Dunsinane, a new commission by David Greig, is all of these things. Nice set, live music, good costumes, snow in the final scene, convincing sword fights and a well done but completely pointless dance half way though (“I don’t care if it makes sense for them all to dance! We’ve got a choreographer on staff in Stratford we need to justify to the Arts Council! I want dancing in every single production we do!”)

What really marks Dunsinane out, however, is not the unsurprising strength of the production from this, the most consistent of British companies, but the strength of the text. David Greig plays wonderfully with the story of Macbeth to craft a tale which is both compelling in its own right and a prescient allegory for modern conflict. An English army sweeps into Scotland to depose Macbeth the tyrant and establish Malcolm, the rightful king, on the throne. The war is quickly won, but victory cannot be achieved – and the weary English cannot go home – without a plan to also win the peace, something which they are painfully ill-equipped to do without an understanding of the complex tribal rivalries, ancient grudges and finely balanced truces which really govern the country. The metaphors with Britain’s current conflicts are clear, but the real strength in Greig’s text is that he manages to bring these out without ever stretching them or shoe-horning them into a modern context. The allegory is clear, intelligent and deftly drawn, never veering into obviousness or tastelessness.

The performance are universally solid, as one would expect from this company. But some go beyond this, hinting at the truly superb. Jonny Phillips is exceptional as English Commander Siward, embodying both quiet integrity and nobility, without ever hinting at stiffness, and the weariness of a man shaping a world he doesn’t quite understand. Brian Ferguson (who I must confess I had mistaken for Jonathan Slinger doing a brilliant Scots accent until I read the cast list) is enigmatic and strangely comic as Malcolm, never truly letting on whether his weakness is calculated or genuine. Sam Swann offers an accomplished performance, capturing the bravura and confusion of a young soldier without ever reverting to stereotype or parody.

The Blonde – who would now like to be known as Legally Blonde following a career development and a trip to the Savoy Theatre a few weeks ago – and I were divided on Siobham Redmond, playing Gruach (Lady Macbeth to you Shakespeare scholars out there). She thought that Ms Redmond brought to the role a power, strength and perseverance of character which was admirable and compelling to watch; I was less convinced, being slightly bored by her scenes and unconvinced by her proto-romance with the otherwise very convincing Siward.

It’s perhaps unfortunate for the RSC that they are so unfailingly competent. There are many well funded national institutions, mentioning no names, who regularly fail to present theatre which is even professional, far less compelling and perhaps these failures make their successes, when they come, slightly sweeter.

But work like Dunsinane – a superbly interesting and well-executed script, supported by excellent acting in a faultless production (although Legally Blonde thought the stage was a little small) – is exactly what the RSC should be striving for.

Really Old, Like Forty Five is a play about ageing and our society’s response to it. It’s also about youth. And family relationships. And ruthless corporate capitalism. And robots.

I’m all for wide ranging themes in theatre.  Angels in America is the best kind of example of a sweeping, bold, brave and expansive examination of a society.  Really Old is the best kind of example of a complete thematic mess.  It can’t decide whether it wants to be Iris, The Power of Yes, August: Osage County or D.A.R.Y.L. It manages to be none of these, but instead manages to be bland, confused (my theatre companion’s theory was that watching it was supposed to actually replicate what it’s like to get Alzheimers) and utterly uninsightful.

It’s difficult to overstate what a clunking, pointless and frustrating production this is.  The dialogue zips along with all the pace and zing of an electric mobility scooter and the performances are, without a single exception, just terribly, terribly weak.

A typical extract from the script, indicative of the wit with which this production conducts itself:

Three women, two old one young, enter and look at a large turtle.  The premise of the following scene is that the turtle is alive but no efforts should be made to make the turtle appear in the least lifelike.  If possible, it should be highly varnished and incredibly, incredibly unrealistic.

A note on the performances: at no time should the actors engage with each other.  If possible, all should face blankly towards the audience and disclaim boomingly into the auditorium in – if possible – monotone voices.

Young Woman: I wonder what it’s like to be an old turtle.

Old Woman 1: I’ll tel you what it’s like to be an old turtle

Pause for laughter.

Or another example of the kind of comedy corkers you can expect:

Old Woman 1: What would you think if it was a rabbit?

Young Woman: What?

Old Woman 1: A rabbit.

Young Woman: Do you mean robot?

