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hypocrite

Caroline Quentin as Lady Sarah and Neil d'Souza as the Puritan Peregrine Pelham take advantage of the vast Inigo Jones' bed in The Hypocrite. Pictures: Duncan Lomax

Roderic Dunnett's BTA awards - 2017

Best perhaps to begin at the top. The RSC, and indeed Welsh National Opera (WNO), have been dancing down the aisles, excelling themselves at almost every turn. One would expect no less, but how gratifying it was in 2017 to be bowled over by half a dozen or more stagings, all of which pressed the right buttons.

It started, for me, with The Swan’s The Hypocrite. I went slightly doubtfully, although the historical aspect, a new look at the English civil war, or at least one fraught aspect, timed to coincide with the role of Hull as the year’s UK City of Culture, somewhat appealed.

That all sounds a bit didactic. Easily on a par with Helen Edmundson’s Queen Anne at the Swan two seasons ago, Richard Bean’s new play, directed with wonderful aplomb by Phillip Breen, proved nothing of the sort. It was certainly the funniest thing I saw all year. Bean’s script, packed full of nuggets, impudent asides, heavy chortles and merry in–your–face oaths, contrived to have the linguistic feel of a Shakespeare or indeed Stuart–era play, beautifully versed and endlessly expressive, while, without compromise or gratuitous indulgence, still acquiring a deliciously modern feel.

Breen produced a miraculously tight show. Much of the credit goes to Mark Addy as the wonderful, part authoritative, part hopeless, Sir John Hotham, a larger than life character tasked with guarding the besieged armoury of Hull, and stuck perilously between cavaliers and roundheads.

Caroline Quentin as his longsuffering wife and Sarah Middleton as Frances, his blissfully deranged daughter, produced a right royal battle of wits. Rupert of the Rhine (Rowan Polonski) was simply a scream, brilliantly cast and staggeringly witty and erratic. James, Duke of York (Jordan Metcalfe) was presented as a useless wet, the very reverse or what he became as head, virtually founder, of the modern British Navy. There was one added treat: Drudge, the shaggy, bent, put–upon retainer (Danielle Bird) was a real bonus: David Jason on top form.

Casting Oscar Wilde’s take on Salome is a challenge. Herod is a bumptious, presumptuous tyrant, Herodias is odious, and the bruised and shabbily clad John the Baptist is a terrifying bible–basher, the epitome of a zealot. But what of the girl herself? What age?  Corrupted, or merely evil? Uncertain, or scarily assured.

One answer: cast a boy as a girl. Matthew Tennyson, scintillating throughout, showed himself the most evocative interpreter of crossover roles since Mark Rylance made them his own. It’s a skill you might think he acquired at school; certainly by inclination, for he is an absolute natural, just as his yearningly beautiful Puck was a homoerotic wonder.

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Matthew Tennyson was sensational as Salomé

Scantily attired in a negligée, from which he emerged (whatever your take thereon) gorgeously full frontal at the close of the seven veils dance, he was sensual, acutely vulnerable, and at the opposite end unnerving, frighteningly determined. This was a tour–de–force, a miracle, of a performance, abetted by Matthew Pidgeon’s Herod, cynical and domineering as Damian Lewis’s Henry VIII, and Gavin Fowler’s massive figure of a Jokanaan. Suzanne Burden’s busty Herodias was foul, as she must be.

The RSC’s Roman Plays, taken all together, were rather a hit. Antony and Cleopatra owed much to the designs – sets and costumes alike – of the remarkably gifted Robert Innes Hopkins. The often dazzling glare of colour lent the feeling both of Roman, or Roman– Egyptian, omnipotence at that time, but also brought out an opulence and sensuality crucial to the doomed later scenes. Antony Byrne was an impressively forceful Antony, with ample presence, for all his political failings; Ben Allen delivered an aptly uncompromising Octavius; but it is on Cleopatra that the main light (Tim Mitchell) inevitably falls, and Josette Simon produced so articulate and queenly figure, one desperately wanted her to win, and to live. The death itself was possibly a little weakly done, or at least not awesomely. But with her attendants (Amber James, Kristin Atherton) and solicitous factotums (Waleed Elgadi, Joseph Adelukan) her court made a striking impact. The love affair went from stolid to inspiringly tender. A good show by any standards.

