Review – The Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein – Jermyn Street Theatre

Two women sit next to each other on a stage filled with white furniture and white frames. “I am Getrude Stein, playing Alice B Toklas,” says one to the audience. “I am Alice B Toklas, playing Getrude Stein, unless I am playing Getrude Stein playing Alice B Toklas,” says the other, to the audience. And on this wordplay goes back and forth until your brain is fighting to make the words make sense … only it does, and it makes a poem, and it brings to life a little world, of two women who long ago loved each other in a little apartment in Paris, and had friends who loved them, and rich lives, full of art and wordplay and fun.

The Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein has a structure of poetry and playfulness that make it feel like it could have been a play written by Stein (Natasha Byrne). There are two other actors, primarily playing Ernest Hemingway (who is berated by Stein for not letting himself show the “sensitive boy inside, far more interesting”) and Pablo Picasso (who gives detailed information about keeping your mistresses away from your wife). This scene-chewing duo (Mark Huckett and Kelly Burke, respectively) provide foils for Stein and Toklas’ generally kind (but at times very sharp) wit. They play a bouquet of roles – as wives, mistresses, other writers, and even Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician Toklas (Alyssa Simon) uses to wind Hemingway up as “the third true genius I have ever known” (pricking his ego over and over again)., and keep the energy high, while Toklas and Stein provide the absolute calm at the center of this whirlwind of art, philosophy, and philandering.

While I can’t vouch for the veracity of the depictions of any of these characters or life in the Stein-Toklas household, I loved seeing these 20th century legends being silly and human on stage. Did they love themselves a little too much? It seems quite likely. Did Toklas and Stein hold their friends warmly in their hearts, despite seeing their imperfections? I’m sure it was so. And along with providing some historical framing for the story of Alice and Getrude’s life, the “other artists” provide much context for women’s lives in Paris. And, yes, more jokes. One of my favorites is when Picasso is trying to get Stein to praise his poetry … “But why did you say nothing about it?” “Well, you know how Jean Cocteau’s drawings were not merely bad, but repugnant?” “Well, yes.” “Sometimes when you’re a genius you have to learn your limitations.” (*This is my best memory of the conversation – I was too busy laughing to write it down verbatim.)

I realize this play might not be for everyone – a simple tale of domestic bliss between two women would be enough to chase off some, the intellectual folderol might disincline others – but I found it the absolute incarnation of why I come to Jermyn Street over and over again – to see an intimate play, done simply, which lets my intellect take flight and also manages to move me. It deserves a sold out run. I was glad to be there at the beginning.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Tuesday March 22, 2022. It continues through April 16th. Running time about 90 minutes.)

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Review – “Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story” – Jermyn Street Theater

Coming out of Christmas time and before the schmaltz of Valentine’s day, it seems like there is a lull perfect for a bit of horror. And Jermyn Street is ready for that space with its production of Thrill Me, a 2005 off-Broadway musical based on the true story of 1920s “thrill killers” Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. While a movie or a novel might focus the horrifying death at the core of this tale, the musical is, instead, focused on the relationship between these two men, and how two mostly ordinary, priveleged young men decided that the thrill they needed in their lives was to kill an adolescent boy.

Jermyn Street Theatre

Is this a story best served by music? Well, yes, really, it is, because explaining how an emotional journey takes place is a perfect job for song. Leopold’s obsession (and devotion) to Loeb, the pressure for each to provide what the other one wants, even the bizarre attraction of arson … a movie could never take us to that place of jubilation, attraction, physical chemistry, and basically all the forces that combined to make these two men think that sex, property destruction, and cold blooded murder were what you needed to make life good. You’re unlikely to agree with them, but you can feel the pressure of these intense emotions combining to make them take the path they did – and see how a few other notable psychopaths might have felt that same tug.

