Dominic Maxwell — Theater Critic

Coward’s prodigious dialogue calls for robust precision. Carroll leads a cavalry of light-comic supporting turns who know what’s needed. Charles Edwards is sublimely stiff in his tailored suits as the diplomat Richard. Lucy Karczewski is a quiet joy as a 1920s shy girl you could mistake for a socially anxious Gen Zer. Their stilted chit-chat is a masterclass in disconnection. Ophelia Lovibond and Will Close as the Bliss children and Jo McInnes as the sardonic housekeeper complete a lively cast.

If there’s anything lacking in the delectable set-up it’s that George and Martha’s sozzled sniping all essentially play as “banter”. This becomes a problem as the laughs die down and Elliott’s production settles into one gear. It lacks danger. We should worry when George smashes a bottle, when Martha lays into him hard, when they embark on a game of “get the guest”. The intimate approach leads Anderson and Crudup to underegg the melodrama that defines George and Martha as much as their wit.

Kinnear excels, however, as Keynes the man arguing against the laissez-faire economics that dominated, Keynes the godfather of the welfare state. The schools of thought are personified by the double act of Keynes and his Austrian rival Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston). One guy loves state intervention, the other loves the free market and both guys kinda love each other. Their tangy exchanges are the evening at its most ideas-driven and most entertaining.

And if you want to see — or be in — a really fine set, come and be wowed by how the designer Paul Farnsworth has turned the Menier Chocolate Factory in London Bridge into an outsized reimagining of Capote’s brown-and-burgundy New York living room. Sit by bookcases, the lovely rugs, the paperweights, the porcelain cats, the desk and decanters, and knick-knacks galore. Ferguson’s Tru bustles and banters right by you, or may even sit at your table. Remarkable.

The Last Ship was first seen in Britain, Stingless, in Newcastle in 2018. By the time of this run at the 2,000-seat Theatre Royal Drury Lane, at the end of a long world tour, its producers have come to realise that they need to repeat their ruse from the Broadway run of having the creator on stage. Otherwise this rueful if finally rousing tale of cruel capitalism, resilient communities and broken families can’t fill rooms this big.

There are some handsome tableaux, including a nifty Last Supper recreation, but amid Drew McOnie’s pleasing but impressionistic choreography on Tom Scutt’s ancient-meets-modern set you may lose track of which imposing fella is which: is that gravel-voiced man Caiaphas or someone from The Matrix? Is that Pontius Pilate, losing some of Tim Rice’s lyrics in the sonic soup? (It is: an otherwise tremendous David Thaxton.) I would have welcomed a more tangible early tension between Jesus and Tyrone Huntley’s Judas — their standoffs sometimes yards away from one another, to fill the set — but Huntley is a highlight, making real human complexity poke its face out of this megawatt machine. Desmonda Cathabel is an easy presence as Mary Magdalene: Everything’s Alright flows like water.

So what can you call Mary Page Marlowe? Because this British debut for Tracy Letts’s 2016 play is an odd 100 minutes of theatre, structurally at least. Matthew Warchus’s precision production begins with a superb diner scene in which Mary Page tells her children she’s leaving the family home. Seemingly significant statements (“Sometimes we do things we shouldn’t do”) stud the small, sharp observations. Riseborough keeps it real but lets you feel the character’s soul. Great writing.

This feels like the show we need right now: a comedy that holds nothing sacred except the right to hold nothing sacred. Marber, the choreographer Lorin Latarro and the costume designer Paul Farnsworth blend spectacle, discipline and daftness. The chorus are supremely well drilled, whether doing a tap routine with Zimmer frames or sieg-heiling their way through the luridly awful show-within-a-show that gives us a Führer arriving in gold lamé on a golden chariot. Who was Hitler, the show seems to ask, except another deluded dreamer? Just with the world’s worst dream.

So we feel in good, unsafe hands with (a returning) David Moorst as a leather-clad, angular Puck who swings over the action as if he has spent half his life in midair. The young lovers get the right blend of the spirited and the naive, Lily Simpkiss’s lovestruck Helena especially. Felicity Montagu brings her sure comic touch to the school-teacherish Quince. Her am-dram rude mechanicals throw a lot of comic ideas at the wall to see what sticks: some don’t, plenty do.

