Author: Michael Hootman

Sam Holcroft’s marvellous comedy looks at a family get-together as it gradually disintegrates. Over the course of a Christmas lunch revelations are revealed, old resentments are reignited and no one is left unscathed by the events – events for which they all share some of the blame. The play has been compared to Ayckbourn, and while it concentrates on the middle-class family in crisis it has a novel twist uniquely its own. Each character is given his or her own rule – projected above the stage – which they then have to follow. It might be as simple as having to sit down to tell a lie, or as baroque as having to keep on dancing like a winding-down automaton until you get a laugh.

Edith (Jane Booker) is the matriarch presiding over the festive celebrations with a military precision. She is variously helped and hindered by her two lawyer sons Adam (Ed Hughes) and Matthew (Jolyon Coy), Adam’s wife Nicole (Laura Rogers) and Matthew’s showbiz girlfriend Carrie (Carlyss Peer). The first act lays the groundwork for the second’s explosive confrontations, ending with the appearance of Edith’s husband Francis (Paul Shelley) who, to the surprise of everyone but Edith, is in a wheelchair and suffering from the effects of a stroke. Given this is the kind of family where the mother will try and deny the medically undeniable, it’s not surprising that there are plenty more secrets to be prised, cajoled and taunted out of the rest of the cast.

The performances are uniformly excellent and the evening is certainly a great example of ensemble playing. Booker excels as the domineering yet vulnerable mother. As her world comes crashing down about her she seems to believe that she can make everything right simply through her force of will. Hughes has real charisma as the blokeish man who has a penchant for breaking into accents and impersonations, whilst Coy is entirely sympathetic as a man trying to do the right thing but somehow just making things worse. Rogers and Peer are great as polar opposites, the former as serious and dignified as the latter frivolous and, occasionally, slightly idiotic.

Although one of the points of the play is that we all have self-imposed rules, I’m not sure if the rules displayed by the characters are supposed to be due to their own internal psychology or simply there because of the whims of the playwright. Though I’m not sure it entirely matters as this is a very funny and supremely entertaining evening.

Continues at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, until Saturday 21.

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This is a truly magnificent production of a twentieth-century classic; its three hours seem to pass in a blink of an eye as director Douglas Rintoul expertly paces the play so that, in places, it has the heart-pounding intensity of a thriller. It’s also an exploration of moral corruption and decency and how the former often tries to pass itself off as the latter. The Crucible is the kind of play which leaves you both drained and strangely elated.

In seventeenth-century Salem a girl is taken ill after she is found, with some friends, dancing in a forest. From the simple fact of a ‘mysterious’ sickness dark rumours circulate about witchcraft. The girl’s father Reverend Parris (Cornelius Clarke) is the town minister and although being linked with sorcery could harm his already tarnished reputation – his focus on hell and damnation even seems to have alienated some members of this Puritan community – he insists on a full investigation. Soon Reverend Hale (Charlie Condou) arrives to find that Parris’s niece Abigail (Lucy Keirl) confesses to consorting with Satan. It’s a situation she exploits as she accuses Elizabeth Proctor (Victoria Yeates) of being a witch as a way of dispatching her so that she can be with her husband John (Eoin Slattery), a man with whom she had an adulterous affair. Before long there are scores of women locked up in jail and neighbour turns on neighbour and old scores are settled as one party points an accusing finger at another.

The play’s central plot mechanism is as finely calibrated as any instrument of torture. Slowly absurd insinuations of serving Lucifer seem to gradually gain traction until they harden into fact and the innocent villagers are unable to stop the inevitable progress of church-sanctioned mass murder. The scene where Proctor presents evidence that one of the children was lying genuinely had the blood pounding in my veins: it seems almost possible that actual justice – as opposed to justice of the inquisitorial court – will prevail. The tension between what should happen and what we know actually will happen makes for something discomforting yet absolutely riveting.

The success of any great production relies on its performances and every one is excellent. Clarke’s Parris is a hectoring bully who will drop his pious godliness – however genuine it might be – when he realises that the situation could turn against him. Condou, who at first is just another willing executioner, evokes strong sympathy as a man forced to come to terms with the part he has played in unleashing genuine evil forces on a small rural community. Yeates is a supremely dignified Elizabeth, and her final scene with her husband is incredibly moving. Jonathan Tafler has a commanding malevolence as Judge Tafler, a self-righteous fanatic who would sooner see innocent people hung that admit to having made a mistake. Slattery, as John Proctor, is the man at the very heart of the play and it’s as devastating performance as I’ve seen in some time. His Proctor is truly heroic; not in some trite comic-book sense – his flaws are too manifest for this. When we get to his final, reckless act of heroism we understand his actions even as we despair at them.

Continues at the Theatre Royal until Saturday 29.

This 1970s’ take on the putting-on-a-musical musical has a central premise fitting for its time: the audition as therapy. Seventeen would-be hoofers are trying for a part in a big Broadway show whose director (Louis Livesey-Clare) seems as interested in their souls as their dancing skills. If the dancers themselves feel that their résumés contain a ‘picture of a person I don’t know’, then the only way for the director to find out who they are is to explore their back stories through asking them what made them become dancers.

The characters we meet include Val (Emily Wright) who casting directors acknowledge is incredibly talented but, until some surgical enhancement, only scored ‘a 3 for looks’; Cassie (Megan O’Hara) who, perhaps unwisely, walked out of a relationship with the director without letting him know; Greg (Gary Lynn) a gay Jew who discovered his true nature whilst making out with a girl and Paul (Hari Johnson) a young Puerto Rican who got onto the lower rungs of showbiz by working in a seedy drag club.

Of the seventeen some are more successfully rendered than others – this can be down to the performance as much as the writing. Probably the most intensely realised is Paul; on stage I’ve seen a lot of gay men wrestling with coming out and their relationship with their parents, but this scene still managed to move me. Even though the writing lacks subtlety, Hari is truly sensational in his ten-minute monologue. He perfectly expresses Paul’s vulnerability and determination with such charm the whole audience was rapt. The part when he relates his parents’ reaction to the truth about his sexuality gave me the requisite lump in my throat. The only duff note comes when Paul says of the drag queens that ‘they had no dignity: they considered themselves freaks’. From the what we know of Paul he’s surely more generous than this.

Other stand-outs include a wonderfully comic set-piece by Jade Hunt playing a woman who can dance but not sing and Nicole Nobrega playing a petite dancer who can still get cast as kids in even in her thirties.

Of course it’s a matter of taste but I’ve never been that keen on some of its more famous songs (One, in particular, I’ve always found too cheesily middle-of-the-road). However, this is a marvellously spirited production full of a number of excellent – and one truly outstanding – performances.