8 Monday May 23 2022 | the timesartsfirst night
The Father and
the Assassin
Olivier, National Theatre
{{(((theatre
N
athuram Godse, the man
who killed Mahatma
Gandhi in 1948, emerges
from the floor of the stage
like a puppet from the music
box in Camberwick Green. “What are
you staring at?” he says. “Have you
never seen a murderer before?”
Godse, played with impassioned
informality by the excellent Shubham
Saraf, is a chatty guide to his own
story in Anupama Chandrasekhar’s
play. And as he narrates, as he takes us
through first attraction then revulsion
towards Gandhi’s policy of non-violent
protest, he toys with preconceptions.
“Before I proceed,” he says, on a
sparely decorated stage framed by a
giant backdrop of stitching (stunning
work by the designer Rajha Shakiry),
“may I please ask you to switch off
your... British scepticism.”
OK, done. And what a promising
premise. Chandrasekhar traces
Godse’s actions through not only his
involvement with the Hindu activist
Vinayak Savarkar but also his unusual
childhood. He was brought up as a girl
— his parents thought their male line
was cursed — yet treated as an oracle.
We get a sweep of history, a sense of
the horrors of Partition. Gandhi, “the
father of the nation”, was one of
millions of Indians to die at that time.
The facts are sobering. Yet there is
little internal life here, few moments
that don’t betray their need to fit in a
lot of information fast.
“I did not want the play to be a
history lesson,” Chandrasekhar writes
in the programme, but The Father and
the Assassin is just that: an illustrated
lecture. Indhu Rubasingham’s
handsome production has to guide us
through Godse and Gandhi’s lives with
a one-thing-then-another tenacity.
Political grievances, parent issues —
you get all this from the programme,
and if it’s facts you’re after they are
laid out more clearly there too. So for
all its flourishes, it’s a stolid evening.
And that’s despite tremendous
performances. Paul Bazely is graceful
but unsentimental as Gandhi. Sagar
Arya has sardonic authority as the
dapper Savarkar.
Much of the audience rose to its feet
at the end, but I left unpersuaded that
a history lesson, however necessary,
had sprouted into a fully working play.
Dominic Maxwell
To Jun 18, nationaltheatre.org.ukresponding with disarming immodesty
as his fame precedes him everywhere
he goes. Yet when Ludwig’s script
demands Goodman to sideline the
twinkly playacting, he raises his game
like the great actor he is.
Poirot might flirt with one of his
suspects, Countess Andrenyi (Laura
Rogers), yet never mind extravagant
vowels, Goodman also makes it clear
that truth matters more to this man
than vanity. “I merely ask questions,”
he tells her as he turns inquisitor. “It is
my job.”
Elsewhere, Jonathan Church’s
production does its best to make
something fresh and theatrical of a
tale with arguably the most familiar
solution in the Christie canon. Robert
Jones’s design does a fine job of getting
us in among the action — movingdining tables and sleeping carriages
across the stage — less so of bringing
any sense of confinement, of tension.
Perhaps that’s too tough an ask for a
story that is more parlour game than
nailbiter. Yet swallow the contrivances
and overlook one or two stiff
performances, and this is an
entertaining, well-played evening. Sara
Stewart is a force of nature as the
knowingly crass, much-married Helen
Hubbard; Patrick Robinson is
endearingly expansive yet businesslike
as Monsieur Bouc, the man who runs
the train company. And Goodman has
entirely cracked the mystery of how to
put a new spin on the world’s most
famous, most Belgian detective.
Dominic Maxwell
To Jun 4, cft.org.uk; Jun 9 to 25,
Theatre Royal BathI
t’s a mystery: why adapt one of
Agatha Christie’s best known
Poirot novels when there are
already two successful film
versions out there — three if you
include the David Suchet TV version?
How can you capture, on a huge
thrust stage, the sense of being caught
on a snowbound train with an
unknown murderer of an unloveable,
rich American in the early 1930s? And
can anyone — even the excellent
Henry Goodman — stop us longing
for the Hercule Poirot we know?
