Few playwrights can shake the stage like Lynn Nottage. The reverberations are even stronger when her work is directed by Lynette Linton. Five years ago, the pair created one of the most important productions of the last decade: Sweat was a tremendous capturing of life in post-industrial rust-belt America.
Clyde’s (2019) is an almost-sequel: set in the same region, with characters living in harsh conditions – with a glimmer of hope.
The zing and rawness of a kitchen in a truck-stop sandwich cafe in Reading, Pennsylvania is vividly conjured by designer Frankie Bradshaw: orange neon sign; giant steel counters that are swung round in a deli dance; a hatch through which Gbemisola Ikumelo’s unremittingly hostile boss spies and yells. Ikumelo, in slashed jeans and demon snakeskin stilettos, is pure lethal bounce. Her staff, who have all served prison sentences, know these are the only jobs they will get; they are also jobs with a dream attached. As the sandwich creator supremo, Giles Terera is both redemptive and ridiculous. Encouraging everyone to concoct fantastic fillings – curried quails, squash and molasses – he highfalutinly offers sandwich as metaphor: it requires collaboration and invention; it is “the most democratic of foods”. Terera plays this potentially maddening figure – “like the Buddha if he’d grown up in the hood” – with patient seriousness, unleashing his comic potential and the substantial truths within the humour.
Around him – to George Dennis’s clanging sound design and Duramaney Kamara’s fine ripples of jazz – tremendous actors embody his hopes with their crackling cohesion. Patrick Gibson, who also appeared in Sweat, is ferrety and touching as a one-time white supremacist who has made himself a new face with tattoos. Sebastian Orozco jitters beguilingly with romantic longing. Ronke Adékoluéjó, the young woman imprisoned for stealing drugs for her sick daughter and taking a bit extra for herself, gives one of the performances of the year. She firecrackers across the stage: furious, affectionate, wounded; explosive in limb and language; not only expleting but ululating.
Nottage wires me more deeply into American life than Arthur Miller ever has. Clyde’s is not as mighty as Sweat – the play doesn’t altogether avoid the sentimentality at which it laughs. Yet it is always vital; there is not a single limp moment. Linton’s direction lifts the drama to another level, making it one of the best evenings in the stalls I’ve had this year.
Remember slow cooking? There is also slow theatre. Four years ago, in Faith, Hope and Charity, Alexander Zeldin delivered a minutely focused, gradually unfolding study of the brutal effects of austerity. Now, in bringing autofiction to the stage, he aims to show that “the ordinary is extraordinary”. The Confessions, which Zeldin also directs, is the story of one woman’s life, based in part on conversations with his mother. The result is absorbing, an immersion in detail that has something in common with the work of the American dramatist Annie Baker: it is as if you are seeing all the individual pixels in a photograph.
Amelda Brown introduces the different phases of her younger self, played by Eryn Jean Norvill: a giggling Australian schoolgirl; the subdued wife of a naval administrator, teetering across the living room carrying her husband’s enormous shoes; the young, supposedly unacademic woman who breaks free, studies to become an art historian, takes up with free thinkers including a muscular feminist (“serve yourself, you limp dicks”) and is subjected to a sexual assault; the mature woman who, now in England, in a scene reminiscent of Jo March’s romance in Little Women, finds love with an older middle-European man – and gives birth to Zeldin.
In this play of many selves, most of the cast take on several roles, with exceptional dexterity. Norvill is extraordinary throughout. Unguarded, apparently skinless, she talks at first in high-pitched, hiccupping phrases; as her confidence grows, her speech takes on a new flow. An air of project hovers over the evening, yet its candour is rare. So is its sense of inwardness. Confession is not only a matter of speech, but of sensation. Josh Anio Grigg’s sound design ensures that the audience hear the scrape of a plate across a table; when someone says shush in a library the sound crashes like a waterfall.
It is always difficult putting JS Bach on stage: he risks looking like spray-on gravitas. There is a threat of that in the programme to The Score, in which a useful compilation of background facts – the Silesian wars of the 1740s, the life of Frederick the Great, Bach’s biography – is solemnly coloured in woodgrain. Trevor Nunn’s staging of Oliver Cotton’s new play begins with some of that sense of pastiche. Brian Cox, the production’s big draw, exercises an immediate pull as the composer, but with sketchy material: big boots, gravel voice and bear hugs. Oh and a wig like an overused tea cosy. He and sharp Nicole Ansari-Cox – his on and offstage wife – are limited by a stately pace, with much repetition of inconsequential phrases. It is as if a tune designed for a flute were being played on an organ.
Yet the evening grows. Robert Jones’s design – windows with beautiful slatted shadows, gilt-patterned doors – is handsome, evocative. Confrontations between Bach and Stephen Hagan’s finely judged Frederick produce unexpected illuminations. Fred’s martial incursions, roundly condemned by the composer, carry echoes of Putin’s territorial aggressions. A subtle perception about what music can suggest: a short piece composed by the king as a test for JSB (he passes) is heard by the composer as a solitary plea from the heart, written by a man who has spent a life dedicated to certainty and action.
I am puzzled as to why Voltaire is played with such splashy floridity by Peter de Jersey, who seems to have wandered in from Fopland. A trio of minor court composers – lickspittles all – are (it is hard to avoid musical puns) flat. Meanwhile, Cox gathers more and more resonance; his authority is the greater because he manages big notes without bellowing; his anger is forceful but without hot air. He embodies a man in which morality and music are at one. Well-tempered.
Star ratings (out of five)
Clyde’s ★★★★
The Confessions ★★★★
The Score ★★★