Old Woman 1: Yes, I mean robot.

Old Woman 2: Well you said rabbit.

Pause for laughter.

That’s not to say there aren’t any good bits. At one point, shortly before the interval, one of the characters stares at the audience and says “Why is my mum in that computer game?”  Which is a curious question to ask because, frankly, it really wasn’t at all clear why, on earth, the playwright had decided to put her mum in a computer game. And really, if anyone’s going to know, it’s probably one of the characters in this complete shambles of a play rather than any of the poor confused people watching it.

We were sincerely hoping that, post interval and glass of wine, things might pick up as the robots (yes, there are robots – it’s all to do with the dehumanised nature of our institutionalised approach to healthcare and our ageing population, you see) threw off their shackles and waged war against their human overlords.  My prediction – that the old women would be forced to barricade themselves in their homes in order to defeat a time-travelling assassin from the future hell bent on destroying the children who would one-day become the leaders of the resistance – sadly didn’t come true; but my companion’s prediction – that someone’s face would fall off – remarkably turned out to be the way in which the playwright decided to pursue the drama.

In the end, with a script as weak as this, Really Old was never going to be anything except Really Poor, but the National didn’t help themselves with this lifeless, flat and poorly acted production.

Thanks for writing again. I do appreciate it. But I think we both know that we need to talk about us.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate your friendship. It’s really not. It’s just that you only seem to write to me when you want something, like money or for me to come and see a play you’re involved in. Frankly, I put up with enough of that at university.

I promised myself I wouldn’t get personal, but your latest letter us a perfect example. Asking if I want to “renew” our friendship for 2010 at a cost of £30 makes me feel a little like you’re using me. I also don’t appreciate the rigid labels you insist on applying to everything: £150 to be a “good friend” seems unreasonable given how good a friend I’ve been to you (I came to see The Investigation, for heavens sake!) and a £1200 fee to be your best friend just feels like you’re being mercenary.

I know that I haven’t been a perfect friend. I didn’t come to see Kursk and I was a little rude behind your back about The Girlfriend Experience. I’m also not proud of some of the circumstances around how we started our friendship: I was on the rebound following a really messy friendship which left me really vulnerable (did you see Speed the Plow?), but any sort of accusation that you were just a “younger model” are absolutely false and the fact that you both have similar names is pure coincidence.

But I’m sure you’ll admit that there are mistakes on your side as well. I think we both know that you’re not proud of what you did on Annie Get Your Gun. You never send anything on my birthday. And any time I write to you asking to borrow some money you just ignore me or fob me off with “the Arts Council doesn’t allow us to make loans or gifts to audience members”. And I thought we were friends.

Look, I’m not saying that we should be enemies or that we shouldn’t see each other any more. I just think we need some space to consider what it is that we both want from this friendship.

All the best,

-ST

I am writing on behalf of the Honourable Association of Theatre Critics for Real Newspapers to express my concern about your organisation’s behaviour during recent previews for Legally Blonde The Musical.

Staggering the press previews for this production might be helpful in offering Theatre Critics flexibility in their timetables and allowing Theatre Critics to experience what a real performance is like but it really misses the point about why we Theatre Critics are Theatre Critics in the first place. I didn’t get to have a chat with my mates beforehand (who are also Theatre Critics, you understand) and the chances of seeing another Walker/Shuttleworth bust up was dramatically diminished by having to guess which night they’d both come to.

All of this pales in comparison to the dreadful treatment afforded some of my fellow Theatre Critics. Some have reported being forced to sit in the middle of a row (!) containing ordinary people. As if that’s not bad enough, some of these people enjoyed the show and applauded at the end whilst standing up. I mean really. The last time I stood up in a theatre was in 1954 and that was only because Harold Hobson needed the loo.

Needless to say I hated your pink fluffy enjoyable play at The Savoy. Hated it with a passion. Not enough to pay for a ticket and justifiably break the embargo (what do you think I am, a blogger?) but enough to tell everyone that Michael Billington will HATE this when he writes about it on Thursday. That’ll teach you.

Yours faithfully,
Honourable Association of Theatre Critics for Real Newspapers

The Kreutzer Sonata, on the other hand, gets it right. Hilton McRae is not just impressive, but actively engaging as he recounts the story of his marriage, his wife’s dubious adultery, his jealousy and her murder at his hands. There are no shortcuts here, which is so often the problem with monologues: the set is superb, the music is beautifully performed, the most dramatic moments are illuminated by a veiled pair of actors performing behind a gauze and Natalie Abrahami’s direction is spot on.

