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.

Travesties by Tom Stoppard, Menier Chocolate Factory, October 7th, 2016

Is it possible that humour dates more than most forms? Is it possible sometimes a collective madness takes over, which makes everyone for a while find funny something that isn't actually funny, (I think that is what happened with the television series Little Britain, which briefly I thought brilliant - and now find original but really quiet horrible).

I ask these questions because Tom Stoppard in my youth was the playwright who seemed to streak across the firmament as the most exciting theatrical comet around, whereas now I can't help wondering if he is the George Bernard Shaw of our era. Shaw was, similarly, widely revered in his life time, whereas now his plays, on the rare occasions they are staged, bore their audiences rigid. There is such effort on display in Shaw's works that each joke lands with a thud, each example of cleverness draws attention to itself so eagerly that the audience feels almost bullied into reluctant admiration. Sadly, in my experience these days the same is true of Stoppard's plays.

There is no doubt that Travesties is clever. It is so clever in fact that for an audience member to even vaguely understand what is going on and who the characters are, it is advisable to read the script and Stoppard's introduction before setting foot in the theatre. Is this a good thing?

The play  takes place mainly in 1918 in Zurich where its main characters - James Joyce; a Romanian Dadaist called Tsara; Lenin and his wife; and the central figure, Henry Carr, an invalided veteran of World War One, attached to the British Consulate - all lived at the time. Two female characters may or may not have had an independent existence in reality. A character who is a butler in the play definitely existed but not as a butler - in reality he was the British Consul.

Actually the play doesn't exactly take place in Zurich - it takes place in the memory of Henry Carr, who conjures up Zurich in 1918 in his mind. Rather than action or plot, Stoppard gives us an extremely complex interplay of ideas - mainly about art and its place in human life, with a sideline in the function of war - all tangled up with very clever but not necessarily particularly interesting allusions to Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, a production of which Joyce helped to stage and Carr performed in.

Of course, it is brilliant to write a whole scene in the form of a limerick but, sadly, just because it is brilliant does not make it necessarily all that entertaining - and isn't the brilliance rather of the crossword-puzzle-solving variety? Stoppard also appears to have been satisfied with the various sallies he includes that echo the cadences of Wilde, even though they do not succeed in making amusing fun of Wilde's habit of aphorism or in matching his level of wit in that form.

For instance, when one character is offered some tea cake and says, "But I don't like tea-cake. Besides, I have sworn never to shake hands with you again" and the other replies. I don't want you to shake hands with me when I'm eating muffins. Muffins should never be eaten with shaking hands", it is fairly obvious that Stoppard hopes to exploit the absurdity of the word "muffin" and somehow create mirth from the slight bending of the concept of shaking hands, yet is the result actually funny or merely wordy and contrived? Again, while I can hear the Wildean echo - who couldn't - in the assertion, "There is no one so radical as a manservant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with" and in the statement "The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration" and in countless other lame efforts scattered through the play, the echo is not the equal of wit itself, (leaving aside the question of whether Wilde himself was really all that amusing - or retains the ability to provoke laughter today, to return to my original question about humour and whether it dates).

The ruminations contained within the dialogue on what art's role is, what constitutes art and what makes an artist are all fascinating, but they are not dramatic. The lessons on Lenin's life and on the formation of the Dadaist movement are, no doubt, accurate, but I don't drag myself out to the theatre for history lessons. The characterisation is non-existent as each person in the drama is really just the bearer of a set of arguments. None of them is given anything remotely resembling an emotional life.

All the same the Menier Chocolate Factory production did its absolute best with the material, and Tom Hollander was terrific. One exchange, parodying or paralleling a similar exchange in The Importance of Being Earnest, that takes place in the second act between the two female characters is so beautifully staged that it has been ringing in my ears ever since, although whether it is quite worth the price of the ticket is debatable.

