What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank - Marylebone Theatre, London

Almost 15 years ago, I read a short story by Nathan Englander in the New Yorker. It was called What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The story is told in the first person and the narrator is a non-observant American Jew. The story is set in the spacious Florida house of the narrator and his wife, Debbie, also non-observant, thanks to the fact that the narrator, as he puts it, "turned her secular". The story concerns a visit by Debbie's long-lost best friend from high school, who, with her husband, is back in America to visit relatives, as the relatives have become too old to make trips to Israel, where the visiting couple live. 

The high school Debbie and her friend attended is described in the story as a "yeshiva high school".  The visiting best friend was called Lauren when she and Debbie were both schoolgirls. However, Lauren married a man called Mark and the two of them moved to Jerusalem and became truly Orthodox. They changed their names, Lauren becoming Shoshanna and Mark becoming Yerucham. The narrator does not like their Orthodoxy. They themselves appear to be caught between envy of the material comforts of the narrator's life and pride about their own country and decisions. 

A great deal of alcohol is consumed; some "pot", as it is called in the story, is smoked; the Holocaust is discussed - Debbie is very troubled by it, while Yerucham argues that the important thing about the Holocaust is to react by becoming a true adherent of Judaism. By adopting the way-of-life of the people who Nazis wanted to destroy, by being very visible, those who wished Jews were annihilated will be forced, he argues, to see that they are still here and still Jewish. The 16-year-old son of Debbie and the narrator shambles out of bed in the middle of all this and asks to borrow the car and then disappears, leaving a fairly poor impression of himself. Finally, a truth game is played, in which each character tries to imagine the other characters are not Jewish and then decide if they would trust them to shelter them if they were to find themselves in Anne Frank's situation. The story ends as one character appears to realise they do not trust another character as much as they ought. 

A play has now been made of the short story, a collaboration between the original author, Nathan Englander, and Patrick Marber. The action has been updated to now. Reportedly one large theatre in London pulled out of staging the play for fear of repercussions from pro-Palestine protestors. The Marylebone Theatre stepped into the breach. For me it was a revelation to find such a lovely little theatre. 

There was much that was good about the production I saw. The stage set was minimal but effective. The acting was energetic and there was not one moment of boredom in the whole performance. However, the changes to the plot made in transition from page to stage and from 2011 to 2025 were troubling. 

Firstly, in the theatrical adaptation, Yerucham goes further in his comments about the Holocaust than he does in the short story, arguing that the Holocaust was the fault of Jews who were insufficiently devout, that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves as a kind of punishment. Secondly, it emerges that Shoshanna has engineered the reunion because she is hoping to get support from the liberal Americans in persuading Yerucham to water down his principles so that she can keep in touch with one of their daughters who has entirely abandoned their Hasidic way of life and consequently been ostracised. And, thanks to the negotiating skills of our friend the liberal narrator, (Debbie's husband), the dinosaur Yerucham is led to agree to his wife's wish. 

Thirdly, the teenage son has been transformed into a recurring presence with an extremely forceful personality. He declares himself a pastafarian. He is given a passionately angry speech about climate change, in which he suggests that all the adults around him are beyond redemption as the world he will inherit has been utterly ruined by them. It isn't entirely clear that the audience isn't being invited to agree with this angry young man. Is he a joke and the performance of the actor in this production is simply too heartfelt to get that across - or is he genuinely meant to be the play's true hero?

Lastly, and most vitally, when Debbie starts to attack her Israeli friends, claiming that Israel is the source of all the problems Jews face in the world and using, unquestioningly and unchallenged, Hamas's casualty figures for the current war, she states that the most urgent - and ever-increasing - danger facing Jews in America is the danger of being attacked by white Nazis. This is such a cop-out on the part of Englander and Marber. The greatest danger Jews face everywhere in the world at present is the anti-semitism of Islamists, not the aggression of white Nazis. Yerucham is given a very few lines to try to remind these Americans he is visiting about the events of 7th October, but he is almost entirely drowned out and the truth of the atrocities committed that day is not given any kind of decent airing. Debbie implies that the appalling things done to innocent people, all too many of them naive supporters of the very people who took such delight in spilling their blood, is only what they had coming to them.

