Abramovich (the excellent Luke Thallon), who battles Berezovsky over ownership of the oil company Sibneft. That case, which came to trial in London in 2012, plays out here as a resounding defeat for Berezovsky that only amplifies his psychic distress. Alexander Litvinenko (Jamael Westman, a former leading man in “Hamilton”), the Putin critic who was poisoned in 2006, shows up, too, as the “most honorable” of dissidents (or so Morgan maintains): a political casualty wreathed in glory that the sorrowful Berezovsky never knew.There’s an aspect of bravery, you feel, in writing “Patriots” at all while Putin is on the march. (That said, like Trump with “The 47th,” it’s possible these men’s egos would thrive on the attention.) In the days after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, orchestras, concert halls and opera houses pulled Russian works from their stages, and it looked as if it might no longer be allowable to perform the Russian repertory in the West; overseas trips by the Bolshoi Ballet, among other storied Russian arts companies, were canceled, as well.Emilia Clarke, second from right, in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc BrennerSo it’s a relief to welcome a Russian classic, “The Seagull,” first presented in 1896 by Anton Chekhov, who died nearly a half-century before Putin was even born. That this first of Chekhov’s four great plays ends, as does “Patriots,” with a suicide is an intriguing coincidence that also points to the undercurrents of pain that inform both plays.Performed barefoot and in modern dress, Jamie Lloyd’s enthralling production, at the Harold Pinter Theater through Sept. 10, furthers the stripped-back approach to the classics he brought to a recent “Cyrano de Bergerac” that was acclaimed in New York and London.Just as that play dispensed with a fake nose for its title character, this “Seagull,” seen here in Anya Reiss’s 2012 version, never features the wounded bird of the title onstage. Doing without props of any kind, the cast members, headed by the “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke in a terrific West End debut, deliver the play seated on green plastic chairs and boxed in by chipboard; they speak with a quiet intensity, as though we were eavesdropping on the characters’ innermost thoughts. Some will be exasperated by the approach, but I was riveted from the first hushed utterance to the last.Like “Patriots,” this “Seagull” draws from its own well of grief, even if the world of writers and actresses in Chekhov’s play is a long way from Morgan’s power-brokers and politicos. Lloyd’s ensemble communicates the shifting affections of a quietly devastating play that leaves you transfixed by the theatrical potency of despair.Patriots. Directed by Rupert Goold. Almeida Theater, through Aug. 20.The Seagull. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Harold Pinter Theater, through Sept. 10; in cinemas Nov. 3. More

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      The Carnage of War, in Punchdrunk’s New London Show

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      The immersive theater company’s production invites up to 600 spectators to roam freely around a loose re-creation of the siege of Troy’s aftermath.LONDON — It’s unusual in a live performance to construct your own narrative, shaping the event as you see fit. But that has long been part of the appeal of Punchdrunk, the ambitious immersive theater company whose latest show, “The Burnt City,” opened here last week.There are no assigned seats, or even spoken words, in the company’s first London project in nine years. Instead, the co-directors, Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, encourage up to 600 spectators to roam two onetime munitions factories (and a new structure conjoining them) and make of the occasion what they will. In my case, that meant being enthralled more often than I was baffled; others may well have the opposite response.Taking as its topic the fall of the ancient city of Troy, the show includes in its cast of characters Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Cassandra, and it dramatizes the cycle of vengeance that follows Paris’s abduction of the famed beauty Helen.The characters, played by a hard-working company of 28 who perform their scenes in a loop, aren’t identified, so you’re left to work out who might be the Trojan queen, Hecuba, or her ill-fated son Polydorus, whose murder is one of several in a narrative full of grief. If you happen recently to have read “The Iliad” or the tragedies by Euripides and Aeschylus that underpin this venture, so much the better.Wearing masquerade masks, as is the Punchdrunk norm, we begin in a hall of display cases filled with artifacts from a 19th-century excavation of supposed Trojan ruins by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann — pottery, libation bowls, headgear and other items. They form what Barrett has described as a “decompression zone” to help us shake off the outside world and plunge us into a bygone civilization. (To that end, cellphones are placed in sealed bags during the performance.)Leaving the dimly lit gallery, we embark on our chosen journey: Turn one way for Troy, the other for Mycenae, the Greek military stronghold that vanquished the smaller city around 1250 B.C.