THEATRE
MY TWO most memorable theatrical evenings of the year have both featured tortured teenagers. Florian
Zeller’s The Son, the third in his trio of family dramas, is a harrowing portrait of a young man traumatised by his parents’ divorce, unable to comprehend his own emotions or to communicate with his elders.
It was expertly translated by Christopher Hampton, lucidly directed by Michael Longhurst and featured a superlative central performance from Laurie Kynaston, already garlanded as the year’s Best Newcomer.
Zeller’s Nicolas would find a kindred spirit in the protagonist of Dear Evan Hansen, an angst-ridden American high school student who allows a misapprehension about a classmate’s suicide to escalate, with disastrous results both for himself and the boy’s family.
Although a small-scale musical, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s sharp score and Steven Levenson’s subtle “book” pack an emotional punch far greater than any other recent Broadway import.
There have been many excellent musical revivals, including Oklahoma in Chichester, Kiss Me Kate in Newbury, Mame at Manchester’s Hope Mill, and The Hired Man in Hornchurch. But the only new musical whose ambition and accomplishment approaches Dear Evan Hansen is Come From Away.
It tells the story of Gander, a small town in Newfoundland, whose population almost doubled on September 11, 2001, when 38 planes, mid-air at the time of the Twin Towers attack, were diverted to its airport.
A splendidly versatile cast of 12 double and treble up as Gander’s residents and visitors, doing full justice to Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s powerful and poignant score.
Fine new plays have been as scarce as fine new musicals. I still shudder to recall the cheap shock tactics of Jordann Tannahill’s trivial travesty Botticelli In The Fire, which should have been confined to the flames long before reaching the stage, and the crass crudity of Martin Crimp’s When We Have Sufficiently Tortured One Another, whose title says it all.
There were notable exceptions, such as Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, which put post-industrial America centre-stage, showing with great skill how poverty, poor labour relations and the fear of unemployment destroy communities, helping to explain to British audiences why millions of blue-collar workers voted for Trump.
Closer to home, Lucy Prebble’s A Very Expensive Poison employed shadow play, puppetry and audience participation to depict the poisoning of the former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko.
As thought provoking as it was theatrical, Prebble indicted both the Russian state for complicity in the crime and the British government for its reluctance to investigate it.
Revival of the year was Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, directed by Ian Rickson. Unlike so many directors, who seem to regard the classics as vehicles for self-advertisement, Rickson mined the text for every nuance from a cast led by Hayley at well, tom Burke and Giles Terera, creating a production that was as contemporary as it was authentic. With Rickson’s production of Uncle Vanya opening January 14, swiftly followed by Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s first play in five years, and the luminous Lesley Manville in Durrenmatt’s The Visit, 2020 has plenty of excitement in store.