Dramas in speech and in music
I: Vincent In Brixton at the Orange Tree, March 20
The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond was already a beloved space; under its current artistic director, Tom Littler, has become one of the most important theatres in or around London. Its last production, Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death”, was superlative; its new account (running till April 18) of Nicholas Wright’s “Vincent in Brixton” (2002) is no less so. The audience, on two levels, is seated all around the action close enough to watch how well Niamh Cusack cracks an egg, and close enough to smell the Brussels sprouts being boiled (I could easily have touched them) in the kitchen setting of Georgia Green’s marvellous staging.
“V. in B.” concerns the period when the young Vincent van Gogh lived in London, sent there as an art dealer by his Dutch family. During the play, he discovers love with his landlady, Ursula Loyer – and discovers the importance of his talent as an artist. It could easily become a sentimental affair – landlady teaches artist the nature of true love and of sincerity in art, while artist preaches the motto that “a woman does not grow old as long as she loves and is loved”. In the original production at the Cottesloe Theatre (now the Dorfman), Clare Higgins played Ursula with astonishing intensity and sensual force; at the Orange Tree, Cusack is no less compelling and even more touchingly vulnerable. In 2002, Jochum Ten Haaf seemed Vincent to the life; in the current revival, Jeroen Frank Kales is taller, paler, with an American-Dutch accent, but utterly compelling, and with a more erotic presence.
Wright’s play gives us a marvellously guessed fictionalised account of how and why London transformed the young van Gogh changed from an obedient Dutch son into a radical European post-impressionist artist with a mission. It comes up quite differently this time – more intimately, less prescient about the artist Vincent will become – but quite as movingly. To watch it at close quarters is a rare privilege.
II: Ackland’s “The Old Ladies” at the Finborough, March 27
The Finborough Theatre, which seats maybe forty people, may well be London’s smallest theatre space, but that’s not its only distinction: it has a policy of only staging plays that have not been seen in London for at least twenty-five years. (I first visited it for the only play by John Galsworthy I’ve ever seen. Since Galsworthy, now known almost only as a novelist – “The Forsyte Saga” et al. – was one of London’s historic and popular playwrights between 1906 and 1929, I’m grateful that the Finborough filled a gap in my knowledge.)
Its latest production (running until April 19) is “The Old Ladies”(1935) by Rodney Ackland (1908-1991). Since his death, Ackland has become best known as the author of “Absolute Hell” (staged at the National Theatre in both 1995 and 2018) as well as for the screenplays of such films as “49th Parallel” (1941) and “The Queen of Spades” (1949), but several of his plays were important West End fare in their day. “The Old Ladies” (adapted from Hugh Walpole’s 1924 novel, and originally directed by John Gielgud with Edith Evans, Jean Cadell, and Mary Jerrold) portrays three old ladies in adjacent rooms in a Cheltenham boarding house: within these tight limitations it concerns good, evil, obsession, fear, the desire for beauty, and a death that may be murder or manslaughter.
The last British revival, which toured in 2003 without reaching the West End, was directed by the veteran Frith Banbury, with Siân Phillips, Rosemary Leach, and Angela Thorne. Remarkably, the Finborough production – acted by Abigail Thaw, Catherine Cusack, and Julia Watson – works much better, even if we make allowance for today’s old-aged actors being much more sprightly than those of earlier generations: it makes a virtue of the theatre’s near-claustrophobic tininess. These women live at very close quarters; you feel their nervous systems.
III: Gorky’s “Summerfolk” at the Olivier, March 23
Those who regret Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) never wrote a greater number of full-length plays should be encouraged to see those by Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), which are more numerous, but which are revived now and then in London . Gorky has his own character as a dramatist – more socialist, and sometimes darker – but in several plays (“Barbarians”, “Enemies”, “Philistines”) he comes close to the startlingly poignant and tragicomic realism of Chekhov’s masterpieces. (To my mind, his later “Vassa Zheleznova” is best of all, and the least Chekhovian.)
Certainly his “Summerfolk” (1904) has a very Gorky streak of sociological criticism: the summerfolk of the title are a whole element of Russian society, much discussed during the play as disturbing and superfluous, a streak that may contribute to the coming implosion of Russian society. Unlike Chekhov Gorky lived to see the Russian Revolution and the evolution of the Bolshevik regime into Stalin’s era. Characters in “Summerfolk” know, as did Diaghilev in a notable 1905 Petersburg speech, that they inhabit a history that will soon change, that their world will be swept away.
And the third act of “Summerfolk” operates like the scherzo in a symphony in its energetic dark-light development of dramatic tensions – presents a fluent, almost operatic, series of contrasting male-female scenes that are partly comic, partly tragic, partly absurd variations on the possibilities of heterosexual love and marriage. Gorky here goes beyond Chekhov – beyond many nineteenth-century novels – in the number of his multiple narratives, but he does so while showing us the complexities of a real society.