In short, the actors were all brilliant and the staging was excellent. My problem - and it is a huge one - is that at the centre of the newly wrought version of the story/play is complete cowardice. Marber and Englander refuse to admit it, but there is one dangerously aggressive bunch of people who are bent on destroying all Jews - and that bunch of people is not disgruntled rightwing white Americans.

The Merchant of Venice 1936, Theatre Royal Bath

 A new production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is always an interesting prospect, as the play is so puzzling. It contains some of Shakespeare's most beautiful speeches, including probably the most famous discussion of mercy in the English language, but it tells the story of a man's desire to use the law to take revenge on another man, almost certainly killing him, and of the punishment that is meted out to that man for desiring to do such a thing. The fact that the man in question, Shylock, is Jewish only adds to the difficulties, as the play appears on the face of it to be anti-semitic, even though in Shylock's famous "If you prick us, do we not bleed" speech in Act 3, Shakespeare writes with what seems to be complete empathy for the plight of Jews subjected to anti-Semitism.

Perhaps because it is so difficult, the opportunities to see the play are fairly rare. But in 2023 an actress called Tracy Ann Oberman decided to create her own production, in which she would play Shylock, setting the action against the backdrop of the rise of Oswald Mosley and his followers. Having read too much PG Wodehouse as a child I have always equated Mosley with Sir Roderick Spode and consequently underestimated his dangerous influence. Oberman's grandmother was living in the East End of London at the time of Mosley's activities and took part in the Battle of Cable Street, something I knew nothing about before going to this performance. It was an event that seems to have demonstrated that Mosley was not the idiotic figure of fun I'd assumed, and learning of its existence has made me wonder about whether Wodehouse did everyone a disservice by creating Spode, using absurdity to minimise what was a real danger.  

Having been performed to great acclaim in London, the production is now touring Britain and so when it came to Bath while I was staying in Bristol I took the opportunity to go along (this is beginning to sound faintly like the opening to a visit to Julian and Sandy as spoken by Kenneth Horne). The performance I went to was a sell-out and in front of me were over 100 school children, almost overcome with excitement at being in a theatre.

The performance began in what I presume was Hebrew as some kind of Jewish ritual was presented, with Oberman at its centre. Once that was over we galloped into the play itself. A small cast doubled up playing a variety of parts and they were excellent in all of them. The whole thing is full of gusto and energy and Obermann as Shylock is superb. The fact that the character is played as a woman seemed to me to work very well - somehow a woman's suffering at the hands of bullies struck me as something one could feel more sympathy for than a man's, possibly because a man, possibly unfairly, is expected to fight rather than cry. Oberman's performance persuaded me that the arrogance and scorn Shylock is subjected to is more than enough to goad her into wishing to make the leader of her enemies suffer in his turn.

In what to me at first seemed a very clever twist but I later realised was an inevitable result of transforming Shylock into the play's hero, Portia, who I had always thought of as a heroine, is here presented as a really nasty creature, taking delight in grinding a Jew into the dust. While this was a revelation for me, given the over-reach of many in the modern legal profession, i didnt mind at all having a sense of hostility for a lawyer whipped up in my heart.

At the end, Oberman stepped forward and told of her grandmother's experiences in the Battle of Cable Street and then, together with the whole cast, exhorted the audience to show solidarity with their contemporary Jewish neighbours, while raising her fist over and over, in a gesture that, were Elon Musk to have made it, might have been mistaken for a Nazi salute. This seemed a faint sacrilege but I think Shakespeare survived it.

Overall, I enjoyed the performance. Despite many of the schoolchildren complaining as they left about how long the thing had gone on, the play has actually been admirably streamlined (although purists might argue that cutting out bits of Shakespeare can never be admirable). But there is one glaring flaw in the production - tragically, it is already out of date. The enemy faced by people of Jewish origin is no longer the Mosley mob they encountered in Cable Street. Oberman knows this all too well as since October 7, 2023 she has had to be guarded against attack from pro-Palestinians. 

It would have taken a lot of work but the truth is the production needs to be revamped. In place of Blackshirts, the characters opposing Shylock need to be dressed in those dreadful uniforms Hamas members love to parade in as they release hostages. It is not frustrated white men but Islamists who are bent on doing violence to Jews these days - and we all need to show solidarity with each other as they will be coming for us next.