Titus Andronicus sends so many shivers down so many spines, some argue that it could come with a health warning. Actually, it usually does. The tragedy here is that we see a great general of later Rome returning to a capital where he makes one fatal error. The irreversible concatenation of revenge lets us see him stripped down, scene by scene, until his gruesome turning of the tables, inflicting a dreadful cannibalism on his foes, leads to the deaths of virtually everyone on stage: nastier than Hamlet, all humanity aborted and soured.

David Troughton, an undeniably great actor and son of another (Patrick Troughton, once a Dr. Who, but so very much more), can, like Olivier, play both the vile (Richard III) and the comic and hilariously crazy (Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass). He needs both ingredients – that word has an ominous association – for Titus, who as a result one dictatorial blunder lands himself in a soup of revenge and counter revenge, culminating is a famous denouement of enforced cannibalism. One feels for him constantly, for the opposition is grisly: Tamora, the Gothic queen (Nia Gwynne) and her two equally odious youngish sons (Sean Hart, Luke MacGregor, emergent as Goths in the worst sense) – a third (Jon Tarcy) having been despatched on Titus’ orders.

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A magnificent performance from David Troughton as Titus Andronicus Picture: Helen Maybanks

Mincing crazily around in his chef’s outfit, Troughton cooks up such an eerie end for them, it almost becomes comic. We never much liked them anyway. Patrick Drury, who seems doomed to be cast as nice, decent chaps (Andronicus’ brother who sorts out the mess, the rather feckless triumvir Lepidus), is amiable and honest. But if the laurels, thanks to Blanche McIntyre’s phenomenally inventive direction, went to anyone else, it was to Hannah Morrish as Lavinia, Titus’ beloved teenage daughter, utterly loyal, whose rape and maiming (hands hacked off, the stumps roughly wrapped in rags), invoked the most moving detail of all. Despite these atrocities she is a Miranda, a Perdita before her time. What was most wondrous was to discover just how much Shakespeare’s verse in this early drama of the 1590s, fabulously spoken by Troughton and especially the sinister, manipulative yet outwardly plausible Aaron (Stefan Adegbola), contains nuggets anticipating the great plays to come.  

While some of the Roman cycle shifted to London in the autumn, one was yet to open at Stratford. The Cicero plays, a six–section, two–parter dubbed Imperium and Dictator, were played at the Swan, which gave a welcome immediacy even though they might have worked well on the larger main stage.

I had plenty of reservations about these, but also admiration too. In the early stages, the grasp of Roman political grappling, a sense of what had already preceded (Sulla, Marius, the Social War et al.) seemed less than perceptive, so that a host of dramatic opportunities, sense of foreboding, etc. would have been missing were it not for the pretty admirable, performance of Richard McCabe (of TV’s Wallander fame, opposite Kenneth Branagh) in the effective title role. Here was a Cicero not just blissfully and wittily ironic, but almost from the outset scathing about his contemporaries on the public stage. Assertive, hesitating, constantly torn, this was a real person, perhaps even brilliantly drawn. Yet did we need to see more? Yes, of his forensic skills, notably, for only at the end of Part 2 did we get a gripping display of those in action: one of the great scenes, too long awaited.

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Richard McCabe as Cicero. Picture: Ikim Yum

One would have expected more undertow in a script drawn from Robert Harris’s novel trilogy on the subject. The truth is that Mike Poulton, so marvellous an adaptor in (notably) Wolf Hall, or translator (The Bacchae, Royal Exchange Theatre), has just missed the boat here. Not by a mile, but sufficiently to make the difference between entrancing drama and great drama. I groaned about the music – despite a new score by Paul Englishby, banal in the extreme, and devoid of historical validity which might have made it such a success, and lent real potency.

Lights, by Mark Henderson, were great; the set, by the usually inspired Antony Ward, inexpressive. But there were, beside McCabe, performances to applaud. One treasured Joseph Kloska’s ubiquitous and characterful, even doggy-devoted amanuensis. Tullia, Cicero’s daughter (Jade Croot) was a sweetie, delightfully acted. In plays called Imperium and Dictator, Caesar (Peter de Jersey) was hopelessly ignored, virtually a spare part in Greg Doran’s production till the last second of Part I, and bumped off, not very impressively, on Ward’s tedious rise of steps, within seven minutes of part 2.

