Review: The Threepenny Opera ★★★★ – Worth paying rather more than half a sixpence to see

When is an opera a play with music? When it’s Simon Stephens’ sharp new reworking for the National Theatre of Brecht’s adaptation of John Gay's 1728 ballad opera (The Beggar's Opera). The perfect match of Kurt Weill’s thrilling, chilling music and Bertolt Brecht’s update of John Gay’s comic, heartless satire seems as timely and timeless as ever in Rufus Norris’s new production.

Brecht and Weill’s ‘play with music’, based on Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation, opened in 1928, two hundred years after Gay’s first night. Brecht and Weill continued the short and intense collaboration that produced Mahagonny, Happy End and more in the years leading up to the rise of National Socialism. GW Pabst’s film adaptation of Die Dreigroschenoper opened in the more dangerous Germany of 1931, and by 1933, the Jewish Weill and his Austrian wife actor/singer Lotte Lenya (the first Polly) had fled Nazi Germany, emigrating to the USA by 1935, followed by Brecht and his Austrian Jewish wife, actor/director  Helene Weigel (the first Mother Courage). Their ‘opera’ had pride of place in the ‘degenerate music’ exhibition curated by the Nazis in Dusseldorf in 1938.

Weill’s ‘avant-garde’ music for the show has become a vital part of our musical landscape but the unwieldy storyline has been wrestled by Stephens into a clearer plot in which London – and its underworld – pull out the stops for a coronation. There’s no consideration of financial crisis as there was in the original but it’s still a monumental fable of the corrupting power of unprincipled sex, money and violence, wrapped up in Brechtian mode for the modern audience.

Vikki Mortimer’s rough and ready design, all staircases and stage flats through which the cast hurl themselves, leaves plenty of space on the front of the vast Olivier stage for David Shrubsole's onstage band to take to that stage and for choreographer Imogen Knight to thread the 20 strong cast through the set. Her effectively grungy, louche costumes give the nod to Otto Dix’s paintings, but you might bump into any of this unsavoury lot in London 2016.

George Ikediashi (aka cabaret performer Le Gateau Chocolat) as the Balladeer, an imposing figure with a huge (yes, chocolatey) voice, gets the show off to a barnstorming start with the Ballad of Mack the Knife. His dark tale is told as a sort of Grand Guignol puppet show in a larger-than-life flimsy paper Punch and Judy booth – with ‘Mackie’ as a cross between Jack the Ripper and Mr Punch, his victim’s guts spilling colourfully over the booth. So the scene and tone are set for a tale that wears its heartlessness on its grubby, grungy sleeve by the time Nick Holder’s superb, exuberantly amoral Peachum gets to set out his stall, singing his Morning Song – with its delicious tune that Weill shrewdly realised he should lift straight from Gay’s original ballad opera.  Peachum ruthlessly deploys his gangs of hooded beggars (divided into types 1-4: war veterans, immigrants, teenage runaways and unhoused lunatics) integrating hapless newbie Filch just in time for the rich pickings he anticipates at the forthcoming Coronation.

He'd like to be equally ruthless with his womenfolk at home, but Haydn Gwynne’s comically cartoonish Mrs Peachum is a match for him. She's drunken and randy, bent on revenge when she discovers her errant daughter Polly has eloped with one of her own squeezes, übervillain and gangleader Macheath. And she’s all angular limbs in black stockings and garters hardly covered by the clinging scarlet swathes of her dress as she crawls up a scaffolding ladder to find Polly’s  ‘room’ at the top empty. But Polly is more than a match for both her parents – and pretty well anyone else who crosses her. The brainy, bespectacled lass in her purposeful cardie comes across as more than resourceful and articulate in Rosalie Craig’s stunningly intelligent and gloriously sung performance. Thankfully, Pirate Jenny’s Song (the tale of the servant girl who dreams of becoming a ruthless pirate who can order the deaths of the insulting bosses and customers she serves) is restored to Polly here (sometimes it is sung by the character Jenny Diver – of whom more later). It sends shivers up the spine, just as it should – no wonder Macheath’s gang listen in awe, stifling their sexist remarks and regarding his new bride with new respect. No wonder he makes her his ‘business partner’ with alacrity!

Central to this play with music is the infamous Macheath, described by Brecht as a ‘short, stocky man of about 40 with a head like a radish, a bit bald but not lacking dignity, someone who impresses women less as a handsome man than a well-situated one’. Rory Kinnear makes an impressive singing debut and it’s good to see the part played as Brecht intended rather than as a lovable rogue or misunderstood bad boy. Kinnear’s Macheath is no slacker when it comes to chilling and thrilling. His casual cruelty belies his fatal attraction to and for the ladies that will prove his eventual downfall. The thrills come from the melodious rounded tones of his singing voice, in this, his first sustained singing role.

Polly is well matched, by Debbie Kurup’s comically indignant foul-mouthed Lucy Brown, her rival in love, to whom Macheath has also promised himself and gives as good as she gets in their Jealousy Duet; and by Sharon Small’s Jenny Diver, the fragile, damaged tart with a wounded heart who shops Macheath to the Peachums. Small gets to sing Surabaya Johnny, a happy interpolation from Happy End – it’s such a great number that the ‘end’ seems to justify the means.

Peter de Jersey also impresses as Lucy’s father Tiger Brown, the gleefully corrupt Chief Inspector of Police who is hand in glove with Peachum, his old mucker from the armed forces– together they make a deliciously malign double act in this pantheon of vicious characters.

