DIXON AND DAUGHTERS
★★★★ National Theatre until June 10 Tickets: 020 3989 5455
Domestic abuse and comedy are an uneasy mix but playwright Deborah Bruce blends them to powerful effect. Written for the company Clean Break who tell the stories of women in the criminal justice system, it opens with widowed Mary (Brid Brennan) coming home after serving a short prison sentence for perjury.
Her daughters are waiting for her but she’s not happy about it. She berates Julie (Andrea Lowe), an alcoholic fleeing her abusive husband, for ruining her bed by sleeping in it (“It’s a memory foam mattress”), ignores Bernie (Liz White) whose attempts to keep the peace fall on deaf ears, and she’s venomous towards psychobabbling stepdaughter
Briana (Alison Fitzjohn) whose evidence led to her conviction.
She prefers the company of the raucous and unpredictable Leigh (Posy Sterling), a homeless fellow inmate whom she invites to stay.
The women jostle together in Mary’s suburban home, depicted like an open doll’s house with semi-opaque walls through which we see activities that might be real or imagined. They reveal facets of their recent pasts, all connected to the men in their lives, particularly the dead father.
The fine cast, including Yazmin Kayani as granddaughter Ella, negotiates the rocky path of cyclical abuse, denial and survival with speed and style under Róisin McBrinn’s lively direction. The sense that the house is haunted by memories of shocking events is emphasised by creepy lighting and sound effects.
It’s not perfect but it doesn’t need to be.
RICHARD III ★★★
Rose Theatre, Kingston, until May 13 Tickets: 020 8174 0090
Adjoa Andoh is a theatrical powerhouse, appearing in Bridgerton as Lady Danbury as well as directing herself in Richard II at The Globe. Now, she grapples with Shakespeare’s “bottled spider”, shifting him from Machiavellian monster into a vaudevillian victim of racial discrimination.
Set in the West Country, it romps through over three hours in the style of a folk horror like Midsommar or The Wicker Man, complete with maypoles and Morris dancers, though not, alas, much horror.
Uniformly clad in white jimjams with coloured sashes to differentiate alliances, the cast is variable (Liz Kettle’s imperiously vengeful Queen Margaret is outstanding).
Andoh throws herself into the role of Richard III with gusto, though her flat direction is unequal to the aspirations of her highly personal concept. Having grown up Black in the wall-to-wall whiteness of a Cotswolds village, she relates to Richard’s ‘otherness’.
For every decision she gets right, she gets one wrong. Richard’s boar mask is perfect; the puppet prince is a dreadful mistake. Repurposing discrimination against disability to skin colour is an awkward process but rarely has Richard’s appellation “Hell’s black intelligencer” seemed so apt.