A few years ago a reader grumbled that I only wrote about women. If only, I thought – my female features clenched in a grim rictus. Would I ever have enough material to do that – even for a week? Well, I do now. The stage is looking different. Not only because actresses are taking on “male” parts. But because writers and directors are doing for women what Tom Stoppard did for attendant lords in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: refocusing a familiar story through the eyes of characters once considered marginal.
Jeanie O’Hare’s Queen Margaret is a decisive example. Margaret of Anjou has more lines than any other female character in Shakespeare’s plays. Why is she not more discussed? O’Hare, who was for seven years dramaturg at the RSC, thinks it’s because her appearances are scattered over several plays, not all often performed – the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. I think it is also because the huge, sad arc of Margaret’s life is disorienting: it’s as if she were several beings. She begins as a package pimped to Henry VI by the Earl of Suffolk, who wants her himself, becomes a vibrant queen and lover – noted for strength of mind and quick tongue – and ends, after the murders of her husband and son, as a raging doom-monger whose fertile linguistic gift burgeons when cursing: most insulters would feel happy to come up with “thou elvish-mark’d abortive rooting hog”.
O’Hare’s play, written with a pentameter beat and some rhyming couplets, and drawing on Shakespeare’s speeches, snares much of this. Set in an approximate – Game Boys and wheelie cases – 21st century, Elizabeth Freestone’s production makes clear the internecine plotting of the Henry plays (wonderfully parodied in the Beyond the Fringe “saucy Worcester” sketch). It shows the north laid waste by strife; in one of the most far-reaching scenes, song swells over a battleground. It convincingly regenders characters: Lorraine Bruce’s powerful York is belligerent in a towel turban.
But some of the sap of Shakespeare’s Margaret is missing: there is not enough smouldering with Sussex – or enough cursing. Jade Anouka is as compelling as she was in the groundbreaking Shakespeare Trilogy at the Donmar: you simply want more of her. Her face blazes; her body is from the start primed for fighting. She has a gusto – in smile, sinews and throaty delivery – that could easily transfix an army. And she has a familiar spirit in the shape of a ghostly Joan of Arc. Lucy Mangan flits around the Queen: poignant and elfin, she is a reminder of the soreness between France and England, and of the longing for peace. An Ariel spirit waiting for release, she is O’Hare’s most ingenious touch.
More refocusing at Stratford East. The Village, Nadia Fall’s first production as artistic director, is a vivid, wrenching adaptation of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna (1619), the Spanish playwright’s Spartacus play about revolt and collective responsibility. Dramatist April De Angelis has moved the play from 15th-century Spain to present-day Uttar Pradesh, and enlarged the character of a young woman into a fiery leader. Very effectively. The central dynamic – in which villagers turn against the swaggering bully who has been raping them – translates perfectly, with the added bitterness of a leadership determined to wipe out a “Muslim threat”. A few tweaks help the transplant: crossbows become guns and there are some authentic-sounding local curses – “may her lettuce droop”. As does the renaming of a comic character from Mengo to Mango: just right for the jolly Sancho Panza character given breezy life by Ameet Chana. He and his eventual lover provide comic high points: oh how Rina Fatania twitches with full-body orgasm when she thinks about – eggplant.
The choice of play is in part a tribute to Stratford’s Joan Littlewood, who in 1955 staged a golden age version of the play under the title The Sheepwell. That title would be far too folksy for Fall’s show, which is fierce – and sumptuously realised.Joanna Scotcher’s design is not always easy to manoeuvre around, but it is emphatically a world on the brink: blistering oranges and saffron; bamboo cut down in front of smouldering purple skies.
De Angelis’s script could lose some obvious contemporary nudges to #MeToo and Trump – but its rhymes help nicely to land jokes – and it’s strong on the treatment of Dalits. Smooth-chopped Art Malik swaggers along with conviction as the villain. And there is a lovely performance from recent Guildhall graduate Anya Chalotra as the gracefully loping tomboy who twists into ferocity – like an unleashed kite exulting in the free air.
It’s a lively start to Fall’s regime. And it is needed. Littlewood is routinely revered: she has recently been made the subject of a statue (not a revolutionary one) and the star of a play. The Theatre Royal could have been the hub of the cultural Olympiad in 2012, but when people were sprinting around Stratford opening up retail opportunities, no one seemed to give it a thought. A stage that, though deeply rooted, has always radiated outwards seemed to have limited its influence to its postal code.
Fall has met with protests that she is trying to chic-up a community resource: protests similar to those faced by Indhu Rubasingham at the new Kiln. The square in front of the beautiful building is a heap of rubble. You could see this as a deterrent – or an emblem. Paris ’68. The cobbles are up!
As they pretty much are at Sylvia
: one of the most singular of theatrical occasions. First, the unexpectedness of the show. Who is Sylvia? Sylvia Pankhurst, the suffragette. What is she? A hip-hop musical. Funk in a long skirt and stiff-collared blouse. Then, the difficulties of the production. A postponed press night. A note from the Old Vic’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus, explaining that the show should be considered “a work in progress”. Finally, on this particular press night, an announcement that it would be a concert performance (no props, no scenery, no real movement), and that all audience members would get a full refund. Oh, and a request: this is the first time I have turned up at a theatre and been asked not to write a review.There is more than one reason for the travails. Two crucial actresses fell ill. And the show itself changed. Commissioned as a dance drama, by Kate Prince of ZooNation, it grew, turned into a sung-through musical, but never quite had the time to edit itself. I will observe the embargo on reviewing but say this: it is clear that a good idea has drawn on remarkable talent. The voices are commanding. There is wit as well as commitment. Not least from Winston Churchill’s mother: a black, rapping matriarch; Churchill himself (also black) is an indecisive toddler-man. Most important, the suffragettes (not all singing from the same her-sheet) are predominantly women of colour. Their triumphs look less predetermined; they look more threatened than a crowd of white women. The precariousness and danger of the struggle is restored. Here are the ingredients for a marvel. I hope the narrative lives up to it when the show is put on in full.
Theatrical women are on the march – though I wouldn’t say we felt sure of our franchise. But push one barrier (your own) and you see another (someone else’s). Misty, first staged earlier this year at the Bush, is – incredibly – only the second play by a black playwright ever to have been produced in the West End. Arinzé Kene – very fine last year in Girl From the North Country – writes and performs explosively.
His talent is to keep his stuff constantly morphing, collapsing, expanding – catching the audience on the back foot. A rap about London living – late-night buses, rastas v trustas – is interrupted by an acerbic commentary from friends, saying he is giving the audience what they expect: parodying himself, giving a minstrel show with this “urban safari jungle shit”. Speech breaks into music: Shiloh Coke and Adrian McLeod are on stage with drums and keys. Domestic sequences swim into a larger city landscape, with Daniel Denton’s videos rendering Hackney as a place of jostling microbes. Realistic reporting is engulfed by dream and nightmare. A stage that begins in shadow and monochrome is pelted with orange balloons.
Quick-footed, overlong, unduly explanatory, innovative, comic, indulgent, Omar Elerian’s production never stops crackling. Misty is a true challenge to what Kene calls the “featre”.
Star ratings (out of five)
Queen Margaret ★★★
The Village ★★★★
Misty ★★★★
• Queen Margaret is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 6 October
• The Village is at Theatre Royal East Stratford, London, until 6 October
• Misty is at the Trafalgar Studios, London, until 20 October
