Hamlet – Olivier, National Theatre ***

Elsinore, in Nicholas Hytner’s production, is a foreboding modern dystopia and a surveillance state. The cast are dressed in dark suits and efficiently move around Claudius’ court in a businesslike manner, haunting the corridors of power. Ophelia is driven mad as much by the behaviour of a distracted Hamlet towards her, as by the guards who follow her everywhere and are, at one point, seen to back her screaming into a corner. This idea of persecution creates a potent atmosphere on stage but is problematic in that it detracts from the real rot at the centre of Elsinore, the fratricide visited on old Hamlet by Claudius and his subsequent incestuous marriage to Gertrude. Disappointingly, Patrick Malahide is a very weak Claudius; he sits quite comfortably as his murderous action is recreated by the players before his eyes and his outburst is unbelievably muted when it does come. A much more energetic performance is given by Ruth Negga as a young and vulnerable Ophelia whose madness is convincingly swift-acting and all-consuming. She drags her shopping trolley around the stage in an unhinged frenzy – it is a modern madness where her flower tokens are replaced by childhood toys, her Barbie doll and a stuffed toy.

Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet alone makes this show a must see despite the disappointing supporting cast. A more lacklustre Laertes I haven’t before had the misfortune to witness and Clare Higgins, usually such a pleasure to watch, makes for a hysterical Gertrude who scuttles about the stage in her high heels, working herself up into a high-pitched wail at Hamlet’s murder of Polonius and never managing to convey the powerful nuances of her character. But Kinnear redeems this production from the charge of being just another mediocre modern interpretation. His eloquence transforms the blank verse into something so much more natural than any of the other actors achieve with Shakespeare’s words in their mouths. His language isn’t fraught with the manifold interpretations which precede his, so the big speeches seem fresh – there is no bombastic emphasis or peculiar locution which marks Kinnear’s delivery out from any other. ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ are delivered quietly and thoughtfully like a philosophical man contemplating his place in the universe, not like a bawling actor self-consciously delivering his lines with all the rhetorical flourishes he can muster. Perhaps it is right that those surrounding him are mere shadows in comparison to this Hamlet’s luminescence – it is Hamlet after all who has been received through the ages as ‘real’ in all his doubt and self-loathing and this realness is only intensified in this production which surrounds him with insubstantial puppets.

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Or You Could Kiss Me by Neil Bartlett – Cottesloe Theatre ***

The Handspring Puppet Company returns to the National Theatre after their breathtaking work on War Horse but to much more intimate and subdued effect. In Or You Could Kiss Me the puppetry is, again, enthralling; the two male protagonists are represented by a pair of decrepit and diminutive dummies, with a very convincing shuffling gait, manipulated skilfully by an on-stage team. The intimacy of the stage-hands with the bodies of the old men echoes the closeness that Mr A and Mr B enjoyed as young men in love. Having met in 1971, the two have been together for sixty-seven years and the ‘little one’, Mr A, now finds himself caring for his larger companion who wheezes and splutters, suffering with the advanced stages of emphysema and memory loss. The men must come to terms with Mr B’s hospitalisation and imminent death which spells the end of their life-long bond which has already been threatened by Mr B’s failing memory.

The ensemble cast switch between portraying the two men in their youth and old age which can appear rather chaotic on stage but manages to maintain narrative coherence. Adjoa Andoh's role as master of ceremonies, narrator, nurse, and house-keeper allows the story to be told from a perspective beyond that of the two men, but her swift role changes and fragmented monologues leant confusion to what would have otherwise been a powerful and simple tale. The play also suffered from being too concerned with its temporal setting; for the two men to be in their late eighties and to have met in 1971, the present time has to be 2036, yet there is no visual evidence that we are situated in the future. Of course, this isn’t an important aspect of the play, and it would detract from the action to have this futuristic aspect foregrounded. But props are a major part of this production and the ‘old-fashioned’ answering machine and laptop are anachronistic and conspicuous because it. Yet the moving portrayal of an enduring love, imperilled first by the homophobia of 1970's South Africa and then by the ravages of old age, transcends the particular downfalls of this production.

