Dervla Kirwan and John Simm in MACBETH at Chichester Festival Theatre. Photo: Manuel Harlan

⭐⭐⭐

Well, it’s good to see a Macbeth which starts on a blasted heath with three pretty sinister witches emerging from the rocks. I’ve seen plenty of versions of this play in which I’ve spent the first ten minutes wondering anxiously whether I’ve made a mistake and come to the wrong show. And what a heath! Simon Daw’s design gives us a huge semi-transparent glass disc with rocks and vegetation below – and it sometimes splits to create a diametric crevasse. Behind that is an upstage mirror screen behind which some of the action takes place and blurred things can happen.

Paul Miller’s directorial debut in his own home town (he runs the Orange Tree at Richmond for a day job) is a rather grown up, measured take on Macbeth. Much of the text which is often cut is restored and the show runs nearly three hours. GeneraIly I like that although the very wordy, action-light English scene could have done with a good prune.

Dervla Kirwan gives us an intelligent, plausible Lady Macbeth whose attractiveness and reasonableness makes what she is saying seem even more horrifying. And her sleep walking scene is one of the best I have ever seen – chilling and pitiful. John Simm manages Macbeth’s descent into tyranny (seems very topical) well. There’s a moment “O! Full of Scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” when Simm makes sure that you hear and see the madness and irrationality setting in and the leisurely pace at which most of the text are delivered gives you time to reflect on it.

In the support roles Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo is strong as Ross and Harry Peacock gives us a pretty straightforward but quite memorable porter. Beatriz Romilly – a female actor – uses her femininity to make Malcolm seem young but poised and initially frightened although she develops the character pleasingly.

It isn’t all great though. There were some audibility problems – which didn’t bother me much because I know the text of this play almost by heart but there is a downside to a very large cast on a thrust stage playing against an almost continuous rumbling sound track (by Max Pappenheim). His video designs don’t add much either. We really don’t need blood spattered across a screen, for example, to tell us that McDuff has killed Macbeth. And why, by the way, does Michael Balogun as Macduff use a somewhat incongruous south London accent when almost everyone else is speaking RP?

And sometimes the story telling gets lost. In Lady Macbeth’s first scene she is – famously – reading a letter from her husband. No one seeing the play for the first time would understand that from this version. Flashing up the odd word on the screen behind as she speaks just feels peculiar. There are minor characters whose identity seems incomprehensible too – too much walking on and off for no apparent reason.

John Simm and Dervla Kirwan in MACBETH at Chichester Festival Theatre. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Famously two men, one an established Broadway producer and the other a wannabe, devise a scam whereby they stand to make a lot of money from deliberately staging a spectacular flop. So they choose an outrageously daft camp musical about Hitler and of course it’s a huge hit. The well-paced piece is full of good songs and self mocking theatrical jokes.

Kevin Gauntlett (we see quite a lot of him in this part of south London) is a very reliable Max Bialystock. He’s convincingly New York, sings a resonant bass line and commands the stage whenever he’s on it. And the tiny scene towards the end when he drops briefly out of role is perfectly judged and very funny. Dominic Binefa is a fine foil as the contrasting Leo Bloom. The recurrent childish hysteria is nicely managed and he sings beautifully. The two lead men play off each other effectively and I like their duet work.

Peter Davis is clearly enjoying himself as the absurdly camp Roger De Bris and Mark Storey is good value as his slender, skipping, simpering sidekick. Megan Claridge has a lovely singing voice as Ulla (I can’t be bothered to type her eight-barrelled name) and Thomas Skinner makes the very best of the strutting, posturing, childish Franz Liebkind who also gets some gloriously silly songs. That’s the joy of The Producers: it’s full of fabulous character roles.

Among a strong ensemble cast (wittily watchable choreography by Aimee-Marie Bow), who emerge to play dozens of minor roles I noted Tyrone Hayward in particular. He’s a lithe dancer.

Full marks too to the thirteen-piece band in the pit, conducted by MD, Joshua Hicken. The sound is excellent and there’s particularly lovely work from Dave Shaw on violin and trumpeters Giles Straw and Jacob Phillips.

It’s a pity, though that – good as the sets by Scenic Projects Ltd of Lowestoft, Suffolk are – that there are too many clunky scene changes. At one point there’s a quite long gap where nothing happens except a lot of banging and dragging behind the downstage curtain. When it finally lifted the audience which was beginning to get restive, applauded at the performance I saw. It felt very ‘am-dram’.

