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Photograph: Marc BrennerĬhloe Lamford’s design – using what is becoming an almost routine Almeida glass box – does not always live up to this intricacy. ‘Stealth and stillness’: Lydia Wilson and Khalid Abdalla in The Duchess of Malfi. This is a vital Webster paradox: in a brutal world – murdered children, taunting fake killings, splenetic, grotesquely strutting chaps – the manoeuvres of the brain trace ingenious and intricate verbal patterns. In this stripped-back text, clusters of phrases sing out new. She is intent, he is palpitating with nerves they uncoil and wind around each other first with gestures and eventually with words. Khalid Abdalla and Lydia Wilson, the knockout performances of the evening, meet for the first time in a lingering – so lingering it tingles with embarrassment – silence. Who would have thought the scenes between the Duch and her lover could be so delicate and so assured in their eroticism. In tackling John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, she goes some way to remaking the playwright Bernard Shaw called “the Tussaud laureate”.įrecknall finds – at least before the plot goes really bonkers gory in the second half – an unexpected stealth and stillness, and reveals a celebration of settled love before the expected riot of violence. Last year her strung-out production of Summer and Smokeshivered Tennessee Williams to his core. Rebecca Frecknall is proving an exceptional reimaginer of familiar and neglected works. This is the first of a new Jamie Lloyd season. Tom Edden also shines, delivering his rap with a gimlet sneer. These characters are their voices: when soldiers die they take off their mics.Īnita-Joy Uwajeh is a wonderfully poised and edgy Roxane Michele Austin a gorgeous, punchy presence, who puts the poetry into patisserie, as a gourmet maker of both lemon tarts and tart verses. And perfect as part of the landscape in a play about sound and words. It is the ur-stage sound: made on the spot by human beings both internal and explosive.

Beatbox (given another life I would try to make it my profession) is a rising theatrical force: brought to the National by the wonderful Grace Savage five years ago and gloriously incarnated in BAC’s Frankenstein. Not least because Vaneeka Dadhria’s magnificent beatboxing – gulping, pulsing, hissing, ticking – continuously gees up the rhythm.

There is an excited, concentrated listening to Crimp’s escalating rhyme feats: “attitude” swims into “latitude“ then sends itself up with “platitude”. Audience and actors are clinched together in – I can hardly believe it – rhyme: like two halves of a couplet.

There is hardly any manly running around there is often stillness Soutra Gilmour’s design – plywood walls and orange stackable chairs – is aggressively non-plumey and plain. Fighting takes the form of poetry slams: combatants see each other off with great jousts of words.