McRae’s performance is shocking and compelling. The conceit is that we are sharing a railway carriage the protagonist , one which we are socially unable to escape – a conceit which is well realised in the Gate’s tiny auditorium where an early exit would require much clambering and uncomfortable proximity with the performers (this was confirmed by my neighbour who spent the whole time whispering “this is crap” and then tweeting “this is crap” but didn’t muster the courage to make an exit). This proximity with McRae is uncomfortable, particularly during the most gruesome parts of his account, but it works wonderfully in the context and serves to focus our attention closely on his words.

To deliver an 80 minute monologue which is coherent and interesting is an impressive feat, but to watch one which is as compelling and beautifully crafted as The Kreutzer Sonata is a pleasure.

All of which is a rather roundabout way of saying that this is my list, in no particular order, of the top theatre of the last decade:

The Histories, RSC, Stratford upon Avon, 2006-8
In terms of sheer scale and ambition, there are few endeavours that can match the RSC’s epic cycle.  Running through all eight of Shakespeare’s history plays* with a common cast, this unflinching endeavour covers 118 years of English History, took almost two years to perform and was seen by over a quarter of a million people.  It all culminated in one weekend in which all the plays were run through in chronological order over the course of four days in the lovely Courtyard Theatre in February 2008 – one of the most spectacular displays of acting and technical endurance one can imagine.

The Pillowman, National, London and tour, 2003-5
Just reading this play – a superbly dark, funny and thoughtful work about the nature of creativity and the importance of art - assures Martin McDonagh as one of the cleverest and funniest playwrights working in English today. Seeing the perfectly cast David Tennant, Jim Broadbend and Nigel Lindsay bring it to life confirmed it.

Festen, Almeida and West End Transfer, London, 2004
Meticulously directed and designed (particularly the dinner scene, memorable not least for its realistic eating, which is surprisingly difficult to get right on stage, I hear) production of this bizarre and chilling dogme film.  Jonny Lee Miller led in Islington and later Paul Nicholls (of Eastenders fame, ish) took over for the West End transfer.

August: Osage County, National, London, 2008
Dark, funny and wonderfully performed US transfer. It’s length (not one, but two intervals to endure at the Lyttelton bar) should have counted against it, but its humour and enthralling depiction of a family falling apart kept the seats full right until the closing curtain.

Masque of the Red Death, BAC, London, 2007
Not everybody loved it (“it’s not theatre, it’s too dark, it’s daft, the masks don’t fit, there’s no plot, it’s boring, it’s stupid, I thought the estate agent next door was an internet cafe because I’ve never seen a Foxtons before”) but I suppose that was never the point. Punchdrunk, claimants to the throne of Britain’s most inventive theatre company, once again brought their own brand of site specific magic to the Battersea Arts Centre, transforming the Clapham Junction venue (yeah, not really Battersea is it) into a haunted house amusement fair for theatre and dance geeks. Everybody has their own version of the night to tell and if you couldn’t get tickets (which many couldn’t, despite it running for months) then you truly missed a unique event.

Hamlet, RSC, Statford and London transfer, 2008
It’s not easy to pick just one Hamlet for the decade. Trevor Nunn made headlines and a star of Ben Whishaw (just witness the length of the returns queue to see his Cock at the Royal Court**) when he cast a bunch of 20-somethings in 2004.  And Jude Law was pretty impressive at the Donmar.  But for me, David Tennant’s intensely physical Hamlet, Patrick Stewart’s wonderfully underplayed Claudius and Robert Jones’ lustrous set take the prize.

Dr Faustus, Young Vic, London, 2002
The Jude Law show took over the Young Vic back in 2002 for a production of this rather difficult play.  Director David Lan didn’t make things easier for himself by casting only seven people for a play which requires Faustus to confront seven deadly sins and nobody who could really pass themselves off as a convincing Helen of Troy for a play which has “was this the face that launched a thousand ships” as its most famous line.  His production in the round dealt with these minor issues (through Kate Flatt’s inventive choreography and the use of a mirror, respectively) and many more with aplomb and presented Jude Law as a superb dramatic actor, as well as a movie star.