Cox, I suppose, is the point here. He inhabits his impoverished genius totally while also operating at the pitch of pure showman. He throws away quips and rises to anger with equal ease. And as Bach compliments Carl (Jamie Wilkes) sincerely, as he withstands the charm whirlwind that is Voltaire (Peter De Jersey), he remains so watchable partly through being so watchful.

I enjoyed The Last Laugh a lot, while never quite buying into it as a piece of drama. For the first half of its 80-minute running time, you think this superstar joke-off might be heading somewhere — and even if it isn’t, the interplay is so good that it’s fun just being in the room with these take-offs of one-offs. Damian Williams has enormous dishevelled authority as Cooper, playing with his props, firing back at Monkhouse’s ruminative smarm with rough banter of his own.

Where Mackintosh has most visibly rung the changes, very smartly, is with Fagin. Too mean and he’s the antisemitic stereotype. Too cuddly and you’re taking out what tension there is. Simon Lipkin, who has been with the show since it began in Chichester last summer, is a serious pleasure. He is vigorous enough literally to toss an urchin out of the way, but vulnerable enough for us to feel for him without anyone saying: “Hey, amoral ringleaders of child pickpocketing gangs have their own truth, y’know.”

Where Mackintosh has most visibly rung the changes, very smartly, is with Fagin. Too mean and he’s the antisemitic stereotype. Too cuddly and you’re taking out what tension there is. Simon Lipkin, who has been with the show since it began in Chichester last summer, is a serious pleasure. He is vigorous enough literally to toss an urchin out of the way, but vulnerable enough for us to feel for him without anyone saying: “Hey, amoral ringleaders of child pickpocketing gangs have their own truth, y’know.”

Heffernan brings a robust delicacy to characters including the second-generation prodigy Philip, who leads the firm’s 20th-century innovations with manipulating money. Krohn is imposingly straitlaced or beguilingly clownish. Overshown is sonorous, bearish or impish as needed. “No one solos and everyone solos,” as the jazz band Weather Report once said of themselves. They each make you think that it is a doddle dishing out thousands of words on a revolving glass and steel platform (designed by Es Devlin) in front of a vast monochrome cyclorama that evokes Manhattan through the decades (videos by Luke Halls).

The longer it goes on, the more this production finds a plangent tone where the witty, the wise and the wounded are forever colliding. “No, it was about self-knowledge through pain,” the humbled Henry chides when his equally outspoken daughter accuses him of having written just another story of jiggery-pokery among the architect classes. Here, as elsewhere in this invigorating evening, many a true word is spoken in jest.

If the satire of Slave Play can all feel a bit five years ago, that may be because that’s how long it has taken to get from hot-ticket acclaim on Broadway — including 12 Tony award nominations — to the West End. Revived here, it boasts some acute moments and fine performances from its Anglo-American cast. Yet Jeremy O Harris’s play comes across as the sort of ideas-led piece that would stimulate over an hour but has instead unwisely swollen to two hours.

Who cares if the psychologising is pound shop and the songs sound like rejected items from an Eighties AOR anthems playlist? When it all keeps moving forward so relentlessly, when its hero’s pain is eventually made palpable by a leading man doing a live classical recital on the revolving piano that sits centre stage, there are more important things than critical faculties. Let’s have tragic fun instead.

It’s not a joy to watch, though. Scott has umpteen strengths, but being the man of a thousand voices is not one of them. He is, purposely, trading in fine distinctions. Sonia sometimes grasps a red tea towel, Maureen the housekeeper puffs on herbal cigarettes, but mostly we have to keep our eyes peeled and our ears unwaxed. Dishing out diffidence, defiance and despair, everyone comes up subtly different hues of Andrew Scott. You know what’s going on, but you might find yourself hard at work to stay clued in, like a party guest trying to remember everyone’s names.

You know the overacting is a choice rather than an accident because the production is led by two of the best actors in Britain, Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel. Ferran, the recent winner of the Critics’ Circle award for best actress as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, looks lost amid the early overplay as a shouty, vigorously larky Eliza Doolittle.

This is a play of ideas, so Steiner won’t waste words on showing how this unlikely new edict is upheld by the authorities. Bernadette and Oliver thriftily cut out pronouns and definite articles to stay within the daily total, turn “I love you” into “loveoo”. Worse, a singsong of Total Eclipse of the Heart trails off when he runs out of words before she does. Every now and then they fall apart.