Incidentally the underuse of the Senate stairway as a means of adding levels to two way exchanges was a drawback. But then parts of this cycle seriously lacked meaty direct exchanges between the main characters (a limp Caesar-Cicero scene, the one unsuccessfully wooing the other, scarcely making up). A ludicrous Pompey (Christopher Saul) was pure cheapness, and historical ineptitude. Oh dear.

Thanks then for Joe Dixon. A powerful if inadequately characterised Catiline in Part One; possibly weakly scripted, yet almost unduly dominant. A big figure in every respect. More relevantly, he made a stupendously good Mark Antony: his speaking is second to none, and his persona rings true in everything he undertakes. We could derive even more from his Antony than from Shakespeare’s (Byrne) in the main house. How could he possibly have lost to Octavian? But Oliver Johnstone made of the future emperor Augustus a cunning little cookie. Abetted by a really sly. pert performance from equally young Piero Nel-Mee, much more troubling than his Clodius in Part One, Johnstone pulled off one of the successes of the whole production, convincing too as Cicero’s protégé in that same first part. The use of the understage machinery to haul up compact centre stage sets was one of Doran’s and Ward’s happiest devisings. At least it made a change from those infernal steps.

While Stratford was going Roman, the Hippodrome, thanks to WNO, with some awesome revivals, was going Soviet. Or thereabouts. Artistic Director David Pountney’s staging of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead has a timelessness about it: any prison, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Ivory Coast, but always with that humane Dostoyevsky imprimatur. The opera is strangely, and rather brilliantly conceived, helped by a cleverly contrived, ramshackle set of levels from Designer Maria Björnson, amid which we see a medley of drearily clad minor characters tramping about, passing a weary time of day, scuttling about their supposed labours, the kind of atmosphere that Pountney so often evokes to perfection: yet all hinges on three main monologues, or soliloquies: admissions of guilt, expressions of tedium, memoirs of a happy or devastating past, or laments about ill fortune. 

The last of these, and most impressive, is by the character Shishkov, to whose massive outpouring Simon Bailey brought such power it took the whole production, as Janáček intended, by the throat. Alan Oke as the wild and dancing, positively scatty yet also especially poignant, Skuratov, took the other laurels. There were lovely intimate touches from Paula Greenwood as the boy Alyeya, who is effectively adopted by Goryanchikov (Ben McAteer); and bits of frenzied malice from Quentin Hayes’ tiresome Small Prisoner. But this was a cast which worked its socks off: every dramatic intervention, or even aside, told, and the tragedy of these forlorn wife– or girlfriend–murderers really impinged. An intensely human cast with an intensely human story. An awesome WNO production.

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Robert Hayward as Prince Khovansky with Helena Thomas as the Persian in Khovanshchina.  Picture: Clive Barda

Khovanshchina is about the other end of politics: the haves, not the have–nots. Robert Hayward, imposing but not very imaginatively drawn by Pountney in the Janáček, is here a bass–baritone figure of real stature, such as in ways he (and perhaps Alastair Miles, Claggart in Opera North’s Billy Budd) uniquely can draw. The unfolding of Mussorgsky’s (or Musorgsky’s) opera builds inexorably towards Khovansky’s fall and death, just as Verdi’s A Masked Ball aims unerringly towards Gustav III’s assassination, or Rigoletto’s jealous protectiveness builds to the murky gloom of his daughter Gilda’s sordid death. Pountney again directed, and the intensity of this production, in its way, could be compared and contrasted with that of Graham Vick’s in–your–face version for his Birmingham Opera Company.

In both, the music was, is, stunning. The Mussorgsky is the sort of rich, dense, full–blooded score WNO’s inevitably superb orchestra loves to get its teeth into, as here, under its current Music Director, the Moravian Czech Tomáš Hanus. In short, these two productions equalled or even capped the great WNO events of recent years: The Merchant of Venice, Hansel and Gretel, The Queen of Spades, Billy Budd, Káťa Kabanová.

Shifting now to the Musical, one is naughtily tempted to say from the sublime to the ridiculous. But show after show has forced me to shelve my prejudices and rethink. I’ve seen too many not to have a view on the bland, feel–good sentimentality that underlies, no, basks on the surface of so many. But the quality of the stagings, the inventiveness of the sets, the sheer brilliance, so often, of the hardworked ensemble, the choreography’s focus, the quality and direction of the band, and the fearsome talents, sometimes including the singing, of some of the leads has taught me a lesson. Whatever one may think of the actual content, as an event they are so often stupendous.