Bach and Sons by Nina Raine, Bridge Theatre London

If you asked me whether Bach and Sons is enjoyable, I would say yes, go and see it; it is entertaining and full of laughs. If you asked me whether it is a good play, I would say it is an extremely English play: it tries to tackle big questions - the meaning of life, the power of music, the difficulty of father-son relationships, the rational enlightenment view versus the Christian perspective - while avoiding the sins the British see as cardinal; that is, being earnest or boring. The audience is borne along on a tide of soothing, second-rate jokes.

Actually, not jokes - just vulgarity. But vulgarity is so often what passes for humour at present. I don't believe that Bach would really have told someone that his employer didn't give "a shiny shit" what kind of music he gave him, or that one of his Passions had gone down "like a turd in a tureen". The fact that Raine has him saying these things, and plenty more in similar vein, suggests to me that, when writers attempt to recreate the past, they sometimes fall into the same trap that science fiction writers trying to predict the future have been known to tumble into - they reveal a great deal about the time they live in and the limits it puts on their imaginations, while getting the time that they are hoping to evoke quite, quite wrong. 

But the oddest thing about Bach and Sons, for me at least, is the fact that, while one of its recurring preoccupations is harmony and dissonance, it is itself consistently dissonant linguistically. To pick three examples, from countless: Bach's son Emmanuel (in the play called Karl), would surely never have critiqued a piece of his father's music by saying to him, "Only you could work a sexy French wiggle into something so German and angsty"; the word "narcissist", even though Raine has it proceeding from Bach's mouth, wasn't coined, either in German or English, until long after the composer's death; surely Frederick the Great only became "the Great" after his death, rather than in his own lifetime. 

More troubling, in a play that claims to be about genuine historical characters, the action of the play is not historically accurate. Raine has, in fact, distorted historical fact quite monstrously in order to make what she thinks will be a good story. A friend who is a really distinguished violinist and knows far more about such things than me, takes over at this point. Here is what he tells me:

"Bach's eldest son, Freidemann, (not Willy), was nine when his mother died in 1720, his younger brother Emanuel, (not Karl), was six. In this production, they are presented as fully grown at the time. There is no evidence at all that Bach pater was having an affair or in any way acquainted with his second wife when his first wife, also his second cousin, died. Nor is there the slightest scrap of evidence that Bach wrote the violin Ciaccona in memory of his first wife, nor even a hint that his first wife's sister was in love with him. The relationship between Emanuel (Karl, in the play) Bach and Frederick (the Great) was not warm or friendly. I could go on. My problem is that these flaws mean that many people will come away from the theatre believing Bach to be a heartless womaniser who flirted with his second wife before his first wife had died and whose two adult children at the time resented this behaviour. There is also a gaping omission: for some reason the youngest son of Bach, Johann Christian, aka the London Bach, is never mentioned in the play, even though he had a great influence on the young Mozart, who knew him when he was in England as a child."

Of the performances, Simon Russell Beale was, as always, very good, sometimes in trying circumstances; Samuel Blenkin, playing the character known as Carl generated most of the play's energy and was impressive; oddly, given that the playwright is herself a woman, the two female characters were paper thin; and the star turn was Pravessh Rana as Frederick (the Great). Each time he appeared, it was as if the whole stage had been reenergised. He glittered with suppressed mental pain and an almost unhinged zeal for rationalism. He was absolutely, wonderfully alarming, as if a bomb were ticking inside a rather splendid porcelain box. I missed him whenever he disappeared. 

I suspect this play was intended to be a new Amadeus. The combination of music and big ideas is very similar. Despite some nice lines, (and some very banal ones, eg Bach declaring, "Everything is a dance. Life is a dance"; Russell Beale really earned my admiration when he managed to get that one out with aplomb), in my view, Bach and Sons is a far shallower piece than Schaffer’s. 

JS Bach dedicated each piece of music he wrote “to the glory of God”. It is an exacting standard, and Nina Raine, Bach’s chronicler here, has aimed lower. The result is dishonest, but not unamusing .

