Endgame at The Old Vic was typical Beckett

For reasons that escape me there is a flood of Beckett performances this year and hot on my visit to Jermyn Street Theatre for a Triple Bill of his works there I found myself at The Old Vic for two more.

As is customary at The Old Vic I went for a seat in the gods, Lilian Baylis Circle where seat A-16 cost me a reasonable £30. There is a safety rail directly across the view but, depending on the staging, I can either sit forward and look over it or slink down and look over it. This time I did a little of both.

Looking around it did not seem to be much of a Beckett audience and I suspect a lot of people were pulled in by Alan Cumming and/or Danial Radcliffe. My suspicions were reinforced when after the short opening play, Rough for Theatre II, the young woman behind me asked the person next to her to explain what was going on in the play as if expecting clarity and simplicity from Beckett.

Rough for Theatre II was an exploration of office work with documents explored and sections read out. Of course the situation was more complex than that and this was done while a man was poised to throw himself out of a window. The pointlessness and the pernicketyness of the situation made this a light funny piece, a reasonable appetiser for the main course.

Endgame felt something like Happy Days with the main character, played by Alan Cumming this time, unable, or unwilling, to move but the differences were significant; here there was much more dialogue with other characters and that dialogue was questioning.

It was still Beckett dialogue though and as with all his other plays (that I know of) it was poetic, quirky, humorous and pointless. That is what I had gone to see and Endgame delivered.

Sea Wall at The Old Vic

Some plays have "mandatory" written all over them, and this was one of them mostly thanks to the name Simon Stephens though the name Andrew Scott helped too. I have a Google Alert set up for Simon Stephens and that has led me to several of his plays across London in recent years.

There was quite a buzz about this play because of the recent high-profile performances by Andrew Scott but despite waiting a couple of hours to negotiate The Old Vic's online queueing system it was fairly easy to get the seat that I wanted, Lilian Baylis Circle A-13 for £20. I was almost tempted to go for a better seat but, to be honest, charging £80 for a forty minute performance seemed something like robbery.

Sea Wall was first performed at Bush Theatre and I am sure was fantastic in that space but it got somewhat lost in the relative vastness of Old Vic, neither the play nor the performance were enough to fill the space. It was interesting enough and for £20 I could not complain about the cost but it did not live up to the hype and that made it something of a disappointment.

Bob Dylan shines in Girl from the North Country at Old Vic

It took quite a lot to get me to see this as, apart from the promise of some Bob Dylan music, nothing about it appealed to me. It sounded bland and I do not like bland.

Then the good reviews flooded in and that was still not enough. Finally a friend said it was so good she was considering going again and that forced me to consider it. I was lucky and was able to get a single seat on its own, A30, in the front row of the Lillian Baylis Circle (my usual place) for a not to be argued over £21. I got a safety rail in front of me for that but I knew from previous experience that I could live with that.

I was still not sure what to expect, which is how I like it, and I settled into my seat with no preconceptions.

I think Girl from the North Country was a musical. There was certainly plenty of music in it but little (if any) of it seemed to be directly related to the story. This was not just an excuse to play some greatest hits either and I did not recognise most of the songs despite owning, and playing, several Dylan albums.

The songs were the highlight of the show and all were delivered with energy and panache. The singing roles were shared widely and successfully, leading to much clapping after every song, just like at a more obvious musical. Those not singing the lead in a particular song were usually dancing, providing some backing vocal, playing instruments or some combination there of. These were long songs too and they filled the performance with their exuberance and, thanks to Dylan's Nobel Prize winning lyrics, intelligent wit.

The songs led the way and the story flowed around them. It flowed nicely too. The simple premise, a guest house, allowed us to follow the fortunes of many people who lived, worked or stayed there. These were generally unsetting stories which was not surprising given that this was set in 1934, just a few years after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 when America was wallowing in the Great Depression. There were tales of love and humour in the mix but there were more about despair and unhappiness.

