London and the South

Vera Liber

London / Dance Reviewer

A baker’s dozen best of 2022:

  1. Sybil: The Moment Has Gone / Waiting for the Sibyl
    (Concept and director William Kentridge Barbican Theatre)

  2. The Excursions of Mr Brouček
    (Leoš Janáček, Grange Park Opera)

  3. La Consagración de la Primavera (Rite of Spring)
    (Concept and choreography Israel Galván, music Igor Stravinsky, Domenico Scarlatti, Frederic Rzewski, Sadler’s Wells)

  4. The Forsythe Evening: Blake Works 1 / Playlist (EP)
    (English National Ballet, Sadler’s Wells)

  5. The Cunning Little Vixen
    (Leoš Janáček, English National Opera, London Coliseum)

  6. 100% Cuban: Liberto / Hybrid / Paysage, soudain, la nuit / Impronta / De Punta a Cabo
    (Acosta Danza, Sadler’s Wells)

  7. Rodger and Hammerstein’s South Pacific
    (A Chichester Festival Theatre Production, Sadler’s Wells)

  8. How It Is (Part 2)
    (Samuel Beckett, The Coronet Theatre)

  9. Dance for Ukraine
    (Inspiration in Motion Production, London Coliseum)

  10. Tosca
    (Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, ROH and ENO, London Coliseum)

  11. Ashton’s Triple: Scenes de Ballet / A Month in the Country / Rhapsody
    (Royal Ballet)
    (so good I saw it twice)

  12. Mayerling
    (Royal Ballet)

  13. Alcina
    (Handel, Royal Opera House)

Karen Bussell

South West Reviewer

Two home-grown (the Drum at Theatre Royal Plymouth) pieces top my list for 2022.

Jason Brownlee’s brutal, semi-autographical, poetic Today I Killed My Very First Bird is punchy, innovatively staged, mostly unpleasant, funny and mesmerising. I went twice and sent the family.

Breathless, Laura Horton’s autobiographical play, is a simple, solo polemic on the highs and lows of hoarding. Fascinating, funny and a deserved Scotsman Fringe First Award winner.

The high-velocity, sexy and sleazy Chicago never fails to razzle dazzle. Lee Mead exceeded expectations as Billy Flynn, pop perennial Sinitta was an interesting choice as Mama while Djalenga Scott vamped and sashayed superbly as Velma Kelly.

Little Voice was a delight with cracking performances from Corrie’s Shobna Gulati and Emmerdale’s Ian Kelsey and with impressionist, singer and actor Christina Bianco spot on as the eponymous LV.

Finally, the charming Bedknobs and Broomsticks weaves magic and adventure around this wartime story with Kenneth MacLeod’s puppets and Jamie Harrison’s special effects fabulous.

Dance: Hofesh Shechter’s stunning Contemporary Dance 2.0 set to an iconic percussive soundscape; Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty with a vampire twist and BRB’s traditional and vivacious Romeo and Juliet all hit the spot.

Keith Mckenna

London Reviewer

There was nervousness in theatre 2022. It wasn't just the financial difficulties of the COVID lockdown. Many theatre workers had not returned from alternate work, and audiences weren't rushing to see shows in their usual numbers.

This generated caution. New work didn’t generally engage with the growing discontent we can see reflected in the cost of living crisis, strikes and the manufactured moral panic around migrants.

There were a number of exceptions. Anyone frustrated by years of Shakespeare delivered as mere fun and spectacle will have been surprised at the number of productions in 2022 carrying an explicitly political message.

My favourite was The Merchant of Venice at the Sam Wanamaker directed by Abigail Graham. Its sympathies are with the gentle and reflective Shylock (Adrian Schiller) dressed in an outdoor jacket with the air of a downtrodden working man, trapped in a hedonistic world where well-dressed lads mock his servant Launcelot when he utters the word "Jew" and where the marriage of the scantily clad Portia is arranged by a game show in which she dances upon a silver pedestal.

There were audience members in the court scene who nodded when Shylock angrily says “fuck your laws” and walks away while his persecutors scramble for his money and his daughter Jessica sings the haunting "Kol Nidre", the words of a persecuted people.

The National Theatre’s Othello directed by Clint Dyer gives an expressionist visual tilt that emphasises the disturbing pressure of a white, racist society in which a prominent black man has married a white woman. The cast dressed in black reminds us of the militarised fascist groups of the 1930s, many of them sitting at various points along the tiered steps that line three sides of the stage, a frozen tableau in the shadows simultaneously reacting physically to the words of Iago or Othello, perhaps leaning grotesquely sideways or raising their arms, emphasising the threat or the emotions of fear and anxiety.

The production opens with a lynch mob outside Brabantio’s home. Paul Hilton, wearing a moustache reminiscent of Hitler or Brecht's Arturo Ui, is both charming and terrifying.

The assertive Desdemona guesses why Emilia has a bruised face and flinches near her husband Iago. Both women are subject to terrible domestic violence.

