Romeo and Juliet – Duke of York’s Theatre

It has been fascinating to watch Jamie Lloyd’s development as a director over the last ten years and the different phases of work that have evolved to inform his latest production, Romeo and Juliet, the first time the director known for reinvigorating classics has tackled Shakespeare in a decade. Now decidedly in a monochrome period in which costume and set design are as vital to the artistic vision as lighting and shadow, this production of Shakespeare’s tragic love story may be notable for bringing film star Tom Holland to the stage – Lloyd has an allure for big stars that separates this director from almost anyone else – but it is in the showcasing of Lloyd’s continual engagement with his own performance history and the notable influences of and dialogue with other theatremakers that makes this so significant, revealing a creative who is constantly evolving to deliver considered and excavative readings of well-known texts.

Romeo and Juliet is a play we see almost too often and in a crowded space it is difficult to make a new production standout. Having a big star is one way to guarantee audience take-up and there have been many starry productions in the West End alone in recent years, from Richard Madden and Lily James for Kenneth Branagh as well as Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley at the National Theatre. There have also been important reimaginings by some of the UK’s most insightful directors, a list which includes Lloyd, such as Rebecca Frecknall’s version for the Almeida that incorporated dance as a principal storytelling device to convey the menace of the Montague and Capulet fracas. Lloyd’s work sits between these two, his big star a draw but still delivering a clear and consistent vision for this story that adopts Lloyd’s distinctive and illuminating application of theatrical technique to create a Romeo and Juliet that is contemporary in style and appeal but devoted to the authority of the text – a core characteristics of Lloyd’s back catalogue. The fundamental importance of this to Lloyd’s theatre means that no actor, piece of stagecraft or design choice is ever bigger than the text it serves.

Seeing Romeo and Juliet in preview, it is clear that the work Lloyd has produced to date has culminated in many of the staging decisions and presentational ideas that shape this production. Looking back, the director’s output is clearly delineated into particular phases, his work from the mid-2010s – Faustus, The Ruling Class and even The Homecoming – were bold, colourful and big productions that were impossible to look away from, arriving onstage with a swagger and lots of tricks, from James McAvoy unicycling to Soutra Gilmour’s endlessly inventive set designs including flowers growing out of the Trafalgar Studios (as it was then) floor. That boldness of purpose is still there in Lloyd’s work, an unforgiving confidence in the worlds that are being generated but this has been tempered by a greater simplicity of staging that emerged first in the remarkable Pinter season and later in the starker Playhouse trio disrupted by the pandemic including the thrilling Cyrano de Bergerac and a poignant approach to The Seagull. Here underplayed MDF sets, no dressing, casual costumes and microphones started to infuse Lloyd’s vision as the language of great plays, their structure and vocabulary became the centrepiece.

That phase in particular commanded a physical stillness in performance that is an essential part of Lloyd’s theatre to this day, and appears here too in Romeo and Juliet as actors address the audience in unnaturally fixed groups or from static positions that focus on the vocal delivery and rely on the audience’s imagination to fill the gaps, imagining props and settings, even physical interactions. It is a strong audience engagement technique that requires absolute concentration on what is being said or implied, and where movement exists it is carefully and meaningfully choreographed to reflect specific purpose in a moment or scene. Lloyd’s recent work is one of the few places where writers’ and director’s theatre meet and form new associations by giving equivalent precedence to both the vision and the source material.

And Lloyd’s latest work has entered a period of exploration of stage space, not only moving front and back of house but also reflecting on the scale of the stage space itself using shadow and light to limit and expand the playing area to suit the intimacy of scenes and to dramatise the psychology of character experiences and track that across the performance. We saw tones of this in Evita for Regent’s Park but it resonated most potently with the more reflective take on Sunset Boulevard that recently dominated the Olivier awards and secured an instant Broadway transfer. This monochromatic world of reality and fantasy that Lloyd envisaged is applied again to Romeo and Juliet that seeks to similarly differentiate between levels of knowledge and perception in Shakespeare’s story as different understandings of truth work through the play. The physical positioning of characters who sometimes stand in lines, sometimes placed in confrontation opposites on either side of the space, sometimes in groups at the front or back says much about who knows what at a given moment but also the various conspiracies, secrets and side conversations happening between and around the lovers that shapes their relationship.

But what is most interesting to see here is the engagement with the work of other creatives and the influence that this has on Lloyd’s staging choices. Although Lloyd adapts this for his own purposes, it is notable that the pitch and vocal approach here nod to Max Webster’s recent Macbeth at the Donmar Warehouse which, using headphones, gave the actors greater freedom to manage the sound levels of their performance to create a radio drama-intimacy with the audience. Filled with whispering menace, this directly influences the performance choice in Romeo and Juliet using a variety of microphone packs and stands which offers the same quiet intensity that Webster achieved but instead projected around the room. This understated quality – quite the opposite of the declamatory Shakespeare that has become so cliched – is incredibly intensive as a result, generating tension and danger for the lovers that enhances the play’s themes and makes better sense of their rash behaviours. Webster and Lloyd here finding common ground in their work. The piece is also inspired by Ivo van Hove whose use of stage cameras is well known (and a little notorious), and while these interventions are not always successful in Romeo and Juliet, the moving screen and layering technique that place different kinds of live image together, often in tandem with actors’ performance, nods to the recent Opening Night where mirrors and camera shots also merged to interesting effect.

