10 Years of Cultural Capital

Earlier this month, Cultural Capital was ten years old and it has been a varied and interesting period in which to write about developments in theatre and its rapidly changing external context. When the site was established in 2013, London was coming down from the wave of excitement around the Olympics the year before and there was a general optimism about what that might mean for more forward-looking notions of inclusion, representation and twenty-first century British identity. A decade on and Cultural Capital has been shaped by unexpected forces, of political instability in the aftermath of Britain’s exit from the European Union, the repositioning of female-centered narratives following high-profile sexual assault cases, the immediate and long-term impact of the pandemic and the influence of new voices and perspectives that are shifting not only what we hear but how those messages are communicated and who by. These themes have fundamentally shaped theatre locally, regionally and nationally since Cultural Capital began, and this tenth anniversary post is an opportunity to reflect on what some of that means for theatremakers today and in the future.

Cultural Capital for most of its life has been devoted to long-form criticism, examining a single production in detail each week, thinking about how plays are structured and performed, balancing an understanding of writing, directing, staging and acting to consider the relationships between creative decision-making and audience experience. But a key purpose has always been to put those decisions and experiences into a broader context, considering where a play or musical fits into the theatre landscape, how it reflects or advocates industry themes or trends as well as potential alignments with the signature style or characteristics of the writer, director or performer.

With one essay per week, over 500 shows have come and gone, many little more than a memory for those who saw it, but what remains is the collective meaning of those experiences and their influence on the work being produced now and in the months and years to come. To reflect on all of this, below are a selection of shows, one from every year that Cultural Capital has existed between 2013 and 2023, that outline some of the main creative and thematic influences on theatremaking today. These are not necessarily the best or favourite shows – always an arbitrary choice – but productions or seasons of work reviewed on this site that have been cultural mileposts or markers that tell the story of theatre content now.

2013 – Coriolanus

Josie Rourke’s production of Coriolanus for the Donmar Warehouse in 2013 is one of the great Shakespearean revivals of the twenty-first century, filmed by National Theatre Live and broadcast freely during the pandemic. Rourke’s powerful interpretation of Shakespeare’s play initiated introspective new work exploring male violence, expectations of contemporary and inherited notions of masculinity, and the spaces in which men can be vulnerable. Rourke’s approach presented the character of Coriolanus as an archetypal hero-warrior, a man who forges reputation through physical conflict and uses it to transition to political office while failing to account for the vagaries of public opinion and populism that certainly speak to our own era. The souring of this relationships anticipated many of the discussions around male toxicity and aggressive patriarchal power structures that have infused cultural debates and responses ever since.

But the most valuable contribution this play made was in the moments between Shakespeare’s words where Rourke and Hiddleston found the private man and the physical vulnerability that he hides from the world, even from his own family. In the most famous scene Coriolanus showers to remove the blood from his battered body, wincing as the water hits his wounds, showing the humanity and pain beneath the masculine frontage but only to the audience. Beautifully captured in a photography by Johan Persson and explained in The Art of Theatre Photography, these private moments of doubt and frailty explore concepts of performative masculinity and its effect which theatre has grappled with ever since, asking questions about what it means to be a man in a public sense in moments of conflict and in the period between, as well as the cost of upholding those inherited traits. Many writers gone on to developed important new work in this area from Clint Dyer and Roy Williams to James Graham, Kyo Choi and Lynne Nottage, but Rourke’s production created that larger platform for debates about contemporary masculine behaviours to thrive.

2014 – A View From the Bridge

Male behaviour is also essential to the Young Vic’s defining production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, another of the greatest and most memorable productions of the century. But its place in this list relies on the presence of its auteur director Ivo van Hove who along with several other creatives appearing later in this piece, herald the rise of a new generation of star directors, artists whose work is immediately recognisable, distinctive and often radical in its presentation of classic works. van Hove’s resonant approach stripped away the physical clutter and realism with which Miller’s plays had often been presented and instead focused on the intensity and inevitability of the unfolding tragedy. Played without an interval and staged only on a slim rectangular set, the cumulative raw power of this production was hugely impactful, a deep and in many ways revelatory excavation of text and character that has defined the director’s work ever since.

The significance of A View From the Bridge, which transferred to the West End a year later, is the relative simplicity in the staging and text-focused approach that has begun to realign interpretations of major work in the years following this production. And while the heavily decorated realist production has by no means disappeared, there is now a real artistic and commercial strength in the approach adopted by van Hove and those who followed. Far from detaching the play from its context, van Hove found strength and freedom, arguably a greater universality, in the characters as well as a forceful muscularity in Miller’s writing that is both exposing for performers but also richly challenging. An important marker on the road to 2023, van Hove and the star directors emerging in his wake continue to shape fresh, text-centred wok with a strong contemporary purpose.

2015 – The Nether

One of theatre’s most important roles is to engage with and represent challenging or uncomfortable stories, particularly when they advance vital conversations about how we live and the ethical and moral implications of those choices. Jennifer Haley’s play The Nether in 2015 is arguably one of the most difficult debates undertaken onstage in the last decade, asking whether creating virtual worlds for pedophiles to act out their fantasies would ultimately prevent characters from doing so in real life. The Nether thus has a two-fold contribution to make to current themes and the positioning of stage content; the first is the growing body of work reflecting on the Internet and online discussions in shaping social behaviour of which many shows from Dear Evan Hansen to Public Domain have since added to our understanding of living with the Internet and its implications for individuals caught in its glare. The dominant place that online engagement has increasingly played in our lives has led to a controversial blurring of boundaries between real and unreal experiences, as well as the conditioning facilitated by anonymous online freedoms, all of which emerged from Hayley’s multilayed assessment of the extremes of Internet platforms.

But The Nether’s second contribution is even more valuable, in reigniting discussions about what should and can be presented on stage, and considering the role of censorship in what theatre audiences are permitted to view. Some of these concerns have been raised just this year with the adaptation of A Little Life (discussed later) eliciting negative responses from some reviewers for its repositioning of those boundaries. But should any topic, even Hayleys’s wide-ranging consideration of remedial support for those with criminal tendencies, be off-limits? Theatre should and does have a vital role to play in facilitating troubling social reflections in a relatively safe and open space, and while even eight years on there are no clear answers, plays like The Nether are absolutely vital to thinking through the what ifs, and encouraging engagement with the darker side of human behaviour.

2016 – The Deep Blue Sea

2016 was a huge change moment in Britain in which the political and social landscape shifted, one of the outcomes of which has been a greater focus on female-led narratives and improved equity of leading roles. There is still a long way to go but the National Theatre’s adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea directed by Carrie Cracknell arrived at the perfect moment. A sensitive and thoughtful revival, it remains one of the most memorable stagings of the last ten years. Rattigan of course had always written well for women, but this felt like the right production at the right moment, foregrounding Hester’s thoughtful and entirely rational interior landscape and the sacrifices she knowingly made to have a different kind of life than the one she was born and married into. At this particular moment in 2016, Cracknell’s production presented a woman who was making a decision about who she was and wanted to be, prepared to accept it regardless of the consequences, taking control of her own mortality as she worked through those outcomes.

This centrism of women in their own narratives is an important theme in the last eight years even when, like Hester, their lives have been shaped by men, in this case her husband, lover and father. Performed by a luminous Helen McCrory in one of her finest roles, Cracknell’s production had a Hamlet-like quality as Hester contemplates whether to live or die – a notion explored in this essay when the show was screened via NT at Home during the pandemic. The strength and reserve of this performance is one of the most significant of this period, finding a greater, more universal resonance in the domestic experience of one woman that set a standard for a more meaningful engagement with women’s stories in the years to come. New work like Jermyn Street Theatre’s 15 Heroines and Galapagos owe a debt to this production and the varied, multi-faceted heroine that Rattigan originally created.