Director Rufus Norris shoves in all the usual Brechtian techniques, from props labelled 'DRUGS' and the cast shouting ‘scene change’ or ‘interval’ to remind us we are watching theatre and not real-life and they palpably add to the enjoyment of the opera as entertainment. But perhaps the sheer pace of the performance gives little space to reflect on the predicament of the characters and their reality in the theatre of life. This is left to powerful actor and wheelchair user Jamie Beddard, like so many disabled actors, a natural Brechtian, whose physicality and vocal quality is a constant reminder of his reality.

By Judi Herman

The Threepenny Opera runs until Saturday 1 October, 7.30pm & 2pm, £15-£45 at National Theatre South Bank, SE1 9PX; 020 7452 3000. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Review: Les Blancs ★★★★ – Beauty and terror out of Africa in Yael Farber's devastating production of Lorraine Hansberry's last play

It’s not by accident that the title of this review recalls Yeats’ poem Easter 1916, so often quoted in this centenary year of the Easter Uprising in Ireland. Lorraine Hansberry was inspired to become a dramatist by seeing a rehearsal of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock at university. And she saw parallels in the struggle for Irish independence with the struggles for equality of both African Americans and the nations in Africa under white rule.

In Les Blancs (The Whites), Lorraine Hansberry was notably the first African-American dramatist to explore the African search for freedom from European colonization. The first drafts of Les Blancs came soon after the success of her landmark play, A Raisin in the Sun in 1960. Although at the beginning of 1965, she was dead from pancreatic cancer, aged 34, she left several drafts of the play. Its title is an answer to Jean Genet’s play The Blacks: A Clown Show, a ritual performance of black resentments against the white oppressor. She saw Genet’s absurdism as escapist, when realism was what was required. Her own story of being black and female in America, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, like Les Blancs, came to the stage thanks to her literary editor and former husband, Jewish publisher, songwriter and political activist Robert Nemiroff. Hansberry’s death inspired Nina Simone to write her famous song in her memory using the poignant title of her autobiography.

Hansberry entrusted Les Blancs, the work she was redrafting in hospital during her last illness, to Nemiroff to nurse into production. He continued to make further drafts based on notes and their conversations and gathered all the drafts into a production text so that it premiered in New York in 1970. Nemiroff kept polishing the script, publishing a revised version in 1983. He died in 1991 and his stepdaughter Joi Gresham, Director and Trustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, collaborated with dramaturg Drew Lichtenberg and director Yael Farber on the text of this National Theatre production.

The storyline is ostensibly clear enough. The people of a fictitious African nation are on the point of rising up to fight their colonial overlords and masters and establish an independent state and the action is seen through the experience of settlers, natives, and an American journalist in the waning days of colonial control.

Although she never went to Africa, what Hansberry brings to the stage in Les Blancs is an extraordinary vivid and credible account of the flashpoint of the struggle in one unnamed African country in the middle of the 20^th century, which could stand for them all. At the same time, her play is also a comment on the struggles against racism and inequality in her native country two years before Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Hansberry wanted to reflect the inequality of the African-American voice in the black/white conversation at the time and an African setting gave a useful distance from which to pillory the strategy and reasoning of American Civil Rights leaders.

In South African-born Farber, 51 years after her death, Hansberry’s play has found a director to fashion a production she would surely have relished. Hansberry writes into her play African-based folklore, chanting, drumming, and dancing, serving both to heighten the tension and reflect the ceremonial role of music and dance in traditional African life. And from its opening minutes Farber brings her play to full-blooded life with the entry of four Matriarchs, who accompany their slow, dignified passage across the stage with an extraordinary and obviously authentic chant (one of the four, Joyce Moholoagae, is Music Director) amid the heady, acrid smell of incense .  Add to this Adam Cork’s music and pretty continuous soundscape and Tim Lutkin’s lighting, almost characters in themselves, on Soutra Gilmour’s set, a skeletal mission hospital and living quarters complete with veranda, steadily revolving in the centre of the village it serves under the dark star-studded velvet of the African night sky, and there is tension, even menace, built in from the start.

Then there is the striking, etiolated figure of Sheila Atim’s Woman, slowly stalking around the set under the burden of a flaming firepot. Hansberry originally planned to have a female protagonist, but revised the play so this, the only black woman, has no name and no lines. And yet the impact of Atim’s presence is unsettling from the start and eventually devastating. An  accusing mother Africa indeed.

By the time a procession of white characters enters from the audience to the contrasting plangent western strains of a cello (one of them is indeed carrying, though not playing, a cello – the chosen instrument of the Albert Schweitzer-like figure who founded the mission), before a word has been spoken, Farber has established her credentials.

And yet this is nothing if not a wordy play, a play of dialectic and conversation, as well as action and ceremony. There is an elegant pairing of characters – offstage that legendary missionary who has founded the mission, away visiting his flock and the village tribal elder on his deathbed; arriving in the village, journalist Charlie Morris, keen to write about the success of the white man’s mission in both senses of the word and Tshembe Matoseh, eldest son of the dying elder returning home from London, where he now lives with his wife and child, to attend his father’s deathbed.

Morris is of course a useful ‘outsider’ lens through which to ‘meet the natives’, both black and white. Elliot Cowan makes of Morris a wonderfully persistent and resilient terrier resolutely going for the killer interview, even when he is by turns sent up and scorned by Danny Sapani’s toweringly intelligent and complex Tshembe.

When he tries to ply Tshembe with whisky and cigarettes, Tshembe retorts with a series of telling put downs. It’s hard to come back from “Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in a wreath of cigarette smoke?”, but Morris does his best even if he is not quite a match for Tshembe. It’s a long exchange but a telling and a gripping one and it’s at the heart of this play.