Girl from the North Country (I never did work out why it was called that) was an undoubted success and an affirmation of humanity and it's ability to survive large setbacks. The large cast was excellent and deserved all the cheers they got but the undoubted star of the show was Robert Zimmerman.

Well crafted and hilarious Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at The Old Vic

As the poster suggests, the main draw for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Old Vic Theatre‎ was meant to be Daniel Radcliffe but my main reason for going was that this was a play that I had heard of but had not seen and the name Tom Stoppard suggested that I should. I was in the queue for tickets promptly and so managed to get hold of Lilian Baylis Circle (the top level) B23 for £39 which was towards the top end of what I was prepared to pay.

The Old Vic is well situated close to Waterloo Station and so I was able to leave work soon after the end of the working day (5:30pm), but well before anybody else, to get to Culture Grub for 6:30pm where I am recognised as a regular. I went for the Chinese style curry with boiled rice, which I may have had once or twice before, and will have once or twice again.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead entertained from the very start as the two leads undertook the tasks given to them by King Claudius in Hamlet in a bumbling and uncertain manner. So uncertain were they that even they could not work out who was Rosencrantz and who was Guildenstern. Their Mr Bean like antics were a core of the play and that was a very solid core.

On a few occasions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern crossed into the world of Hamlet and we had some familiar scenes from that play embedded into this one. A simple device that was very effective.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern crossed paths a few times with The Player, a harlequin character played with great gusto and aplomb by David Haig, who will always be one of the marks in The Hustle to me. His performance had been described as show stealing in some reviews that I had seen and while I could understand why that had been said I think that the strongest performance was Joshua McGuire as Guildenstern (or was it Rosencrantz?).

The production did a lot to emphasise the fun of the story and the play was two hours of relentless light entertainment that brought many smiles and much laughter, the antithesis to the Hamlet that inspired it.

The Master Builder at the Old Vic

The poster tells you why I went to see The Master Builder; it has the impressive names Fiennes, Ibsen and Hare on it.

The Ibsen name was the more problematic of the three and it had taken me some effort (two viewings and one listening in a short period) to appreciate Ghosts. But The Master Builder was just the sort of play that I should be seeing and The Old Vic was just the sort of place to see it.

It's an expensive theatre, certainly when compared to most of the ones that I go to, so I headed up to the top level, as usual, and claimed my place in the Lilian Baylis Circle Seat A24 for an acceptable £30. The view there was fine, as the photo shows. The leg room was somewhat limited but not really a problem except for when trying to get past people to get to my seat.

The Master Builder of the play is an architect, Halvard, who had risen to become the leading builder in his locality. In rising he had trampled over some people, the son of one of whom, Ragnar,Apple Store now worked for him as a junior. Also working for him was that man's intended fiancee, Kaia. Halvard and Kaia had a thing going on which Halvard's wife, Aline, suspected.

Playing the steadying influence was the Chekovian Doctor Herdal and making everything even more complicated was Hilde, a pretty young woman from a nearby town who had come to visit Halvard in response to a promise he had made to her to build castles in the air when she was a young girl ten years earlier.

The play then wrestled with several psychological ideas including Halvard's relationships with the young women, his legacy and his relationship with God, another Master Builder. Pointedly, Halvard was addressed as The Master Builder throughout.

The tension in the plot came from Halvard's possible futures which included scandal, contented retirement, overthrow by a young contender, success and failure. Elements of the past were uncovered which helped to explain somethings and to darken the mood further. Halvard was, to put it simply, trapped between his joyless wife and the childish dreams of Hilde.

My frustration with Ibsen is that there was clearly a lot going on in all of the relationships and I felt like I was missing a lot of the detail, rather like going to a party where you do not know anybody else there, things were said but meanings were missed. I am sure that I would appreciate The Master Builder more on a second or third viewing but I would have liked to have got more from the first.

The other thing that slightly spoiled it for me was the way that Fiennes portrayed Halvard. He spent a lot of time standing up with his hands on his hips and I simply could not get the image of Leonard Rossiter as Rigsby out of my mind. Even Halvard's waistcoat seemed to be a homage to Rigsby's cardigan.

