Aeschylus’s The Persians is commonly described as “the world’s oldest surviving play”. Here we have a group of councillors and wives of warriors, waiting anxiously for news about a great empire’s foreign adventure against a minor border enemy – a pesky little bunch of Hellenes that the ruler was sure could be crushed once and for all, thus avenging a surprise defeat suffered by his father.

This script from 472BC could, in 2006, hardly be more topical. (It is set even in the same part of the world as George Bush’s Iraq adventure.) Yet George Eugeniou’s production at the Theatro Technis in Camden resists the temptation to draw direct parallels.

Instead here we have a classically presented production, with slow, stylised dance, simple but highly effective music (by Gillian Spragg) and many lines of chanting choruses. It reminded me of the recent Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices production of Metamorphoses & Elektra.

On alternating nights, as on the press opening last night, Queen Atossa is played by Tania Batzouglou, speaking the original ancient Greek. This is one of those choices that might badly backfire, but instead it works beautifully. I can’t speak for the quality of the Ancient Greek, but Batzouglou sounds like someone speaking in her native tongue, and the exaggerated gestures and gushing emotion mean there’s never any doubt about her meaning and feelings.

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Plays don’t come any more topical than Speechless, now on a late-night run at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. The scene is set: the Prime Minister, only a year out from an election triumph, is in deep trouble, pressured by the media, and many of his colleagues, including a restive Chancellor, to leave his office. Lest any particularly dense member of the audience should miss the parallels, the walls of the office in which all of the action is set is decorated with cuttings from the latest scandals.

Speechless begins with the government’s star speechwriter, Myra MacDonald (Suzanne Harbison), being given the job of drafting a speech for a desperate, surprise move, a snap election, by her putative boss, the slimy Charles Bannerman (Paul Cassidy).

Unlike his real-life (now shipped off to Brussels) parallel, Bannerman is definitely heterosexual, in a shirt-unbuttoned-to-show-chest-hair way. But it is not his sleaziness, or the fact that his pass is an obvious attempt to respond a taunt that his wife is sleeping with the Chancellor, that causes Myra to reject his advances. Any classy, high-powered woman like her would. But, it soon emerges, she has more reason than that.

It is a promising scenario, and the play benefits from Harbison’s strong stage presence. She powerfully conveys the depths of her disillusionment with the souring of the Labour dream, and conveys the further reason for her reluctance to respond to her boss’s clumsy pass — that she has been sleeping with the PM — in a subtle, classy way, long before the script reveals the fact.
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Shakespeare’s Caius Martius Coriolanus is a difficult character for most modern western audiences. He might go down well on a US Marine base in Iraq, but his bull-headed pursuit of military glory and frenzied defence of his own extraordinarily developed sense of personal honour sit rather oddly in modern London. The Jacobean audience might have seen nobility, if of a flawed kind; we see only dangerous, self-regarding ego.

Coriolanus is thus a huge challenge for the first production of the new director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole. When the first night crowd applauded as the gates of the city closed on Rome’s expelled military hero in Act Four, I wondered if Dromgoole was up to the challenge.

Up to this point Jonathan Cake’s military hero is all dash, muscle and buzzing charisma. Even his words can scarcely keep up with him; too many are lost in the rushing air. On the odd moment he is standing still, his petulant jutting jaw and tantrum-stamping feet are too reminiscent of a three-year-old to be taken seriously as a national figure, even of the most Homeric type.

Sympathy, as reflected in the applause, rests with the plebian forces driving him from Rome in response to his would-be-tyrannical scorn, even though Shakespeare clearly means even an audience like this to have no sympathy with the two unctuous tribunes (Frank McCusker as Sicinius Velutus and John Dougall as Junius Brutus) orchestrating their revolt.

In the second act, however, Cake slows down, and Coriolanus develops into a figure of some depth, some feeling. In this newly opened space, other characters also flower, from his driven mother Volumnia (a virtuoso performance from Margot Leicester) to Robin Soans’ well-meaning but limited patrician Menenius Agrippa, who just wants to be friends with everyone and enjoy peace and a comfortable life.
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By Teresa Merrigan

When Jimmy Porter first burst on to the stage in Look Back in Anger, his ranting and railing against the harshness and contradictions of life in 1950s England proved impossible to ignore. The angry young man created by John Osborne was credited with ushering in a new era not just in the arts but in attitudes to authority and youth. The shock at the presence on stage of an ironing board – which kept Jimmy’s meek, middle-class wife busy – illustrates how far art was removed from reality.

Five decades on, in a neat role-reversal, it is the husband who fusses over the ironing board in Lie Back in Anger, while the wife holds forth on the injustices and impossibilities of life. But does this angry young woman force us to consider uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our society? Well, she certainly deserves a hearing, but ultimately Jimmy Porter’s 21st-century female alter-ego commands not so much attention as irritation.

Bridget O’Donnell was inspired by the 50th anniversary of Osborne’s play to examine whether a modern woman can be as uncompromising as Jimmy and whether the allegedly revolutionary decades that followed the original have brought genuine change. The problem with her play lies perhaps with the successors to the kitchen-sink drama: the soap opera and reality TV show. In both the participants, real and imagined, examine their lives in minute, sometimes painful, often tediously repetitive, detail. Jenny, O’Donnell’s anti-heroine, while keenly observed, rarely rises about this level.
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There are some interesting characters in 15 Minutes, which has just opened at the Arcola Theatre. Maggie (Moira Brooker) is a veteran television documentary-maker battling to come to terms with the “reality TV” age. Her married (to someone else) boyfriend Robin (Tim Block), is a cynical old Fleet Street hack – a type I recognise all too well. Maggie’s “subject” is Toni (Carly Hillman), a rebellious youngster who after a stretch in Holloway is trying, sort of, to get her life into line, not helped by her angry young man Mason (Ashley Rolfe).

These are familiar – perhaps too familiar – characters, but a combination of solid writing and excellent acting take them beyond the stereotypes. The problem with the play is clear, however, in its title. 15 Minutes refers – the programme explains – to the Andy Warhol quote about fame, something that has gone beyond cliche to the point of joke. The story here is of the exploitative and partial nature of “reality” TV. Yes? And it is about how subjects can sometimes turn the tables and become (for their “managers”) all too active agents. Yes?
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