The songs wouldn’t really make it fly, though, if it weren’t for the intense physicality brought to the roles by Bart Lambert (Leopold) and Jack Reitman (Loeb). Loeb’s obsession with Nietzche, his belief that he was a “superman” that could never be caught by the dull plebs that surrounded him, and the genuine fire and “push me/pull you” relationship with Leopold were believable and toxic. I couldn’t help but think of modern incel culture, in which deluded young men think the women who reject them are in fact the defective ones and deserving of death, rather than realizing that they are actively being avoided because of their toxicity.

However, after living in the emotional cooker of Covid for nearly two years, I found that Lambert actually seemed to be taking the twitchiness of his character a bit too far for such an intimate venue as the Jermyn. The 1920s scenes (contrasting to the ones he does in the 50s with the parole board, as a much older and more mature character) seeemed almost like a silent movie, with his hands held like claws and his face screwed up as if in agony. And, as an aside, this play should NOT be seen as a true crime show; while it might make sense to have one character be more sympathetic, reading through the various information I could find made me think author Stephen Dolginoff in fact chose the wrong man to be portrayed as a villain. That said, you have to make your source material work in the medium in which it is going to be presented, and the many details that were changed up between reality and the show certainly served to make it a tighter evening.

Thankfully, though, director Matthew Parker handled the actual murderin a way that a queasy nellie like myself was able to ride through without damage – there was no body, no blood, no actual violence, and no horrible recounting of every little detail of what happened. I know that’s how some people like their thrillers, but I frankly could not have coped. Still, if you want a bracing, adrenaline-raising night out, Thrill Me is a most unusual musical and decidedly a welcome note of counter-programming in a West End that seems afraid to offer anything that isn’t escapist or nauseatingly cute.

(This review is for press night, which took place on January 18th, 2022. It continues through February 5th.)

Post script: here is a picture of Bobby Franks, because I think it’s important to remember him.

Review – The Dog Walker – Jermyn Street Theater

A neurotic writer asks a dog walker to assist her with the insurmountable task of taking her pet into the outside world. They meet. Romance ensues. Seems like a very logical plot for a play, right? Only in Paul Minx’s The Dog Walker, it is most clear that what we are watching is not a romantic comedy, although it does seem to be teetering on comedy lines. Keri (Victoria Yeates) is a high strung writer who sits in her apartment window shouting abuse (and encouragement) at the people that pass by on the sidewalk below; Herbert Doakes (Andrew Dennis) is a Caribbean immigrant who has been unlucky in love (although he’s quite gifted in the job department as he also works as a custodian). Both of them seem to be very believable and interesting characters.

However, as Doakes reveals himself scene by scene (he’s mostly a figure of comedy in the first act), he begins to seem creepier and creepier. He’s not just a dog walker, or a middle aged man in a strained marriage, he’s a slightly delusional stalkery person with a very poor sense of boundaries. Keri similarly doesn’t have very good boundaries but her offers of alcohol and general hostility don’t seem quite as frightening – she’s ignorable. But for rather a lot of the time after Doakes comes back to Keri’s apartment with her dog’s ashes, I began to expect the play would take a much more sinister turn. In the end, Keri’s offer to marry simply for health insurance makes an exchange of sex for non-romantic motives seem nearly sensible … but I couldn’t believe she would want to do this given the personal safety issues.

Victoria Yeates and Andrew Dennis. Credit to Robert Workman

The final act of this play treats the earlier issue of the ghost that Keri sees more realistically, grounding it in a personal tragedy so that it becomes more of an element of her personality and life story rather than just the leftovers of an accident she saw through her window. And yet, despite the fact that this revelation should have generated a lot my sympathy for her, I found myself just not finding the truth in her story. Losing a child is actually the kind of thing that draws a much more solid line through a person’s life, and the depression she was experiencing in the first act could in no way be seen as actually being caused by grieving. I just didn’t buy it. It felt tacked on.

Although the characters they inhabited seemed drawn with rough edges, I found both Yeates and Dennis very watchable. She seemed perfectly the high strung writer who wasn’t coping with real life very well; he was a compelling man with richer layers underneath the persona of “comedy relief dog walker.” But ultimately the relationship that developed between them was not one I was able to swallow. Minx says in the program that he paused this play for some time; I feel it would benefit from more time to find itself and its story still.

