The week in theatre: Play On!; A Good House; Moby Dick

The Guardian

26-01-2025

Mood indigo. Moments of blue. Hot spots of red. Play On!, a jazz musical conceived by Sheldon Epps with a book by Cheryl L West, is a blend of tributes. To Twelfth Night, whose opening line, 'If music be the food of love, play on', supplies the title. To Duke Ellington, whose numbers run through the evening as plot and permeate it as atmosphere. Also to Ellington's reported synaesthesia – his seeing notes as colours. Ultz's strong evocation of the Cotton Club, where black artists performed to a white audience in 1940s Harlem, is not painted in predictable monochrome: beats of violet and azure are framed by a scarlet proscenium arch.
This is not the first time that Shakespeare's comedy has lent itself to musical reinvention. Kwame Kwei-Armah's opening show at the Young Vic in 2018 set the drama to R&B, Motown and music hall. Still, this Talawa production, directed by Michael Buffong, is not so much a version of Twelfth Night as a response to it. A nice bit of name-play is at the centre: the melomane, brooding presence is not Duke Orsino – a titled, entitled nonworker – but the Duke: Ellington, who earned his soubriquet through his gifts. Several characters have vanished, though no one is likely to sob at the absence of Sebastian. What most of us would think of as the nub of Shakespeare – the speeches! – are obliterated. You have to listen hard to catch the few direct quotes: 'Some are born great' gets a look-in, as does the playing around with witty fools and foolish wits, delivered by Llewellyn Jamal's Jester, whose limbs are as elastic as his loyalty.
Yet the play's moods of rapture, longing, discontent and sudden surges of energy are gorgeously present, woven through the evening by an onstage band who deliver wonders by Ellington, from Take the 'A' Train to It Don't Mean a Thing. Koko Alexandra sultries compellingly as Lady Liv – dressed with shimmering irony in a butterfly costume with glitter thorax and gauzy shawl wings. Earl Gregory's Duke and Tsemaye Bob-Egbe's Vyman/Viola take off beautifully from each other, the latter's character reimagined as an aspiring songwriter who would not get taken seriously dressed as a woman. Waves of frustration and exhilaration sweep across the stage in shrug-shoulder dance routines choreographed by Kenrick 'H20' Sandy.
Shakespearean disguise – a vital route to self-discovery – is central, and cast off more literally than usual when Viola reveals herself to her lover not by suddenly appearing in women's garb but by stripping off. There is good news for those who feel Malvolio (here 'Rev') has more to offer than scapegoatery. Cameron Bernard Jones – slick, uptight and appealing – is also well served by his costume: no cross-gartering but all-over bright yellow, like an animated dollop of custard.
Bright and emphatic, Amy Jephta's new play punches home its awkward arguments with a leery grin. A Good House, produced in collaboration with the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and Bristol Old Vic, expands the geographical boundaries of David Byrne's Royal Court – one of the characters is a Zulu speaker – though without greatly enlarging its social and psychological targets. In the tradition of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park (2010), the play looks at racism and class through the prism of property.
In a South African gated community (Ultz's design is convincingly declamatorily bourgeois, with plush pouffe and decorative basketware), three couples – one black and two white – discuss a price-lowering shack that has suddenly appeared on an adjacent lot. Rough-edged prejudice quickly emerges over the cheese board: one man assumes that when his black neighbour explains he works in 'securities', he must mean he is employed by a security company; another that he must come from the shack.
The neat and nasty points land, but with insufficient shock. The hearty bonhomie of the white householders is too evident a cover: one man wags his finger at a black resident when he talks about the sedate neighbourhood's aversion to loud music. The shack itself is given a subtle aura of unreality – glimpsed from time to time in arbitrarily altered form, while the owners remain invisible – but characterisation is dogged. Jephta's intriguing play would be more fulfilling with a subtler undercurrent and less underlining.
As improbable as the idea of Herman Melville swallowing the unconscious in his prose is the notion of putting his novel on stage. With puppets. Yet Yngvild Aspeli's 85-minute production of Moby Dick for Plexus Polaire – part of this year's MimeLondon – magnificently summons reality and its shadow, waves and depths in a mixture of puppets and fleshy actors.
The swoops of the novel – its metaphors and its adventures – are given eye-enlarging expression as the scale contracts and expands. The massive Barbican stage is covered in black-and-white video of the sea. The crew of harpooners and cabin boy and mates are lit individually, as they swing below deck in their hammocks. Tiny boats with matchstick oars are sent out on the billowing waves. A skull-faced chorus moves across the stage, where a tremendous onstage trio – double bass, percussion and guitar – conjure up the noise of a shoal of small fish moving through the ocean. Finally, the mighty whale glides past like a giant duvet, one tiny knowing eye embedded in its folds like a jewel.
Star ratings (out of five)
Play On! ★★★★A Good House ★★★Moby Dick ★★★★
Play On! is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 22 February
A Good House is at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, London, until 8 February