the times | Friday March 18 2022 13first night
Tom Fool
Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond
{{{{(theatre
D
espite Franz Xaver Kroetz’s
status as one of the most
important and prolific
European playwrights, his
work is rarely produced in
the UK. Diyan Zora’s production of
Tom Fool, Kroetz’s devastating 1978
domestic drama, is good enough —
taut, funny and moving — to make
me long to see a lot more of the
German-born septuagenarian’s work.
Of course, it helps when you cast
Anna Francolini, Michael Shaeffer
and Jonah Rzeskiewicz in the roles
of Martha, Otto and Ludwig — a
middle-aged, working-class couple
and their adolescent son. The venue
is cosy and the seating in the round,
exposing the fine actors to constant
close scrutiny. Under Zora’s guidance
their performances are shot through
with a painful beauty.
Kroetz’s writing sneaks up on you in
a series of relatively short and
seemingly clinical scenes, each given
its own projected title. He starts us off
in Martha and Otto’s home, perfectly
realised in Zoë Hurwitz’s design as an
environment that is modest and
functional. Martha, never idle, keeps
it clean. Otto is a semi-skilled labourer
on the assembly line of a car factory
who, in his spare time, builds
large-scale model aircraft. Ludwig,
meanwhile, is well behaved but broody
and covertly rebellious.
What happens to this oh so typical
family hinges on money: a small
incident, perhaps, but one that shatters
the status quo. The great achievement
of Kroetz’s sharply written play, and
Zora’s fluid production, is how it allows
us to peer into the characters’ inner
lives without losing sight of the bigger
picture. It is their specificity that
illuminates the ideas Kroetz wants to
convey about gender expectations,
economic entrapment and the
tensions that go with them.
Tom Fool is neither sentimental nor
didactic about the social issues that
underpin it. But what I am most likely
to remember are the wonderfully
ambivalent feelings engendered by the
performances: Shaeffer’s at best
semi-articulated aspirations and lonely
self-loathing as Otto, the desire for
pleasure and the careworn
disappointment at its unattainability
in Francolini’s Martha, and as Ludwig,
Rzeskiewicz’s wounded humiliation at
Otto’s splenetic treatment of him in
one of the first act’s two key scenes.
Donald Hutera
To Apr 16, orangetreetheatre.co.ukThey make the kind of lightning-rod
epics that play well everywhere,
combining the bombast of U2 with the
strut of INXS, and in David Le’aupepe
they have a frontman with leonine
charisma, hip-swinging energy and a
sensual baritone.
Dressed in black jeans, a black vest
and a patterned shirt, Le’aupepe gave
us the lot — chest thumps, Jesus
poses, Tarzan yells, intersong sermons
— topped off during the stirring
Magnolia with an enthusiastic bout of
crowd surfing. The Angel of 8th Ave,
inspired by their move to London, was
a swirling, cathartic opener, while Let
Me Down Easy and Spirit Boy had a
foot-stamping blend of muscle and
melody. There were five others onstage, including the violin player
Tom Hobden — once of the British
band Noah and the Whale — but it
was hard to take your eyes and ears
off Le’aupepe.
Some see Gang of Youths as too
earnest, a point that the singer seemed
to be addressing when he said, “Don’t
be a f***ing cynic. You’re not gonna
remember how many things you rolled
your eyes at, you’re gonna remember
how deeply you felt.” Which was a
great play for the non-cynical
demographic. Le’aupepe does have a
point, though — we have more than
enough archness to go around. The
gutsy sincerity on show here was, by
comparison, rather thrilling.
Ed PottonA
ustralia hasn’t given us
many humongous
mainstream rock bands in
recent years, but that may
be about to change with
Gang of Youths. It already has in their
native country, where the
Sydneysiders have sold out stadiums
and won fistfuls of awards. Then in
2019 they started again, moving to
London and relative obscurity. Not for
long, though — their third album,
Angel in Realtime, made the UK Top 10
this month and here they filled the
5,000-capacity Brixton Academy with
roaring devotees.
Judging by the accents among the
audience it’s not just Australian expats
who have cottoned on to their charms. David Le’aupepe of Gang of YouthsGang of Youths
O2 Academy Brixton, SW9
{{{{(pop
LLOYD WINTERST
here has been no shortage of
performances of the national
anthem of Ukraine in recent
weeks; indeed, there’s a
danger now that as
orchestras keep striking up the tune
we are only paying lip service to a
cause. What’s more, on paper, it might
have seemed a little jarring for the
Czech Philharmonic to play the
anthem just before its Russian chief
conductor, Semyon Bychkov, led them
through the Czech national epic,
Smetana’s Ma Vlast (My Country).
