Photo: Steve Tanner
It's very good news. Indhu Rubasingham will become artistic director of the National in 2025. That should be welcomed not only because of who she is - the first woman or person of color to lead the nation's largest theater - but also because of what she has done and will do. She set London's Kiln theater on fire, making it feel comfortable and look glorious, and changed the name (from the Tricycle), undeterred by pickets outside the early shows. She created new work that took off enormously - Red velvet, Retrograde - and in Willesden's wife unleashes a blistering combination of Zadie Smith and Chaucer. At the National she led the notoriously difficult Olivier The father and the murderer and made the Lyttelton crackle The bastard with the hat. Remember when 'eye for detail' was code for 'woman' in job postings? Forget it: Rubasingham is thinking big and helping to make the theater a place not just of representation, but of leaps in empathy.
As does Emma Rice, formerly of the Globe, who has just opened a new permanent home for her company, Wise Children. The Lucky Chance is a converted Methodist church that once housed a nursery: barrel roof, polished wood, a bar in the foyer with a piano (songs on launch night). Its past uses - for partying, strolling, being cared for - have permeated the walls.
The little match girl and happier stories, based on an earlier show written by Rice with Joel Horwood, features 21st-century criminals, paramedics and hi-vis jackets - but retains the melancholy of Hans Christian Andersen's 1845 fairy tale. It has the confrontational resilience of all Rice shows, where realism and magic, traditional skills and modern brutality are combined. Ian Ross's music mixes street tunes on accordion and violin with ripples from a harp ("that's relaxing and annoying at the same time"). Actors tumble and handstand in colored tights and 18th century wigs standing up like a judge in the wind. When matches are struck, a series of lamps light up above the stage. For a moment it seems that this will be an evening in which the triumph of imagination over harsh circumstances will rejoice. Nothing so soft.
The story continues
The match girl is a wooden doll. Her face is tightly smiling, but her puppeteer can make her completely forlorn: when snowflakes fall on the stage, shivers run over her body; while her outstretched hand is ignored, her head hangs down, and you'd swear the smile is gone. The terrible ending is retained. The competition girl dies - no tricks, no dodges - within easy reach of the audience. The puppeteer gently breaks free: the child's limbs are folded stiffly; all animation disappeared; the end of illusions.
Rupert Goold's Almeida has gravitas and swagger. You can even smell those qualities in the bar. And see them in the collaborators who adapted Paweł Pawlikowski's 2018 film for the stage. Conor McPherson, whose Girl from the Northland made a ballad of Dylan songs, is the writer of Cold War; Elvis Costello delivers songs; Goold directs.
Set in post-war Poland, this story is doomed - is there another kind? - love and an elegy for a torn Europe, driven by questions about authenticity. The musical hero has a secret and his principles are not steadfast; he can adapt the work of others, but not compose his own work. The folk music that brings him and his beloved singer together is adopted by communist bosses, hoping to forge a new tradition of songs 'about collective agricultural machinery'.
Elliot Levey's Fixer buzzes with terrible plausibility. Anya Chalotra is wonderful as the spotty-eyed romantic: weak with sadness, barking with resentment, enraptured as she sings. Luke Thallon distills the period. A lesser actor would tremble and throw out winking hints of cunning. Thallon holds himself tight, as if half frozen; words escape him with difficulty. With each new role he becomes more powerful and elusive.
As in Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'roll, revived this month in Hampstead, music shapes the inner and outer landscape of west and east: guttural, individualistic, reluctant ballads from Costello; traditional choruses with elbow wagging, a touch of Chopin, a touch of jazz. Ellen Kane's choreography embodies these differences, as do Evie Gurney's costumes: boleros, embroidery, brownness and flared skirts. Paule Constable's lighting is crucial: blazing in the Parisian brightness and evoking the dying hopes of the east in a glittering darkness.
For a fast moving caper, Pandemonium is actually a slow burn. Armando Iannucci's version of Boris Johnson is one of the fastest-selling tickets of the season: it's directed by Patrick Marber, has an incredibly agile cast - and fills a need, clearly visible in the audience's mood, for a theatrical response to what's going on.
The difficulty of satire is obvious. Staged in the thick of the daily revelations from the Covid investigation, the real-life competition is overwhelming. Iannucci's script doesn't look for unexpected targets but offers, in cod 17th century style, a rogues gallery of cut-out characters. Furious, sometimes funny: a handy comic package. As Shakespeare-spouting Orbis Rex, Paul Chahidi doesn't offer a full imitation, but casts a rictus grin across the ironic slip of his features - and lets his Jacobethan-strung legs glide around like a swan leaning underwater; the haystack blonde wig is eventually taken off stage by a no-nonsense waste picker.
Some names click right away. Some look laborious at first glance, but when you remember those ape-like limbs stretched out wearily on the parliament bench, even Jacob Rhesus Monkey seems realistic. I was already half-loving with the idea of Matt Hemlock as a slippery green thing from a swamp, but now I'm finding it hard to let go of the idea of Riches Sooner as a "half man, half coin" gnome. The image of a prime minister, recognizable mainly by the large gap between his white socks and tight trousers, has become as indelible an image as John Major wearing his Y-fronts over his trousers. Call a Steve Bell?