Morris fares better with the missionary doctors, Anna Madeley’s hard-working idealistic Dr Gotterling and James Fleet’s disillusioned, Chekovian Dr Dekovan (another of Hansberry’s neat pairings) - both excellent. And he is welcomed with open arms by Madame Neilson, the absent missionary’s elderly, almost blind but resilient wife (a wonderfully detailed performance from Siân Phillips), embodying the hopes and dreams of the long-term white settler who has thrown in her lot with the continent and done all in her power - and with her mindset - to make bridges with its people. Her blindness is symbolic and indeed she even declares that she is pleased not to be able to see the horrors going on around her as the events of the play become ever darker.

This is down in no small part to Major George Rice, representative of white rule and the British army, first seen dragging behind him a tortured and bleeding native whom he has been interrogating. Clive Francis plays the terrifying racist martinet to the hilt, spitting out the word boy he uses to address the black villagers. It’s a chilling counterpart (again a pairing) to Madame Nielsen’s love of this continent to hear him speak lyrically of the land on which he has settled, when he clearly regards its inhabitants as sub human. There are shades of Steve Biko, whose  death in custody in South Africa caused armed insurrection, when a similar case gives those inhabitants all the incitement they need to rise up against The Whites of the title.

Hansberry ratchets up the tension by condensing the action into just a matter of hours, almost into real time. No sooner is his father dead than Tshembe is caught between two worlds – the West that he has left behind and his native village where he trapped by an insurrection he is urged to join. And then there are his two brothers, desperately sincere Abioseh (Gary Beadle), who has found his home in the church and Eric, the anguished illegitimate product of mixed race parentage (a heartbreakingly convincing performance form Tunji Kasim). All three are damaged and defined by the rape of their native land and the bloody struggle it is undergoing.

By the time the play reaches its stunning, terrifying climax, Tshembe has evoked Anne Frank, Auschwitz and Dachau. Hansberry’s vision, realized by Farber, Lichtenberg and Gresham, has a terrible beauty indeed.

By Judi Herman

Les Blancs runs until Thursday 2 June, 7.30pm & 2pm, £15-£35, at National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 9PX; 020 7452 3000. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Review: Bar Mitzvah Boy ★★★★ – The musical version of Jack Rosenthal’s coming of age story gets the intimate production it deserves

Jack Rosenthal’s television play, originally transmitted in the BBC’s Play for Today in 1976, passed into folk legend, at least in the Jewish community. It told the simple but shocking story of young Eliot Green and his apprehensions over his forthcoming Bar Mitzvah and his worry that all the grown men in his life are somewhat immature and imperfect. In the meantime, the family goes through all the stock neuroses of putting on the then almost obligatory celebratory dinner dance.

At the time, it was wonderful to see even such caricatures on mainstream television and Rosenthal’s concept, that the play was about universal themes of adolescence and family rather than insular concerns, was helped by his genial writing and affectionate performances and direction.

So when Don Black offered to put together a Jewish team, including Jule Styne, to stage Bar Mitzvah Boy as a musical, surely it had to be a smash hit? Yet it only ran for 77 performances in London and was equally a failure when reset in 1946 Brooklyn in a New York tryout.

Critics at the time blamed the failure on an awkward mix of American tunes and British words and a focus on the parents’ battles over the Bar Mitzvah party rather than Eliot’s qualms about the whole point of the day. Indeed, Rosenthal himself went on to write 'Smash', a stage play about his own anguish at seeing his television play mangled into a musical West End failure.

So why would a revival of Barmitzvah Boy – the Musical, succeed this time round? Well, the new book by David Thompson (The Scottsboro Boys, and script adaptation for Chicago) goes back to Rosenthal’s original intentions and places Eliot and his worries centre stage so the actions of others are clearly seen through his eyes. Thompson has also reduced cast numbers to an essential 8 from the 14 in the TV play and 12 in the original musical, making for a much tighter focus on the plot, and Don Black has written new lyrics to previously unheard Styne compositions to complement  the revisions.

Sue Kelvin and Robert Maskell, as Eliot’s parents Rita and Victor Green, bring out the heart and soul of the aspirational Jewish working class, particularly in the numbers ‘The Bar Mitzvah of Eliot Green’ and ‘We’ve Done Alright. The whole cast is in great voice, but Sue Kelvin's is a marvel - huge, brassy and tender as appropriate. There’s a fine, wonderfully warm performance, beautifully sung, by Lara Stubbs as Lesley, Eliot’s older sister (lucky the new teenager who has one as perceptive and supportive as this!) , who brings everyone together at the end. Will she end up with her current boyfriend, the over-nice Harold (Nicholas Corre) who comes into his own delivering “Harold’s Dilemma'?

Adam Bregman makes his professional debut as Eliot and celebrated his own Bar Mitzvah last year! He is the archetypal 13 year old trying to make sense of the world and those around him and he doesn’t let lyrics or tunes get in the way of conveying what Eliot is trying to tell us. And there's a delicious performance from Hannah Rose-Thompson, as Denise, Eliot's mouthy playground mate, much more than just Rosenthal's clever prism for looking at Eliot's dilemma through non Jewish eyes (and providing a way out of it in the end).

Playing supporting roles in the adult world, Jeremy Rose is pitch perfect as Rabbi Sherman and Hayward B Morse makes Granddad loveable and just a tad irritating as all good Jewish Granddad's should be ...

