Charles Dance, 78, Reunites with Jewel In The Crown Co-Stars for Geriatric Love Triangle After 40 Years

Creditors (Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond)

Verdict: Dance stirs up trouble

Rating:

How delicious to get a rare squint at Charles Dance up close and personal in Richmond’s boutique Orange Tree Theatre.

The 78-year-old is making his first stage appearance in nearly 20 years – alongside fellow Jewel In The Crown alumnae Geraldine James (75) and Nicholas Farrell (70) – in a play by 19th-century Scandinavian master of sexual neurosis August Strindberg.

His drama has been updated by playwright Howard Brenton and therefore becomes a geriatric love triangle.

Dance was once the tawny lion of the screen; and more recently terrified a whole new generation of TV viewers as Game Of Thrones’ ruthless patriarch Tywin Lannister.

Here, though, he looks more like a snowy owl. For reasons at first unknown, his character, the twisted trickster Gustaf, makes it his business here to gaslight a supposed friend, an artist called Adolf (Farrell), persuading him he is suffering from epilepsy because of ‘sexual excess’.

But he also leads Adolf to suspect his wife’s fidelity, and tells him that his paintings somehow provide evidence that he’s dying.

Best not to reason why, but simply to accept Dance’s tall, suave and freckly old-timer, toying with Farrell’s credulous Adolf.

He is an eager victim; comically amenable to Gustaf’s suggestion that he may be an idiot.

We too must wonder, given that Adolf claims that he was able to feel his first wife’s contractions in childbirth – and that he believes his new wife Tekla (James) has ‘grown inside him like an organ’, taking away his will.

Yes, it’s an unusually peculiar piece of work, even for Strindberg; made faintly humorous by Brenton.

And the big revelation late on about Gustaf’s real identity and motivation is more puzzling than shocking.

Still, you can’t help but be fascinated – and a little chilled – by Dance’s rheumy, blinking stare, coldly fixing his trembling quarry.

We’re more inclined to laugh at Farrell’s nervous roué, Adolf, and James’s kittenish Tekla – who creepily refers to her hubby as ‘little brother’.

Tom Littler’s sold out production is elegantly graced by Louie Whitemore’s cool design of Swedish woodwork painted white and blue, with costumes in matching neutrals. Nonetheless, casting actors in their seventies diminishes the erotic tension of a play originally imagined for actors in their thirties, and intended to make them sweat with carnal fear and desire.

Creditors is on till October 11. The show is sold out but for information on returns, or on-the-day tickets, visit orangetreetheatre.co.uk

The Producers (Garrick Theatre)

Verdict: If you’ve got it, flaunt it

Rating:

‘Shocking, outrageous and insulting. I loved every minute of it!’ runs the review for Funny Boy (a musical version of Hamlet) in a New York paper the day after its premiere (and instant closure) in the opening scene of The Producers. Ditto Patrick Marber’s blissfully silly show — but this one should run and run.

Having burst the seams of the tiny Menier theatre where it began, Marber’s bravura staging now has a larger cast, and more space to outrage and insult.

Or maybe, on first view, I didn’t clock the champagne waiter dressed as Jesus in a loincloth and crown of thorns; or the size of the living Greek statue’s bouncing appendage.

This is the story of failing Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Andy Nyman), who joins forces with stagestruck accountant Leo Bloom (Marc Antolin) to stage a sure-fire flop and pocket the unspent investment.

Bialystock’s band of angels are all devilishly randy old ladies, paying for one last thrill en route to the cemetery.

His choice, Springtime For Hitler, written by a lederhosen-wearing pigeon-fancier with a Fuhrer fetish called Franz Liebkind (Harry Morrison), puts the camp into Mien Kampf even before Max appoints the worst director ever, Roger de Bris (Trevor Ashley, a huge talent) to ‘keep it gay’.

A radiant Joanna Woodward lights up the stage as Ulla, the Swedish sex-bomb assistant who gets a standing ovation from the producers even when they are sitting down.

The show’s original creator, Mel Brooks, said that good comedy blows dust off your soul. I sailed out of the theatre, my soul clean as a whistle.

The Producers is booking at the Garrick into 2026.

GEORGINA BROWN

Haywire (The Barn, Cirencester)

Verdict: Better on the radio

Rating:

For more than two decades, Tim Stimpson has written scripts for The Archers, none better than the riveting twists and turns of the storyline about Helen and controlling Rob Titchener.

More recent ‘issues’ such as rewilding and sewage-dumping are less gripping. Frankly, I’m still missing maddening Jennifer.

But I was intrigued by the sound of Stimpson’s nostalgic totter down memory lane to celebrate the birth of this British institution.

Haywire returns to the Birmingham radio studio in the Fifties where — true story — Godfrey Baisley, aka ‘God’, created a ‘continuing drama’ (never say soap) to keep farmers abreast of a fast-changing world.

Some 75 years on, the show goes on, propelled as ever by Arthur Wood’s Barwick Green, the theme music ‘God’ stumbled on to conjure up ‘a pint of ale on a warm summer’s evening’.

At least, that is where this hyperactive, convoluted, farce-within-a-play begins. Here, Jonty, in a pitch to become the next editor of The Archers, is staging Inventing Ambridge.

 At his own expense, he has assembled a crew of jobbing actors — plus a celeb from Strictly — to recreate the first episodes covering Phil and Grace’s short, doomed marriage and the pressures behind the scenes from BBC bigwigs back then.

Those were the days when a director got away with telling an actor earning eight bob a week to ‘sound more attractive’ — and she smouldered obediently. 

Joseph O’Malley’s remarkable cast switch superbly in and out of their various roles, from actors in the Fifties noiselessly turning scripts to play the fictional cut-glass Brief Encounter characters of bygone days, to contemporary actors whose private passions are spilling messily into the studio creating sub-Noises Off mayhem. 

But at a considerable dramatic price: none of them, ‘real’ or fictional, is more than a sketch of a type, hard to care less about and rendering Haywire as confused and confusing as its title suggests.

What survives are the ingenious DIY sound effects: a bowl of yogurt, squelched to suggest the sound of a lamb being born. Ah! The magic of radio.

 Haywire runs at the Barn Theatre in Cirencester until October 11.

GEORGINA BROWN