A scene from Nicholas Hytner's production of One Man, Two Guvnors in the National Theatre's Olivier repertoire starring James Corden, transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket and to New York. Photo: Johann Persson

At Driving Miss Daisy

Wyndham's

The title Driving Miss Daisy has two meanings. It invites us to ask not only who is driving the elderly Miss Daisy but also what is driving her. In that writer Alfred Uhry focuses exclusively on answering these two questions, his play takes us on a perfect circular journey.

   The answer to the first question - who is driving Miss Daisy? - is James Earl Jones. As Hoke Coleburn, the grizzled black chauffeur, he is very much in the driver's seat. Taken on by Daisy's son when Daisy's eyesight makes her a menace on the roads of her Georgia hometown, Hoke just loves his car. And when Jones's face breaks into such an engaging grin of pleasure every time he gets behind the wheel of his pretend Oldsmobile then we know that the irascible Miss Daisy is in a safe pair of hands - even though of course she fights her son tooth and nail to prevent this indignity being foisted on her.

   Not that Miss Daisy is a racist, as she herself avers on more than one occasion. And when uttered in the firm truthful and softly modulating voice that can only belong to Vanessa Redgrave, you know she speaks the truth. And when we first see her in her kitchen vigorously beating the flour and eggs into a cake mixture, splendidly attired in her armour of apron and Alice band, we know that Miss Daisy has always done her own domestic chores. What is driving her though - in answer to the second question -  is that same feisty sense of independence and integrity which will ensure she continues to develop and grow as the Civil Rights movement itself develops and grows over the quarter century that her unlikely friendship with Hoke prevails.

   The Civil Rights movement is only the backdrop to this play and director David Esbjornson conveys its epic sweep with some moving and iconic black and white projections. In the forefront this affectionate play is about friendship and old age, with old age being the great leveller. Its overriding vision of both the personal and the political is contained in the words of that old marching anthem: 'we'll walk hand in hand…..some day-ay-aayy….for deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome one day….'  

   Hoke is a bit of an Uncle Tom, kindly disposed to white folk and knowing his place in the scheme of things. Only once does he stand his ground - and then only for the short while it takes Miss Daisy to learn she shouldn't take him for granted. His reminiscences of lynchings back in the day sound curiously nostalgic. We know a little of his back story but not as much as Miss Daisy's, because Miss Daisy is the subject of this play and Hoke, although the driver, is its object, essentially a backseat passenger. To compensate, Uhry gives him the best and the funniest lines which Jones delivers with a morose relish.

   Miss Daisy is also let off the hook as a white woman in being Jewish and therefore a member of an oppressed ethnic group whose synagogue is also targeted by the Klan. She may not be racist but she is nevertheless still full of funny little prejudices and ideas, but Uhry implies that her general crankiness is just the way she is. For equal measure he shows us that she can't stand the phoniness of Christmas schmaltz either.

   Where the script might be lightweight, Jones and Redgrave create the perfect balance between them, both positively irradiating the stage with a glow that comes from their own personal gravitas built up after a lifetime's achievement and their own political good will achieved after a lifetime's dedication to humanitarian causes. To see both of them on stage together is a pleasure and a glory almost beyond words.

   Uhry's end piece is a perfectly realised sequence in which we see the hitherto elegant and straight backed Redgrave sink stoop shouldered and shapeless into advanced old age, entirely devoted to Jones upon whom she focuses her attention with absolute love and humility. Swapping the Oldsmobile for a wheelchair, he is still her driver and she is still being driven by her indomitable will.

JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR

At Betrayal

Comedy

In Betrayal it seems that Pinter himself thought the role of Robert, the husband, was the best, and, given the choice, chose to play him in a radio adaptation of the play. In Ian Rickson's new production you can see why: Robert is the most mysterious, ambiguous of the three principals.

   The lovers, Emma and Jerry, make it pretty clear what they are feeling, or not feeling, and either way being rather guilty about it. Robert, on the other hand, plays it very cool for most of the time, yet leaves us with the feeling that a volcanic eruption of violence is just beneath the surface, allowed to break out only once, around the midpoint of the play, in the Torcello scene, when he seems about to attack Emma physically, and only just barely holds off. If the play is really, as has often been said, one of the definitive depictions of the neurotically repressed English, forever skating on the thin ice of propriety and what one does or does not do, then Robert is the nub of the argument.

  It is a role which would have been perfect for James Mason (the Mason of Lolita), and would still be perfect for Jeremy Irons (the Irons of Swann in Love). Ben Miles has no difficulty here in keeping us on tenterhooks, never knowing, and always wanting to know, which way this strange and dangerous person will jump next. Unfortunately I did not feel that the two other principals, Kristin Scott Thomas and Douglas Henshall, quite lived up to the challenge.