Like Sunset Boulevard and numerous excerpts from van Hove’s work, Lloyd takes the performance outside the traditional proscenium space and into the stairwells, bars and other notable locations in ways that support the storytelling to dramatise party scenes and underscore moments of emotional and physical exile from Verona. Bringing the urban landscape of London into the show is extended onto Lloyd’s stage design, it may be badged as Italy in 1597 but this is still today’s capital city, blending the inside and outside worlds of the theatre and further reducing the barriers between the real places the audience has come from and the ‘false’ one of the play. As ever, looking at a Jamie Lloyd show is to have the audience composition mirrored back to us.

The creation of scene then is extremely evocative, a world of gangs and masculine hubris that bristles with danger. From the charged interactions between the Montague and Capulet men to the controlling intensity of Juliet’s father whose threatening insistence that she marry Paris makes sense of the rash acts that determine the play’s conclusion. Dressed in loose-fit jeans and hoodies, Lloyd denies the actors any props so the violence must come from their physical bearing and vocal intent with effective use of blackout to counteract the stageyness of acts of harm. Shakespeare tells us what happened to Tybalt, Mercutio and later to the lovers, the language is the means by which information is conveyed and there is real jeopardy in Lloyd choosing not to show what the writer tells. The low whisper of the text and its maudlin delivery sets a unique tone for this doomed romance, making it truly fatal as each scenes raises the stakes and makes sense of both the love story and its essential tragedy.

For all the shameful furor over casting, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers is easily the best thing in this production, her sassy Juliet is no simpering teenager wanting to be swept away by love but a knowing young woman with a clear agency to make dangerous choices. Her chemistry with Tom Holland’s Romeo is particularly potent but convinces that this is love not lust, a deep and unexpected connection that she cannot escape . Yet in Amewudah-Rivers’s performance she nonetheless enters into the relationship knowing the costs and her own worth. Holland is an emotional and sensitive Romeo, already lovelorn for Rosaline and struggling to contain his feelings. The impact of his meeting with Juliet is significant but the masculine posturing and the deep loyalties to his tribe create confliction in him that Holland conveys really well. There is much to admire in this restrained performance that suggests an inevitability to Romeo’s story as the one who was always destined to sacrifice himself to love, and Holland, as many before him, responds to Lloyd’s style of theatremaking with a notable performance.

So it has been fascinating to see the continued evolution of Jamie Lloyd’s theatre, a director who is in constant communication not only with the ideas and techniques present in the different phases of his own output over time but also those of fellow creatives whose work in the last few months has also influenced him, ensuring his approach reflects the world we know however distant we are from the playwright in time and geography. The primacy of the text and particularly its language is only enhanced and rarely overwhelmed in Lloyd’s productions, and whether it is the intricacy and specificity of Pinter, the existential cry of Chekhov or the florid but emotionally intense Shakespearean verse, as here in Romeo and Juliet, this director supports and enhances the words without detracting from their directiveness and force. And yet the vision is always bold, revealing some new layer or insight that comes through Lloyd’s distinct and consistent directorial style, event theatre in its way with stars like Holland and recently Nicole Scherzinger delivering electrifying performances alongside new talent like Amewudah-Rivers. It is London and Verona, it is 1597 and it is now, Shakespeare and Lloyd in complete collaboration.

Romeo and Juliet is at the Duke of York’s Theatre until 3 August. Tickets start at £25 and are being released regularly across the run. Follow this site on X (Twitter) @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

People, Places and Things – Trafalgar Theatre

Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things returns to a slightly different West End to the one that it first entered in 2016 when it transferred a year after its National Theatre debut. A considerable shift has taken place in both the representations of mental health and addictive behaviours onstage and in the responsiveness of audiences to these personal and often intimate stories of self-abuse, and Macmillan’s play has much to do with redrawing those boundaries. Seeing it again 8 years on in the wake of works like A Little Life and A Stranger Loop, it is useful to think once more about the balance of power in the central character’s life in a period where agency and who gets to tell stories has evolved as well as how the technical requirements of representing a singular perspective are accomplished through the management of narrative and stage craft.

Rightly considered a great modern play when it premiered, People, Places and Things arrived at a poignant cultural moment, a pre-Me Too world in which the bad behaviour of celebrities was still considered entertaining newspaper fodder and the stuff of wider ridicule. The sense of shame attached to female star behaviours in particular was often brutal and the cycle of wild partying, rehab and relapse, so thoughtfully captured in Macmillan’s play, is a trajectory many have followed with little sympathy or public concern for the mental health of the individuals concerned. In 2024 that all looks rather different following improvement of support networks for those in the public eye and, having lived through more years of instability and the kind of world chaos that Macmillan’s protagonist struggles to reconcile, our receptiveness to Nina / Emma’s struggles, her rage and our willingness to see more of ourselves in her crushed frustration about making the pieces fit certainly feels more potent.

There are no easy answers in Macmillan’s play, no magic formula to helping someone overcome their addictions and, crucially, no set way to respond to the challenges of the daily struggle to stay afloat. This constantly provoking and semi-existential anguish continues to plague the lead as she enters and goes through the rehabilitation process searching, ultimately, for an identity for herself that she can believe in. As debates around identity politics and acceptance of the infinite ways to be have accelerated since People, Places and Things was first staged, Macmillan’s text takes on a new dimension, stepping back from the simplistic trajectory of a chaotic and tormented soul looking for calm and instead themes of self-discovery and how identities are constructed, shattered, reconstructed, externally influenced and evolve come more squarely into view. In the protagonist’s search for self understanding, these ideas have always been in the play but the character’s often comedic anger is cast in a different light as the process of rehab forces her to look within to find a sliver of self upon which to anchor her recovery.

