The lease of the Theatre Royal Haymarket is for sale. And an early vocal bid has come from a group wanting to establish a “female-led” theatre. Accalia Arts has raised more than £10,000 from crowdfunding. Were they to win, they would not be the first women to programme work at the theatre. In 1736, Charlotte Charke – cross-dresser, actress and poet – placed an ad promoting a summer season by “a mad company of comedians”: she was appearing in Hurlothrumbo as Lord Flame. That wildness from rebel voices looks appealing. The Haymarket could do with a shake-up. It has got stuck in a timid repertoire and sluggish stagings.
Frozen raises the temperature. But not quite enough in Jonathan Munby’s production. First put on 20 years ago, Bryony Lavery’s play about the disappearance of a young girl is a distinguished piece of work. It clinically cuts through weepiness yet is emotionally open, showing the struggle to maintain accuracy when shaken by horror.
A pre-teenager sets off on a visit to her grandmother and never returns. Shades of Red Riding Hood in this – but there is no other fairytale element. Three characters supply the chain of events and its consequences. Jason Watkins plays the man who sexually assaulted and murdered the girl, Suranne Jones her mother, and Nina Sosanya a psychiatrist researching serial killers (in an overdetermined touch, she comes from Iceland). They give their own accounts, frozen apart, before confronting each other.
Sosanya’s part is the least developed but she brings her customary poise to debating the difference between crimes “of evil” and “of illness”. Watkins excels as the affectless killer: a chappie who sets about the business of abduction as he might tackle a complicated timetable: “You make it work”. He brings the same polythene and order to both his DVD collection and his act of murder.
No one who has followed Suranne Jones from Coronation Street through Scott & Bailey and Doctor Foster – or who saw her on the stage marvellously overblown in Top Girls – will be surprised at the power of her anguish here: quivering but contained. It was confusing and disappointing (to me at any rate) to hear Natalie Durkin of Accalia, when discussing her plans for the Haymarket on Woman’s Hour, describe Jones as hugely talented but “not very diverse”.
If only these focused performances and concentrated script had been seen in a smaller space. Designer Paul Wills’s translucent screens, sometimes bearing the face of the dead child, loom like an army of giant ice cubes over the action. A tight play is slackened, looking more like a debate than a human study.
According to her biographer, Fidelis Morgan, Charlotte Charke went en chevalier not to cop off with women but because she stood a better chance of getting a good job dressed as a fellow. To stay afloat in the theatre, a woman has always needed to do more than one thing. One of the skills that has kept Bryony Lavery’s theatrical career buoyant over some four decades is that of adaptation. Treasure Island, 101 Dalmatians, Our Mutual Friend and now Brighton Rock, in a joint production by York Theatre Royal and Pilot Theatre. Graham Greene’s 1938 novel of damnation by the seaside is ripe for dramatisation, coasting on highly charged realism and apocalyptic suggestion. Gangs, acid attacks, stabbings, protection rackets, sudden death, gaudy comfort, cakes in cafes, absolute cruelty. All lit up by the flare of Greene’s Catholicism.
Fourteen years ago, the Almeida put on a tepid musical version. This is darker, less lavish and more emotionally ambitious.
Lavery has filleted the book into a series of quick moments. Pilot’s new artistic director, Esther Richardson, has made a production that flickers from one brightly lit spot to another. Economical but lucid. Sara Perks’s design goes to the sad heart of the matter. An iron walkway twists above the stage, curving down to contain a dismal bedroom. Lit with spotlights, it becomes a pier: an illusion of gaiety perched on a dark sea. Hannah Peel’s music gives that heart a beat. Drums tick and thrum through the action. Occasionally a dainty melody – Elizabethan Serenade tinkles respectably – is given an icy turn.
The warm, human hope of the evening, the bold, free-with-her-favours Ida, is given gorgeous voice by Gloria Onitiri in numbers with a touch of music hall and sometimes the swing of jazz; she moves through the play like a beacon in scarlet or leopardskin. In a mesmerising moment, Jacob James Beswick, as vicious Pinkie, sings to the waitress he has in his thrall: Sarah Middleton is sweetly persuasive as this teenage innocent. He is very still as he delivers – beautifully – the Agnus Dei. It rings out like a terrible taunt.
The most arresting episodes spring from an imaginative staging that is not matched by individual performances. As yet. I saw Brighton Rock at preview, which in the case of this small company meant after only a couple of stagings. The cast has time to go up a notch as the production goes on tour. Then this could be really remarkable.
Star ratings (out of 5)
Frozen ★★★
Brighton Rock ★★★★
• Frozen is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 5 May
• Brighton Rock is at York Theatre Royal until 3 March, then touring