And I was a bit disappointed with the venue. I expected the changes at Fairfield Halls to be much more radical, given the length of closure. In fact, although it’s light, bright and refurbed in the main foyer, once you get into the Ashcroft Theatre little has changed except that part of the centre aisle has gone to make way for more tightly packed seats (and more income?). The seats themselves have not been replaced and are still threadbare in places. As Kevin Gauntlett comments ruefully from the stage: “It’ll be nice when it’s finished.”

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Adapted by Eliot Giuralarocca from five of Chekhov’s short stories this is a compelling, original and often funny two hours of theatre with five actor musicians. And it makes for unusual artistic cohesion when both the adapter/director and the composer/MD (Tom Neill) are also in the cast. It flows along like a well oiled machine.

Chekhov, as his famous great plays show, was a shrewd observer of human life and that comes through powerfully in these stories in which the bored wife/tedious husband idea recurs several times. The longest and most developed story is The Lady with a Little Dogwhich straddles the interval. Guiralarocca, a talented actor, playing a doctor on holiday on his own, meets Elisabeth Snegir’s lady – who wants desperately to be virtuous but ….- and her dog, nicely imagined on the end of a lead. It gets stroked, it snuffles about and it barks. Snegir Is also a good singer (no radio mikes) and plays several instruments.

There’s also delightful work from Laura Singleton too. She can do terrific things with her face and her native Welsh accent especially in The Bear as she becomes more and more manic and randy. Tom Neill and Graeme Dalling are both accomplished actors and take, between them, dozens of other parts as well as playing instruments. Dalling is particularly funny framed as the dead husband in The Bear.

I like the way Tom Neill’s music supports the story telling in this show. It never feels less than integrated and there’s some rather lovely choral Russian part-singing which fits the mood and period perfectly.

So does Charlotte McClelland’s subdued lighting and Victoria Spearing’s set is very ingenious indeed. She uses sheets pegged up (which sometimes have shadow action behind), homespun wooden items (a cart and a mini platform) which covert to other things and, at one point collapsible furniture. It looks very simple and it’s certainly low tech but actually it’s quite complex and very skilfully thought out.

I saw this show on a sunny Saturday afternoon and I am sad to note that the audience was a bit sparse. That’s a pity because this is well worth seeing. I hope they get the better houses they deserve at other performances and tour venues.

⭐⭐

Matthew Xia’s first production as Artistic Director of Actor’s Touring Company (ATC) is a strange mixture. It’s spiky, original, thought-provoking and showcases some good acting. On the other hand it is also very slow, tortuously wordy, self-consciously and transparently “clever” and tediously repetitive.

Four actors present Maya Arad Yasur’s play (translated by Eran Edry) as a piece of shared storytelling. The conceit is the suggestion that they are making it up as they go along, constantly doubling back and changing details. And when any of them speaks in Dutch or German one of them rings a bill which triggers a dash by the speaker to a microphone to deliver a translation – funny the first few times but it soon it becomes predictable and pointless.

The story which gradually emerges (sort of) is that of a heavily pregnant, present day Jewish violinist living in Amsterdam who unaccountably receives a massive gas bill – charges have been accruing since 1944. Cue for the plot, such as it is, to explore (circuitously) the Jewish experience in 1940s Amsterdam. Three quarters of all Dutch Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

Xia makes pleasing use of Orange Tree Theatre’s quite small square, in-the-round playing space and I like the novelty of the chain mail curtain (design Naomi Kuyck-Cohen) which bisects it in the second half. It creates doorways and rattles. I have no idea what it is meant to suggest or symbolise but it is interestingly unusual to look at.

Actors don’t play parts as such in this play. They tell a role-shifitng story. The two women, Michal Horowicz and Hara Yannas bring crispness and clarity of diction. They make a lot of eye contact with the audience too although the continual head swivelling feels a bit contrived. Daniel Abelson is strong and forceful with a talent for quite funny one-liners and Fiston Barek is a fine on-stage active listener – always an indicator of intelligent acting.

Another quirk of this piece is its occasional physicality. At one point, for instance the cast becomes a flock of starlings. With movement work by Jennifer Jackson it’s theatrically quite arresting although it adds little to the story telling.

Everyone involved in this production – the cast and creatives – identifies as “other” including Jewish men and women, black men Greek, African, South American, LGBT+, Irish, Traveller and disabled. The raison d’etre of ATC is to produce plays which come from beyond our shores and to give voice to “the outsider within.” Amsterdam certainly does that but it would have been better if it had done so less obscurely.