The week in theatre: The Little Matchgirl and Happier Tales; Cold War; Pandemonium – review
It is very good news. Indhu Rubasingham takes over as artistic director of the National in 2025. That must be welcomed not only for who she is – the first woman or person of colour to run the country’s biggest theatre – but for what she has done, and will do. She set London’s Kiln theatre alight, making it feel comfortable and look glorious, changing its name (from the Tricycle), undeterred by pickets outside the early shows. She put on new work that soared – Red Velvet, Retrograde – and in The Wife of Willesden let rip a zinging combination of Zadie Smith and Chaucer. At the National she has commanded the notoriously difficult Olivier with The Father and the Assassin and made the Lyttelton crackle with The Motherfucker With the Hat. Remember when “an eye for detail” was code for “female” in job ads? Forget it: Rubasingham thinks big – helping to make the theatre a place not merely of representation but of leaps in empathy.
As does Emma Rice, formerly of the Globe, who has just opened a new permanent home for her company, Wise Children. The Lucky Chance is a converted Methodist church that once housed a nursery: barrel roof, gleaming wood, a bar in the foyer with a piano (carols on launch night). Its former uses – for celebration, larking about, being looked after – have impregnated the walls.
The Little Matchgirl and Happier Tales, based on an earlier show written by Rice with Joel Horwood, features 21st-century thugs, paramedics and hi-vis jackets – but retains the wistfulness of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairytale. It has the confrontational bounce of all Rice’s shows, blending realism and magic, traditional skills and modern sassiness. Ian Ross’s music mingles street tunes on accordion and fiddle with ripples from a harp (“that’s relaxing and at the same time annoying”). Actors tumble and handstand in coloured tights and 18th-century wigs that stand erect like a judge’s in the wind. When matches are struck, a string of bulbs light up above the stage. For a moment it looks as if this will be an evening exulting in the triumph of the imagination over harsh circumstances. Nothing so soft.
The match girl is a wooden puppet. Her face is fixed in a smile, yet her puppeteer can make her utterly desolate: as a scatter of snowflakes fall on to the stage, shivers take over her body; as her outstretched hand is ignored, her head droops, and you would swear the smile has gone. The terrible ending is kept. The match girl dies – no tricks, no evasion – within touching distance of the audience. The puppeteer gently disengages: the child’s limbs are stiffly folded; all animation gone; the end of illusions.
Rupert Goold’s Almeida has seriousness and swagger. You smell those qualities even in the bar. And see them in the collaborators who have adapted Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film for the stage. Conor McPherson, whose Girl from the North Country made a ballad out of Dylan numbers, is the writer of Cold War; Elvis Costello supplies songs; Goold directs.
Set in postwar Poland, this is a story of doomed – is there any other kind? – love and an elegy for torn Europe, driven by questions about authenticity. The musician hero has a secret and his principles are not steadfast; he can adapt the work of others but not compose his own. The folk music that brings him and his singer lover together is taken up by Communist bosses, hoping to forge a new tradition of songs “about collective agricultural machinery”.
Elliot Levey’s fixer buzzes with terrible plausibility. Anya Chalotra is marvellous as a smudgy-eyed romantic: limp with unhappiness, barking with resentment, rapt when singing. Luke Thallon distils the period. A lesser actor would tremble and throw out winking hints at shiftiness. Thallon holds himself taut, as if semi-frozen; words escape him with difficulty. He is becoming more powerful and more elusive with each new role.
As in Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll, revived this month at Hampstead, music forms the inner and outer landscape of west and east: throaty, individualistic, reluctant ballads from Costello; elbow-wagging traditional choruses, a shimmer of Chopin, a swirl of jazz. Ellen Kane’s choreography embodies these differences, as do Evie Gurney’s costumes – boleros, embroidery, brownness and flared skirts. Paule Constable’s lighting is vital: flaring into Parisian brightness, summoning the dying hopes of the east in a glimmering darkness.
For a quick-moving caper, Pandemonium is actually a slow burn. Armando Iannucci’s take on Boris Johnson is one of the fastest-selling tickets of the season: it is directed by Patrick Marber, has a terrifically nimble cast – and meets a need, evident in the mood of the audience, for a theatrical response to what has going on.
The difficulty for satire is obvious. Staged in the thick of the daily revelations from the Covid inquiry, the competition from real life is overwhelming. Iannucci’s script does not seek out unexpected targets but, in cod 17th-century style, offers a rogues’ gallery of cutout characters. Furious, sometimes funny: a handy comic kit. As Shakespeare-spouting Orbis Rex, Paul Chahidi does not offer full-on impersonation but slaps a rictus grin over the ironic slip of his features – and sends his Jacobethan-tighted legs slithering around like a swan peddling under water; the haystack blond wig is eventually removed from the stage by a no-nonsense litter picker.
Some names click in immediately. Some at first look laboured, but when you remember those simian limbs stretched out in fatigue on the parlimentary bench, even Jacob Rhesus Monkey seems realistic. I was already half there with the idea of Matt Hemlock as a slithery green thing from a swamp, but now find it hard to budge the idea of Riches Sooner as a leprechaun “half man, half coin”. The image of a PM mainly recognisable by the large gap between his white socks and tight trousers has become as indelible an image as John Major wearing his Y-fronts over his trousers. Ring a Steve Bell?
Star ratings (out of five)
The Little Matchgirl ★★★★
Cold War ★★★★
Pandemonium ★★★
The Little Matchgirl and Happier Tales is at the Lucky Chance, Frome, until 23 December
Pandemonium is at the Soho theatre, London, until 13 January
