John Doyle bids farewell to the theater that launched his international career - Berkshire’s beautiful and intimate Watermill Theatre, Newbury - with that most famously vexed of musicals about growing up if not necessarily growing wise: Merrily We Roll Along, the 1982 Broadway flop from Stephen Sondheim and George Furth that owes its resuscitation in no small measure to the UK. A Leicester production some years ago with Maria Friedman demonstrated the sheer theatrical viability of a bruising score - one of Sondheim’s very best - that was thrown under an even better spotlight at the Donmar Warehouse in 2000 in a Michael Grandage-directed staging of Merrily that, against the odds, went on to dominate the musical categories at that year’s Olivier Awards. This latest incarnation isn’t as purely touching as those previous two productions and tends to substitute anger and a pervasive sourness for the extraordinary emotional surges that marked out the Donmar version, in particular. (I, for one, shall never forget watching that production’s final performance from the Donmar balcony, the cast all but losing it in conjunction with the audience by the time they reached Sondheim’s  seminal, almost hymnal paean to life’s possibilities, Our Time.)

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Chekhov’s almost unbearably mournful play of love unrequited and lives flailing and unfulfilled is spectacularly well served in a new touring production from the venerable Peter Hall that also inaugurates a new playhouse west of London, the 900-seat Rose, built to approximate the spatial dimensions of the onetime Elizabethan venue near Bankside that long ago ceased to exist. How wonderful, then, to welcome a new building in the west London suburban community of Kingston while at the same time heralding that truly rare production of the abiding Russian master that for once reveals precisely what he meant by calling his plays, against all expectation, comedies.

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Sometimes, the title says it all. Watching Michael Grandage’s fleet and furious new production of Othello, a 3-hour-15 minute staging that positively hurtles by - I was mightily struck by something that ought to be true more often. This is that rare staging of Shakespeare’s trickiest of tragedies actually to put its title character at the center of the experience. Sure, it’s Ewan McGregor’s Shakespearean stage debut as Iago that has audiences sleeping overnight for day seats or bartering for thousands of bucks on ebay, but I defy anyone not to depart the playhouse swept away by, and celebrating, the hapless Venetian Moor of the title as played by a bearded, gloriously basso profundo Chiwetel Ejiofor (concurrently on screen in American Gangster). Miscast - and not for reasons of race - in the Grandage/Donmar revival of The Vortex several years ago, Ejiofor comes into his own with what at this late date looks like the Shakespearean performance of a busy Bardic year, though Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker’s Benedick and Beatrice, of course, are yet to come.

Grandage for some time now has looked like a logical inheritor to Trevor Nunn when it comes to lucidly expressed Shakespeare, and his Othello will be of particular interest to those who remember Grandage actually playing (and very well) Roderigo in the Nunn-directed RSC Othello nearly 20 years ago, in which Willard White’s sonorously moving Othello was nonetheless acted off the stage by a career-best Ian McKellen as the coolest, scariest Iago I shall probably ever see. It’s nonetheless something of a surprise to find McGregor cutting such a blank, inexpressive nemesis, the play’s hate-filled anti-hero fuelled not so much by motiveless malignancy - to use Coleridge’s famous phrase - as by a serious set of teeth that seem to gleam in keen anticipation of the gathering entrapments of Shakespeare’s coiled-tight narrative. (With a remarkably toothsome Roderigo from Edward Bennett, this may be the first Othello to send particular shivers down the spines of dentists.) His charm less evident here than it was in Grandage’s West End/Donmar Guys and Dolls, McGregor will no doubt improve as the run continues and as greater command of the verse allows him to deepen a take on the part that at present seems notably scattershot. (more…)

Oh dear will they never learn? You can’t serve a Victorian melodrama as cold cuts - it needs the sauce of excess and surprise and in this otherwise slick production whilst director Peter Gill does a solid job he misses out. He shapes it well, sets it in an appropriate 19th century sitting room (design is by Hayden Griffin ) and the pace is good - but this is a hot house story, not a naturalistic play. And you do need that essential excess.
Never once does one feel, as gas lamps flicker low and shadows haunt the over-decorated room, that there is danger in the London streets. Nor that footfalls in the attic are menacing to the poor lonely little wife. In short you watch, get interested, yet not once catch your breath, let alone shudder. The bubbles of a wicked brew never pop to the surface.
Well they didn’t for me as once they had at the weekly rep in my home town when I was growing up. Great Yarmouth had lots of shows as a major seaside resort rather like Atlantic City. It also had the Little Theatre, a group of professional actors who did a play a week - that set the wicked theatre seed for this regular ticket-buyer. Gaslight was a popular solid standby play - it still is. One set, few actors, same costumes, except for the naughty housemaid Nancy - who is a slut on her nights out. Patrick Hamilton’s play is still popular (he also wrote the chilling Rope): well played it should still work well.
The story of a pretty woman with a devilish husband who controls and mentally tortures her is a good one, even more so when we discover, via Rough (Kenneth Cranham) , the detective sergeant later in the play, that a woman has been murdered  in this very sitting room.
As Bella Rosamund Pike is a light bird, flitting nervously about her cage, but she should be more vital less vapid. One gets bored with her flutterings. Husband Andrew Woodall has menace but hides it rather too well. Two servants slip in and out but it isn’t until Rough arrives that the production catches fire. He is splendid and pulls it all together, but it’s a bit late by then. It can be a most compelling evening. Some will know it from the film in which Ingrid Bergman did a lot of anguish. Unfortunately here we don’t get hard, macabre black-and-white treatment.
The play suits this splendid old theatre, which was redecorated by a superb designer Tanya Moiselwitsch and has recently been overhauled (though they miss out on things such as the tassels all round the balcony.) Kevin Spacey needs such popular plays at his Old Vic. This production isn’t the best choice however, and he has yet to prove that in selecting fare and artists he is a worthy follow-up to the doughty ladies who founded it (and Sadlers’ Wells), and such great theatre men as Tyrone Guthrie.