The big surprise is that only Sue Kelvin and Adam Bregman are actually Jewish. The whole cast invests every performance with a real unforced authenticity

The Gatehouse is configured long and thin but Stewart Nicholls’ musical staging and direction makes good use of the space so that choreography seems both natural and appropriate and never over the top. Edward Court’s four-man band provide richer support than you might expect from a quartet, with an evocative, klezmer vibe to match the music– it’s a pity they were mostly hidden behind a fringed curtain on Grace Smart’s otherwise uncluttered set. Yes the plot is still thin, the music still too American for 1970’s Willesden, but there’s an integrity here that Jack Rosenthal would probably have approved of. Will it be a smash hit? Go and see for yourselves, you’ll have a lovely time deciding.

By Judi Herman

Bar Mitzvah Boy runs until Sunday 10 April, 7.30pm & 4pm, £18-£22, Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate Village, N6 4BD; 020 8340 3488. www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com

As well as Saturday 16 & Sunday 17 April, 7.30pm & 3pm, £22, £18 concs, at The Radlett Centre, Herts, WD7 8HL; 01923 859 291. www.radlettcentre.co.uk

Review: NotMoses ★★★ – Carry on taking the tablets, there's some epic fun to be had amongst the groans and jokes

Filmmaker Gary Sinyor’s irreverent retelling of the Exodus story starts with the baby left floating on the Nile when the Princess takes up Moses, a nicer baby who doesn’t cry and has a proper - er – Moses basket. NotMoses grows up a slave in Prince Moses’ shadow, until God orders both of them to lead the Israelites out of bondage – though it takes feisty Miriam to lead the Exodus. Synor’s intent was Life of Brian meets The Ten Commandments, but it’s rather more Carry On Taking the Tablets, silly humour that sends up the biblical story and religion. Like the Carry On films it could just get the audience vote and become a cult hit.

Knowledge of the Bible and its language (or the first five books anyway) certainly helps, and Synor displays his lightly, learned in cheder (religion school) and synagogue in his Manchester childhood. It all starts with a comedy canter through the stories of the patriarchs leading up to the plight of the Israelites as slaves in Egypt. The Bible lesson turns out to be an extended sermon from Leon Stewart’s well-meaning, though misguided (and anachronistic) rabbi, ministering to the Hebrew slaves. A bit of popular culture helps too as Joseph inevitably bursts into song …

You can’t fault the cast for playing the characters with sincerity as well as a knowing twinkle, for staying in character and not sending it up unless appropriate.  Greg Barnett invests NotMoses with the determination and frustration of the atheist who doesn’t believe in God, ready to lead the Children of Israel out of Egypt without anyone’s help. He is comedy paired with Thomas Nelstrop’s Moses, a preppie budding accountant at the palace who grows the beard and perfects the biblical epic lingo once he's heard God in the Burning Bush - and had his kebabs singed there (ooh, Matriarch!).

There’s the expected cast of stock characters, notably the admirable Jasmine Hyde channeling Amanda Barrie in Carry On Cleo, Niv Patel's pouting, petulant Rameses and Joe Morrow as a camp, crowd-pleasing slave driver. But Moses’ sister, Miriam, is a modern fighter for equal women’s rights in this very patriarchal world and Danielle Bird delivers the strongest and most serious speech of the evening with great compassion and conviction.

Life at number 613 (the number of commandments Jews are supposed to keep - geddit), where NotMoses lives with his slave parents, provides a send up of Jewish family life with a nod to Fiddler on the Roof, the Papa (Dana Haqjoo doubling as a legless Pharoah, squatting on his throne like a Dr Who villain or Dan Dare’s Mekon) bemoaning his lack of riches and the Mama (Antonia Davies) preoccupied with food and finding a nice Jewish girl for her son.

And struggling with a series of diktats heralded by thunder, the chosen people have spotted that the Divine Being is also preoccupied with food, not to mention clothing. In the light of the laws on keeping kosher and synagogue readings from of the Torah in recent weeks dwelling in detail on what priests should wear, Sinyor has a point. This is a family Being too, who has to deal with his difficult adolescent Child (presumably omnipresent rather than anachronistic), an extra dimension to ponder, voiced by 13-year-old Izzy Lee at this performance.

There are, of course, plenty more anachronisms, word jokes and double-entendres, from Jethro, Moses' future father-in-law, offering meat he says “Is-lamb” to the toilet humour of the effects of eating unleavened bread (matzah). It often smacks of student revue or something a synagogue youth drama group might come up with for a fundraiser, which does mean there are actually  real nuggets of crowd-pleasing fun amongst the groans and lamer jokes.

Synor says the project started life as a film script and this shows in the too frequent fadeouts between the many scenes, effectively salvaged though by Carla Goodman’s sparse sets and Lola Post Production’s epic visual effects creating Egyptian palaces and pyramids and an impressive divided Red Sea, to the soundtrack of Erran Baron Cohen’s matching epic music. The plague of rather realistic plastic frogs which rains down on stage and audience alike is a nice (or should that be nasty) touch.

Some years ago, the playwright Steve Waters wrote that working with a good director is rather like going into analysis – however lucid you might feel to yourself, what emerges in the production of a play exceeds your intention. “Your set might be definitive, your dream cast fixed, but your play in the hands of another often yields a far more surprising piece of theatre than you're capable of envisaging.”

It would have been interesting to see what emerged with a theatre director at the helm and without the expectations of West End opening, albeit in the intimate surroundings of the Arts Theatre, but nevertheless, it certainly gets a lot of laughs so it could prove to be that cult hit.