The play begins with an excerpt from The Seagull in which the lead is playing Nina and experiences a breakdown mid-performance that requires her to seek help. Soon after she arrives at the facility claiming her name is also Nina. A consummate actress, one of the pleasures of People, Places and Things is its examination of the multilayered nature of performance and the extent to which we either do or are expected to put on different masks with different groups, something Nina firmly refuses to do while adopting her own sets of disguises in order to protect herself from the intimacy that the process of acceptance, sharing and recovery demands of her. Within a few scenes she offers up the name Emma to her doctor and is known as such for the rest of her time in rehab but Macmillan hints that this may also be a fabrication the facility and the audience must accept if we are to ‘know’ this woman better. Emma’s performative resistance to opening up and sharing herself within the therapy classes becomes one of the play’s dramatic drivers, one that both clings to a separation between the private and public identities she has formed, but also precipitates the lack of identity she actually experiences and the ways in which acting and theatre have allowed her to fill the gaps that a separate personality may inhabit.

We saw this too in A Little Life as Jude existed in several parallel experiences at the same time, individual tracks of his life in which his encounters with different friends, his background, traumas and his self-abuse were picked out as fractured shards of a singular but irreconcilable personality each given their own stylised presentation through the technical construction and presentation of the story. Macmillan precipitated that here with Emma’s own complicated concealments and falsely constructed layers of identity that distract or misdirect others from the (to her) unanswerable substance of her motivations and purpose. In Macmillan’s story directed by Jeremy Herrin, these manifest as multiple versions of herself performed by actors in similar costumes who emerge from beds and walls to crawl around Emma during her detox periods in the play, a frantic splitting of herself that reflects time passing but also the many ‘characters’ and personalities she adopts, all shrinking from the painful process that is in some ways reducing. But Macmillan’s text also references the many counterfeit Emmas that she meets in her theatrical work, a line of similar-looking women at auditions all pulling further at the thin thread of self which constantly fights for ways to feel unique in an industry that teaches her to be generic. This interplay of the many characters Emma is and has been as well as the everyman role she is given in the theatre is certainly more vivid in 2024’s more nuanced West End landscape.

Emma was always written sympathetically, her brash exterior and refusal to engage in the cliches of the therapy process and pre-empting a state of being ‘cured,’ are laced with desperate tragedy and the more we learn about her family context – especially in the achingly poignant final scene – the more sensitive the viewer becomes to the size of her feelings of displacement and the battles she is fighting. Audiences are even more attuned to the complex female narratives that have emerged since 2016 and seeing People, Places and Things again, it is remarkable how influential the play has been in this respect, creating an often unlikeable anti-heroine unafraid of confrontation and absolutely certain that she knows what she wants all of the time. Emma never apologises for herself or her activities which is fascinating to see again, particularly in a central moment railing against the whole concept of group therapy as indicating a ‘defectiveness’ in the addicts that she refuses to accept. This eternal confrontation with the world and the agency to manage her own storytelling within the play, determining who she will be and what she will believe or accept really did set a standard for the ways women characters can be represented on stage. And Emma is a fascinating character study, she is more than just ‘complex’ (the bland term so often applied to negative female roles) she is very alive even when contradictorily bent on self-destruction.

Faith is an important theme as Emma argues against the sense of destiny, God or even meaning as a driving force in human lives. The randomness of big and small events, and her inability, even unwillingness to control any of it becomes her defining characteristic as she actively resists the structure imposed by the rehab process and the false hope that the group sessions provide. Following a brief but important exchange with her primary doctor who believes in God and medicine which Emma finds contradictory and incredulous, the final section of the play suggests how right Emma may have been as the real world intrudes so vehemently. It is a clear statement from Macmillan that while the role play and practice conversations help the addict to manage and own their behaviour, there’s no controlling those outside the process, the titular people, places and things that means the whole cycle may just start all over again.

Reprising the role that made her name, Denise Gough is just as memorable 8 years later with a character who demands an intellectual and emotional but also a very physical performance across the 2 hour and 40 minute running time. While Emma’s drunk and high state demands big and demonstrative gestures, which Gough delivers expertly, it is in the subtly of her restlessness that reveals the brilliance of this performance. In the early scenes Emma appears to be holding herself together, nervously twitching her foot, folding into herself and turning away from others all to keep the demands of their intimacy at bay – intrusions into her carefully protected physical and emotional space cause her to aggressively lash out. Over time, particularly in the second Act, those tics disappear as acceptance replaces her fury and Gough shows Emma beginning to inhabit her confidence once more.

But she is also an intellectual creation, often quoting from Shakespeare and Ibsen, and knowingly constructing different personalities to inhabit in order to amplify the emotional concealments she is attempting. In Gough’s interpretation, Emma is then both a tangible and intangible character who hides behind lies – such as insisting her story is the plot of Hedda Gabler – but also peppers the therapy world with projections of her mother and father who creep into consciousness. Gough’s Emma is continually creating a version of herself that others will respond to or who she wants to be in that moment because she is simultaneously almost unknown to herself. And this makes her credible and rounded, a person seeking but refusing help, wanting to be understood and left alone, and all the more interesting to the audience for it.