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Reclining Nude with Black Stockings by Snoo Wilson – Arcola Theatre ***

Powerful male artists with vulnerable women in their thrall seem to be a recurrent theme of productions at the Arcola. Earlier in the year, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Line portrayed a curmudgeonly Degas and his relationship with his protégé, Susan, and housemaid, Zoe. Wilson’s is a much shorter and more intense work, delving into the erotic passions which drove Egon Schiele to create his iconic nude paintings.

The charming but bumbling Johannes Flaschberger is our narrator, appearing in the form of Gustav Klimt but addressing us, the audience, as Athenians in order to suggest some kind of parallel with Greek tragedy. Shiele, although not all that dissimilar to the tragic hero beating his breast at the cruelty and inexorability of his fate, he is no mere plaything of the Gods, without volition of his own. He may make pronouncements of innocence and non-culpability but by painting his provocative nudes and carrying on a dalliance with numerous women and models, Schiele is setting himself up for trouble in the eyes of Viennese polite society. To Klimt and his muse, Valerie, he is a tortured genius, but to the police and society at large, he is a deranged and perverted egomaniac. In a Kafkaesque trial scene, Schiele’s artwork is set alight, Valerie finds herself in a catch 22 situation when denying her madness but affirming her involvement in and appreciation of Schiele’s art, and Schiele is condemned on a trumped up charge of rape.

The play is well done and the parts of Valerie and Schiele’s young model are performed passionately by Katie McGuinness and Naomi Sheldon respectively. The Arcola’s Studio 2 is a tiny space which makes the moments of full frontal nudity brave and intimate which, in the context of the play, do not feel gratuitous or titillating. But the play doesn’t please on all fronts; Simon Harrison’s Schiele was enigmatic, sometimes emotionally cold and even inhuman in his betrayal of Valerie, so why the lack of interrogation in respect of the rape charge. We are expected to fall into line with the view that Schiele is being defamed by an ultra-conservative state out to crush his artistic expression. But Schiele is played as a rather distasteful man, for all his genius, who uses and then discards the women he encounters. For this play to feel like more of an examination of Schiele, his art and his passions, we need a more nuanced approach to the central problem of the rape charge and less of Klimt the narrator and his distracting stage business.

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Story of a Rabbit by Hugh Hughes (Shôn Dale-Jones) – The Pit, Barbican *****

Alongside the quietly enigmatic Dafydd Williams, Hugh Hughes delivers a spell-binding show which plumbs the depths of loss and bereavement but at the same time is peculiarly uplifting and life-affirming. Hughes’ project here, according to the programme, is to share his wonderful world with us, and he certainly has a unique insight which is both charming and childlike, especially in the way he marvels at the quotidian (for instance, the number of potato particles in a potato). Telling two stories of death in parallel, his father’s and the next-door-neighbour’s rabbit’s, Hughes gives us an incredibly moving insight into the experiences that can shape an individual; Hughes is at once separate from our own lives and, for the short duration of the show, entirely part of us.

Hughes is a mischievous sprite of a man who wavers between a heartbroken son coming to terms with his father’s death and a stand-up comedian who knows exactly how to exploit his material for laughs. He immediately engages his audience, in a way that could be termed meta-theatrical if it wasn’t for the fact that his self-consciousness is evoked entirely to poke fun at the very approach to theatre that would employ such terms. Indeed, he warns us that throughout the performance he will be using dance and movement to express himself then later proceeds to display an especially peculiar routine which he tells us he conceived during a workshop in Bulgaria, funded by the Arts Council. As the show begins, the lights are up in the studio space and he addresses the audience directly. He offers a cup of tea to one lucky member of the audience, identified by having a ‘T’ written on the back of his ticket, and a second cup of tea (‘EA’ on the ticket this time) is offered later on in the show which serves as a disarming interlude when the narrative reaches its emotional peak. And the performance follows this trajectory throughout; Hughes is excited by the shear wonder of the universe and his place in it, he concentrates on the pathos of his father’s death and then switches to the relative light-relief of the rabbit’s death, then, when it all gets rather morose and Dafydd’s haunting melodies are bringing the tempo down, Hughes bursts through with an unexpected sideline accompanied by Dafydd on the banjo.