Those gripes aside, it was still a decent enough play and I thought that Sarah Snook was excellent as the playful Hilde. There was plenty in the characters and their stories to get to grips with and it was an enthralling couple of hours of drama.

Kevin Spacey's swan song with Clarence Darrow at the Old Vic

Occasionally I push the boat out and go for a west end production when my natural instincts are to live among the fringe theatres. Clarence Darrow was one such occasion and the clear reason for going was to see Kevin Spacey at his swansong as artistic director at the Old Vic. I has seen him as Richard III in 2011 and he had been brilliant in that.

Even so, there was still a limit to what I was prepared to pay for the experience and I went for a relatively cheap ticket (£35) up in the gods (Lilian Baylis Circle D15).

My expectations were given a little lift when I saw Twelve Angry Men a few days previously and somebody mentioned Clarence Darrow (the real person, not the play) in that.

On the day I worked in our Kings Cross office and walked the increasingly familiar road down to Southwark looking for somewhere to eat. I discovered Culture Grub, a small Chinese restaurant that seems to cater mostly for students and the poorer locals. The food was good, quick and cheap. I suspect that I'll be back there next time I am looking to eat before going to the Old or Young Vics.

My view from the gods was fine and my reasoning that the play would be all about the voice and little about the staging proved to be right. The stage, such as it was, consisted of a desk and a few cabinets in his office. Some unpacking and sorting out was going on but that was just an excuse to add movement to the play.

The other technique used to make the play more than just a speech was to engage with the audience in some of the exchanges. Nobody sitting in the front rows was ready for this and so it did not always work that well.

But that was just the froth on the top, the play was all about Kevin Spacey's delivery of Clarence Darrow's words. These fell into two camps, stories about his life and reenactments of court scenes. This approach worked very well and produced a variety of moods that a simple narration could have missed. In his personal life Darrow was funny, flippant and motivated and as a court lawyer he was passionate and loquacious.

And that was kind of the point, Darrow had his heart in the right place and he had the skills to help people.

Darrow explained several cases to us and, given the period that we were talking about, it is not surprising that these covered unionisation (a.k.a. communism) and race. Darrow was helping the people in real-life that Steinbeck was standing up for in his books. My sympathies were naturally with the people that Darrow was working for and that helped me to like him and, therefore, the play.

The mix of narration and re-enactment gave the play some mood changes while the pace stayed pretty constant with no twists or surprises. It was left to the skill of Kevin Spacey to breath life in to the words, and that he did. This was a fitting farewell for Spacey but more because it was a one-man show rather than because of the strength of the role. I'll remember his Richard III more.

Stella cast for The Crucible at The Old Vic

The Crucible at the Old Vic was one of the "must see" plays of the Summer (the other was A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic, just down the road) and I duly bought my ticket some months in advance. I was not entirely convinced though and I balked at paying anything like the top price and so I went for a seat (B26) in the Lilian Baylis Circle, i.e. the top level. Even up there I had to fork out £30.

It was another work in Reading day but the transport worked well (the main risk was the time it can take to get from the office to Reading station by bus) and I got to Waterloo in good time to try another tasty West Cornwall Pasty before diving in to The Pit Bar for a beer.

Fed and watered I trudged to the top of the building to take my seat. It was comfortable enough and the view was fine.

The stage was arranged differently from my previous visits being almost in the round with a few seats to the side of the stage and a few more at the back. To be honest I am not sure that the arrangement worked for everybody as it was a fairly static performance, it's a play of words not actions, which meant that some people would have spent some time looking at the back of the person talking. I had no such trouble up in the gods.

For all that Arthur Miller was a big name playwright I had never seen one of his plays before and had little idea of what to expect. The running time of over three hours, with an interval on top of that, was something of a clue that this could be a long smouldering American drama in the vein of Long Day's Journey into Night or, more recently, Dances with Wolves. And so it proved to be.

