This has been a stimulating Directors’ Cuts season, and the best has been kept until last. Crave is an extraordinary prose-poem for which writer Sarah Kane supplied no setting, no stage directions and no descriptions of its four characters, . .
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★★★☆☆ Writer, Chino Odimba’s BC/AD mash is a very Euripidean project of reimagining characters from traditional myth as contemporaries, with all the psychological nuance that we might now expect. So a modern tale of marital infidelity and familial breakup is superimposed on Euripides’ original with Medea becoming a present day Maddy . . . this is a novel reworking of a much interpreted classic which has enable the Old Vic to present some noteworthy talent.
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★★★★★ The ‘Messiah’ becomes ‘The Beloved’ and his followers, a crestfallen bunch of activists, rummage around looking for some meaning and direction following his death. The chorus, much loved by Handel who was very sweet on the English choral tradition, particularly following the waning of our love affair with Italian opera, here takes a role similar to that of the chorus in classical Greek theatre . . .
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★★★★★ The very wonderful Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham and June Watson play Mrs Jarrett, Sally, Lena and Vi. Directed by James Macdonald this quartet come to life as an ensemble, hilariously so when singing their version of The Crystals’ De Doo Ron Ron, and with depth and sensitivity when exploring the shadowy side of these characters’ lives.
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★★★★☆ The set is fantastically inventive; there is wood, plenty of it, along with tyres, ropes and tubes; just like at the Vench. And the little touches with scene-markers, torches and traffitape are delightful. Stephen Warbeck’s music is the nail that joins the planks together and director Jeremy Herrin smartly assembles the whole lot, which enables the vision to be realised.
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