Once upon a time there was a worry. That when theatres reopened after the pandemic they would be covered in a security blanket of the familiar. Old musicals and Shakespeare. Actually, the stage is teeming with new plays.
Bach & Sons has been one of the most eagerly awaited. It stars Simon Russell Beale, twinkle-toed and velvet-voiced as the mighty composer. It is directed by Nicholas Hytner, who has a long history of directing opera, and has the benefit of George Fenton as music supervisor: musical excerpts are given a chance to breathe. It is by Nina Raine, the most distilled of playwrights. That “&” in the title suggests what she can do with a phrase: it brushes the most revered of musical names with a touch of the mercantile.
Yet this is an evening of rapt moments, not of urgency. Jon Clark’s lighting carves out creamy alcoves and dark recesses; Vicki Mortimer’s design evokes dark and dazzling 18th-century interiors from gleaming pianos and harpsichords and laden boughs of chandeliers. Samuel Blenkin as Carl Philipp Emanuel and Douggie McMeekin as Wilhelm Friedemann – the one assiduous and anxious, the other talented and careless – supply fine cameos, variations on their father’s main theme. The action does not so much unwind as revolve.
Two of Raine’s longstanding interests are entwined here: the dynamics of family life – especially the power of the patriarch – and the fascination of nonverbal language. In Tribes (2010), the play of hers that I love best, she engulfs her spectators in a world without hearing, and explores the precision of signing.
As a study of the apparent contradictions of musical genius, Bach & Sons is more subtle than Amadeus. Peter Shaffer contrasts Mozart’s celestial harmonies with his fleshy action. Raine puts side by side the glory of the music and the man’s grumpy withholding of encouragement from his children, but makes it plain that the withholding is not simply a blotch but an aspect of his supposed virtue: an inability to lie. Russell Beale, who can convey contempt with a flick of the wrist as he takes off his wig, makes the faith convincing because it is so utterly taken for granted: never sanctimonious. Holiness with a dimple.
So far so good, but the dialogue is too freighted with information; the difficulty of putting into words what is declared as indescribable risks turning episodes into music lessons. Do we want counterpoint or unison in family life? Well, what most audiences want will be to hear the possibilities, rather than have them framed as explicit challenges. When this happens, a marvellous play is seen rippling under the skin of this clever one. Music becomes the action, as it does in a beautiful, sad dance between Bach and his dead wife, Maria Barbara (played with crisp delicacy by Pandora Colin), and, most notably, when mother and sons, presided over by Dad, sing Frère Jacques as a round, each with the same material, each altering the pattern: a perfect image of family life; acoustic DNA.
The Lyric Hammersmith is staking a claim to be at the forefront of new writing. Not in a predictable way. The three short plays with which the theatre reopens under the overarching title Out West are alive with questions; each sends nerves zinging. Yet none of them shriek cutting edge or avant garde. Their drama is stealthy, and all use the form I thought the stage must have wrung dry over the past year – the monologue. It is fascinating to see that form patiently reconsidered, sounding different: each of these voices seems more than singular, as if it carries the echo of others. Together, strongly directed by Rachel O’Riordan and Diane Page, they make an evening of unusual amplitude.
Soutra Gilmour’s set, cunningly lit by Jessica Hung Han Yun, is central to the success. The only structure on stage is a huge flight of wide, plywood steps: they can swivel; they can suggest an interior or exterior, the hollows underneath looking sometimes like doors. It is rough-edged but monumental.
Tanika Gupta’s The Overseas Student spins the west of the title so that it refers both to London and the Occident. Gupta, who transfixingly reimagined A Doll’s House in Calcutta, looks at Barons Court, down the road from the Lyric, through the eyes of a young man arriving from India in 1898. He is an anglophile more familiar with Latin than with Sanskrit, who buys a top hat and tux for everyday wear, mistakes a lift for a hotel bedroom (and is amazed when it starts to move) – and turns out to be the 19-year-old Gandhi.
Esh Alladi plays him with elegant lightness. As he twists a hand in response to the fine notes of home that drift through the air in Simon Slater’s soundscape, the heaviness that also hangs there is the more apparent. What turns this innocent into a future leader? Not one revelation, but a drift of disappointments: the smell of dead animals in his digs; Christianity all-pervasive, “like an atmosphere”; the reproof – on both the outward and return voyages – for being on the “wrong” deck, the one reserved for Europeans.
Simon Stephens has, in Fatherland and Sea Wall, established himself as the dramatist of dads. Blue Water and Cold and Fresh, set in Hammersmith, draws on the experience of being a father and of being the son of a man who drank. Yet there is another equal influence: conversations Stephens had with the actor Emmanuella Cole following the murder of George Floyd. What seems in Tom Mothersdale’s apparently effortless chat to be a meander turns out to be a twist: a painful, memorable skewering of the assumptions of a liberal white man.
Roy Williams goes straight for the pulse. On radio and on stage, he plants an individual voice in your ear and is able to turn a short speech into a mini-thriller. “My singing voice was banging,” says vibrant Ayesha Antoine in Go, Girl. She performed as a teenager when Michelle Obama visited her school – and found herself and friends patronised by a schoolfellow as one of a group of “lost girls”. Now she has a daughter who may be heading for trouble. Or not. Just as you begin to fear disaster you get a gleam of radiance.
Star ratings (out of five)
Bach & Sons ★★★
Out West ★★★★
• Bach & Sons is at the Bridge, London, until 11 September
• Out West is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 24 July
