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Assassins (Susan Elkin reviews)

Assassins

Stephen Sondheim

Book by John Wiedman

Directed by Bruce Guthrie

Royal Academy Musical Theatre

 

If you assassinate an American president, you change the world and will always be remembered. We’ve all heard of John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. And look at Brutus – it’s over two thousand years since he murdered Julius Caesar but his fame lives on.

It all depends how much fame matters to you. Dating from 1990, and not one of Sondheim’s best known shows, Assassins wittily explores the concept of fame through the stories of nine assassins – four who succeeded in killing American presidents and five who failed. It’s clever, poignant and thrusting as you’d expect from Sondheim who, in this show, includes a couple of music-free episodes although there’s also a great deal of his trademark text set to music which runs impeccably with the rhythms.

This revival is flamboyantly staged and energetically choreographed (Ben Hartley) with a fine cast  of sixteen. Two casts do two performances each so a total of 32 students are involved. At the performance I saw, Issac Wray shone as Samuel Byck, Matthew Arnold excelled as Charles Guiteau and Jelani Munroe commanded the stage both as Balladeer and then as Lee Harvey Oswald in a wonderfully done, almost-Biblical temptation scene. And we get a splendid theatrical tour de force when he finally pulls the trigger – noise, projected headlines, balloons, light and smoke as the world changes, in an instant, forever.

This is a richly talented company, all of whom, have strong careers ahead of them if that’s what they go on wanting. Also doing a fine job, as usual, is the Musical Theatre Orchestra in the pit delivering all those cross rhythms and timing the entries when the music cuts across speech.

Before the show, I spoke briefly in the RAM café to a couple who were about my age. We chuckled about the all-bases-covered trigger warning in the programme: “sexual violence, violence including guns and gunshots, death, suicide, self-harm, strong language and flashing lights”. We septugenarians reckoned we had seen and heard it all before and could cope. Joking apart though, it quickly became mildly irritating that the students in the audience – keen to support their friends – tittered every time anyone on stage said “fuck”. Time for a bit of growing up?

 

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Stella Powell-Jones, artistic director of Jermyn Street Theatre. This was for Ink Pellet – the bi-monthly arts magazine for teachers for which I write most of the copy. In passing, Stella told me that her Scottish/German husband, Alexander Starritt, is a novelist. His debut novel We Germans, inspired by his own grandfather, was published in 2020. It tells, she explained, the story of a German army conscript. I thought it sounded interesting and told her I would read it. So I did and here we are. We obsessive readers find interesting books via many routes: they come out and demand to be read wherever we are and whatever we’re doing.

Normally I shy away from anything involving WW2 and or cruelty/torture/violence but I’m really glad I read this one because it comes at events from a totally unfamiliar point of view. We are a very long way, in every sense, from digging for victory, Vera Lynn and the Dambusters March in this novel.

It takes the form of a long letter, written in old age, from Meissner to his grandson Callum with occasional interjections and reflections from the latter in present day. Meissner serves on the Eastern front and is for a long time part of a tiny feral group working its way across Eastern Europe between Russia and Germany without a commanding officer. It’s ugly and it’s dangerous.

Meissner witnesses, and is sometimes party to, some appalling atrocities. He is long haunted, for example, by arriving at a settlement to find all the inhabitants, irrespective of age or sex, hanged in the trees like bats or pendulous fruits. And the horizontal crucifixions, the victims’ bodies arching like pinned frogs as they scream, will stay with me for a very long time as they do with him. Sometimes Meissner and the men he’s with, shoot people for food. It’s not personal. It’s sauve-qui-peu. Callum tells us that when his “opa” was finally released from camp imprisonment after the war, he’d been away eight years and weighed seven and a half stone despite his six foot two height and broad shoulders.

