History in music and in theatre

I:   Cédric Tiberghien in French music at the Wigmore Hall

On Tuesday 7 April at the Wigmore Hall, the French pianist Cédric Tiberghien (pictured) – a tall, broad man wearing an elegant pink tweed suit that would be hard to forget in a hurry – played a wholly intelligent and interesting programme of time-hopping French music. He began by playing Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” (first performed and published in 1919), with each of its six items interleaved with a Couperin number that fascinatingly connected with Ravel’s rhythms, melodies, and harmonies. Although I’ve known the Ravel for decades, this arrangement made me appreciate its time-travelling better than ever before. Still, Tiberghien played the Baroque items at times with slightly too much pedal, the Ravel ones with overmuch rubato.

After the interval, however, he became truly magisterial, alternating now between Debussy and Rameau (and also playing Julian Anderson’s Etude No. 4 “Misreading Rameau”, from 1999). He was now absolutely assured in his sense of style in both eighteenth- and twentieth-century items, and enthralling. French modernist music has always had its neoclassical elements, but this concert cast new light, sometimes making the eighteenth- and twentieth-century musical items sound much closer than I had thought.

II:   Christopher Hampton’s “Liaisons Dangereuses” at the National Theatre

Christopher Hampton’s theatrical adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s classic epistolary novel (1782) may now be called a modern classic in its own right – though with reservations. First staged in 1985 by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, Hampton’s play catches plenty of the perilously heartless games of seduction being played by the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Beneath the polite façade of polite social behaviour, issues usually grouped under the headings of desire, love, courtship, and sex turn here into matters of war, cruelty, and revenge.   Inevitably, however, this play blunts the morally analytical force of the Laclos novel, which shows a steely mind even in its account of hotly sexual emotion and activity. (That steeliness may be found again in the writings of the Marquis de Sade.)

Marianne Elliott’s vivid, engrossing production of “Liaisons Dangereuses” at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre (in repertory to June 6) blunts the Laclos style further – even subverts it – by adding extensive choreography by Tom Jackson Greaves. His highly anachronistic dances maximise the narrative’s elements of ballroom whoosh and sexual initiation, without also showing the formal age of the minuet that would fit the narrrative’s polite surface.   (One of his numbers, with one woman handled by multiple men, borrows from Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” – but he makes no effort to show the manners of the Baroque world, whereas MacMillan certainly does.)

Elliott’s production has terrific sweep, humour, suspense, sexiness – though it spends too little time on the pious resistance of the young Présidente de Tourvel (Monica Barbaro) to the Vicomte’s skilful campaign to undermine it. Although Valmont succeeds with the Présidente, her strong sense of morality is a crucial part of the beauty that attracts him to her.   And so this production catches too little of her tragedy, and misses the full poignancy of his. The Marquise meanwhile arranges for him also to seduce the more ingenuous Cécile de Volanges, with whom he scores another success. (Hannah van der Westhuysen could be subtler with both Cécile’s initial gaucherie and with her ultimate conversion to greater complexity. As her mother, Cat Simmons shows far too coarse a sense of the class system.) Natalie Roar’s costumes combine the overall eighteenth-century look of female attire (and modern underwear) with a more open-necked version of nineteenth- or twentieth-century clothing for men.

This production triumphs by casting Lesley Manville as the Marquise, the elegant, sly, scheming, central figure of this duplicitous milieu – in 1985, she played Cécile de Volanges in the original production. (It must be said she has been ageing extremely well these last forty years.) All the dresses designed for her by Roar are thrilling, with a strong element of blood red that only becomes secondary in the final scene. It’s long been apparent that Manville is one of our finest actors, on stage and screen. She’s wonderfully inscrutable here, her mystery only darkening as we follow her machinations.

As the Vicomte, Aidan Turner has distinctive presence, tremendous sexual allure, evident intelligence, and an element of sheer glee. It would help if also gave inklings of the Vicomte’s truly ambivalent sense of morality: this character surely does admire the very principles he tries to undermine in the Présidente. It’s good to be returned to the Laclos world, but this production has so free a way with it that I now need to re-read the original novel.