“The Burnt City” is the first London project in nine years from Punchdrunk, which also created “Sleep No More.”Julian AbramsMost of the action plays out in the capacious, high-ceilinged rooms of the warehouse representing Mycenae, including Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia and his eventual murder — here graphically depicted in a shower. (Nudity is presumably one of several reasons that playgoers ages 16 and 17 are allowed entry only with “a responsible guardian.”) Stephen Dobbie’s mood-setting sound design thrums ominously throughout, and at several points we encounter some frenzied, furious dancing in which Doyle, a noted choreographer, lets her performers cut loose.Troy, by contrast, is a deliberate mash-up of eras and references, and the exemplary design team of Barrett, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns get to have some macabre fun. This neon-lit labyrinth features a department store called Alighieri’s that evokes the underworld of Dante, and piles of bones to remind us of the siege of Troy’s carnage. An illuminated sign advertises “finest fake flowers,” for anyone who might want to pay respects.In contrast to previous Punchdrunk shows — like the company’s signature New York success, “Sleep No More” — there is little buttonholing of individual playgoers for one-on-one encounters (perhaps not so desirable in the age of social distancing), and the proceedings don’t build to the usual galvanic finale. You depart impressed by a concerted appeal to the imagination, though maybe another go-round is needed to fill in the gaps.Punchdrunk asks audiences to expect the unexpected, and so, in its way, does “Daddy: A Melodrama,” the Jeremy O. Harris play running through Saturday in its London premiere at the Almeida Theater. Directed, as in New York in 2019, by Danya Taymor, the production places an infinity swimming pool downstage — not the first thing you expect to see upon entering an auditorium.Terique Jarrett and Sharlene Whyte in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy: A Melodrama,” directed by Danya Taymor at the Almeida Theater.Marc BrennerSpectators in the first few rows shield themselves as the actors splash about, with frontal nudity, as in “The Burnt City,” presented unselfconsciously. The frolics serve a story that grips across nearly three hours, even as it tilts after the intermission toward the melodrama of the title. Telling of a Black American male artist and the older white “daddy” who acts as the younger man’s patron and lover, Harris’s play is a parable of possession, in which people can be owned, just as art can.The charismatic Danish actor Claes Bang (now onscreen in “The Northman”) plays Andre, a European art collector based in Los Angeles, and the hugely gifted Terique Jarrett, handed the driving part, plays Franklin, the mid-20s boytoy who makes dolls of varying sizes — and who may represent a doll of sorts to Andre.Complications arise when Franklin’s deeply religious mother, Zora (Sharlene Whyte, commendably fierce), arrives for a visit only to voice displeasure with the lifestyle her boy has chosen. “What happened?” she demands to know of the Bible-quoting son who once sat on her lap in church. Franklin’s chums take their own poolside view of events: “So I guess since Mom’s a no-go,” says Max (the musical theater actor John McCrea, in waspish form), “Daddy has to suffice.”Whyte’s Zora faces down her son with an outsize grandeur worthy of Punchdrunk at its most heightened. The male leads, meanwhile, expertly chart the changing dynamics of a liaison at risk of burning itself out. Franklin, for all the fuss made over him, looks poignantly set on a path toward loneliness, left with not so much a burnt city as a scorched soul.The Burnt City. Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. One Cartridge Place, through Dec. 4.Daddy: A Melodrama. Directed by Danya Taymor. Almeida Theater, through April 30. More

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      On London Stages, Maverick Responses to Mortality

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      Creative adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” and Ionesco’s “The Chairs” grapple with death and feature inclusions of the coronavirus and performance artists.LONDON — The opportunity to see Kathryn Hunter in peak form is a rare treat, and one that is currently available by booking a seat for the Almeida Theater’s revival of “The Chairs.” This hugely gifted actress plays a character, billed as the Old Woman in Ionesco’s 1952 classic, with enough boundless wit and energy to make a mockery of age.Recently, Hunter has been acclaimed onscreen for playing all three witches in Joel Coen’s adaptation of “Macbeth,” starring Denzel Washington, for which she won a New York Film Critics Circle award. But this American-born mainstay of the London theater also gleams onstage with an unbridled delight in performance that is a pleasure to behold.The result lends a welcome immediacy to Ionesco’s potentially inaccessible exercise