2017 – Ink

James Graham is unarguably one of the most important playwrights of the last ten years, and while This House from 2012 was his breakout piece, in 2017 he dominated new work with three plays opening in the same year – Ink at the Almeida, Labour of Love at the Noel Coward and Quiz at Chichester Festival Theatre. But it is the former that best symbolises the thematic direction of the writer’s focus in the years since it premiered and by extension a growing body of work reflecting on politics, society and the role of the media in shaping what we think and how we behave. Under new owner Rupert Murdoch, Ink charted the first year of The Sun newspaper’s growing influence and explained the introduction of audience-driven, transformative populist content that rejected older forms of newspaper reporting and replaced it with a fresh tone that – the character’s argue – spoke on the level of its working class readership. Whether the tabloid tapped into and reflecting a pre-existing need for this content or actively created the appetite for it, is one of the Graham’s major themes as protagonist Larry Lamb fails to heed a warning about the unmanageable consequences of the changes his team instigate.

Ink is a notable turning point in Graham’s work, moving from the political subjects with which he is still most associated to the broader anatomy of non-democratic organisations that wield considerable social power, and few writers have so consistently and clearly explained the cause and effect relationships between our power structures and the challenges facing modern Britain. This play also embedded the thematic focus and theatrical styles that have defined the playwright’s work in subsequent years in which Graham has pointed to other major change moments in post-war history that inform how we engage as a society today. But Ink was the first major play to look beyond traditional political subjects and explain how our society works now.

2018 – Summer and Smoke

There have been few developments more satisfying to watch than the rise of Rebecca Frecknall, an exciting star director who, like Ivo van Hove, has shaped theatrical content in this period with a distinctive and illuminating vision. Focused on rethinking classic texts by major dramatists, Frecknall’s breakthrough production was the Almeida’s Summer and Smoke, one of Tennessee Williams’s lesser appreciated works until Frecknall brought into the mainstream with a deftly staged production. Williams had been ripe for re-evaluation in the last ten years and Benedict Andrews had done some of that foundational work with some stripped back productions of major texts, but this version of Summer and Smoke established what would become a recognisable and highly successful directorial approach in which Frecknall is notably empathetic to the female-centric narratives in existing work.

What was so striking about this production was the emotional beat that Frecknall so carefully elucidated, a powerful and surprising connection between two unlikely people that grows, flames and dies across the course of the play. The clarity of that trajectory and the intensely felt tragedy of two people just missing one another was stark and beautiful. And this has become Frecknall’s trademark, the rethinking of often overlooked female experiences presented with care and contextual understanding of how private grief and trauma drives behaviour. Combined with a simpler, representative staging and accents of music, this star director has opened up not only Williams’s work but also Chekhov and Shakespeare with Lorca to come in the autumn. The effect that Frecknall is having on the London stage is extraordinary and important, rethinking how women are presented through investigative and emotionally-connected approaches to classic texts.

2019 – Pinter at the Pinter

Another star director rose to prominence during the last decade and Jamie Lloyd has demonstrated a similar text-focuses approach while growing into his own distinctive and minimalistic style which has also delivered some of the great revivals of recent years. This reached its apex with the Pinter at the Pinter season celebrating the short works of the writer running from late 2018 into the Spring of 2019. While Pinter is rarely off stage for long, Lloyd’s season was little short of a landmark in understanding this influential writer’s work and seeing the skills of its director develop as the season evolved. This was an education in Pinter for audiences who saw all of the eight shows, broadening out our impressions of the playwright from strange and menacing to a nuanced observer of human life, someone who wrote widely about power, relationships, family and love. Increasing our understanding through careful curation Lloyd actively demonstrated the range and skill of Pinter while also subtly drawing attention to the technical accomplishment of his works, building from the accessible stories set in totalitarian states to the complex linguistic poetry of the closing double bill A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter where Pinter’s vocabulary choices create worlds of meaning about class, power and human worth as well as atmospheric tension and drama.

And this season shaped its director as well, giving Lloyd the text-focused tools that have allowed him to find deeper emotional purpose in other classic works, and placing the interior experience of character at the heart of otherwise denuded productions. The simplicity of staging and faith in the meaning and elegance of the writing resulted in a gripping and devastating version of Betrayal at the end of the Pinter season as well as a subsequent Playhouse run (interrupted by the pandemic) that included heart-stopping new versions of Cyrano de Bergerac and The Seagull. You felt Lloyd grow into the director he was always meant to be because of the Pinter at the Pinter season, and the theatre he makes, like Frecknall and van Hove, has the capacity to reach beyond the surface, digging deep into the text and the emotional responses of its audiences.

2020 – The Death of England: Delroy

With pandemic closures, just being in a theatre again took on an added emotional resonance for audiences and never more so than the production that, albeit temporarily, reopened the Olivier Theatre, Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s The Death of England: Delroy, easily one of the most important play cycles of the twenty-first century. Now a quadrilogy, this series of two monologues and two duologues has captured and reflected on the anatomy of modern Britain, the slow to change embedded and systemic racism that shapes daily life, and the casual assumptions that are inherited between generations. This second play was the point at which the series established itself as a rounded exploration of contemporary British identity, placing the experience of initial protagonist Michael in the context of his best friend Delroy as the consequences of their long association and behaviour to one another interacted across notions of Black British identity – one of the most important theatrical themes in this period – and the expectations of masculinity in working class lives and families.

Other plays including Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night and Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights have also been essential to the exploration of the Black British experience and the new prominence given to some of these stories and voices are vitally shaping what modern theatre needs to look like. But Dyer and Williams have most consistently articulated the complexities of self and community emerging from the multilayered, complementary and contradictory reflections on identity that this play cycle has captured, creating a nexus between different racial experiences at a macro and micro level in society. A male-focused piece (at least until the final chapter is played in September), the infusion of themes including male vulnerability, the expectations of fatherhood as well as the enduring impact of verbal and physical violence on generations of men have made The Death of England series a watershed in not only writing but also staging work that considers second and third generation immigrant identities of all kinds, unpicking, claiming and celebrating all the ways there are to be British.

2021 – Cruise

By no means the first or only play to represent the LGTBQIA perspective in the last decade, Jack Holden’s Cruise was however the culmination of the work that had gone before and established a new intergenerational understanding that has begun to reframe notions of inherited trauma, support within the community and collective purpose. Opening in a major West End theatre after premiering online, Cruise also signaled a shift in ideas about the stories told in larger commercial venues and who is allowed to tell them, returning to the West End in 2022 and now playing to great acclaim in Manchester. The impact of Cruise and the platform it has given to the breadth possible in a single writer-performer show will continue to be felt in the years ahead, where the ambition and scale of stories told by individuals is already changing.

Telling the dual tale of a contemporary gay man and his equivalent in the 1980s, Holden’s show asked interesting questions about the impact of the Aids epidemic on Soho and its importance in shaping LGTBQIA identities in subsequent generations, especially for those born long after this pivotal period. The sharing of knowledge and nurturing of young men still cast out by family and friends based on their sexuality connects the two eras, along with the importance of learning from and appreciating the trauma of early generations. This cultural, geographical and identity sharing concept was drawn together in Cruise as Holden’s character thought deeply about the connections between past, present and future, and what it means to be part of a community partially defined by its historic suffering. Moving beyond the behemoth plays like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (also revived in the last ten years), like Dyer and Williams, Cruise focused on everyday life for ordinary people exploring strong cultural identities in contemporary Britain that builds meaningfully on the work and lived experience of those who came before.

