Theatre

Wasn’t it Philomena Cunk who first observed that Shakespeare’s greatest work is Game of Thrones? She had a point. When I told friends that the Royal Shakespeare Company was adapting George R.R. Martin’s saga for the stage, the GoT fans lit up. The non-fans were incredulous, and not in a good way. Now Game of Thrones: The Mad King has landed, nearly four hours of it, and it represents a gamble for the RSC. Nearly a decade after peak Thrones, a vast inbuilt audience can no longer be assumed. This new stage version needs to please both camps if it’s to become the money-spinner that the company clearly (and justifiably) intends it to be. I’d like to imagine that I’m the target audience.

1536, by Ava Pickett, is set in a wheatfield near Colchester during the final months of Anne Boleyn’s life. Three peasant women, Jane, Mariella and Anna, meet to discuss the latest news as it trickles in from London. When Anne is imprisoned in the Tower, they try to imagine her state of mind. ‘Terrified,’ says Mariella. ‘Furious,’ says Anna. ‘Starving,’ says Jane. After her execution, Jane shrugs, ‘She deserved it.’ The others are more sympathetic but their commentary is hard to care about because they can’t influence the events they’re discussing. Nor does Anne’s experience affect their lives in any way so their chitchat is narratively pointless. They’re far more interested in two local lads, William and Richard, who represent the extremes of male behaviour.

Please Please Me is a play about Brian Epstein whose brief and troubled life remains relatively unknown. Tom Wright’s linear script opens with the teenage Epstein enjoying secret affairs with teddy boys while working at his dad’s record shop on Merseyside. When he spotted the Beatles at the Cavern, he was smitten by their homoerotic energy rather than their music or their potential for making tons of cash. He put them in suits to soften their image while encouraging their talent for witty backchat. ‘A little pinch of naughty but family friendly,’ was his branding message. But he lacked artistic vision and he cut a lousy deal to sell plastic Beatles dolls which cost the band a fortune and angered Paul McCartney.

A Doll’s House has been reconstructed at the Almeida with a new script by Anya Reiss. Torvald Helmer is an inept drug-addled financier who wants to sell his business to a wealthy American investor. But the deal is a dud. Without his knowledge, Torvald’s bossy wife, Nora, has stolen £860,000 from a client’s account to boost the firm’s apparent profitability and her crime is about to be disclosed by a bent accountant, Nils, who wants to blackmail her. She needs to get her hands on a small fortune fast. This cumbersome and intricate back story is explained to us during the first half which is set over the Christmas holidays in the converted cellar of Nora and Thorvald’s beautiful London home. The cellar appears to be the family nerve centre.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a problem play. It debuted at the National in 1998 and ran for two years in the West End before transferring to Broadway. Since then, no UK producer has mounted a revival. Something must alarm investors. It’s a very chatty show. Three actors with three wooden chairs appear on a plain stage reciting dialogue about a meeting in Denmark in 1941 between the physicist Niels Bohr, his missus, and a family friend, Werner Heisenberg. The discussion focuses on the main developments in atomic science during the 20th century. Mrs Bohr, played by Alex Kingston, is there to offer a female angle on the ruminations of the two mega-nerds.

In The Print is a docudrama about the bitter war between Rupert Murdoch and the unions in the mid-1980s. Murdoch was determined to computerise the production of his UK titles and to terminate the far left’s stranglehold on his business. Daily papers are vulnerable to last-minute strikes and his thieving employees made no secret of their larcenous tactics. The print workers, known as ‘inkies’, earned £1,000 a week for 16 hours’ work and their union, Sogat, behaved like a bunch of racketeers. They laughed at Murdoch by submitting wage claims for employees called ‘Donald Duck’ and ‘Ronald Reagan’. Murdoch fought back with smart, imaginative tactics that Sogat, under Brenda Dean’s leadership, couldn’t handle.

Teeth ’ n’ Smiles is not quite a musical. David Hare’s 1975 play about rock’n’roll includes a handful of tunes performed by a group of failing musicians. It feels like several dramas rammed together. One strand concerns the aimless witter of instrumentalists who lounge around backstage discussing drugs and groupies. Another strand follows the lead singer, Maggie, and her destructive appetites for booze and casual sex. The third element concerns the band’s manager, Saraffian (Phil Daniels), who knows nothing about showbusiness and seems keen to advertise his ignorance to the world. Saraffian is a Dickensian figure who talks like Fagin and believes that pop stars should resemble school prefects.