Hughes brings infectious energy and touching insight to his show. He greets everyone individually, shaking their hand, as they enter the auditorium, then does the same and hands out badges at the end. This sounds gimmicky but the audience thoroughly enjoyed this unusual intimacy. Hughes was, after all, sharing a deeply personal moment with us, the moment of his father’s death, and it would have been an inferior and colder experience if Hughes had maintained the conventional distance between performer and audience. Story of a Rabbit is one of the most enjoyable performances I have experienced this year because Hughes doesn’t pretend – he is not an actor in the usual sense, this is his story and he plays in a space that is littered with the objects and paraphernalia belonging to his life. The genius of the piece is that we are asked to share in this experience and shown how it can affect us, and amazingly the audience forgets its English reticence and fully engages with the loveable Hughes.

The Wonderful World of Hugh Hughes, currently playing at the Barbican, consists of three performance pieces: Floating, Story of a Rabbit, and 360.

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The Prince of Homburg by Heinrich von Kleist – Donmar Warehouse ****

The hubristic Prince of Homburg is the darling of the Prussian court, raised by the Elector and his wife as if he were one of their own. Prone to sleep-walking, Homburg is discovered in the grounds of the Elector’s palace in a deep trance. The Elector exploits the situation, placing a wreath of laurel on Homburg’s head and offering up to him his niece, Natalia, as a prize. Homburg awakens, with only a woman’s white glove in his hand to testify to the veracity of his dream. For someone prone to reverie, it is significant that the Prince doesn’t experience such an episode again; instead Homburg must face the harsh reality of the Elector’s wrath. Homburg achieves victory on the battlefield by disobeying the Elector’s orders and is thus punished as an example to all who would deliberately act against his commands. Heartbreakingly, Natalia has fallen in love with Homburg and agrees to marry him as soon as it is erroneously reported that the Elector has died in battle. After condemning Homburg to death, the Elector is beseeched by Natalia to pardon Homburg and she is jubilant when he issues her with a writ to release Homburg from confinement. However, the writ is a double bind and, in order for Homburg to secure his freedom, he must state that the Elector has acted wrongly. This is a devastating twist and Homburg then has to choose between living in infamy, as one who would speak against the regime in which he wholeheartedly believes, and a noble death.

This play benefits immensely from the intimate space at the Donmar where the pitiful anguish expressed by Charlie Cox’s Homburg is intensely felt in this slick production which packs a real existential punch. Despite the intimacy, the Elector’s palace is a grey, minimalist structure – its imposing edifice as inhuman as Ian MacDiarmid’s Elector. His diminutive tyrant is thankfully more than your average cardboard cut-out despot; we glimpse his fear at losing a tenuous hold on power over an increasingly disaffected court. But it is significant that both Natalia and Homburg are adopted by the Elector as daughter and son and yet are treated as mere pawns in his power game; their insistence on the fact that the Elector has been like a father to them is no subtle indicator that the Elector is acting monstrously towards them, like no true parent would. The power of this play lies in the way it sustains an internal struggle in the audience to reconcile the desperate situation of Homburg’s death sentence with the coldly rational actions of the Elector. Homburg then matches this rationality with his own self-defeating logic which ultimately seals his fate.

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Ruined by Lynn Nottage – Almeida Theatre ****

Mama Nadi owns an out-of-town bar in the Democratic Public of Congo; her place, a ramshackle two-sided shack taking up the entire stage, is a welcoming and lively retreat from the civil war which is ripping the country apart beyond its doors. Then the professor pays a visit – he has something in his truck that he thinks Mama will be happy to pay good money for, not the usual cigarettes or lipstick, but female refugees. Mama takes the women in, not out of some altruistic impulse to ease their suffering, but rather to put them to work as prostitutes and hopefully generate some income. Life at Mama's is preferable to the alternative, a life lived ostracised from the community because of being 'ruined' as a result of sexual abuse and mutilation. Despite this, Mama's girls are more than hospitable, providing lap-dances for the visiting militia in the bar - a sanctuary from the warring factions outside.