Review – “Master Harold and the Boys” and “The Ice Cream Boys” – National and Jermyn Street Theaters

To understand South Africa, I think there is much to be said for understanding the works of Athol Fugard; and to enjoy “The Ice Cream Boys,” I think it is good to know the history of South Africa. “Master Harold and the Boys” is, in fact, a perfect set up to understand a play about the modern condition of South Africa, in which freedom has been won but so little equality has been achieved. In “Master Harold,” currently showing at the National, we are faced with a situation of incredible inequality, where two grown men have to bow and scrape before a teenaged boy who’s power over them is less about the fact that they work for his mother and more about the color of his skin. The play teases out both the incredible humanity that could exist between the races in this situation and the incredible inhumanity that the entire structure of apartheid enforced; it is a beautiful piece of theater, very touching, and Lucien Msamati gives a masterful performance as ballroom dancing champion Sam. Its hour and forty minutes is worth it to the last drop.

The apartheid government kept this play from being staged, but forty years later things in South Africa are very different. In “The Ice Cream Boys,” currently playing at thte Jermyn Street Theatre, Gail Louw puts Jacob Zuma (Andrew Francis), fourth president of South Africa, in a hospital room with white Ronnie Kasrils (Jack Klaff), and a different kind of power play spins out. Zuma and Kasrils fought together to liberate South Africa, but Kasrils sees Zuma as a traitor to the cause of equality. Zuma, meanwhile, sees Kasrils as a traitor to himself – he once saw him as a brother, but Kasrils has taken actions to directly discredit Zuma.

As they recount their history together, the nurse (Bu Kunene) appears several times playing other people in South Africa – Mandela, Zuma’s uncle – giving other people’s views on Zuma’s life. But in the end, fending off Zuma’s play for her and also giving her own opinions, she delivers a cutting analysis of how this president is seen by the people he was meant to serve – as selfish and out of touch with what is needed to make South Africa flourish.

While I had been hoping for a much more ramped up interaction between the two men, I found this way of learning about South Africa’s history in the years SINCE “Master Harold” very interesting. Francis is magnetic and self assured, while Klaff seems believably like someone who once carried a machine gun to make a revolution happen. But somehow the impact is not as strong as I’d hoped for, I think because Kasrils’ work in the security services to me implicated him in other kinds of crimes against South Africa. Perhaps he only rose to power once the ANC was in; but I doubt that his behavior was as high minded as this play makes it.

Overall, my recommendation is to see both plays while they’re on; they paint a fascinating picture of a country with a troubled past and an unclear present.

(Master Harold and the Boys is on at the National Theater until December 17th; The Ice Cream Boys is on at Jermyn Street until November 2nd.)

Review – Miss Julie – Jermyn Street Theatre

Miss Julie seems to be the most consistently popular of August Strindberg’s works – so much so that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “straight” version of it. But this one, a new version by Howard Brenton, was set firmly in the era after trains and before cars, so there is no reason to wonder, for example, why Julie’s father doesn’t just ring ahead. Julie (Charlotte Hamblin) lives in a world where you can have a reputation to be ruined, where sleeping with a servant (Jean – James Sheldon) is a great way to do it, and if you’re so unfortunate as to be engaged to said philandering servant, you just have to put up (Kristin – Dorothea Myer-Bennett).

But that would all make it so easy and boring, wouldn’t it? The gorgeousness of this play comes in its wonderful moments of human interaction, all done completely naturally in the kitchen of the servant’s quarters. Jean has had a crush on Miss Julie since they were both children – or has he? – and Julie relishes being adored – or does she? – while Kristin toils all day with no thought for herself – or does she? As they interact, each of their selfish desires slowly unspools, and you, the audience, get a deeper and deeper look into the complex clockwork that whirls behind each character’s eyes. None of these people are altruists, but similarly – and sadly – none of them seems to have a very clear cut idea about how to pursue actual happiness beyond a short moment in time.