2022 – Oklahoma!

Musical theatre has changed substantially in the last decade, not just in the development of new shows but the reconfiguration of existing and sometimes problematic ones, and this art form returned stronger from the pandemic, adapting to new technologies and with a renewed energy for inventiveness. The 2022 production of Oklahoma! at the Young Vic transferred from America and came to symbolise all of the advances made by the genre in the last 10 years, building on the foundational reimagining work that multiple directors and creatives have applied to classic texts in a new era, responding openly and directly to changing morality and contemporary experiences. From Jamie Lloyd’s Evita to Daniel Evans’s hughely resonant South Pacific, Rebecca Frecknall’s Cabaret and Timothy Sheader’s Carousel, these productions have grappled with the racial complexities of their subject matter, sexual coercion and power shifts that have contributed to the bold progression of the musical in this period.

Oklahoma! was again the culmination of all of these approaches that have taken the genre a step further by playing with expected audience reactions. Daniel Fish’s production was a rare theatre experience, one that sent you home with feelings of considerable unease about the story and the characters. This usually upbeat, sunny love story soured beautifully on stage, becoming a darker tale of coercion and criminal conspiracy, of male violence and expressive female sexuality that shifted and morphed as the musical unfolded. Performed in stark lighting with film, vocal effects and darkness used to pointed effect, this was an astoundingly unnerving experience, one that became morally muddy. Theatre almost always wants to send its audiences home feeling uplifted and with its problems resolved, but Fish made everyone feel sullied, complicit somehow in some terrible act of destruction that stained us all, pushing the feeling of discomfort and disconcertion in ways that felt experimental and exciting. Musical theatre has certainly become a place to explore more complex responses and its continued evolution is one of the most fascinating developments of recent years.

2023…

With so many productions to come, it may be a little early to speculate on which show from this year is the most indicative of the themes and directions that theatre is currently pursuing, but one show already sits at the intersection of so many of the foundational ideas discussed in this essay. The production of A Little Life, adapted from Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, is helmed by one of the new generation of star directors that have been a feature of this period, with Ivo van Hove’s sparing appreciation for the original text while carefully and meaningfully rearranging it for the stage. It combined discussions of male mental health and vulnerability, LGTBQIA histories and identity, and a complex subject matter that led several critics to question whether self-harm is an appropriate subject for audiences. A powerful and insightful piece of theatre, A Little Life has filled two West End houses and earned a cinema recording, combined content and form with the literary basis, political and social purpose which so many of the plays in this selection have highlighted, perhaps the ultimate representation of 10 years in mainstream London theatre.

…. and Beyond

Much has changed in the ten years that Cultural Capital has existed and many different stories could be told about that period through its key productions, writers, creatives and developments in content that this piece has explored. Pick an entirely different selection and perhaps other themes would emerge, while a focus on only regional or only fringe would highlight the many great things about the existing theatre ecosystem but also the many challenges of representation, funding and decision-making not included here. There are also other reflections that have not been made in this piece on the nature of theatre criticism itself, who gets to do it, the reductive value of star ratings and how the industry interacts with a diversity of critics and theatre writers in an increasingly social media driven promotional context.

But there is still a place for long form criticism, an opportunity to reflect in detail on individual shows and the wider connections that can and should be made between all of these isolated productions. There are clear and direct lines of thought from Coriolanus in 2013 to A Little Life in 2023, and it is possible to see that evolution through these shows and reflect on how the theatre we have now came to be. And while a few are still running either in the West End or regionally, some even available to watch online, all of this is just a memory. Theatre is a transcendental state, gone before you know it and what matters, what always matters is what’s next. So let’s find out…

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Romeo and Juliet – Almeida Theatre

The boundary between different art forms is where the most creative things happen, put theatre, dance, music and cinema together and it can even give new life to a very well-worn tale. Romeo and Juliet has been done and done and done, so finding a new way to tell the story almost everyone in the room will already know at least something about is enormously challenging. It is a play performed with such regularity and seen so often that in plodding through the overly-familiar scenes – a meet cute, a balcony, a fatal stabbing and some poison – it is easy to miss what it is really about, not love but hate, pure irreconcilable and consuming hate between two sets of men. Rebecca Frecknall’s new production for the Almeida Theatre foregrounds that hate and the male violence that drives their children to destruction.

There are many things that set this revival apart, not least Shakespeare’s promise of two hours’ traffic which is actually delivered almost to time with no interval. Frecknall has made deft cuts to sharpen the story and while this play’s declarations of undying love have always been quick, coming after a single encounter, so too are the consequences that play out over only a few days, giving the lovers too little time to reflect and creating instead a reactionary pace that hastens their end.

And seeing the plot anew through Frecknall’s eyes, the audience can see that this is a story filled with rash behaviours and hot-headed actions that individuals barely have time to repent. The simmering anger of the rival gangs towards one another that tips into violence within moments of trading their first insults, the speed with which both Romeo and Juliet forget their mutual grief to grasp their only night of passion and the blistering anger of Juliet’s father when she refuses to marry Paris merely a few hours after her cousin’s murder are the drum beats of this version as the tragic drive pulls the couple towards their inevitable ending, one that Frecknall’s tightly-wound production brings compelling new life to.

The master stroke is to make this really feel like a play about men, about posturing masculinity, control and competition that consumes and marginalises the experience of women in their way, of whom we see only three – Juliet, her mother and the nurse. Beyond Romeo’s soon-forgotten first amore Rosaline who is never seen and easily dismissed, women are controlled, sold in marriage or expected to be grateful and servile, obeying the commands of their menfolk. That Romeo stands apart from this model in his treatment of Juliet is more notable in this version of Shakespeare’s tale, although his involvement in the performative bravado of his family very quietly implies that perhaps had they been given the time, Romeo may have been as contemptuous of his wife as Lord Capulet proves to be of his spouse and daughter.

Romeo here has a foot in both camps to an extent, a kindly devoted lover but still an impulsive young man who commits a major act of violence even after his wedding. And Frecknall includes him in the fascinating dance sequences that stand in place of the story’s violence, stylised encounters created by Frecknall and fight director Jonathan Holby that turn the men into avenging Valkyries, aided by Wagner’s emotive and forceful music which recurs through the show. The choreography is balletic in style but this is no West Side Story finger-clicking gang warfare but an intensified frenzy of coordinated pack movement that builds the enmity and power of these two groups and the effect of their frequent clashes. The introduction of dance is unusual but it becomes an absorbing shorthand to convey a complex backstory and escalating assault, the origins of which Shakespeare never explains.

The hyper-masculine reality that Frecknall creates is contrasted by the naive simplicity of Juliet’s early love in which the cast find great humour as well as the traditional sentiment. The disabusing of those sensibilities is something that happens by degrees across this unbroken production as the simplicity of true love becomes embroiled in the reality of the couple’s circumstances and Romeo’s own true nature. And while Juliet doesn’t love him any less, the rapid ascent into the adult world is something that changes the character as she better understands the consequences of family rivalry and the cost of her own actions. These two things stand in stark contrast throughout and the realisation of the taint on their marriage that comes from the dual deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt on their wedding day adds considerable impetus to their choices in the aftermath. Far from reducing their love, it brings increased impact to a very slightly reconceived final scene, giving the familiar end an added emotional resonance that shocks with a terrible new power.

