Tree-mendous set! Shame about the wilting characters
Albion (BBC4 on Sunday at 10.10pm and then on iPlayer)
Verdict: Stage epic falters on the small screen ★★★✩✩
The Comedy Of Errors (Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre, Chester)
Verdict: Jolly slapstick in the sun ★★★★✩
Fanny And Stella (Garden Theatre at the Eagle, Vauxhall, London)
Verdict: Lewd Carry On ★★★✩✩
CAST your mind back, if you can, as far as 2017. The year after the Brexit referendum. It was a time when many were lamenting the fact that we lived in a horribly divided country.
And Mike Bartlett’s drama Albion was seen as an attempt to distil that moment, with a snapshot of metropolitan London decamping to rural England.
Filmed just before lockdown this year, when it returned to Islington’s Almeida Theatre for a brief run, it starred Victoria Hamilton as a wealthy businesswoman, retiring to her idyllic childhood home to restore its historic gardens as a memorial to fallen British soldiers — including her son, killed by a bomb in Afghanistan.
Much as I admired the ambitious sweep of the work, written in a Chekhovian style and spread over four seasons, I didn’t warm to its characters.
Hamilton’s Audrey put me in mind of the younger Queen, wearing lipstick and wellies while instructing the gardeners at Sandringham. But unlike with the Queen, I found little to love beneath her brisk, brusque and very English carapace.
Much as she weeps at the loss of her son, all that’s at stake is the vanity project of her garden. Tellingly, the 55 on her birthday cake is mistaken for ‘SS’. production is left chasing emotion with mawkish music and ghostly set-pieces between scenes.
■ ONE way for theatres to beat lockdown restrictions is to keep on doing what they’re doing ... outside.
And The Comedy of Errors, at Chester’s Grosvenor Park, is a perfect example of just that. It’s one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays which is best served, as it is here, at an even shorter 75 minutes.
You’ll hardly see a jollier version of the slapstick yarn set on the island of Ephesus with actors singing La Isla Bonita at the start and Club Tropicana at the end.
It’s the silliest stuff, with a master and servant landing on
Ephesus without knowing their long-lost identical twins are also resident on the island. This cues a farce of mistaken identities, with Alex Clifton’s hearty production miming slapstick with spoons and pots for sound effects.
The special thing about this show, though, is that they’ve recruited two sets of real-life identical twins: Danielle and Nichole Bird as the two masters and Mari and Lowri Izzard as the two servants.
I hadn’t fully twigged that there were four of them, and found myself studying them carefully, looking for trickery, only to find they were, indeed, matched pairs.
There are other nice (if not exactly subtle) touches, including a druidic witch doctor, played by Simeon Truby, aiming to exorcise one of the twins who has been made mad by the confusion.
The scaffolding arena, with actors cavorting on woodchip and Astroturf flooring, and barrels for platforms, is also a glorious suntrap, so be sure you take water and very high-factor sunscreen unless you fancy being transformed, as I was, into a lobster.
■ BROAD-MINDED readers may also be interested in the real-life story of Fanny And Stella, aka Messrs Ernest Boulton and William Park, two Victorian transvestites who fought the law and were acquitted of the then crime of sodomy.
THEIr tale has been cheerfully reinvented as a Gilbert and Sullivan-ish musical with saucy book and lyrics by the creator of TV’s Taggart, Glenn Chandler. It is rather uncomfortable wearing a face mask for the show’s full 90 minutes, though I daresay I’ll have to get used to it. And it might have been better condensed to an hour-long cabaret. Even so, Fanny And Stella is deliciously camp and bighearted, with Jed Berry and Kane Verrall stomping about in the title roles, before a red velvet curtain, wearing Victorian corsetry over skinny jeans and DMs. The Sound of Music it ain’t (songs include the jolly but provocative Sodomy on The Strand). Luckily, social crusading takes a back seat to robust, triple-X-rated Kenneth Williams-ish innuendo.