James Graham, the playwright with the surest of political touches, was a captivating castaway last week on Desert Island Discs. He chose a keg of single malt and Pulp and revealed that as a 10-year-old he took to the ice rink – as a stripping vicar. He described the central importance of the theatre in his home town of Nottingham, where he scribbled plays while employed as a stage-door keeper – and paid tribute to the tiny Finborough in Earl’s Court, who encouraged him early on. He also talked ardently about the stage as a generator of hope: strange that in a Netflixed age people should still gather in the dark to listen together to a story.
I hope the Labour party tuned in. I’m encouraged by the shadow culture secretary, Thangam Debbonaire, saying she’ll push for arts to be at the centre of school curriculums, but she must push it further. Keir Starmer last week gave a clarion call: arts for everyone. Labour should be as proud that he can play the flute as it is that he plays five-a-side.
A banner in Starter for Ten in Bristol (home of Debbonaire’s constituency) makes the point neatly: we are risking, through cuts to education and local councils, a “Total Eclipse of the Arts”. This new musical, based on a novel by David Nicholls, author of One Day, and directed by Charlie Parham, has a bounce that takes it beyond an apparently niche focus. The hero’s main characteristic is an obsession with University Challenge so total that his father makes him a fake buzzer. The setting is Bristol University, which Nicholls attended, as I did.
The plot turns on what I had thought to be the peculiarly fierce aspirations of the place, part academic, part social. “If they’re not at Oxbridge or Durham, they’re here,” someone sighs, rolling his eyes at a braying youth. Emily Lane’s gorgeous portrayal of a juicy, pouting, apparently vapid, actually rather sweet posh vamp caused my companion (another former Bristol student) and I to exclaim during the interval: “It’s E**.” Yet I bet there’s an E** at every university. The more apparently local, the more universal.
Hatty Carman and Tom Rasmussen’s 80s post-punk music includes a jolly nod to Madonna and a nimble rap executed by Miracle Chance, but everything is so overamplified that it’s hard to distinguish acute lyrics by Emma Hall, Carman, Rasmussen and Parham. Some things are weirdly wrong. Bicycles may be a quick way of signalling “student”, but they are not common in a hilly city. Robert Portal’s Bamber Gascoigne is off-kilter. The easy ebullience is missing from his matted wig and from his delivery; an antelope intelligence replaced by a Jerry Springer swagger.
Yet Adam Bregman is appealing as the floundering first-generation university attender, and Mel Giedroyc rampages buoyantly as a big-haired, doting mother and as a terrifying telly exec in pussy-bow and check suit, sounding like Margaret Thatcher – that most over-represented of PMs in the theatre. Giedroyc also makes effortlessly blunt but genial sorties into the audience, posing questions. “Ribena!” roared the Bristolians in answer to one of them. The challenges will easily be adapted to other cities. Which this vivacious show, hopefully with a few tucks, will surely be visiting.
Tom Littler is doing interesting things as the Orange Tree’s artistic director. The approach to classic works is enjoyably unpredictable. In January, a version of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey was exhilaratingly, unreverentially queer. Now Trevor Nunn’s direction of Uncle Vanya is completely traditional: everyone in period (1899) dress; everyone an RP speaker. It is exquisitely judged.
Recent stagings of Chekhov’s play – a production with Toby Jones is on streaming services, while one with Andrew Scott is in cinemas – have torn revelations out of the drama. Nunn, directing it for the first time in his 60-year-long career, brings another layer of memory to blend with the yearning for vanished hopes, old times, youth: a theatrical evocation of productions before these earth-shakers.
The sheer amount of stuff in Simon Daw’s in-the-round design is an adhesive aspect: the samovar, the abacus, the letter holder are all pointers to the world of contrasting busyness and leisure that the characters inhabit. Leaning in, the audience add to the sense of stifling.
This is re-creation, not reinvention, but there are twists in the patient exploration of character. As Vanya, James Lance – Ted Lasso’s Trent Crimm – is feral and half-awake, snorting and snarling like a grumpy badger poked out, blinking, from his sett. Astrov, the early ecologist, sometimes has a touch of the goody-goody, but Andrew Richardson, got up like a non-tubercular Chekhov or DH Lawrence, makes him convincingly intent, flaunting his virility with a bare-chest moment.
The play’s title swivels the action towards Vanya’s niece, Sonya, and Madeleine Gray, open-faced and firm, is a lovely focal point as the utterly worthy girl who does not know how to beguile. She, and Nunn, beautifully clinch the play’s first half. She has been instructed to call a halt to music and fun: she spreads her arms out and amid dying candles says “no”. The word echoes as the lights go down. There’s a similar effect at the end of the play as character after character repeats the word “gone”, with shades of regret, resignation and satisfaction. Nunn lets them take their time: the word sounds like a doleful chime, and a tribute.
Star ratings (out of five)
Starter for Ten ★★★
Uncle Vanya ★★★★
