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Critics' choice: top 5 plays
Evening Standard 16.10.06
Tobias and the Angel: charming
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We pick the best productions in town including Tobias and the Angel, the new Godot, Wicked, Cabaret and The Madras House.
Waiting For Godot
New Ambassadors, WC2
Fifty-one years after directing the avant-garde play that revolutionised the post-war British stage, Sir Peter Hall returns with a new production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. It could be more entertaining; James Laurenson's Vladimir and Alan Dobie's whitebearded Estragon, dressed as tramps on their uppers, speak at us like stand-up comedians rather than to each other. Their comic repartee trips off the tongue and stumbles. But the play still casts its rare spell. (0870 060 6627). Until 18 November. Nicholas de Jongh
Cabaret
Lyric, W1
Kander and Ebb's serious-minded, politically motivated musical revels in Berlin's hedonistic nightlife and those dancing to pleasure's tunes in 1930. It then draws back to attack Germans who believe the Nazis are no concern of theirs. Anna Maxwell Martin is miscast as Sally Bowles, the vulnerable good-time girl ready for a bit of bad, though Rufus Norris's inventive production does show Cabaret at the last to be a great musical, full of alluring tunes, and a timeless appealing for humanity in the sight of political and sexual fascism. (0870 890 1107). Until 7 April 2006. NdJ
Tobias and the Angel
Young Vic, SE1
The new Young Vic building is open on time and within its £12.5m budget. As if in celebratory offering, a religious work opens the new season, and a more allembracing and deeply charming modern opera you could not wish for. Tobias and theAngel is alive with the energy of mass endeavour, its professional cast supplemented by a talented amateur chorus of men, women and children from Lambeth and Southwark. They play the townsfolk in a story of two towns, represented on either side of a traverse stage, and of young Tobias who, with Archangel Raphael at his side, journeys from one to another to solve their problems. 020 7922 2922). Until 21 October. Kieron Quirke
Wicked
Apollo Victoria, W1
No show as weird or steeped in fairytale magic as Wicked has cast its multimillion pound spell upon the London stage in decades. This prequel to the Wizard of Oz belongs in a rare pantheon of musicals in which the music does not matter much. It is the spectacle, the experience of a magical mystery tour through the fantasy land of Oz that takes and holds attention. (0870 4000 751). Booking to 24 February, 2007. NdJ
LAST CHANCE: The Madras House
Orange Tree, Richmond
There are strange, thematic echoes of Ibsen and premonitions of Lorca in Harley Granville Barker's critique of Edwardian society and its exploitation of women. The vital link in the play's episodic scheme, with its rejection of traditional narrative, is Timothy Watson's bleakly becalmed Philip Madras, a young man with a restless wife, eager to be shot of two family firms. His father, Constantine (Richard Durden) emerges as the embodiment of the sexual hypocrisy, cruelty and marital subterfuge that his son avoids. Granville Barker lacks Shaw's flair for provocation and polemic, yet his dark, Edwardian world-picture remains worth viewing. (020 8940 3633). Until 14 October. NdJ
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