Oklahoma! is stunningly reimagined at the Young Vic — plus more London theatre reviews

Oklahoma!

Young Vic, London

There’s no bright golden haze and no meadow in Daniel Fish’s stunning rethink of Oklahoma! This staging of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, first seen on Broadway in 2019 and now making its UK debut, unfolds in what feels like a local community hall, the whole auditorium boxed up in light wood. Slow-cookers and packs of Bud sit waiting on trestle tables; a bluegrass band is tuning up at one end.

There’s a sense of anticipation in the air — of festivity, yes, but also of trouble. As well as glittery bunting, the place is bristling with guns, displayed on racks along every wall. It reminds us that the musical is set in 1906, in a frontier town in Indian Territory on the verge of statehood; the cast’s modern dress links that mentality with the present-day US and with the mythology that sustains it. This is a tough, tight-knit community and we are all — audience included, under the bright lights — locked in with whatever is about to unfold.

Into this space strolls Arthur Darvill’s cowboy Curly and strikes up that famous opening number (“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’”), tentatively at first, gazing intently round at his fellow cast members as he sets in motion the story of Laurey and her two would-be suitors (Curly and Jud). The production has been dubbed the “sexy Oklahoma!” and with good reason: the heat of lust pulses through it, most strikingly in Curly’s seductive, dreamy rendition of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and in Marisha Wallace’s sensational, defiant delivery of Ado Annie’s “I Cain’t Say No”, which would raise the roof if it wasn’t weighed down by all that bunting.

But underneath the desire there’s also something much darker. Here farmhand Jud isn’t a menacing misfit but a lonely outsider, played with sad, watchful intensity by Patrick Vaill. That, and the fact that Darvill lends Curly an unattractive streak of entitlement, makes Laurey’s dilemma more powerful and real. In Anoushka Lucas’s nuanced performance, she becomes an inherently independent woman trapped in a small town with limited options. Meanwhile, the threatening encounter between Curly and Jud in the smokehouse (“Pore Jud Is Daid”), played out in total darkness with their pale faces projected on to a wall, prickles with barely repressed violence. As those slow-cookers steam, there’s a growing sense of pressure building in the room too. Jud’s death and the subsequent “trial” are deeply loaded here.

What makes the production is that it also fizzes with vibrant comedy. Wallace’s wonderful, spirited Ado Annie is well matched by James Davis, very funny as her none-too-bright fiancé Will, and by his commitment-phobic rival (Stavros Demetraki). The band, playing a stripped-back version of the score, are terrific, and the switches between light and shade, comedy and tragedy are deftly handled. Ending with a rousing, determined delivery of “Oklahoma!”, Fish’s staging celebrates this beloved musical while also finding more sinister truths in the story it tells about America.

★★★★★

To June 25, youngvic.org

Middle

National Theatre, London

The spectre of a worn-out, humdrum marriage that hovers before the young couples in Oklahoma! becomes an actuality in Middle. David Eldridge’s new play is the central plank in a three-part exploration of the changing nature of love. And where his earlier Beginning (2017) was charged with the hope of a nascent relationship, Middle has the careworn feel of a stalled marriage built into its very fabric.

It’s the sort of territory Chekhov explores in Uncle Vanya, only here the brooding frustration seeps through a large, comfortable house in middle England. Like Beginning, the play opens in the small hours of the morning. But this time there is no wine — instead we see Claire Rushbrook’s insomniac Maggie heating up milk on the stove. When her husband Gary (Daniel Ryan) joins her in the kitchen, he finds more than a hot drink brewing. “I’m not sure I love you any more,” she says.

Very little happens in terms of incident: this is a drama in which the action is all on an emotional level and, as such, it is excruciatingly honest and beautifully controlled by Eldridge. And while the play never leaves this nicely appointed house, it’s about modern living in many ways: the workaholism, the frustrations, the empty consumerism.

Polly Findlay’s production ebbs and flows with the arguments, spiking into rage and despair in places, subsiding into silent misery in others. Rushbrook and Ryan are movingly precise, charting their characters’ subtly shifting emotions. At one point they both freeze as their daughter stirs above: a reminder of what is at stake. And the play ends ambivalently: will they survive or not?

Beginning, Middle . . . there is clearly going to be an End. Quite what that will be is left tantalisingly unclear here.

★★★★☆

To June 18, nationaltheatre.org.uk

Age of Rage

Barbican, London

Age of Rage, from the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, opens with what looks like a barbecue: as the audience take their seats, a man on stage is chopping hunks of meat and tossing them on to the flames. But look more closely and the familiar scene becomes horrific. It’s clear that the torso he cleaves is human — a small human at that. This is Atreus of Greek mythology, evoking his grandfather’s crime by serving up his brother’s children to their father and so perpetuating a curse that will cascade down the generations and through the Trojan war.

In Ivo van Hove’s production, that feast is also symbolic. This is a story in which children will be slaughtered again and again, a story peopled with desolate mothers, anguished fathers and vengeful sons and daughters. Like Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City, it’s inspired by the Greek tragedies of Euripides and Aeschylus and sees in the fall of Troy a template for the senseless brutality of war across the ages. But it’s hugely different in tone: this is a blazing, harrowing piece of theatre, brilliant, raw and terrible.

We begin the story proper with Agamemnon (Hans Kesting, excellent), stranded in Aulis as he awaits a wind to sail his troops to Troy, agonised by the divine instruction he has received to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. He will be the first of many to find a reason for atrocity — and that atrocity will breed new reasons for further brutality. The recurring patterns are highlighted by the fact that every child lost is embodied by Ilke Paddenburg, who plays Iphigenia. As they die, her slight form appears, projected dancing across a screen, the images multiplying with the slaughter.

The show has an epic, elemental quality, with Jan Versweyveld’s starkly expressive design, Wim Vandekeybus’s restless choreography and van Hove’s searing stage images. But it’s the moments of intimacy and grief that make it strike home, from the innocent glee with which Paddenburg’s Iphigenia greets her father Agamemnon to the raw agony of Hecuba (Janni Goslinga) faced with the corpse of her son and the quiet descent of Astyanax’s slowly falling body. Grimly good.

★★★★☆

Run finished, ita.nl