The last of those questions is the
easiest to answer in this playful, fitfully
stylish, sometimes flat but ultimately
satisfying adaptation by the American
playwright Ken Ludwig. Goodman is a
simply outstanding Poirot. He is a
small man with a big presence, Henry Goodman is brilliant as PoirotMurder on the
Orient Express
Chichester Festival Theatre
{{{((theatre
RICHARD HUBERT SMITHC
harli XCX is the pop idol
who isn’t. At her biggest
London show to date the
Essex-raised 29-year-old
born Charlotte Aitchison
had the appearance of a normal star:
big catchy tunes, pneumatic dance
routines, an elaborate Greco-Roman
stage set, myriad costume changes, an
opposition to rock’s emphasis on
authenticity with not a musician in
sight. Charli XCX is too self-aware and
alternative to be a straightforward pop
figure, though, even if she did a pretty
good impersonation of one.
Charli XCX’s latest album, Crash, is
her most accessible yet, but as soon as
she blasted into Lightning, a manic
barrage of synthetic whooshes and
over-emoting vocals, it was clear that
this was a parody and a celebration of
pop at its most outrageous. She took
on the role of a showbusiness drill
sergeant, commanding her audience tomatch her dedication to the cause.
“Everybody put your phone torch on
and up in the sky! It’s cheesy but I like
it!” she screamed. They obeyed. “Get
up on each other’s shoulders, bitches!”
she roared. They did try, but there
were a lot of brightly coloured figures
collapsing sideways in the process.
Britney Spears is the figure Charli
XCX most often cites as an inspiration,
but really this was a reminder of
Madonna in her prime: the same tightly
choreographed dance routines, the
same display of sexuality so
performative it becomes camp. There
were some amazing songs: Boom Clap,
an actual big hit from 2014; New Shapes,
a futuristic love song for which she was
joined by the glamorous American
singer Caroline Polachek. And when a
fan threw a Princess Diana flag on to
the stage, the singer cried as she
wrapped herself in it. “You supported
me when no one else believed in me!”
Actually, she doesn’t need the
mainstream to believe in her. Charli
XCX is a cult star to the core, even if
appearances suggest otherwise.
Will Hodgkinson
Rock City, Nottingham, tonightCharli XCX
Alexandra Palace, N22
{{{{(pop
The Wreckers
Glyndebourne
{{{{(opera
The plot of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers has parallels with Benjamin Britten’s Peter GrimesWild waves of passion
Ethel Smyth’s
forgotten 1906
work is givenan imaginative
revival, writes
RichardMorrison
A
humdrum Proms
performance of The
Wreckers 30 years ago
didn’t quite convince me
that Ethel Smyth’s 1906
opera was the masterpiece that
admirers of the ebullient lesbian
suffragette composer claimed. Either
I’ve become more tolerant or, more
likely, Glyndebourne has sprinkled
some magic on the piece, because its
new production is theatrically and
musically much more gripping than I
feared. And that’s despite it being
elongated to epic length by half an
hour of rediscovered music, and being
sung in French. OK, Smyth’s librettist
originally wrote it in French, but it’s
still an odd decision for an opera
composed by an Englishwoman, set in
Cornwall and now revived in Sussex.
That aside, the director Melly Still
champions the work imaginatively.
Her staging evokes a religious-
fundamentalist coastal community,
their lives as precarious as the flotsam
strewn around a ramshackle jetty
(dark brooding designs by Ana Inés
Jabares-Pita). The villagers live off the
cargo of the ships they deliberately
wreck by extinguishing the beam from
their lighthouse.
However, the local preacher’s
rebellious wife and her lover secretlylight a beacon and the community
mercilessly punishes them for it. The
director adds four black-dressed
women who weave through the action
like dead souls but that never distracts
from the storytelling.
Clearly there are parallels with
Britten’s Peter Grimes, a later English
opera about a coastal community that
won’t tolerate those who don’t
conform. And it’s a curious fact that
Britten possessed a score of The
Wreckers. To measure it musically
against Britten, however, is pointless.
Smyth was rooted in romanticism. The
score is a derivative patchwork, one
moment as tonal and tuneful as
Carmen, the next as ferociously
chromatic as The Flying Dutchman.
Yet what is strikingly revealed here
by the conductor Robin Ticciati, the
immaculate London Philharmonic, a
fired-up chorus and a large cast (of
whom the standouts are Karis Tucker
as the rebellious wife and Lauren
Fagan as her jealous nemesis) is the
work’s wildness, volatility and sheer
passion. Whether Smyth is evoking
the turbulent sea of human emotions,
or the sea itself — conjured up by a
rush of bodies in the final seconds —
this is an opera that deserves to be
heard and seen as she intended.
To Jun 24, glyndebourne.comThis was pop
at its most
outrageous