The Crucible told the story of the Salem Witch Trials where a bit of fun, girls dancing in the woods, leads to accusations of witchcraft and this is then blamed for everything bad that happens and suspicious eyes were turned on any behaviour deemed unusual. Behaviour like reading.

A group of honest villagers got caught up in this and were unable to protest their innocence against a tide of supposition and superstition. It did not end well.

As the poster at the top shows, this was billed as a vehicle for Richard Armitage and his appearances in Robin Hood, Spooks and The Hobbit had pushy mums bring their precious children by the truckload. They must have wondered why.

Armitage, as the main hero John Proctor, was convincing enough but he played it a little too close to his other roles, particularly his Spooks character Lucas North, for my liking as he was swept along by events and was powerless to stop them. Perhaps it was because of this type-casting that he was chosen for the role.

William Gaunt, who will always be super-powered secret agent Richard Barrett in The Champions to me, was superb as John's friend who was also entangled in the allegations and who faced them with steely determination and also acceptance of the inevitable.

The story turned when a senior cleric arrived in the village to investigate the witchcraft stories and this was a turning point in the production too. Jack Ellis was absolutely brilliant as Deputy Governor Danforth and, for me, stole the show. He was certain, strong and ruthless as he barked out his instructions. He was the enemy that the villagers had to fear despite his good office. He became the centre of the play that had been a collection of disparate narratives.

The rest of the cast deserve a mention too because, frankly, they were all good.

The Crucible told its long story with some style and would could have been a three hour trial for the audience passed by ridiculously quickly. The ending was a little obvious and was made the weaker for happening off-stage, shades of Chekhov there, but the point of the play was the journey, not the destination, and that was taut, tense and terrifying.

I enjoyed The Crucible a lot, and felt exhausted by the ride at the end, but somehow, as with Streetcar, it did not quite reach the heights that I expected of it and so a good performance ended up feeling a little disappointing.

Fortune's Fool at the Old Vic

I love the theatre and I see a lot of very good plays but, occasionally, one falls flat and that is usually at one of the major West End theatres. Fortune's Fool was one of those duds.

The promotional material described it as "savagely funny" which seemed like a good thing to take the family to as a Christmas treat. The clincher was the presence of Iain Glen who we all know and love from Game of Thrones.

So it was a great disappointment on arriving at the Old Vic to discover that Iain Glen would not be performing.

That started a debate on the rights of theatres to do that. If I booked to see Bob Dylan and he was indisposed then I would not be expected to settle for  tribute band but theatres think that they can use big stars to sell tickets and then not offer any compensation when they fail to produce the big stars.

The play, by Ivan Turgenev, is set in pre-revolution Russia for which Downton Abbey is a good approximation. A young heiress has been away from home for a few years and returns with her new husband who is keen to revitalise the large estate. He is advised by a flamboyant neighbour and has to contend with the old fool who also live in the house.

There is some humour in the situation and the characters and while I smiled a lot and laughed a few times it would not be fair to call it savagely funny, or anything close to that.

There is a serious side to the story too concerning the fool's possible fortune and his relationship to the family. A conclusion, of sorts, is reached but this part of the story lacks bite, realism and, well, drama.

With thin humour and weak drama it was difficult to see what the point of the play was. I am not sure that Iain Glen could have rescued the situation but he would have made a poor situation better.

Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic (gripping)

I went to see Sweet Bird of Youth because it is by Tennessee Williams though the promotional material emphasised the inclusion of Kim Cattrall, who apparently is famous for being in something called sex in the City.

In the end we were both right, the play was well crafted and Kim Cattrall acted wonderfully. As did the other main star, Seth Numrich, the other main star.

She played a fading Hollywood star and him a young gigolo that she picked up on her travels. He dreams of a career on the big screen and sees her as the way to achieve this. She just seems him as somebody to have a little fun with for a while.

Buoyed by the ambitions prospect of better things he takes her back to his home town of St Cloud, Florida to claim the girl that he left behind and to take that girl with him to Hollywood.

Of course it is nothing like as simple as that and we soon learn more about his past, why he left the town and the consequences of his return.