III:   Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” at the Almeida

The plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) used to be held up as models not just for their provocative social analysis but for their dramaturgical skill – for poetic imagery, for complex suspense and double-plotting. Even in Ibsen plays you think you know, it’s remarkable to experience them anew in the theatre – they have twists and turns that take you by surprise. In this century, however, they’ve been brought back to London’s stages with various abridgements and drastic updates that have whittled Ibsen down to a minor fraction of his great achievement. Witness “A Doll’s House” (1879) at the Almeida Theatre.

“A Doll’s House” – long the archetype of feminist plays – ends with the famous sound of the front door shutting, telling us that Nora has walked out on her marriage and her children because she has learnt her higher duty is not to them but to herself. But at the end of Anya Reiss’s dismal dot.com version at the Almeida (running till May 23), directed by the feckless Joe Hill-Gibbins, Nora (Romola Garai) and her husband Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) are still onstage together, still at loggerheads. Ibsen’s most renowned stage direction has been ignored because Reiss and Hill-Gibbins know better. Before that, they have Torvald, Nora and others use the word “c**t” as a casual insult.   (And never mind that generations have regarded the derogatory use of “c**t” as an indication of misogyny.) It’s a final sign that Reiss, Hill-Gibbins, and the Almeida are determined to short-change Ibsen, their audience, and their actors.

Nora and her friend Kristine (Thalissa Teixeira) both talk so much about deriving information from Instagram that it feels like a gimmick. Reiss has felt free enough to make Nora borrow £860,000 from someone else’s bank account to find money to help pay for her husband’s way out of drug addiction – and yet she and her friend Petter Rank (Oliver Huband) have quick sniffs of cocaine during the course of the action.

Ibsen’s Nora compares herself (as does Torvald) to a squirrel. That may well be her demeaning herself to please him, but it is as nothing beside Reiss’s Nora’s use of a fancy-dress sexy-nurse costume. Oh – and Torvald interrupts the final scene to watch the TV headlines, which tell him that America has bombed Syria, thus probably starting World War III and, oh yes, making Nora’s misdemeanours relatively unimportant. Whereas Ibsen’s Nora, in the final scene, painstakingly and movingly takes Torvald through all that’s been wrong about the values by which they have both lived – their final conversation makes this one of the great scenes in world drama – Reiss’s Nora doesn’t waste her husband’s time or ours with such thoughtfulness. Who needs Ibsen when we have Reiss & Co to tell us how much they know about the present day?

Traditionally staged, “A Doll’s House” can still be thrilling; I remember taking a New York friend who knew nothing it it to a 2016 Brooklyn production by Theatre for a New Audience – he was enthralled. Anthony Page’s 1996 production, starring Janet McTeer, was a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic, in which the play seemed in no way dated. But no, the Almeida and Hill-Gibbins and Reiss all know so, so, so much better.

Although there’s not much left here of poor Ibsen – Reiss particularly wrecks his choice of words and his organisation of thought into sentences – the play’s overall dramatic structure has just enough residual strength to allow its five main characters to emerge with some clarity in this production. Romola Garai should be so right for the character Nora that I felt angry she was not being given Ibsen’s far more eloquent words (which I’ve witnessed in several different translations). Torvald, of course, is generally belittled at the Almeida into a standard male chauvinist pig by Mothersdale, so that we can have the usual token feelings about capitalist heterosexual men. Still, Huband manages to eke out some of Petter Rank’s warmth and loyalty, James Corrigan just begins to show the three-dimensional qualities of Nils Krostad, and Thalissa Teixeira somehow makes Kristine Lande the play’s most impressive and rounded character. (I wanted a spinoff play about her.)

This “Doll’s House” isn’t nothing – the audience is held – but it is a deliberately reduced version of ibsen’s classic play. When will London theatre start to honour Ibsen again rather than cheapen him?

@Alastair Macaulay, 2026