By Judi Herman

NotMoses runs until 14 May 2016, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £19.50-£49.50, at Arts Theatre, Great Newport St, WC2H 7JB, 020 7836 8463. https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk

Review: Mrs Henderson Presents ★★★★ – Vintage British fun in a new musical that evokes good old wartime spirit

Musical theatre doesn’t need to be ground-breaking or stuffed full of numbers that go on to become ‘standards’ to be thoroughly enjoyable. What’s needed is a compelling story, an excellent ensemble and music and lyrics that move the plot along rather than holding up the action. Mrs Henderson Presents is just that – and it’s unashamedly and eccentrically British – with a Jewish protagonist sharing top honours for good measure.

Writer and director Terry Johnson was captivated by the 2005 film Mrs Henderson Presents, the story of the Windmill Theatre in London starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins, and he jumped at the chance of developing a musical of the film with leading Jewish lyricist Don Black and composers George Fenton and Simon Chamberlain.

In 1930, recently-widowed Mrs Laura Henderson buys the old Palais de Luxe cinema as a creative diversion and fits it out as a tiny, one-tier theatre, renamed the Windmill. It is, of course, not profitable so she hires Vivian Van Damm to change its fortunes. Van Damm, of Dutch Jewish origin, hits on the idea of ‘Revudeville’, a programme of continuous variety with 18 entertainment acts. But this is also a commercial failure, so they add the daring dimension of nudity to create the allure of the Folies Bergère. To get round the censorship laws policed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, Mrs H argues that since nude statues cannot be banned on moral grounds neither can living statues or tableaux vivants. Hence the ruling "If it moves, it's rude".

This is the true story ripe for transmuting into first cinema and now stage-musical gold. And Van Damm's flair for public relations created the legend of the theatre that "never closed". Newspapers carried pictures of plucky Windmill girls in tin hats on fire-watching duty, and stories of showgirls giving V-signs to German bombers. Indeed, except for a 12-day period in 1939, when all London theatres were ordered closed, the Windmill remained open throughout the Blitz.

The plot inevitably rests heavily on the shoulders of Henderson and Van Damm and the love interest of artiste Maureen and stage hand turned airman Eddie. Tracie Bennett suffuses doughty Mrs Henderson with an extraordinary zest for living, not least in the numbers Whatever Time I Have and Anything But Young, and she captures that marvellous British spirit of no-nonsense eccentricity. Ian Bartholomew's caring Van Damm manages to be at once authoritative and self-deprecating - and not a little surprised at how well his precarious show business is turning out. The plight of Jews in Europe is suddenly placed centre stage when he receives news of the German invasion of Holland and the rounding up of Jews by the Nazis, including his own relatives left behind. Wearing a Star of David armband in solidarity, he expresses his distress in the number Living in a Dream World. There’s fun at his expense too, when Emma Williams’ warm, feisty Maureen challenges all the men in the theatre company to reveal all first if they want the girls to strip off and Mrs Henderson, feigning surprise, exclaims drily “You are Jewish!” Williams displays a lovely dawning  realisation as a woman discovering the 'power of her own presence' as Johnson puts it, notably in her full frontal nude castigation of Mr Hitler as the bombs fall, while Matthew Malthouse's Eddie is at his best trying to 'Fred and Ginger' Maureen.

Johnson directs his own story (first seen at the Theatre Royal, Bath, last year) against Tim Shorthall's set that vividly conjures up back and front stage (and roof) of the Windmill, all backcloths and props, superbly lit by Ben Ormerod to suggest both the dinginess of backstage and the bright lights of the front. And there’s a witty single light that comes on above Mrs Henderson's head when she has her ‘lightbulb’ moment - nudity is the way out of their problems! But paradoxically, nude revues need glamorous costumes and Paul Wills comes up with some gorgeous outfits for the revues and lovely period authenticity for the workaday clothing.

It's all good-natured and corny pre-war and war-time chipperness, from the front of cloth comic ("cheeky chappie" Jamie Foreman) to the back-stage crew and dance captain (Samuel Holmes, elegant and waspish in just the right proportions). Robert Hands’s Lord Chamberlain and his secretary (Oliver Jackson) have a lot of fun with the writing team’s homage to Gilbert and Sullivan, the eponymous Lord Chamberlain’s Song. Lizzy Connolly, Lauren Hood and Katie Bernstein as the pioneering  statues baring all for raised wages of 30 bob a week are terrific throughout. They give delightful support (no pun intended)  in a nifty little number with famous paintings ‘dressing’ the set to demonstrate the high art displayed by those ample Rubens and Renoir nudes. Andrew Wright’s choreography is spot-on convincing for the period – and I guess he gets the credit for those tableaux vivants too. And the music and lyrics team of Fenton, Chamberlain and Black have been around long enough to pastiche the 40's style with panache. They give the music their own original flavour too, never allowing the music to overwhelm lyrics that do a nice job moving on the plot. There's a debate to be had as to whether the portrayal of such nudity in 2016 is inappropriately exploitative or empowering but judging by the response the night I saw the production, audiences are enjoying the fun and sharing it with the cast onstage – clothed and unclothed.

By Judi Herman

Mrs Henderson Presents runs until Saturday 18 June, 7.30pm, £10-£97.50, at Noel Coward Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4AU; 0844 482 5140. www.mrshenderson.co.uk

Review: Poppy + George ★★★★ – A beguiling, thought-provoking exploration by Diane Samuels of identity and possibility after the Great War

The year is 1919. The Great War is finally over and Poppy Wright, inspired by her suffragette teacher, arrives in London from the north of England to make her mark, rather than stay in service as a nanny. In the heart of the East End, in a back alleyway, she finds work in Smith’s tailoring and costumiers’ workshop. There she meets not only Smith, the Russian Jewish tailor with a Chinese past, but also George the chauffeur and war hero and Tommy Johns, the music hall female impersonator, also back from the trenches.

