GENIUS, REALPOLITIK, RELIGION
In days of horrifying battle there was fairly a jolt in a confrontation between Stephen Hagan’s resplendently silver-suited Frederick the Great and the homely determine of Johann Sebastian Bach. The pious aged cantor from Leipzig, his dwelling peace shattered within the Silesian warfare , speaks of the noisy licentious soldiery and the rape of a blind native woman by the king’s troops. Sarcastically he remarks to the monarch “It was an honour to be part of your….invasion!”.
“Intervention!” snaps the youthful man, with Enlightenment conviction about Europe’s must be modernized by Prussians. He speaks excusingly of the overreactions of adrenalin-fuelled soldiery in wartimes, and of “stolen land”.
Who in that viewers didn’t shiver on the topicality of such a confrontation? Oliver Cotton’s play has been a very long time in creation, however Trevor Nunn’s elegant manufacturing might hardly have fallen on a sharper second for such a scene.
But it’s after all mainly about music and its inspiration: Bach religious, trying to find a language of God, Frederick scornfully atheist however himself a flautist and composer. The two males are to fulfill once more later, fictionally, in a coda the place the drama lies of their philosophical and non secular variations: flamboyant emperor versus a battered, half-blind genius, unimpressed and unafraid in a cotton nightcap.
This Bach, who we encounter first at dwelling, is Brian Cox, beloved from Succession. He is an effortlessly immense stage presence from the beginning, grumbling to his spouse (Nicole Ansari-Cox , his actual partner), dreading the muddy journey to court docket though he’ll see his nervous, anxious musician son Carl in employment there. The couple kneel to hope collectively for security and for God’s will , and out of the blue your coronary heart strikes. This is just not fairly an ideal play, much less polished than Nina Raine’s latest “Bach and Sons” ; it generally sags a bit within the first half, and at occasions exhibits its historic analysis a bit clumsily. But that second ,and others, shake the guts with the great thing about music and religion: a maidservant (Dona Croll, quietly spectacular) remembering the shock of devotion within the St Matthew Passion. And at its centre after all there’s second outdated Bach silences a court-full of scornful rivals and their monarch by assembly a sly problem with a fancy magnificence of fugue.
For after the transient home opening, the scene turns elegantly to the palatial splendours of Potsdam with the outdated man cursing the fussiness en route (“You Prussians can’t fall in a ditch without showing your bloody papers”) A comically bold trio of rival composers alternately flatter and mock the Bachs father and son, and King Frederick – who has written a sophisticated little tune in his head in mattress – has uttered a problem is to make it right into a three-part fugue, following the present legal guidelines of concord and counterpoint.
Only outdated Johann Sebastian can do it, knocking it out unseen on the harpsichord whereas onlookers and monarch step ahead as if hypnotized. Gruffly he accepts a lunch invitation compleete with Voltaire (Peter de Jersey taking advantage of philosophical cynicism). He reiterates his stable religion, which results in the Frenchman studying him a passage from Hamlet. Not traditionally confirmed, such moments, however because the French put it, all very “bien-imaginé”. There’s a degree while you suspect a transfer to some fairytale ending with the common-or-garden triumphing, however doubt vanishes because the play ends with the 2 males’s second assembly, below the crucifix in humble Leipzig. And Cotton affords us, uncynically, a reiteration of deep seriousness about music, creation and God. For ‘if the world is a shipwreck, sing within the lifeboats”.
theatre royal bathtub to eight November
score 4