in absurdism, which hasn’t been staged here since 1997. That version, directed by Simon McBurney, Hunter’s longtime colleague at the Complicité theater company, transferred against expectation to Broadway, garnering six Tony nominations. This new iteration, adapted by its director, Omar Elerian, runs until March 5, leaving time for Hunter to limber up for her next stage assignment: playing Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe this summer.The Old Woman, in fact, is in her 90s, so older than Lear but blessed in Hunter’s interpretation with a wide-eyed sense of wonder. Having been coupled for 75 years with the Old Man (played by Hunter’s own husband, Marcello Magni, another Complicité veteran), she joins her elegantly dressed spouse in awaiting the arrival of any number of guests to attend some sort of conference that may save the world. Or, more likely, not.Among them is a Speaker (Toby Sedgwick), who is this play’s equivalent of Beckett’s elusive Godot. The difference is that the Speaker actually does show up, allowing the duo to bow out of lives that haven’t been easy: “We shall decompose in marine solitude,” announces the Old Man. “Let’s not complain too much though.”Premiered in French by the Romanian-born Ionesco, “The Chairs” preceded “Waiting for Godot” by one year and represents a landmark text more often than not confined to the classroom. Committed to dusting away the cobwebs, Elerian’s English-language version insists upon the contemporary whenever possible. Before he is even seen, the Old Man is heard fretting about the performance: “Tell [the audience] I have Covid,” he says to his wife in an offstage argument about whether or not to do the show. Afterward, we learn that the Old Woman has had 21 booster shots.Once they emerge before us, the pair call to mind two aging vaudevillians having one last hurrah. She totters about in a red wig and dark petticoat, curtsying with endearing politesse and suggesting in her singularly throaty voice that “we cut the next bit; it’s terribly long.” (The production runs nearly two hours, no intermission.) He proffers a handkerchief to a nearby audience member and readies himself for the chairs of the title, several of which Magni manages to catch in midair: no mean feat for someone of any age. Ionesco’s original text calls for 40 chairs minimum, but I lost count of the quantity at the Almeida.Those chairs, of course, sit empty as comic business gives way to the stuff of tragedy. We hear of the children the couple wanted but never had and the “pain, regrets, remorse” that have been their shared fate instead, the Old Man chastising himself for allowing his mother to die, untended, in a ditch. Abandonment, he says, is an inescapable fact of life.The emotional pull of the material remains sufficiently strong that I wish Elerian’s adaptation wasn’t quite so fussy. The opening shenanigans are awfully forced, as are the closing remarks from the Speaker, who usually utters scarcely a word in this play. A discourse on “alternate truths,” this orator’s rambling observations are attuned to the concerns of the world today but nonetheless feel like padding. Its farcical elements notwithstanding, the play is sufficiently powerful as is, Ionesco’s overriding bleakness as topical now as ever, which speaks volumes to how little has changed in 70 years.From left, Sam Archer, Ash Hunter and Lucy McCormick in “Wuthering Heights,” adapted and directed by Emma Rice at the National Theater.Steve TannerEven more so than Elerian, Emma Rice is a prominent director-adapter who doesn’t take familiar texts at face value. A former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Rice made her name running the touring company Kneehigh, which deconstructed such time-honored titles as “Brief Encounter” and “Tristan & Yseult.” Since then, Rice has started a theatrical entity called Wise Children, whose irreverent take on the Emily Brontë novel “Wuthering Heights” can be found on the Lyttelton stage of the National Theater through March 19.The eclectic impulses behind this production are evident from its cast, which brings together dancers, performance artists and a “Hamilton” alum to tell the corpse-strewn story of the foundling, Heathcliff (Ash Hunter, the veteran of the aforementioned musical), and the ill-starred Catherine (Lucy McCormick, a maverick talent who moves between self-devised work and plays such as this one). Juggling several roles is the charismatic Sam Archer, an actor-dancer whose nimble movement very explicitly keeps Rice’s take on this 1847 novel from seeming earthbound: It’s always helpful to have a performer on hand capable of soaring at any moment.Rice’s freewheeling approach to the material won’t suit the purists. It’s surprising to find the Yorkshire moors — a setting crucial to the novel — brought to three-dimensional life by an assemblage led by the arresting Nandi Bhebhe, who seems to be wearing a crown of sticks and twigs and has a retinue of similarly attired human plants. Elsewhere, the convolutions of the plot are confronted head-on. “How is anybody expected to follow this?” asks the resident narrator, Lockwood (one of Archer’s several roles), only