It’s fascinating to watch Julie, Jean, and Kristin go through their little dance together. Hamblin nicely captures both Julie’s huge enthusiasm for living, her cruelty, and her crumbling mind as she realizes she’s gone to far to be able to easily patch her life back together. Sheldon is dead handsome – easy enough to see a lady of the house flirting with him – and makes a great argument both for his essential equality with any other man and his inability to snap himself out of thinking like a servant. He was completely convincing all the way through, even though he was essentially disagreeing with what he had just said completely. And Myer-Bennett is a treat to watch as a woman who knows herself quite well and has far less illusions than either her mistress or her fiancee. The three of them have great chemistry and easily take us out of the workaday world into the explosive passions and ideals (and compromises) of their world.

With a tight running time of 90 minutes, Tom Littler’s production should have a breathless pace, but in fact there is more than enough time given to make the evening feel like it’s been all of a midsummer’s night – only not one with a pleasant dream. And every philosophical conversation in the play still feels fresh and sharp. There may be a million ways to update this play, but Littler shows that, stripped and raw and laid before us as if it were new, Miss Julie is still a tsunami of emotion until the lights go down.

(This review is for the opening night performance that took place on Tuesday, April 30th, 2019. It continues in rep with The Creditors at the

Review – The Creditors – Jermyn Street Theater

It’s a pleasure to go to the theater knowing you’re going to see a fresh take on a classic you love. Strindberg has become a favorite of mine as I’ve settled into middle age and learned to enjoy his realistic portrayals of people who have been made bitter by life – well, by other people, in particular their husbands and wives. So I was enthusiastic for seeing how Creditors managed ten years further along in my life, in a new version by Howard Brenton that the Jermyn Street Theater is performing in rep with Miss Julie.

The Creditors is a deliciously tight three person show that has the marvellous good fortune off having Dorothea Myer-Bennett in the central role of Tekla. As a Victorian era woman who has a career of her own (as a writer) and has been divorced and remarried, she is a splash of bracing water given how most women were depicted at the time. I mean, look at A Doll’s House, one decade older; how could women have moved along to a position of having so much agency in such a short time? In fact, I’m pretty sure they didn’t: this makes Tekla even more interesting and pushed the play into the realm of … well, all of these people who don’t believe in God, marry and divorce as they please, and (both) work, didn’t it all feel very modern?

This leaves a couple of notes that fell flat, or, rather, seemed out of place perhaps because they were so very 19th century. Adolf (James Sheldon), the carer for Tekla’s husband Gustav (David Sturzaker), is obsessed with men dominating and controlling women; he spends his time with Gustav trying to work him into a frenzy of jealousy about his wife. And, per Gustav, Tekla and he gave up the child they had together – to be honest, I found this just flat out unbelievable. Tekla and Gustav calling each other brother and sister, sure, but that … it just felt like Strindberg was trying to hard. Adolf being a misogynistic control freak, sure, but the abandoned child plus … well, Gustav’s soft-headedness … do people really give up on their art that easily, with just a few days of someone trying to philosophize them out of it?

Dorothea Myer-Bennett and James Sheldon, photo by Robert Day

So, fine, maybe Strindberg isn’t trying for pure realism here, but watching the characters on stage, it was hard not to get sucked into the interaction. Tekla’s affection for her husband seemed fully believable, her connection with Adolf was entirely natural … but the attempt to twist history and, not to spoil the plot (I mean this is not exactly a new play), people’s minds, was like the delightful Machiavellian twist at the heart of many of Shakespeare’s best tragedies. Who needs knives and armies when we can destroy people with words? I suspect the ending wouldn’t have been quite so perfectly tied up outside of a stage, but watching this vibrant cast of three feint and parry with the greatest of all weapons – the human mind – was just rather delicious all the way through. And at ninety minutes, there wasn’t a bit of fat.

