Trevor Nunns Bold Twist on Classic Comedy

Easy Virtue (Arts Theatre, )

Verdict: Young love

Rating:

PARENTING styles have evolved down the ages. In Noel Coward’s day – 100 years ago – they were transitioning from firm moral instruction to today’s neurotic relativism.

The result can be funny – as in Coward’s early comedy Easy Virtue, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn at Cambridge’s refurbished Arts Theatre, the venue that kick-started his career when he was a student.

The show stars Greta Scacchi as Mrs Whittaker, a proudly moralising matriarch who is alarmed to learn that her beloved son Johnnie (Joseph Potter), is returning from the French Riviera married to Larita (Alice Orr-Ewing) – a blonde divorcee 20 years his senior with loose hips and looser morals.

Although her daughters are excited by the new addition, Mrs Whittaker sees Larita as an existential threat to everything she holds holy.

Written by a 26-year-old Coward, the play is smartly presented as a battle over the meaning of ‘true love’. But, it’s the battle for moral authority which is more entertaining, and it’s a tussle in which Mrs Whittaker is not assisted by her all-too-reasonable Colonel husband — in a near whispered performance from Michael Praed that’s so understated, it’s as if he’s saving his voice for a later theatrical engagement.

The flaw in the tale is that Johnnie is a posh country bumpkin who doesn’t stand a chance, in the long run, with the lavishly sophisticated Larita. Their liaison is obviously doomed and outlasts its plausibility on stage. That would normally only be a marginal issue in Coward comedies, except that here he does also want us to take seriously his ideas about love.

Still, there’s much fun in Scacchi’s palpitating parent on the brink of a breakdown.

And Orr-Ewing is every covetous mother’s nightmare: draped in Cartier and Chanel, and launching icy zingers.

Nunn directs a snappy ensemble with typical panache, although his efforts to avoid caricature sometimes slacken the comic tension. But that shouldn’t put anyone off this delicious production with cheeky performances all round. Fingers crossed for a transfer.

Easy Virtue runs at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge until March 7.

Evening All Afternoon (Donmar Warehouse, London)

Verdict: Lost love

Rating:

On a more serious note, Evening All Afternoon, asks what it means to be a mother. The question besets two women: art student Delilah and aging spinster Jennifer.

Neither have been mothers, but both have lost one.

Written by Anna Ziegler, author of the Nicole Kidman 2015 hit Photograph 51, the two are thrown together when Jennifer marries Delilah’s father, John.

Following the sudden death of her loving mother, Brooklyn born Delilah (Erin Kellyman) is an angry, attitudinising teenager topped by a storm of ginger curls.

Also coming to terms with the loss of [itals] her [end itals] mother, Jennifer (Anastasia Hille) is a reticent, introverted mouse, lacking confidence and speaking in compound rambles of self-deprecating subclauses.

Jennifer nonetheless makes it her business to reach out to her icily resistant step-daughter. This involves putting up with a great deal of hostility, while brooking entrenched awkwardness of her own. Neither enjoys it much.

What’s missing is not so much the women’s mothers, as the never seen husband/father John. Does he exist, or is he a figment of their imagination? It wouldn’t matter, except that he’s the very reason they have come together.

The acting digs deep into the emotional isolation of each woman. Hille is full of tics and uncertainties. Kellyman brims with sadness and anger.

It’s also cleverly staged by director Diyan Zora and designer Basia Binkowska in a sea of blue, conjuring the women’s worlds with two chairs, a few trinkets, and a short ladder.

‘Regular people doing regular things,’ says Delilah. ‘It’s the best thing art can do.’

I’m not sure I agree, but Ziegler fulfils her brief with tenderness and grace.

 Evening All Afternoon is at the Donmar until April 11

Bird Grove (Hampstead Theatre)

Verdict: Tough Love

Rating:

Although now generally deplored, there is much to admire in the Victorian approach to parenting — as witnessed in Bird Grove, the story of Middlemarch novelist George Eliot navigating her years as a young woman in Coventry before she was famous.

Born Mary Ann Evans (Elizabeth Dulau), she’s a brainy bookworm who keeps house for her retired estate manager father (Game of Thrones’ Owen Teale).

But wait... Alexei Kaye Campbell’s play wastes over an hour with Mary Ann’s obviously idiotic suitor Horace (Jonnie Broadbent), who is suffering an onslaught of diarrhoea.

Then, completely out of the blue, Mary Ann refuses to accompany her father to church. She’s decided she wants to live ‘truthfully’.

Dad tells her to get her coat, or move out. At last, we have a dramatic motor - albeit a spluttering lawnmower.

Kaye Campbell passes off the redundant first hour as halting drawing room comedy. Not his strong suit.

Teale makes up for it by adding clammy warmth to the father’s commendable Yorkshire intransigence.

Dulau, by contrast, is a solemn Eliot lookalike espousing entry level feminism and opining on the role of religion as an instrument of social control in Victorian society (stifles yawn).

Thankfully Sarah Woodward, as Mary Ann’s tutor-turned-mentor, adds lighter touches with comic, religious and moral squeamishness.

Unhelpfully, the father-daughter conflict is allowed to fizzle out in Anna Ledwich’s sedentary production on Sarah Beaton’s elegant China blue set of antique furniture. And there’s little sense of how any of this influenced Eliot as a writer, or of the racy life in London she went on to live.

Instead, we can at least be grateful for some tips on Victorian parenting.

Bird Grove runs at the Hampstead till March 21.

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind (Swan, Stratford upon Avon)

Verdict: The sky’s the limit

Rating:

A starving hyena (a slinky, sly Shaka Kalokoh) stalks the drought-stricken village in Malawi where the locals plant seed and pray – in vain. ‘All day we cry, we have lost many friends,’ is their oft-repeated lament.

But a miracle happens. Which is not a spoiler – for the clue is in the title.

A nimble Alistair Nwachukwu plays the resourceful 13-year-old who uses a school library book and scraps from a dump to build on his hunch that the pedal-power that makes a dynamo bike-light shine might create electricity for a wind turbine to pump water to the parched crops.

William’s memoir, already an award-winning movie by British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, acquires a new surge of energy in Lynette Linton’s vivid, vibrant production.

What’s missing is drama, excitement and exhilaration. Over-simplified, over-amplified, over-acted (the goofy headmaster is a grating exaggeration), it is also underwritten, undercooked and underpowered. Even in the final climactic scene, when the windmill whirs at last, the water merely trickles. It should have been a blast – in every sense.

While limber dancing and Tim Sutton’s African-inspired music, gorgeous harmonies, drumming and ululations are terrifically atmospheric, the melodies are seldom distinctive or memorable. One song amusingly moves from ‘it won’t work, William’ to ‘ it might work, William’ to ‘it must work, William’, deftly propelling the story.

Only the silent performances from the human hyena and William’s dog, brought to bounding life by Yana Penrose until he dies of hunger, have real theatrical momentum.

William’s father, Trywell (Sifiso Mazibuko) lives up to his name as the biggest, strongest man in the village, particularly in his hymn-like number ‘I will plough the land while I have breath enough’. He is shackled to the earth while his better-educated son can reach higher, a tension well caught when William’s wise, imaginative mother (Madeline Appiah) points out: ‘You lifted him, now let him see the way.’

And so he does. But at the end, the resounding cheers were for William’s astonishing achievement rather than this loud, underwhelming show.

GEORGINA BROWN 

Until March 28.