This is one of the most ambitious new plays I’ve seen in years, but it’s almost strangled by its ambition. Tim Luscombe’s subject is the European Union, its birth and growth, and its impact, mostly disastrous, on individual lives. It’s also the story of a Suffolk man (Robert Hands), from boyhood to middle age: born into a fishing community, he becomes a Whitehall civil servant and ends up, after some turncoating, carrying out the EU’s death sentence on his fellow villagers. That sounds pat, but it’s the most powerful scene in the play, and should have been its conclusion: it’s a mistake to follow it with a scene that is as tiresomely whimsical as the opening one. This is an epic play, but Luscombe is clearly a playwright of intense scenes. Here he is, dramatically, in a foreign country. The play is top-heavy and over-researched, and you grow weary of people hurling statistics and slogans at each other. Attlee, Jean Monnet and Heath appear, the first two being improbably rude to each other. The actors play several parts with versatility, but without showing off. Liz Cooke’s set is terrific. Three stars
John Peter
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Tartuffe
Watermill, Newbury
This is a high-octane production, driven at full force by Jonathan Munby. You can see why Molière came under attack from the church. Tartuffe is a sanctimonious bigot who uses the vocabulary of Christian morality to enslave and rob his dim benefactor. Actually, in Des McAleer’s rock-like performance, he’s not so much dim as stubborn, not easily fooled but, once entrapped, obstinate in the extreme. Adrian Schiller, in a cool, venomous, cunningly varnished performance, captures Tartuffe’s essence, which is the realisation that the best way to castrate your victim is to use his own instruments. Before embarking on his attempt to seduce Mme Orgon (Catherine Kanter), he takes a snack in a blasphemous parody of the Mass: priestly bearing, white tablecloths, candles, a sip of wine, profiteroles delicately eaten. Marty Cruickshank is a magisterially dragonish Mme Pernelle; John McAndrew (Cléante) provides Molièrean common sense without being pompous. Four stars
John Peter
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Faith Healer
Gate, Dublin
“But faith in what?” asks Frank Hardy (Ralph Fiennes), an itinerant Irish healer who travels through the dying villages of Scotland and Wales in the company of his wife, Gracie (Ingrid Craigie), and manager, Teddy (Ian McDiarmid). In constructing a narrative out of four contradictory monologues, Brian Friel puts the emphasis on storytelling rather than dramatic action, in a testament to human frailty. His self-editing characters may well be incorrigible liars, but it’s more likely they’re simply unwilling or unable to recall the precise truths of their sordid, failed lives. Fiennes is a charismatic Frank, but while his rare moments of transcendence are entirely believable, the actor carries with him a patina of glamour that undermines his attempts to explore the more malign aspects of Frank’s personality. Craigie gracefully shoulders the heavy burden of introducing the melodrama that first reveals the extent of Frank’s self-delusions, while McDiarmid’s cockney manager is a masterpiece of comic timing. Jonathan Kent’s otherwise taut direction sags somewhat in the latter stages, a critical failure in what is essentially a philosophical take on the shaggy-dog tale: Friel may have no faith in memory, communication, history or traditional narrative structure, but his belief in the potency of language remains undimmed. Four stars
Declan Burke
Thatcher: The Musical
Warwick Arts Centre
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“You,” said John Barbirolli to a lady cellist, “have between your legs an instrument that can give pleasure to millions, and all you can do is scratch it.” That’s just about it for this fifth-form knees-up masquerading as satire.
Three women play Thatcher at different times of her life; none of them gets the accent right; all of them make her a shrill, hyperventilated buffoon. The miners’ strike is barely mentioned. British Falklanders are shown as whimpering sheep. All politicians are raucous twits. Reagan is a village idiot. What a waste of good material. You’ve been warned. One star
John Peter