Someone at the RSC must like As You Like It since this is the third production they’ve staged in as many years. In 2023 Geraldine James was Rosalind in an elegiac production whose genuinely winning feature was that many of the cast were of pensionable age. The following year saw an outdoor presentation which I remember for its jolly music and ensemble spirit. Now, under the inventive direction of Daniel Evans, we are invited to look at the play in yet another light.

To begin with, this is As You Like It with an entirely male cast so that we share something of the experience of Shakespeare’s audience, though with grown men instead of boys in the four females roles. The US actor Jonathan Groff offers up a brisk, strapping Rosalind while Fisayo Akinade provides a more supple, feminine Celia and one who seems to be having a great time too. The alliance between this pair  can sometimes seem like a standard girls’ boarding-school friendship and to have the cousins played by men makes us appreciate afresh the authentic bond linking them.

And they need such mutual support because Duke Frederick, who has usurped his older brother Duke Senior (Gary Wilmot in both parts, respectively chill and warm), really is a tyrant in the making. Surrounded by a black-clad entourage, he loves nothing better than a testosterone-charged wrestling match; when he slaps Celia for her defence of Rosalind there is a gasp from the audience. The Act One set (Anisha Fields), with a stage floor like a frozen pond and an unbroken white backdrop, makes for a cold court, something which is often underplayed in the drama.

Arden is represented by a expanse of sheep-nibbled turf backed by a great slope of long grasses, winding paths and rock that towers over the characters like an arrested green wave. This isn’t a piece of pastoral, more a chunk of real-life landscape brought in by the truckload. A Welsh landscape, as it happens, to judge by the accents of some of the forest’s inhabitants and by their harmonious singing. The costumes (Colin Richmond) have a ragged lived-in quality which contrasts with the militaristic sheen of the court outfits.

As a trespasser into this not-quite-paradise, Elliot Barnes-Worrell is a straightforward and clear-spoken Orlando, a foil to the more devious Rosalind. Caleb Roberts is effective too as Oliver, at first contemptuous of his brother and then managing the transition – one of many changes in a play of sudden shifts – to the penitent lover of Celia. Richard McCabe gives the most affecting Jaques I’ve seen, at first appearing like a sozzled afternoon dandy in a Soho pub and then catching himself by surprise as he reaches the end of the famous seven ages of man speech (‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’).

You can really believe it when he announces at the end that he’s going to join the equally changed Duke Frederick and turn hermit.

The broadly comic characters in Arden are all well-realised in a production that plays close attention to the text. Among many in the cast making their RSC debut, Rhys Parry Jones is the ‘true labourer’ Corin as well as a rather butch Hymen while Tim Phoebe provides a prim and proper Phoebe.

There was a very extended glitch on the Press Night at Stratford when the great white backdrop jammed in its ascent and prevented the emergence of the Forest of Arden. The audience, I’m happy to say, showed British phlegm and patience and greeted the eventual resumption of the action with applause and cheers. They did likewise with a standing ovation at the conclusion of this thoroughly interesting and idiosyncratic production of As You Like It.

★★★★☆ Philip Gooden, 7 October

It’s 1957 and we’re in Pittsburgh at the heart of a black working-class community. The setting is the porch and yard of a meagre property belonging to garbage man Troy Maxson, his wife Rose and son Cory. Troy is an uncompromising figure, attractive but domineering, the pivot around whom the other characters revolve. They include Lyons, an older son by another woman, his brother Gabe, and his friend and drinking partner, Bono.

This impressive Leeds Playhouse/Headlong revival of August Wilson’s classic drama highlights both universal aspects of family life and ones particular to a moment in American black history. Yes, it’s about infidelity, masculine authority, clashing ambitions and the tension between generations, but director Daniel Bailey’s intense production also shows how every aspect of daily existence cannot help but be filtered through the prism of race.

At the start Troy – a magnetic performance by Ray Fearon – is angry that a ‘colored’ can’t be promoted to driving a garbage truck. He’s resentful that Cory might get somewhere as a baseball player, believing he was held back from similar success by racial discrimination. When the easy-going Bono (Everal A Walsh) tells him that ‘Times have changed…You just come along too early’, Troy’s angry response is ‘There ought not never have been no time called too early!’, which simultaneously makes a character point and underlines the long-standing injustices of the American system.

Madeline Appiah as Rose, subtly conveying her love and occasional exasperation with her husband in the first half, really comes into her own in the second act with a moving outburst that shifts the dynamic between the couple. Josh Tedeku is similarly effective as young Cory, fearful of his father but determined to strike out on his own. The older son Lyons (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay) is an aspiring jazz player, a cool cat always destined for disappointment because his father won’t come to his performances (‘I don’t like that Chinese music.’).

