Is the National Theatre rediscovering its popular touch? As Rufus Norris heads to the end of his decade in charge there — his still-to-be-named successor arrives in 2025 — his ability to connect with a large audience appears to be hitting new peaks. Dear England, an intimate epic about Gareth Southgate and the England football team, has even more wallop now it’s in the West End. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s bestselling novel, is ending its huge tour with a West End encore. Both are shows to recommend to the most theatrephobic friends.
The Motive and the Cue, starring Johnny Flynn as Richard Burton and Mark Gatiss as John Gielgud, goes “up west” in December. It’s joined in February by the Richard Hawley musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge. And the 2024 season not only features Michael Sheen as Labour’s father of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, in a new play, Nye, it also has London Tide, a new version of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend with songs by PJ Harvey. Oh, and some shows will start at 6.30pm, so you can be home in time for Newsnight. Is Norris going out on a wave of good times for all?
In some ways, sure. But then you go and see The Confessions, the sort of initially interminable play that you might slip away from early had anyone stuck an interval in it, and remember that theatre can’t always be a doddle.
Alexander Zeldin’s first National play, LOVE, set in a homeless hostel, was a kind of masterpiece. The Confessions contains great things, but it is no masterpiece. “I’m not interesting,” 80-year-old Alice (Amelda Brown) says as she starts to take us through her life from postwar Australia to starting over in London in her forties. You get the irony — isn’t everyone’s life fascinating, told right? Don’t we all count? — but Zeldin races neither to explain where the story is heading nor that Alice is based on his mother.
I ended up really liking The Confessions. But its first hour drifts from one baggy scene to another, full of moments of vérité social awkwardness as Alice (played in her youth by Eryn Jean Norvill) settles down with a stifling berk. Alice goes through divorce, higher education, countercultural experimentation. Lines and details grab, it’s artfully staged and beautifully played, but doesn’t a story need more shape than “a life”? Even if it is underwritten by Alice’s slow emancipation from the awful men in her life who at best talk over her and at worst ...
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Well, sorry to say, it’s when Alice reaches her nadir that the play takes off. Zeldin stages a sexual assault that is all the more vivid for happening offstage. The steps that Alice takes next will prompt post-show discussions, but struck me as daring in their staging, nudity included, and in the real-life bravery they depict. The audience holds its breath as one. And as Alice heads towards her happyish ending in London the room fills with a gorgeously lifelike mix of love and heartbreak and making do and being glad for what you’ve got. The Confessions needs your patience, but it rewards it.
At the Donmar another fêted playwright’s latest show is lighter but less interesting. Clyde’s is a follow-up of sorts to Sweat, the great play about the deindustrialisation of Pennsylvania that won the playwright Lynn Nottage the second of her two Pulitzers. Here, she reunites with the director (Lynette Linton) and one cast member (Patrick Gibson) who helped to take Sweat from the Donmar to the West End. It’s hard to see the same happening for this tale of four ex-cons cooking up second chances in the kitchen of a truck-stop diner.
It’s not Nottage’s fault that the TV series The Bear did more with a kitchen setting months after Clyde’s opened on Broadway in 2021. She has, however, written a play where lots gets said but little happens. The ex-cons are delightful; the female boss, Clyde, is a boorish bully. It sprouts a few funny or touching moments late on, and it’s nicely played. And that’s about it for 90 minutes.
The Confessions
Lyttleton, National Theatre, London SE1
★★★☆☆
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Clyde’s
Donmar Warehouse, London WC2
★★☆☆☆
What’s the best show you’ve seen at the theatre recently? Let us know in the comments below
For tickets, visit thetimes.co.uk/tickets