And nowhere is this more revealing than the scene late in the play when Juliet’s father demands she marry her official suitor Paris in which Frecknall’s cast find an alarming ferocity that explains the toxic inheritance of male violence that characterises this interpretation. Until this point, Lord Capulet (Jamie Ballard) has only been affable and publicly loving towards his family, but suddenly behind closed doors, when defied, a monstrous rage emerges that terrifies the three women in the room. Ballard stalks the stage, intimidating and threatening, showing a different face to this character that exposes the true nature of the society and the family rivalries that persist unchecked. It is a world controlled by powerful men who deliberately instill the same notions of hate and antagonism they got from their own fathers in their successors. Frecknall’s production argues that boys die in Romeo and Juliet because older men demand they do to keep an ancient feud alive, so what hope do two lovers ever have against this insistent coercion of the young and they way it is used to reinforce the power of their fathers.

Designed by Chloe Lamford, with lighting by Lee Curran, this is a decidedly cinematic production that uses a variety of editing and scene-setting techniques borrowed directly from film to hone the story and to find quite different resonances in the text. In trimming down the play, Frecknall also finds places to overlap different interactions that give this production a new driver including playing side-by-side the conversations between the Nurse and Juliet as well as Friar Laurence and Romeo following the double murder. In setting these simultaneously, as a film director would do, Frecknall cuts between the scenes, blending them together to show the audience how these activities affect the hopes and fortunes of the newlyweds. In other places, major speeches have additional silent action taking place in the background, an opportunity to contrast the romanticism of young love with the reality of their enemy households, again adding this feeling of inevitable doom to proceedings that traps the characters in their trajectory.

It gives the play a filmic quality and pace without detracting from the content, helping to really clarify the ways in which the circumstances and experiences of these characters is constantly shaping the outcome of their story. As a result nothing happens in isolation, instead Frecknall has given the play a fresh understanding of cause and effect, using this new management and presentation of the text to enhance the impossibility of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship and moving this story on from petulant first love that destroys itself to a despairing couple who are backed into a corner by degrees with only one way out. The director underscores this with choreographed activity taking place behind Juliet’s major speech when she takes Friar Laurence’s sleeping draught, with small vignettes silently staged in the background that show the family causes of her despair.

The pacing of this production is then its most important feature as scenes flow easily from one to the next, shaping the text to create fluid transitions that motor this familiar plot and help the audience to find new meanings and an urgent energy in its presentation. Debbie Duru’s costume design blends Jacobean ruffled collors and jerkins with hints of New Romanticism but still with a twenty-first century style feeding through the choice of fabrics and colours, that make the story feel both timeless and contemporary. Lamford’s minimalist stage design likewise enhances the story, focusing on character with few props and giving the playing space itself a moment of recognition at the very start of the play.

Getting the central pairing right is, of course, essential and here both Toheeb Jimoh as Romeo and Isis Hainsworth as Juliet bring interesting gradations to their roles, giving them a strong chemistry that becomes their only lifeline as the story unfolds. Both crave escape and safety in their own way, initially without realising it and that only enhances their investment in one another as Romeo seeks respite from the uber-male expectations placed on him while Juliet’s desire for romantic love initially feeds a particular fantasy but becomes an essential outlet if she is to escape the confines of her father’s house and eventually the limitations of an arranged marriage to a man she knows no better than Romeo. That trajectory from girlish innocence to a more substantive understanding and control over her own destiny is an important development in Hainsworth’s performance and one that balances the outward compliance expected of young women with a rebellious spirit, even an anger that springs occasionally when her needs are overridden, frustrated by the gap between the life she wants and the changing, and even dangerous, reality around her. It makes her final moments more moving and affecting than they can sometimes be, driven by the walls metaphorically closing in around her in which love cannot be enough.

By contrast, Jimoh’s Romeo treads a more difficult path between the swift exchange of lovers, the genuine and heartfelt feeling he discovers for Juliet and the bantering friendships and family loyalties that tie him into set violent behaviours. That Romeo has trouble reconciling these drives his troubled character, pulled in multiple directions in Jimoh’s performance that allows these different expectations to overtake him. When Jimoh’s Romeo is in love, he is wholly in love but in the midst of turf war he is overcome by the requirements of his Montague blood and unable to think of the consequences for his marriage or his mortality. His end too becomes far more emotive as a result, impetuous to the last, Romeo’s fate feels like a waste of life, as it should, and the all or nothing dynamic that governs this version of Romeo shapes his life and his death.

In a slimline performance, several other characters also work hard to make their mark in an ensemble that Frecknall uses to create the poisonous context in which the lovers exist, all of whom are creators and victims of their circumstances in different ways. As well as Ballard’s Lord Capulet, Paul Higgins’s Friar Laurence is an ominous figure here, not quite the saviour but a more ambiguous architect of Romeo and Juliet’s fate by presiding over their marriage and presenting Juliet with the fateful sleeping draught plan that quickly unravels. As a result, there is something both kindly and shadowy in Higgins’s performance that supports the broader culpability for this tragedy and likewise underscores the fate of Jack Riddiford’s Mercutio who, though briefly seen has a new significance. Strutting like a 60s Mick Jagger with costume to match, Riddiford is a live wire, the Queen Mab speech full of allusion and mystery that suits his art student vibe, but like Romeo, he too is motivated by a deeply held personal kinship that seeks out confrontation with his family’s rivals and curses these same bonds of loyalty that force him to defend it with his life.

Frecknall has rightly won great acclaim with a series of intimate productions that recast familiar stories, finding both alternative perspectives and contemporary pulses, especially in the presentation of female characters given a different kind of agency. In this Almeida Theatre production, it is the combination of theatre, music and dance that creates something quite different, finding compelling meaning and purpose in the masculine construction of the play from which the inevitable tragedy emerges. Romeo and Juliet may be over performed to the point that the audience is ahead of the actors in anticipating what is to come, but this insightful two hour production gives it renewed purpose once more.

Romeo and Juliet is at the Almeida Theatre until 29 July with tickets from £12.50. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

A Streetcar Named Desire – Almeida Theatre

It has been fascinating watching Rebecca Frecknall’s development as a director, from making her mark with a defining production of Summer and Smoke four years ago to the multi-Olivier award winning Cabaret still running in the West End more than twelve months on from its astonishing debut. Now, she tackles one of the greatest plays of all time, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire back in the intimacy of the Almeida Theatre and brings a devastating new clarity to it, eschewing the distraction of a heavy set and the cliches that tend to dog interpretations of Williams, from the exaggerated Southern accents to Blanche’s affected gentility. Instead, Frecknall restores emotional credibility to her protagonist by putting the relationship between two sisters at the heart of this production and using it to examine the wreckage that love and desire can leave behind for those too fragile to endure it.

A Streetcar Named Desire arrives with considerable regularity and it tends to be a favourite among professional and amateur companies. The last major London version was, however, eight years ago when Gillian Anderson took the leading role in Benedict Andrews’s 2014 version at the Young Vic, a contemporary staging on a streetcar-shaped revolving stage that was notably re-released via National Theatre at home. And with many star version before it including Rachel Weisz at the Donmar, the twenty-first century has not been short of Williams’s greatest play. But Frecknall offers a new dimension to this latest one, a simple but compelling truth that casts every scene anew and brings a fresh perspective to well-worn notions of what this play and its characters ought to be.

