Tim Hochstrasser 
We encounter rural Britain more frequently through soaps – Emmerdale and The Archers – than on the stage. This is a missed opportunity for writers and for this reason alone this new play by Bea Roberts is a welcome and unusual joint-winner of the first Theatre 503 Writing Award. This month it receives a run in London before heading off to the Bristol Old Vic, which co-sponsors the production.
Arthur Miller was born a hundred years ago. A centenary is about discovering work afresh if it is about anything and the King’s Head deserve great credit for choosing to commemorate this great writer, not through one of plays with which we are very familiar, but with a less-well known but not lesser work that still speaks to us powerfully.
One part of the mission of Above the Stag is to remind us of notable plays on gay themes that have not always received the attention they deserved, or whose continuing topicality and universal value needs restating. The Sum of Us by David Stevens falls very much within both these categories, and now receives a welcome fresh production at the launch of the autumn season.
This play can be seen as a saucy romp or as something rather more unexpectedly melancholy than that; but either way it is a thoroughly absorbing evening, and you really don’t feel the passage of time at all.
While this is a deserved revival of an intriguing show, the core material remains in some respects unsatisfactory, and the scale of the show is not a great fit with the location. If this sounds churlish, then that is only because in musical theatre – as in opera – for the whole to succeed to best advantage the list of parts that need to be in great shape is a long and exacting one.
And so to the culmination of the contemporary opera section of the Grimeborn Festival, a double-bill in the form of Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Medium and The Wanton Sublime, a new work by Tarik O’Regan, to a libretto by Anna Rabinowitz. Robert Shaw directed both operas and the Orpheus Sinfonia conducted by Andrew Griffiths accompanied the second half. The house was sold-out in anticipation of an evening of musicianship of high quality – an expectation that was by-and-large fulfilled.
It is very rare that a company integrates a new concept so thoroughly into a Shakespeare play – too often it is merely gestural – but here the level of attention to detail is hugely impressive and imaginative while still sitting comfortably with the spirit of the original.
The play triumphantly uncovers and re-asserts McQueen’s credo that design is at its best an act of love of the person – a summing up of who that man or woman was, is and may become – and therefore lies, paradoxically, in the mind as much as purely in the visual sense. It was for this reason that Alexander McQueen chose the Shakespeare line that heads this review to wear as a tattoo – a blazon for his time, and – surely – for all our times.
