Plays To See

The marvel of Swan Lake is its plasticity and flexibility in the hands of so many generations of performers, directors and designers.

George Fu is a natural colourist as a player and composer, and this was immediately in evidence at the start of his recent Wigmore Hall recital. In the renownedly precise acoustic of this hall his performance of Messiaen’s punning ‘Le Loriot’, from his catalogue of bird song, found delectable gradations of touch and tone.

I Can Die Too is a play within a play: a technical rehearsal of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine (The Human Voice). The title echoes Cocteau’s famous remark upon learning of the death of his friend Édith Piaf. That immediately raises a question: what kind of loss is Lily (Frances Ruffelle) carrying, and where will it lead as she moves between rehearsal room, performance, and reality? The premise is deceptively simple.

With that deceptively simple observation, Christine Lahti opens one of the most compelling evenings of theatre currently on the London stage. The recipient of an Academy Award, Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award, Lahti strips away every trace of celebrity to present something far more courageous: herself. At first glance, The Smile of Her appears to be an autobiographical solo play. It is, but it is also much more.

The Ancient Greeks knew all about terrible families. They thought nothing of offering their audiences blood-soaked revenges of dynastic dysfunction involving incest, betrayal and sexual deviancy. But that is simply to speak of the sensational qualities of the plays. When you go to see an Aeschylus or Sophocles drama you expect to leave uncontrollably tear-stung and winded by the weight of human tragedy.

Before the Almeida was a theatre, it was a monastery, a pub, a scientific society hub. Could it one day become a drug-induced centre of efficiency, an underwater restaurant, a moon colony? The indomitable Stephanie Bain is obsessed with time, this instalment being the latest in a trilogy of plays dedicated to the unstoppable cycle: 24 (Day) and 81 (Life). The theatre is such a quintessential part of Islington, and this is the dramatised history of its people in the past, present, and future.

Aakash Odedra’s ‘Songs of the Bulbul’ is a truly remarkable show; a comprehensive exploration of that most ephemeral of things: beauty. Although stories often cut across cultures and time, the symbols storytellers use, are usually significant to their own particular cultures. In the Sufi tradition, the bulbul/nightingale, the bird with the sweetest voice, is an arch symbol of the soul’s attempt to encounter and embrace the divine. The bulbul’s best song is sung when the face of the divine is seen.

The Sardinian word accabadora comes from the root of the Spanish verb acabar, “to finish,” and denotes the woman who brings things to an end. It names a figure once real in the villages of Sardinia: a woman who, upon request, brought an end to the lives of those too sick to go on living with dignity. She was the community’s tactful answer to a death that would not come naturally.

Shakespeare’s King Lear becomes a family tragedy first and a political one second in this modern adaptation. Reimagining Lear as a queen and a mother in the early stages of dementia brings the play closer to home, but it also softens much of the original’s violence and tragic force. There is little sense of royal grandeur from the outset. The play opens in Lear’s spacious office, a set that cleverly transforms into several locations during the first half.

Die Frau ohne Schatten (The woman Without a Shadow) is the fifth and most ambitious collaboration between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Begun in November 1910 and delayed by the First World War, it did not reach the stage of the Vienna State Opera until October 1919. That nine-year gestation, straddling the upheaval of the war, altered the moral world of the opera.