Daily Mail, Friday, September 6, 2019 Page 51
LUKE JONESit’s friday! theatre
However good the play is, do
remember that Shakespeare’s
Globe is the most uncomfortable
theatre in Christendom.
Jacobean comedy did much for
language but little for lower back
support. Yet this bright, gaudy
Bartholomew Fair makes you for-
get your lumbar woes. ‘Lewd men
and strange women’ is what we’re
promised and what we get.
Pig carcasses dangle from the
ceiling, cocaine is hoovered up
and bums are grabbed.
Bartholomew
Fair is a messy
play. we’re
shown the
chaos of a great
social mingling;
ne’er-do-wells
meet the pious
meet the local
Justice in
disguise. every-
one’s woes are
wound together,
then slowly unspooled.
The joy in this production of Ben
Jonson’s play is the slapstick, the
way insults are spat, its Carry-on
jollity. The cast pitch it that way;
big and loud. Joshua Lacey as a
swaggering essex boy with a tight
suit and bare ankles. Jenna Augen
goes from being busty, rambunc-
tious stall owner to portly preacher
Zeal. Zach wyatt (above) rather
steals the show as a filthy-rich
posho slumming it and being
fleeced in the process. He flounces
with gusto.
Director Blanche McIntyre has
the cast racing round the stage,
into the crowd, appearing at doors
and clambering through rows.
But it’s quite a dense text. It
needs a good chop to excavate
some clarity. The shouty mayhem
doesn’t always help.
Numerous times I found myself
adrift, forgetting, for example,
whose wife has been kidnapped,
turned into a prostitute and is
now watching a puppet show.
I laughed like a drain.W
HAT a week for this
show to open. It’s a
play starring Lindsay
Duncan and Alex Jen-
nings in which a Tory
MP’s political and personal life is
going to hell in a hand-cart. The
very same week many Tories
found themselves in a similar
direction of travel.
even No 10’s new hard man Dominic
Cummings couldn’t have scheduled that.
Alright, the setting of Simon woods’s
play is very different. we’re in the Cots-
wolds of 1988 and it’s not Brexit that’s
poisoning the water, it’s Mrs Thatcher’s
infamous Clause 28, which banned the
promotion of homosexuality in schools.
Jennings plays weary Tory MP robin
back from an exhausting week touring the
country to find his wife Diana half cut at
11am, watching foxes laying waste to his
beloved garden.
Diana is a part-time Lefty who delights
in knocking chunks out of her Tory hus-
band over his attitudes to homosexuality,
his failures in the boudoir and — groan —
his sense of entitlement (from which she
obviously benefits by default).
emotionally they’re about as far apart as
the two sides in the Brexit debate. And to
begin with it’s all quite promising.
Like Parliament today, they can’t agree
on anything and are reduced to trading
insults. And highly polished, nicely
poisonous insults they are, too.Leap right in
to all the fun
of the fair
Two Trains Running
(Royal & Derngate, Northampton)
Verdict: Stirring hymn to 1960s Pittsburgh ★★★★✩Hansard (Lyttelton, National Theatre)
Verdict: Tory couple made to pull their punches
★★★✩✩by Patrick Marmion
Bartholomew Fair
(Shakespeare’s Globe
Theatre, London)
Verdict: Deliciously naughty ★★★★✩What
a Tory
furore
‘Theatre is always about people
trying to understand themselves,
never about people with jobs,’
snarls Jennings at his artsy other
half. Good one. Mostly, though,
it’s cheap Tory-bashing elegantly
phrased. ‘So easy to mistake an
expensive education for an under-
standing of the world,’ sneers
Duncan. ouch! Much stickier
stuff is slung besides. one jeer
about old etonians ‘running’ (not
the word used on stage) the coun-
try provokes a cheer.
But it’s worth noting woods is
himself an eton-educated writer
— which presumably has no
bearing on his first play landing
on the Lyttelton stage.
The cat-and-mouse game — or
cat and rat — couldn’t be in bet-
ter thespian hands, either.
Aside from the fact that her
blonde colouring and silk kimono
blend into Hildegard Bechtler’s
beige cottage set, Duncan is an
outstanding and very classy pain
in her husband’s neck.
Jennings is a handsome gent
who imbues his Savile row Torywith style and dignity, only losing
his sang-froid on one spectacular
occasion. Both keep occupied
making toast on the Aga, mixing
Pimms, setting up a film projec-
tor and acting as if their mutual
demolition was a domestic rou-
tine like washing-up.
Much is owed to edward Albee’s
marital breakdown drama who’sAfraid of virginia woolf?, obvi-
ously woods’s inspiration.
The problem is the play never
hunts bigger game. Yes there is
Clause 28, which remains for
many a live issue today. But it,
too, seems to presage something
bigger about the fury of modern
politics. Instead of venturing into
such territory, woods prefers asentimental ending. Perhaps he
was afraid of alienating his audi-
ence. I for one would rather he’d
stuck to his guns and taken full
advantage of his play’s setting,
before the ban on foxhunting —
and made this a real blood sport.
For that, alas, we must continue
watching the news feed
from westminster.AUGUST WILSON is best known for his series of
ten plays charting the history of the black com-
munity in Pittsburgh through the 20th Century.
This one is set in the social and political ferment
of 1960s America (after the death of Martin
Luther King and the rise of Malcolm X and his
militant Black Power movement), with a
cracking revival by Nancy Medina.
In a diner in Pittsburgh’s run-down Lower Hill
district we meet six men from a marginalised
community — each of them is a kind of hustler,
striking deals with their past, their future
and each other. But the core of the action
involves Michael Salami’s Sterling: fresh out of
jail and determined to impress cagey waitressRisa (a fascinating Anita-Joy Uwajeh). Sterling is
abetted by Wolf the spiv (Ray Emmet Brown).
But what really puts him in the frame for
romantic success is his compassion for a men-
tally disturbed homeless man (Derek Ezenagu).
Intense, touching performances lead a
stirring hymn to these people and those times.
Catch it on tour until the end of October.
PMArt imitates life in this toxic
study of a bitterly divided
political couple ...
Pictures: CATHERINE ASHMORE / MARC BRENNER