Family conflict is at the centre of Fences but it is leavened by affection and humour. Ambiguity too. Troy is loving enough towards Gabe, the younger brother who sees visions as a result of a head wound, but he also takes advantage of the compensation which the war veteran receives. Gabe, in an affecting performance by Simon-Anthony Rhoden, opens and closes the drama as he plays on the trumpet which forever dangles round his neck. The angel Gabriel or a benignly mad middle-aged man? Both perhaps.

Troy is, in effect, the dramatist of his own life and he spins tales which keep his family (and the audience) riveted. We get a sense of the black experience through the first half of the twentieth century and a full-length portrait of a conflicted man, one who is obsessed with repairing the yard fence, both an image of the coldness between himself and his sons and the barrier which, in an impassioned monologue, Troy imagines as keeping death and his sickle at bay.

This is a memorable revival, with lighting (Jai Morjaria) running from ice blue to smoky orange and reflecting the shifts of the music (Khalil Madovi) from frantic to warm. The naturalistic set by Lily Arnold is more complicated than first appears and that might serve as a metaphor for a production which deservedly received a standing ovation on the night I went.

★★★★★ Philip Gooden, 1 October 2026

With thanks to StageTalk

Photography credit: Tyler Fayose

On stage|: 28 July – 1 August

Virginia Woolf’s novel, Night and Day, was a study of a young Edwardian girl who was more interested in maths and astronomy than finding a husband. Tina Gharavi’s film takes this obsession further, making the ambitious Katharine apply to Cambridge to further her career.

But here the film seems to find it necessary to exaggerate the prejudice against women studying, by staging a mock interview with three male physicists, who would never be interviewing her anyway! The facts are that Katharine would have been applying to a college, not a faculty. And in 1910 Newnham College actually had more than 10 women studying physics, using the Cavendish Laboratory. Admittedly, these women could not be awarded degrees until 1948, but to exaggerate the difficulty of entry through this fake interview scene (apparently located in the cloisters, for some reason) actually reduces the credibility of the situation.

The extent of astronomical knowledge is more accurately portrayed: surprisingly in 1910, when Halley’s comet appeared across the sky, physicists still thought the universe was finite, and confined to the Milky Way. It was only when Hubble’s telescope extended their visual range in the 1920s that scientists realised the unlimited extent of the galaxies. Though we are led to believe that Katharine was already aware of this possibility in 1910 with her tiny home-made telescope!

Other distortions of the novel to make the film producer’s point include the introduction of a gay relationship: the character of Cyril in the novel has two children with the woman he is living with, but not married to, which would be radical enough in those times. But Gharavi takes his status further, making him the gay cousin of Katharine, with a black lover who pours out his heart to her after Cyril dies dramatically and unexpectedly, just beyond the ha-ha of the country house they are visiting.

So we already have three strong themes from Edwardian times, of women’s suffrage, higher education and unorthodox living situations; but do audiences really need those realities to be pulled out of shape to make a modern point? Go back to the truth of the novel and be amazed, with a rather softer soundtrack too…

Brenda Stones/3 July 26

Wyndham gives a more scientific explanation in The Day of the Triffids (Michael Joseph, 1951) for how the ambulatory plant got its name, stressing that this was no incidental weed but the result of human meddling with nature. And in a television interview he described how the formative image of a lethal ‘vegetable’ emerged from a twilight walk down a country lane where he felt that the branches overhead ‘might come over and strike down, or if they had stings, sting at one, and the whole thing eventually grew out of that. The moving vegetable would be a real menace.’

The Day of the Triffids made Wyndham’s name and established him as the successor to H. G. Wells, but it was the culmination of many years of uncertainty and frustrated literary ambition. Born in 1903 near Edgbaston to parents who separated when he was eight, Wyndham did not enjoy a happy childhood until he was sent to Bedales in the village of Steep, Hampshire. The school might have been spartan but its relatively liberal nature, unorthodoxy and sense of fellowship, even its pastoral setting, were things that affected Wyndham for the rest of his life. If, from the apocalyptic ruins of novels such as Triffids and The Kraken Wakes (Michael Joseph, 1953), there emerge the outlines of a different and more egalitarian community, they have echoes of Wyndham’s teenage years in the South Downs.

