Three Musketeers, two high-energy hits

The Importance of Being Earnest (Lytteleton, National Theatre, London)

Verdict: Wilde about Earnest

Astonishingly, this is only the second time the National Theatre has staged Oscar Wilde’s famously ‘trivial comedy for serious people’. Before this it was more than four decades ago, in 1982, when Judi Dench took her upholstered seat as Lady ‘a handbag!?’ Bracknell, directed by Peter Hall.

Perhaps what puts producers off is the play’s formidable quotability. Its nigh-on three-hour duration can feel like a recitation from the Oxford Dictionary Of Quotations, thanks to lines that range from ‘the truth is rarely pure and never simple’ to the giddy ‘the suspense is terrible, I hope it will last’.

The challenge for any director is, therefore, how to free the play from the moorings of its Victorian, deja-vu super-status and let it breathe. And, to his credit, Max Webster has done just that with a sparkling new production.

So much is in the casting, and what casting: with Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa and Fleabag’s Hugh Skinner lining up before Sharon D. Clarke, as a formidable Jamaican battleaxe Lady Bracknell who seems to hail from the colonies and sports more decorations on her chest than a Field Marshall.

Webster frames the story as a gay pride event, offering a drag-queen parade as prologue and curtain call. Although in between we hear Dr Dre played on the piano, this is a brightly coloured — almost traditional — production, that’s fiercely faithful to Wilde’s wickedly subversive spirit.

Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa and Fleabag’s Hugh Skinner star in the National Theatre production of  Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

In keeping with Wilde’s prescription, Gatwa is deliciously pleased with himself and brings boyish charm to Algernon, skipping on and off stage in fabulously foppish suits. Skinner’s Jack, meanwhile, has a fevered repertoire of anxious smiles and chaotic frowns

Gatwa is a gloriously impertinent tease as ‘ostentatiously eligible’ Algernon, who follows his friend Jack Worthington to the country in search of marriage and mischief.

Jack, now posh, was a foundling, discovered as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station, and needs to secure the approval of Lady B to marry his beloved Gwendolen (Ronke Adekoluejo).

Everyone, however, is openly shamming their Sєxuality; and the consequences are very high spirits within a plot as тιԍнтly structured as a German railway timetable.

In-jokes and ad-libbing (including a plug for East End queer venue Dalston Superstore) apart, Webster’s production focuses on Wilde’s narrative convolutions. He reminds us it’s not only a play with great lines, but great roles, too.

In keeping with Wilde’s prescription, Gatwa is deliciously pleased with himself and brings boyish charm to Algernon, skipping on and off stage in fabulously foppish suits.

Skinner’s Jack, meanwhile, has a fevered repertoire of anxious smiles and chaotic frowns beneath his wavy mop-top.

In keeping with Wilde’s prescription, Gatwa is deliciously pleased with himself and brings boyish charm to Algernon, skipping on and off stage in fabulously foppish suits

And the ladies are up to their own tricks, with Gwendolen stringing Jack along to get her hands on his precocious ward Cecily (Eliza Scanlen), who has ‘fallen into the habit of thinking for herself’.

They are marshalled by Julian Bleach’s manservant, interrupting proceedings with increasingly large gongs.

Yes, liberties are taken. But that is surely the best way of blowing the dust off this national treasure. Besides, set and costume designer Rae Smith gives us eye-catching spectacles: a creamy Mayfair drawing room, a country garden, a capacious library in a stately home.

No surprise that most shows are sold out, despite the subsidised theatre’s ticket price of £110 for a seat in the stalls.

But you can catch it in cinemas from February 20 — and who knows, perhaps even in the West End thereafter?

Until January 25.

 

Three Musketeers, two high-energy hits

The Three Musketeers (New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme)

My children often roll their eyes and say, ‘Dad, it’s not that deep.’ But I am resolved to keep Christmas in December. No mince pie shall pᴀss my lips before Sunday. And, inspired by Scrooge, I will defer the theatrical tide of Dickens’s Christmas Carols until then too.

I was therefore delighted to find two high-energy takes on The Three Musketeers, in Staffs and Gloucs.

Newcastle-under-Lyme has a particularly fine rendition, as Alexandre Dumas’s Parisian swordsmen are joined by country bumpkin D’Artagnan and caught up in a dastardly plot surrounding the French Queen’s necklace.

