Lenny Henry makes it look like the simplest thing in the world. He saunters on looking as if he will deliver a glorious turn. He ends by being seen as a fragment of dreadful history. It is rare for an actor to arouse the reaction that Henry gets when he comes on stage. It is recognition, expectation and exhilaration.
Yet also something else. The audience seem to be saying: you are ours. A star, but one who will take us by the hand. Now he exercises the same power with his first play – a one-hander – in which he involves an audience in the appalling government treatment of the Windrush generation.
Henry’s writing is so direct, so chattily circumstantial, that it is sometimes hard to remember that August in England is not autobiography. He speaks as August, a man who came to the UK from Jamaica when he was eight (“So did I,” shouts a woman in the row behind me), and found his father in bed with a woman not his wife. He got over it, formed a band (Black Fist), fell in love with a girl who watched him, paying more attention to his trousers than his face, had three children – whose photos are pinned at the back of the stage – suffered terribly at the death of his life companion, but also behaved badly. Oh, and discovered new love at the dentist.
For all Henry begins cockahoop, hip swirling, bum winking, this is the opposite of a showoff show. Directed by Daniel Bailey and Lynette Linton, he takes his spectators deep into relaxed everyday life. Events are so humdrum that when the manila envelopes start arriving, questioning his right to live in England, they seem dotty, almost comical. Anyone would ignore them. Outrage lands eventually – with the demand he leave his home and go to the Jamaica he left more than 40 years earlier. Along with others. In the closing moments, documentary footage of Windrush evictees flashes up – and Henry himself quietly leaves the stage. Never has a history felt less like a case study.
Thirty years ago this month, Derek Jarman made his last film. Blue was an urgent report from the frontline, chronicling the days in which Aids was causing the artist to go blind. The visual content was steady, intense: an unchanging screen of Yves Klein blue; the words were drawn from Jarman’s diaries; and Jarman’s own voice is heard, lowered, with interesting QE2 vowels.
Blue was an evocation, and an act of bravery: telling the truth – both stark and elaborate, personal and mythical – in the face of fear and homophobia. Now Neil Bartlett has revisited the work with live performers: the result, Blue Now, is faithful to the original but less explosive.
The screen is the same; unmoving, though when shades of delphinium, cobalt and cornflower are mentioned, it can seem to spring new depths. The words – apart, I think, from a mention of Kyiv alongside Bosnia – are unchanged. There are glimpses of the Styx, and a medical tally: 30 pills a day, some too big to swallow. Jarman thinks his diseased eye looks like a planet; his oculist suggests it is more like a pizza. Hours of uncertainty are recorded: “Hell is a Waiting Room.”
The crunch of shingle and the whirring of the washing machine are familiar, but there is a new silky weave of electronic music composed by Simon Fisher Turner, who provided the original soundscape. Four narrators are also visible in front of the screen: Travis Alabanza, Jay Bernard, Joelle Taylor and Russell Tovey. Their voices are distinctive, but none overperform; each has a strong connection to the words. To the side, Ali Gordon provides another performance element, signing dextrously, hands swaying and diving to conjure music as well as words.
It is a valuable recall, scrupulous and heartfelt. Yet no longer delivered by the writer at a time of danger, speaking to a less hostile world, it is not so much defiant as reverent. Not a gauntlet thrown down but homage offered up.
Noël Coward is in the theatrical air. At the National, his music is rippling in The Motive and the Cue. At the Donmar, Private Lives is being staged as a drama of domestic thuggery. Now Daniel Raggett directs Coward’s most startling play, Though awkward around the edges, it features a dazzling central duo: Joshua James and Lia Williams (in real life mother and son) play the drug-addled young man and his mother, carrying on with a chap of about his age.
At its premiere in 1924, when Coward himself starred, understudied by John Gielgud, The Vortex shocked with addiction, a suggestion of incest and lashings of adultery. It carries a further surprise for those who, overlooking the full-on patriotism of In Which We Serve, think of the playwright as a dandy in a dressing gown: its language is at times so forthright, so apparently un-Cowardly. Though darkness is at first undercover, an hour and a half later the sheath of wit is removed. The play ends in melodrama and moral denunciation.
It is a hard arc to make convincing but Joanna Scotcher’s design charts it excitingly. The opening scene is amber and padded and tasselled and peach – and, oh, the pouffes! The closing moments are so bleak and bare that we might be watching Samuel Beckett: the furniture has gone; a strange, smoky delirium (lit by Zoe Spurr) has flitted and passed, and now all is bleached and exposed: mother and son are confronting the facts of their hectic, wretched lives.
Raggett’s emphatic production is not quick enough to make the revelations and accusations really surprising. Yet Williams and James set the stage alight. He moves with a lassitude that at first seems nonchalance but becomes more saturnine as despair and addiction take over: sprawled on his back, he looks like an empty suit. Williams does not do the obvious raddled thing. Darting, arms waving like wings, checking her hair before she hugs, she is convincingly youthful. Yet hunched with her back to the audience, in a white dress of many plumy layers, she could be a dying swan.
Star ratings (out of five)
August in England ★★★★
Blue Now ★★★
The Vortex ★★★
August in England is at the Bush theatre, London, until 10 June
The Vortex is at the Chichester Festival Theatre until 20 May