for Bhebhe to chip in with an awareness that “no one said this is going to be easy.”Rice’s goal is to ease a path through a labyrinthine novel by bringing her total-theater aesthetic to a music-heavy production that announces the characters’ fates on a chalkboard, a choice that taps directly into the association many will have with this novel from their student days. A trim or two wouldn’t go amiss, and there are times when the reinvention seems reckless, not revelatory.But I won’t soon forget a fierce-eyed McCormick haunting the action from beyond the grave like an ongoing premonition of doom, and Katy Owen’s chirpy Isabella Linton all but steals the show: a figure of audience-friendly fun amid the landscape of mortality that, as with “The Chairs,” we come to realize is our shared lot.The Chairs. Directed by Omar Elerian. Almeida Theater, through March 5.Wuthering Heights. Directed by Emma Rice. National Theater, through March 19. More

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      Three Stars, Three Ways, Three Classic Plays

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      On British stages, Saoirse Ronan, Cush Jumbo and Ian McKellen present contrasting approaches to Shakespeare and Chekhov. LONDON — Saoirse Ronan may be the main attraction of “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” as Shakespeare’s play is billed at the Almeida Theater, where it will run through Nov. 27. Yet, not for the first time in the director Yaël Farber’s career, Farber rules every minute of this attenuated account of the famously short work. Running nearly an hour longer than many “Macbeths,” the production conjoins sound, lighting and design to conjure a haunting mood that does more for the play than any individual’s performance. The menace and foreboding are palpable before the three witches have spoken a word.Where, then, does this leave Ronan, the superb Irish film actress and four-time Oscar nominee, in her British stage debut? She sometimes seems a decorative accessory to an exercise in total theater in which Tim Lutkin’s scalding lighting design, for instance, shines as bright as any Hollywood star.Yes, Ronan is given more to do than many Lady Macbeths, to foreground the actress most audience members have come to see. She’s there for the slaughter of Lady Macduff (Akiya Henry) and her children, which in turn reduces Ronan’s initially demure purveyor of evil to an anxious, hysterical wreck.But even as James McArdle in the title role builds to a vocal frenzy, we’re drawn to the hazily lit stage, which fills with water at the end, so the play’s combatants can splash about. (Those seated near the front might want to bring ponchos just in case.) Farber’s actors work hard, and often well, but they’re subsidiary to the atmosphere of gloom and dread she creates. That stays with you long after the thrill of celebrity has worn off.There’s never any doubting the intense stage presence of Cush Jumbo, the blazing talent known to TV audiences from “The Good Fight” and “The Good Wife” and who, unlike Ronan, cut her teeth in the theater. Some years back, she played Mark Antony in an all-female London production of “Julius Caesar” that was later seen in New York.Cush Jumbo in “Hamlet,” directed by Greg Hersov at the Young Vic theater.Helen MurrayHer return to the stage here as Hamlet, at the Young Vic through Nov. 13, constitutes an event. It’s just a shame that the director Greg Hersov’s modern-dress production doesn’t more frequently rise to the level of a star who is also the rare Black British actress to take this iconic role.Now and again, you sense inspiration. I liked the idea of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as selfie-taking hipsters who try their best to engage with the prickly Danish prince. Tara Fitzgerald’s Gertrude is an emotionally reined-in fashionista who may never have had an honest emotion in her life — until it’s too late.Elsewhere, Adrian Dunbar is a surprisingly dull Claudius; Joseph Marcell’s twinkly Polonius plays to the house, as if milking the character’s self-satisfaction for laughs. (His murder is bewilderingly staged to minimal impact, which seems odd given its importance as an early indicator of Hamlet’s building rage.)Throughout an unevenly paced evening, the androgynous Jumbo sets Hamlet apart as surely the smartest person in the room, and also the most furious. “To be or not to be?” feels less like an existential rumination than like the angry outburst of someone who’s had enough. I’ve seen more moving Hamlets, yet Jumbo fully catches the edgy restlessness of a protean character. Purring “this likes me well” of the knife he will use in combat, Jumbo’s Hamlet separately refers to “the very witching time of night.” This got me thinking: If Jumbo is looking for more Shakespearean roles, as I hope she is, what about having a go at Macbeth or his lady — or both?It’s not long ago that I caught another unusual choice for Hamlet in the age-inappropriate Ian McKellen. At 82, the acting veteran is still onstage in Britain, this time in the starry company of Francesca Annis and Martin Shaw in “The Cherry Orchard.” This Chekhov revival, directed, as was McKellen’s “Hamlet,” by his longtime friend and colleague Sean Mathias, is on view through Nov. 13 in the riverside town of Windsor, and is worth the trip.Ian McKellen in Windsor, England, in July. He’s now appearing there in “The Cherry Orchard.”  Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesUnlike the two Shakespeares, Chekhov’s 1904 play is kept in period and brings to mind the name-heavy productions of the classics that used to be mainstays of the West End but aren’t so much anymore. In a vital new adaptation by the American playwright Martin Sherman (“Bent”), this “Cherry Orchard” even indulges in a little gender-bending, with the eccentric uncle, Gaev, played by a tearful Jenny Seagrove — last seen as Gertrude to McKellen’s Hamlet.The focus of the play remains Madame Ranevskaya, the financially heedless aristocrat newly returned from Paris to the ancestral Russian estate that will soon be sold out from under her. Annis, a onetime Juliet to McKellen’s Romeo, is perfectly cast in a role that capitalizes on her natural elegance and luxuriant voice. Shaw, too, is in terrific form as the wealthy Lopakhin, the peasant’s son made good whose warnings about the fate of the orchard go unheeded.Shuffling about with a cane, a long beard tumbling from his chin, McKellen seizes the role of the aging manservant, Firs, without stealing focus from his colleagues. “I’ve lived a long time,” Firs says at one point, to an appreciative chuckle from the audience.Like Hamlet, McKellen knows the play’s the thing. Sometimes a classic text, simply and clearly told, is all you want, or need.The Tragedy of Macbeth. Directed by Yaël Farber. Almeida Theater, to Nov. 27.Hamlet. Directed by Greg Hersov. Young Vic theater, to Nov. 13.The Cherry Orchard. Directed by Sean Mathias. Theater Royal Windsor, to Nov. 13. More

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      Raging Prince and Simpering King: A Tale of Two Shakespeares

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      Livestreamed productions of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” from London reflect the vital role directors have in redefining these classic characters.I’ve seen Hamlet cry. And pout. And waffle. And jest. And rave. But I haven’t seen Hamlet rage the way Cush Jumbo’s Hamlet does in a new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Young Vic in London. It’s the kind of determinate rage that convincingly powers him through his revenge.Yet this production gets its spark from the politics of having a Black woman in the role, directing her anger at an injustice.What this “Hamlet” — and its fellow Shakespeare tragedy “Macbeth,” which is also onstage in London right now, at the Almeida Theater — reminds us of is the important role that a director can play in molding these central characters who are defined by their resolve, or lack thereof. Their choices may not only render a classic new again, but also make space for contemporary gender and racial politics.These plays, running in person and via livestream — which is how I saw them — show two different approaches to directing Shakespearean tragedies. Greg Hersov’s “Hamlet” has a compelling, well-defined protagonist inhabiting a not-quite polished production; while Yaël Farber’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is an appealing production with bland lead performances.Farber typically has a strong command of her stages; her productions are often dark, and hung with a polished, ornate melancholy. (Her gracefully haunting take on “Hamlet,” starring an electric Ruth Negga, felt stolen from the dreams of Edgar Allan Poe.) This “Macbeth” is bleak, spare and gritty. (Soutra Gilmour is the set designer.)The play opens with an overturned wheelbarrow full of soldiers’ boots and a man bathing in a bucket of blood. And yet it’s also delicate, with Tom Lane’s cello score (performed by Aoife Burke); and stately, with the three elder Weird Sisters (Diane Fletcher, Maureen Hibbert and Valerie Lilley) dressed in handsome gray suits that David Byrne would envy. (Joanna Scotcher designed the costumes.)Farber takes a political stance in her direction, making the war imagery brutal and heavy-handed. But the largest surprise, and slip-up, in this otherwise charismatically styled and beautifully filmed production is that the central couple, played by James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan, are rather conventional and unremarkably defined.James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan in Yaël Farber’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” at the Almeida Theater in London.Marc BrennerI say central couple, though Macbeth was never the most interesting part of the play; he is ambitious but irresolute. He must be goaded on by Lady Macbeth, one of the most fearsome, emasculating — and fascinating — women in English literature. Though undoubtedly a great performer with a gleam of Hollywood celebrity, Ronan feels miscast in the role. Even as a murderer, Ronan has a jejune, effervescent quality that’s at odds with the base evil of the character.Farber sometimes positions Lady Macbeth as a sexual figure, her body sprawled in bed or on the