With strong support including Sinead Cusack playing the doctor, therapist and Emma’s mother who all wear the same authoritative face and Kevin McMonagle as Emma’s dad and a more severely afflicted patient, Herrin is sparring and thoughtful in the use of techniques to suggest Emma’s broader dislocation combining Andrzej Goulding’s video projection, Tom Gibbons’s soundscape and James Farncombe’s lighting to create moments of disorientation as the drink and drugs take effect, but also the bigger more frenzied experiences of clubbing and detox that seem to split Emma into her multiple selves with movement choreographed by Polly Bennett. Herrin balances those periods of brief intensity with the longer sections of text, a style that has been quite influential in staging different experiences of reality within mental health stories.

This revival of People, Places and Things comes to the West End in an entirely different context to its first appearance 8 years ago, one that thanks to the standards set by this play is even more receptive to the many layers of Emma’s experience and perhaps more sensitive to the struggle to cope with the world outside herself. There have been renewed debates about what is appropriate to depict in theatres and what stories are told in bigger venues, and all of that just fuels the need for Macmillan’s play, giving new life and purpose to its Hamlet-like reflections on the difficulties of just being alive.

People, Places and Things is at the Trafalgar Theatre until 10 August with tickets from £20. Follow this site on X (Twitter) @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

Punch – Nottingham Playhouse

Having spent a career examining and analysing the balance of power in UK institutions and their state-of-the-nation implications, James Graham’s latest work is now starting to look at the impact of those structures on the lives of ordinary people fundamentally shaped by the lack of opportunity and lack of investment in core services and support networks that disproportionately affects working class lives. Opening two plays in the same month that consider the effect of state decision-making on ordinary individuals and families, Boys from the Blackstuff, transferring to the National Theatre and Punch at Nottingham Playhouse are compassionate stories that place their characters in a broader socio-political context to examine the extent to which the fragility and precariousness of their existence limits choice and shapes behaviours. From a decline in educational support to decaying social housing projects, economic retrenchment and the loss of regional identities, these plays symbolise the failures and long-term implications of post-war governments to manage the needs of the wider population and its consequences for social cohesion.

Like Boys from the Blackstuff, Punch is first and foremost an intimate examination of contemporary masculinity and the complex cross-generational forces that still control ideas of manliness and how it is displayed at the individual level. Faithfully based on Jacob Dunne’s 2022 memoir, the central character is couched in a particularly potent and demonstrative form of young male behaviour that relies on codes of loyalty, territorial ownership and visible machismo. Dunne’s book is clear about the process of carving a place in this structure and the time it takes to reach a level of acceptance and even leadership that Graham transfers to the play. A key theme in the writer’s work for two decades, there is a strand of male violence and resultant feelings of both power and powerlessness that connect the themes and attitudes of this play with similar conflicts in Sons of York from 2008, there a family dynamic in which competing forms of manly behaviour interact with state-of-the-nation forces shaping the lives of three generations of men at a core moment of change. Jacob’s experience in Punch picks up on these threads in Graham’s work as a means of exerting control over an external environment that is in flux and an immediate physical space – The Meadows estate – where status and, to some degree, fear are perhaps the primary means of self-protection in a built environment that implies confrontation as its steady state.

This translates into Graham’s play as a bristling tension as Jacob describes the physical and socio-cultural experience of living in The Meadows. Through some montage sequences and a quick-fire barrage of narrative, Graham summaries Jacob’s entry into this semi-aggressive culture, initially presenting a binary choice between different friendship groups, then adopting the relevant tribal colours and later deciding whether knives or physical fighting would be Jacob’s ‘signature’ style. There is something of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting and Blur’s Park Life in the way this section of the play is constructed, the drilling narrative told from an individual’s perspective hammering home both in its rat-a-tat structure and particular vocabulary of power, control and menace, all creating a sense of Jacob’s untouchability, building the tension and a hubris before anticipating the fall to come. Although this aspect of male working class masculinity has been dramatised many times – and it is here performed with considerable swagger by actor David Shields – Graham nicely undercuts any celebratory tones that often accompanied the presentation of working class male violence on stage and screen by placing this in the broader context of political and economic failure, and analysing the underpinning need for control and recognition in a system that robs the individual of power to determine and direct their own lives.

Punch, as a result, is a story that plays with timelines to a degree, taking Dunne’s roughly chronological memoir and reordering the narrative to create different layers of storytelling as well as various dramatic drivers within the structure. Some of that is done to create anticipation, a hint of dramatic irony that lets the audience see elements of the story’s outcomes just as Best of Enemies began with an excerpt that reveals part of a crescendo moment. Here too, Graham cuts back and forth in time to make this a more satisfying theatrical experience, and as with his earlier work, builds that into a broader commentary around the central narrative. Just as William F. Buckley’s televised outburst became the defining moment of his life – in Graham’s play at least – shaping public perception of him, so does Jacob’s single punch determine the course of his life thereafter as he travels though different forms of justice. The use of time shifts allows this context to then form in Graham’s hands, drawing back to think about the personal circumstances that have led Jacob to this split-second instinct and reflect on the political shifts and limitations that across decades have backed working class men into a corner.

This story becomes characteristic of Graham’s approach to identifying the fault lines of British society and their deeply embedded implications for individuals trapped in cycles of decline that pass trauma down the generations as the binding of working class men in one era seeps into the next, forming the substance of the 1980s-set Boys from the Blackstuff and drawing a direct line to the early 2010s restrictions that affect Jacob’s own future. Encouraged to be ‘aspirational working class men,’ both groups discover how hollow that phrase is in practice when the systems that Graham dramatises, from schooling to diminishing work opportunities in disenfranchised communities, are stacked against them.