(This review was for the preview performance that took place Monday, April 29, 2019. It continues through June first.)

Review – Original Death Rabbit – Jermyn Street Theatre

Technology, and how we deal with it, is one of my favorite topics for plays and for new writing. As human beings, we’ve gone well beyond letters and even phone calls; theater has struggled to keep up with the rapid changes in how we communicate with each other. Plays are, at their core, about dialogue; but these days, we talk to each other with text messages, with instant messages, with comments on posts, and with emojis, memes, and captioned photos. None of these translate well to the stage. But what does, and should, is how these changes are affecting us as people and as a society – what does having a thousand different ways to communicate with each other (and often with strangers) do to individuals. And this is what Rose Heiney’s play Original Death Rabbit is about – how life as lived partially on the internet is changing us.

Kimberley Nixon in the Original Death Rabbit at Jermyn Street Theatre – photo by Robert Workman

Original Death Rabbit is the online handle of a young woman who briefly shot to fame as the originator of an online meme, a la the “icebucket challenge” or “planking.” A photo was taken of her wearing a pink bunny onesie at a funeral and it became an internet craze – taking pictures of yourself (or others) at inappropriate places wearing the same thing. But like any person who gets five minutes of fame, there’s a lot more to ODR than the moment she was caught hiding in a cemetery or when the paps finally found her on the doorstep of her apartment. ODR is a young woman with mental health issues, who comes from a family with mental health issues, who finds that with an unrelenting spotlight on her she is more inclined than ever to not leave the house and to spend her time on online forums and trolling her top enemy on Twitter. Her depiction of a life lived in a tiny flat, only communicating via text, seems remarkably acccurate and depressing – a good reason to unplug forever and force yourself to get back to face to face communication.

The whole thing is done as a monologue by Kimberley Nixon – an impressive feat, and one she carries off with complete self assurance. It’s easy to imagine ODR and Nixon herself as being spoiled, self-obsessed, insecure, raging, and able to completely lose herself in poetry – Nixon wraps the character around herself so much that she disappears, and I found myself lost in the “maze of twisted passages all alike” that is ODR’s brain. How had she become so broken? Why wasn’t she trying to save herself?

Original Death Rabbit is a tightly woven portrait of a person who is allowed to further withdraw into mental illness in a world where it can be hard to tell when people are hiding and when, in fact, they are in danger. That said, I found myself torn between wanting to shout, “Get over yourself!” to the character, to wanting to call the author and ask her to give ODR a little something to make her a bit more well-rounded. Dealing with your own and a family’s mental illness gives an author (and an audience) a lot of material to work with, but having all of a story be told as a video being made for YouTube – or perhaps an extended blog post – is just not quite enough to make me care about the person on stage, or her family. I wanted to see more, to go deeper, to know that the bullshit happy happy faces people put up on social media are very much not representative of the struggles that are happening below – because ODR’s struggles never seemed to get to that key nerve I wanted to get. Still, it’s worth seeing if you want to see theater that’s engaging with the effect of technology on our lives – the topic has much to offer.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Tuesday, January 15, 2019. It continues through February 9th.)

Review – Burke and Hare – Jermyn Street Theatre

In a completely genius move of counter-programming, Jermyn Street have chosen to stage a most unusual Christmas show: a celebration of two 19th century Scottish grave robbers, completely with jolly songs, bad jokes, and on stage corpsing of the most literal sort. With three actors playing more roles than I could count (yet all nicely delineated by clothing and accent), the night moved at a whirlwind pace, barely seeming to leave the central room at the lodging house where Mr Hare (Alex Parry) lives along with his wife, the proprietor (Katy Daghorn). Burke (Hayden Wood) shows up, short of cash, but willing to work; and when a chance comes to sort a dead lodger’s debt by selling off his corpse, Burke shows little shyness in joining in the Hares’ plans.