Oleanna by David Mamet, Arts Theatre, Great Newport Street, London

Since it appeared in 1992 most people, (me included), have regarded David Mamet's play Oleanna, which tells the story of a disastrous series of meetings between a university teacher and one of his students, as a drama about the early skirmishes of the so-called culture wars. The production I saw of it in 2004 gave me the impression that there was a hero - the university teacher - and there was a villain - the student. The production of the play that is now running in London reveals that it is much more complex and interesting than that, and that it has no heroes or villains. It isn't about a hapless man unable to understand the demands of feminism, as I had imagined; it is a play about understanding and misunderstanding more broadly, about the meaninglessness of much that passes for intelligent work in academia today and about the dreary treadmill that we have made for younger generations by insisting that university degrees are needed for almost any job.

The play has three acts, and every one of them takes place in the same setting - the office of a university teacher called John, who, it emerges, has, after a long time and hard graft, just recently been approved for tenure - although, crucially, the final documentation has not been completed. At the start of the play, we find John hunched at a desk on the left of the stage. He is talking on the telephone. From what it is possible to tell from his side of the conversation, he is trying to buy a house, and his wife is explaining to him that there is a legal difficulty about the boundaries of the land the house sits on. She wants him to come down to the house to talk to the real estate agent urgently.

Behind John, sitting on the other side of a second desk is a young woman. She is a little scruffily dressed and not visibly in the business of spending much time on making herself look attractive. Eventually John gets off the telephone, writes some notes and then, at last, turns to her.  

"I'm sorry",  he says, not a moment too soon. The young woman replies by asking him about a phrase she overheard him use during his telephone conversation. 

"What's a term of art?" she asks. He looks astounded. "Is that what you want to talk about?" he demands. He then adds a little speech that I continue to find mystifying: 

"Let's take the mysticism out of it, shall we? Carol? Don't you think? I'll tell you: when you have some "thing". Which must be broached. Don't you think?"

Carol is clearly confused by this. What is impossible to know is whether they had been conversing and were interrupted by the telephone call John has just finished.  Do John's remarks relate to that earlier conversation, or is he being extremely rude, simply telling Carol that he knows better than her what is a suitable subject for discussion? Although he then apologises and tries to answer Carol's question, somehow the dialogue between them remains mystifying

This is clever, since Carol has come to see her teacher to explain that she finds everything that he is trying to teach her completely perplexing. She knows she is failing, and she doesn't know how to make sense of the fact that, as she tells John, she is doing what she is told, she is taking notes, but she still understands nothing. As it is difficult to understand much of what John is saying, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for her dilemma.

John tells Carol that she is "an incredibly bright girl." She tries to interrupt, and he starts again, saying "You're an incredibly ... you have no problem with the ... " but then he ends up with, "Who's kidding who?", which I take to mean that he doesn't think she is "incredibly bright". He quotes a sentence she has written in an assignment  - "I think that the ideas contained in this work express the author's feelings in a way that he intended, based on his results." John seems to think that this sentence is faulty, although it doesn't seem to me to be any more difficult to understand than most of what he says, nor much of what passes for intelligent writing these days: to take just the latest example I have noticed, among many, here is something that I read just now. It is written by a distinguished poet to explain how he chose the winners of a poetry prize: 

"I primarily looked for work that saw the theme of metamorphosis as a frame, and within which might take the freedom - both a blessing and a curse at times - to a place that will encourage both the artist and their audience to be able respond to the work over time."

John explains to Carol that he thinks she is angry. She says it is true that she has problems because she comes from a social and economic milieu that is unlike that of most of her fellow students, but that she absolutely has to pass John's course. 

The two talk across each other, the telephone rings, regularly interrupting their already disjointed dialogue of the deaf. In a moving outcry, Carol beseeches John, saying: 

"Teach me. Teach me ... I want to understand". 

She goes on to explain her dilemma in greater detail: 

"There are people out there. People who came here. To know something they didn't know. Who came here. To be helped. To be helped. So someone would help them. To do something. To know something. To get, what do they say? 'To get on in the world.' How can I do that if I don't, if I fail? But I don't understand. I don't understand. I don't understand what anything means ... and I walk around. From morning 'til night: with this one thought in my head. I'm stupid."