It is staged with Frecknall’s trademark simplicity, a bare stage no larger than the performance space for Cabaret with seating in the round. The significance of the slightly angled platform and clear wooden boards is stark, a blank canvas onto which the creators and indeed Blanche can project her skewed fantasies, a fresh start where anything is possible. The momentary resemblance to a ropeless bare knuckle boxing ring only adds to the anticipatory atmosphere as characters and occasional props appear. Frecknall never wants to get in the way of the text and so items are moved into the playing space only as they are needed by the actors, and delivered by those not in the scene. It is deftly done, a chair appearing a few moments before it is used, a telephone as required by the script, Blanche’s pre-packed suitcase ready to take her onto the next dream, all of it removed as seamlessly as it arrived.

Frecknell never hides these intrusions into the illusion of the play, effortlessly merging this vaguely Brechtian device with the naturalism that Williams demands and they never interrupt the flow of the scene. Instead, it draws attention to the prop and rather than cluttering the stage, they hint at place and at the claustrophobia of Stella and Stanley’s two-room apartment while leaving the characters with nothing to hide behind, no elaborate set to absorb or distract from their inevitable destruction as the audience observes their emotional unraveling from every angle.

The director uses music and lighting in lieu of unnecessary set to chart the beats of this play and its turning points. And it has a painterly quality, utilising cues from the scrip such as Blanche’s preference for dimly-lit spaces to preserve her modesty and the illusion of youth. So lighting designer Lee Curran (who also lit Summer and Smoke so evocatively) creates interesting patterns within the show that map the tone and changing mood of the story, opening with a warn and rich New Orleans afternoon sun casting its optimistic pinkish rays across the housing complex and instantly generating the uncomfortable heat that pervades the atmosphere that Williams infers. It is sultry and sweaty so Curran projects light from the side to suggest a sun beginning to set as shadows encroach – a pointed psychological moment in which the escaping Blanche seeks a hopeful welcome with her past and personality edging slowly into the frame, a place where she will only run into herself once more.

Later, inside the Kowalski’s home, the brightness is muted by the Chinese shade that Blanche insists should cover the single lightbulb hanging in the air and bringing a calm semi-romance as Blanche refuses to engage with the reality of her sister’s life and Stella’s more vivid internal and physical experience. Curran then introduces drama within the lighting scheme that responds to these contrasting emotional states and power shifts. The costume colour palette of red, salmon, yellow and mustard stand stark and vibrant in moments of confrontation. And the production looks beautiful as a result with several shots, particularly in the second part, creating some incredible stage pictures.

On Blanche’s birthday, for example, Frecknall creates a pointed moment in which the sisters sit at the front of the stage with a perfect looking blue and white-iced cake while far back Stanley looms between them, the pinkish tone of his t-shirt matching his wife’s pleated skirt, a nod both to the sibling focus of this interpretation as well as the interplay of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity that suffuse this production through costume (by Merle Hensel) and characterisation. Further into the production, those two ideas contend again as Blanche in a stunning but flouncy yellow number with layers of skirt is starkly presented against Stanley’s blood-red silk pyjamas in a moment that seems frozen in time and lit dramatically by Curran.

Hensel’s costume design, though contemporary, is extremely evocative both in style and shade, and considerable thought has gone into the contrast between Blanche and everyone else; she also picks pleats along with gauzy material, sheer fabrics, romantic floral designs and shoulder ruffles which speak to a grander approach to dress and a degree of polish that distinguish her particularly from Stella whose more casual manner is reflected in more practical shape and fabric choices. Character and themes are incorporated into every production choice and the overall vision is an artistic one.

Frecknall’s non-musical productions are really defined by their composition and its becomes a sparingly employed theatrical device to denote the emotional beat of the play. The use of piano and metronome were essential to the slow-burn intensity of Summer and Smoke, while this Streetcar applies drums and percussion to similar effect, underscoring but never distracting from Williams’s text which remains the absolute centre of this production. Often there is no musical accompaniment beyond those proscribed by the author; the radio that Blanche uses to irritate Stanley’s poker game or the romantic band sound she hears as a faded echo of memory when remembering her last night with her husband. Where Frecknall and composer Angus Macrae insert additional music it is in places where a change is occurring in the scene, beating out a suddenly acknowledged tension in which characters are learning something new about themselves and times when their relationships are in flux from which, as the culminating drums and cymbals indicate, they will emerge with an entirely new perspective on one another.

While most productions tend to build themselves around the sparky confrontation of Stanley and Blanche, more than any version of this play in recent years, this Streetcar foregrounds the connection between the sisters, initially contrasting their approaches and responses to the New Orleans scenario as well as their shared past at a beloved childhood home. At different points in the play the two women are shown to be more realistic or pragmatic than their sibling and while it is Blanche who tends to be the dreamer, hiding behind illusions about herself, its so interesting to see Stella being drawn from the shadows of Williams’s play and given almost as much time in the spotlight in a story that fundamentally shifts the nature of her marriage and her future beyond the action we observe.

At the start we see a powerful version of Stella, comfortable in her womanhood, sexually fulfilled by a man who she desires and quite happy to have rejected the gentility of her childhood for the modest life with Stanley. Blanche, by contrast, seems the less experienced of the two, uncomfortable around the magnetism of this couple and seeking Stella’s maternal protection. But slowly that shifts as Blanche’s influence over her sister subtly increases, bringing with it a reminder of the people they once were. Later in the play, this production suggests, it is Blanche who is more realistic about the consequences of their family life, living with the death of their parents and the financial burden of sustaining a large home that Stella (and by extension Stanley) have slightly more romantic notions about. It is under Blanche’s influence that Stella starts to question her husband’s manners about which they fight and, despite the famous reunion scene in the middle of the play, months later they are drifting apart as something between them has broken and the sisters become a closer unit almost in spite of themselves.

And much of that is possible due to the more naturalistic presentation of Blanche that over time draws the sisters closer together. Here Blanche is less overtly a “Southern Belle” and more sympathetically viewed as a woman experiencing a deep and affecting trauma at a young age that has shaped her life immeasurably. She has all the same affectations, the tendency to bathe as a way to repurify herself, the want of beauty and calm in every space and a prioritisation of genteel manners, but Frecknall’s interpretation of Blanche is far more human, more subtle than previously seen making her a deeply tragic rather than a comic figure that means her trajectory is all the more affecting.

Stepping in at extremely short notice, Patsy Ferran gives the most astonishing performance as Blanche, though younger than we have ever seen her, softening the extremes of the Southern accent to create the portrait of a woman with nowhere else to turn and ultimately in the last place she ever wanted to go. There is deep resilience in Ferran’s Blanche, a strength that has helped her to endure years of shame within her hometown and the aching loneliness that sits at the heart of this character. Ferran has always dug deep into the seeming fragility of her characters to found greater reserves within and this is exactly what she finds in Blanche. And there is a deep sensuality in Ferran’s performance – not something that has been required of the actor before – one that, again, is subtle but nonetheless vital to her eventual descent into delusion. Ferran finds that place where Blanche’s romantic hopes, so often dashed by brutish men, crash disastrously against the reality of her physical existence, charting her final capitulation with meaning and a true empathy for a woman who has barely known a moment of happiness.