In the words of his biographer Amy Binns (Hidden Wyndham, Grace Judson Press, 2019), Wyndham ‘left school to an uncertain future typical of Bedales graduates’. He toyed with various careers, including farming and advertising, before fixing on full-time writing. For years he contributed sci-fi short stories to American pulp magazines like Amazing Stories writing as John Benyon Harris, his birth name (Wyndham had a suite of middle names from which to pick pseudonyms). It’s a mark of his modest and faintly unconventional nature that he spent thirty years living frugally at the Penn Club in Tavistock Terrace, and later in Bedford Place, in the heart of Bloomsbury. He began a devoted and lifelong relationship with Grace Wilson, another Penn resident and an independent-minded English teacher. For many years they were unable to marry because Grace would have lost her job had they done so; that, together with the unhappy experience of his parents, almost certainly contributed to Wyndham’s ambivalence toward traditional social structures. During World War II he worked as a censor for the Ministry of Information at Senate House, which becomes in The Day of the Triffids a gathering place for those who are still sighted after a blinding, worldwide meteor shower. Later, Wyndham enlisted and served as a cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals, arriving in France soon after D-Day.

The post-war period produced more short stories and false starts in other directions, including a detective novel, until Wyndham sent an early version of Triffids to Frederick Pohl in New York. Pohl was a fellow science-fiction writer but, more to the point, also a literary agent. After extensive revisions Pohl sold the story to Collier’s for serialisation for $12,500. This was a life-changing sum, the equivalent of many times the average annual wage in Britain. For British publication Wyndham approached Robert Lusty, a connection from the Penn Club and deputy chair of Michael Joseph, saying in characteristically tentative fashion that he was looking for advice as he didn’t think the story was right for the publisher. Lusty disagreed, the book was published and John Wyndham never looked back.

Fig. 1: The dust-jacket front cover of the first edition of The Day of the Triffids, designed by Patrick Gierth.

The Day of the Triffids was issued as a mainstream novel, with an enticing cover by the illustrator Patrick Gierth depicting a couple of triffids prowling round Piccadilly Circus, empty except for a few small, flailing human figures. (In the same year Gierth produced another memorable cover for Geoffrey Household’s A Rough Shoot, also published by Joseph.) The cover shows something terrible and inexplicable happening in a very familiar setting, and this contrast became the template for several in the sequence of highly successful novels which followed the publication of Triffids.

After years of roaming in space for his pulp magazine yarns, Wyndham had come back down to earth and found his authentic literary self. His real interest was not in interplanetary voyages or scientific gizmos but in the way people and society reacted under extreme stress. As a firewatcher on the roof of the Penn Club during the Blitz, Wyndham had glimpses of destruction that he would later incorporate into his fiction; similarly, walking the streets revealed not only the resilience but the darker side of the wartime capital, the looting and assaults, handy material for a dystopian vision. It wasn’t all gloom, though. If the events that unfolded in Wyndham’s novels were appalling, they were also in some curious way appealing. The notion of a clean slate, of restarting society, or some slimmed-down version of it, can have a peculiar resonance. Wyndham’s central characters tend to be no-nonsense, practical males accompanied by women who are also no-nonsense, etc. In other words, they are well qualified to survive, and perhaps to thrive.

There could even be a picturesque, slightly surreal quality to these fresh worlds, as in The Kraken Wakes (Michael Joseph, 1953) where alien invaders, dwelling at the bottom of the sea, precipitate the melting of the polar ice caps. Low-lying land is inundated. From a vantage point in the National Gallery, the narrator watches the water lapping round Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square and wonders what Nelson would make of his new view.

Wyndham shifted his ground with The Chrysalids (Michael Joseph, 1955), set in Labrador in the distant future and envisaging a fundamentalist, post-apocalyptic community in which any deviation from the physical norm in humans or animals is considered a ‘blasphemy’ to be punished by death or exile. The nature of the apocalypse or ‘Tribulation’ is never made clear but is probably nuclear war, a spectre which haunts much of Wyndham’s work. A group of children develop telepathic powers – a punishable mutation – but eventually break free of their stultifying society. Often cited as the strongest of Wyndham’s novels, it was well received, no doubt helped by the pleasing artwork on the jacket of the UK first edition (by illustrator Brian Wildsmith) depicting a footprint in the sand. Closer examination reveals the foot to have six toes.

Fig. 2: The front cover of the Penguin 1979 reprint of The Chrysalids.

