Clive Davis — Theater Critic

If I sound exasperated it’s because Daniel Aukin’s production arrives at the Duke of York’s in London trailing so much praise and so many Tony awards. The performances are first-rate, and David Zinn’s set really does make you feel as if you have a seat on the mixing desk. Yet at over three hours long it’s burdened with far too many longueurs. How ironic that arguments in the second half turn on how to make minor cuts to the album’s running time: Stereophonic would be much punchier if it were at least 30 minutes shorter.

The problem now, of course, is how to make this period piece speak to a modern audience. “Speak” being the operative word, since, like so many of Shaw’s plays, you often feel you are being addressed by a writer who turns every other conversation into an Oxford Union debate. The torrent of words beats you into submission. Even with a text that has been cut down and clarified by Cooke himself, you still sense Shaw’s hectoring presence.

By the end, we’re much less sure that James has the upper hand. Luka confronts his sense of shame, sometimes in comically brutish language (his definition of marriage is having “pussy on tap”). What we see of James’s inner life begins to seem less serene than we first thought. Ireland conveys all this through memorably jagged exchanges bathed in redeeming black humour.

Lewis, who played the pompous mentalist in Mind Mangler — Mischief’s send-up of the magician’s trade — steals scene after scene as Douglas Woodbead, a monumentally self-satisfied thespian who arrives at a fancy West End hotel to prepare for an audition for the first Bond film. Although his recent credits do not amount to much more than appearing in a haemorrhoids commercial, he is confident of getting the role ahead of some Scottish upstart called “Sean”. Little does he know that he is about to be entangled with American and Soviet secret agents who have converged on the premises in pursuit of plans for a secret weapon.

Let me be absolutely honest and say that this star rating should come with a health warning. Why? Because the valedictory offering from the late Stephen Sondheim is such a curate’s egg. The musical fantasy that unfolds on the National’s Lyttelton stage is, for long stretches, utterly absorbing. Yet it’s undeniably flawed, too.

Nicholas Hytner’s immaculately paced production arrives at the Harold Pinter Theatre trailing a clutch of Olivier awards, and with the American actor John Lithgow reprising his incandescent portrayal of children’s author Roald Dahl as an unforgettable mixture of wit, charm, bully and unfiltered antisemite. With the war in Gaza still making news, Rosenblatt’s study could hardly be more timely. If the TV drama Adolescence did a solid job of catching the zeitgeist, Giant offers an even more incisive example of writing that holds a mirror up to the way we live now.

This is going to be a test of faith for Ewan McGregor’s admirers. How much are they willing to endure to see him in the flesh in a painfully windy psychodrama, modelled on Ibsen’s The Master Builder, which grinds its way to a wildly implausible conclusion? Kudos to him, I say, for appearing on a London stage for the first time in nearly 20 years. McGregor doesn’t come unstuck anywhere near as badly as Sigourney Weaver did in The Tempest. Yet the truth is that he simply doesn’t have the gravitas needed for the role of a superstar architect whose personal life is about to implode.

Peals of audience laughter are not the sound you normally associate with Ibsen. Gary Owen’s updated version of the playwright’s brooding drama about an embattled widow, an orphanage and the poisonous legacy of a dissolute husband certainly isn’t lacking in courage. In his latest offering at the Lyric Hammersmith in London the Welsh playwright throws himself into rearranging the original storyline of Ghosts, but the sudden shifts in tone, sometimes lurching from awkward comedy to Grand Guignol in a few sentences, undermine Rachel O’Riordan’s production.

Some of the script seems to have been tweaked to appeal to British audiences. That said, I’m not sure a joke about Janet Street-Porter’s teeth means an awful lot to anyone under pension age. Tijana Bjelajac’s set design has a touch of Rocky Horror Gothic, Ben Cracknell’s lighting is all tongue-in-cheek Sturm und Drang, and Yvonne Gilbert’s sound design adds cheeky comic effects. Have a strong drink or two before you go and abandon yourself to the sheer silliness of it all.

Along the way the story has been streamlined. The officious Dogberry has been excised; the romantic entanglements are resolved even more briskly. Given that Mara Huf’s Hero has a penchant for full-on twerking, it might not seem obvious why James Phoon’s Claudio is alarmed by any threat to her virtue. But this is one of those productions where it’s best not to ponder the details too closely.

The actors also seem constrained by Bob Crowley’s narrow design and the use of hydraulics to raise and lower sections of the stage. The Bridge’s auditorium has to be one of the most atmospheric in the country, but here the rising and falling of platforms — which worked so well in Hytner’s magnificent version of Guys and Dolls — becomes more of a distraction. The same is true of Grant Olding’s music, which might as well have been written for yet another TV drama about a maverick detective.

There’s lots of explicit talk about goings-on in the boudoir — the language is very blunt at times. But watching Stephen Mangan, Nicola Walker and Erin Doherty exchange a mix of crude banter and philosophical profundities on the implications of a threesome — or “throuple”, if you prefer — is a little like wandering around a giant erotic emporium on an industrial estate. After the twelfth box of vibrators starts buzzing away, a certain boredom sets in.