The particular genius of this show is how so few actors in such a tiny space manage to do so much, conveying the back alleys of Edinburgh, the blood-splashed lecture halls of the cadaver-hungry doctors, and the heave and squalor of a rooming house not of the highest class. Much credit for this no doubt must go to director Abigail Pickard Price and designer Toots Butcher; Jermyn Street is very much an intimate theater but they created a space that felt far larger. And the comedy was right on target – black at times but full of silliness especially as the various actors attempted to compensate for the shortage of bodies to fill the roles (see what I did there?).

Burke and Hare, full cast – Hayden Wood, Alex Parry, and Katy Daghorn. Photo by Philip Tull.

My worry was that this story would completely descent to goriness, given that I’m fairly phobic about blood, but most of the spare body parts were so silly that I couldn’t have been the least bit frightened; and there was, in the end, only one murder scene, played toward then end and actually quite moving. If you add in the fact that the corpse on stage the longest appeared to be giggling under her sheet, the overall effect was leavened with enough humor – gallows humor, shall we say – that I was able to make it through the entire play without getting creeped out.

While Burke and Hare is not going to be stealing punters away from the Palladium panto, pretty much every theater goer in town is going to want a break from endless helpings of treacle and mince pies, and this show is just right for us – zippy, fun, tightly performed, and with enough of a feeling of improv that every night should feel fresh – just like the corpses.

(This review is for the opening night performance, which took place Friday, November 30, 2018. It continues through December 21st.)

Review – The Play About My Dad – Jermyn Street Theater

With daily headlines about the youth sports team trapped in a cave in Thailand, Monday night seemed perfect timing to be watching a play about the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on the lives of residents of Missippi. Spun out amongst three groups of people as the moment of crisis approached and the tension ratcheted, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Floyd Collins, the musical about the man trapped in a cave in 1930s Kentucky. Would htey live? Would they die? The four families Boo Killebrew chose to show us were unknowns, all potential members of the class of 1836 people killed in this murderous storm. It made for riveting viewing. Who would make it out alive?

Killebrew chose an intriguing framing device, of putting herself and her father Larry (David Shaal) as characters in the play, so that she could write about the process of writing and creating in a meta-theatrical way, as well as exploring their relationship. Larry the character is thus able to speak about what Larry Killebrew saw, as a doctor at a hospital, and about his relationship with Boo (Hannah Britland) and about the writing process in general. Killebrew then adds some people she knew less well as characters (specifically Kenny Tyson – Ammar Duffus – an ambulance driver, and Essie Watson – Miquel Brown – Dad Killebrew’s babysitter from way back when), and then four other people, a family and another EMT, to round out the stories. But Killebrew herself was not there, which is a bit of a shame. That said, I was torn between finding the use of her insertion of herself as playwright into the narrative irritating, as it introduced a lot of superfluous dialogue, and finding it fascinating, because, well, I too write plays, and I found the discussions of her technique very, very interesting – so interesting it distracted me from the actual narratives she had created.

Still, it was the topic of Hurricane Katrina that drew me to this show. I don’t often get to see plays about recent American history – that is, anything less than a hundred years old – so this attempt to wade into the muck of this shameful catastrophe was square center in my mind’s eye. How would a play about Katrina spin out? How much focus would we get on the woeful response of people on the ground? How much on the disproportionate effect of the hurricane on the black and elderly? Would we look at the policemen that refused to let black citizens drive out of New Orleans? Would we look at the causes of the disaster?

In short, no, we did not. We heard three tales of people who mostly fatally affected by the storm. We struggled with them as they attempted to deal with the fact the waters were rising so high that they were likely to wind up drowned; we wondered why they did not leave when the danger of staying was clear. And side by side with their stories we hear the story of Boo Killebrew struggling with her father leaving his family (Boo and her mom), and the fear she felt when their car ran out of gas during a storm, and a little bit about what was happening and Larry Killebrew’s hospital during and after the storm.