John again brushes her assertion aside, insisting she is angry, and then proceeds to say that he too always thought of himself as stupid and still does. He goes on to denigrate the whole system of testing and grades at his institution, decrying as a worthless farce the "article of faith...that all are entitled to Higher Education", pointing out that we "have ceased to ask, 'What is it good for?'" 

Carol asks why he is involved in the education system, if he thinks it so bad, and he replies, "I do it because I love it", which, although he clearly doesn't recognise it, is an immensely arrogant thing to say to her, suggesting that he believes himself part of the elite who should be educated, while she is misguided in seeking an education. 

More foolishly still, the next thing John does is to decide to take the first piece of advice he gave to Carol and apply it to himself - to "take the mysticism" out of the relationship between himself and Carol, shedding the mystique of being the "teacher": 

"If we're going to take off the Artificial stricture, of 'Teacher' and 'Student', why should my problems be any more a mystery than your own?" he asks Carol. Her perplexity only deepens, and her respect, (possibly limited already), visibly begins to diminish. John achieves nothing helpful by his decision - which runs parallel with the modern insistence that hierarchy is 'an artificial construct' and not only unhelpful but 'elitist'. In fact, he naively begins his own downfall. 

Meanwhile, Carol's desire for understanding is not assuaged and John doesn't even notice that he understands almost nothing about anything at all, least of all what it is she is worried about. 

As the play goes on, Carol evolves from believing she has no power, to discovering that she has, possibly partly thanks to John's decision to "take off the Artificial stricture" and place the pair of them on an equal footing. John does not evolve at all and his career is destroyed. The final scene is horribly violent. Carol still understands nothing about the course she is supposed to be studying. Perhaps the fact that John is at the end barred from teaching the rubbish he spouts is a good thing - except that we know that there will always be another mediocrity to take his place. 

What does become clear is that both characters are victims of one of contemporary society's most gigantic cons - that university education is valuable for everyone, no matter what. Both the play's characters are engaged in an enterprise - mass university education - that is not at all worthwhile for either of them. Sexual politics, it turns out, is just a side issue to the central core of the play, (or possibly a by-product, borne of the frustration and anger of people in a system that is entirely unsuitable for them). The question of whether it is useful or helpful for large numbers of people to go to university and study, not because they love ideas, but "to get on in the world", as Carol puts it, is at the heart of the piece and, judging by Oleanna, the  answer is no, it is not worth it, the enterprise is not merely pointless but damaging for most of the people concerned.

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(On a flippant note, one thing it is impossible not to think, each time the telephone interrupts John and Carol, usually at moments when they seem poised on the point of understanding each other, is that the greatest evidence of John's foolishness is his failure to pull the cord out of the back of the thing temporarily - or to at least take the receiver off the hook. 

I was also interested to hear echoes of Carol when I read an article in the Guardian the day after watching Oleanna, in which a woman from Pakistan described going to law school, where, she said, “a lot of white female professors told me to quit”; when she finally emerged with a qualification and started working in NGOs, she claimed to be "obstructed in every possible way" by white women. I heard Carol in her baffled angry pride and misunderstanding of what may well have been offered as cooperative collaboration in editing a piece of writing but which she took to be an attack, probably borne of racism: 

"Every time I would write a report there would be 10 people who would shred it", the woman from Pakistan told the Guardian, "telling me how I was wrong and I was failing and I didn’t know this and I didn’t know that. I was either never allowed to speak or entrapped.” 

On one occasion only did John appear to have any real intelligence - the moment when, having been informed that he is to be given a surprise party, he tells Carol that a surprise can sometimes be a form of aggression.

Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard's new play, Leopoldstadt is named after the area in Vienna where Jewish people new to the city usually first found residence and also where, I think, the Nazis first of all forced all Jewish children to go to school, regardless of how far away their house was from it, and eventually forced all Jewish people to live.

When the curtain goes up on the play, the audience is met with a scene that, intentionally or not, exactly mirrors the scene at the opening of the ballet The Nutcracker. It is a richly furnished, turn of the century, European sitting room, with an ornate chaise-longue centre stage, a mahogany dining table behind - which alternates with a piano in different scenes, I think, or possibly both are always onstage together (human visual memory, at least mine, is patchy) - and comfortable antique armchairs and side tables at each side.