Director Robert Hastie gives us a detailed, realistic production where we talk not of his direction but of the play itself and of its many characters. Although the actors are miked, any amplification seems entirely for the further stretches of the difficult Olivier space: to those of us sitting near the stage voices carried naturally. The new English version of the play by siblings Nina and Moses Raine is lively and fresh – though with a few jarringly anachronisms of parlance (“okay”, “f*cking”, “c*nts”, and so on). I admired all the acting, but wanted all of it larger: the best Russian acting is fabulously expansive, as this is not.
IV: Shakespeare’s “Henry V” at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, March 24
Although the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” will not be regarded as a classic account of this play, it’s vivid and energetic. And what’s historically important – I hope – is that it shows a return to the RSC’s foundational principles of verse-speaking. For too many years, this company has allowed or encouraged its actors – not least such leading names as Simon Russell Beale and Geoffrey Streatfeild – to do actorly pauses in mid-phrase (what I call the “Is this a dagger I see before me” school of acting), to give the impression the character is looking for the right word at the expense of Shakespeare’s constructions. Here, however, Alfred Enoch, as Henry V, took his timing from Shakespeare’s, pausing at the end of lines and/or sentences. It’s amazing how much more natural this sounds. Shakespeare, who often calls King Henry “Harry” and Princess Katherine “Kate”, has already written actorly naturalism into his lines.
Tamara Harvey, who has been joint artistic director of the RSC since 2024, directs. Some of the cast are people of colour, at least one featured role is reassigned as a woman, one actor has some degree of limb atrophy. This production makes me takes interest and pleasure in these decisions. I do hope that Harvey encourages her actors to make rather more of the verse’s iambic pulse.
She has made two highly questionable decisions. One: to begin the play with part of the final scene of “Henry IV Part One”, so that you hear Henry’s early feelings about the crown. Two: to redistribute the Chorus’s lines among other members of the cast – especially Henry himself. Harvey justifies the first simply by giving us a theatrically potent (abridged) account of the final meeting of Henry IV and Henry V. Although I miss the Chorus as an independent figure- one of the most remarkable masterstrokes of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy – Harvey’s version plays with great fluency.
Harvey makes the battle scenes vivid and picturesque. Enoch’s Henry V is a constant source of energy, even when silent and motionless. Although Catrin Aaron is too verbally dim as the Queen of France, the cast abounds in lively character playing. (I especially relished Ewan Wardrop as a hyperactive Nym.)
V: Wagner’s “Tristan” Broadcast from the Metropolitan, March 22
As heard and shown at Curzon Mayfair on Saturday March 21, the New York Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” is carried by the unflagging impetus of conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the very high levels of singing by Michael Spyres (Tristan) and Lise Davidsen (Isolde).
Those levels are so high that I’m uncomfortable to observe that Spyres and Davidsen approach their roles in quite different ways. Spyres, singing very much in the style of the mid-twentieth century tenor Ludwig Suthaus, projects the words ideally and with deep feeling; Davidsen places the vocal lines with perfect attack and radiant tone, while seeming to impose the words as a secondary issue.
Ekaterina Gubanova (Brangäne) and Tomasz Konieczny (Kurwenal) made less excellent impressions. Ryan Speedo Green (King Marke), by contrast, was compellingly eloquent, lodging the words and the music in our ears as indissoluble units.
The director Yuval Sharon makes all three acts unnecessarily complex, with two Tristans and two Isoldes. At one point, we’re watching the singing Isolde addressing the non-singing Tristan; at another, we’re watching the singing Tristan and Isolde like astral projections, high above the grounded couple. Isolde gives birth to Tristan’s baby just before singing the Liebestod to (and about) their child. The effect of all these theatre games is intellectual and clinical, but wholly unmoving.
When watching the live broadcast, a further complexity arises from the over-complex ways in which the Met now projects the visuals and the acoustics of its performance. On March 21, the singers’ voices could be heard suddenly moving from one stage resonance to another. This, when coupled with the double casting of lead roles, gave the effect that we were watching not a live performance but an artfully deconstructed rearrangement of it.
VI: Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at Covent Garden, March 25
The conductor Mark Elder made his Covent Garden debut in May 1976 in Verdi’s “Rigoletto”; it was neat to bring him back in “Rigoletto” this March, just before that anniversary’s half-century. Both he and the orchestra have improved over the decades: in a score that I thought I’d known well even before 1976, I was hearing things I’d never heard before this March (especially from the strings during the first Sparafucil scene).
The bright-voiced Peruvian tenor Iván Ayón Rivas will be fine if only he learns not to lag behind his conductor’s beat. Although Elder did all he could to oblige him, Rivas kept slowing things down. His character is the libertine Duke of Mantua, who is presented by Oliver Mears’s 2021 production as an object lesson in toxic masculinity, even more than his male courtiers. This is not the most Mears-like of productions – for once, he more or less tells the opera’s story rather than a different one of his own – but it is irksome in how unsubtly it tells us what to think. The unsubtlety also pervades the physical aspects of the staging: too much is boringly symmetrical, and it’s embarrassing to find how visible the Duke remains when the opera obviously wants him to remain unseen. In the final scene, set designer Simon Lima Holdsworth gives us a sky that turns stormy long after the music has told us so.
