by It is good news. Indhu Rubasingham will take over as artistic director of the National in 2025. That must be welcomed not only for who she is – the first woman or person of color to run the country’s largest theater – but for what she has done , and she will. She set London’s Kiln theater on fire, much to her relief and glorious appearance, changing her name (from the Tricycle), which pickets outside the early shows did not mind. She submitted a new work which raised – Red Velvet, Downgrading – and i Mrs Willesden let rip a zinging mix of Zadie Smith and Chaucer. At the National she leads the very difficult Olivier The Father and the Assassin and the Lyttelton crackled with Online Game The Motherfucker With The Hat. Remember when “eye for detail” was code for “female” in job ads? Forget it: Rubasingham is a big idea – it helps make theater not just a place for representation but leaps of empathy.
As does Emma Rice, formerly of the Globe, who has just opened a new permanent home for her company, Wise Children. The Lucky Chance is a converted Methodist church that once housed a nursery: barrel roof, gleaming wood, foyer bar with piano (carols on launch night). Its former uses – for celebration, sheltering, caring – have filled the walls.
The Little Girl and Happy Stories, based on an earlier show written by Rice with Joel Horwood, has 21st-century thugs, paramedics and high-vis jackets – but retains the vividness of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairy tale. , mixing realism and magic, traditional skills and modern sassiness. In Ian Ross’s music street tunes on the accordion and fiddle are mixed with ripples from the harp (“that’s relaxing and exciting at the same time”). Actors meet and pose in colorful tights and 18th century wigs that stand tall like a judge in the wind. When matches are struck, a string of bulbs light up above the stage. For a moment it looks like this will be an evening rejoicing in the triumph of imagination over difficult circumstances. Nothing so soft.
The game girl is a wooden puppet. She has a smile on her face, but her puppeteer can make her completely lonely: when snowflakes fall scattered on the stage, her body trembles; as her outstretched hand is ignored, her head drops, and you’ll swear the smile is gone. The horrible ending is kept. The girl of the game dies – no trick, no evasion – within striking distance of the audience. The puppeteer releases gently: the child’s limbs are stiffly folded; all animation gone; the end of the illusion.
Rupert Goold’s Almeida has seriousness and swagger. You smell those qualities even in the bar. And see them in the collaborators who adapted Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film for the stage. Conor McPherson, who A girl from the North made a ballad out of Dylan’s numbers, he is the writer of Conradh na Gaeilge Cold War; Elvis Costello provides songs; Goold directs.
Set in post-war Poland, this is a doomed story – is there any other kind? – the love and elegy for a torn Europe, fueled by questions of authenticity. The hero of music has a secret and his principles are not stable; he can adapt the work of others but he cannot compose his own. Communist leaders take up the country music that brings him and his singer lover together, hoping to create a new tradition of songs “under collective agricultural machinery”.
Elliot Levey’s employer softens with terrifying plausibility. Anya Chalotra is wonderful as a smudgy-eyed romantic: limp with displeasure, barking with resentment, rapping as she sings. Luke Thallon distills the period. A lesser actor would tremble and throw winning hints at a move. Thallon is tense, as if half-frozen; words escape him with difficulty. He is becoming more powerful and more elusive with each new role.
As in Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll, revived this month at Hampstead, music forms the inner and outer landscape of west and east: throaty, lonely, reluctant ballads from Costello; a traditional corner-turning chorus, a Chopin flourish, a jazz queue. Ellen Kane’s choreography embraces these variations, as do Evie Gurney’s costumes – boleros, embroidery, browns and flared skirts. Paule Constable’s lighting is crucial: shining into the brightness of Paris, calling out the hope of the east dying in a glittering darkness.
For a fast-moving caper, Pandemonium really a slow burn. Armando Iannucci’s take on Boris Johnson is one of the best-selling tickets of the season: it’s directed by Patrick Marber, has a wonderfully venomous cast – and satisfies a need, clear in the audience’s mind, for a theatrical response to what is in progress.
The difficulty for the satirist is obvious. Staged in the midst of the daily revelations from the Covid inquiry, the real-world competition is top notch. Iannucci’s script doesn’t seek out unexpected targets but, in 17th-century cod style, offers a rogues’ gallery of cut-out characters. Furious, sometimes funny: handy comedy equipment. As Orbis Rex shouts at Shakespeare, Paul Chahidi doesn’t offer a full impersonation but slaps a rictus grin over the ironic slippage of his features – and lets his Jacobean tights slide around like a swan splashing under water; In the end, the blueberry blonde wig is removed from the stage by a dull trash picker.
Click on several names at once. Some of them look artificial at first, but when you remember those limbs stretched out as they tire on the parliament bench, even Jacob the Rhesus Monkey looks realistic. I was already half there with the idea of Matt Hemlock as a slithery green thing from a swamp, but now it’s hard to consider the idea of Riches Sooner as a “half man, half coin” leprechaun. The image of a PM recognizable mainly by the large gap between his white socks and tight trousers has become as indelible as John Major wearing his Y-face over his trousers. Call Steve Bell?
Star ratings (out of five)
The Little Girl ★★★★
Cold War ★★★★
Pandemonium ★★★