Barney Norris’s script — based on a novella by the French writer David Foenkinos — explores obsessive thoughts about the road not taken. Butterfield, better known as the awkward Otis Milburn in the TV series, is very assured, pacing back and forth on a glossy white letterbox set strewn with odd items of furniture and bric-a-brac, including a video camera on which he reprises his first, fateful audition. Imagine an innocent ten-year-old being asked to switch between looking vulnerable, hopeful and cheerful in seconds.

Cameron’s yarn, full of briny bombast, may be an easy target, but the in-jokes are exquisitely delivered. So too are the songs, driven by a trim band led by the musical director Adam Wachter. Drew is a quite astonishing mixture of OTT vocalising and girl-next-door folksiness. Without wishing to give away too many plot twists, I’ll add that Layton Williams makes the transition from playing a louche sailor to a stunningly convincing facsimile of a raging Tina Turner.

While it’s good to see a VIP of Sigourney Weaver’s stature making her belated West End debut — the 75-year-old Hollywood actress is surely bringing in lots of people who haven’t bothered with iambic pentameters since they were at school — she turns in a strangely impersonal performance as Prospero, as if encountering the script for the first time. That all-around household helper, Alexa, could have breathed more life into the lines.

A steely-eyed Anne-Marie Duff drips venom as Regina. Steffan Rhodri is persuasive as the charmless Oscar, whose main pastime, apart from dreaming of riches, is bullying his highly strung wife, Birdie, a member of a grand plantation family. Anna Madeley’s character, a sort of proto-Blanche DuBois is, in fact, the most interesting of all of them; it’s just a pity we don’t see more of her. In the end, however, she, like the rest of the cast, is ground down by the gears of the clockwork plot.

As Leo Bloom, the neurotic accountant-turned-impresario, the rubber-limbed Marc Antolin spins around the floor like a broken Catherine wheel during a fit of hysterics. And there are satisfyingly OTT performances from Trevor Ashley as ultra-camp director Roger De Bris and Harry Morrison as demented Nazi composer and pigeon-fancier Franz Liebkind, who has his chorus line in the form of a row of swastika-wearing bird puppets.

The main problem, inevitably, is that if you’ve seen the screen version of Lauren Weisberger’s novel, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could match Meryl Streep’s gloriously icy performance as magazine editor Miranda Priestly. As anyone who saw her in Ugly Betty knows, Vanessa Williams — who plays Miranda here — can turn on the hauteur. She’s an accomplished singer too, yet you’re still left with the impression that you’re looking at a photocopy of a Technicolor original.

Clark’s melodies are sinuous and restless: it comes as no surprise to see him name-checking that powerhouse folk band Bellowhead in the programme notes. The lyrics, rich in references to the cyclical nature of all life (The Tide Is Comin’ in is a highlight of the second half) form an affecting blend of poetry and the down-to-earth. Chi-San Howard’s choreography is steeped in a sense of community.

The drama, which had its premiere in the US in 2013, is set soon after the election of Barack Obama, giving Wohl an opportunity to indulge in some tired sparring about American parochialism and European worldliness. Irene is a woefully ignorant estate agent from Denver who thinks everything is “cute”. On a rowdy bachelorette party, she picks up the older, enigmatic Manuel who takes her back to an apartment littered with house-moving boxes. There’s an explosion of tipsy, erotic energy at first. Then secrets slowly rise to the surface as Lynette Linton’s production ticks along. Jai Morjaria’s subdued lighting casts shadows in the set designer Frankie Bradshaw’s domestic interior.

It’s a reboot that will appeal most of all to Coogan fans who aren’t familiar with the film, which celebrated its 60th birthday this year. If you do know the original, it’s fun to hear some of the slivers of extra dialogue added by Iannucci and Foley after scrolling through Kubrick’s notebooks and drafts. All the same, set designer Hildegard Bechtler’s war room is never going to look as imposing as Ken Adam’s James Bond-like screen creation. And if the scale model of the B-52, flying high over a video backdrop, gives the second half of the show an undeniable kick, the rest of the production looks cramped in the confines of the Noël Coward.

Perhaps because we’ve seen the approach copied so often in recent years — the opening video sequence where Strong, addressing the media in the street, comes across as a fusion of Blair and Obama, looks decidedly contrived. And the moment when an overheated Oedipus and Jocasta try to have a quick bout of sex behind the backs of family and aides results in some cheesy “baby, baby” soft porn groaning.

His version of the feckless Captain Jack is a leering, gurning loafer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Charlie Chaplin’s tramp. Sit near the front of the stalls and you’ll find Rylance constantly trying to catch your eye as he performs yet another double-take. It’s weirdly laboured, and makes the play’s sudden transition from high jinks to grim melodrama all the harder to take.

O’Riordan ensures that almost every inflection, every gesture, is over-egged in a production that self-consciously mixes the modern and the traditional. There is certainly no danger of forgetting that we are watching a play within a play when the delivery is so emphatic. At the same time, it’s hard to keep track of the storyline when the cast are switching back and forth between characters.

When it was first staged in America a decade ago the piece was entitled Conviction, a slick play on words. Katharine Farmer, who directed Crim’s rape drama Never Not Once at this venue in 2022, doesn’t always seem at ease with the abrupt transitions from soul-searching to sitcom-style humour. The result is that there were moments of laughter at inappropriate moments, especially in an overlong second half. Nevertheless, Dwan always holds our attention. We head home with unanswered questions tumbling around in our head.