Having had many years to reflect on what happened and what they did, Meissner – who served in the Wehrmacht, or Nazi combined forces, but was never a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser – ponders the gulf between personal and collective responsibility. And that’s the nub of what this novel is about. He sees himself as a good man. Once he’d planned to go to university and become a scientist. After the war he married a woman who worked in the office at the prison camp, with whom he enjoyed a fine marriage which he believes offset some of the horror which preceded it. He has raised a family, has always been kind and decent to others and has achieved financial success. But is any of this enough to atone for some of the evil he was once part of? After all he was there even if he was never an instigator. There is, of course, no answer.

It is well known that, in real life, most people who’ve lived through such horrors simply don’t talk about them to their loved ones. My grandfather served in France from 1914 and my father piloted aircraft in RAF’s Coastal Command in the 1940s. Neither talked much about the nitty gritty and how I wish now that I’d attempted to draw them out. What is unusual about Starritt’s character, Meissner, is that he is telling his grandson exactly what happened, what he saw and what he did without fudging any of the dreadful details – as if he wants to cleanse himself by getting it off his chest as one might to a confessor.  And Callum, meanwhile, channels and processes it as he recalls visits to his grandparents in Germany as both child and adult and tries to relate his Opa’s experience to his own. It’s a moving, thoughtful, unusual novel – and one of those books which dents you so that you will always look at certain things differently.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: How Not To Be A Political Wife by Sarah Vine

Twelfth Night

William Shakespeare

Directed by Chris Avery

Shakespeare at the Towers

Buckden Towers, St Neots

 

Star rating 4

 

Well, this respected, 65 year old company formerly known as Shakespeare at the George, has fallen squarely on its feet. Following the unexpected termination of its contract with Greene King to stage annual shows at the George Hotel in Huntingdon last year, it has moved to the gloriously scenic Buckden Towers which has nearly 1000 years of history seeping out of every brick. It is now a conference and retreat centre run by the Clarentian missionaries and its knot garden is the perfect setting for Shakespeare – with a bigger playing area and more seating. Newly rebranded as Shakespeare at the Towers, the company has a decidedly fresh spring its step.

A quick recap of Shakespeare’s most sexually ambiguous plot in case you’re new to it: Viola and her twin brother Sebastian are shipwrecked off Illyria and each thinks the other dead. Viola disguises herself as a young man and goes to work for Count Orsino who thinks he’s in love with unobtainable Olivia. Viola has by now fallen in love with Orsino and, when she’s sent with messages, Olivia falls in love with her. Then Sebastian turns up so Olivia can marry him and eventually Orsino realises where his affections really lie. It’s situation comedy and mistaken identity for which disbelief has to be willingly suspended because of course Viola and Sebastian couldn’t possibly really be confused with each other. In parallel we get shenanigans in Olivia’s household involving her pompous steward, Malvolio and her drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch.

There are a number of new faces in the generally strong cast. Sally le Page commands the stage as Olivia, finding petulance and impatience in the character and rueful humour when she finally recognises the feelings which are assailing her unbidden. It’s a nice directorial touch to bring her out of mourning in the second half too. And Tiffany Charnley really nails Viola – feisty, determined, angry, anxious and very keen on Orsino although, as always, it’s hard to fathom why. He is a very “wet” character although in this production Ryan Coetsee does his best to endow him with some charisma.

Familiar faces include Richard Sockett who gives us a richly accomplished Sir Toby Belch – incorrigible but somehow loveable and Sockett really makes us understand why Maria (Alex Priestly – good) is so fond of him. And there’s a finely nuanced performance from Ashton Cull as Malvolio. He makes him self-important and tiresome but resists caricature which somehow highlights the tragedy of the gulling and the madhouse imprisonment.

It’s good (and relatively unusual these days) to see Shakespeare in general, and Twelfth Night in particular, done in a traditional, gimmick-free way. And the setting lends itself to that, especially when the side lights illuminate the dusk after the interval and we see all that nicely coloured velvet and satin to good effect. And director Chris Avery uses two auditorium side entrances and a centre stage archway – more or less as was the norm at the George although the scale is bigger now.

There could have been a problem with sound in this space but for the most part there isn’t. It took five minutes to settle at the performance I saw. After that every word was clearly audible. And that’s quite an achievement without any mic-ing up.

