Mogadishu Vivienne Franzmann’s play won’t assuage any anxieties about state schools and kids gone wrong. The scenes in Matthew Dunster’s production are charged with a sort of battle-front jumpiness. Jason (Malachi Kirby), a muscular black teenager who could be politely described as “hot-tempered”, lays into a Turkish pupil at school. When a white teacher, Amanda (Julia Ford), tries to break up the fight, Jason lashes out at her. Amanda knows enough about Jason’s personal history to have qualms about reporting this to her head. While she dithers, Jason accuses her of racism and assault, and pressures his posse into backing up his story. Soon, to the indignation of her wise-mouth daughter, Amanda is facing disciplinary action. Nobody seems equipped to help or handle Jason. He could be a social cliché — thankfully, Franzmann offers just enough clues about who he is beneath his swagger. One of the drama’s most chilling moments sees him being browbeaten by his father. Mogadishu was joint winner of the 2008 Bruntwood Playwriting Competition. Franzmann splashes the script — her first — with too much melodrama, but she doesn’t paste solutions onto the problems she shows us. Jason and Amanda are both tossed aside, and the waste is maddening. MS
Oedipus Steven Berkoff’s re-creation of Sophocles’s play is not a ”version” pretending to be a translation: it is a homage to an ancient masterpiece, and shows that rewriting it in a harsh, edgy modern language can still make you feel the heat and passion of its power. Berkoff never “modernises” the play to make it “accessible”; nor does he create a pious theatrical antiquity to display his knowledge. His rough, eight-strong male chorus clearly represent the ordinary people of Thebes, roaring their lines brutally, but always clearly, like an organised earthquake. The production does have a Greek feel, subtle but not ostentatious, in Michael Vale’s landscape set and John Chambers’s off-stage music. Simon Merrells is a heroic Oedipus, restless but controlled, a man fighting desperately for and against his own life. At the end, he cries out that he has been blinded by his own arrogance — which is where I disagree with Berkoff. There’s no such thing in Sophocles’s text. It is the gods who destroy Oedipus. That is what the play is about, and that, the unpredictability of the gods, is what haunts all the Greek tragedies we know. Having said that, this is still the bravest, most exciting and moving production of a Greek tragedy I have seen in years. JP
A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson What wouldn’t one give to spend a couple of hours in the company of the great lexicographer and essayist Dr Johnson? Instead, we have to make do with this portrait drawn from Boswell and lovingly put together by Russell Barr, Ian Redford and Max Stafford-Clark. Which isn’t such a hardship, as this is far more than just a string of famous quotes. Bewigged, ruddy and rotund, Redford’s harrumphing Johnson makes witty company as he attacks the Scots, praises his cat, Hodge (played, alarmingly, by a jack russell), tries to come to terms with his approaching death and is outraged by Garrick’s use of powdered actresses as the three witches in Macbeth. It’s Johnson’s many contradictions that fascinate. His kindness is contrasted with his thunderous temper. His mind could hardly have been quicker, yet his scrofula-scarred body always took its time. Barr makes the most of a string of characters including Flora Macdonald, George III, Wilkes and the ever-watchful Boswell. Oddly, Trudie Styler is scheduled to appear as Mrs Thrale at some performances, which makes a jarring intrusion into the style of performance established by the two male actors. Nevertheless, this small show is driven by a large and generous heart. JE