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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Susannah Clapp

Supermac returns

Never So Good Lyttelton, London SE1

Hamlet Tobacco Factory, Bristol

Truly a wind of change has blown across the stage. Twenty-eight years after Howard Brenton offended Mary Whitehouse with The Romans in Britain, the dramatical scourge of the Establishment has written an account of a Tory politician's life which is genial, reflective and at times almost elegiac.

Never So Good follows Harold Macmillan from Eton (did he leave early because of a boy thing?) to the Somme (a persuasive case is made for his experiences haunting and democratising him for ever). It gets him through the Suez crisis (where he's canny) and the Profumo affair (where he's at sea); it shows him glumly turning up to see himself parodied in Beyond the Fringe, and dolefully witnessing - wistful but compliant - his wife's lifelong liaison with Bob Boothby.

Brenton suggests but doesn't push modern parallels (what do we do there after the war is over? asks someone about Suez); he manipulates a few facts (the date of Edward Heath's dealings in Europe is accelerated). Still, his main contention is quietly but insistently presented: Macmillan was one of the best leaders the Left never had.

His play would be more incisive if it tried to do less. It would be more complete if it evoked life outside government: Howard Davies's atmospheric cavalcade swims dextrously from the shadows of the First World War to chandeliered ballrooms, but it works too hard at conjuring up changes of era through dance sequences - from jazz to, almost, the Beatles. Nevertheless, Never So Good delivers a blow to the contemporary political heart: the ministers around Supermac were variously rakes, trimmers and prigs but at least their policies weren't the result of focus groups.

Ian McNeice is a fine, plummy, waddling Churchill, Anna Chancellor an improbably sassy but ultra-watchable Dorothy Macmillan. Still, it's Jeremy Irons who gives the play wings. He doesn't offer an impersonation - there's no walrussing around in plus-fours: he's unrhetorical, wizened, elegantly disappointed: he is a man stranded on an island, watching the tide of events rushing past him.

At last there's good news from Bristol, where the closure of the Old Vic has left the city theatrically deprived. Jonathan Miller's production of Hamlet - his fourth - is robust, dynamic and bitingly clear: in the best tradition of the exemplary Tobacco Factory, it is intellectually high-vaulting and materially austere.

The bare stage is full of shadows and glimmers; everything is grey and black and gold, until Ophelia appears with smudges of blood on her nightdress. Her mad scene is one of the most convincing ever staged: it has no decorative daftness - the herbs she dispenses are twigs - but nor is it all grunts and grovels: Annabel Scholey paws Claudius, rages, bursts into laughter, shies away alarmed when her brother approaches. Around her, the royal family stand dumbstruck - for once looking less as if they're giving her a breather so that she can deliver her big speech, than as if rooted by embarrassment and distress.

The homelife of our own dear Queen is - unexplicitly - evoked: watching deranged Ophelia, with her supportive brother and scary prospective in-laws, is to see the Lady Di of the 17th century; Laertes's warning to his sister that her beau is not free to make a love-match rings out with new force. A neat bit of staging shows Hamlet and Laertes squaring up from the beginning; their terminal duel is galvanic.

This is a production full of reverberations: the Ghost, Hamlet's dead dad, is played with impressive hauteur by Andrew Hilton, founder of the Tobacco Factory, who inhabited the same part more than 40 years ago. It is driven by an almost revolutionarily sane Hamlet. Jamie Ballard is flushed, disturbed, but clear-sighted: he debates like the philosophy student that he is; he's clearly in love with Ophelia (that's rare): he blubs like a man whose flesh - and whose substance - really is beginning to melt.

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