Congratulations to everyone involved in this very pleasing production. An enormous amount ot hard work has gone on behind the scenes to make this move the success it is. Here’s to the next 65 years.

 

Twelfth Night runs until 05 July

Next year’s show is The Comedy of Errors 23 June – 04 July, 2026

www.saat.org,uk

Historical Bassoons

Directed by Peter Whelan

Royal Academy of Music

25 June 2025

 

I booked this concert with glee. Bassoons make me beam. I just adore that mellow creaminess and the instrument’s range which means that in its bottom register it can sound like a wistful cello and at the other end like a saxophone. Yet, there’s something about the bassoon’s bounciness which nearly always sounds good humoured.  Moreover, as a string player, I have no understanding of the techniques required to achieve those effects. I just admire them.

It’s also a pleasure to note that the RAM can field nine promising bassoonists. I read recently that conservatoires are now finding great difficulty in recruiting bassoon players because, children are not taking the instrument up. So this was rather an encouraging ensemble.

Led by Peter Whelan,  bassoonist with parallel careers as a conductor and keyboard player, this concert featured five works from seventeenth century Germany, Italy and France. Whelan introduced each with humour and it was evident that, Professor of Historical Bassoon at RAM, he has an inspirational rapport with these smiling young players.

The opener was part of a Telemann cantata which Whelan quipped was probably a world premiere because it was hidden away when he found it. It featured the whole group and I was immediately struck by the clarity of the acoustic in the David Josefowitz Recital Hall, a room at RAM I haven’t been in before. I was also impressed by the musicality of Fergus Butt who played a declamatory bass line in this work. His rhythmic expressiveness and tone are outstanding. And he visibly lives the music he’s playing. Definitely one to watch.

This view was confirmed when he then gave us a four movement Vivaldi concerto for recorder (Gabriel Alves Candido da Silva – good)  and bassoon with Whelan playing harpsichord continuo. It’s a piece full of virtuosic colour and I liked the way these two players delivered the plaintive recorder melody over pretty stunning bassoon semiquavers in the third movement followed by lovely bassoon work and recorder “knitting” in the last. It’s surprising how well this arguably unlikely combination of instruments works.

Sadly, the arrangement of Quoniam Tu Solus from JS Bach’s B Minor Mass which came next was the least successful item in the concert. It featured all five bassoons and the best that can be said is that it was a brave effort. It lacked cohesion and wasn’t always in tune.

Moving quickly on we then got part of a suite by Joseph de Boismortier (1689-1755) who was, apparently, a prolific composer of bassoon music. This work gave each of the five players time in the spotlight. It was cheerful, tuneful and competently delivered.

The  50 minute concert ended with Michael Corrette’s Concerto for Four Bassoons. Again it was Fergus Butt who drew the eye and ear as the parts wove round each other in the first movement. Working seamlessly with the other three, he then produced all the soulfulness the instrument is capable of in the short middle movement. His quasi-cadenza in the third movement was quite something too.

Whelan told the audience that this was the first historical bassoon concert presented by RAM in a very long time – and perhaps ever. I think it’s a lovely idea and smiled all the way home. Please do it again soon.

First, two David Copperfield-related anecdotes: When I was teaching part-time in the English department of a girls’ boarding school, our Head of Department decided that we should prepare a module of “off-piste” work for our 40 incoming A level students in the first week of the autumn term based on a book which they would all be required to read over the summer. I suggested David Copperfield and got the job of preparing the work which I duly did, after joyfully rereading the text. Then Sir, who had a personal loathing of anything longer than a novella, patronisingly decided that we couldn’t possibly ask our students to read a 950-page novel. “It’s not even on the syllabus. The parents wouldn’t wear it.” So that was the end of that. And I was outraged.

A few years later I was interviewed on the Radio 4 Today programme about children’s reading and the importance of the so-called classics along with author Melvyn Burgess who was there to argue for modern “relevance”. At the end of it, John Humphrys, renowned for putting interviewees through the mangle, turned to me kindly and said. “Well Susan, one final word: Name one book everyone should have read” I shot back David Copperfield and he terminated the interview with the warm comment: “Well no one could disagree with that.” Game, set and match to Susan (and Mr Humphrys).