This beguiling, thought-provoking play, from the writer of the hugely successful Kindertransport, explores a time of change and opportunity after the cataclysm of the First World War and the subsequent influenza flu pandemic, when all classes questioned their subsequent lives and their roles in a new, modern era. Poppy is increasingly entranced by the freedoms held out by the suffragette movement, at the same time as falling in love with George, while the supportive Smith consoles Tommy as he attempts to reconcile with a wife and child he has not seen for years.

David Holmes lighting works magic with Ruari Murchison’s open set, all brickwork and fabric storage, with costumes flying above that are flights of fancy in themselves – plus the all-important piano – to create an enchanted space in which the unexpected can happen. And perhaps taking a cue from Polonius’ saw “the clothes doth oft proclaim the man”, she explores how those garments can be used as ‘shape-changers’ to fashion an individual’s  image   The sound and composition by Gwyneth Herbert, reflecting, as she says the “bawdy music hall, the rhythm of sewing machines and shadowy, uneasy echoes" wonderfully evokes the world of possibilities in which the four characters dwell.

Jennie Darnell directs Samuels’ exploration of gender identity and new possibilities in a changing world with a charmingly light and good-humoured touch that never preaches or lectures. Together Darnell and Samuels conjure the pathos of the fading music hall and its artistes after the Great War. Nadia Clifford’s luminous warm-hearted Poppy captures a woman starting to open her mind to those new possibilities, and teetering on the brink of exploring life with George, swaggering Rebecca Oldfield, comfortable in her skin and her chauffeur’s braces and trousers. Jacob Krichefski , an imposing bushy presence, beautifully conveys Smith’s exotic past and intriguing hinterland; and multi-talented actor/musician Mark Rice-Oxley gives an outstanding and deeply affecting performance as Tommy, believably making up tunes and lyrics on the hoof.

Twenty years after its first incarnation as Turncoat, a one-act play Samuels wrote for young people’s company Theatre Centre, in an increasingly gender blind world, she reminds us that it's still good to dare to leap into the unknown and to question our roles. And there's no better place do that than in the former music hall that is the current Watford Palace Theatre.

By Judi Herman

Poppy + George runs to 27 February, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £12-£22.50, at Watford Palace Theatre, 20 Clarendon Rd, WD17 1JZ; 01923 225671. http://watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk

Listen to Diane Samuels on JR OutLoud discussing Poppy + George and her new oratorio, Song of Dina.

JR OutLoud: Diane Samuels talks about her play Poppy + George and her new oratorio Song of Dina

Liverpudlian playwright Diane Samuels talks to Judi Herman about identity and change from London's East End 1919 to now. These themes feature in her play Poppy + George, about Northerner Poppy Wright, who is taken on at a tailoring workshop by the proprietor Smith, a Russian Jew with a Chinese past. It's here that Poppy also meets Tommy the music hall artist and George the chauffeur, both changed by serving in the trenches.

Diane also discusses her new project (at 21:49), Song of Dina, a multimedia oratorio with music by composer Maurice Chernick, based on the story of the Patriarch Jacob’s only daughter.

Poppy + George runs to Saturday 27 February, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £12-£22.50, at Watford Palace Theatre, 20 Clarendon Rd, WD17 1JZ; 01923 225671. http://watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk

Song of Dina launch event on Wednesday 6 April, 7.45pm, FREE, at JW3, 341-351 Finchley Rd, NW3 6ET; 020 7433 8989. www.jw3.org.uk

Read JR's four-star review of Poppy + George

Review: Battlefield ★★★★ – Peter Brook returns to the Mahabharata with a meditation on the aftermath of war that will stay with audiences

Thirty years ago, the great and influential Jewish theatre practitioner Peter Brook worked with writer Jean-Claude Carriere and a large cast from the company who had gathered around him in Paris to dramatise The Mahabharata: the Sanskrit epic of the mighty Bharata family torn apart by a great war. The result was nine hours of mesmerising epic theatre, which I was fortunate enough to see in a Glasgow tramshed transformed by red earth into the Indian subcontinent. Now aged 90, working with his long-term collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, he returns to just one section of the mighty epic, which they've called Battlefield.

This meditation on the sorrow and pity of war, eloquent and moving in its extraordinary simplicity, is sadly both timely and timeless as we continue to commemorate two World Wars, while the world is ripped apart and whole peoples put to flight by conflict in Syria and elsewhere. Battlefield is about the aftermath of war and especially internecine struggle within dynasties, here two great families, the Pandavas and Kauravas. The five Pandava brothers may have triumphed over their cousins the hundred sons of the blind King Dritarashtra, but for Yudishtira, oldest of the Pandavas who must now become king, it is a Pyrrhic victory. He has lost so much and so many family members and confederates lie dead on the field of battle. So he finds he has all too much in common with the old blind King he has defeated.

And so many themes and threads in this story sound as familiar as the weekly Torah portions and Haftorah readings you can hear in synagogues around the world every Shabbat. For David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan, “The beauty of Israel is slain among thy high places,” and his later raw cry over the death of his traitor son Absalom, “Oh, Absalom, Absalom, my son…” resonate with the anguish of these survivors of battle, both victor and vanquished. There is even the story of a baby pulled from a river where his mother has abandoned him floating in a basket. His rescuers are princely and he grows up to be the mighty warrior Karna.