To the left of the stage is a huge Christmas tree being decorated by the children of the house and their cousins, aided by various adults. It is a cosy scene of family jollity. There is much cheerful conversation in which we learn who everyone is - although you have to be quicker than me to catch all the names and work out how they relate to each other. There is a mathematician and a doctor called Ernst who, despite the name, I somehow got the wrong impression was Egyptian until very late in the play. There is a grandmother and her daughter, who may be married to the mathematician. The owner of the house is I think Hermann who has become a Christian as he has married a beautiful young Austrian Catholic. In case we are in any doubt about what the rest of the characters are, a small boy tries to put a star of David on the top of the tree and it is explained to him that that kind of star isn't used on this kind of tree.

A teenage girl who is visiting Vienna from the Ukraine confesses to her Christian aunt that a young Austrian officer has asked her to meet him tomorrow and she needs a chaperone. The aunt, slightly reluctantly, agrees to go along. The next thing we know the aunt and the Austrian officer are having it off, even though he is ghastly - and even though he was the one who started flirting with the aunt's niece; no explanation is given for his fickleness, beyond the overriding impression that he is an utter cad. In any case, the teenager goes back to the Ukraine, saddened.

What are we to make of the aunt's sudden fall into the arms of the Austrian cad? Nothing about her behaviour before or after suggests she is a philanderer - if that word can be applied to a woman - so what is going on? Is she a secret anti-semite who in her heart of hearts only really fancies Gentiles? Where does this plot twist fit psychologically?

Or are we supposed to ignore individual psychology in this play and accept that a plot development may be simply a useful cog in the machine of revealing anti-semitism? For the horrid Austrian cad then meets the adulterous Christian aunt's husband at a party and treats him with terrific snobbery, on account of his race, and insults the man's wife.  The husband challenges the young man to a duel and the young man has to spell out to him that the army does not allow its soldiers to accept duelling challenges from Jews. Thus, Stoppard establishes that there is institutional anti-semitism in turn of the century Vienna.

Time moves forward and insult is heaped on insult for our poor Jewish family. Tension mounts. There is quite a lot of talk about Dr Karl, which probably most audiences would not understand but I assume refers to Dr Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, who without any doubt used anti-semitism to his own political ends and who some regard as the inspiration for Hitler's anti-semitism. Eventually, the family is reduced to nothing and unimaginable cruelties are wreaked on them. A character supposed to be Tom Stoppard - but only if he were transformed into one of the wetter members of the Drones Club - comes back to Vienna, which he and his mother fled when he was a child. He is put back in touch with the past he has forgotten, which leads to some rather feeble tears of guilt. He asks about what happened to the people he now begins to vaguely remember and a shadowy tableau of that first scene appears. Each individual is named, and when their fate is inquired about the answers that come back are - "Dachau", "Theresienstadt", "Auschwitz", "Auschwitz", "Auschwitz", "Auschwitz", "Auschwitz" ...

The horror I feel for what happened to families such as Stoppard's imaginary creation is enormous, but unfortunately that does not make this play any less disappointing. A play, particularly a Stoppard play, is not usually simply a history lesson*. What I was hoping for was some kind of dramatic evocation of the strange madness that erupted, an opportunity, via the alchemy of Stoppard's brilliant mix of ideas and penetrating understanding and the magic that is good theatre, to get a new perspective on the dread and terror and wild inhuman viciousness of the time and the strange forces that created evil. But what Stoppard has made is a very old-fashioned family drama in which the characters are one-dimensional - on the one hand, the Jewish family, who are without fault and entirely endearing, because, in order for us to feel bad about what happens to them they need to be absolutely blameless, rather than the usual complicated beings that real humans are, and, on the other the equally shallow baddies - the dastardly adulterous anti-semitic officer who comes across as a pantomime villain, and the Catholic wife ,who is simply mystifying; for one brief scene a raving sex fiend, for the rest characterised only by an eagerness to get all the traditions and practices of her new family right.

