A darker shade of Bennett: PATRICK MARMION reviews The Shrine/A Bed Among The lentils

The Shrine/A Bed Among The Lentils (Bridge Theatre, London)

Rating:

Verdict: Playlet noir

Rose (hopemilltheatre.co.uk)

Rating:

Verdict: Beattie’s brilliant

Denonement (traverse.co.uk)

Rating:

Verdict: Armageddon outta here 

Stories are often changed by the context in which they are told. And in the context of Covid-19, Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues — originally written for TV in the Eighties and Nineties — look a whole lot darker.

You may already have seen The Shrine, starring Monica Dolan, and A Bed Among The Lentils, with Lesley Manville, on TV or iPlayer this summer. But the series of celebrated playlets are getting a second outing at Sir Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre in London (in rep with David Hare’s monologue Beat The Devil, starring Ralph Fiennes).

I’ve always tended to think of Bennett as a kindly old grandad who turns his wry wit on the quiet lives of ordinary people. But these two stories struck me here as a little less benign.

In The Shrine, Dolan plays a mature lady keeping vigil on the A65 near Skipton at the site where her husband died in a motorbike accident. Thanks to flowers left by a stranger and the coroner’s discovery of unbuttoned trousers, she realises he wasn’t the man she thought he was.

A Bed Among The Lentils finds Manville playing the mousey wife of a North Yorkshire vicar. But the mouse learns to roar — in bed — after her quest for sherry leads her to the liquor counter of an Indian shopkeeper. An amusing set-up, of course, but both plays are also laced with bitter caricatures of those who still practise Bennett’s lapsed Anglicanism.

This is in no way an aspersion on the performances. Dolan’s bereaved wife, clinging to her grief, has a voice hollowed by sadness that occasionally thickens to suppress insurgent emotion.

And as ‘Mrs Vicar’ in her limp, drab clothes, Manville delivers an acerbic performance, centred on a knot of resentment which her character nurses with altar wine and Benson & Hedges.

Both pieces are sparsely presented: the first with a budget kitchen and projections of hedgerows, the second with mock-Tudor rectory furniture and projections of rain. They make elegant place holders, keeping the theatre warm until we get back to normal.

I’ll never shake the memory of Maureen Lipman as the Jewish granny in the Eighties BT ads. But this online recording, made at Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, could be the best performance I’ve seen her give.

Rose is a revival of Martin Sherman’s play about an elderly woman recalling her life in the 20th century.

The memoir charts familiar but, at times, horrifying territory. Rose recounts her journey, from Cossack assaults on her Shtetl in Ukraine in the 1920s to finding love in Warsaw and the battle of the ghetto in 1943 — before making a new life, with a new husband, as a hotelier in New Jersey.

With grandchildren growing up in Israel, she goes on to pose uncomfortable questions about Israeli army violence today.

Lipman’s solo performance has the quality of a testimony to a tribunal and Rose’s breathing difficulties due partly to the ravages of time are also triggered by strong emotion. Tellingly, she wears a striped smock subtly reminiscent of death camp uniforms.

It’s a long haul — 80 years in two hours — but one that should surely earn Lipman an ‘ology’.

Speculating on what you might do at the end of the world is traditionally a vice of adolescent boys. It is now the premise of John Morton’s radio play Denouement, available on Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre website starring Ian McElhinney (Granda Joe in Derry Girls) and his wife Marie Jones (the writer of Stones In His Pockets).

The relationship between their 68- and 70-year-old characters Adele and Liam is credible enough, as they face extinction on the West Coast of Ireland in the year 2048. But Morton has Adele bingeing on cocaine while Liam decides, bizarrely, that now is a good time to write his memoirs.

The dialogue is delivered in colourful Ulster brogue. Dogs howl at the door, requiring regular mercy killings (thank heavens this is just an audio play); and both characters rue past affairs.

As a portrait of a marriage, it’s brilliant. As a vision of Armageddon, it’s utterly daft.

Three Kings (Old Vic) 

Rating:

Verdict: Dark magic 

After numerous false starts, Andrew Scott finally got his hour on stage in this hypnotic monologue about a feckless Irish father, written by Scott’s former partner Stephen Beresford.

The trouble started at the end of July when the first of five performances was cancelled after Scott was struck by a non-Covid-related indisposition. He then had ‘minor surgery’, the run was deferred for a few days and later postponed indefinitely.

Part of the Old Vic’s In Camera fundraising series, the play was eventually staged late last week.

And it was worth the wait. Three Kings is an exquisite, brilliantly dark piece about a young man in search of the love and approval of his charismatic father: a Dublin-born barfly and self-styled businessman. It may not be autobiographical but it has a chilly ring of truth, told from the point of view of a son who loathes and yet adores his dad.

Bottling that ambivalence is the brilliance of Scott’s mercurial performance, broadcast from the empty Old Vic. Playing all the roles, he eyes you the same way the father does his son — erupting into rage when attention wanders, as hard core boozers do.

There are eccentricities in Matthew Warchus’s production, such as the 1960s-car-chase music between scenes, and other sound effects which fall flat on Zoom. But I had the good fortune to watch this twice, and as soon as it was over, I wanted to see it again.

It’s a total mystery to me why the Old Vic aren’t selling unlimited numbers of tickets. But I will be astonished if it doesn’t resurface soon.

Live At Covent Garden 4 (Royal Opera House) 

Rating:

Verdict: Operatic hors d’oeuvres   

This was the biggest of the Royal Opera’s Saturday online concerts so far, with the stalls seats stripped out and the socially- distanced orchestra taking up the space normally occupied by well-heeled opera buffs.

Conductor Antonio Pappano got off to a fizzing start with the Overture to Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro. Then Figaro himself arrived, but in his Rossini guise from Il Barbiere Di Siviglia, Italian baritone Vito Priante giving a likeable account of the tongue-twisting ‘Largo al factotum’.

With lyrical New Zealand tenor Filipe Manu on the bill, having little to do, it seemed strange to have Charles Castronovo singing effortfully in the Act One duet from L’Elisir D’Amore: compensation came from the delightful soprano Lisette Oropesa.

Also lovely was mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, showing great vocal agility in the finale of Rossini’s La Cenerentola.

Oropesa charmed us again in Amina’s sleepwalking finale from Bellini’s pastoral idyll La Sonnambula, complete with chorus and Manu chipping in nicely with Elvino’s brief phrases.

Castronovo was better suited to Riccardo’s big Act Three scene from Verdi’s A Masked Ball and the final scene from Carmen, where Priante shone briefly as the Toreador and Akhmetshina proved a tempestuous Carmen.

Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley dug deep for his nastiest moods in Iago’s chilling Credo from Otello and Scarpia’s scene where he stoked up Tosca’s jealous rage, then gloated while she sang a Te Deum.

Kristine Opolais made a fiery Tosca but also adapted herself to the pure melody of the Song To The Moon from Dvorák’s Rusalka. Priante made a villainous Dappertutto in an aria from The Tales Of Hoffmann and Oropesa sang Manon’s Gavotte with fine style.

The concert is available online for another three weeks.