floor draped in gauzy cloth, and her legs wrapped around Macbeth’s waist in greeting. But Ronan and McArdle lack chemistry, and this Lady Macbeth is also presented as oddly virginal; Ronan, wearing a playful white-blond bob, and mostly white attire, is the brightest image in this gloomy production.This Lady Macbeth could also represent a certain dangerous white female power that comes at the expense of men and women of color; in one scene, Macduff’s wife (Akiya Henry) and children, who are all played by Black actors, are viciously murdered as Lady Macbeth guiltily stands to the side. It’s an overly violent scene, punctuated by Lady Macduff’s jagged screams, that drags on for an excruciatingly long time.As for McArdle, he gives a believably shocked and earnest portrayal of Macbeth, and, later in the production, manages to deliver a rabid version of the murderous Scottish king. But he bumbles through the steps in between. Ultimately, we’re left with a murderous couple that somehow manages to be forgettable.On the other hand, in Hersov’s “Hamlet,” the trappings of the production are less lively: The music and costumes have an early 1990s vibe, though the reason is unclear. The livestream is, impressively, very accessible. You can watch from various camera angles, and captions and British Sign Language are also provided. Still, the video and audio quality leaves more to be desired.Where Hersov does provides a decisive interpretation is in the melancholy prince — and his suicidal lover. This Hamlet is not the desperate, confused young man so many productions present, but a prince empowered by his feelings. Jumbo gives a fiery, vitriolic performance; this Hamlet’s grief passes through a sieve of righteous anger. His wit is barbed with sneers and eye rolls. Even his jokes are delivered with an acerbic bite.Norah Lopez Holden as Ophelia, with Jumbo as Hamlet, in the production that is streaming through Saturday.Helen MurrayThe decision at the heart of the play — “to be or not to be,” that famous meditation on living and dying — seems less of an open question in this production. Jumbo’s prince philosophizes almost for the sport of it; he always seems resolved to what he must do.Ophelia (Norah Lopez Holden), who so often is just a girlfriend tragically lost to hysterics, is here as clear and confident as Jumbo’s Hamlet. In her first scene, she seductively sways her hips while listening to music, and she fantasizes a sexy Latin dance with Hamlet before she’s jolted back to reality. She isn’t a receptacle of Hamlet’s desire, but a young woman with sexual agency and desires of her own. Holden’s Ophelia has attitude, telling off her elder brother for his hypocrisy and firing back at Hamlet when she’s had enough of his gibes and babble.And when she descends into madness, it does not seem like the insanity of a girl who’s heartbroken and grieving; it seems as much an act as Hamlet’s, and her suicide appears to be a rejection of the world she inhabits.For Ophelia to show such agency within the bounds of the character as written is quietly extraordinary. And to see a Black woman reframe Hamlet as confident and righteously enraged is a political take unusual for the play. Hersov’s “Hamlet” remakes its main man from the ground up. After all, what a piece of work is a man — or a Black woman — on a fresh stage.The Tragedy of MacbethThrough Nov. 27 (streaming through Saturday) at the Almeida Theater in London; almeida.co.uk.HamletThrough Nov. 13 (streaming through Saturday) at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org. More

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      On London Stages, High Ambitions and Mixed Results

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      In “Rockets and Blue Lights” and “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia,” British playwrights make grand gestures. Sometimes too grand.LONDON — It seems reasonable to expect fireworks from a play called “Rockets and Blue Lights,” a vivid title for an overstuffed, if intriguing, drama with no shortage of things to say.Running through Oct. 9 at the National Theater here, Winsome Pinnock’s play may require a chart to help track the action: Ten actors play 24 roles. But if the intricate plotting takes a while to flare, the ambition of the piece is welcome throughout. In a theatrical climate defined over the last year by solo or small-cast plays, here is writing that thinks big. It also brings Pinnock back to the National, where the author, now 60, made history in 1994 as the first Black British woman to have a play at that address.