Plays To See

Giulio Cesare in Egitto was one of Handel’s great successes. It was first performed in 1724 for the Royal Academy of Music, with the famous castrato Senesino singing the role of Caesar. For this performance at The Arcola, as part of the Grimeborn season, New Trinity Baroque, led by Predrag Gosta, uses a version that may be shortened but loses none of the drama of a story that tells of Caesar’s adventures in Egypt as he overcomes Tolomeo (Ptolemy) and is overcome by Cleopatra.

Today the news is drama. Newspapers have taken to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram to dispense stories via short-form video clips, intended to engage in a hypnotic manner akin to the latest viral video dance. It’s just one nifty strategy of retaining audience engagement at a time when print newspapers are being passed over for more immediate, digital sources of information.

Shakespeare’s King Lear, first performed in 1606, still finds new ways to entrance an audience in Titas Halder’s striking Crucible production. Through Halder’s steady directorial hand and Richard Kent’s assured costume and set design, the production lays the groundwork for an all-star cast’s talent to reverberate through the Crucible’s famous thrust stage.

To watch Bitter Visions is to implicitly agree to be part of a ritual. Upon entering the downstairs studio at the Arcola, theatregoers are handed black veils to immerse themselves in a drama that reaches back to the twelfth century. Ordo Virtutum, as the piece was then known, was composed for convent performance by polymathic abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) – a woman who was as comfortable composing religious chants as she was penning a medical treatise concerned with gynaecology.

Bernie and Polly were both working in a restaurant in Bournemouth until Bernie quit her job as a chef. Now, amid the packing cases of a move, she is preparing to leave. Polly arrives to confess her love and beg her to stay but she is confounded by her own social awkwardness. The cookie dough of the title represents the malleable nature of relationships. A chance meeting here or there, a word said in the wrong or right place can condemn or ignite a romance.

Annie Wobbler (Revisited) It certainly must be an exciting honour for an actress to have an esteemed playwright pen a one-woman play expressly for you. But that is exactly what happened to Nicola McAuliffe in 1981 when Arnold Wesker wrote Annie Wobbler especially for her. The play, again featuring McAuliffe, has now been updated to reflect the changes of the 45 intervening years, and Annie Wobbler (Revisited) currently is running at the Finborough Theatre in West London.

The story of gay Irishmen who came to London in the late 1980s to escape the prejudice and hatred they experienced in their own country is one worth telling. Mammy’s House, created by Derek Murphy and Amy Clarke, takes us into the lives of some of those men during the AIDS crisis, and, importantly, remembers not only those who died but the people who nursed and cared for them when so many others walked away.

Old Krapp, who has a deliberately unheroic, even vulgar name, is listening to tapes he made 40 year previously. He wants to record one last tape, as if to sum it all up. Krapp comes on in a grey bathrobe and sits at his desk where there is a tape recorder. He pulls out some tapes from a drawer and threads them through the machine. He doesn’t do much: he eats bananas and listens to himself as a younger man.

The production is a thought-provoking contribution to the South East London Festival. The title accurately describes a series of sketches involving five women playing out dramas in which they have felt threatened by men.

Can domestic staff outwit their privileged masters? Mozart and Da Ponte’s answer was yes – and then some. The Marriage of Figaro was written in 1786 as an opera buffa, a humorous opera defined by its relatable characters, witty dialogue and earthy stories. Beneath its farcical façade there was a serious political purpose: Europe was taking a revolutionary turn, and here was a production that dared to ridicule the ruling aristocracy’s intellectual deficiencies and flagrant abuses of power.