History secular and sacred
I: Alan Cox and In the Print
In “In The Print”, a new play by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington, it’s an entire pleasure to watch the actor Alan Cox as the Rupert Murdoch of 1995-1996. Cox has been a gloriously versatile actor for over thirty years: watching him as the ruthless Australian newspaper magnate, I kept marvelling that he was once definitive as the debonair, aristocratic, carefree Algernon in a Haymarket production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”. But then I also admired him in Neil Simon’s romantic comedy “Barefoot in the Park”, as Konstantin in “The Seagull” (son to Judi Dench’s Arkadina), and as a young working-class husband in D.H.Lawrence’s “The Daughter-in-Law”, among others. These days, his face looks wry, lived-in, shrewd. He has force without ever forcing.
The Murdoch of “In The Print” is using the new trade union laws of the Thatcher government to transform the print media. When he ends the play by saying that, with his new-won power, he is going “to make the world a better place”, it’s easy to laugh and to feel chills in the same moment.
Alan Cox’s real-life father is Brian Cox, who plays the Murdoch figure in the television series “Succession”. So it’s clever to cast him (Alan) as this younger version of the real Murdoch – though neither he nor this production (directed by Josh Roche) nudges you to spot any parallels.
He’s cast opposite the young actress Claudia Jolly as Brenda Dean, general secretary of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades and first woman ever to lead a British trade union. Dean – a northerner, largely forgotten now by history, as the play observes – is the play’s canny central character, the one who does most to unite opposition to Murdoch; and it emerges that she’s the opponent he most respects. Although many of us still remember that long dispute, the play makes the history of that era fresh: it’s not just a good story in itself, it makes you wish that the history of Thatcherism in action were rewritten, to show just how Murdoch was taking advantage of its new legislation to prepare his route to Fox News and to global domination of the media. Jolly, even though she uses a Lancastrian accent, also shows us how Dean seemed a new kind of eminent woman – the Margaret Thatcher of the trade union movement.
The four other actors are also well cast. The only flaw of this Khan-Salinsky play is that it seems to have been written for the screen: none of its scenes have much length (or sufficient weight). The only flaw of Roche’s production, played with the audience on three sides, is acoustic: unnecessary background music sometimes makes it hard to catch all the actors’ lines.
II: Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling
When I attended the world premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s three-act ballet “Mayerling” in 1978 (on Valentine’s Day, so curious a date in the calendar for a ballet about sex, politics, and suicide in a royal family!), I was excited; I saw it several times that year alone. I had no idea, however, that the ballet would be being performed forty-eight years on.
Everyone can see this ballet’s flaws. Poor Crown Prince Rudolf, on his wedding night, finds four Hungarian officers lurking in wait for him: they’re like blackmailers whispering darkly to him and pressurising him with half-Nelsons. (The printed programme tells us they’re urging the cause of Hungarian secession, but their behaviour suggests something slyer and shadier, as if they’re gay episodes from his past.) The sheer density of interconnected characters has always been bewildering for newcomers to the ballet. (On his wedding night, Rudolf has pas de deux with three other women before finally joining his bride.)
It took time to realise that “Mayerling” was the greatest achievement of this flawed but valuably large-minded choreographer: its imperfections are part of its complex but rich texture. Although it’s hard at first to figure out who’s who, MacMillan’s skill in body language is at its finest throughout: none of the six main women can be mistaken for one another, and only those Hungarian men give off misleading signals. Not only that: “Mayerling” the ballet is a historically valuable treatment of this crisis in European history, which has been both sensationalised in some versions and sentimentalised in others.
MacMillan began creating the role of Rudolf on Anthony Dowell, a left-turner. (When Dowell injured his neck seriously, MacMillan made most of the role on David Wall, giving it the kind of strenuous partnering that Dowell, when he returned to the stage, needed to avoid after such an injury, so that he never essayed the role.) MacMillan, during his lifetime, insisted on retaining all the left turns in Act One, even though they were one more layer of complexity for the many right-turners who have tackled this most taxing role. Matthew Ball, this year’s first-cast Rudolf, is one of the twenty-first-century dancers who have turned to the right. Doubtless few people notice that: still I find there’s something about those left turns that in my mind seem Rudolfian – unorthodox.
Another, yet subtler, post-MacMillan change is that, whereas the second act features a grief-laden Liszt song that used to have two stanzas, now that somg has one stanza alone. David Wall used to remain poignantly motionless throughout the song: this was one of the ballet’s great moments. Now Ball changes position – minimally and expressively, to be sure; but MacMillan’s point, amazing in a ballet, used to be Rudolf’s inability to express his anguish by any movement at all.