But some very big questions aren’t answered. And, for me very oddly in a play set in the South, we have no discussion or examination of racial interactions, and, rather worse I think, no examination of the impact of poverty on people’s outcomes. So many people who couldn’t swim; so many people who couldn’t drive away; so many people that weren’t able to keep up their houses; so many people afraid of what missing three days of work would do to them. And alongside it we have two well to do white people whose concerns during the storm were buying a dress and getting phone service again. In the end, it felt like there were two entirely different stories being told – one about Hurricane Katrina, and one about a father/daughter relationship – but by blending them together, Killebrew makes it look like she is exploiting other people’s suffering without really understanding it, and trying to equate her emotional experience with people actually dying. The net effect is to pollute both stories. The people who die are just backdrop to a family drama, but in fact theirs is the real drama. There are some good threads going here and some good roles for non-white actors – a pleasure to see in London to be sure – but it would be better to see this done as “The Play About Katrina” and “The Play About My Dad,” so the issues in each play could be focused on appropriately without one trivializing the other. The story of Kenny Tyson dealing with his mother’s loss and being able to see the past and the future is interesting enough to carry its own play; I’d love to see him, and the other working class and poor people of The Play About My Dad, brought front and center with their own play. Still, it was nice to see recent, and important, US history put on stage, and brilliant to get to see the people from the South shown as just typical folks holding down jobs and looking after their families. I look forward to seeing how Killebrew’s work develops as she matures.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Monday, July 9, 2018. It continues through July 21st.)

Review – Pride and Prejudice – Two Bits Classics at Jermyn Street Theater

The thought of two people acting all of Pride and Prejudice seems farcical at the outset, more so when I realized that it was to be a man and a woman. I mean, just look at Elizabeth Bennet’s family! She’s one of five daughters, and in her whole household there is only one man AND SIX WOMEN! And, frankly, Mr Darcy isn’t around nearly enough to justify an entire man in the cast – at least two thirds of the characters are female! But there I was, at Jermyn Street, waiting to see what had been created and, honestly, hoping for the best.

Fortunately, while Joannah Tincey and Nick Underwood do stick to playing the two leads, Elizabeth and Darcy (and in the appropriate gender), the choice of genders for the various other parts is surprisingly more varied than I expected. Mr and Mrs Bennet are as expected – Underwood with a pipe and Tincey rather frequently twirling a hanky (and talking in a very comic accent) – but there is quite a bit of variety into the casting otherwise, rather sensibly as the various characters tend to appear in pairs, Darcy himself being frequently seen with Mr Bingley, and the youngest Bennet sisters being somewhat attached at the hip. There is no doubt that Mr Underwood is extraordinarily flexible with his portrayal of the female roles. And, to my surprise, so is Ms Tincey as a man (whipping aside her skirt to show trousers). You cannot help but be somewhat astounded at what a rich job they have done at making these many characters come to life, with only the tiny bit of waffling (the middle sister who only ever gets to be a music stand; an occasional chair that is supposed to be occupied).

Jane Bennet (left) and Caroline Bingley (with fan) – Nick Underwood and Joannah Tincey – photo courtesy Carrie Johnson

So we’ve established that there’s much of a to-do with the actors popping on hats, picking up pipes, or carefully arranging a sash to give a military air. Despite this, the production as a whole has a feeling of carefully controlled simplicity, with only picture rails, a half-window, some boxes and a fireplace serving to recreate one after another interior scene (of people in widely varying circumstances) and, indeed, even the outdoors (as Elizabeth takes her many walks). All of the richness is provided by the glorious words of Jane Austen and the highly memorable characters she created, who quickly became who I saw on stage as the scene required – the brash and stupid Lydia, grasping and shallow Mrs Bennet, formal and gentle Jane. What an accomplishment! And what a very good evening at the theater – it was a longish show but time positively raced by. Like the works of Jane Austen, this feels like a play one could see again and again – a classic performed with bravura and so, so much comedy. It’s delicious counter-programming for the festive season as well. Well done, all!

(This review is for the opening night performance which took place on Thursday, December 1st. It continues through Decmeber 21st.)