The best of John Wyndham’s later books was The Midwich Cuckoos (Michael Joseph, 1957) in which all the inhabitants of an archetypal Wiltshire village fall into a trance during which the women of childbearing age are apparently impregnated by aliens. The children who emerge nine months later are strangely similar to each other though worryingly different from their mothers. They have golden eyes and blonde hair. They display a kind of ‘hive mind’, something which was always of interest to the author, but unlike the youngsters using telepathy in The Chrysalids, these intruders on the English pastoral scene have a more sinister side to them, capable for example of causing a car driver who has injured one of them to have a fatal accident. In other hands, the traditional tropes of science-fiction such as alien invasion, possession and manipulation are simply outlandish or even ludicrous, but Wyndham had the knack of grounding his stories in the everyday world even as that everyday world was being wrenched apart.

The Midwich Cuckoos was an immediate success, reprinting within weeks, and in 1960 was filmed as Village of the Damned, starring George Sanders. The most successful of Wyndham’s screen adaptations, it is now rightly regarded as a cult classic. One of the notions lurking behind these two books featuring gifted if odd youngsters is that we scarcely have need of interplanetary visitors since they, the children, might already be the aliens among us. It’s no coincidence that Wyndham’s novels appeared in the mid-1950s just as the adult world was becoming aware of, and agitated by, the rise of a distinct teenage culture.

Now buoyed by substantial royalties and working at a slower rate, Wyndham produced two more novels before his death following a heart attack in 1969. Trouble With Lichen (Michael Joseph, 1960) dramatises the discovery of an anti-ageing drug extracted from an obscure lichen. As the title suggests, this isn’t an undiluted benefit, and Wyndham shows the sharply diVerent reactions of the two biochemist discoverers, one male, one female. In line with the approving attitude elsewhere in his fiction towards strong, decisive women, more weight is given to the female protagonist of Trouble With Lichen than to the man.

In Chocky (Michael Joseph, 1969) he returned to the theme of the possessed child but this time on a smaller scale. The parents of 12-year-old Matthew notice that the boy has an unusually active and persistent ‘imaginary friend’ with whom he has frequent conversations. After running through possible explanations, including mental illness, it turns out that Chocky is a benevolent presence, a ‘scout’ from a distant universe lodging inside the child’s mind, here to learn about and perhaps to guide humanity. A child is chosen as being more malleable than an adult. The grand and catastrophic strands of Wyndham’s classic fiction are here replaced by something homelier. Margaret Atwood, a long-time admirer of the author, notes in her afterword to a recent edition: ‘Wyndham keeps the novel’s tone light: Chocky is close to a domestic comedy, much like E.T., a film I’m guessing may have been partly inspired by it’ (NYRB Classics, 2015).

Indeed there is a Spielbergian quality, avant la lettre, to Wyndham’s later fiction, with its focus on childhood and its intermittent optimism. It is perhaps the thread of hopefulness running through almost all his work which caused Brian Aldiss to refer disparagingly to him as a ‘cosy catastrophist’. The adjective is misplaced, however. Wyndham was capable of truly disquieting visions, as in the novella Consider Her Ways, first published in an anthology Sometime, Never (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956). Wyndham’s story envisages a society in which men have become extinct and a few select women are able to reproduce artificially. Sometimes interpreted as a rather grim feminist parable, Consider Her Ways fulfils one of the functions of speculative fiction, to make the reader think as much about the present as the future.

Like many of Wyndham’s readers and admirers, I first came across him in my early teens, pleased to find something ‘modern’ after Journey to the Centre of the Earth or The Time Machine. Indeed, I remember thinking – this was not long after the beginning of the 1960s – that all the discussion about the need for new social arrangements, and particularly sexual ones, in the utterly changed world of The Day of the Triffids was a bit daring. My collection consists mostly of Penguins from that era, but I have two Michael Joseph firsts, acquired a few years ago at Blackwell’s and from the library of John Baxter. Neither Trouble With Lichen or Chocky has the cachet or the collectibility of the really desirable quartet from Wyndham’s first burst of success and were more modestly priced at £75 and £50 respectively.

Courtesy of Blackwell’s Rare Books, current figures for that famous quartet put Triffids in the region of £1,200 and upwards (though signed copies can go for £11,000 or more), while both The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos are available for around £750 and The Chrysalids for £600. My copy of Lichen has doubled in value so it may be that Wyndham’s more substantial books are also on a rising curve. I hope so because I think his novels are worth collecting both as exemplary science fiction and, though this may sound paradoxical, as very characteristic products of the 1950s and early 60s.

The other two contributors to Sometime, Never, the novella collection previously mentioned, were William Golding and Mervyn Peake. At the time, Wyndham would have been the most familiar name, with three best-selling novels under his belt (Lord of the Flies had appeared only two years before). Now, nearly three quarters of a century later, Wyndham remains enduringly popular, the majority of his books never out of print and his visions of the future still influential. Alex Garland, the screenwriter of 28 Days Later (2002), has acknowledged the influence of The Day of the Triffids on the film. Both begin with a man waking up in hospital and discovering a London landscape which has suffered a terrible transformation. But I think that the placing of him alongside Golding and Peake, despite being an accident of anthology as it were, tells us something of significance. With his sometimes-askew imagination, his willingness to explore daunting areas and his very English sensibility, John Wyndham has an honourable place in that high literary company.

With thanks to The Book Collector, Spring 2026 edition.

*****

Wagner’s monumental cycle of operas has always provoked controversy. Recent productions have moved away from the composer’s own naturalistic stage directions and the visual interpretations of nineteenth century artists such as Arthur Rackham, Odilon Redon or Carl Emil Doepler, who designed the costumes for the first production of the tetralogy at Bayreuth in 1876. After the Second World War, particularly in a divided Germany, there were pressures to rethink Wagnerian interpretation, to move beyond myth and symbolism, heroic violence and racial pride, to more pressing and immediate political and economic themes. Two years ago, at the Berlin Staatsoper, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s direction lurched implausibly between a corporate boardroom and a mental hospital. The Valkyries were in track suits and the rest of the characters looked like they had been kitted out in Primark. The conductor was Phillippe Jourdain, the orchestra and singers first rate. But most members of the audience were left in some confusion as to precisely what was going on.

By way of contrast, the current production at La Scala conducted by Simone Young and directed and designed by Sir David McVicar, takes the Ring back to its mythic roots while making brilliant use of the 21st century potential of inventive and versatile light effects to indicate setting and mood. Sumptuous costumes by Emma Kingsbury are clearly influenced by the interpretations of the above-mentioned artists while hinting at the early twentieth-century fashions of Mario Fortuny as well as more recent inspirations such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Game of Thrones. The whole production is infused with a vibrant athleticism which verges at time on the acrobatic.  Not only do the Rhine Maidens appear to be actually swimming, but they are joined by a mysterious naked man (a Rhine boy?) whose astonishing but inexplicable gyrations are one of the few anomalies in an otherwise harmonious vision.  Beautiful quasi-human horses prance on running blades, while the giants Fasolt (Jong Min Park) and Fafner (Ain Anger) must surely have created operatic history by performing their demanding roles on stilts.

Suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite to enjoying these operas and one of the difficulties for any director/designer must be the need to link the many different, parallel worlds.  In this vast opera house, it is crucial to play at several levels so that the actor singers are more than dots on a flat surface.  McVicar and his co-designer, Hannah Postlethwaite, achieve this by strewing the area of action with huge rocks shaped like broken human heads and hands.  These become caves, mountains, the dragon’s lair, Brünnhilde’s resting place. It is as if an age of giants has gone before and we are left with their shattered memorials, a perpetual reminder of the inevitable decline and ephemerality of all civilisations.

Simone Young’s conducting is passionate and energetic, her gestures large yet precise and there is a powerful sense of forward motion. She has an apparently instinctive feeling for the great sweep of the score, and Wagner’s music never drags as it can do in more ponderous versions. The effect is at once lush and exciting, verging on the wild, different from the more polished sound of the Staatsoper orchestra under Phillippe Jourdain in Berlin. Young started her Wagner career as assistant to Barenboim in Bayreuth and clearly lives and breathes these operas. The cast, orchestra, and audience love her. There was a touching moment in the first interval to Die Walküre when the first clarinet was invited onstage to rapturous applause to recognize his final performance after 40 years in the band.

But in the limited time available (I am on holiday in Naples as I write), my focus will be the final work of the cycle, Götterdämmerung. At the start of the opera, we find ourselves in yet another parallel world, the home of the Norns who, like the classical Fates, must weave the rope of past, present and future.  In their horror of what is to come, their rope unravels and falls apart.  Then, after Siegfried’s poignant farewell to Brünnhilde, we arrive in the kingdom of the Gibichings. The stage is illuminated with gold, a vast gilded skull looming behind the action from the back.  Is this the slayed dragon from Siegfried? Is all this gold the looted treasure from Fafner’s cave? And yet the mood here is distinctly human and horribly familiar. The Gibichungs are a fierce, militaristic clan, their uniforms hinting at Prussian bellicosity and the early days of European fascism.

From this point on the opera moves fast with a fatal love potion and plot twists worthy of any contemporary thriller. Through all this rapid action, Klaus Florian Vogt’s powerful Siegfried gains a new emotional stature. He has left behind the angry adolescent and grown into his destiny as the great hero. Vogt has the power and vocal agility the role requires and there is never a hint of exhaustion.  He is well matched by Camilla Nylund’s Brünnhilde, noble and impassioned, her initial shock and despair leading to a fury that is all too easy to comprehend. She is at her best when all movement stops and she is standing front stage, singing out to the auditorium in conventional operatic style.

The build-up to the death of Siegfried is famously rich in dramatic irony, with the audience knowing so much more than the participants.  We watch in horror as the lovers becomes victim to the nefarious machinations of Hagen (Günther Groissböck), culminating in the terrible moment when Brünnhilde tells him exactly how to kill the man she believes has betrayed her. For those who grew weary during the long explanations and extended declarations of the earlier operas, the rapid pace of Götterdämmerung comes as something of a relief, despite its dark contents.

Finally, out of the twists and turns and horror of Siegfried’s death comes a sudden shift of tempo, the heart-rending beauty of the hero’s funeral march.  Readers should look elsewhere for an analysis of this ten-minute orchestral interlude which draws in motifs not only associated with Siegfried, but also his parents Siegmund and Sieglinde. Every listener will have his or her very personal response.

In the final dramatic scene of the drama the stage shimmers with soaring red and gold flame. There are clouds of grey black smoke. This is the moment we have all been waiting for. The heroine and her loyal steed, the half-human, half-equine Grane run through the blaze to the funeral pyre, kneeling at the head and feet of the great hero as the flames rise upward. Through the inferno we see the broad staircase of Valhalla and the hooded figure of Wotan falling to his doom.  It’s hard not to feel that the composer would have approved.

The Ring is sometimes avoided by those who dislike the racism implicit in the story, the strong whiff of antisemitism in the presentation of the Nibelungs. Others will justify the philosophy of its creator by pointing out that the thirst for power and control amongst the warring races is shown to be an empty quest. No one actually uses the ring, and all those who seek to possess it are destroyed, even the Gods. The Ring is a lengthy parable about the dangers of power and in that sense, it is as relevant to the world we live in today as it was to the nineteenth century. On a more human level, it tells a familiar domestic story of forbidden love and jealousy. The current production doesn’t burden us with a specific contemporary angle on Wagner’s intentions. Rather it presents a world on stage comprised of both beauty and horror, leaving us to bring our own thoughts and reflections to this great piece of operatic writing.

Ros Carne, Naples, March 2026.

Edward Albee’s visceral four- hander is a bold choice for the first in-house production from this theatre’s Artistic Director, Mike Tweddle. The play was first performed in New York City in 1962 and while some of the writer’s preoccupations may feel particular to its place and era, the brilliant script never feels dated. It is a monumental work, far more than the portrait of a marriage in free fall, it is also an anguished plea to all of us to face the truth about ourselves.

Liz Ashcroft’s single set is, at first glance, naturalistic, a drab book-lined living room on the campus of a New England college. Within the design, a smaller proscenium arch hints at the theatricality of the world on stage. Here for more than three hours, in real time, two couples drink, play games, taunt, and torment each other, revealing their deepest fears and longings.   The dialogue is sharp, often fiery, quick repartee interspersed with painful stories that recreate past trauma and feel like a series of plays within the play.

The cast is superb. Katy Stephens, as Martha, prowls like a stalking cat, arms outstretched, wrists curled like claws, ready to pounce from the moment she announces the arrival of guests at 2am. She appears in green silk, drunk and disappointed in her life, tottering on uncomfortable shoes, horribly cruel to her husband, lurching from self-pity to wild vivacity, using her visitors as allies, growing increasingly uncontrolled and predatory until the final terrible scene where her violence turns in against herself.

Matthew Pidgeon is the perfect foil as her demoralised husband, George. At first almost immune to his wife’s constant belittling, the arrival of guests gives a focus to his passive aggression. As she grows drunker and crazier, he takes control, becoming the agent of stage action like the pretend shooting, the arrival of flowers. Despite her cries for attention, he becomes the master of ceremonies, the one to organise the brutal games and tell false tales, whatever the pain to his victims.

When the younger couple, Nick and Honey, enter the mix, the chemistry never falters. Leah Haile sparkles as the nervous campus wife, mannered, respectable, speaking in euphemisms and shocked by crude language. With time and brandy, she too unravels, bursting out in interpretative dance as if shedding a skin, needy and desperate for affection, clutching her life of pretence as a protection from loneliness.  Ben Hall as her husband Nick has an equally marked dramatic journey. Proud of his physical prowess and professional achievements, lurching from shy good manners to honest anger as he becomes the butt of his host’s vicious teasing and his hostess’ sexual predation.

An obvious thought about these young people, stopping by for a drink at 2am, is, ‘Why don’t they leave?’ But we soon realise they are caught in a trap, just as we, the audience, are caught in a trap. It’s an uncomfortable play to watch, tragic, but not a tragedy, comic, but not a comedy, naturalism verging on absurdity. It’s a comment on the American Dream, but also a comment for all time about the lies we tell ourselves and each other, a precursor of much of the great drama and cinema of the 1960s and beyond.

★★★★★    Ros Carne   25 February 2026

Masculine hypocrisy takes a witty battering in Laura Wade’s stylish adaptation of this Somerset Maugham classic. The original play, first performed in 1926, shocked London audiences with its clear-eyed vision of marriage as an economic contract.  Modern audiences are more likely to give a nod of approval to the serious message that underlines the comedy. But the play retains its power to move and disturb in its stark dramatization of sexual double standards.

Tamara Harvey’s touring production for the Royal Shakespeare Company is a feast for the eyes. Constance Middleton, determined to become financially independent of her wealthy surgeon husband, John, chooses to follow her natural talents, setting up in business with her sister as an interior designer. Her own home becomes her showroom, the imaginary and the real converging in Anna Fleischle and Cat Fuller’s elegant set and costumes.  The comfortable light-filled space is reassuring, hinting at the world of the early twentieth century well-made play. Characters glide past a transparent wall before entering the pastel themed drawing room, a perfect setting for the glorious 1920s costumes. With several nods to the 21^st century, these look as fresh as if they’d walked off our streets yesterday, even as the moody jazz piano conjures the world of the bright young things. Despite the butler, the over-sized telephone and the references to the war, this feels very much like a play for today, albeit a wealthy upper middle-class segment of today.

The show’s heart is Kara Tointon’s charismatic and lovable Constance. She is a delight to watch, graceful and vulnerable, weeping at her daughter’s departure to private boarding school, while remaining a hard-nosed realist, managing to remain cool through a year of her husband’s infidelity. Her timing is pitch perfect with some delicious dramatic moments, as when she hurls her handkerchief onto the piano to warn her mother to leave the room so she can be alone with her desirable male friend, only for her mother to misinterpret the melodramatic gesture. It’s easy to see Maugham’s debt to Wilde.

Tointon is supported by a strong cast, particularly Sara Crowe as her mother and Amy Vicary-Smith in a heightened role as her unmarried sister. The sizzling family chemistry is a delight. Gloria Onitiri adds a flash of outside excitement as Marie Louise, though her interpretation of the role of the mistress feels at times histrionic. The men, true to the script, are very much secondary players, almost wooden in contrast with the vibrant women.

Wade has made subtle changes to the original version, maintaining the comic moments and verbal acuity, while emphasising the underlying theme. Where Maugham uses consecutive time, she gives us a flashback, showing the actual infidelity, thus cutting back on the wordiness of the script. She also plays with the ending, making the main character more likable for a modern audience. It’s a tiny last-minute tweak, creating a degree of uncertainty about Constance’s future conduct. In so doing, Wade softens her brittle edge which, critic and biographers agree, may have been coloured by Maugham’s own experience of an unhappy marriage. Purists might baulk at this, but the message of the play remains. Financial independence is key, and the fight for sexual equality continues.

★★★★☆      Ros Carne     3 February 2026

With thanks to StageTalk magazine

photographer credit @ Mihaela Bodlovic

Out of interest, I wanted to see what AI could do with Anna Funder’s story of Mrs Orwell.  This is not me writing, or my writing style.  I would want to do ‘something clever’ with Wifedom, and my own Lifedom, such as Babydom that halted my Writerdom for a number of years.  Oh! And we mustn’t forget Cookingdom, Shoppingdom and Washingdom.  And Inspiredom. (My two children are kind, clever, creative – and they’ve completed their duty in leaving the nest!)  I wonder what a 2025 Husbandom would say?  “Hey! I’m walking the baby in the Pramdom and feeding from the baby Spoondom.  Yes, I can change in the Kingdom of Nappydom! I am a modern take on Daddydom, Daddydom, Daddy-Daddy-dom.”

In this ‘rhyming review’ (where I’d wanted a brilliant ballad) I have guided AI with questions and edits to its initial suggestions.  It had a habit of using the word ‘scaffold’ which I didn’t feel was right for this piece.  I also tried out other styles – Co-Pilot asked if I’d like to try a Rap, being naturally drawn to musical compositions, I did – and it was quite good.  But with each example, more was needed (as we writers find during the early process of writing for ourselves). For now, here an extract (6 of 10 stanzas) from the AI Poetic Overview.  And  it still needs editing! 

Dear Readers and Writers: Your thoughts please, such as did it entice you to read Wifedom?  Feel free to ‘have a go’ and ‘make changes’ – let me know how you get on.

In shadows she stood, while the spotlight was his,
Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a life gone amiss.
George Orwell wrote truths of the world’s disguise,
Yet her labour and love hid from history’s eyes.

Her hands shaped his pages, his drafts she refined,
The brilliance we praise was a partnership signed.
Invisible editor, silent and true,
Her effort the framework on which his words grew.

Meanwhile, and in between:

She scrubbed at the lavatory, blockages grim,
While Orwell chased muses, the world turned to him.

In Spain she was stranded, the city in flame,
Headquarters abandoned, yet she still remained.
On a mattress she sat, with the secrets below,
Passports and papers the world shouldn’t know.

Through danger she slipped, through shadows she fled,
A tale half imagined, half history read.
Her courage or fiction — the line’s hard to trace,
But Funder restores her to time and to place.

Anna Funder unearths what silence concealed,
A wife’s hidden story, at last now revealed.
Through fragments of letters, creatively art,
She restores Eileen’s place, her essential part.

So Wifedom reminds us, with rhythm and rhyme,
Unseen contributions can outlast their time.
A call to remember, to honour, to see –
The wives in the margins who shaped history.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder is published by Penguin

THE FORSYTE SAGA Parts 1 & 2 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

28 November – 10 January

What’s that line about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way? It’s certainly true of the wealthy and assured Forsytes whose conflicts and rivalries span generations, as each hands down its particular bundle of secrets and neuroses to the next.

The RSC are staging John Galsworthy’s famous saga in two parts at the Stratford Swan, with a total run-time of around five hours, and all expertly distilled by Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan from the multi-volume original. The production focuses on the experience of the women in the narrative, with the first part dedicated to Irene (Fiona Hampton), reluctant wife to Soames Forsyte (Joseph Millson) , and the second to Fleur (Flora Spencer-Longhurst), Soames’s daughter by his second wife.

The younger woman is very much of the twentieth century while Irene finds herself the victim of Victorian male attitudes. In short, Soames regards her as his possession. Status, money, respectability are all-important. A woman’s role is to adorn – and adore – her man and, of course, to provide him with a son.  Irene’s growing friendship with a young architect, an outsider like her, provokes the main crisis in the first play and indirectly its most notorious scene, the rape of Irene by her husband.

Yet Galsworthy and his adapters are too subtle to paint Soames as an out-and-out monster. Underneath the hardness and the calculation, there is a romantic streak as well as passion, and Joseph Millson conveys both the rigidity of the man and his need for love.   The contradictions extend to the entire dynasty. Though the elders of the family believe themselves to be ‘the backbone of England’ and can be condemned for their conviction that ‘everything is a commodity’, we’re reminded that commercial success is the financial underpinning for art, science and even religion. An appreciation for paintings, as both collectable and aesthetic objects, is one of the threads that run through this complex, ambivalent drama.

Things inevitably change over the the 50-year period encompassed by the two parts of The Forsyte Saga. Historical events like the Boer War or the General Strike are used as milestones. The end of the Victorian era is finely suggested by the slow lowering of the red curtains which tower over the stage in the first play while the transition between the 19th century and the 1920s is shown in the shift from (literally) buttoned-up clothing to looser, softer garments (set and costume, Anna Yates). Significantly, Soames is dressed much the same at the end – top hat, wing collar – as at the beginning.

But the new is not necessarily better than the old. At first we see Fleur as an open and innocent guide to the past. But it turns out she has her father’s blood and will batter her way through remorselessly to get what she wants. The ending is cathartic but subdued. To an extent, the events in part two are an echo of what occurs in part one, and perhaps the point is that what we can’t escape is not so much fate as it is the shaping legacy of family.

Under the direction of Josh Roche, these are elaborate productions, with a large cast and a multiplicity of scenes shifting smoothly between public and private, notably assisted by the lighting (Alex Musgrave), sound and music (Max Pappenheim). It seems appropriate that at one of the key moments in the play we hear the poignant and mysterious Tallis Fantasia by Vaughan Williams, since both the music and the drama are straining to catch some essence of Englishness, even if it will always remain out of reach.

★★★★☆      Philip Gooden     6 December 2025

Photography credit: Carn Harle

With thanks to StageTalk magazine