A View From The Bridge (NTLive, in cinemas from Thursday)
Verdict: Handsomely austere
The Hound Of The Baskervilles (Watermill Theatre Gardens, Newbury)
Rating: 
Verdict: Ideal Holmes
Watching Rosie (originaltheatreonline.com)
Rating:
Verdict: Ten minutes well spent
Hunted: Mark Strong in A View From The Bridge
This fabulous production of A View From The Bridge, Arthur Miller’s drama about Italian immigrants in New York after the war, should perhaps come with a viewer warning: ‘May make you yearn too strongly for the red meat of live theatre.’
It stars the always terrific Mark Strong, and is the sort of raw, elemental live performance we used to take for granted before lockdown. Catching the Young Vic Theatre’s 2015 staging again, on screen, made me realise just how badly I miss seeing great plays live.
Directed by Ivo van Hove, it’s the tale of an Italian dock worker Eddie Carbone (Strong) who takes a couple of illegal Sicilian immigrants into his home.
Unfortunately, one of them, Rodolpho, takes a fancy to Eddie’s beloved niece, who’s lived with Eddie and his wife (Nicola Walker) since her mother died when she was a baby. Worse still for Eddie, his niece likes Rodolpho, too. A lot.
Normally the play is done with a good deal of furniture. Here, there is none — except for a single chair, brought on ceremoniously for a macho-man lifting contest.
Instead, van Hove’s handsomely austere production is a quasi-religious experience invoking Greek and Japanese classical theatre, and set in a stark designer bear pit, with actors wearing costumes in 50 shades of grey.
This makes the play look bleakly ritualistic, but it also makes the story focus on the acting. And, my God, what acting!
I liked Strong well enough when I saw the show at the Young Vic. But maybe because I’ve been undergoing theatrical cold turkey for four months; or maybe because his performance had matured by the time it reached the West End, where this was filmed, this time he simply blew me away.
Strong is like a hunted animal, and his character’s tragedy is that of a man who becomes that most despised of things: a possessive, tough-guy patriarch.
And while the woke among us may not feel for his emotional flaying, more warm-blooded creatures will be filled with pity, and fear.
Nicola Walker burns with intensity as his neglected wife, and we see Phoebe Fox as the teenage niece grow up before our eyes over the two hours.
Michael Gould frames the action nicely as the Philip Marlowe-esque lawyer-narrator who tries, and fails, to bring Eddie to reason.
Emun Elliott is quietly terrifying, too, as Eddie’s eventual executioner. Together, they left me pining for the unmediated joy of real theatre. Until that returns, this should sit well in cinemas.
The Watermill’s delightfully dippy adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dartmoor whodunnit, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, has plenty of charm.
A perfect accompaniment to a picnic or cream tea (served at socially distanced tables, with chilled wine on demand), the Sherlock caper is a combo of food and fun that’s simply alimentary, my dear Watson.
Devised with three actors, the show observes social distancing, too, but also, cleverly, lampoons it. To avoid contact, the trio use tricks such as miming flinging a letter across the stage only for the recipient to ‘catch’ it, by plucking a replica from their pocket.
Abigail Pickard Price’s production uses only a few crates and chairs, while all the characters are played, at different times, by all the actors (Victoria Blunt, Rosalind Lailey and James Mack).
Luckily you can tell them apart by their hats. Tickets are selling fast, so pray for an Indian summer … and additional shows. Or hold out for the Watermill’s next garden venture: the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot.
Hounded: Victoria Blunt and Rosalind Lailey
If enterprise awards are handed out at the end of lockdown, the Original Theatre Company will top my list. To follow their recent Zoom adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, they’re airing an amiable ditty about dementia (I know — but it’s true!).
Miriam Margolyes plays an elderly lady in lockdown who thinks the granddaughter she’s talking to on her laptop is literally inside a television — and may have met Ant and Dec while in there.
She also tries to introduce her — online — to the young man dropping food parcels at her front door. The reality of dementia may be less charming, but the show is raising money for Dementia UK, so it’s ten minutes well spent.
Tune in for the Shedinburgh Festival!
Edinburgh Fringe (virtual) (eif.co.uk, edfringe.com)
Normally, at this point in August, I am being lashed by wind and rain swirling off the Firth of Forth; assaulted by the whiff of burgers sizzling in street-side caravans; and screeched at by bagpipes.
But Edinburgh this year will be as much a cultural ghost town as the rest of the UK.
Arthur Smith: Walk-on role
This is particularly bad news for the comedians who have come to dominate the festival, and means there will be a dearth of gags doing the rounds, too. (My favourite of recent times was Tim Vine’s quip about crime in multi-storey car parks: ‘It’s wrong on so many levels.’)
But fear not, there is life in the old dog yet, with — yes, you guessed it — a virtual festival. For the International or ‘Official’ Festival there is a programme of digital work covering music, opera and ballet, as well as theatre, running online as part of what they are defiantly calling ‘My Light Shines On’.
This includes a film, Ghost Light, going out on the EIF and National Theatre of Scotland websites this Sunday at 9.35pm. Shot by film-maker Hope Dickson Leach, it’s a spooky journey backstage at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, featuring actors, including Siobhan Redmond and James McArdle, rehearsing and performing works by writers from J.M. Barrie to David Greig.
On the once leviathan, now diminutive Fringe, meanwhile, they are pulling out whatever stops they can. One of the biggest umbrella companies, The Gilded Balloon, is streaming some of its best archive shows from top comedians including Dara O’Briain, Daniel Kitson and Tom Allen on a weekly basis (gildedballoon.co.uk).
And funnyman Arthur Smith is doing (real) socially distanced walks through the Scottish capital (selling fast at pleasance.co.uk).
There’s a weekly Fringe On Friday online variety show, starting tonight at 9pm and hosted by comedian Suzi Ruffell (edfringe.com). And don’t forget ‘Shedinburgh’, where veteran Fringe performers, including Sara Pascoe, will do a live-streamed turn in a shed (shedinburgh.com). It all sounds completely bonkers — so in that sense, at least, maybe this year isn’t so different after all.