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 heart, guts and soul as a genius whose grumpy old manness is offset by an unshakeable belief that God speaks to us all through the world. In a sense he’s more like an ahead-of-his-time hippy than a religious bore: his ultimately unshakeable belief that the world is a remarkable place stands in contrast to Frederick’s insecurity-driven realpolitik.
And after an exposition-heavy opening act, Cotton’s play settles into a decent groove, with Frederick’s challenge to Bach to improvise a fugue portrayed as a deliberate trap set up to humiliate the old man. Spoilers – although you’d have to be clinically dead to not see this coming from a mile off – but Bach aces the whole thing and proceeds to give the flabbergasted Frederick a piece of his mind. It’s somewhat clunky, yee-haw fist pumping stuff, but theatre isn’t actually obliged to be stingingly sophisticated.
I wonder if a more interesting director might have given Cotton’s text a bit more spark and depth. Cox lends his scenes an air of gravitas and profundity. But elsewhere, Trevor Nunn’s production keeps things simple, sometimes excruciatingly so – the bits where Cox mimes playing the harpsichord look genuinely terrible.
The Score is solid enough commercial entertainment, but really it's a second tier show built around one top tier cast member.