I was therefore delighted to find two high-energy takes on The Three Musketeers, in Staffs and Gloucs

Theresa Heskins’s brisk adaptation thrilled its target audience of primary school children when I caught it — in particular thanks to Lemar Moller’s affable D’Artagnan. 

Some repartee could be snappier, but it’s action-packed, with tumultuous sword fights choreographed by Philip d’Orleans. 

Characters are drawn with deft flashes of steel — Hadley Smith’s dandy Porthos, Thomas Dennis’s tasty Aramis, and Louis J. Rhone’s curt Athos. 

There’s a good stand-off between maid Constance (Chloe Ragrag) and spy Milady (Charlotte Price), while Perry Moore’s consonants as the scheming Cardinal are colder and more cutting than the blades.

The Three Musketeers (Barn Theatre, Cirencester)

The swordsmen in Cirencester also amuse but more in the way of a student review in which the heroes form a 17th-century boy band.

In a show with costumes designed by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and upbeat songs by Lee Freeman and Mark Anderson, ‘D’Arty’ (George Shuter) comes to Paris to avenge his musketeer father, and gets caught up in another necklace subterfuge.

Shuter is an amiably naïve D’Arty alongside love interest Conny (Hayley Canham). But weirdly he and the Musketeers wield spray cans instead of swords, and are distinguished more by LLB’s costumes than derring-do.

Yet the young cast sing, dance and play multiple instruments in a genial, seasonal (grr), audio-visual romp. Touché!

 

Donizetti meets Dad’s Army in the ENO’s new Elixir Of Love

 By Tully Potter 

The Elixir Of Love (English National Opera) 

Verdict: We’re in strange territory…

Don’t tell him, Pike, but something very rum is going on: they’ve set a classic Italian 19th-century comedy in England during World War II. But it’s all right — I think I spotted one or two of the Platoon among the khaki-clad types.

The trouble with your humble scribe is that he’s been seeing this little masterpiece done properly since 1956. And the trouble with Harry Fehr’s production is that one keeps expecting the Dad’s Army lot to show up.

Welsh soprano Rhian Lois as Adina is like a cross between Mrs Fox and Mrs Pike and New Zealander Thomas Atkins as Nemorino looks so English, he could pᴀss for Pike, were he not in mufti. Presumably, as a farmer, he is in a ‘reserved occupation’.

Making Belcore an RAF wing commander misses the whole point about him, that he is a brash plebeian army sergeant. And the vicar is more Dad’s Army than the Italian notary of the original.

With the quack Doctor Dulcamara sporting a Yank accent, we are in strange territory indeed.

Welsh soprano Rhian Lois (centre) as Adina in the ENO’s new Elixir Of Love. She  is like a cross between Mrs Fox and Mrs Pike

Don’t tell him, Pike, but something very rum is going on: they’ve set a classic Italian 19th-century comedy in England during World War II. But it’s all right — I think I spotted one or two of the Platoon among the khaki-clad types

Somewhere along the line, a precious pastoral pleasure (and treasure) by two geniuses disappears down the cracks, ending up as neither Gilbert & Sullivan nor Donizetti & Romani, but a sort of wartime tinned macaroni

Then there is the translation, by the late Amanda Holden (not that one). You can amuse yourself, watching the surтιтles to see what cliché’d line endings she has dredged up from the online RhymeZone. If ‘pleasure’ comes, ‘treasure’ is bound to follow.

Somewhere along the line, a precious pastoral pleasure (and treasure) by two geniuses disappears down the cracks, ending up as neither Gilbert & Sullivan nor Donizetti & Romani, but a sort of wartime tinned macaroni.

This is a tenor opera, and Atkins sings sweetly, especially in his great Act 2 aria; but both he and Lois, who warbles with a will, could improve the purity of their vowels: ‘money’ comes out as ‘marney’ and ‘suffering’ as ‘sarfering’.

Dan D’Souza as Belcore and Brandon Cedel as Dulcamara sing decently enough, although neither is very funny — the latter’s best joke is torpedoed by the translator.

Teresa Riveiro Bohm conducts with brio and both chorus and orchestra (a nice solo bᴀssoon) are fine.

Now here is an idea: instead of duplicating the Royal Opera’s efforts, why doesn’t ENO give us some of the works from this era which were written in English — The Bohemian Girl, The Lily Of Killarney or Maritana?