The Pain and the Itch
Royal Court, London SW1
The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder
Cottesloe, London SE1
Dominic Cooke's smashing production of The Pain and the Itch is a standard-bearer for the new Royal Court. It's Cooke's first production as artistic director, and he has tagged it as a drama that marks a shift in policy. It is, he thinks, a play that will make the theatre's audiences, accustomed to trooping into Sloane Square to squinny at the underclasses, shudder at themselves for a change.
Cooke promises to be a first-rate artistic director, but these arguments aren't faultless: it can't be a good thing for a theatre to peer, BBC-ishly, at its audience before deciding on its programme; and in any case, to aim precisely to mirror the lives of its spectators would be daft - how many tramps go to see Waiting for Godot? Still, he's done well in programming Bruce Norris's play. It's sharp and sturdy and surprising, a latter-day variation of Ibsen's Ghosts, with the bonus of good jokes.
A liberal American family come together for Thanksgiving. They behave, as drama democrats always do, undemocratically. Granma (finely doolally Amanda Boxer, in smock, straggly bun and permanent benignity) prefaces every other sentence with her socialist credentials and looks with startled pride when a Muslim cab driver refers to a soufflé ('You know the word?'). One of her sons is a defensive house husband, played with considerable subtlety by Matthew Macfadyen, who goes from smug to cross with a wave of his oven gloves. The other is a bullying plastic surgeon whose East European girlfriend hoots at the idea of Granma's socialism as she sprays let's-liquidate-the-Gypsies remarks around the immaculate sitting room. At the centre of the rows and self-justifications is a small girl with an irritated vulva: she's given an extraordinary glum aplomb by Shannon Kelly.
There aren't many surprises in the characters here, and career woman as control-freak bitch could perhaps do with a little honing. Still, the twists of the plot are exquisitely unwound. Robert Innes Hopkins's clever design - which, with its big windows and open staircase, boasts of frankness yet conceals crannies - perfectly projects the breezy, confident lying at the play's centre. The Pain and the Itch is not a departure for the whole of play-writing, but it is a departure for the Court. Not least because its quick-witted acerbity comes, like the barbs of Restoration drama, in a headily enjoyable form.
Matt Charman, who won Soho Theatre's Verity Bargate Award three years ago with his vivacious A Night at the Dogs, has, in The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder, created a play which displays some of his talents but which doesn't come together. It's based on a plausible and intriguing fantasy: a middle-aged man who has made a good living from scaffolding turns to constructing a family. He collects women, serially marrying them, divorcing them and wanting them to live together in benign conjunction: they have communal meals, with orange juice, every week, and take it in turns to bed the happy sod.
Clare Holman, the randiest of the wives, unravels with terrible conviction. Playing her sad and unusual (he keeps books of baby names under his bed) teenage son, Adam Gillen, who is barely out of drama school, makes a remarkable debut as a sensitive, sullen gangler.
Charman unleashes the refreshing idea that the women have remade the man's psyche; he ends with the more familiar notion that because they don't own him, they are likely to be destroyed by him. He doesn't really manage to bridge the two suggestions, but he does throw out a scatter of good lines. And it's better to be in two - or even five - interesting minds than one dull one. Charman won't go away.
Three to see
Manchester Festival Various venues, 28 Jun-15 Jul
Includes Johnny Vegas, dance theatre and a warehouse version of Polanski's The Pianist
Angels in America Lyric Hammersmith, London
Daniel Kramer directs Tony Kushner's Reagan-era epic.
Mary Poppins Prince Edward, London
Still flying high.
