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 .