PATRICK MARMION reviews Incidental Moments Of The Day and Credo

 Incidental Moments Of The Day (YouTube)  

Verdict: Nelson’s column draws to a close

Rating:

Credo (iPlayer/nationaltheatreofscotland.com)

 Verdict: Signing off in style  

Rating:

  WE’RE not out of the woods yet, as far as Covid is concerned, and there may be more woods on the way — like those that came to meet Macbeth at Dunsinane.

But although some really great work emerged out of this year’s lockdown, the time has already come to say goodbye to some of it.

One was the charming series of Apple Family plays, written for Zoom by New York-based playwright Richard Nelson — the first was released on the city’s Public Theater website. The Apple clan, in Upstate New York, came to feel like old friends to me.

I have been particularly grateful for the sanity of the trilogy — the final episode of which is called Incidental Moments Of The Day.

It follows the usual format, with the fifty-something Apple siblings shooting the breeze on successive Zoom calls, discussing themselves, the Government, their hopes and fears. 

In this instalment we find retired brother Richard (Jay O. Sanders) moving house, after finding a girlfriend who’s inspired him to take up theatre.

Melancholy Marian (Laila Robins) is away on a date with a fellow whose face she’s never seen, thanks to his Covid mask. Younger sister Jane (Sally Murphy), who’s struggling with depression, wonders if sis’s mystery man actually has a nose.

M EANWHILE, Jane’s partner Tim (Stephen Kunken) finds himself in his childhood bedroom, now that his mother has moved into a care home.

Perhaps most bravely, the older sister Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) expresses her fears about the continuing charge of the woke brigade.

And in an unusual touch for the normally chat-orientated Nelson, one of Barbara’s former English students logs on from France and performs a dance to a piece of ragtime music.

If, like me, you loved the first two in the series, What Do We Need To Talk About? and And So We Come Forth, then this is a fond farewell. There are other plays in Nelson’s war chest, and now we’ve sampled his work, perhaps an intrepid producer will bring some of it to the UK.

n Liz LochheaD, Scotland’s first lady of verse, is an equal fountain of good sense in Credo, part of the terrific Scenes For Survival shorts from the National Theatre of Scotland, which conclude this week. I will miss them greatly. The poet offers her rhyming rules on writing for the stage: ‘Just tell the one and only, ever lovin’, rootin’ tootin’ story!’ Amen to that.

Credo is a wry but warm six-minute work featuring Lochhead, looking a bit like a bag lady, sitting on a bench in a Glasgow open air theatre and reading from a battered script binder.

Andy Clark illustrates her commandments with Chaplin-esque routines on a stage, which are set to jazz trumpet.

Also worth a squint this week, from the same series, is The Quiz, which features Sanjeev Kohli as Sukhdeep, a Currys area manager organising his high school’s 30th anniversary reunion quiz.

It’s a bit like The Office, on furlough in Glasgow, with a nice twist at the end.

Not everything was gold in Scenes For Survival — including, surprisingly, Scottish-American actor Alan Cumming’s creepy perambulations in the woods near his home in the Catskills, New York.

But I shall remember Mark Bonnar as the penitent politician in Larchview, and Peter Mullan as the Glaswegian hardman visited by disgruntled birds in Fatbaws, long after this year is over.

Something’s stirring in the West End 

ONE of the many concepts we’ve had to get to grips with this year has been that of ‘disinfectant fogging’. It’s a method of cleaning an entire auditorium first mooted by Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber as a way of bringing audiences back to West End theatres.

But it’s Nica Burns’s Nimax theatres that will be the first West End venues to reopen — at a loss, but helped by those antiseptic vapours. Fittingly, former doctor Adam Kay leads the way in an NHS comedy, This Is Going To Hurt, from October 22 at Shaftesbury Avenue’s Apollo Theatre.

The musical Six, about Henry VIII’s half dozen wives, is set to return to the same street — in the Lyric — from November 14 (unless it goes divorced, beheaded, postponed). The dancing queens’ vehicle will be the first musical to open in the West End.

Burns is hoping Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Magic Goes Wrong and The Play That Goes Wrong will follow soon after.

Harry Potter And The Cursed Child is waiting until social distancing is completely over, so there will be no magic at the Palace Theatre for a while.

Sir Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre has already shown how a return to live theatre can be achieved, with a little help from e-tickets, temperature checks, one-way systems, face masks — and a good blast of that sanitising mist (see review, right).

Over at Sir Nicholas’s former stomping ground the National Theatre, they are hoping to get back on track next month with Giles Terera in Death Of England: Delroy. This is Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s follow-up to Death Of England, which starred Rafe Spall what seems like a lifetime ago, but was actually earlier this year.

It’s being staged in the Olivier, which has been reconfigured in the round to allow greater numbers while maintaining social distancing. And it’s a monologue — an art form we may have to learn to love.

 

Kristin’s left to moulder away among the antiques  

The Hand Of God/The Outside Dog (Bridge Theatre, London)

Verdict: Loveless Bennett

Rating:

KRISTIN Scott Thomas can be seen live at London’s Bridge Theatre, reprising her vinegary turn in The Hand Of God (first seen on the BBC this summer), in the latest pairing of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues.

It’s as though her character from 1994’s Four Weddings And A Funeral had grown, in the intervening decades, into an embittered old antiques dealer.

Celia (Scott Thomas) alternates between sneering at her ignorant customers, and enduring long, lonely vigils as she waits for those same ignoramuses to buy some of her ‘good cottage furniture’. I thought we’d reached a low point when she starts casting a covetous eye over the furniture of a dying neighbour, from which she hopes to make a mint.

But worse follows, when she’s given the framed drawing of a single finger, which she judges to be of little value and even less taste.

Scott Thomas is effortlessly withering, with her aristocratic hooter and crystal consonants — even if she’s sometimes a little hard to hear. But Celia, in pink cashmere, quilted gilet, flat shoes and Liberty print skirt, is treated with disdain by Bennett, who is himself a connoisseur of antiques.

Nor is there much relief in the evening’s curtain raiser, which stars Rochenda Sandall as a feisty but downtrodden working-class Leeds woman who comes to suspect that her slaughterman husband could be a serial killer.

This one is played out as a dark psychological thriller, in Nadia Fall’s sharply drawn production. But I found both offerings more than a little loveless.

 The Hand Of God/The Outside Dog runs until September 26. Book tickets at bridgetheatre.co.uk.