Graham employs a first-person narrative device for the first time in his major works phase, having Jacob describe his activities as they happen as well as reflecting on the various impacts this has for his development as a character. Not since The Man in 2010 has a primary Graham creation addressed the audience directly, although the concept became part of the toolkit in wrapping up the outcomes of Best of Enemies. It is an interesting point to revive this as a central storytelling tenet which does two things; it replicates the approach taken in Dunne’s memoir that speaks to the reader in the same way and it gives Jacob agency in the telling of his own story. This latter point is significant in the wider picture of working class masculinity that Graham represents in this play with all the pressures and structural elements of British society that suppress and attempt to reroute working class perspectives. Drawing Dunne’s own voice into this play is, therefore, an important act of solidarity in which Graham theatrically facilitates Dunne in telling his own story while using dramatised scenes to delve into the experience of the other characters in a typically balanced and compassionate reflection on the impact of Jacob’s choices on those around him.

Directed by Adam Penford, the physicality of Punch is one of its most important features and the energy levels are high from the start as the impact of the crucial night segues into Jacob’s backstory, the act itself becoming a punctuation mark throughout the show imagined as a moment of blackout. Using just six actors largely playing multiple roles with costume and performance style to differentiate between characters who often shift quickly, there is an easy flow to the production that smooths transitions between multiple locations and time periods while maintaining a pitch of adrenaline-fueled vibrancy in the first 65-minute Act. The more reflective second half runs for an equivalent length but draws together the strands to dig into the emotional and human consequences of Jacob’s punch that works nicely in partnership with its predecessor. The management of space and tone is particularly effective using the two levels created by set designer Anna Fleischle to imply the tunnels and bridges that make up The Meadows which in reflecting Graham’s text becomes the defining backdrop to Jacob and, by extension, everyone else’s experience. Penford makes good use of this design with a frenzy of activities as Jacob describes his pacey lifestyle and of the intimidating and imposing wildness of life on the estate with a spread of performers using speed and height to create the drink and drug culture that underpins the immersive narration of male violence and its effects.

Leading the show, Shields’s central performance as Jacob is particularly well pitched for an early preview, exploring not only the experience of his character in different time periods that affects bearing as well as the vocal quality the actor adopts from scene to scene, but he also portrays the real extremes of emotional need that Jacob undergoes, from the arrogant certainty that puts him at the top of his group to the remorseful and broken probationer who struggles to reconcile what he has done. Both of these elements are well rendered in Shields’s performance, the early sections of the play building on both a feeling of Jacob being increasingly lost to the world he inhabits as school and social housing fail him and his peers, and the growing place of violence in substituting self-esteem and loss of external control over his life. Likewise, the impact of the Restorative Justice process and the lengthy scene with his victim’s parents is full of bewilderment, pain and emotional confliction that Shields makes quite meaningful.

An ensemble cast fill out the remaining roles with Julie Hesmondhalgh and Tony Hirst playing James Hodgkinson’s parents, bringing a quiet dignity to their roles as they struggle with concepts of forgiveness and confrontation as well as trying to find meaning in a senseless and random act. Both give a moving performance in crucial roles that Graham gives due weight to within Jacob’s narrative, a sensitivity to the perspective of all sides that is reflected in the balance among the performers. Although given less room in the story, Emma Pallant as Jacob’s alcoholic mother and social worker are figures also shaped by state-of-the-nation forces that determine their own trajectory and lead to some of the play’s statistical activism. Some of the needs of the secondary characters pull against the first-person narrative that Graham has created when different individuals step forward to induct the audience into some of the story’s explanatory or expositional requirement which strain, but Punch marks an important evolutionary direction for Graham that, along with Boys from the Blackstuff and Sherwood, considers the important and contrasting effect of state-of-the-nation forces on the experiences and perceived value of working class lives.

Punch is at Nottingham Playhouse until 25 May with tickets from £9.50. Follow this site on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

James Graham: State of the Nation Playwright will be published by Palgrave Macmillan on 1 August.

The Cherry Orchard- Donmar Warehouse

The second contemporary adaptation of Chekhov in under a year, Benedict Andrews’s reworking of The Cherry Orchard for the Donmar Warehouse emphasises the class divisions between the characters and how attitudes to the accumulation and management of money are directly affected by an individual’s background. Knowing the intrinsic value of things and the romanticism of heritage are on completely separate tracks in Andrews’s emphasis, this production is given a stark and unforgiving setting directed by Andrews which proves fatal to the deluded and often buffoonish, entitled central family – landowners facing bankruptcy but unable to reign in their economic impulses. A far more successful attempt at Chekhov than Simon Stephens’s Vanya, Andrews infuses this production of The Cherry Orchard with the dream of divine intervention and the prevarication of those who hope that a last minute rescue plan will save them from their inevitable fate.

Chekhov has always had a contemporary consciousness that makes his work still resonant in 2024, although until fairly recently stagings tended to asphyxiate the thrumming life of Chekhov’s work under heavy sets and tight corsets. When Doctor Astrov worries about deforestation in Uncle Vanya, the environmental consequences for public health and wellbeing made the 2020 production by Ian Rickson all the more evocative. Here, Andrews looks at the divisions between rich and poor, how parental status shapes the attitudes of subsequent generations and, notably, the rather topical investigation of how great families and their estates were created and sustained, built on the back of worker and slave labour. The impression of (once) wealthy people with little to do but live and spend while characters like Lopakhin have striven hard to rise through the classes by immersing themselves in work, haunts this production and while these themes may seem grafted on, they were part of Chekhov’s text all along, we just seem them more clearly now.

