Haymarket Theatre Royal

While it would be pushing it to say Frederick the Great loomed large in my childhood, he probably loomed larger in mine than yours. Aside from the fact my family is Polish – Frederick is well up there on our national shitlist – my dad is a lecturer in eighteenth century European history with a habit of bitching about the Prussian monarch as if he were a hated work colleague. Oliver Cotton’s The Score essentially sets Brian Cox’s grouchy, loveable and deeply devout JS Bach against Stephen Hagan’s capricious atheist Frederick. It’s a fictionalised account of their real 1747 encounter, wherein the Prussian king asked the legendary composer to improvise a fiendishly tricky fugue for him.  While I’m sure Cotton has done his homework, he’s surely betting that the average British audience is unlikely to have any real opinion on Frederick. His play contents itself with an antagonist who is a sort of vague mish mash of biographical exposition, Blackadder-style toff-isms, and bits where Frederick’s warmongering is unsubtly paralleled with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m not saying there’s any need to be totally historically accurate in a work of fiction. But Cotton’s king feels like a half-hearted collection of tyrant tropes rather than a credible character. It’s hard not to see The Score as a distant relative of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but it’s simply not in the same league in terms of characterisation. Still, we’re here to see Brian Cox’s Bach, and the Succession star gives it...

Lindsay Posner’s Tamsin Greig-starring revival of Terence Rattigan’s melancholy 1952 classic got good notices when it ran at Theatre Royal Bath earlier in 2024, and now it books a transfer to the West End. Greig returns as the suicidal Hester, whose life has disintegrated following her abandonment of her husband William in favour of a younger lover, alcoholic former RAF pilot Freddie. Finbar Lynch also reprises his role as William, with other casting TBC.

This review is from the original 2024 National Theatre run of Till the Stars Come Down. It will transfer to the West End in 2025 with casting TBA. Tickets go on sale March 20. Beth Steel has earned her debut at the National Theatre, slowly grafting her way up via a string of working-class dramas at Hampstead Theatre, on to the hipper Almeida for 2022’s ‘House of Shades’, and now finally arriving at the dizzying heights of the Dorfman. ‘Till the Stars Come Down’ is a beautifully observed and often bruisingly hilarious play that centres on Hazel, Maggie and Sylvia, a trio of sisters from Mansfield, who have reunited for the wedding of Sinead Matthews’s Sylvia. The first half hour of Bijan Sheibani’s production is luxuriant character building, nary a man in sight as the sisters chatter about Sylvie’s imminent wedding, catch up on lost time – Lisa McGrillis’s Maggie unexpectedly left town a little while ago – and banter. Banter a lot: all of Steel’s characters have a way with words, a quintessentially English, working-class wit. But Lorraine Ashbourne’s dissolute Aunty Carol is something else, a veritable one-liner machine: even if you hate everything else about the play you’d have to be made of stone not to laugh like a drain at something like half of her lines. As the drama warms up, it looks like it’s going to be about the white working class’s response to EU migration – Sylvie’s husband-to-be Marek (Marc Wooton) is Polish, and the family is divided about him, to say the...