David Copperfield (1850) is a gloriously meaty novel, definitely one of the 19th century’s greatest and, in my view, Dickens’s best. Narrated by the eponymous David (also known in the novel as Davy, Trot, Trotwood and Daisy among other things) in autobiographical format it owes some of its material to Dickens’s own life: the horrendous spell in a factory when he was still a child, the debtors’ prison and the success as a novelist are all there. It is written like a soap opera because it was first published in serial form and Dickens knew exactly how to keep his readers panting for more.

It’s also full of colourful minor characters who tend to get omitted from the frequent bland dramatisations, adaptations and spin-offs. It’s worth going back to the novel every ten years or so, as I do, to meet Dickensian wonders such as Miss Mowcher, the dwarf who tells David, in a very 21st century way, that he shouldn’t assume that because she’s short of stature she’s short of brain. Then there’s the appalling “respectable” (not) Littimer and the poor girl Sarah who turns in desperation to prostitution. Or think of the carrier Mr Barkis who is “always willing” (to marry Peggoty) and leaves her and others a surprising amount of money when he dies. Or what about Mrs Gummidge? She’s profoundly depressed but give her a purpose and she can rise to an occasion with aplomb.  It’s a rich, three dimensional tapestry whose main theme is, I suppose, parents/quasi parents and children who feature in many forms.

At the heart of the novel is a whole cast of characters who are so famous that they have somehow acquired a life beyond their context in the 175 years since David Copperfield first landed.  Meet Peggoty, David’s old nurse, dear friend and mother substitute and Betsey Trotwood, his forthright, decisive aunt with her hilarious loathing of donkeys. Mr Micawber, whose loquaciousness belies his fecklessness, and said to be based on Dickens’s father, who was imprisoned for debt, is a magical creation. So, in a completely different way, is kind, caring, decent Mr Peggotty – the sort of man we’d all like in our lives. Uriah Heep, characterised by his feigned humbleness and clammy handwringing, is a calculating crook and so it goes on.

David, orphaned young and virtually abandoned thanks to his step-father the cruel Mr Murdstone, eventually finds love but he doesn’t get it right the first time. Dora, his boss’s daughter is a silly goose and never likely to pull her wifely weight although she’s sweet. The reader can see ruefully past the narrator’s passion. He or she can also see where David’s affections are likely to end up and Agnes is one of the more convincing of Dicken’s virtuous women. In general he tends to be better at flawed females.

The most interesting character in this long, free flowing but utterly compelling novel, is James Steerforth. David meets first meets him at Salem House, the appalling Blackheath school he is banished to by Mr Murdstone. Steerforth is older, good looking, highly charismatic and takes David under his protection. We know he’s bad news almost from the start because he tricks David into parting with his money at first encounter but the younger boy is entranced. Years later their paths cross again and David introduces him to the Peggotys, and, fatally, to their pretty little niece, Emily. Steerforth behaves appallingly and David comes to recognise what his old friend is really like from the injury to Mrs Steerforth’s companion, Rosa, onwards. On the other hand, Steerforth is a rounded, complex character and David’s feelings are very mixed because this is a man he actually adores like a beloved older brother. In a way it’s yet another take on parent/child relationships and it’s quite nuanced.

Notice the way Dickens evokes places in this novel too. He travelled a lot on book tours and dramatised readings so he really does know Canterbury, Dover, Yarmouth and rural Suffolk and Kent – as well, obviously as London which was rapidly expanding to include former villages such as Highgate where the narrator buys a house. The backdrop is anything but bland.