The glory of this production, little more than an hour long, is its stunning simplicity. It is performed on a thrust stage, again covered by that orange-red dust, by four powerful performers – at the same time physical and cerebral – who morph sinuously from one role to another as necessary. Nobody is credited with the simple design, but Oria Puppo’s streamlined costumes, echoing that theme of the modern and timeless, are enhanced by huge bolts of red and orange cloth to wonderful effect, serving as robes and cloaks, rivers, the elements of fire and earth, storms and even untold riches. Philippe Vialatte’s mood-making lighting too seems like an extra character. And the whole is brilliantly underscored and orchestrated by the drumming of master musician Toshi Tsuchitori, whose rhythms eloquently enhance and alter the mood and pace.

Stories are folded within stories, and amidst that sorrow and pity there are plenty of flashes of humour, albeit dark or rueful. Each performer is singular and all work wonderfully together. Sean O’Callaghan is a huge and imposing presence, especially moving as the blind and bereaved King Dritarashtra, but ruefully comical as a worm in danger of being crushed. To Jared McNeill falls the role of the victorious Yudishtira, as graceful – and abashed – in victory, as the vanquished old King he has toppled. While Ery Nzaramba is both funny and authoritative as the wise men whose advice to the king comes in the form of those parables about a succession of animals including that worm, as well as a pigeon and a mongoose.

Stately Carole Karemera (who plays the pigeon with comic economy) is as capable of huge dignity as the queenly women caught up in the struggle, principally Yudishtira’s mother Kunti, but it is her heartrending Ganga, her terrifying cry of grief and loss at the death of her son that I shall long remember – standing for every bereaved mother indeed.

“For an idea to stick it must be burnt into our memories,” says Brook in his hugely influential meditation on theatre, The Empty Space. The singularly funny and thought-provoking tale of a king who offers more and more of his body to be weighed in the scales against that pigeon till every bone is part of the weigh-in proves to be a telling and memorable metaphor. And then one of the wise men has a parable for the new King in which a mongoose tells a rich man to give away all his riches to the poor. He begins to involve the audience, homing in on various members asking if they are rich or poor. Some fess up to being rich, others assert they are poor and are ‘rewarded’ with some of those red and orange cloths. The last of these ‘lucky’ recipients finds his lap piled so high he cannot move and can barely applaud at the end. It is the image of this discomfiture, which so perfectly embodies the ambiguity of riches – and indeed victory – that sticks in my memory. The storytelling of Brook and Estienne accrues power even as they continue to strip it bare to the bone.

By Judi Herman

Battlefield runs until Saturday 27 February, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £10-£35, at Young Vic Theatre, 66 The Cut, SE1 8LZ; 020 7922 2922. www.youngvic.org

Review: Jeepers Creepers ★★★ – Get perhaps a bit too up close and personal with supreme Jewish comic writer/performer Marty Feldman

Marty Feldman features as the world's favourite Jewish vampire in one of my favourite sketches ever, with the punchline, “Oi, have you got troubles,” when the vampire hunter holds up his cross. He was the writer/comedian with the wild hair and staring eyes, the result of a botched operation for Graves’ disease, though they stood him in good stead as the creator of some of the funniest characters ever seen on small or big screen. Think ‘Young’ Frankenstein's hunchbacked henchman Igor in Mel Brooks' movie. Indeed he is sort of undead in Robert Ross’s new biodrama, directed by Feldman’s old mucker and lifelong admirer, Terry Jones. It opens with silent film titles on a screen at the back (in appreciation of Feldman’s appearance in another Mel Brooks film, Silent Movie), announcing ‘three years’ dead’, then two, then six months, each title accompanied by the appearance of a ghostly luminescent skull in a glass case, until Feldman is alive again and not so much kicking as contorting – for he is indeed in Igor mode, complete with hunchback prosthetic.

David Boyle’s frenetic, elastic recreation of Feldman engages with the audience – in my case one-to-one, for he lures me briefly onto the small cramped stage set up as a claustrophobic, Stateside hotel room – be ready to take part if you sit in middle of the front row!

Happily his partner on stage is Rebecca Vaughan as his life partner Lauretta Feldman. The year is 1974, Young Frankenstein is about to be released and Feldman is about to hit the big time in the USA. The couple are playing a waiting game, holed up in the hotel the night before Feldman is due to appear on a prime-time chat show. The warning in the foyer that herbal cigarettes are used in this production is not in vain. The Feldmans chain-smoke their way through the night and Marty drinks his way through it too, while Lauretta leafs through Vogue as her efforts to persuade him to get to sleep prove futile.

So it’s a night of dissecting previous triumphs and disasters and for Lauretta at least, nervously anticipating what might go wrong in front of millions of viewers the next evening.

We learn that Feldman is a womaniser as well as a hard drinker (though we also learn that he knows that home is where the heart is and always goes back to Lauretta); and we are present when he has his fatal heart attack at the tragically young age of 48 in a Mexican hotel room. But I’m not sure that those who don’t already know his work (and love it, for I’m sure to know it is to love it), will pick up the references to his extraordinary back catalogue of radio and TV script writing and appearances – including co-writing Round the Horne on radio and The Army Game and The Frost Report for TV, and writing and appearing in iconic shows, such as At Last the 1948 Show and his own series Marty. But if it makes folk seek out the work then that’s no bad thing – and they can always read playwright Robert Ross’s well-reviewed biography of Feldman, Marty Feldman, The Biography of a Comedy Legend.

