Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles.
One app.

Start reading

Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles. One news app.

Start reading

The Guardian - UK

Entertainment

Susannah Clapp

Susannah Clapp’s best theatre of 2018

Tyler Worthington, Nadine Rose Johnson, Aminita Francis, Germane Marvel and Nathaniel Forder-Staple in Frankenstein at Battersea Arts Centre, March 2018. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Observer

This was the year that the whitewashing of the British theatre began to stop. Slowly, timidly, but I think decisively. Crucially, not only the faces seen on stage, but some of those running theatres and those writing for it began to belong to people of colour. Justin Audibert was appointed artistic director of the Unicorn, a crucial position: as a leading theatre for young people, it has the capacity to build the audience of the future. Tarek Iskander was this month announced as the new head of that essential generator Battersea Arts Centre. Matthew Xia took over Actors Touring Company. Madani Younis, leaving the Bush to become creative director of the South Bank, was replaced by Lynette Linton, whose tremendous production of Lynn Nottage’s Sweat opened this month at the Donmar.

Kwame Kwei-Armah kicked off his reign at the Young Vic with a glorious musical version of Twelfth Night set at the Notting Hill Carnival, which featured a beautifully sung Viola from Gabrielle Brooks and Gerard Carey’s magnificent, highly wrought Malvolio. Kwei-Armah had a hard act to follow. David Lan’s final programming at the theatre had been as strong as ever. Fun Home, set in a funeral parlour, proved how long the reach of a musical can be. Stephen Daldry’s production of The Inheritance, tracing the story of generations of gay men in New York, was mighty in conception and exquisite in realisation.

Andrew Burnap and Samuel H Levine in The Inheritance at the Young Vic, March 2018. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Observer

It’s 13 years since Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen moved from the National to the Garrick. The number of black British dramatists to have a play produced in the West End has remained so low that in 2018 a tiny nudge in numbers looked like a significant advance. Arinzé Kene’s fierce, constantly morphing Misty transferred from the Bush. At the end of the year, Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night was the first drama by a British woman of colour to have a West End showing.

Indhu Rubasingham, who got some stick for changing the name of the Tricycle to the Kiln, was accused of being exclusive while actually bringing the outside world on to the stage with her programming. Nadia Fall, also accused of chic-ing up a community resource, took over with vivacity and some particularly telling designs at Theatre Royal Stratford East, where Joanna Scotcher conjured a saffron and purple world on the brink in The Village, and Rosie Elnile evoked the world of girls’ football as both cocooned and exposed in a duvet-like set for The Wolves.

For Jonathan Kent’s beautiful production of Florian Zeller’s The Height of the Storm – a story of fractured memory – Anthony Ward designed a glimmering, reflecting, confusing space. Zeller’s play, his best since The Father, was lit up by the peerless acting of Eileen Atkins and Jonathan Pryce. Atkins also delivered nonchalant mushroom peeling, the most impressive vegetable manoeuvring since Linda Bassett eviscerated runner beans at the Donmar.

Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins in The Height of the Storm by Florian Zeller at Wyndham’s, October 2018. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Observer

There was terrific work from actors at the beginning of their careers. Anya Chalotra made a lovely debut in The Village; in The Whale, Rosie Sheehy was for me one of the discoveries of the year at Bath’s ever-enterprising Ustinov. At the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon, Jude Owusu carried off Tamburlaine with utter conviction, while at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Jade Anouka blazed as Queen Margaret. Fisayo Akinade made comedy look like a breeze in The Way of the World. There was another particular breakthrough. In the Chickenshed’s glorious A Christmas Carol, signers for the deaf were placed not at the sides of the stage but in the heart of the action. For once, non-hearing spectators did not have to look away at crucial moments in order to find out what was being said.

Oman Douglas and Melissa James in Wise Children at the Old Vic, October 2018. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Observer

At the Globe, Michelle Terry took over as artistic director from Emma Rice (who bounced back from her expulsion with an exuberantly rude adaptation of Angela Carter’s Wise Children). Terry’s opening productions involved gender switching and the mashing up of eras. Most innovatively, Nadia Nadarajah, a deaf actor, cast as Celia in As You Like It, delivered her speeches in British sign language. Her on-stage cousin, Rosalind, sometimes provided a spoken translation, yet it was scarcely necessary: her butterfly hands were so eloquent; audiences quickly learned a new stage language. Such breakthroughs are sometimes spoken of as if they chiefly benefited artists who were formerly excluded. The great benefit is to the theatre, which has been starved of their talent.