Giles Terera’s Othello is initially shown warrior-like exercising with a fighting stick surrounded by an adulating crowd. There are scars on his body, the consequence of battle or imprisonment as a slave.

Black male vulnerability and violence also dominate the intensely physical dance performance of Ivan Michael Blackstock’s Traplord which explores the distressing and destructive masculine solutions to the anxieties that haunt black men in a white racist society.

Everything takes place in semi-darkness. Movements carry a sense of rage, a sense of threat, as bodies are twisted awkwardly, as fingers are pointed like a gun. Occasionally, a dancer heavily clad in black is caught in a searchlight like a hunted man or a prisoner standing on the edges of a prison camp.

In a year when the world felt the consequences of war in Europe, the Donmar and the Sam Wanamaker depict the brutality of war in contemporary costumed productions of Henry V.

Kit Harrington’s Henry V at the Donmar is no heroic figure. He threatens to rape and murder in Harfleur to further his theft of France but hangs his former friend Bardolph for stealing a small ornament, the body convulsing in the air at the end of a rope.

When his soldiers seem hesitant to slit the throats of prisoners, he grabs a prisoner to demonstrate how it's done. One soldier says that it is surely against the rules of war.

Amidst the singing and dancing of the victory party that follows a battle, the soldiers treat each other with an edgy roughness that seems to speak of trauma unresolved. In a very moving scene, one soldier considers killing himself.

Headlong’s Henry V (Oliver Johnstone), directed by Holly Race-Roughan, is driven by insecurity to bully, murder and sexually abuse others. He strangles to death a friend he believes betrayed him and laughs waving a tennis ball contemptuously over a dead prisoner he ordered killed.

Grand speeches such as “once more unto the breach” are delivered like a tortured, Hamlet-like introspective. He warns Harfleur that if they don’t surrender, then their “shrill-shrieking daughters; would be defiled and your naked infants spitted upon pikes.”

English soldiers dance around the hanging body of Bardolph and, along with Henry, cheer the killing of the French.

Meeting Katherine, the daughter of the defeated King of France, he tells her she “must therefore needs prove a good soldier-breeder,” touches her without consent, twisting her head so he can kiss it. There is an expression of heartbreaking sadness on the face of the woman with them.

Headlong inserts a final scene in which a contemporary immigration official lectures Katherine on the rules required to stay in England such as opposition to sex trafficking, slavery, extremism and intolerance along with supporting democracy. All of which should exclude Henry.

Henry Naylor’s funny and moving dramatic memoir Afghanistan is Not Funny takes us to his twenty-year connection as a writer with the war-torn country, which began with his suggestion of a sketch for a comedy show being rejected by a producer telling him, “if we are going to war, we can’t be cracking jokes. Afghanistan is not funny.”

Phil, a friend working in the country, helps organise his visit with a guide the Afghan Houmein, who can no longer afford to be a surgeon.

Henry sees children with amputations, a woman who ran a secret school for girls and the ruins of a factory bombed by America. Most chilling is an encounter at gunpoint with an American colonel who warned him that he “could take you out to the desert and make you disappear.” The soldier was later charged with war crimes for doing precisely that in Iraq.

In addition, Phil is seriously injured, Houmein disappears and Henry is haunted by the image we see of an Afghanistan woman traumatised by the war.

Nathaniel McBride’s Dictating to the Estate marked five years since the Grenfell fire killed 72 people. It recalls its victims, the earlier warnings of the tenants, and the inquest findings of the Lakanal House fire. But these and the mass of corporate evidence of the potential disaster failed to shift the focus away from cost-cutting and profit maximisation.

The mood music for this is evoked by Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech promising to “kill off the health and safety culture for good... We need to realise... that some accidents are inevitable.”

Government cost-cutting is at the heart of Francesca Martinez’s remarkable play All Of Us at the National Theatre, which charts in witty dialogue and moving scenes the trouble facing people suddenly deprived of Personal Independent Payments. It centres on Jess (Martinez), a therapist who has cerebral palsy, and her friend Poppy who, though in a wheelchair, is determined to lead a full life. Unfortunately, cuts mean Jess loses her mobility allowance and Poppy, deprived of night care, must be put to bed by 9PM in a nappy.

They are not the only ones to suffer. The second half opens with a protest meeting with the local MP at which from various parts of the theatre other victims of benefit cuts express their outrage while police roughly try to clear the protesters.

Police are also a threat to Johnny “Rooster” Byron (Mark Rylance) in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, my favourite play of the last ten years given a revival at the Apollo. Byron’s home is a caravan in the ancient forests of the West Country. It has become a refuge for the outcasts and the abused. The humorous conversations, alcohol and tall stories bond the group together and give them a lively sense of purpose that is threatened by the woods being cleared to make way for property developers. But as the police advance, the final image is of the defiant, bloodied figure of Byron banging a drum that we had earlier heard would bring the help of giants. It was an inspiring moment that left some of the audience in tears.

Given the social unrest now being stirred up, it wouldn't be a surprise if more politically engaged theatre found its way into the shows we see in 2023.