Which brings me to the Belgrade. I continue to stand in admiration of the quality of visiting shows, and the balance achieved, by many of our Midland venues. The Derngate, The Curve, Derby Theatre, Nottingham Playhouse, Warwick Arts Centre, the list goes on. But I have the feeling that Hamish Glen’s Belgrade tops the lot – at least, none betters it, and I include the somewhat glitzy Hippodrome and rather more predictable New Alexandra. 

Take All or Nothing, the dashing Musical about that once youthful smash–hit group, The Small Faces. Carol Harrison’s thoughtful, rather inspiring book manages to tell the ups and downs of the players – Kenney Jones, Ian McLagan, above all the petulant, boyish, self–driven, and childhood Oliver! star, Steve Marriott (Samuel Pope in a beautifully believable performance) – with amazing flair and intelligence. The music was scintillating, every bar of it; real and raw, not concocted–for–a–Musical. But nine tenths of the effect was achieved by creating a guardian angel figure (Chris Simmons, an older Steve (he died at 44), who hovers about his younger self and wryly watches the group struggle through their teething problems, its charismatic growth, the effects of fame, the mere four years of their late 1960s greatness.

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Samuel Pope as Steve Marriott in All or Nothing

The performers were all fabulous, Stefan Edwards’ (as Jones’) drumming a tour–de–force. But Pope’s movements, bewitching, fluid, elasticated, were a wonder in themselves.  What’cha Gonna Do About it, Itchycoo Park, the title song All or Nothing gave you the feeling you were there, back in those unforgettable, landmark years. Even I came away humming Sha La La La Lee.

The most persuasive Musical I saw in the East Midlands was, on every front, Scrooge, starring the unmatchable Jasper Britton, which I did not cover for Behind the Arras, but sadly should have, at the Leicester Curve. A similar task took me to Milton Keynes Theatre, to check up on whether Billy Elliott on tour had the same kind of precision it displayed in London. I already knew it was one of the best constructed and musically successful Musicals of the decade, or the previous decade. It had lost nothing. In some respects, it was more energised, more stylish, more perfected. It leaves one aghast, not just at puerile dancing talent, but the whole cast, and perhaps above all the stupendous miners’ chorus.

Almost as colourful as Musical, and certainly more zany, was another visit to the Belgrade:  Oddsocks Productions’ mercurial, capricious and off–the–wall staging of Romeo and Juliet. They are of course celebrated for taking Shakespeare and sending him up. But it’s not really that. Their stagings (Macbeth was touring also) are not intended to diminish anything. If Capulet and Tybalt appear played by the same actor (Andy Barrow), the latter a biker, one understood the economy. Romeo, a pretty ghastly East Ender (Matthew Burns), and Juliet, a clubber–cum–scrubber, made Verona seem a bit like Nottingham at night (Pippa Lewis, scampishly into the part), there was a scrupulous loyalty to the words that made this a pretty fine R&J by any standards. I hadn’t expected that. Alexander Bean, a hefty Mercutio doubling with Friar Laurence (‘Fryer’, crazy chip shop pun), was in some ways best of them all. Add Rebecca Little’s ubiquitous Nurse, and Gavin Harrison’s camp and impossible Count Paris), and there you have the team. They’re musically adept too: a huge asset. Andy Barrow and Ellie Mackenzie are behind these miraculous, groovy Oddsocks shows. What a team.

Still with the Belgrade, this well–run theatre well capable of mounting its own shows brought in Willy Russell’s Olivier award–scooper Shirley Valentine, clearly one to set beside his triumphant Educating Rita. Shirley (played by the wonderfully adroit Jodie Prenger) is trapped, in a marriage, in a meaningless lifestyle, epitomised by the well–stocked but inevitably dull, mind numbing kitchen in which most of the action takes place. The script is a glorious pot–pourri of Scouse miseries, dashed hopes, unfulfilled longing, dreams of escape. As a one–person show it’s staggering how Prenger maintained momentum, kept us curled up with laughter in our seats. After all, it’s tragic. But each time we are poised on the precipice of despair, another laugh comes along. A great, show, and masterly solo performance.  