The girl left behind, we discover, is the daughter of a local plantation owner who has political ambitions and who sees the young man as an unsuitable match for his daughter.

We also discover more of what went wrong between them, which turns out to be even worse than we first suspected, and explains why her father drove the young man out of town and why various people are unhappy that he is back.

This is Southern USA so race plays a part too and the prospective political comes out in support of drastic measures to protect innocent white women from marauding white men. The point is well made that the only marauder we see is white.

The play is all about the main character's hopes for the future and the way that they wax and wane.It was very intense watching this drama of characters, events and their implications unfold over a gripping two and a half hours.

There were several ends with some characters achieving what they wanted and some failing drastically. The overall balance was negative but a lot of that was due to the time and place of the story which meant that the black and the poor were unlikely to win very much and that the justice dispensed could be very rough indeed.

There was an awful lot to take in at the end and that, plus the strong delivery, made for an afternoon of superb theatre.

Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic

The Old Vic has decided that Sheridan Smith is the big pull for the new Hedda Gabler and they are probably right. It is certainly one of the reasons that I went.

The other reasons were the Isben and Old Vic brands, both of which have stood me pretty well in the past (with some notable exceptions).

The evening got off to good start with a glass of champagne in the Pit Bar under the theatre and then a quick word with some of the cast of Benidorm who were there to see their former colleague (Sheridan was in Series 3).

Then it was time to settle in to my seat in the centre of the front row of the Dress Circle. This is my favourite position in large theatres.

Hedda Gabler covers familiar Ibsen territory, a married woman in some turmoil that include another man.

Hedda is married to a seriously boring but earnest academic (not sure how that happened) and they have returned to Oslo after their long honeymoon (which was more academic research than romance) to start their new life in a rather grand house. He has hopes of a professorship but she lacks any ambition for the future.

Add to the mix a former college friend who went off the rails but who has bounced back with a highly regarded book, a lecherous judge, an aunt who wants to bring Hedda firmly in to the extended family, a stubborn maid who has served the family for many years and another former colleague (a woman) who appears to have left her husband in Trondheim to be with the author having helped him to write his book over many months.

Hedda's life is full of options but none of them look that good.

Her husband wants to wallow in academia, the author wants to rekindle an earlier romance and the judge wants to call on her every day until she relents to his pursuit.

Hedda starts by trying to impose her will on everything from whether the curtains should be open and what to call her new auntie. She is brusque and deliberately insulting as she does this. It's a temper tantrum from a spoilt brat.

The story develops from there. You know it is going to be an unhappy ending but the suspense comes from not knowing which unhappy ending it will be. There are quite a few jokes along the way and the play is surprisingly light for most of the way but Hedda's position is always untenable and a denouement inevitable.

The cast are magnificent especially the husband and the errant wife. In one memorable scene when the possibility of babies is mentioned he goes right over the top moving quickly past choosing names for them to selecting which piano teacher to have.

Sheridan as Hedda I am less sure about and even less sure whether the lack of Hedda's gravitas was down to her acting, the direction she was given or the way the character is written in the play, i.e. perhaps it was meant to be like that.

I had no particular problems with the way Hedda was played but it did seem a little odd for Ibsen to name the play after this character and for the Old Vic to make such a fuss over Sheridan playing it when the role is not actually central to the play. It is as much about the husband and the author as it is about her.

Putting aside my unrealistic unmet expectations, this was an excellent production with a lot of rich characters interacting vibrantly with each other as the complex situation evolves. Everybody played their part well and the evening was definitely a big success if not quite a triumph.

The Playboy of the Western World at the Old Vic

My current deep immersion in London's theatre scene, in all its guises, brought me back to the Old Vic to see The Playboy of the Western World.

But first I had to get there and as I am working in Cardiff at the moment that meant a well-timed train to Paddington, a rumble along the Bakerloo Line and a quick beer and a bowl of nuts at the Waterloo Theatre Bar.