Of course David Copperfield is studded with coincidences. It’s a Dickensian trademark that his huge cast of characters should encounter each other quite by chance in unlikely places. In general  the complex plotting is immaculate although there are flaws. For example, when she recovers her fortune, Betsy Trotwood cannot move back to her Dover house because she sold it for £70 hundreds of pages earlier but that’s a very minor criticism in a novel which races along. Despite the length, I reread it this time in ten days (while, as always, reading other things concurrently). It’s a page turner like no other. If only those 40 students had been led to discover it. Let’s hope many of them have found their own way to it since.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  We Germans by Alexander Starritt

Love, Conflict, Renaissance

Monteverdi, Strozzi and Jonathan Dove

Directed by Sir Thomas Allen

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

 

Some might deem this material obscurely esoteric so it’s a real treat to be in an environment where it’s mainstream. And, of course, it’s richly encouraging to see and hear young, emerging performers running with it and achieving excellence.

The opening work, programme devised by Nick Sears, links songs by Monteverdi and Strozzi to provide a loose narrative about joshing young men and wistful women. The “plot” (such as it is) doesn’t matter much. The important thing is the sound and that soars with aplomb. Cecilia Yufan Zhang, mezzo, currently studying at RCM Opera Studio gives an especially arresting performance, her voice every shade of nuanced claret.

This is followed by a short account of  Monteverdi’s scene. Tancredi e Clorinda in which a Sarcen woman and a Christian knight fight, masked, to her death and a love revelation. All three items in this programme are visually illustrated by dancers from Rambert School, choregraphed by Anna Smith and Harry Wilson. It works especially effectively in Tancredi e Clorinda in which the dancers enact the fight while the singers freeze behind them.

After the interval we get Jonathan Dove’s mini-opera, Angels. It tells the story of Piero Della Francesca (died 1492)  who was inspired by Angels and painted them – a lot. With libretto by Alistair Middleton, this version is for harp, counter tenor and soprano. Will Prior, counter tenor, as Piero is splendid. He has a mellifluous voice and really catches his character’s wistful uncertainty and vulnerability. It’s staged against three arches at the back in which his soprano angels (Bella Marslen and Maryam Wocial – both good) often stand, looking like paintings.

The RCM Opera Orchestra does a fine job in a small pit only just below the stage – historical instruments carefully tuned to A=415 for Monterverdi and Strozzi. The lay out means that conductor, Michael Rosewell is clearly visible to all.   For me, it was an unexpected bonus to see and hear that wonderful instrument the theorbo played live (by Kristiina Watt)  and from row D, I was close to it.

And what a delight to see octogenarian, Sir Thomas Allen who directs this show so ably, on stage with the students and cheerfully taking part in the Monteverdi number which concludes Love, Conflict, Renaissance. His engagement and pleasure at what has been achieved are warmly clear. 

Emma

Jane Austen, adapted by Doon Mackichan and Martin Millar

Director: Rachel Moorhead

Questors Theatre in Walpole Park

 

Star rating: 3.5

 

Well it may be technically “amateur” but this outdoor production is professionally strong. Moreover, it sparkles with wit and flair, as Jane Austen must if you want to bring it off the page successfully. The blend of Austen’s own words, imagined conversations between author, her nieces and her characters and whacky blasts of the 21st century (the shades-of-Six rap at the opening, for instance) all cohere to make pleasing theatre. It respects the source but isn’t afraid to be innovative with it.

Emma Woodhouse (Caitlyn Vary) is a manipulative and snobby young woman who gets her kicks from trying to arrange marriages for everyone around her, especially the gullible seventeen year old Harriet Smith (Eloise McCreedy – good). Of course it always goes wrong and eventually she realises that she has been suppressing her own love for the man who’s been in her life all along.

Priya Patel is excellent as Jane Austen sharing her story with her family as she writes it. She creates a benign, mischievous personality allowing the story to evolve while retaining control. It’s a neat device and Patel has nailed the essence of Austen. Moreover, she morphs seamlessly and many times into the sensible, avuncular but appealing Mr Knightley simply by changing her voice and standing in a masculine way. It’s very accomplished.