   The first scene, a locus classicus of the famous Pinter pause - apparently we now call them 'silences' - is promising, as the back history of these two people with more between them than meets the eye gradually emerges from a welter of mutual embarrassment, and we listen with intense concentration. But after this, whenever Robert is not on the scene, things tend to go a little slack. Particularly about two-thirds of the way through. Pinter had a good explanation. Once I remarked to him how amazed I was that he managed to adapt a play like The Caretaker to the screen without apparent loss, when one would have sworn it could not safely lose a word. He replied 'It's easy. The problem with the classical set-up, if you see it as falling into a natural three-act structure with climaxes at the end of the second and the third act, is that for reasons of balance the climaxes are too far apart. The first half of every third act is expendable: servants' tittle-tattle or something of the sort pads the piece out when you long to rush from the first climax to the final catastrophe or happy ending. Cut from there and no one will notice it's gone. After the Torcello scene there is, it seems to me, a definite sag. Maybe it has something to do with the unusual structure of the play, where Pinter has undertaken to tell the story backwards, so that it starts with the lovers after love, or at least the affair, has died, and ends with the almost casual way they drift into it in the first place, both apparently happily married and the parents of growing families. Poor Douglas Henshall possibly suffers most: he is, admittedly, landed with the wimpy, whiney character, with whom it is difficult to feel much sympathy, and he is probably wise to blur the outlines with a softly ingratiating Irish accent. Jeremy Herbert's setting, adroitly modified behind a scrim bearing the date of each scene, is complex when you consider it, but makes reasonably sure that you don't: this is an affair taking place entirely in nondescript back streets worthy of Graham Greene.

Even though it is one long act, played here without an interval, I think that applies also in Betrayal. Kristin Scott Thomas I have frequently admired, whether in homegrown frivolities like Up at the Villa, or in intense French-language stuff like Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (which is, come to think of it, au fond a Gallic take on marital betrayal), but she seems on stage a little colourless and unvarying. Perhaps she is essentially a screen actress. Or perhaps she needed more preview time to work herself into it, though that is difficult to believe: by the time I saw it on the First Night, virtually everyone I know had seen it already, it had been discussed exhaustively on Radio Four, and I had to be very careful to keep my reactions uncorrupted. Ah well, I had better confess that Betrayal has never been one of my favorite Pinter plays, which of course means only the least best, and leave you to disentangle matters for yourselves. 

GERARD WERSON
At The Faith Machine
Royal Court Downstairs
It may have been a small cast of eight  in Alexi Kaye Campbell's new play but their  excellent ensemble performances largely fulfil its big ambitions, asking the questions we ask,  or choose not to ask: why are we living our lives in the ways we do, what might be the consequences of our actions, how are we to face up to the series of choices we must negotiate? This play follows Campbell's 2008 Royal Court award-winning hit The Pride, which tracked the course of gay liberation up to the  more enlightened present. The dramatic situations addressed in Faith Machine  resemble a condensed novel, or perhaps one of the many US cable  dramas we've enjoyed recently. Not even the elegant minimalist design (Mark Thompson) and the fluent accomplished direction (Jamie Lloyd) can however disguise the often prolix and shapeless nature of the piece, which, in this production, requires two intervals . But what it nevertheless impressively does give us are men and women whom we care about, whose predicaments engage and amuseus, whose presence and eventual  loss are vivid to the audience.
  We see the young couple as the play opens (Tom played by Kyle Soller, and Sophie,played by Hayley Atwell) having a row in their New York apartment. Tom is an aspiring novelist taking on an advertising copywrite account with a poisonous pharmaceutical company, and Sophie - she is herself the faith machine - threatens to leave him if he does this deal with the devil.  In the background is the ghost of her father, the bishop Edward (Ian McDiarmid), who is - and was  - the real faith machine as opposed to the marginalised and racked  official faith machine of the tiny state cult known as the Church of England.  
   Edward has retreated in self-imposed exile to Patmos, where Saint John had his revelation, and has made his choice, rejecting the overtures of a black bigoted bishop (Jude Akuwudike) to return to the fold. If this seems rather contrived, it evokes the recent career of the bishop Richard Holloway, and the present plight of the Archbishop of Canterbury who is unable to implement his own liberal views in the worldwide Anglican communion and who is rumoured to be retiring ten years early into an Oxbridge college. McDiarmid gives here one of his utterly commanding performances, full of disgust and self-disgust and even  kindness, but later, in a brilliant (but over-extended scene), descending into dementia.
  If much of this suggests the portentous, that  is often kept at bay by sprightly social comedy and a charming lightness of tone: there is a quartet of lovers, a polite supper-party is comically broken-up and disrupted, an Ukrainian maid (Kezrena James) who is both knowing and naive and who might almost have stepped out of a Coward play, and even in the time-honoured English manner a namecheck that makes the audience laugh (Croydon). Also adding to the rich romance that is part of this brew are time shifts both between the acts and within the acts: so that's what they did, we think, that's who they fell for, that's how that turned out, and we care and we feel for them  much as we did when watching, say, Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. A substantial part of this play - and this is intended as a compliment - is tried tested familiar and successful.
  The centre of the piece's  anguish questioning and acidulous commentary is Tom for  Kyle Soller's performance in this part  is little short of a wonder to behold: he is young, American, honest open and corrupt, charged with nervy energy, blurting out what he thinks and feels as he makes his good-natured  American collaboration with the corrupt status quo. As  you watch this brilliant performance in all its almost cartoonish mental and physical energy it etches  itself indelibly in the memory. Tom is redeemed rather unconvincingly at the conclusion of the drama but more to the point is that his attitudes offset the megaphone attitudes of the female faith healer, who often has  too much to say, alas - particularly in her opening scene - in a prosy sub-melodramatic manner. Living and making choices would be much easier if the faith healer looked and sounded like Tom who is, let's face it, on the side of Fun.