Seemingly impervious to the suffering endured by her new wards, Mama puts them to work. Jenny Jules' Mama is charismatic, wilful and strong but her mercenary interest in her customers, and the rough diamond she has sequestered away, makes her seem cold and inhuman. For Mama, if something can't be measured on a set of scales it isn't worth anything. The menace that has been threatening at the door finally crosses the threshold and there is a palpable change in tone as soon as the second half of the play begins. Horrific violence is first reported by Salima who has been forcibly held as a slave, enduring rape and beatings for five months, and who returns to her village only to be shunned by her family and then beaten and chased away by her husband. The play reaches a climax with the intrusion of war into Mama's realm and the death of Salima who screams 'you won' fight your war on my body any more' as she plunges a knife into her pregnant belly. We learn a crucial thing about Mama at the end of the play – she too is 'ruined' and this explains why she has been so solicitous for Sophie's well-being even after she was found to be stealing from the money-box. The professor finally breaks down the emotional barriers Mama has shored up against her humiliation and she responds to his tender avowal of love.

I can't bring myself to be critical of this play because it was so immensely enjoyable. That's not to say it was faultless, just that it delivered a thought-provoking message in an entertaining and deeply moving way. If I were to be cynical, I might say that the play couldn't decide whether it was a comedy or a tragedy- the humorous elements were perhaps too frequent, the violence, when it came, was then too gratuitous and unrelenting. The love story, rushed in to provide a happy ending, was probably too trite and too unproblematic a conclusion to the deeply troubling series of events that preceded it. Countering this imperfection was an impressive exuberance and vitality; the acting was excellent and the story deeply affecting. The disparate elements came together not to produce a balanced or harmonious piece of theatre (after all, we have moved on from dusty Aristotelian notions of classical dramatic form), but rather to portray the messiness of life and the enduring strength of the human spirit in the face of inhuman brutality and unimaginable adversity.

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London Assurance by Dion Boucicault – National Theatre *****

A delightfully energetic farce, London Assurance is pure entertainment and, under Nicholas Hytner's direction, a joy from start to finish. Sir Harcourt Courtly, a sixty year-old fop, leaves London for a country estate in order to marry the young Grace, niece to Max Harkaway, who at eighteen and haughtily dismissive of love, has committed to marrying Courtly in order to retain her inheritance. Arriving separately and in disguise, Courtly's son, Charles, falls in love with Grace and, along with the hanger-on Dazzle, hatches a plan to divert his father's attention and gain Grace's hand in marriage. Enter Lady Gay Spanker, stealing the show with her exuberant gaiety and hilarious obsession with hunting, to ensnare Courtly and allow young love to flourish.

The conventional happy ending retains a pleasing bite as we realise that Grace's pairing with Charles is not a simple triumph of love over money and duty. Charles inherits the wealth promised to his father if Courtly doesn't marry Grace and so, by choosing Charles, she dodges the unsavoury poser for a younger model in this marriage market. The play is replete with references to the 'mercantile' ways of the world and, although written over 150 years ago, it raises many a knowingly ironic laugh – Dazzle owes numerous debts but assures his creditors that their money will be safer with him than in the Bank of England. Much hilarity ensues as a result of the town/country divide, with the rural dwellers perceiving the Londoners to be vain and vacuous, and the urbanites thinking the country-folk to be nothing more than ignorant hicks with an unnatural predilection for riding horses.

The real reason to go and see this production is not the quality of the play itself; although a neat and entertaining diversion, it would be nothing without a superb cast of comic actors. And here is a superb cast indeed which brings together Fiona Shaw as Lady Spanker and Simon Russell Beale as Courtly – both are outrageous and work so inimitably well together that they could carry the play by themselves. The real treat is that Shaw and Beale are the prize jewels in a glittering crown; the support from the likes of Nick Sampson as Cool and Richard Briers as Lady Spanker's downtrodden husband is first-class. I would be reluctant to see another production of this play in the future, I think we have the definitive version here and I urge you to see it. I doubt it will ever be this good again.

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