![]() ![]() It hasn’t been seen since 1936 and has been reinstated (at the expense of Fumed Oak).Myles Drennan is one of Ireland’s most respected jazz pianists, a naturally gifted player admired by his fellow musicians for his impeccable taste and deep knowledge of jazz piano history. She’s genuinely touching here, just as she is blissfully scatty and self-centred as the actress who chaotically chairs the charity committee in Star Chamber, an affectionate, rather strenuously amusing joke about theatrical egos. Sara Crowe is inimitably funny playing, among other things, one of a couple of dull, shyly eager guests from the colonies who turn up and are blithely ignored by their smart London hosts. ![]() Miranda Foster and Nick Waring excel, whether as skint bohemians on the Riviera, plotting to pay off their gambling debts through a faked robbery, or as the image of middle-class decency and bravely repressed passion in that railway refreshment room in Still Life. It would be a shame to miss the full beauty of the versatility on offer by only seeing one batch. Family Album, a musical skit on bogus Victorian piety, is a laborious jest, even when engagingly performed. The dancing and singing are not this production’s strongest suit, and the fantasia-like fluidity of Shadow Play therefore feels disappointingly clunky. That way you will appreciate better how the odd dud is offset by a gem. ![]() ![]() My tip, though, would be to see the whole caboodle either in three instalments or as an entire cycle, performed on Saturdays and Sundays. The plays have been arranged in three triple bills, titled Bedroom Farces, Nuclear Families and Secret Hearts. Parts of this are as lacerating as Strindberg. The Astonished Heart offers a devastating post-mortem on the suicide of a celebrated psychiatrist whose patient, liberal wife cannot save him from toppling into a disastrous obsession with his mistress whom she bullied at school. In its flashbacks and cross-cuts, its structure feels boldly cinematic and it gives song (as in the lovely “You Were There”) the haunting ache of remembered ecstasy. Shadow Play is a strange musical dream in which an unhappy Mayfair wife ask for a divorce from her husband, takes too many sleeping pills and slips back into a hallucination recalling the joyous days of courtship. You’re jolted by plays that seem more experimental, in form and content, than Coward is ordinarily given credit for. ![]()
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