Otherwise Ball has become one of this role’s great interpreters: he rises in psychological and physical tension as the ballet proceeds, he becomes a less and less orthodox member of the Habsburg court in Vienna, he’s increasingly tormented in more and more ways, and he finds release only with morphine and sex.
On March 30, not all his female partners were of his calibre. (Too many of today’s Royal dancers broadcast character and intention more by facial expression than by physical integrity.) But Melissa Hamilton, at first too sly and knowing, rises with unusual power to the startling peaks of sexual intensity that make the second half of the final duet at Mayerling so breathtaking. And Mayara Magri as Marie Larisch – though she misjudges the character’s haunting final “Hush, not a word” farewell curtsey – otherwise judges very finely the complexities of this ultimately inscrutable character. In MacmIllan’s interpretation of history, Marie Larisch is many things: she’s Rudolf’s most understanding friend, she’s a significant figure at court (she is the empress’s niece), and she’s a needy former mistress of Rudolf. MacMillan makes her the most multifaceted character in the ballet. (Although MacMillan never tells us this, we can believe his Marie Larisch has the chatty voice quoted by T.S.Eliot – who met her – in the opening stanza of “The Waste Land”.
“And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight.”)
III: Paul Lewis’s chamber Beethoven piano concertos
It’s so easy for us to listen to Beethoven on disc or broadcast that we forget the reductions of his larger scores that used to be used. On March 29-30, the pianist Paul Lewis, the Vertavo String Quartet, and the double bass player Tim Gibbs gave two concerts at the Wigmore Hall of Vinzenz Lachner’s 1880s arrangements of the first, second, and third piano concerti, with string quintet replacing Beethoven’s full orchestra. Although Lewis’s playing often made massive (sometimes excessive) use of amplifying pedal, it was always clear that this uncannily authoritative artist has a complete grasp of Beethoven’s classical/Romantic character and the scores’ detailed architecture. Lewis looks so modest and quiet that his mastery often takes you by surprise. A single downward scale in the first concerto had such colossal power that, seeming to come out of the blue, it made me and others laugh happily out loud. Of course Beethoven is better with an orchestra, but the chance to hear three of his concerti in two days is seldom to be found with our orchestras.
IV: Arcangelo’s St Matthew Passion
The late Michael Tanner wrote that two supreme musical works demand a complete suspension of all disbelief. One is Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”, the other Bach’s “St Matthew Passion”. I’ve been attending both works for well over forty years, on both sides of the Atlantic; though I agree these works are superlative, I testify that not all accounts of them help us to fight off disbelief. (As broadcast recently, the New York Met’s new “Tristan”seemed to have several layers of disbelieving going on.)
How good therefore to be able to say that the April Fool’s Day account of the Matthew Passion by Arcangelo at the Barbican – part of a European tour – was first-rate from the first (exceptional) chord onwards. Jonathan Cohen conducts this vivid period-instrument ensemble with unremitting drive: he never lingers, though he rushes nothing. Nick Pritchard is a wonderful Evangelist, unremittingly eloquent in his eloquent placing of words and music. In the arias for countertenor or alto, Hugo Cutting is right back on top form; I’ve never encountered a countertenor deliver this music with such touchingly mellifluously beauty. In the soprano and tenor arias, Carolyn Sampson and – especially – Hugo Hymas are superb. Too bad that Alex Rosen is a dully loud Christ (you’d like to hope for some radiance or mystery from this central character – not a bit of either)and that Thomas E. Bauer, a baritone, is not well suited to Bach’s bass lines. But the intense reaction of a close friend, experiencing this Passion for the first time, confirmed that Arcangelo captures this masterpiece’s greatness.
V: Ruth Padel and Haydn’s Seven Last Words
On the afternoon of Good Friday, the Wigmore Hall presented an unusual arrangement of one of the classic musical scores associated with Holy Week: Haydn’s string-quartet version of “The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour” with the poet Ruth Padel reading her 2014 poems about each of the seven utterances attributed to Christ from the Cross. Padel, amplified, tended to whisper her poems, eloquently but breathily; ideally, I’d prefer a more focused vocal tone to match the beautiful playing by Aylen Pritchin and Tim Crawford (violins), Iris Juda (viola), and David Waterman (cello). But Padel’s choice of words and her phrasing are always arresting: she addresses her words to Christ, as if she were an attentive disciple witnessing the Crucifixion at close quarters, speaking of “the smokehouse of the heart”, “The sticking point of how to ask for help”; “No angels around now”. Even if her dramatisation of Calvary is not one with which I’m comfortable, it was immediately striking that discomfort was part of her texture; I was always gripped. Haydn’s quartet, in my experience, has never felt more connected to each stage of the dramatic situation.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026