Suddenly, theatre is firing on its newest cylinders. Immersive ingenuity, political fantasy, choreography that stretches the vocabulary of the stage.
Coventry, currently the UK city of culture, is the real star of The Great Middlemarch Mystery. Josephine Burton and Ruth Livesey’s Dash Arts adaptation of George Eliot’s novel, which Burton directs, moves the action from the 1830s to the 1980s and sets it in a series of 18th-century buildings near the city centre. The audience piece together the plot by running after characters as they move around the cobbled streets. At one end of the town hall, firebrand Will Ladislaw is promoting his radical newspaper; at the other, women gather for a sewing bee. In Mr Bulstrode’s bank – polished wood and carriage clocks – dodgy money is changing hands. In the bar at the Green Dragon, a bearded villain slumps drunk in an armchair.
This is truly site-specific theatre, not only because it takes place in the city that (probably) inspired Eliot’s novel. The production’s melding of past and present echo Coventry’s individual way of honouring its history, with the ruins of the bombed cathedral left alongside the postwar building.
Not all is clear or smooth; the acting – some of it, suitably, by Coventry residents – comes and goes. At first, elements of the adaptation seem gaspworthy: there is no Dorothea Brooke, no absolute heroine. Yet the novel’s dynamic and much of its detail are captured; a flyer advertising “the Casaubon Foundation” is left casually on a side table.
Change is in the air as it was for Eliot, with disruption in the world of finance – and the outbreak of a life-threatening disease. As are ideas of what middle England can be. The justified impatience and ridiculous snobbery of the outsider is nicely caught in the person of the visionary doctor with mobile eyebrows and a jacket just slightly too big for his frame (as he is for his boots). Here is the dispiriting life of women with nothing to do but hope for upward mobility and more puffed sleeves; here is the inspiring independence of radicals.
Vitally, by making spectators forge their own links between sites, stories, factions and families, The Great Middlemarch Mystery goes to the core of Eliot’s project: to show life not as singular destiny but part of an infinitely complicated web.
Political theatre is reaching – it needs to – for more hallucinatory realism. Think of Lucy Prebble’s brilliant 2019 attack on Putin in A Very Expensive Poison, with its giant puppets, its massive gold phallus, its roaring anger. Think of Mike Bartlett’s 2014 reimagining of the state of Britain in King Charles III.
In The 47th, Bartlett turns his attention to the United States, once again ratcheting up his language with blank verse, and casting giant shadows over the action with echoes of Shakespearean tragedy: King Lear’s division of his kingdom; sleepwalking from Macbeth; the galvanic cockiness of Richard III. His new play, not quite analysis and not quite prediction, has less imaginative force than his earlier satire: though set in the future, it does not so much jump forward as stamp wildly on the spot, rerunning recent events. Yet the Trump years have a grisly fascination: they are so nearly incredible. Rupert Goold’s production crackles.
There is a new president – not quite who and not quite how you might think. Miriam Buether’s design is aptly sleek, but fires, riots and horned headdresses are spreading across the country; the storming of the Capitol looks less like an isolated act than the pattern for the future.
Bertie Carvel’s Trump is alone worth the price of a ticket: not so much an impersonation as a reincarnation, as if Carvel himself has completely vanished and in his place something that seems barely human – a wax model perhaps – has been given palpable life. He is funny from the moment he gets out of the golf buggy on which he arrives, and scratches his crack; he is frightening as he moves from tease to power-fuelled taunt. He is altogether both eerie and plausible, with the ex-pres’s singular combination of fleshy swagger and doll-like dainty flinches – as if his features have been jetted on to the unsuspecting blank of his face.
Tamara Tunie brings terrific strength, directness and modesty to the part of Kamala Harris. Simon Williams dodders nicely as Joe Biden, and Freddie Meredith’s Eric is finely elusive. Lydia Wilson’s Ivanka is a Disney princess in stilettos and the most lethal character on stage. Brilliantly, she moves as if she were a fragment of celluloid not flesh. She makes looking confected seem to be a genetic inheritance.
For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy marks a welcome moment of change in the theatre. Ryan Calais Cameron’s play, which premiered last autumn at the New Diorama, is propelled not only by new voices, but a new stage vocabulary.
The title tips its hat to the late Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” of 1976, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, but Cameron’s production is its own fresh and startling thing. It breaks apart the tradition of men being resistant to talking intimately; it disrupts any lingering ideas of monolithic black manhood; it proves again that movement in a play can be as powerful and expressive as speech.
A knot of men are plaited together on a dusky stage: traditionally, this would mean they were fighting. But this huddle unravels gently: the chaps are not working against each other, they pull apart not from antipathy but to declare their individual differences. They are by turns fluid, punchy, witty, in gesture as well as word. One skims smoothly away from his mates reaching out to the sides of the stage, another flips himself into the air on one hand; a third barrels boldly to the front to challenge the stalls.
Anna Reid’s design and Rory Beaton’s lighting – bright with spanking primary colours and plastic chairs – is playful, friendly. Dialogue and monologues are often troubled, always questing. The evening begins with generalised therapy talk that is a barrier to further questioning: it is surely time to bin the word “resilience”. It rapidly becomes particular – confessional, anecdotal, defiant, but never merely male grandstanding. There is a sad memory of infants shrinking from a black boy at kiss chase, and a boast about pulling because of being light-skinned; there is a terrifying recollection of a violent father. The men’s names suggest the reach, the point and the command of the play. Each is a different shade of black: Obsidian, Jet, Pitch.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Great Middlemarch Mystery ★★★
The 47th ★★★★
For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy ★★★★
Listen to a podcast mini-series about the making of The Great Middlemarch Mystery
The 47th is at the Old Vic, London, until 28 May
For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy is at the Royal Court, London, until 30 April