Those were the professionals. Had amateur theatre much to offer? You bet. A searing production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Leamington’s Loft Theatre (amateur) to set beside Malvern’s Death of a Salesman (professional, touring, Nicholas Woodeson a solid replacement following Tim Pigott–Smith’s untimely death). The knockout amateur productions came from, as it happens, Stratford (see more below). The Bear Pit is an amateur set–up of comparable high standards to the Loft: full of verve: powerful imagination, and even a certain kind of wisdom pervades its stagings (Ronald Harwood’s Quartet, a bit ponderous and possibly not his best conceit, was also seen this autumn, albeit nicely presented).  

But their One Man, Two Guvnors was right off the chart: brilliant, side–splitting, tremendously well managed, with vital, quick–fire dialogue, witty props, and David Mears giving a performance well up to professional standards in the crazy main James Corden role of Francis Henshall. Huge fun, but also, undeterred by a smallish acting area, an adroit piece of stagecraft.

The Loft also initiated an unusual historical saga show featuring half a dozen performers, written for and directed at its compact studio by David Fletcher. Inspiredly written, not just tidily but very skilfully directed, The Ballad of Lady Bessy proved a glorious vehicle for Elizabeth Morris, a young actress utterly capable of holding a stage for long swathes of reflection and punchy narrative.

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Pete Meredith as Henry VII with wife Bessy, Elizabeth of York played by Elizabeth Morris

She plays Elizabeth of York, mother of Henry VIII, and much of the play is about her tussles and stand up rows with her mother, Elizabeth Woodville (Susie May Lynch), who previously held vast influence in England as Edward IV’s wife, but now, partly thanks to Crookback Dick’s brief reign, and his machinations when Duke of Gloucester, has been sidelined, and resents it. There were some entertaining if not quite as effective extra roles, but the credit for this pretty amazing tour–de–force must go to Fletcher and to this superbly feisty, well thought–through performance by Morris. A treat of an evening.  

If the Loft, now under the leadership of the admirable Sue Moore, also one of their company’s most formidable performers, gave us not just a suitably haunting The Physicists (Dürrenmatt) midway through the year, with John Fenner (Newton), Jeremy Heynes (Einstein) and Tim Willis (former Artistic Director, who some way back gave us – more Miller – a splendid, internally torn Eddie Carbone in A View From the Bridge) as Möbius, not to mention its beautifully moody, utterly Chekhovian reading of Three Sisters a season or so ago, then all credit, too, to Kenilworth’s Talisman theatre for a finely cast, emotionally intense production of The Cherry Orchard. Simon Stephens’ translation did not, I fear, always hit the mark. The loss of patronymics, for instance, so essential still to Russian interplay, ‘modernised’ the script without actually helping.

But that did not prevent a jolly nearly first class team effort from a plucky and spirited cast. I picked out the wrinkled retainer Firs (Neil Vallance), but also Colin Ritchie’s blustering Scottish Lopakhin, Julie–Ann Randell, an unusually young Ranevskaya, but delightfully playful amid the worries, doggy–devoted to family responsibilities, and shared anxieties; and a similarly young Gayev in Dave Crossfield. It went further: take Graham Buckingham–Underhill’s Simeonov–Pishchik (again shorn of his gloriously ponderous full name), childishly delighted to strike lucky at the end.

John Dawson directed the whole with great intelligence and sensitivity to idiom, and he brought the best out of Molly Ives’ enchanting Anya, and even more so from Leigh Walker’s Varya. Even so, I felt he might have played up the whims and Angsts of several characters more fully, to enhance definition. No such need with Dunyasha (Paige Phelps), a girl on the make, who emerged as a palpable hit: moves and gestures constantly arresting, occasionally stage–stealing but usually relevant. A great find for the Talisman of whom more may be encountered.

After all, this is a play that pits the old, pre–Revolution school (Firs, Pischik, the contented but dyed–in–the wool brother and sister) against a middle group (Trofimov, Carlotta) and the arrogance of a nouveau generation (Lopakhin, Masha, Dunyasha) geared up to change but utterly presumptuous with it. Some will even, against their better judgment, or weighed heavily upon, will face up to facts and make the change (Varya, Pishchik).   

Thanks to the always supportive Behind the Arras, I have inched my way in as a kind of official reporter for not just one of the big success stories of the West Midlands, though that it is, but frankly a national triumph, widely acknowledged as such.