Anjana Vasan brings her Stella out of the shadows to give her an equal place in this drama, a woman who seems initially more in touch with the reality of life than her sister but with Vasan’s performance understanding the romantic delusion that Stella too has been living under, one that comes tumbling down as the months roll on. And Vasan is particularly good at charting the changing relationship with Stanley as her confidence grows under the influence of her sister which sees the spousal connection begin to fracture. Where once their marriage was a tight unit, it becomes far less satisfactory to this Stella as her husband’s attitudes increasingly put distance between them, and as Stella’s pregnancy advances so too does her dissatisfaction with the life she once enjoyed with a finale that marks a clear and permanent change in their marriage.

Paul Mescal’s Stanley has been much anticipated and proves just the right mix of bullish masculinity and sensitivity that make Stanley such an appealing character. Particularly interesting here is how the brutish, menacing side of Stanley evolves in Mescal’s performance which politely welcomes Blanche in the early scenes and demonstrates a real and deep tenderness for his wife following a violent outburst that reduces him to tears. But this is a turning point for Mescal’s deeply masculine Stanley who retreats into himself as the home where he was once “king” feels exclusionary, exhibiting an aggression that culminates in a betrayal of his wife and of the man he once was. Mescal’s performance perfectly complements Vasan and Ferran, with Stanley losing himself in a fantasy of who he should be. It may not destroy him as it does Blanche but it takes away the one thing that motivates Stanley, the love and respect of his wife.

This is an intense and compelling version of A Streetcar Named Desire that succeeds in presenting a more truthful but no less powerful version of this story. It is kinder to its heroine than ever before, bringing new layers to its intense and empathetic conclusion while exploring the interplay between the characters’ romantic and practical needs. Frecknall has a real feel for these mid-century writers and the compromises of living in limited circumstances while trying to maintain artistic pursuits and ragged dreams of a better future aided by the kindness of strangers. All of that comes together so beautifully here and Williams has rarely felt so powerful.

A Streetcar Named Desire is at the Almeida Theatre until 4 February with tickets from £10. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

Cabaret – Playhouse Theatre

We’ve all spent far too long sitting alone in our rooms so the cabaret is exactly where we need to be. What emerged as a delicious theatre rumour a few months ago has not only become a real production but a dream come true experience. Theatre closure was long and ruinous for many but Rebecca Frecknall’s Cabaret is our long-awaited reward. It may still be some time until press night but you may as well hand this company a truck load of Oliviers right not because this production is why theatre matters so much, staged at the newly refurbished Playhouse Theatre which welcomes audiences for the first time since March 2020 – you won’t want to go home.

The venue has undergone a remarkable transformation, taking a theatre with some of the poorest sight-lines, particularly from its steeply raked upper circle, to create a central in-the-round space that is far more visible, building on the original stalls to place cabaret tables around a small, circular stage. The effect is quite something and incredibly atmospheric, with the carpentry and creative team give it a Music Hall style design that feels historic, lived-in and cosily intimate.

There is no sawdust and paint aroma as you might expect and, with strategic use of drapes, a new box space has been added on either side of the original dress circle to house the musicians. This former proscenium-arch theatre has been completely opened-up which gives Frecknall the freedom to use the entire playing space for performance, underscoring the central thesis that characters exist beyond their Kit Kat Club persona, intermingling with and reflecting the very real people who have come to see them.

The experience begins from the moment you enter the theatre with the creation of a labyrinthine tour through the corridors normally out of bounds to the public but now dressed as basement bars with crinkly gold leaf and low lighting. Before finding your seat, catch a performance from members of the Kit Kat Club in a warm-up act danced on the foyer bar. Pause, marvel and enjoy as suggestively dressed artists create the mood, priming the audience for the main event.

It is a clever approach to immediate immersion that continues as you take your seat with music and dance performances carried through to all levels of the theatre – the fact that everyone looks a little worn, generating a middling enthusiasm is all part of the tone that Frecknall is creating, one that adds a seedy melancholy in which the show is so carefully poised. These are not so much creatures of pleasure determined to fulfil the fantasies of club members, but exhausted dancers struggling to summon the enthusiasm for yet more careless clients, the Underbelly artists perfectly capturing the mood of disdain.

There was always something about this production from the moment of its announcement to the atmospheric visual imagery adorning the posters. In offering a seedy glamour, this Cabaret was always going to be a bit special. And so it proves. We have come to expect a particular style from Frecknall’s work, a way of investigating text and character that finds the crucial emotional beats beneath the surface and gives her productions an almost musical rhythm where pace, tone and style rise and fall like dance or orchestration.

Applying her techniques to an actual musical brings a greater resonance to Cabaret exploring the ways in which songs and story create character insight and narrative development while re-examining the emotional shading in those elements to create a darker and less celebratory interpretation of a world ending and a brief sanctuary that can no longer withstand the political context assailing its walls.

Frecknall’s interpretation looks to works like Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and Somerset Maughan’s Of Human Bondage in its exploration of the waring effect of poverty for both men and women in this era as the characters shuffle from club to boarding house. One particularly astute observation is how rapidly the sheen of glamour wears off, leaving behind a feeling of oppression that grows weightier as the story plays out, suggesting not only the growing political dangers around the characters as society begins to shift, but also the grinding effect of poverty from which individuals struggle to pick themselves up time after time.

In some of the productions more powerful moments, Frecknall elucidates an understanding of the fruitlessness of the characters’ dreams of escape, the hope – as Sally herself suggests – that this time it will be different, but knowing all the while that it never will. In staging this, there are tones of Bob, Jenny and Ella from Hamilton’s novel, creations whose hopes of distraction and escape are inflamed but eventually extinguished, leaving them, at best, the same, but often worse off then before, emotionally if not financially. What Frecknall does so well is to situate the lives of her characters in this broader context, and while we may only encounter them in Kander and Ebb’s songs and the few dramatic scenes between them, these people seem to exist beyond the confines of this night at the Kit Kat Club and even this musical.

In a show filled with some of the most beloved musical theatre numbers and an attachment to how these should be staged using Bob Fosse’s iconic choreography, Frecknall’s triumph is to set aside the performance history of Cabaret – much as Jamie Lloyd did with Evita – to reconsider the integration of music and dramatic scenes as a continuous emotional journey with both serving a clear and consistent vision for the show. Frecknall has made that balance especially compelling, giving equivalent emphasis to character interaction and development while repointing the usually exuberant and ‘big’ approach to staging the song and dance numbers, using them to reflect the changing mood of the club and the advancing political tide that will consume them all in the months and years to come.

The skill that choreographer Julia Cheng and set and costume designer Tom Scutt bring to the staging is to make that shift feel entirely organic, so that not only do we realise that we have been missing a trick all these years by not seeing the possibilities of this small, contained, narrative interpretation, but making it so beautiful and affecting, a grand inevitable tragedy, that operates simultaneously on a large and small scale.

As with Summer and Smoke, it is the emotional beats that Frecknall makes so devastatingly effective, injecting a kind of thrumming life blood into each character that amplifies their wants and needs beyond their role as a performer or neighbour. This is particularly notable in the relationship between Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz whose shy flirtation in a reasonably bawdy household is at the heart of the show, tracking their late-blooming love and its consequences with a melting tenderness that will warm and eventually break your heart as circumstances conspire against them.

How this is reflected in Cabaret’s few character numbers (i.e. those not doubling as performances at the Kit Kat Club) is very skilful, capturing all the hope, loneliness and fear of the lovers in a consistent journey from spoken interaction to musical exposure of their soul, taking the audience with them entirely as both kinds of theatrical expression reflect and enhance each other, creating a completeness that is very moving.