This list is, needless to say, subjective and very much skewed towards London which is unfair given the really rather good work going on in the regions.  I’m not the only one to put together a similar list, and the others are listed below (if you have one, I’d be delighted to link to it – just drop me an email):

• The Sunday Times reckons that The Norman Conquests was the third best theatrical event of the decade.  Other than that (and God of Carnage and Stovepipe), it’s a pretty solid list
• The Village Voice – NY focused, unsurprisingly
• The Guardian heart Punchdrunk, the National, the Globe and, for some reason, verbatim theatre

* Henry VIII doesn’t count because it’s rubbish and has loads of stage direction and isn’t consecutive with the rest of them and nobody really thinks Shakespeare wrote much of it. Mostly because it’s rubbish.

** Geddit?

The Priory really is a rather old fashioned play. Cast of seven, same setting throughout, lots of people walking on and off for slightly incongruous reasons so that appropriate plot-driving conversations can take place, dramatic tension, character development, the whole lot. After all this site specific intensity and metatheatrical tomfoolery and clinical interwar nihilistic eroticism and stylised corporate villianry and that bloody cart, a good old fashioned play about people and stuff is quite a breath of fresh air.

The location is a converted priory, the time is New Year’s Eve and the protagonist is Kate, recently dumped, who wants to spend the evening with a group of close friends, without drugs and without drama. Needless to say, these plans make for a boring play and so the arrival of the excitable Laura, the insufferable Rebecca and the insatiable Adam move things up a gear, as do the revelations as to Kate’s real reasons for organising the evening’s celebrations.

For the most part The Priory treads superbly a thin line between comedy and tragedy. There are very funny moments and very horrible moments, funny moments you can’t believe you’re the only one laughing to and horrible moments when you can’t believe anybody else is laughing. It’s not perfect (there’s a date rape joke which feels crass rather than clever and falls very flat), but some sequences are wonderfully pitched, such as the stand off between Kate and Rebecca, where every salvo was met with a laugh or an audible gasp.

The performances are solid, with Jessica Hynes as Kate particularly strong and Rupert Penry-Jones superbly, although somewhat predictably, cast as charming and unreliable.

The Priory runs until 9 January at the Royal Court. Book here.

I can’t have been the only person who viewed the Northern Broadsides/West Yorkshire Playhouse’s casting of Lenny Henry as Othello as leaden with potential for a truly disastrous theatre spectacle, a respected regional company sacrificing its hard won integrity in favour of celebrity- and novelty-driven audiences.

I also can’t gave been the only one who was subsequently surprised to read that he was actually garnering pretty solid reviews. Charles Spencer in the Telegraph said it was “one of the most astonishing debuts in Shakespeare I have ever seen”. Mr Billingham in the Guardian saw in Henry a “simple dignity to his performance that touches one”.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. This production is not a disaster, but neither is it really terribly compelling or interesting. All kudos to Lenny Henry for taking on something very challenging and well beyond the call of duty for a bone fide National Treasure, but let’s call a spade a spade: this show is, at best, passably competent and, at worst, pretty embarrassing.

Henry is fine, but by no means impressive. His physicality, his relative size and his powerful activity on stage, is compelling but he garbles his lines incomprehensibly and in this his underconfidence is palpable.

He is supported ably by Conrad Nelson, playing Iago, who is the indoubted star of the production, brimming with intelligence and interesting approaches to familiar lines – and with the added benefit of being audible to the audience. It would be difficult to imagine a more unexceptional Desdemona than Jessica Harris and most of the other characters come across as flat and uninteresting.

The main problem with this Othello isn’t the cast, however, but the utter vacuum in which they operate. There is not a single identifiable directorial choice in this production, by which I don’t mean that it is slick and effortless, but that is bland and uninteresting. Those choices which are evident are wrong: all the male characters look the same, making them unidentifiable to even someone who knows the play; the combat scenes are unimpressive; the set is uninspired, bland enough to serve for any Shakespeare. A director who spent the whole rehearsal period shouting “SPEAK SLOWER! NOBODY CAN HEAR YOU!” would have been a start, but we didn’t even have that, let alone somebody to stamp their own vision on this classic.

This is by no means a catastrophe, and Lenny Henry’s performance is no joke, but it is, at best, a pretty weak production – the fact that it all could have been a lot worse doesn’t really justify the ticket price.