Part of the reason for this has been the loosening up of traditional ways of presenting the writer that have allowed the deep understanding of human nature and the emotional range of Chekhov’s work to come to prominence in recent years. Many of the characteristics of his work are brought to the fore by Andrews in this Donmar adaptation which finds different levels of compassion for the central characters forced to slowly accept the loss of a beloved home and the symbolic destruction of the dreamy cherry orchard that severs an old way of life from a sense of progress that inevitably replaces it. The extent to which the audience empathises with matriarch Liubov’s attachment to the past or with Lopakhin’s fiscal sense fluctuate nicely through the show as Chekhov presents different sides to his characters and their changing behaviours as their fortunes evolve.

Sitting underneath all of Chekhov’s work is an existential questioning of human suffering and the extent to which individuals choose to bear their burdens in the hope that future generations will have a better life. Just as Sonia accepts her heartache and prolonged misery at the end of Uncle Vanya so do characters in The Cherry Orchard contemplate the environmental, economic and political future of this rural district. A leftist radical Pyotr Trofimov stands between governance by hereditary elites and those with new money, arguing for a more equal society growing out of the destruction of class barriers that he advocates in several speeches in this adaptation. Spoken with fervency, they are treated with disdain by the other guests who barely listen and poke fun at Trofimov’s insistence, patronising his utopian ideal. Treated with this mixed regard by Andrews who gives the arguments prominence but also shows the deadening impact on the sociable weekend, the effect on the audience is particularly interesting, taking the words and sentiments seriously to stress the perspective of this character yet not so seriously that they alienate the viewer in the way that Tomas Ostermeir’s less nuanced approach to political discussion in An Enemy of the People does over at the Duke of York’s. Throughout, Andrews’s reworking of Chekhov’s text keeps these differing political forces in balance, showing the audience the different and often contentious ways to live and their possible consequences for both individuals and for society as a whole.

There is a similar commentary on the experience of living in urban and rural areas, with several characters moving between the two in the course of the play. Just like Uncle Vanya, there is a notable division between the permanent residents of this house and the countryside whose dreams are often narrowed to marriage or desire for local ownership, and those who live a more nomadic and expansive life in towns and cities through which they travel – Liubov in particular who comes from a lighter existence in Paris returning only to escape a disastrous but addictive love affair. One of the key things that Andrews does here is to also note how these two groups perceive each other; the rural characters seeing their counterparts as frivolous and empty, while the urban-based creations have a more romantic idea of the countryside drawing on childhood memories of happier times in which they take refuge from the complexity of their adult lives, and there is a nice sense of life continuing beyond the scenes of the play with short-lived pleasures soon replaced by the grind and mundanity of everyday existence.

Andrews’s text is modern but faithful to Chekhov’s original sentiment and architecture. The vocabulary is updated to reflect contemporary dialogue and the class-affected ways that different characters might speak but Andrews retains the sense of poetry, particularly in Liubov’s unfolding emotional tragedy that heightens as the sale of the orchard approaches, as well as Chekhov’s conjectural discussions on the nature of human existence. There is a successful balance here that makes this version particularly engaging and Andrews has sidestepped a common issue in adapting classic works that may feel familiar to contemporary ears but can flatten the depth and emotional intensity of character experiences. However, this version of The Cherry Orchard aligns with the fluid approaches that have defined stagings of the writer’s work in recent years without losing the essence of Chekhov’s meaning and complex presentation of characters with multiple faults and edges, who can be deeply tragic and simultaneously ridiculous, out of touch and full of pathos.

Magda Willi – who worked with Andrews on A Streetcare Named Desire – takes a crowded but spartan approach to designing the world of the aristocrats and this in-the-round space is dominated by a garish orange patterned carpet that covers the stage and lines the walls of the Donmar Warehouse with no other stage furniture at all. Great design should reflect the themes and decision-making within the production and this bold colour scheme underpins Andrews’s commentary on the faintly grotesque behaviours of the wealthier characters as well as their being somehow out of their time. Set in the modern day, this carpeted cocoon nods to an earlier era of opulence that now seems dated and much like the central characters Willi’s approach suggests a house that has failed to evolve, a haven for the few with happy memories to relive but a relic of an earlier era that, like the biannual flowering of the cherry orchard, needs to be entirely uprooted to make way for a new kind of future – here Lopakhin’s mercantile dominance and Trofimov’s universal equality drawing away from serfdom and the feudal past.

All of this takes place and is emphasised by James Farncombe’s unforgiving lighting that shines bright white light down on the characters throughout the play giving them nowhere to hide from the new forces shaping their lives. Everyone in this production is fully exposed by the combination of Willi’s open staging and Farncombe’s forensic lighting where the audience can look at them from all angles, and no one in the play escapes scrutiny and censure. Although the inevitable future sweeps them all away by the end of the story with the breaking down of the old ways given a physicality here, Andrews’s text retains Chekhov’s nuanced understanding of human nature in which no character is entirely good or bad, deserving or wretched and instead shows that the generations taking control have faults of their own.

Nina Hoss is an excellent Liubov, fragile and flighty yet still commanding, still noble in demeanor, demanding a form of respect for her status. Unused to thinking practically about the world, Liubov is a romantic, equally swept away by remembrances of the cherry orchard and a happy childhood in the house as she is by her unworthy Parisian lover, and Hoss suggests the desperate need to be wanted that filters through her character’s behaviour. To an extent this also explains her failure to manage her money, touched by a begging child who passes through the gardens and swept up in the thoughts of luxury and fun in the moment however straightened her circumstances. The break when it comes is managed really well by Hoss whose Liubov fractures under the weight of hope unfulfilled that her precious home will be saved but rallies as a lady of her station should to make a dignified withdrawal in the end.