Yet in his short speech Bychkov
spoke of common connections. Pieces
such as Ma Vlast “bring us even closer
to recognising that everyone has one’s
roots in lands that brought us into the
world,” he said. Perhaps he was
thinking too of his homeland: he left
Soviet Russia in his early twenties.
“Slava Ukraini,” he then concluded.
The anthem was itself brilliantly done.
The Czech Philharmonic’s distinctive
timbres — the almost throbbing
strings, the fat, milky brass — sent the
music straight to the stomach.
And Ma Vlast? It is a totemic work
for Czechs but, as Bychkov intimated,
that doesn’t mean it’s narrowly
jingoistic. Written at a time when
there was no Czech state, Smetana’s
guiding vision is established by the
scene depicted in the first section,
Vysehrad, a symbolic castle that
was long since destroyed. Ma Vlast
paints glorious images of Czech
history and nature but does so
through a mythic, half-illusory filter.
One eye is always wet.
That was how it seemed here,
anyway, with the combination of
magnificent, tireless playing from the
Czechs and rapturous conducting from
Bychkov. True, he’s a conductor who
sometimes likes to glory in pure sound
and in the less inspired moments he
might have lightened some of the
textures and set a more urgent pace.
But there were so many glorious
episodes: an impetuous Vltava, a full-
blooded Sarka and the hymnic Tabor.
It was a generous orchestra that also
laid on a firework display to start the
night. Yuja Wang, a bolt of energy in a
tangerine dress, was in excellent form
for Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No- The work is skittish in temperament
(Rachmaninov did a huge redraft, but
didn’t really fix it) but then so is this
pianist. Cushioned by the rich strings,
she negotiated Rachmaninov’s
expressive leaps with fizz and flair.
Neil Fisher
Czech PO/Bychkov
Barbican
{{{{{classical
Così fan tutte
London Coliseum
{{{((opera
Hanna Hipp as Dorabella and Benson Wilson as Guglielmo in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, set in Coney IslandOh, what a circus
This Mozart
from English
National Opera
is larky but
lightweight,
writes Richard
Morrison
G
iven what’s going on in the
world I guess many people
will be grateful for an
evening of undemanding
and entertaining escapism.
And Phelim McDermott’s 2014
English National Opera staging of Così
fan tutte, transposed in Tom Pye’s sets
to New York’s Coney Island funfair in
the 1950s, certainly supplies a surreal
divertissement of flamboyant frills.
They include a revolving big wheel,
gaudily painted fairground signs and
banners, old-fashioned teacup and
swan rides, a balloon that hoists
Fiordiligi high above the stage as she
delivers one of Mozart’s most testing
soprano numbers, and a dozen circus
performers from McDermott’s
Improbable theatre troupe. They swirl
swords, eat fire and shift sets, none too
silently, between and sometimes
during arias.
I spent half of the production’s three
hours-plus duration being charmed by
all this inventiveness and bustle, and
the other half being irritated that it so
often distracted from some very good
singing. Especially when things went
wrong, such as the loud backstage
bang that intruded on one quiet solo.
And whereas the mime routines were
razor-sharp in 2014, a lack of slickness
here suggested not enough rehearsal
time, perhaps due to the Covid
outbreak among the cast that led to
ENO cancelling the first two
performances in the run.There’s a bigger problem with
McDermott’s staging, though. Its
escapism unfortunately includes
escaping from the deeper and darker
implications of the lovers’ tangled
feelings. That’s a pity. The two women
in particular — Nardus Williams as
Fiordiligi and Hanna Hipp as
Dorabella — act with plenty of
personality and sing with expressive
power, but every time the mood gets
serious McDermott pops in another
visual gag. And although Neal Davies
gives a masterclass in vocal projection
as Don Alfonso, the production never
suggests why this genial spiv wants to
wreck four young people’s lives.
Soraya Mafi enjoys herself as
Despina, though her excursion into
country and western singing is a
lamentable incongruity.
Amitai Pati has a dangerously light
tenor for the Coliseum’s big space, but
he and the excellent Benson Wilson
make a spirited and likeable Ferrando
and Guglielmo.
None of the singers is helped,
however, by Kerem Hasan’s
conducting, which allows far too many
moments of rocky ensemble between
the singers and an orchestra that
seems to be playing mostly on
autopilot. It’s impossible to imagine
Colin Davis, Charles Mackerras or
Mark Elder — all former music
directors of this company — allowing
Mozart to be performed this slackly.
To Sunday, eno.org