Meanwhile there is much to enjoy in the performances of Boyle and Vaughan (he could also tackle Gene Wilder any time he likes, for he’s a dead ringer for Feldman’s co-star in Young Frankenstein), despite their uncomfortable proximity in the confines of the tiny – and herbal smoke-filled – studio theatre.

By Judi Herman

Jeepers Creepers runs until Saturday 20 February, 7pm & 4pm, £20.50-£22.50, at Leicester Square Theatre, 6 Leicester Place, WC2H 7BX; 020 7734 2222. www.leicestersquaretheatre.com

Review: The Pianist of Willesden Lane ★★★★ – Moving pictures of a mother’s life and music glow in the warmth of a daughter’s love

Adapted by Hershey Felder from the book The Children of Willesden Lane, by Los Angelean pianist Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen, this is the true story of Golabek's mother, Lisa Jura. As a young Jewish pianist Jura's dreams about her Vienna concert debut were shattered by the Nazis in the 1938 Anschluss like the glass of Kristallnacht, as her family bravely placed her on the Kindertransport to London.

At first sight the set resembles a music salon or concert hall dominated by a magnificent Steinway grand piano, with mirrors in ornate gilded frames on the walls behind and a bank of flowers around the footlights.

Golabek, a slight red-head dressed simply in black, moves into the light on the steps and turns the warmth of her smile on her audience to address them. Soon she turns to the piano from where she will tell so much of the story about her mother. As her long elegant fingers touch the keys, she reveals one of the most potent reasons for the success of her loving tribute to her mother. Having inherited her mother’s gift, because she took in the stories about her mother's life as Jura taught her to play the piano, Golabek can perfectly time her storytelling to create a seamless weave between words and music, underscoring with great sensitivity and, when necessary, allowing words or music to breathe alone.

It’s a story at once singular and familiar – as in the end perhaps all such stories are. Every Holocaust survivor’s story reveals a family life cruelly cut short, a childhood abruptly ended, heart-breaking separation from loved ones. Jura is no different, her mutual love for her parents and sisters is quite enough to make her story heart-breaking. But her particular heartbreak – and her salvation – is her passion for the piano music she was born to play.

Jura lives for her weekly piano lessons, dreaming of making her professional debut with Grieg’s piano concerto as she crosses Vienna to see her music professor. But this is the week that he has been ordered to give up his Jewish pupils and this is just the start of the restrictions and persecutions the Anschluss and the arrival of the Nazis brings to the city’s Jews. So no sooner has Golabek evoked the rich cultural life of pre-war Vienna, the salons, cafés and concert halls (cleverly illustrated by photographs and film projected on all those mirrors by projection designer Andrew Wilder, with lighting designer Christopher Rynne), than her mother’s dreams are shattered in the glass of Kristallnacht. Jura’s father is humiliated and forced to clean the streets, but there is a chance for just one of his girls to escape on the Kindertransport. The terrible choice must be made and falls on the young pianist.

Jura’s own evocations of her life, lovingly painted for her daughter as they sat together at the piano must have been extraordinarily vivid and reinforced by constant retelling too, for Golabek’s own retelling is spellbinding, tracing her mother’s journey across Europe, her arrival in pre-war Britain, and eventually, after a sojourn in the Sussex countryside, at the hostel in Willesden Lane, filled with other young people with similar stories.

The welcome she receives there, how she enthrals her new friends as she is drawn to play the hostel’s piano, what befalls her during the air raids and above all the kindness of strangers as well as her fellows, is the stuff from which Golabek and director/adaptor Hershey Felder mould such a rich show.

When Jura gets work in an East End garment factory, Golabek draws a striking analogy between the notes she plays on the keys of the piano and its strings, the textures of the music she weaves and the ‘music’ of the sewing machines on which she works, weaving garments at the factory.

Golabek’s musical selection is an eclectic delight, including Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Bach and many more from Jura’s classical repertoire, spiced with a couple of popular songs also dear to her mother’s heart – Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band and These Foolish Things (Eric Maschewitz and Jack Strachey).

It would be a shame to reveal all of Jura’s uplifting story, but there are delightful vignettes on the way – of Myra Hess at the piano in her famous lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery during and after the Blitz; of ‘our brave boys’ at rest and play in the piano bar where she gets to play for her living, to save her fingers from being ruined at those machines; and of the folk she meets in war-torn, bombed out London, her co-workers at the factory and her peers at the hostel all showing solidarity with the young pianist and rooting for her as she triumphs at last.

There is of course romance too, but again it would be telling to reveal the story of how Jura meets the man who will be the father of the children to whom she will one day pass on her talent and her love of music and her story.

So see – and hear – this beautiful, heart-warming show for yourself. It is especially poignant that it plays here through the week of Holocaust Memorial Day; and not surprising to hear that it has sold out for months in New York and toured the USA too, where Golabek educates young people about the Holocaust with a film, as well as this theatre piece based on her book The Children of Willesden Lane.

By Judi Herman

The Pianist of Willesden Lane runs until Saturday 27 February, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £22.50-£40, at St James Theatre, 12 Palace St, SW1E 5JA; 0844 264 2140. www.stjamestheatre.co.uk

Watch a brief extract from the show below:

To find out more about all the projects in which Mona Golabek and her family are involved, including the documentaries, I am a Pianist and Finding Lea Tickotsky, and the book The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport – A Memoir of Music, Love and Survival by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen, visit holdontoyourmusic.org.