Multi-roling lies at the heart of this adaptation for a cast of eight. And Nick Thomas is wonderful at it, turning some of his quick character changes into part of the comedy. His querulous, health-obsessed, elderly Mr Woodhouse delights as does his country-voiced Robert Martin and the good-looking, apparently sophisticated Mr Elton among other roles.  It’s a complicated story with a big cast of characters but the story telling is pretty clear in this version.

Vary, who plays just one role, gets the complexities of the title character – the heroine Jane Austen famously expected no one to like except her – convincingly. And Anoop Jagan, the only other cast member to play just a single role, has huge fun with the dishy but dastardly Frank Churchill. I really like the way this production leans gently and wittily on the occasional sexual innuendo too because of course Austen’s writing, at heart, is all about longing and lust usually fuelled by rampaging teenage hormones.

The first outdoor Questors production since the pandemic, Emma is played on a simple but effective set (by Nikoleta Stefanova) with a pair of brick-like pillars, a chaise longue and a side table. But it is graced by the Pitzhanger museum, the Georgian back of which towers atmospherically over the set and that works nicely. The cast are mic’d so that everything is audible even in a busy public park, although there was a great deal of crackle at the performance I saw and that needs sorting out.

A “straight through” show, Emma runs for one hour and three quarters which is too long. It could, and should, easily be played at 50 minutes each way without loss of impetus.

Rockets and Blue Lights

Winsome Pinnock

Directed by Lande Belo

Tower Theatre until 28 June

 

Star rating 3.5

 

It’s very interesting play which examines the truth and complexity of the legacy of slavery from a kaleidoscopic range of angles. Structurally it reminds me of both Our Country’s Good and Tom Stoppard’s adaption of A French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Famous Hollywood actress Lou (Tiffany Ola – excellent) is back in Britain working on a new film about JWW Turner and his 1840 painting The Slave Ship – except that she feels the film should be a lot more about the kidnapped, incarcerated murdered Africans than about a white British artist, not least because we’re in 2006/7 and, funded by an anti-slavery charity,  the film is timed to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slave trading across the British Empire.

There’s a reproduction of the painting at the entrance to the auditorium, as well as historical information displayed around Twer Theatre’s bar area. The original hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Mass. It was inspired by the utterly horrifying 1781 Zong massacre in which 130 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard so that the company could claim insurance. Turner’s painting is subtitled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On” and, given that it depicts only impressionistic fragments of bodies amongst the wind, waves, mist and panic, Pinnock’s play presents Turner (Paul Kristovic – impeccably nuanced performance) as a man of moral ambiguity.

It’s a play full of short scenes which shifts from film set  (Akeem Mauli-Nicol is good as the director) where the cast are doing an initial read-through to horrifying scenes which Lou finds very difficult to act because she  loathes what she calls “torture porn” and at one point turns violently on the actor playing the overseer (Matteo Caporusso – pleasing in several roles). The white version of events, Lou says, eliminates the many insurrections. These people were a lot more than mere victims

Along the way we see illustrations of how abolition didn’t “cure” slavery as we dart about in time. Decommissioned slave ships, for example, were an issue. And what were slave traders supposed to do once their living had been taken from them? Obviously the trade didn’t die overnight – it went underground and resurfaced in different guises. And it’s still with us. “We used to have slave boats. Now we have equality laws” as one character comments ruefully, implying presumably that had we not had the former we would not need the latter. One of the last speeches in the play movingly lists names such as Stephen Lawrence and incidents such as the New Cross fire  – deaths whose root causes can, arguably, be traced back to slavery.

Winner of the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award, Rockets and Blue Lights opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2020, directed by Miranda Cromwell. It  eventually, pandemic notwithstanding, transferred to the National Theatre, London, in 2021. It’s good to see it so competently revived now because it has a lot of important things to say.

On the other hand at nearly three hours (with interval) this production is  too long and the fractured story telling isn’t always as clear as it should be  Music by Isabelle Ajani is nicely composed but adds little to the narrative although it gives several actors the chance to sing. It was a treat, though to get a snatch of Joseph Boulogne’s music.  Often called “the Black Mozart”, he lived from 1745 to 1799 and was a prolific composer of whom we don’t hear enough.