Adeel Akhtar is the opposite of Hoss’s brittle creation, a pushy and certain businessman who prides himself on making his own way in the world and sees the economic future for the estate without sentiment. There are lots of interesting layers to this performance, a hint of generational revenge for being the son of a former servant now made good, there is arrogance that doesn’t always make Lopakhin sympathetic, and a callousness later in the play that brings everything he thinks he wants but Akhtar makes that victory bittersweet giving Lopakhin a hint of loneliness that makes his future fiscally fruitful but potentially empty of any real feeling or connection with others.

The supporting cast is excellent, from Daniel Monks’s Trofimov passionately airing his views but stuck between worlds to Michael Gould’s lollipop sucking Gaev who manages no better than his sister in facing the truth about the house. June Watson’s fabulously grouchy Firs, a clever gender swap, is given the greatest respect in the household while bemoaning the lack of clarity and hierarchy that the end of serfdom has created in her lifetime and Posy Sterling’s Dunyasha, a maid looking for excitement and uninterested in the local offerings, yet still unlikely to leave the area to seek anything better. Some of the other roles and their relation to the cherry orchard are a little less distinct if you have never seen the play before but the interaction of characters representing traditional class boundaries, new and old money is a strong element of this adaptation.

Andrews controls the flow of the action really well with lots of different characters to manage whose relationships to the house and each other are often complicated. There is a careful choreography in how the waves of activity are managed – anticipating the arrival of Liubov’s party, the interaction between misty memory and pragmatic reality and the triumphant emergence of capitalism. There are no scene breaks or Acts in this interpretation, the action becomes one continuous flow excepting the interval with the actors seated in the audience around the stage. This is particularly effective in the longer Act Three as the aristocrats wait for news about the sale of the orchard during a party at the house with a live band. Andrews has characters weave in and out of this space having fragmented interactions, drawing audience members in to dance as the tension rises and rises, eventually morphing into a fierce combination of anxiety, music and doom-laden expectation, a desperate jazz that signals the death knell of their way of life.

The Cherry Orchard is at the Donmar Warehouse until 22 June with tickets from £15. Follow this site on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

Love’s Labour’s Lost – RSC

Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey announce their arrival as the new co-directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company with a year long season of work with serious star power, bringing the RSC back into the spotlight with canny marketing campaigns that stretch as far as London luring audience members onto the train to Stratford. Emily Burns’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost marks the start of a new era in Stratford in so many ways and much can be read into the approach taken to this revival and what that will mean for the promising year ahead. Setting out its stall with a show that is both frothy light yet with deep shade wrapped in a hugely enjoyable comedy package performed by a group of very fine young actors, there is a definite vigour and purpose in this new company that has set a high bar for the rest of the season.

Burns starts with a contemporary setting, a sometime hurdle for Shakespeare adaptations that can feel a little forced into a pointless period piece that may offer nice visuals but little substance in the morality and psychology of the play. But here there is a much clearer perspective on the layers of ingrained behaviour and entitlement that shape activities in Love’s Labour’s Lost placing the characters in a seeming haven, a retreat / luxury spa away from the political concerns and issues that shape their lives. But beneath the surface, there are class, wealth and nationality barriers that come between the characters in ways that act as subtle judgments leading to a more satisfactory conclusion to the play – Shakespeare’s original conclusion, but emphasising some of the play’s less savoury undertones and implications.

The primary commentary focuses on the relationship between the four couples who fall for each other in the few days they spend free from their wider cares. The men are scholars who reluctantly renounce women for a year to focus on their studies while the women are on a diplomatic mission to negotiate the return of some land, and while this seriousness of purpose drives the top layer of the play, the throwing off of these plans as inconvenient romance alters their intent becomes the comedy centrepiece. Burns’s approach does two quite interesting things, it gives the female characters, led by the spirited Rosaline and Princess, greater agency and self-sufficiency in the plot suggesting they may not reciprocate the ardent emotions expressed by their lovers, and then pushes the point further by making the men quite unworthy of them.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is quite a laddish play for a while with Berowne, King Ferdinand, Dumaine and Longaville party boys whose initial reluctance to forswear female company and excess in order to improve their minds is couched in ego. The group has charm but they brag and boast, assuming that all women must desire them and look to have a good time at the expense of others. And Burns draws this attitude out across the show as they use the clown Costard to set plots in motion, actively belittle and betray each other as well as treating the hotel’s largely international staff with some contempt, particularly scorning them during the Nine Worthies performance that anticipates the show’s finale. As they separately betray their vow of abstinence and reveal their secret attractions to the Princess, Rosaline, Katherine and Maria, the men club together, ready to prowl and certain they will get what they want. This is interesting work from the RSC company, placing what could be sympathetic characters in a slightly toxic light, making them seem shallow and perhaps more interested in the act of conquest than the fully-rounded women they may win.

One of the finest scenes of this interpretation uses Shakespeare’s highly comic scenario to reinforce this perspective. In overly romantic garb, dressed as knights in full metal armour performing an excruciatingly hilarious Backstreet Boys number, the four men are tricked into wooing the wrong ladies, deceived by the gifts they have sent ahead which have been secretly swapped to test their true feelings. That none of the men propose to the correct women makes perfect sense of the less edifying depiction of Berowne and his friend and the surface impression of love that they offer with its flowery verse and excessive demonstration of feeling that Burns’s production presents – how can they profess to love deeply when they cannot recognise their beloved in a crowd of four? With Shakespeare’s more ambiguous ending leaving the men ultimately unsatisfied and needing to prove their devotion, Burns’s show leaves the audience wondering if any of these not irredeemable but fairly shallow men will really remember this new vow in 12 months time.