And this production’s biggest coup is to do exactly the same thing with the Kit Kat Club songs, repositioning them as reflections of inner turmoil and a changing relationship with the nature of performance as their ‘real life’ offers and sometimes shuts-off avenues for development and personal changes that shape how songs are then performed. The greatest example of this is Sally’s version of the title number close to the end of Act Two, the once gloriously upbeat and defiant anthem in which the singer gives her all in the place she feels most at home, here becomes a sarcastic song of broken defeat in which Sally rails against the disappointments of her life, culminating in this cry of pain.

Performed by Jessie Buckley, it is an agonising, seductive and show-stopping moment that entirely captures the end of a trajectory for Sally that has taken her through confidence and self-satisfaction, hopes of a ‘normal’ life to a sad and painful disillusion that casts her lower than she was ever high. And this is not a singular moment but something Frecknall weaves throughout the show, allowing every song to bring that kind of insight and leaving the audience holding their breath in anticipation as every character’s depth and ache is felt through these songs from the saucy Don’t Tell Mama where Sally is on form but still a product of her circumstances, to the Emcee’s pointed interpretation of Money that so clearly emphasises the underlying melancholy of working class life with the long spectre of the First World War shaping Germany’s existence and a vision of the deaths to come, to the bitter chill of Tomorrow Belongs to Me as exuberant individuality is slowly sacrificed to a besuited uniformity – something which creeps across the show, chasing away the light as fascism descends.

This reinterpretation casts a more incisive perspective on Sally’s character, breaking away somewhat from Liza Minnelli’s more buoyant approach, taking life’s knocks on the chin, and in Buckley’s performance charting the slow erosion of Sally as each new encounter and every song chips more and more from her ability to endure. Yet Buckley still makes Sally charming, grubbily alluring in her musical performances and pragmatic, a different kind of woman, able to withstand any fresh circumstances and turn them successfully to her advantage.

Yet beneath the surface, Buckley carries a deep well of soulful agony, a desire for more that makes the elusive Sally a desperate dreamer both craving a new, more certain life with the promise of something to love, but so afraid of the reality that she becomes a self-destructive force. It is a beautiful performance, fragile and strong at the same time, and filled with such pathos for Sally and the endless cycles of her life that burrow deep into your consciousness and emotional responses.

Eddie Redmayne’s Emcee does something similar, playing against type in a role that demands a showmanship and transformational physicality that shapes and directs the narrative. It couldn’t be further from his work for film and big franchise, and like Buckley, this may be the greatest performance of Redmayne’s career, presenting that visually dazzling outward face of the club while internalising all of Frecknall’s themes about the toll of long-term poverty and public performance in a dangerous unstable political climate.

Redmayne’s Emcee is a deliberate oddity, with a hunched-over flexibility that allows him to stalk the stage, creating not just an androgynous feel but also the impression of a creative quite distinct from everyone around him. Always dressed in careful but elaborate style including clowns, sailor suits, skeletal soldiers and slick businessmen – and particular kudos to Scutt for his impeccable contribution to character creation – Redmayne’s capacity for metamorphosis is extraordinary while visually and vocally guiding the audience through the sensitively changing tones of this story.

There is superb support from Omari Douglas as the American writer wanting to be corrupted, Stewart Clarke as the personable Nazi supporter whose influence affects the sweet affair between Elliot Levy’s Herr Schultz and Liza Sadovy’s Fraulein Schneider, while the very small company of Kit Kat Club dancers Theo Maddix, Daniel Perry, Andre Refig, Christopher Tenda, Bethany Terry, Lillie-Pearl Wildman and Sophie Maria Wojna bring each number to life, roaming around the revolving and multi-level stage with a slinky but stained glamour.

Frecknall’s Cabaret is truly astounding, a show that will take your breath away from the second it begins and leave you thinking about it for weeks afterwards. The veil of interwar social melancholy is wonderfully pitched, leaving you wondering what Frecknall might make of After the Dance as a future project. The major tragedy here is that so few people will get to see it with prohibitively expensive ticket prices. Cabaret should be seen, it is a true advert for the beguiling, life changing power of theatre that you shouldn’t have to sacrifice a week’s salary for. It is profoundly moving and entirely consuming, it repositions a show we know too well and finds all kinds of new depths, meanings and resonances so our relationship to it will never be quite the same again. As well as accessible tickets deals, let’s make this work of art available affordably online and in cinemas, book the NT Live cameras now because everyone should have the chance to be transfigured by it.

Cabaret is at the Playhouse Theatre until 14 May 2022 although cast changes are likely from February. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

The Art of Theatre Photography

Theatre photography is one of the most important ways to promote a new production and simultaneously one of the elements audiences – and probably most creatives – actively think least about. While the contributions of actors, directors, designers and more recently the technical crew to creating and embodying the visual concept of a show are increasingly understood and recognised within the industry, the role of the photographer is vastly underestimated. Search for ‘theatre photography’ and the results focus entirely on technical learning and tips but far less on the crucial role of the photographer in capturing the essence of a production. Yet, to the outside world, their images are the entry point into a show, brokering that relationship with potential audiences.

Production and rehearsal room photos are far more than window dressing and along with posters that increasingly use digital photography rather than graphics, they signal to potential theatregoers what this production has to say. They demonstrate how revivals have distinguished their approach from earlier productions and help new shows to compete in a crowded marketplace, where numerous alternatives vye for your attention and your money. A set of well chosen photographs can do far more than the critics and sometimes even the synopsis to entice an audience into the theatre – as a promotional tool, they are invaluable.The very best production shots can distil the work of the wider cast and crew into a series of storytelling images, bringing the show’s aesthetic as well as its tone, style and psychological approach meaningfully into view.

Yet, only a few photographers are able to truly capture the essence of a production, to encapsulate its quality and depth in a single shot and three photographers have dominated the professionalisation and art of stage imagery for some time – Johan Persson, Marc Brenner and Manuel Harlan. Their pictures make the transition into independent objects of art, acting only partly as a visual record of performance and instead largely exist as beautiful images in their own right. These photographers are particularly adept at recording that one defining image, the analysis of which reveals all you need to know about that particular show.

Johan Persson

Persson’s sought after work recently includes Ian Rickson’s productions of Rosmersholm in 2019 and Uncle Vanya (pictured above) at the beginning of 2020, both of which had a painterly set designed by Rae Smith. Persson’s ability to capture the particularly shades of those spaces, the combination of light and shadow in the visuals was particularly striking as forgotten corners of lived-in rooms were briefly illuminated by rays of sunlight from the natural world intruding into a once silent household. He is a photographer that often finds contradiction in an image as the emotional and the physical contend.

One of Persson’s finest images – an arguably one of the truly great theatre pictures – has re-emerged during lockdown thanks to the proliferation of online theatre performances. This image of Tom Hiddleston in the Donmar Warehouse’s Coriolanus was printed on the back of tickets before the venue went paperless last year and was framed on their staircase. Memorable even six years on, this is electrifying photography, full of drama and evoking a particular moment within the show where the bloodied hero, victoriously returned from battle, enjoys a moment alone. Crucially as a single representation of this production it captures everything Director Josie Rourke wanted to say across its 2.5 hour running time.