Because of this lack of any richness of characterisation, the play becomes a form of agitprop, or at least a form of panto. You feel as you watch that you should be shouting hurrah for the goodies and booing the baddies. What you miss is any attempt to penetrate the complexities of this terrible, strange period in which humans who'd grown up in one of the most civilised cities and civilised regimes that have ever existed - (mention is very briefly made of the Emperor Franz Joseph learning Hebrew and being entirely supportive of the Jewish people, but this glimpse of one of the many contradictory aspects of the situation vanishes in an instant) - transformed into baying monsters who victimised their Jewish neighbours with a brutality that is hard to contemplate.

Sad to say, Leopoldstadt is not brilliant as a piece of transfiguring drama, although perhaps, if you knew nothing at all about what had gone on in Vienna, it might be a place to start to learn the rudimentary facts.* I may have been expecting too much; perhaps it is impossible ever to arrive at any kind of comprehension of the unimaginable events of the period after the Anschluss in Austria; certainly, Leopoldstadt only describes what happened. Maybe, if you don't already know anything about the subject, it may be a place to start.

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*Another thing one usually expects from Stoppard is comedy but, there is only one laugh in the play -  a misunderstanding in which a man who introduces himself as a doctor is taken to be the doctor come to perform the ritual circumcision on a baby, when in fact he is a lawyer come with some papers for the head of the house - practically anyone with a university degree tends to call themselves "Herr Doktor" in Vienna. Anyway, the baby's mother, who is pretty reluctant to let her child be tampered with, comes in and asks him if he needs any equipment. She doesn't know that he isn't who she thinks he is, nor that he has just been given a cigar by her father. Therefore, when he tells her that he could find a cigar cutter useful but, if she doesn't have one, it's fine, because he can always bite the end off with her teeth, she runs away screaming.


* If you then want to learn more about what happened to Jewish people living in Vienna, I would recommend a superb memoir called Last Waltz in Vienna by George Clare, which deals much more subtly and interestingly with the whole subject.

Tartuffe, National Theatre (Lyttleton) - 24 February, 2019

I had all but given up on theatre, after enduring a few evenings of overhyped agit prop and deciding that the "industry" had been entirely overtaken by purveyors of emperors' new clothes, (exhibit A) and people with political axes to grind (except, of course, at the commercial end of things, where vehicles for TV stars and huge vulgar musicals cobbled together from Disney movies hold sway; sadly, these don't appeal to me either).

But, having an evening free in London, I decided to give drama another go. I set out with low hopes, but I'm glad to report that the production I saw of Tartuffe at the National Theatre reignited my love of theatre.

The story the play tells is an old and familiar one - a rich and powerful man falls prey to a charlatan and is very nearly undone. The National Theatre version plays it as a farce, and what made it so pleasurable was the performances. The actors showed marvellous comic timing and there was brilliant interaction between the members of the cast. Only Hari Dhillon as Cleante let the side down a little, with a faintly wooden performance (but then his role is the least interesting of the main characters). Kevin Doyle as Orgon was wonderful and something of a revelation for those of us who have seen him as a succession of spinelessly wicked characters on the television. Kitty Archer, after a very slightly awkward beginning, was hilarious as Orgon's spoilt but charming daughter. Denis O'Hare was funny in a nauseating manner, particularly in the scene involving ice cubes. Kathy Kiera Clarke shone as Dorine.

There were no surprises, just ensemble acting and a reminder of the wonder that is live theatre - these brilliant people have learned their lines perfectly, rehearsed to the level of athletes, and they come out and light up the stage each night, giving performances that are never quite the same, producing each night a new miracle for audiences.

Hello theatre, I'm hooked again.

Amadeus by Peter Schaffer, National Theatre, London, 9th January, 2017

I  first saw Amadeus in the early 1980s in the London theatre that now seems to be the permanent home of Phantom of the Opera. I loved the play then and I love it still. I have heard people say it has an unfair advantage, Mozart's music, which it uses to play with the audience's emotions. But then the play is all about unfair advantages - or the perception that they are unfair at any rate.

