28 ARTS
THE WEEK 7 May 2022Drama
Theatre: Prima Facie
Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1 (0333-009 6690). Until 18 June Running time: 1hr 40mins ★★★★“West End debuts don’t come
much more astonishing than
this,” said Dominic Cavendish
in The Daily Telegraph. Anyone
who has seen Jodie Comer’s
“chameleonic” performance as
the assassin Villanelle in TVs
Killing Eve will understand why
she’s in such demand on screen.
Now, her solo turn in Prima
Facie, as a hotshot criminal
barrister who unravels after she
is raped by a colleague, “propels
her into the front rank of stage
stars”. Comer’s “terrific facial
expressiveness” and vocal
versatility were well-known;
“the revelation” here is her
physicality. She “embodies the swaggering work hard/play hard
culture of legal high-flyers”, and populates the stage with multiple
characters, including her bruiser brother, a condescended-to
policeman, and Jules, the apparently “sheepish” colleague.Comer’s “ferocious yet forensic performance” blows the audience
away, agreed Patrick Marmion in the Daily Mail. In a story that’s
told in a “blizzard of quickly shifting perspectives”, she brings an
immediate appeal to the character of the ambitious young lawyer
Tessa. Her irreverence is infectious, and her “abrupt disintegration
into ashen-faced confusion is seriously distressing”. Comer
absolutely owns the stage, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out;
but the play itself is “pretty clunky”. The Australian playwright,Suzie Miller, has worked as a
barrister – and what she has
produced is an “impassioned”
indictment of the legal system,
but a slightly “ponderous”
drama. For instance, Tessa is
known for her skill in defending
men accused of sexual assault,
and has enjoyed demolishing
their accusers at the witness
stand; yet in a “baffling”
omission, she never reflects upon
this when she herself becomes
a victim of sexual assault. The
piece is “unabashedly” driven
by an agenda that Comer’s
character is there to serve,
agreed Dominic Maxwell in The
Times. But it does make “its point in style”. And as for Comer,
“nothing can quite prepare you” for her range, energy, resilience,
emotional clarity and sheer presence. “Awards will follow.”
Prima Facie is also showing in cinemas on 21 July (ntlive.com).Comer: propels herself into “the front rank of stage stars”The week’s other opening
Much Ado About Nothing Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1
(020-7401 9919). Until 23 October
“Verdant, visually appealing and very funny”, Lucy Bailey’s new
production of Much Ado gets the Globe’s outdoor summer
season off to flying start. Lucy Phelps excels as Beatrice; Ralph
Davis makes a “sweetly debonair” Benedick (Sunday Telegraph).© HELEN MURRAY; SIMON ANNAND
Stars reflect the overall quality of reviews and our own independent assessment (5 stars=don’t miss; 1 star=don’t bother)“There’s mighty, and then there’s
Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, a
performance so powerfully
connected to its part that it feels
almost superhuman,” said Matt
Wolf in The New York Times.
Back in 2009, Jez Butterworth’s
play, and Rylance’s astonishing
central turn in it, took the world
by storm. Now it is back, once
again transporting audiences to
a Wiltshire wood on St George’s
Day, where Johnny “Rooster”
Byron – a charismatic, barrel-
chested reprobate who deals drugs
and parties with local youths – is
facing eviction from his illegal
encampment. The production
reunites Rylance, 62, with director Ian Rickson and some of
the original cast, including Mackenzie Crook, who is still
“heartbreaking” as Ginger, the most loyal of Rooster’s ragtag
band. And it is a triumph: this is “no museum piece coasting on
past kudos, but a vital experience with a revitalising effect”.Jerusalem is “the great play of the century so far”, said Sarah
Crompton on What’s On Stage. And here, “it is even better than
before: the performances richer, the strain of melancholy that
underpins its fierce comic energy stronger”. The play’s “dark
undercurrents” are also more disturbing, said Sarah Hemming
in the Financial Times. It plays out in a country “ragged with
argument and disputation, that has seen Brexit, rising racism,culture wars and the growth of
performative patriotism”. In a
world changed by #MeToo and
Black Lives Matter, “the male
characters’ bad-taste jokes” and
casual racism “look uglier now,
as do references to underage
sex”; and the female characters
are still “underwritten”. On the
other hand, the play’s portrayal
of a group of lost souls and
“malcontents” seems yet more
telling, as does the brutal
attack on Rooster as a “gyppo
outsider”. Jerusalem is a play
about mystery and the
“importance of legend”, but it
also interrogates the danger of
myth-making, making the drama feel “sharply pertinent”.Heretical as it may seem, I did not love Jerusalem when I first saw
it, said Arifa Akbar in The Observer, with its harking back to
a mythical England, filled with “energies, druids and Stonehenge
giants”. And the “Little Britain-style humour” of the first act is
even more jarring now. But the play is not “the sum total of
its anachronisms”; it is a complicated, layered piece that in the
second act expands into a “mysterious and majestic drama,
enormous in its sense of tragedy. Much of this is down to Rylance’s
epic performance, as physical as it is psychologically profound.”
I don’t think this is the greatest play of the century, but “Rylance’s
Rooster is surely the greatest performance of the century”.Theatre: Jerusalem
Apollo Theatre, London W1 (0330-333 4809). Until 7 August Running time: 3hrs (with two intervals) ★★★★★Rylance (second left): an astonishing performance