When did Bermondsey get so trendy? When I first arrived in London, losing sight of the river anywhere east of London bridge was immediate precursor to losing your wallet or several pints of blood. It certainly wasn’t the place to go to enjoy loft living, check out a new vintage boutique, grab a bite at the local gastropub and then taste a few local microbrews while blogging about your trip to the nearby climbing wall and juice bar.

I am reliably informed, in fact, that Bermondsey is the new Hoxton. I’m not trying to sell you a flat, but according to my observations last Saturday, it certainly is an upcoming artistic and cultural hotspot: nearly everybody I saw was dressed up as a sexy witch, a sexy cat, a sexy devil or a stab victim (some things never change, I suppose). If that doesn’t say “artistic enclave close to shops and bars” then I don’t know what does.

The particular warehouse conversion I was there to see has been recently renovated to a high standard in neutral colours and now boasts a spacious bar perfect for entertaining and an enormous clunking and hissing metal machine – certain to be a conversation piece at your next social gathering.

Money, the new site specific show from Shunt, centres on this machine, which is some sort of vague analogy for capitalism or the fall of man or man’s inhumanity to man or the condition of man or man’s natural state as savage or something. It’s never quite clear and the whole message behind proceedings turns out to be really quite blunt – but that’s hardly the point because this was never really going to be about a message or a story or identifiable theme, and is really all about the proceedings themselves, which are actually quite slick and well done.

We are marched around and plunged into darkness, we watch from below and above, we pelt performers with plastic balls as we drink champagne – a particular metatheatrical conceit which will be extended by statute to all theatres in the land when I’m Prime Minister – and we sit transfixed as the entite machine tries one spin cycle too far and attempts takeoff with us inside.

The plot is absent and the mock gravity is laughable (our actors had an especially tough time performing the late show on a Saturday night which happens to be haloween and where the bar has been open for three and a half hours – later on a stage manager appealed plaintively for the return of a pilfered door key), but that’s never the point. This is really a very silly and pointless show, but the attention to detail us superb and the set pieces are fantasticly slick which is really the whole point.

Early viewing recommended.

As I’ve previously written, The Habit of Art is a serious undertaking for the National Theatre. The previous Bennett/Hytner collaboration was the much lauded (and enormously profitable) History Boys which did much to bolster Hytner’s reputation at Sellafield on Thames.

The comparisons between the new play and the former are inevitable but unhelpful, because The Habit of Art is a strikingly different play: focused on the creation of art and its associated processes, theatre, authorship and filled throughout with meta-theatrical devices. It is, in short, much more of an Alan Bennett play than The History Boys ever was.

The plot follows a rehearsal for a new production at the National, with Frances de la Tour at the helm as Stage Manager in the absence of the director – who has been called away to Leeds for a conference on the importance of regional theatre which he had forgotten about.

The play within the play is called Caliban’s Day and focuses on an imagined meeting late in life between WH Auden (played by Fitz, played by Richard Griffiths who replaced Michael Gambon due to illness), Benjamin Britten (played by Henry, played by Alex Jennings) and a rent boy representing Caliban (played by Stuart, played by Stephen Wight). The narrator is Humphrey Carpenter, their biographer, played by Donald, played by Adrian Scarborough. If it all sounds terribly convoluted then it’s testament to Bennett’s nimble touch that it never feels like that for a moment.

This set up, in fact, gives Bennett a superb blank canvas on which to play with ideas such as the nature of theatre (“I’m a device!” whines one actor, “Of course he’s a fucking device!” exclaims the author, himself a device), the nature of creativity and the nature of reputation.  Each of these themes is overlaid by an overarching question as to the intersection between the essential natures of these concepts and their associated peripheries, the eponymous ‘habits’.

Needless to say, Bennett’s script fizzes with wit, humour and intellect.  Needless to say, the performances are faultless (although it must be admitted that they are more competent than they are exceptional).  Needless to say, the direction feels slick and effortless. The play never truly engages on an emotional level – we never really care about Auden or Britten or the actors putting on the preposterous Caliban’s Day – but given the many layers with which Bennett weaves his play, perhaps that’s not a failing.  Whatever this play lacks in heart it certainly makes up for in brains.

The Habit of Art will likely not run for half a decade, likely not make instant stars of its entire cast, likely not reduce audiences to weeping and likely not fill the coffers of the NT to bursting.  Nevertheless, this is an excellent production of an excellent play – and we can’t really ask more than that.