Whether or not the plot has any basis in truth I have no idea, but for those who don't know it, the play presents the story of Salieri, the dominant composer in Vienna at the time of Mozart's arrival there. Salieri recognises Mozart as infinitely more gifted than he is and takes this as evidence of the unfairness of God. In this reaction, Salieri resembles the prodigal son's brother in his anger at not being favoured. He is in fact missing the point of the religion he thinks he has been serving - Mozart is Salieri's own personal Messiah and just as humanity decided to destroy Jesus, Salieri decides to destroy Mozart for being too good.

Poor Mozart - played really wonderfully in this production by Adam Gillen, he comes across as good in soul as well as good at music. Gillen manages to inject great poignance into the role by hinting at a seriousness and depth that his character has learnt to hide behind inanity, like a bright child trying to survive in the playground. He is completely guileless and so lacking in vanity - yes, he knows he is a very good composer, but that is not vanity, just honesty - that it never occurs to him that anyone else might be wracked by jealousy of his extraordinary talent. When he improvises on a piece by Salieri and suggests they both play around with it together, the thought that Salieri might be insulted never crosses his mind. They are both musicians, music is the thing and it is fun to mess about together playing music.  Perhaps this is what holds Salieri back from greatness - the fact that music is not the thing for him but merely the means to an end - that end being unrivalled success.

Anyway, there are plenty of things wrong with this production - it was unnecessarily cluttered and the decision to have Salieri played by an African was distracting, particularly as his two side kicks were also played by black actors, thus risking the narrative becoming one about black people feeling annoyed at being less talented than the white people in the play or, even worse, Africans feeling unable to match the cultural achievements of the white Age of Enlightenment. I suppose we are all supposed to be colour blind but I doubt any white actor will be playing Martin Luther King any time soon. And perhaps actually my objection wasn't about race but just about Salieri's style of (over?) acting.  After all Costanza, Mozart's wife, is also played by an actor who may not be entirely Anglo, (Karla Crome), but her performance is so incredibly moving that the thought that it was odd to cast her never crossed my mind.*

But I'm resolved to be positive in 2017 so let's leave quibbles aside and focus on the moving emotional core of the production - the cruelty that slowly destroys Mozart and robs the world of his gifts. The way in which Adam Gillen conveys the loneliness of true genius beneath the mask of a giggling clown is marvellous and the scenes he shares with Costanza as his health declines and his financial situation worsens are almost unbearably sad. It is a long time since I've sat in a big crowded theatre and felt the kind of intensity of attention these two actors managed to create the night I was there. It is even longer since I've sat in a theatre with tears pouring down my face. To inspire such an emotional reaction, live, onstage, without special effects or screens or any special technological frippery is a great achievement and revived my faith in the power of theatre, that ancient, magical form.

*Reading the programme later I realised that, if you go to the National Theatre under its current management, you just have to put up with their tedious "diversity" policies, which also presumably were behind the maddeningly pointless transformation of one of the male characters in Amadeus into a woman - in Vienna at the time of Mozart a woman would not have walked about in men's clothes and called herself a counsellor at the court.

But never mind - on the page of the programme headed "A Theatre for Everyone", Rufus Norris, the NT's boss, is quoted as saying:

"The NT has the responsibility and the privilege to celebrate this nation. The work we put on our stages, the audiences we play to, the staff, subject matter and areas of national debate should reflect and celebrate the diversity of the nation in terms of, for example, ethnicity, disability, sexuality and class."

The article goes on to explain that:

"Trying to shift perceptions of what theatre can be and for whom is not for the faint hearted .... To focus these efforts, the NT has set diversity targets for all faces of the operation and a report on their progress will be published on the NT website. The current 2016 figures show that the NT is making progress: 50% of all commissioned new work in 2015-16 was written by women, 30% of performers were from BAME backgrounds, which is also encouraging but the aim is to do better. The five-year Equality Action Plan states that by 2021 20% of the workforce will be from a BAME (black, asian and minority ethnic) background. Disability targets will be announced soon and there is active discussion about how best to engage with the issue of sexuality."

I am against celebrating anything except birthdays and Christmas. I don't understand why the effort to shift perceptions is necessary, given most good shows at the National Theatre sell out extremely quickly. As for five year plans, heaven help us - and why have an aim to employ a greater percentage of so-called BAME in the workforce than exists in the population? The whole thing is dispiriting in the extreme.