 

NICK AHAD
In the North

When he arrived in Sheffield to run the famous Crucible, Lyceum and Studio (in the biggest theatre complex in the UK outside the National Theatre) Daniel Evans made a number of commitments. He would act on stage, he said. He would bring to the region the best plays which had premiered in London, he said and he would bring the best of the UK's theatre talent to Steel City.
  He has already made good on a number of his promises, but in The Pride, he makes good on all three at once. Originally debuted at the Royal Court in 2008, The Pride is brought to Sheffield in its first outing since then, with a sublime cast and in Richard Wilson a brilliant director. Although best known in the UK for his television work in front of the camera in One Foot In the Grave and Merlin, Wilson is regarded as one of the country's best directors of new writing and, on the strength of this, it is not difficult to see why.
  The Pride, a first play from Alexi Kaye Campbell, has at its heart an interesting device and one that surprises, given the author's inexperience.
Crossing a time divide, it tells the story of three characters whose lives collide in 1958 and three separate characters, who share the same name - and ultimately some of the same heartache - in 2008.Oliver of the '58 vintage is played with a heartbreaking gentleness by Daniel Evans and a waspish sense of fun in 2008. Although this chamber piece is very much a three hander, it feels like Oliver's story and it is with the openness of a country field in summer that Evans draws us in and along with him.
   In 1958 Oliver, a gay novelist, meets with his illustrator Sylvia and her strangely uptight husband Philip. Jamie Sives plays Philip like a wounded tiger, sizing up his prey, wanting to pounce but needing to ensure that he has the fight in him to emerge the victor. Philip is repressing his homosexuality while Oliver has come to terms with who he is. The scenes when these two are left alone together by Sylvia crackle with an almost unbearable tension. It is a tension that boils over horrifically, unbearably, at the end of the first act when a terrible incident of violence is committed in 1958.
   Despite the immensely strong performances and intense directing, the final third of the play lets The Pride down a little, when Campbell appears to lose his nerve. His dialogue often, particularly in the 1958 sections, is reminiscent of Rattigan, all untold emotions bubbling beneath the surface. In the final third, however, he brings us a happy ending of sorts, which can't help but feel like a cop out. It is as though Campbell feels the need to reward us with levity for having gone on such a difficult journey thus far. It is a small failing, and given it is his first play, an excusable one. There will be much more to come from this talent.
   While Campbell is a talent with promise, a talent fulfilled is Jonathan Munby. A director with an impressive CV, he was at the helm of The Prince of Homburg at London's Donmar in autumn 2010, and his Canterbury Tales for the RSC toured America. In early summer he brought a scorching Italian heat to the Quarry Theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds with his production of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore. The controversial play had lost none of its power to shock and the theatre found itself in the middle of a war of words with the local Catholic church over its advertising of the play. If he had any nerves due to the controversy, which threatened protesters outside the theatre on show night, Munby showed none with a piece of work that was masterfully directed.
The tale of a brother and sister whose incestuous relationship condemns the sister, Annabella, to an untimely grave, it is clearly a twisted version of Romeo and Juliet (Ford was writing less than a century after Shakespeare's demise). Annabella, brought to life with an immature playfulness by recent graduate, Sara Vickers, appears alongside Damien Molony, another making his debut, as her brother Giovanni. Munby, however, is not blessed with strong performances in these two leads. The older actors of the cast are far stronger, in particular Sally Dexter as Hippolita, who prowls like a jaguar in her black oufits.
  The relative strengths and weaknesses of the performances, however, are secondary to the direction on show. Rarely have I seen a production taken quite so firmly by the scruff of the neck and directed with such vigour. It is reminiscent of Michael Grandage's Don Carlos, which transferred to the West End after opening in Sheffield in the early 2000s.Munby makes statement after bold statement with a piece of work that bears his stamp through its very dna.
   A much more collaborative effort came from the simply brilliant Mapping the City. The zeitgeist across the North firmly rests with promenade performances, which is what all the interesting young, building-less companies appear to be doing.So it is with Slung Low, a Leeds-based outfit that works across the country, whose latest show was based at Hull Truck Theatre - but only for about the first five minutes. After that, the audience, limited to around 30, were led a merry, happy dance around the city's streets. And what a dance we were led.
   Three stories, each written by a different playwright, were presented across the city. The audience listens in to the actors' dialogue through headphones, they wear radio mics. The stories, all beautifully, poetically written, are genuinely wonderful and often heart-wrenching, the real magic that happens in this performance comes from the very special relationship that happens between the audience, the actors and the city in which the action plays out. As you walk down streets, through alleyways, into abandoned buildings, you have no idea where the next amazing piece of theatre will spring from. If promenade theatre is done this well, then I hope it's here to stay.