I imagine most people would say that Freddie Fox is impressive as Tsara, and in a way he is. However, his performance is more akin to an Olympics gymnastic mat exercise than something involving genuine heart and spirit. Perhaps if he were somewhat less impressed with himself - indeed if he could simply forget himself and how well he is performing for a fraction of a second - it might be easier for the spectator to find him genuinely impressive - although one could argue, not in the end successfully, I think, that he is merely mirroring Stoppard's own self-absorbed delight in himself.

The decision to cast a woman "of colour" as Lenin's wife is something that I suppose just has to be overlooked in the interests of equality but it is distracting. Would a coloured actor be chosen for the more central parts of James Joyce or Lenin? If not, is this piece of casting just a tokenistic gesture? If we are going to be colour blind, can we also cast a white man in the role of Othello?

Ultimately, despite absolutely valiant efforts by the cast and magnificent choreography to try to enliven proceedings, the evening is big on speechifying and very small on heart. It seemed a surprising coincidence when, walking through Regent's Park the next morning, I overheard a woman telling her companion: "I go to the theatre for emotion; I want to laugh or cry and I didn't do either." Could she also have been at the Menier the evening before I wondered? Who knows.

If you can get tickets, the play is worth attending, in order to see just how far ingenuity goes in trying to convert an amalgam of philosophical essays into an evening of theatre. The performances are mostly excellent, the direction and staging and design are brilliant, but the fundamental material they are working with means that, dramatically, the evening cannot be a great success

The Cause by Jeremy James at Jermyn Street Theatre

The Cause opens with the left stage only lit. There we are introduced to an aged Hungarian painter, who has come to visit an old friend of his family - he is going to paint her portrait. At the end of his visit, when he sees the old friend's daughter for the first time, he collapses. It later emerges that his left side is paralysed - with no clear physical cause - as a result. "Luckily" the family friend is a psychoanalyst so together they undertake a journey into his past, convinced his inability to move his painting arm is due to past trauma.

The past, as the artist remembers it bit by bit, is then reenacted centre stage. It turns out the elderly was one of four wild Hungarian students who, gripped by a desire to free Hungary from the Austrian yoke, decide to assassinate Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Er, what? The Hungarians may not have been keen on Franz Ferdinand's Three Crown proposal, which would have given autonomy to Slavs, but by 1914 they had already fought their own battles for autonomy within the empire - and won. The foursome do mutter at one point about not wanting to have an emperor who is doubling up as emperor of the other part of the empire - a similar kind of argument to the Australian Republican movement's one about the current Queen of England having the role of Queen of Australia as a sideline - but the students' fervour doesn't make historical sense to me. Perhaps there was in reality a bunch of hot heads like those portrayed in the play, in which case I apologise and limit my criticism to the very clunky dialogue of this group, the rather school play acting standard and the dreadful costumes - why couldn't they have had plain white shirts (and given how little painting they appear to do, must all of them have their hands smeared so thickly with different shades of paint the entire time?) - but as things stand I am baffled about how such a historically flawed play could be put on.

As if all this were not enough, on the righthand side of the stage, officers of the Black Hand movement appeared from time to time, to provide, rather astonishingly, a bit of comic relief. The two actors in this section were the best thing in the production but using the Black Hand as a humorous recurring interlude struck me as an error. Some sections of the audience were provoked to laughter by their pantomime villain jolly japes but, as the Black Handers were actually vicious terrorists, whose actions turned the world into an infinitely worse place, I just felt uncomfortable.

In the final preposterous plot twist, the old Hungarian painter recalls that he murdered someone - although not Franz Ferdinand. How do you forget you shot someone point blank in a vicious, cold hearted and thoroughly pointless gesture? It slipped my mind, guv,sorry. Having rediscovered what he's done, the old painter faces the actor playing his younger self and is urged to forgive himself. I don't think there is any reason to do so - and I think there is even less reason to forgive the playwright for producing this drivel or the theatre for staging it. What were they thinking? This is one of the most misconceived dramas imaginable. I am sorry to say that I cannot come up with a single good thing to say about it.  The suspension of disbelief was absolutely impossible. Complete and total rubbish. the kind of thing that gives theatre a very bad name