That, too, begins in Stratford. Edward’s Boys are in all probability the most exciting, sparkling school drama company in the country – they hail from Shakespeare’s own Grammar School of King Edward VI, Stratford. One reason, apart from the thrilling and invariably inspired dramatic impact of Perry Mills’ productions, is their choice of repertoire. For over a decade they have concentrated on plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, some of which have scarcely been seen since their inception. Marston, Ford, Lyly, Middleton: Mills is constantly digging up abandoned treasures, often quite wordy texts, for the success of which the quality of these boys’ verse speaking, quite apart from their gutsy, often (as this year) tongue–in–cheek, acting is largely responsible.

In their latest spring play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, by the somewhat maverick but brilliant Thomas Nashe, Dan Power dominated the show effortlessly in the role of Henry VIII’s former jester Will Summer, a kind of ingenious narrator and master of ceremonies, surrounded by a team of staggering variety and versatility. Rory Gopsill, Charlie Waters, Dominic Howden, Pascal Vogiaridis, Jack Hawkins, Ritvick Nagar, Edward’s Boys stalwarts all, and names we might one day hear more of, pulled off quite mesmerising performances, Waters’ and Nagar’s verse speaking now up with the best.

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The splendiferous Dan Power as the very alive ghost of Henry VIII's jester, Will Summer(s)

One of the joys of every production is that it includes a programme designed by David Troughton: yes, he of the RSC’s Titus Andronicus above, armed with another quite wondrous talent as an artist. His vision for each play is so perceptive, so penetrating, his designs so gloriously apt to the script, it creates an atmosphere of its own, looking inside and brilliantly evoking plot and character.

But like that, the boys are unsurpassed. To be offered this material in such polished presentations is a privilege. To see such talent blossoming, an ever exciting experience. The ensemble also performs at Shakespeare’s Globe. That’s where it belongs.

In this context a chance, too, to pay tribute to two remarkable productions from Warwick School which I should have honoured in Behind the Arras before, but somehow failed to. From the juniors came a production of Peter Pan, A Musical Adventure that was so touching and beautifully contrived it struck all the right nerves of this unmatched tale of children’s bravado. To spread the laurels, it contrived to serve up, shared across the two halves, a pair of Peters, a couple of Hooks, more than one boy Wendy. The first Peter was more fey, but beautifully vulnerable, the second more determined, a bit solider. But they were both pure joy. The Hooks with their sham moustaches were gutsy, the Wendys sweet, the back–up chorus quite marvellously directed. They had no fear of the thoroughly professional Bridge House Theatre stage. Indeed, they handled it with impressive assurance. The special effects were entrancing, finely devised. This was a young, indeed very young, ensemble, some of whom likewise seemed on their way to great things.

Again at their Bridge House Theatre, Warwick’s elder boys presented Animal Farm, adapted by Peter Hall, no less: and very effective they were, the poignant put–upons and the mean, domineering pigs alike. How unpleasant Napoleon’s (William Jackson–Bettles’) Kapo–like Henchmen were; how bullying the ‘other pigs’. We loved seeing Tom Firth kitted out as Muriel (Mollie), a role he carried off with no lack of aplomb. Hens, Pigeons, Puppies, Sheep and Cows suffered their own kind of abuse. But of course we especially loathed Taha Elamin’s polished Squealer, and identified, oh so sadly, with Tom Quinn’s long–suffering, tragic Boxer, the carthorse destined for the mincer, with Alex Robinson’s Old Major, and Cameron Thomas’s Snowball nicely cast. Like Peter Pan’s, Jane Garnett and Grace Taylor’s Direction, as well as set and costumes, were of a high order: beautifully thought through, and exquisitely fashioned. A dozen others made up this sizzling cast.

I found this youngsters’ Animal Farm streets superior to a recent touring production, which pressed all the wrong knobs. Plucky kids, great shows.

Best Staging: The Hypocrite, RSC Swan Theatre

Best Amateur Staging: One Man, Two Guvnors, The Bearpit

Best Opera Staging: From the House of the Dead, WNO, Hippodrome

Best Musical: All Or Nothing, Belgrade B1

Best Performers: Matthew Tennyson, Salome, Joe Dixon, Cicero: Dictator, David Troughton, Titus Andronicus, RSC, Stratford

Best singer in an Opera: Robert Hayward, Khovanshchina, WNO, Hippodrome

Best performer in a Musical: Samuel Pope, All Or Nothing

Best Amateur Performer: Elizabeth Moris, The Ballad of Lady Bessy, Loft Studio

Best Young Performer: Dan Power, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, Edward’s Boys

 

Roderic Dunnett 

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