Vocally, Aida Garifullina’s Gilda has the soaring lyricism and pathos the role calls for. I wish Mears and Holdworth didn’t expose the character by making her bedroom window so huge: we can see she’s asking for trouble long before it arrives. As Rigoletto, baritone George Petean, without the ringing top notes that some Verdi singers have made memorable, has both the role’s dark fury and its tenderly paternal devotion.
VII: Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw” at the Linbury Theatre, March 26
Other people argue against Britten’s chamber opera “The Turn of the Screw”. For them, it’s too quaint, too polite, too clever, too mild. For me, it’s one of the great works of music drama, and a particular masterpiece of Britten’s talent for psychodrama. Henry James’s novella is more ambiguous in suggesting that the horrors of its layered ghost story may all be the projection of the Governess’s neurosis. But Britten’s opera journeys so deep – yet so steadily – into that neurosis that we have growing layers of doubt about who’s doing what to whom, even while we’re following the action.
This governess (touchingly sung by Isabelle Peters) find herself arriving in a country house haunted by a dead pair of adult servants, Peter Quint (an unusually non-spectral Elgan Llŷr Thomas) and Miss Jessel (an equally arresting Kate Royal), who even now are perverting the children away from honesty and into games that really may be some form of perversion. How many kinds of death are enclosed within this morbid tale? Are the children obsessed by the dead? Do the ghosts want the children to join them in death? Are Miles and Flora being groomed to become the next Quint and Miss Jessel? Does the final turn of the screw become the governess’s ultimate realisation that she has done as much as the ghosts to drive the boy Miles to death? (“What have we done between us?”)
The new staging by Natalie Abrahami and Michael Levine is dark, black-and-white, shadowy, with video projections that show us face-on views of characters even while their backs or profiles are to us. And this is another production that features non-singing doubles: here it’s the dead Quint and Miss Jessel who have alter egos. The suggestion – subtle but all the more alarming – is that the child abuse of the story is multiple and cyclical.
As scene follows scene, levels of water fill the stage. At first, this water is the outdoor lake that Flora calls “the Dead Sea” – but this becomes like the Dead Marshes in the “Lord of the Ring” films, with drawned dolls facing upward in the shallow water as if luring the living into their embrace. This water becomes a deathly lagoon that frames the whole story. Conductor Bassem Akiki ensures that Britten’s score, while taking different tacks, never relaxes its grip.
VIII: Violinist Maxim Vengerov As Replacement with the London Philharmonic
Already this year, London orchestras have already managed to programme rival accounts of the same scores in quick succession – Stravinsky’s Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la fée” and Rachmaninov’s “Symphonic Dances”. But for the Philharmonia to schedule Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto with Lisa Batiashvili on Sunday 22 March at the Royal Festival Hall, just thirty-two days after a peak performance by Anne Sophie Mutter, conductor Karina Canellakis, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra of the same concerto in the same hall was quite a challenge, the more so as Mutter’s February 18 performance, celebrating fifty years before the public, was top-quality. A few days before the March 22 concert, an announcement came that Batiashvili and the Philharmonia’s principal conductor, Santtu-Mathias Rouvali, were both unwell and would be replaced for the concerto by Maxim Vengerov and Mark Wigglesworth.
In the circumstance, Vengerov was an ideal choice. He had hardly begun that it became evident that to choose between Mutter and him in the Tchaikovsky concerto would be like choosing between Frida Leider and Kirsten Flagstad as Wagner’s Brünnhilde. Like Mutter, Vengerov is renowned for the beauty of his violin tone: hers is gleaming honey, his a darker shade of amber. She brought to every phrase a quality of affectionately fresh thought; he brought one of unhurried calm even to the very fastest sequences. London has had several first-rate violinists in the first three months of 2026, not least Joshua Bell, Josef Špaček, Alena Baeva: there is room in my heart for all of them. Ultimately in this concerto I give the prize to Mutter, the inspiring nuance of whose phrasing was so breathtaking and whose highest notes were always so luminously; but Vengerov won on his encore, playing the Romance from Henryk Wieniawski’s second violin concerto with a deeply tender brilliance.
While the other items of the London Philharmonic February 18 concert featured two popular winners (Sibelius’s “Pohjola’s Daughter” and Beethoven’s Seventh), the Philharmonia’s March 22 concert included two lesser-known but important scores – Grażyna Bacewicz’s “Overture for Symphonic Orchestra” and William Walton’s first symphony (1935). Wigglesworth gave magisterial accounts of both. The Walton symphony, in particular, was beautifully, tautly, keenly shaped: an absorbing work of many-layered drama.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026