What makes this such a successful interpretation is the equal strength of the female characters whose cool disinterest in their swains creates an aura of cynicism that suits the tone of the show. One of the ways that Shakespeare frames this story is having the men decide which lady they want and letting the ‘games’ begin, but there is never any suggestion in the text that the women necessarily desire the man that pursues them, as though they have no choice in the matter. So Burns’s production leaves plenty of room for ambiguity; perhaps they enjoy the attention or their heads are momentarily turned by the ardent verses they receive yet there is never a moment when the friends lose their hearts entirely, always conscious not only of their own personal value as a Princess and her retinue but also of the potential deception being acted upon them by young men who play at being in love. By the end, the interpretation even implies that for the women, these relationships merely passed the time or were part of a last hurrah before they return to their official political and monarchical duties.

Love’s Labour’s Lost also has two classes of character – masters and servants – who are given quite different characteristics and status in this production, largely interacting within their own groups throughout. The servants here are reimagined as hotel and spa workers, Jaquenetta a country wench becoming a maid while her beau Don Armado is the exuberant tennis coach who, along with their fellow workers, exist quite separately from the rich and pampered guests they take care of. It is subtle but adds a useful extra layer of narrative to the behaviours and divisions explored in the show, underscoring some of the entitled attitudes and thoughtlessness of Berowne’s group whose jauntiness and self-interest is nicely undercut by the suggestion of poorly paid and poorly used working characters they mock later in the story.

So while this new RSC production of Love’s Labour’s Lost is hugely entertaining there is some really interesting messaging sewn through the adaptation that slightly repositions Shakespeare’s text and draws out different contemporary resonance that takes the story through to a more poignant finale moment. This is a really strong conclusion, a sudden but successful change of tone that firmly ends the revels and takes the characters back to their real lives. As the bubble bursts, the management of these scenes is very effective, using a combination of music, lighting and performance to show how one life is shed and a new future adopted. There are quiet nods here to Henry IV and Henry V in the exploration of monarchical ceremony and persona, what it means to throw off a youthful glee and evolve rapidly into a more sober ruler. Burns’s staging of the final moment in particular is really thoughtful about the different dynamics that have worked across the play, where individual desire and satisfaction gives way to collective need and the excesses of the holiday spirit are consumed by dignity and authority that, perhaps, widens the gap between the would-be lovers even further.

In his first major leading role on stage, Luke Thompson gets to showcase the range that has underpinned his training in high-quality Shakespeare productions from Julius Caesar to Hamlet and King Lear. The comedy of Love’s Labour’s Lost and visual approach that Burns has used create opportunities for sparky word play and physical humour that Thompson manages with ease, capturing the comfortable machismo of his character, the arrogant charm that makes Berowne appealing but also overly certain of himself and his appeal to any woman he sets his sights on. Thompson’s gift as an actor has always been an ability to turn the tone of his performance in a moment and here Berowne’s applications to Rosaline are played as heartfelt and true, the brusk but witty barbs they trade leading into a sincerity of meaning beneath the florid language. And although Berowne’s protestations are not entirely believed, Thompson’s performance shows his progression across the story, a sense of his being struck and then chastened by the emotion that, of all the men in the play, has the greatest chance of lasting a year.

Ioanna Kimbrook is a very collected Rosaline, highly cynical about the relationships being formed and unwilling to betray too much of her own feeling. There are some enjoyable scenes of embarrassment on the golf course as a love letter is read out in front of her giggling companions and the comic timing of the exchange of tokens when the men profess love to the wrong person is a subplot that Rosaline orchestrates well and with clarity for the audience. A similar note of sincerity creeps into Kimbrook’s performance as Berowne’s persistence starts to make an impact, told through stolen glances, even though Rosaline is determined to remain aloof from him, and the chemistry with Thompson hints at a future Beatrice and Benedick.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is an ensemble comedy and there is great support all round from the Princess (Melanie-Joyce Bermude) and her retinue, Sarita Garbony and Amy Griffiths, taking agency from their character roles to create a collection of distinct and often very funny performances. Berowne’s pals Ferdinand (Abiola Owokonirna), Dumaine (Brandon Bassir) and Longaville (Eric Stroud) are a good match for their female counterparts and each get their chance to shine in the comedy – the Barbershop quartet of knights will certainly live long in theatre memory. Managing the diplomacy, Jordan Metcalfe’s Boyet slowly adjusts to the steamy atmosphere, ultimately representing the Princess but wanting to be one of the boys, while there is much to enjoy in Marienella Phillips role as Jacquenetta and Jack Bardoe’s excessively silly Don Armado.

Although a respect for and understanding of Shakespeare’s texts goes without saying, it is a bold start to the new management of the RSC, heralding a playfulness and willingness to innovate that will lure audiences back to Stratford once more and it is notable that the very first words spoken in this new era are not performed in English. Emily Burns’s Love’s Labour’s Lost has set a standard for the rest of this season with a zesty young cast delivering a hugely entertaining but thoughtful comedy. With more early career talent heading to Stratford including Alfred Enoch in Pericles and a much anticipated Hamlet from Luke Thallon, you may find yourself on the train to the RSC a few times in 2024.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon until 18 May with tickets from £8. Follow this site on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog