Is this thing on…?

<Blows dust off screen>

…ah, there you are. Good. Yes, it’s been a little while since any reviews appeared here, but that’s because it’s been a little while since I’ve been to the theatre. What can I say? Send me tickets to things and I’ll write about them.

In the meantime I can promise to write a review at least once a year, because once a year I take my god-daughter to a show as part of her Christmas present, and this year that show was Matilda, which happily has just opened in the West End. We actually went en famille, because we decided that even the younger brother might enjoy it, which he duly did. I think it would be hard to find a demographic to whom it wouldn’t appeal, because – like all of Roald Dahl’s children’s books – the story is dark and funny and exciting, but Tim Minchin’s songs are so big-hearted and good-natured that you can’t help but smile all the way through them.

Whether for reasons of privacy or nerves or something else, the website doesn’t show pictures of the children, so I’m not entirely sure which Matilda we saw, but she was very good – not at all stage schooly, which is quite often a problem with children in musicals – and with a sense of physical comedy that I’ve rarely seen in an adult, let alone in an eleven-year-old (probably). Carrying a show this bombastic and exuberant is a big task, but she pulled it off with relish and was lovely to watch throughout.

The other star of the show is Bertie Carvel as Miss Trunchbull. In the book, and in the 1996 Danny Devito film (which is excellent, and if you haven’t seen it you should rent it now), Miss Trunchbull is properly, unrelentingly, terrifying. For the musical version, someone has realised that characters in musicals can either sing or be scary (would Oliver Reed have made such an intimidating Bill Sykes if he’d bellowed out “My Name” in the film?), and sensibly opted for the former. Carvel’s physical performance is unique and mesmerising and extraordinary, but it’s not frightening. Which is fine: apart from anything else, there are quite a lot of children in the audience, and the tickets are very expensive, so you don’t want them hiding under their seats for half of the show.

Paul Kaye and Josie Walker are also excellent as Matilda’s parents in what is a true ensemble piece, some of the highlights coming in the big musical numbers which don’t have a great deal to do with the plot, but which jolly the thing along and provide the sorts of thrills you need when you take children to the theatre. My only slight problem was that in places the lyrics weren’t quite audible, because they were fast and clever and lots of people were singing at once. It’s a problem that I also sometimes have with Sondheim, and if you’re going to be compared to a songwriter, it might as well be him, so it’s not a real gripe. Tim Minchin is above all a happy comedian (there aren’t many, although I got into a fight on the internet when I said that recently), and that shines through in his songs, which are sweet and funny and heartwarming.

It’s not often that a new musical comes along that seems to be everything a musical should be – Wicked is the closest thing we’ve had recently, but I’ve never been quite able to fall in love with Wicked. I fell in love with Matilda the minute it started, and if you sent me a ticket I’d go and see it again tomorrow.

The box office staff are rather sweetly concerned about me. ‘You don’t speak Thai? Any Thai?’ they keep asking. And I try to explain that I knew the play well enough, I’ll be fine, but don’t know if this gets through. They sell me a ticket, but look at me anxiously from time to time. It gets to eight o’clock, the advertised starting time, and nothing happens. Some teenage girls decide to pass the time taking pictures of themselves with the dog.

Eventually they let us in, about ten minutes late. The set is all white – walls made of white sliding panels, white tables and chairs. A giant red chaise longue. And all the props are bright red, a concept they take to dotty lengths – all anyone ever drinks is rosé wine, and at one point Emma serves up a salad made entirely of rose petals.

Only not Emma, because they’ve changed the names to Thai – she’s Jiramol, played by Pavinee Samakrabutr, beautiful in a diminuitive Eva Longoria kind of way. And I suspect they spent a large part of the budget on her frocks, which are uniformly stunning. She looks, in almost every scene, like she’s on her way to the Golden Globes. Her men friends are compelling too, tall and good-looking in a warrior-poet kind of way.

The translation seems reasonably faithful, as far as I can tell, although as previously established I know precisely enough Thai to order in restaurants and no more. I think they felt sorry for the guy playing the waiter only having one scene, and have put him into a couple of others (the actor is also credited as part of the ‘set up team’). And the ending is a bit different – her husband actually catches Jiramol and his best man canoodling in the marital bedroom, which makes the whole rest of the play rather more perverse than usual.

It’s a good production, on the whole, even if the walls are thin and you can hear the dog howling out in the lobby. The actors are charismatic and not afraid to hold a pause, which is always good in Pinter. The set design achieves a lot with a clearly limited budget, and the music is so lushly scored I suspect they nicked it off a film soundtrack. There isn’t a great deal of Thai theatre around, so I was encouraged by the youth and enthusiasm of the audience (where youth= anyone younger than me) and hope this is a sign of great things to come. Democrazy seems to be one to watch.

However, both Avenue Q and the South Park movie also share an obvious love for and awareness of classical musical style and convention, and this side of their creators’ talents is also in abundant supply. Taken on its most straightforward terms, The Book of Mormon is a masterclass in construction and pacing. It has strong, well-defined characters in whom it’s easy to get emotionally invested and whose story is moved forward to a satisfying conclusion through superb, catchy show-tunes in a variety of styles which nod to heavily to recent Broadway tradition – there are echoes to be heard of Rent, Wicked and Hairspray – and even to The Sound of Music

At its core it’s a fairly archetypal plot: two unlikely partners battle adversity and learn a little bit about themselves along the way. Our two heroes in this case are both Mormon missionaries – clean-cut superstar of the faith Elder Price, and slobby drop-out Elder Cunningham – who are sent to join the massively unsuccessful efforts of their brethren in Uganda (total souls saved: zero). Price’s bullet-proof confidence in himself is shaken, while Cunningham is called upon to rise to challenges he always thought beyond him.

Apart from the sturdiness of its dramatic skeleton, the beauty of The Book of Mormon is that it’s ambitious, and successful, on every level. It’s hugely funny – the most I’ve laughed in a theatre since The Producers – and delights in taking pot-shots at any number of issues. The Lion King and left-for-dead Broadway rival Bono get their noses playfully tweaked and the peculiar tenets of Mormonism get a thorough dusting down but more serious issues are brought into play as well: hilarious comic songs deal seriously with ideas about the suppression of self required by religious conformity and the arrogance and dilettantism of religious colonialism. They don’t flinch from Africa’s AIDS pandemic, factional warfare or the cultural perpetuation of female circumcision.

Like the very best satirists, Parker, Stone and Lopez are at heart humanists and while they’re merciless towards weak ideas and sloppy thinking, they’re unfailingly generous and compassionate towards individuals. It’s a kind show at its core and, perhaps surprisingly, is not by any means a blanket condemnation of religion but a plea for a more sophisticated application of its power.

The production isn’t quite perfect – the final section runs a little too long and its impact is diluted by repeating material from earlier in the show, and while Andrew Rannells as Elder Price and Nikki M. James as Nabalungi, a village girl who is taken up with their missionary zeal, are both superb, Josh Gad as Elder Cunningham leans a little too heavily on the dishevelled and boorish side. His character feels like it was written for, and is pretty much played as, a young Jack Black but Gad lacks Black’s underlying innocent sweetness to leaven the role.

These quibbles are minor, though, in a show which can make theatrical gold from an exegesis of the life of Joseph Smith – ‘the prophet with a little Donny Osmond flair’ – to a Dantean vision of a Creepy Mormon Hell Dream, complete with menacing apparitions of maple topped donuts. I’d say it’s time to give Parker and Stone a MacArthur Genius grant but their truckload of Tonys and packed houses suggest they’re doing just fine as they are.

Nonetheless, the new production of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying is determined to deliver a respectable bang for the pre-assured buck, as demonstrated by the choice of hotter than hot director-choreographer Rob Ashford. He delivers a show which takes a thin plot – the climb to success of ingenuous charmer J. Pierrepont Finch from window-washer to executive wunderkind – and presents it in the slickest, paciest fashion imaginable.

The play retains its original 1960s setting and it’s designed as a gorgeous homage to the decade’s most stylish, modernist impulses with a series of set pieces which glide smoothly on, garnished with beautiful people in sharp suits and ruthlessly cut dresses. The songs are well-tooled and springily arranged, if never hugely memorable (and several of them recall Frank Loesser’s own earlier work in Guys and Dolls perhaps too closely). The energetic  choreography is a masterclass in ensemble dance, full of witty and graceful moments with a chorus drilled to perfection. Of a uniformly strong supporting cast, the stand-outs are Christopher J. Hanke as Finch’s haplessly scheming rival and Rob Bartlett who takes two separate small parts and makes a huge impression in them both.

The most heartening aspect of the production, though, is that the avalanche of established Broadway talent ends up complementing rather than carrying the central performances. John Larroquette, as the easily swayed company president, fits a mostly comic part beautifully and milks it for all it’s worth. He makes an amusing visual counterpoint to the diminutive Radcliffe who’s a good head shorter than pretty much everyone else on stage.

It’s not just his lack of height which makes Radcliffe a less-than-obvious star attraction; his voice, both speaking and singing, is fairly weak and his dancing looks more carefully memorised than to the manner born. Somehow, though, he makes it all work. If it’s a quirk of circumstance that he’s the star of the show, he’s obviously determined to justify it. He’s a charismatic and likeable presence, with a nice comic touch, and if his musical chops aren’t abundant, they’re by no means embarrassing. Buoyed by the palpable goodwill of the audience, he acquits himself admirably.

The immaculate production unfortunately can only go so far to hide some problems with the show, most of which stem from its roots in the 60s. Mad Men may have made it cool to be sexist again but all of the female characters here are a very sorry lot; the heroine’s ‘I Want’ number is basically an unironic version of ‘Somewhere That’s Green’ in which she dreams of cooking supper every night for our pint-sized hero, and her entire story is defined by her obsession with getting married. The show’s sexism is deep in the bone: there’s an entire number called ‘A Secretary is Not a Toy.’

The production decides to play all of this completely straight, which is probably the best bet in the circumstances since it’s not a piece which can really support updating or re-interpretation (the only nod to the last thirty years is brief, funny Tom Cruise sight gag). If you can stomach the archaic values, it’s a bright, breezy, gossamer thin piece of well mounted entertainment which garnered an enthusiastic and well-earned standing ovation. It just doesn’t really bear too much thinking about, but perhaps that doesn’t always matter.

The end result wears its history fairly close to the surface. Even if its painful birth had not been gleefully documented along the way, the unwieldiness of the show makes it obvious that it’s the product of conflicting impulses which have been jammed together to make an awkwardly compromised show.

The plot as it now stands is a fairly straight-forward Spider-Man origin story: geeky kid gets bitten by super-spider and acquires its proportionate abilities and decides to fight crime after the death of his beloved uncle. He loves aspiring Broadway actress Mary-Jane Watson. Norman Osborn, brilliant scientist turned certifiable loon, is his antagonist in his own mutated form as the Green Goblin. It’s no coincidence that it sounds more like a collection of bullet-points than a plot; there’s very little in the way of connective tissue in this story, either in terms of narrative or character. It feels like a rote ticking-off of iconic moments of the established Spider-Man mythos which don’t really cohere into an emotional journey. Jennifer Damiano’s Mary-Jane is particularly ill-served in this respect. She’s introduced in one of the better songs, No More, where we’re told about her abusive home-life and her longing for something kinder, but this is never touched upon again and she’s soon reduced to the role of adoring, frustrated girlfriend to be used as motivation for both hero and villain.

The only noticeable piece of invention is the character of Arachne, filched from myth to become a spiritual symbol of spider-hood (or something). A Taymor innovation, she was apparently a co-lead in the original production and drew the focus of much of the criticism. The solution which has been cooked up is not a happy one. Presumably unwilling to lose her expensive design or several songs, she pops up occasionally as…a motif? A dream? A vision? Your guess is as good as mine but she adds nothing to proceedings except for being part of an attractively gentle aerial ballet sequence.

With little substance to offer in the way of plot or character, the show falls back on its aesthetic and production values and the results are a very mixed bag. The design of the show is a bewildering mess. There’s some invention on display in the sets, which play amusingly with perspective, but it generally looks and feels a little bare and, surprisingly, cheap while the costuming and make-up is totally inconsistent. Peter and Mary-Jane are restrained and realist while other characters and environments are massively stylised pop-art caricatures. Norman Osborn’s lab looks like a 1950s science-fiction set, complete with assistants in Baco-foil suits, while J Jonah Jameson is stuffed into a comically oversize suit with a giant bouffant wig. He refers to the internet, but is backed up with an all-female chorus of a 1950s typing pool complete with manual typewriters. During an heroic montage of Spider-Man’s early exploits – one of the first times the show actually comes to life – the villains are played with grotesque giant cartoon head masks (making it seem slightly as though New York is under siege from an army of Frank Sidebottom fans) but this conceit comes from nowhere and is never seen again.

The music, by Bono and The Edge, is for the most part murky and unmemorable and isn’t helped by the fact that distorted amplification makes it very hard to hear any lyrics most of the time. The lack of a coherent identity for the score is a problem; the reprise of the best song, Rise Above, is the only time it feels like anything other than a completely disparate collection of mostly bad songs.

One undoubted triumph is in the much-discussed aerial sequences; performers fly around the theatre, through and above the audience, with dazzling speed and grace (and with no noticeable glitches on the night I saw it) and the result is genuinely thrilling. These moments are mostly confined to the second half, which consequently has much more verve than the rather boring first act, but it unfortunately becomes an exercise in sitting impatiently through another dull song or toothless dramatic beat while waiting for someone to take to the sky again.

The show’s other high spot is Patrick Page’s performance as Norman Osborn and the Green Goblin. Even under ludicrous costuming in both identities he manages to break through the wall of nervous indifference which seems to surround the rest of the cast to establish a strong connection with the audience and sells his every moment with gusto. His Act Two opener, A Freak Like Me (Needs Company), is a highpoint of the production. In a show which badly lacks its own identity – it’s a mish-mash of rock, circus and drama stealing aesthetic cues variously from comics, cartoons and films – he injects a dose of pure musical theatre and brings the endeavour gloriously to life on its own terms for moments which are sadly too brief. He fleetingly suggests a success which might have been, but this farrago feels like it’s wasted a huge amount of effort and ideas, assembled without genuine creative purpose and thrown on stage to die.

I’d seen it twice before (as had she: in fact, I’ve only ever been to see it with her, at her instigation), but the last time was a while ago and it turned out I’d forgotten quite a lot of it, which was a pleasant surprise – although the bits I remembered were the best bits, which are still the best bits even when you know what’s going to happen.

And it has a lot of best bits. Even now, after 25 years, it’s as dramatic a piece of stagecraft as anything I’ve seen: full of spectacle and illusion and trompe l’oeil (although I think that on the third pass I finally managed to figure out how all the tricks are done), and impressively ambitious in scale. And it’s smart. As the action breathlessly flits from Christine’s dressing room to the Phantom’s lair to a full-scale operatic performance from Hannibal, complete with giant elephant, we go from silent observers to members of the cast, playing the audience at the Opéra and applauding a performance we haven’t really seen. It’s clever and cheeky and it works.

I don’t want to talk about the music, because you already know it. I love it, but I can see why people wouldn’t, and there is a certain amount of mental juggling required to accept Andrew Lloyd Webber’s poppy compositions in the context of 19th century opera. I think you have to be postmodern about these things.

I do want to talk about the singing, because Sofia Escobar is the loveliest and most enchanting Christine I’ve ever seen – and what’s more she sounds just like Sarah Brightman (apart from her slight accent, which only adds to the charm). The casting director must have jumped for joy when they found her. John Owen-Jones is an appropriately menacing Phantom and has a voice to die for, and it’s not his fault he’s not as handsome as Ramon Karimloo, whom I hope one day gets to play this version of the character, rather than the toothless, daddish Phantom of Love Never Dies. Will Barratt and Wendy Ferguson are excellent as Raoul and Carlotta, and I reserve a special mention for Cheryl McAvoy as Madame Giry, because it’s the hardest-working, least-rewarding part in the piece, and she shines, despite having to wear all black and frown the whole time.

So I think I enjoyed it more this time around than ever before – but bear in mind that, as I have attested elsewhere, I am slightly obsessed with this show. That said, even if you don’t like what Phantom of the Opera does, it still does it better than anyone else.

[A note: I've said this before, but if you go, try to make sure you sit in the stalls, but not in the front few rows or the back few rows. The action happens all over the theatre, and the middle section of the stalls is the optimum spot for seeing everything.]

And, well, it was excellent. One of the best plays I’ve seen in as long as I can remember, and completely not overwhelmed by the stunt casting, which you forget more or less as soon as you’ve spotted Sienna Miller, who is fine, and Sheridan Smith, who is outstanding.

I used to find Sheridan Smith annoying, because I had only seen her in annoying BBC3 shows like Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, and Grown Ups. Then I saw her in Little Shop of Horrors and Legally Blonde and realised that she’s really an excellent comic actress as well as being a lovely singer, but I still had reservations about her ability to carry off a serious, meaty dramatic role.

Well, this role has a fair bit of comedy in it but it has a lot more besides, and Smith rises to the challenge effortlessly. Her Doris, Countess Skriczevinsky, is so completely accomplished and believable and touching that she’d be the star of the show, if only everyone else weren’t almost as good. This is a true ensemble piece, and part of the reason it works so well is that it’s just a very good play; its mechanics and interplays perfectly crafted and balanced, so that it’s only afterwards that you realise how very well-written it is.

It’s also beautifully staged, on the Theatre Royal’s monster of a stage. The very weight and heft of the scenery bears down upon the action, scoring it into your brain with a formal dignity which is perfectly suited to the drama. And the changes of mood, the switches from comedy to tragedy and back again, are so elegantly done, with such lightness of touch, that I found myself laughing and crying all at once, which was a novel but not unpleasant sensation.

Flare Path has six weeks to run and I deliberately haven’t told you what it’s about because I think you should go and see it blind, like I did, although it won’t spoil it for you if you already know the story. And next time I complain about stunt casting, you can remind me of this and tell me to stop whining.

I didn’t know the story before I went in, which is something that always worries me a bit when it comes to ballet: I still remember the time I saw Coppélia and didn’t realise that Swanhilde was pretending to be the doll in the second half, resulting in all sorts of confusion until I went away and read a synopsis of the plot. The Most Incredible Thing gets around this problem by cheating slightly and introducing words, which mostly works although it occasionally seems heavy-handed, but it did at least mean that I always knew what was happening.

Mostly, though, what surprised me – in a good way – about it was how traditional it was. I was expecting something avant-garde and experimental, but despite the lavish use of special effects, this was very much a figurative show rather than an abstract one, with proper sets and costumes, making it the kind of ballet you could take a child to (though nobody did on the night I went), which is my favourite sort, my knowledge and understanding of dance being limited to things I have learned from watching Strictly Come Dancing.

But it’s the very unfamiliarity of ballet that I find so engaging: I look at the bodies and I can’t begin to imagine how they do what they do, or what the people who live inside them must be like the rest of the time. You feel you can get the measure of actors, or singers, but never dancers. This was made especially explicit during the second act, which is a stunning piece of kaleidoscopic choreography where bodies become detached from their human life entirely and turn into mechanical elements of a vast machine whose music and imagery is still whirring around my brain a week later. I can’t begin to describe it so I shan’t try, but it was beautifully and cleverly done, and it was that section, rather than any of the narrative segments, that stood out as the highlight.

That said, the dancers playing the main characters gave an engaging and watchable performance, and the choreography by Javier De Frutos gave them each the space to develop personalities of their own (I especially liked the baddie, although the swaying, rippling princess is the real star of the piece).

This was a ten-night run which sold out before it started, but I hope it comes back for a longer season at Sadler’s Wells (which is, incidentally, one of London’s few well-designed theatres, where you can see the stage unobstructed from nearly every seat). And when it does, you should definitely go and see it, even if you think you don’t like ballet.*

* Though possibly not if you don’t like the Pet Shop Boys, because the music sounds a LOT like the Pet Shop Boys, despite the lack of the distinctive keyboard sound which is officially called “orchestra hit” even though I always think it’s called “electro bang”, which is a much more appropriate name for it. But if you don’t like the Pet Shop Boys then you and I will never see eye to eye anyway, I’m afraid.

It’s a sophisticated musical — perhaps the most Sondheimy Sondheim — full of wit and insight and cleverness and slightly surprising (are they almost discordant?) harmonies. I loved it.

Bobby is an affluent, hip New Yorker, about to turn 35. The one thing that sets him apart from his friends is his single status. Should he stick to his playboy ways or settle down? Can he settle down?

There’s not really much plot to Company. The other characters are the five married (or about to be married) couples who form Bobby’s immediate circle of friends, and the three women he’s romantically entangled with: an airhead air stewardess, a kooky rebel and the nice small-town girl he’s never really appreciated. They surround Bobby, urging him to find the right girl, to get married. In a series of vignettes, each couple demonstrates the upsides and the downsides of marriage.

The Southwark Playhouse is small and square with the audience surrounding the performers on three sides. It works brilliantly. The cast enter and exit from the four corners of the auditorium and Bobby is often placed at the centre of the space, literally encircled by his friends and lovers, the centre of an actual social whirl. In the title song (an intricate number in which a series of entreaties for Bobby’s company build to a complex cacophony of demands) some voices are near, others are further away and the effect is to perfectly capture the hubbub of life in the big city, at once thrilling and oppressive. As a side note, the sound of the occasional train rumbling overhead only adds to the effect.

I’m not sure the attempts to update the setting from the 1970s to the 2010s were entirely necessary, or added very much. Company mostly doesn’t feel like a period piece. Struggles with love, sex, friendship, commitment, regret, explored through the milieu of affluent urbanites, is always going to feel relevant to an audience of affluent urbanites who no doubt have had their own struggles with love, sex, commitment etc.

The excellent cast is predominantly young and perhaps in a couple of cases slightly too young for their parts. There are standout turns from Cassidy Janson as Amy (who gets the virtuoso comic number Getting Married Today) and Michelle Bishop as (kooky girlfriend) Marta. Oh yes, I should probably mention the most surprising piece of casting, which is Mark Curry (of Blue Peter fame) who plays Larry. The character doesn’t actually get all that much to do, beyond the ensemble work, and Curry is fine, aside from one or two dodgy accent moments.

I had a slight problem with Rupert Young who makes a rather callow Bobby and doesn’t quite convince as 35. I thought he lacked some of the sexiness and charisma it feels like the part needs (it’s hard to be sure, not having seen any other productions). Whatever, Young’s Bobby feels like a bit of a cipher and I’m not sure whether that’s a problem with the writing, or Young’s performance. He’s also one of the weaker singers in the cast and Being Alive (Bobby’s big epiphany number at the end of Act II) lacks emotional punch and falls a little flat in both senses of the word. Again, I’m not sure if that’s because the writing hasn’t been quite strong enough to get us there, or if Young just can’t pull it off.

None of this matters too much though. As I said at the beginning, it’s the company that makes Company. The whole is very much more than the sum of its parts.

I’m not sure quite where to start. I’d like to start with the good points, but there really aren’t many. The only unequivocally good thing I have to say is that it is beautifully lit, which is the kind of thing I look out for even when I’m enjoying a play, so that’s not quite the faint praise it sounds. I was also going to single out Bryony Hannah, who shines as schoolgirl Mary Tilford, but the things I was going to say were things like “she shows a lot of promise” and “her accent isn’t perfect, but for a teenager she does a tolerable job”, but having since learned that she is actually 26, I don’t feel quite so enthusiastically about her youthful talents. She is very good, though.

Ellen Burstyn is also good as Mary’s conflicted grandmother, and the only straightforwardly good scene in the play is one between the two of them, where the sense of a complicated but loving relationship is played out convincingly. Generally, Burstyn aside, the schoolchildren are better than the grown-ups at making us believe in them, and nowhere is this more painfully evident than in the relationship between Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss as a pair of old friends running a girls’ boarding school. They tiptoe around each other, barely look at one another and generally give the impression of two people who have only just met and aren’t quite sure how to treat one another. A generous interpretation would be that this is an intentional attempt at conveying an undercurrent of awkwardness between them, but the drama at the centre of the story only works if we can believe that they are genuinely close and loving friends, and, well, what it actually looks like is two actresses on a stage who have only just met and aren’t quite sure how to treat one another.

There’s also a problem with accents. The play is set in New England, and some of the accents sound vaguely New England. Others sound vaguely Bronx, and most of the schoolgirls manage a sort of transatlantic hybrid that more or less does the job, if you’re not listening too carefully. And then there’s Keira Knightley, who makes a brave stab at an American accent but regularly fails, sometimes to startling effect, as when a stream of cut-glass vowels suddenly appear mid-speech. I’m afraid I laughed. I’m afraid I wasn’t the only one.

I like Keira Knightley. I think she’s freakishly beautiful, and I think she’s perfectly cast in Pirates of the Caribbean and Atonement and Love, Actually, where she can be posh and beautiful and queenly and invulnerable. And she is all of those things, a bit, in The Children’s Hour, but the accent is so off, and as a result she is so obviously and noticeably Keira Knightley, that it’s a constant distraction, especially when she says “I’m nothing special to look at”. You’re Keira Knightley, you doof!

But, accent aside, Keira can’t help being weird and stilted, because the play is weird and stilted. The dialogue bears no resemblance at all to actual human speech, and we leap from random accusation to random accusation with very little time to learn anything about the characters. I didn’t care what happened to anyone, because I didn’t believe in any of them, or in their situation. I can’t decide whether this is the fault of the play or the production, but in this version, anyway, The Children’s Hour is a thin, narrow, mean little play and I can’t begin to understand why anyone thought it worth reviving. As the beloved said to me after it finally ended (it is very long) , the moral of the story appears to be that lying is bad, and women are worse.

I did quite enjoy myself, but for all the wrong reasons. And there were stretches where I was so bored that my mind wandered and I would suddenly realise I’d spent five minutes thinking about something else and no idea what had just happened (the answer was always “nothing”). Keira could barely bring herself to smile during the curtain call and I thought, I wonder whether she knows that this play is boring and stupid and bad? I hope not, but I suspect so.

All of which means that although I am madly tempted by this, which came via email this morning:

Starring Sienna Miller and Sheridan Smith, Flare Path is a story of love and loyalty, courage and fear, based on the experiences of Terence Rattigan as a tail gunner in the RAF during the Second World War.

I am going to learn from my mistakes and steer well clear.