Then it was time for Theatre Plan B. Theatre Plan A applies to small theatres with free seating and involves securing a seat in the front row. Plan B applies to larger (and more expensive) theatres and means going for a seat high-up. If you cannot sit right next to the action then you might as well save money and go for the Upper Circle. I also like the view from up there, something I've learned from Glyndebourne.

The Playboy (using a shortened title through laziness) is set in a small pub in a small village in Ireland about a century ago where we meet the landlord's lively daughter, Margaret, and her dull fiancée Shawn. They are Irish peasants and do the actors do their best to sound like Irish peasants which made following the dialogue a little difficult at times. I was grateful for my Irish mother and Irish colleagues for giving me lessons in understanding their accents.

The play is supported, carried and enriched by its dialogue (which is another way of saying that not much happens) so being able to follow (most of) it was very useful.

We meet a few more villagers, including Margaret's father, who are mostly as jolly as you would expect peasant in a pub with no obvious opening hours to be.

In to this genteel setting a young stranger, Christy, arrives in a whirl of chaos. He's agitated, voluble and bustling. The reason for this is that he killed his father "when last Tuesday was a week" and has been on the run and hiding in ditches every since.

Murder obviously had not quite the same sense of seriousness in 19th century Ireland that it does today and the upshot of this revelation is that everybody is captivated by Christy.

This is especially true of Margaret and a gaggle of village girls who find a pretence to come to the pub to see him. The old women are interested in him too and a widow flirts outrageously.

And there we have it. A young man with an exciting history and a small group of villagers reacting to it. The dialogue that comes from the encounter is fast and funny. It's a comedy of attitudes.

The story develops nicely too. Christy's becomes even more popular by winning a donkey race and Margaret resolves to marry him. Then his murdered father appears alive after all only to be murdered again. Now the villagers turn on Christy, a murder in another village brings notoriety but a murder in their own village brings the risk of them being implicated in the foul deed.

A couple of twists later and the story reaches its unexpected but very satisfactory conclusion.

I am sure that there are complexities and subtleties to this play that I missed (that's probably always true) and I consumed it gleefully as a work of entertainment rather than a work of deep meaning. And theatre that entertains as well as this is always worth seeing.

Richard III at the Old Vic

Richard III has got a lot of attention thanks to the combination of Kevin Spacey and Sam Mendes so I jumped at the opportunity to go provided by the theatre club at work.

The impact is immediate.

Kevin Spacey stands in the middle of an almost bare set and thunders in to "Now is the winter of our discontent ". And the next three hours continues in a similar vein.

Kevin Spacey is simply magnificent and dominates the large stage with his diction, movement and small gestures.

The leg brace and badly angled foot confirm his deformity while the raised eyebrows and little smirks to the audience confirm his malevolence. We can see his evil clearly while those around him are often blinded to it by his clever words.

The staging is appropriately brutal too (an awful lot of people die in this story). The main set remains the stark row of doors on either side with just a few props added when necessary.

The dress is modern in the style of South American Dictator. Brutal clothes for brutal times.

The story unfolds unrelentingly as the foul deeds and resultant bodies pile up. Each death is marked with a red cross on one of the doors. More doors have to be added during the interval.

The heralded combination of Kevin Spacey and Sam Mendes delivered exhilarating and exceptional theatre. 

The sweat on Spacey's faceat the end is a testament to the effort put in to the role and the long standing ovation was the much deserved reward. This was stunning theatre at its very best.

A Flea in Her Ear at the Old Vic

Another theatre offer via work saw me back at the Old Vic this time for a classic French Farce by Georges Feydeau and translated by John Mortimer.

I had seen mixed reviews of the play but a farce is a farce so I went with reasonable hopes of being entertained if not intellectually stretched.

The 507 bus took me almost door-to-door from the office to the theatre and so I arrived early enough to get a seat in the Pit Bar and to eat one of the British Railway standard cheese and tomato sandwiches. The Staropramem lager was a welcome find though.