Dachniki meaning ‘dacha people’ is the Russian title of the National Theatre’s new production of Gorky’s sprawling 1905 drama. Nina and Moses Raine, who adapted the play, chose the flavourless title Summerfolk which doesn’t quite capture the play’s distinctive Russian atmosphere of ennui, intellectual rumination and despair. However, their perky, supple and idiomatic dialogue works very well. Gorky appears to have written the script as a feverish homage to Chekhov, who died in 1904, and he pinched numerous characters and plot twists from his mentor. The beautiful, vain and sexually inert Varvara is a copy of Yelena in Uncle Vanya. Kaleria, the nervous actress who performs amateur verse for her friends, is inspired by Nina in The Seagull.

Neil LaBute is one of America’s most provocative and interesting playwrights. His best-known work, The Shape of Things, was made into a movie starring Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd. America the Beautiful consists of nine plays in three chapters, the first two of which are being staged at King’s Head, the third at the Greenwich Theatre. This complex arrangement sends a signal that LaBute is a mercurial and elusive artist whose fans must chase across London to savour the full richness of his talent. The lesbian stares and leers aggressively while her victim cowers and bleats in protest The first show, Chapter 1, consists of three unconnected skits about sexual jealousy.

Interest in Dracula seems to go on for ever. Kip Williams has chosen Cynthia Erivo to star in his new version of the yarn about a clique of blood-quaffers who bite their victims’ necks and lick the seepings. The show is staged as a read-through of Bram Stoker’s text supplemented by costumes, wigs and a few orchestral hits recorded on tape. Erivo plays all 23 roles and her performance is simultaneously filmed and broadcast to the audience on TV screens dotted around the theatre. This creates two problems. First, Erivo can’t see or interact with the crowd because she’s encircled by wardrobe assistants and cameramen who swarm around her like gnats. Secondly, the audience are expected to look at the screens and not at the stage. This is odd.

Shadowlands, by William Nicholson, is a solid and unsurprising account of the brief marriage between C.S. Lewis (known as Clive), and the American poet Joy Davidman. Her cancer diagnosis overshadowed their romance but they snatched a few lustful holidays together before she expired in an NHS hospital in 1960. Hugh Bonneville, as Clive, delivers his standard three-note performance – bemused decency, bumbling hesitation, ironic charm – which tells us nothing about the author’s inner life. Bonneville has succeeded in building a huge presence in the movie industry from an almost complete dearth of actorly qualities. He’s not handsome, sexy, tough, athletic, amusing, mysterious, evil or even slightly unpleasant. He’s not brilliant or stupid. He’s not admirable or despicable.

Cable Street is a musical that premièred last year at the Southwark Playhouse and has now migrated to the Marylebone Theatre. Fans of beautiful staging will be instantly smitten by the amazing achievement of the designer, Yoav Segal. The script by Tim Gilvin and Adam Kanefsky tells the story of a violent stand-off in October 1936 between cockney activists and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The authors treat the East End during the depression as a panto or a moral fairy tale. It’s good vs evil. The socialists are hard-working, golden-hearted heroes who rise up against the wicked landlords and their cruel rent hikes. The fascists are angry, misshapen losers led by a waddling baldie in a stick-on moustache. The socioeconomic background is hard to decipher.

Safe Haven is a history play by Chris Bowers who worked for the Foreign Office and later for the UN as a human-rights activist. The two careers seem to be interchangeable. His drama follows an idealistic and oversensitive Oxford graduate, Catherine, who joins the diplomatic service during the first Gulf War in 1991. Catherine believes that the Foreign Office exists to throw money at basket-case countries that lack the maturity to govern themselves. The entire department acts as a sort of puppy rescue service for dysfunctional nations overseas. All her colleagues accept the wisdom of this approach even though it has the same effect as casting diamonds into quicksand. Catherine responds to historic events like a homeowner assessing a new lamp for the guest bedroom.

A few days after Tom Stoppard’s death last month, Michael Baum, a distinguished surgeon, wrote a letter to the Times. He explained how Stoppard’s discussion of chaos theory in Arcadia had inspired him to discover a new and far more effective chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. ‘Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia,’ wrote Baum. I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between science and drama. I knew Tom Stoppard and when I was professor of history and philosophy of science at UCL, we had several illuminating conversations about art, science and theatre, which he recalled in a 1994 article entitled ‘Playing with Science’ for the journal Engineering and Science. ‘Science and art are nowadays beyond being like each other.