Manor (National Theatre London).
Verdict: Bonkers
Rating: 
A Christmas Carol (Old Vic London).
Verdict: No matter what season, a treat
Rating: 
Four Quartets, Harold Pinter Theatre
Verdict: Glimpses of Eternity
Rating: 
The National Theatre finally created a play that will only be understood by ultra Right-wing paranoid conspirators and soil-worshipping nutjobs.
Everyone else will be left baffled and bewildered but, on the upside, it shows that the country’s flagship theatre really does reach out to all sections of society.
The set-up for Moira Buffini’s rambling and frankly bonkers new play, starring the normally exquisite Nancy Carroll and mercurial Shaun Evans (he of ITV’s Endeavour and recent BBC series Vigil), seems simple enough.
Diana (Carroll), lives in a crumbling manor house, battered and ravaged by the biblical tempest, which is apparently caused by climate change.
She was in desperate need of shelter when a cross-section from modern British society stepped up to help her.
First to arrive is an ancient — gay — vicar (David Hargreaves), followed by a black London nurse (Michele Austin) and her bolshie daughter (Shaniqua Okwok).
Ted Farrier (Evans), who is the leader of Albion – a group of British white supremacists – joins them.
The set-up for Moira Buffini’s rambling and frankly bonkers new play, starring the normally exquisite Nancy Carroll and mercurial Shaun Evans (pictured), seems simple enough
The house is chaotic inside as well. Following an argument, Diana’s husband (Owen McDonnell), a washed-up rock star, has fallen downstairs while high on magic mushrooms.
His daughter Isis (Liadan Dunlea) isn’t too bothered. She seems more eager to clarify that she’s named after the Egyptian goddess, and not the Islamic State group.
Also in the spontaneous house party from hell is an overweight former Sainsbury’s check-out assistant (Edward Judge), who falls under Ted’s spell — and Ted’s chauffeur (Peter Bray), recruited to the Albion cause while in jail.
Finally, there is Ted’s blind academic girlfriend (Amy Forrest), who happens to be an expert in French revolutionary history.
Diana’s manor house is, I suppose, meant to represent Britain falling apart. But really, it’s just a pretext for the men to spout sub-Nietzschean supremacist twaddle.
Naturally, people will wistful about Islamic takeovers. The nurse warns darkly that they are ‘clinging to the laws of the future’. Is that what you mean? We don’t know.
Buffini fares better with the vicar, who has a nice line in Whitney Houston-ish platitudes: ‘It’s hard to sustain love until you love yourself’.
There are just too many characters out there with too many ideas, and everyone is putting in their effort.
Carroll’s whimsical Diana goes from being repulsed by Ted to becoming spellbound by the ‘charismatic man of action’.
Hobbling from a sprained ankle, Evans’s Ted is a rattish, Reiss-apparelled Scouser. He may be vaguely charismatic, but not in a rip your clothes off kind of way — more in a ‘call the cops, now!’ kind of way (although, to be fair to Diana, her phone lines are down).
Not surprisingly, Fiona Buffini’s production fails to make sense of her sister’s madcap misadventure, which is neither dramatically serious nor obviously funny.
Lez Brotherston’s wonky set is as hard to look at as the plot is to follow. And Jon Nicholls’s slasher-movie music urges us to think of all this in terms of apocalyptic doom.
I am at least impressed that the Buffini sisters managed to steer this chaos through the National’s literary department.
I’ve long suspected the place might have been infiltrated by renegade, Right-wing fifth columnists. Possibly, now we may have evidence.
A Christmas Carol for November! It’s a sham!
First Mark Gatiss’s Nottingham production (reopening this week in Alexandra Palace); and now Stephen Mangan, in the Old Vic’s fifth iteration of the show in five years.
Hadn’t theatres better remain dark and ‘reduce the surplus population’ of Christmas Carols, as old Scrooge might put it?
It’s not true! Matthew Warchus’s production of Jack Thorne’s adaptation is the benchmark of modern Christmas Carols on stage.
Stephen Mangan slots into the show like sage-and-onion stuffing into the festive bird — even if he looks more like the kind of metrosexual beardy man you’d expect to find advertising Waitrose rare-breed turkeys than a miser, counting his pennies and rueing his ‘choices’ in life.
And Mangan slots into the show like sage-and-onion stuffing into the festive bird — even if he looks more like the kind of metrosexual beardy man you’d expect to find advertising Waitrose rare-breed turkeys than a miser, counting his pennies and rueing his ‘choices’ in life.
Anyway, the real star of Warchus’s production is the atmosphere created by a Milky Way of lanterns over Rob Howell’s catwalk stage. As Ebenezer receives a tour of his childhood by ghosts of Christmas present, past and future, the creaking sound effects provide most of the scenery.
Christopher Nightingale’s enchanting music sends the cast reeling in jigs, and has them singing snatches of carols during scene changes, while weaving in heart-tugging variations on O Holy Night. And at the end, the company’s crystalline hand-held bell ringing reduces the audience to rapt, damp-eyed ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’.
Add to that a snow machine filling the theatre with whirling white flakes — and a whip round for the charity FoodCycle — and dare I say it … it’s A Christmas Carol that comes not a moment too soon.
Best of all, it’ll be even riper next month.
Matthew Warchus’s production of Jack Thorne’s adaptation is the benchmark of modern Christmas Carols on stage
Poetry in motion is Fiennes’ performance
By Libby Purves
Sometimes, just a brief performance can change, shake or rouse, and even transform you. Get out of the hustle and bustle of earning and spending and get away from those scrolling screens.
For 75 minutes, sit quietly while a tall, bald, and slightly grotesque man contemplates time, eternity, and death.
Feel with him the ‘still centre of the turning world’, the piercing wonder of those moments when suddenly, something immense fills you, then slips away, uncatchable.
T.S. T.S.
Ralph Fiennes spent the two long lockdowns learning them by heart: he had recorded them before, but wanted to get closer to Eliot’s religious and philosophical vision.
In this performance it feels like he accomplished that: Reaching out to (despite the fact that no human can ever grasp it) for those precious moments of time.
You might find them in a quiet rose garden or beside a crashing ocean in the distant sounds of children. Or, as in Eliot’s case, while watching fire by night during the Blitz.
Ralph Fiennes spent the two long lockdowns learning them by heart: he had recorded them before, but wanted to get closer to Eliot’s religious and philosophical vision
As Fiennes learned the poems, it occurred to him — as the lockdowns made time seem either to squeeze or stretch, and exposed our fragility — that the four might be performed physically.
This was genius. We are carried onstage by his presence, his movements, and sometimes even his humor. The set is simple, but has great grey walls that revolve. He moves between dark spaces, ranging from despair to exaltation, sometimes even laughter, as the space becomes more and more open.
Eliot’s poetry is often lyrically poetic, and often well-taught. However, he sometimes has to stop to contemplate his own inability, utter or not, to convey what he sees.
Fiennes uses this well, making it seem to sometimes appeal to us alone or deep in meditation.
This show may have been more engrossing because he has been performing it for many months. It’s worth swimming in.