Going in to the theatre was something of a shock as it was nothing like I remembered it from just a couple of years ago for Complicit. Then the layout of the theatre was proscenium style with clusters of chairs around it but this time it was a typical Victorian theatre with the emphasis on decoration rather than comfort.

The set, a reception room in a grand house, started to allay any fears about the production and it was only the presence of some of the most attentive and dedicated camera-spotters that I've seen in a theatre that prevented me from taking a photo of it. Pity, because I liked the set and cannot find a photo of it on the internet.

The play quickly introduces us to the main characters and the first plot device. The wife of the house suspects her husband of being unfaithful to her and devises a plan to test this. She gets a friend to write to her husband inviting him to an assignation at a hotel with an ill reputation. The friend's husband then arrives and recognising his wife's handwriting things she is up to no good.

Add to this the family doctor and a nephew with a speech impediment (both of whom use the hotel), a manservant with ideas above his station and a gentleman with designs on the wife and the scene is set for the farce. End of Act 1.

Act 2 takes us to the hotel where farce reigns in typical fashion.

People come and go, hiding from each other as they do so, the many doors open and close and confusion triumphs. It may be reasonably predictable but it is delivered with aplomb and the laughter is sincere and continuous. It is genuinely funny.

The misunderstandings which sent the characters to the hotel are resolved in a riotous end to the act but the play's defining feature is that the devises that initiate the farce are them supplemented by another.

The bellboy at the hotel turns out to be the spitting image of the husband. A deceit portrayed simply by getting one actor to play both roles.

Here we see the husband dressed as the bellboy (all part of the story) attacking his wife's amour when earlier the bellboy dressed as the husband had ignored the dalliance.

When the first set of misunderstandings collapse in the hotel the participants flee and gradually they all return to the grand house where the doppelgänger ploy is played out beautifully.

As you might expect, it all ends happily in the end with only minor consequences. Then the audience claps and cheers long and enthusiastically in recognition that they have been royally entertained for a couple of hours. And there is not a lot wrong with that.

Complicit at The Old Vic

It is almost exactly twenty years since I last went to The Old Vic (to see Eric Porter as King Lear) and I was finally drawn back to see Complicit through a tempting discount offer at work.

My prolonged absence has little to do with The Old Vic itself and has more to do with the steady diet of good theatre locally at the Orange Tree in Richmond.

My visits to Central London theatres have averaged about once a year and these have generally been with the family in tow, which has been the major influence on what I've seen.

The Old Vic is very conveniently situated for me being just a few minutes walk from Waterloo Station. As the picture shows, its a fairly standard Victorian theatre. There are few surprises in the waiting areas either where the former grandeur is slightly diminished by worn carpets and tired décor. The Pit Bar in the basement has been updated and is a cosy place to enjoy that all important pre-performance pint of Staropramen.

The theatre itself is more of a shock. There is a lot of the old theatre still there but the centre has been gouged out to move the stage so that it is now in the round, i.e. surrounded by seating. It is a round stage too, unlike the Orange Tree which is also in the round but is square (if you get what I mean). It works well.

Complicit examines America's attitude to the war on terror where a leading journalist who exposes torture, and the rendition that leads to it, is attacked as an terrorist sympathiser. The war is deemed by the authorities to take precedent over the right to free speech.

The play discussed the conflict of free speech and patriotism through dialogues between the journalist (Richard Dreyfuss), his attorney (David Suchet) and his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) over two days as the journalist is interrogated by a Grand Jury.

The dialogues between journalist and attorney are the meat of the play and both actors are superb in presenting the arguments and in showing the emotion of the situation.

It is less clear why the wife is there. Her arguments about putting the family first are unconvincing and there is no passion shown between the couple. It may just be a crude devise to allow the two main actors some respite but it does not really matter as this little weakness does nothing to diminish the main drama.

The short story around the Grand Jury hearing serves as a good framework for the arguments and gives the play a natural and rewarding ending. Well, two actually. The play does what it sets out to do, it is thought provoking for people on both sides of the argument and it provides entertainment. It's not faultless but it is very good.