Theatre: Albion
Almeida Theatre, London N1 (020-7359 4404). Until 24 November Running time: 3hrs 5mins ★★★
As a writer for TV, Mike Bartlett pulled in ten million of us for the final episode of Doctor Foster, the “sometimes daft, never dull” melodrama that he conceived as a modernday riff on Medea, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. And as a stage dramatist, he has had the same knack “of taking a provocative and grabbable conceit and then working it hard”: he did so in his blank verse drama, King Charles III; he did so again in Bull, a drama that put office politics into the boxing ring. His new play, Albion, features yet another of his “ignore-me-if-you-can” central conceits: a grand old country-house garden by the name of Albion, now fallen into disrepair, has been bought up by Audrey, a businesswoman who wants to return it to its former glory. “Ooh, we think, once we’ve got over admiring the verdant set by Miriam Buether, is the garden modern Britain?”
Of course it is, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Although the set-up might sound like the “height of unsubtlety”, the genius of Albion is that it “contemplates the political by cleaving firmly to the personal”. The brusque new owner of the Oxfordshire house we’re in – a “transfixingly watchable” Victoria Hamilton – wants to restore the grounds, which had originally been laid out as a garden of remembrance for the First World War dead, as a resting place for the ashes of her son, killed in one of Blair’s wars. What starts as a “secateurs-sharp comedy of middle-class manners” evolves into something more melancholic and Chekhovian.
There are loud echoes of Chekhov in both the structure and characterisation, said Sarah Hemming in the FT. This is a play, though, in which the central garden metaphor is sometimes “worked too hard”. There are “clumpy” moments where “you can see way too much trellis beneath the roses, and at three hours it could use some pruning”. In the main, though, it is “scintillating”, said Matt Wolf in The New York Times. Hamilton triumphs, and there are superb supporting performances from – among many others – Helen Schlesinger as Audrey’s novelist chum, Nicholas Rowe as her husband and Charlotte Hope as her daughter.