We see the intensity of this second and its fervent masculinity as the figure plastered in the blood of other men enjoys a moment of post-victory elation. But he is rendered human by the contrasting notes of vulnerability in the image, the painful wince caused by water on freshly drawn wounds, the physical cost of societal expectations of manly behaviour playing out across his body as he privately grapples with the mental and material cost of war, a cost he must tend to in this very private scene that sits between the lines of Shakepeare’s play. Watched through, Hiddleston’s characterisation visits every aspect of this character’s public and private face which is so forcibly and stunningly captured here in this single Persson image.

Contrast that with this photograph from the musical Follies, first staged at the National Theatre in 2017 when Persson took this show-defining photograph, one that eschews the big stars to reflect an obsession with the nostalgic and ethereal that were so bewitching in Dominic Cooke’s landmark interpretation. There is a dreamlike quality to the visuals created by Vicki Mortimer on stage that is rendered entirely in this single image, and while Coriolanus is about two realities – the military and the personal – colliding, Follies is entirely focused on unreality, on fantasy, the impressionability of memory and the despair of lives never lived.

Persson’s image has the same photographic quality as his shot  from Coriolanus but the ghostly image of historic chorus girls backlit against the crumbling facade of the music hall’s brickwork and the illuminated Weismann’s Follies sign, itself in disrepair, pinpoints the emotional confusion of Sally, Buddy, Ben and Phyllis as they travel back in time. The lingering regret of Follies, the glamour of youth and the memory of so much possibility lost is at the heart of Sondheim’s musical. Avoiding sentimentality, Persson’s single shot entirely sums-up a production in which these shadow-selves haunted and comforted the women they became, the Follies itself a now crumbling edifice to something now permanently adrift, a time, a life and a dream about to be crushed forever.

Marc Brenner

Brenner’s work has been just as emotive, a favourite at the Almeida, his photographs have captured moments of great intimacy and flair on stage where external political, socio-economic and military structures buffet the characters as forcibly as their inner lives. Brenner has developed a particularly fruitful relationship with Jamie Lloyd, recording all of his productions from the seedy excesses of 2016’s Faustus to the visual simplicity of the remarkable Pinter at the Pinter season, the emotional cavern of Betrayal (pictured above) and, most recently, the brooding linguistic energy of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Last summer, Brenner took this image at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre during Lloyd’s superb revival of Evita whose transfer to the Barbican this summer has been sadly postponed. Brenner’s long experience of Lloyd’s work instantly reveals all you need to know about this production. Gone are the elaborate 1980s costumes, the coiffured hairdos and elaborate sets and in their place is Lloyd and designer Soutra Gilmour’s fresh and unencumbered vision told in the Argentinian colours of white and blue, using the original purity of the lyrics and the music to tell the story of Eva Peron while bringing a new visual language to the experience of musical theatre.

In his blog, Brenner writes about the challenge of staging the images of this production, working with the parallel shapes created by Gilmour’s steps and responding to the changes to sunset times that daily affected lighting design across the entire run. As art, this image incorporates that technical knowledge, snapping the moment the light falls on the central female figure, framing her against the even rake of the staging and the almost symmetrically-posed dancers. But the depth in Brenner’s photograph encapsulates and reflects the layers of meaning in the story. Here is the simply dressed but nonetheless charismatic Eva Peron who uses her humble origins to climb the ladder of fame, building relationship with the working classes to sustain her position. The smoke effects speak to the frequency of protest and violence in the musical, as well as the almost goddess-like status that Evita achieved which bookends the show.

Evita’s relationship to Colonel Peron may be a political powerplay, but one of Brenner’s most beautiful creations is this image for Rebecca Frecknall’s production of Summer and Smoke at the Almeida (where it was also printed on the back of tickets) which transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre. The performance reawakened interest in lesser-performed Tennessee Williams plays and became a captivating example of two people just missing one another. Famed for its rare stripped back approach, using musical tones to set the emotional beat and pace of the story, Brenner’s gorgeous picture, like Persson’s shot from Coriolanus, is one of the great examples of theatre photography as art in its own right, expressing the hopeless romanticism of the relationship between John and Alma through this one image.

The soft pink/orange glow of the lighting sets a mood for this picture evoking the warm evening heat of the South that is so essential to tone and atmosphere in Williams’s most lyrical work. This highly romanticised scene as depicted by Brenner is a momentary fantasy between them but one tinged with regretful longing. John’s (Matthew Needham) direct gaze reflects his open personality while Alma’s (Patsy Ferran) slighty bowed head and closed eyes speak volumes about her process of internalisation in which this moment of physical intimacy warms and scares her – both hope for so much in this second but already understand it cannot end happily. It is an eloquent and dramatically layered shot, instantly transporting the viewer back to one of the most arresting productions of recent years.

Manuel Harlan

Understanding the same degrees of light and shade in an image, Manuel Harlan’s work, favoured by The Old Vic and the RSC, is incredibly evocative, often recording key moments of change or the thematic subtext of a play that helps the audience to understand the genesis of the production. This image from David Leveaux’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was not used in press releases or reviews, and was perhaps considered too oblique as a marketing tool showing neither of the production’s leads, Daniel Radcliffe and Joshua McGuire. Yet, it is an extraordinarily atmospheric summary of a play that recasts two originally shadowy figures from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and gives them their comic due. What happens in this photography is particularly fascinating, recording in one sense the purposeful artificiality of Anna Fleischel’s staging choices – the roll of marbled paper that covers ceiling, walls and floor, the errant stepladder and the strategically positioned lighting – to create a studio feel, while at the same time offering a hint of these two characters overwhelmed by the vast emptiness of the world they inhabit and, the small part they play in Shakespeare’s construction of it.

As a piece of art, the illumination of the two protagonists captured in silhouette behind a gauzy curtain speaks to the notions of concealment and spying that are vital to both plays as well as their tangential role in the events at Elsinore. At the same time the hints of colour, a dash of orange on the rear wall and at the top of the curtain add a liveliness to what would almost be a solely black and white depiction of this world. It is a striking piece of photography, one that implies a purgatorial state in which Stoppard and Shakespeare have trapped their characters, not quite real but not entirely fictionalised either.

All too real was the dynamic verve of The Bridge’s immersive production of Julius Caesar staged in 2018 at the still relatively young playhouse by Nicholas Hytner, allowing members of the audience to act as the whipped-up mob crucial to the action in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. The immediacy of the production is reflected in this turning-point moment, photographed by Harlan, immediately following the death of Caesar in which the Conspirators begin to recognise the unforeseen dangers they have unleashed

Harlan, like Persson with his shot of Coriolanus and Brenner in his image from Evita, has entirely caught a defining political and human moment in this picture which implicitly reveals the rest of the play. The artistic framing and use of perspective in this shot are vital, the Conspirators are foregrounded with their hands bathed in blood and purpose achieved, while the ruined corps of Caesar is raised above them, his gaping wounds soon to be referenced in Mark Antony’s famous speech both centralised and slightly out of focus. Yet, the confusion of Brutus, Cassius et al foretells the misdirection to come as they fail to sell their deed to the onlooking crowd, a fatal flaw in their plot which will cost them their lives. Harlan has entirely caught the energy of this room and the exact moment at which the game changes.

Selling prints may not be something theatres want to consider – although in the newly straightened times created by months of enforced lockdown it may generate some much needed revenue – but theatre photography is far more than a series of marketing images. The very best exponents of this art form, Persson, Brenner and Harlan, are able to locate and develop a shot that summarises the narrative and thematic substance of a show, incorporating the director, designer and actors’ vision. But they also move to a realm beyond the physical representation of theatre, these extraordinary images are objects of art, testament to the skill of photographers able to read, interpret and capture these defining moments.

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