“Rockets and Blue Lights” was seen briefly in March 2020 at the Royal Exchange Theater in Manchester before the pandemic intervened; a subsequent radio version was adapted for the BBC. The director Miranda Cromwell’s current production tethers a strong cast to a play in which present and past collide. Pinnock’s principal theme is how artists illuminate (or betray) the world around them, and her way in is the work of the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner.The reference in the title is to one of two oil paintings by Turner that were exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1840. The other, “The Slave Ship,” might depict the infamous 1781 Zong massacre, which resulted in the deaths of more than 130 African slaves at sea. (Scholars are divided over the work’s inspiration.) The same painting is also known by an explanatory alternate title, “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon Coming On,” and Pinnock traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see the picture for herself.The drama begins in 2007, with two women debating Turner’s achievement. How can such an ugly scene be so beautiful, Lou (Kiza Deen), asks of a painting in which she has a vested interest. An actress, she has signed on for a film in which she will play one of the drowning slaves — an assignment a far cry from her previous starring role, on a TV sci-fi series called “Space Colony Mars.”The action in “Rockets and Blue Lights” plays out on a set designed by Laura Hopkins.Brinkhoff-MoegenburgPinnock then rewinds to the 19th century to address the rapport that develops between Turner himself (a feisty Paul Bradley) and a Black sailor, Thomas (an excellent Karl Collins), whom Turner encounters by the docks. “I can tell by your blistered hand that you’re a man of the sea,” Thomas notes admiringly of the artist. Thomas, though, comes to grief, as befits a play in which the dead haunt the living: The film Lou is making is called, significantly, “The Ghost Ship.”The drama ricochets through enough themes — enslavement, artistic integrity, personal responsibility, among many others — for a play double its two-and-half-hour running time. Through it all, Laura Hopkins’s set allows water to lap at the edges: an apt visual for a play in which the sea is of more than passing interest.That our attention is riveted throughout is due not just to Pinnock but also to Cromwell, a 2020 Olivier Award winner for “Death of a Salesman,” who locates the human pulse in an often dizzying text. The play ends with a moving roll call of the dead and a reminder that art can ennoble the deceased and, in a certain way, give them life.Death also hovers over a second, though vastly different recent London opening: “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia,” at the Almeida through Sept 18. This play by Josh Azouz filters World War II through the lens of the German occupation of Tunisia, a onetime French protectorate, which began late in 1942. In thrall to France’s Vichy regime at the time of the Nazis’ arrival, Tunisia, a useful program essay informs us, was home not just to a predominantly Muslim population but to 90,000 Jews, many of whom did not make it to the protectorate’s liberation, in May 1943.Adrian Edmondson as Grandma, left, and Yasmin Paige as Loys in Josh Azouz’s “One Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia” at the Almeida.Marc BrennerAs his title suggests, Azouz has taken an obvious leaf from Quentin Tarantino and exhibits the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s taste for folding unexpected levity into tales of depravity. The result shares with Pinnock’s play a gratifying appetite for chronicling history anew, but wears out its welcome much faster: After a while, the gallows humor just seems glib.“Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia’s” defining character is a cruel yet smiley Nazi officer who has taken charge of the local community: The opening scene, set in a labor camp outside the city of Tunis, finds an impassioned young Arab, Youssef (Ethan Kai), forced by one of this villain’s minions to urinate on his longtime friend Victor (Pierro Niel-Mee), a Jew. Youssef advises Victor to move to New York after the war, and the talk soon turns to dispossession, and what it even means to call a place home.The two men and their wives exist at the mercy of the tactically cheerful Nazi, who is improbably nicknamed Grandma because he likes knitting and refers to himself as an “old woman” — albeit one unafraid to float the prospect of gouging out the eyes of Victor’s wife, Loys (Yasmin Paige, eloquently furious).The power games unfold on a deceptively drab wooden set by Max Johns that springs open as required, and features holes for characters to poke their heads through, as in Beckett. Yet the more Azouz recalls one forebear or another, the more you register the difficulty he has in navigating shifts in tone; the director Eleanor Rhode brings a comparatively prosaic eye to material that might benefit from some stage wizardry.It’s good to see the charismatic Kai back onstage after his electric performance in “Equus” a season or two ago, and the comic actor Adrian Edmondson deserves credit for never soft-pedaling Grandma’s dark impulses. But for all its laudable intentions, the play sits suspended between historical inquiry, sendup and cautionary fable: audacious, to be sure, but not fully realized.From left, Laura Hanna, Ethan Kai, Yasmin Paige and Pierro Niel-Mee in “Once Upon a Time in Tunisia,” directed by Eleanor Rhode.Marc BrennerRockets and Blue Lights. Directed by Miranda Cromwell. National Theater, through Oct. 9.Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia. Directed by Eleanor Rhode. Almeida Theater, through Sept. 18. More