Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy: pure theatre gold

Or (as I wanted to put in the title but found it too long) 'the best six and a half hours you'll ever spend in a theatre'. That's not including the two-hour-plus breaks in between last Saturday's run. Who would have thought that the 11am Julius Caesar, Henry IV (Part One with three scenes from Part Two) at 3.30pm and The Tempest at 8 could have been linked together so pertinently, or that Phyllida Lloyd's concept of setting them all in a women's prison with an all-female cast could really be sustained? Well, I had an inkling when I went to the first run of Henry IV at the Donmar's main Covent Garden venue. But of course this was always going to be something extra-special, starting with the buzz in the excellent temporary venue just beyond King's Cross Station.

Below was the scene - a big patch of blue prisoners call the sky, plus plane, above the structure - just before 11am on a crisp winter day,

this the return for Henry IV after I'd made an excursion into the West End to buy a full score of Ligeti's Le grand macabre for my Monday Opera in Depth class and came back for a mosey around the British Library's magnificent free exhibition of most treasured manuscripts

and this the front of the theatre, illuminated by the pavilion structure just beyond, following a good supper in Kings Place.

Harriet Walter is the big name around which the three plays have developed - I'm not ever going to stop going on about how she played Schoenberg's Moses as well as the Marschallin, Prima Donna and Brünnhilde for me up in Birmingham, one of the proudest days of my professional life - and her Prospero (pictured below in the second of many excellent production images by Helen Maybanks) was always going to be central. And indeed, hers is the most moving portrayal by far I've ever seen on stage.

But she would be the first to admit it's not mainly about her. Lloyd has developed one of the best ensembles, sex regardless, I've ever seen in a theatre. We've come a long way since Kathryn Hunter played Richard III and 'shrew' Katherine, Janet McTeer Petruchio, in the Globe's all-women ventures; the supporting casts were sometimes barely that, and left quite a lot to be desired.

Not so anyone here. It's difficult to know how to go about a form of reviewing: should it be 'the play's the thing', and one by one, or a highlighting of individual performances which are not entirely the point? Nevertheless the standouts were many, and so, having dispensed with the prison roll calls that begin and end the first two plays by this one typical image,

let's salute the specific excellences of performances which can only leave one the more amazed given that every participant had at least one different role in each play. No one figure dominates Julius Caesar; the personal and political volatility is too central for that. My first experiences of it were studying the text for O-level (which fortunately didn't destroy my admiration for it), playing the role of Cassius - although, as my English master put it in his review for the school magazine I had to edit, some of my 'sensitive cadences...only reached the front few rows of the audience', I did have the one virtue of never needed a prompt - and seeing the National Theatre production with Gielgud in one of his last performances as Caesar.

Jackie Clune's Emperor is central at the start, a lively opening prison scene substituting for Shakespeare's I.i. Then we're off into the dialogues of Cassius and Brutus. Admirable from the start the way Lloyd gets her actors to express occasionally complicated sense with the precision of their hand gestures; that made Cassius' first long speech - which I've forgotten bar the 'colossus' bit - very urgent in the hands and voice of the excellent Martina Laird, pictured with Walter.

Walter's Brutus seems fine and sensitive, and of course a bit ridiculous when trying to justify the bloodiness of the assassination.

The difference between him and Caesar is highlighted by the respective scenes with the wives; Brutus's Portia (Clare Dunne, pictured with Walter above) is his equal, Caesar's Calpurnia (Zainab Hasan) is not.

The conspiracy gathers pace towards the first climax (pictured above); Karen Dunbar, top left, almost steals the show as Casca, turning out to be a genius of a comedian later as a dim Bardolph and a rollicking Trinculo. Would love to have seen her open the Commonwealth Games. Lloyd's clean lines make you appreciate the symmetry, or rather the rapid change after the murder and the descent into bloody internecine quarrels accompanied by all the abuses of war. Jade Anouka was, when I first saw her, and still is the most compelling Henry IV Hotspur, played as a wired young black man full of macho postures when the reality is a vulnerable kid, gifted and with no proper outlet for his energies.

She's hardly less remarkable as Mark Antony, progressing in the oratorical fulcrum from a nervously improvising, cornered friend of Caesar

into a dominant orator; that made the big speech more compelling than ever. Anouka's final triumph was as a Puckish Ariel, with some fine rapping thrown in for good measure.

Battle scenes in Shakespeare can make the later stages pall; the brilliance of Lloyd's sets in the first two plays was to make the combats and even the toy prison props similar yet different: warriors as boys with toys, as The Guardian's Lyn Gardner shrewdly put it. Henry IV Part I is more perilous as the combats proliferate, but there was no sense of let-down here. Even so, it was better to return to this production's perfect poise between the Falstaff/Hal scenes and the king's speeches as well as his confrontations with a seemingly feckless son (Walter and Dunne below),

with Hotspur as the earlier third point of a perfect triangle.

Sophie Stanton has been a theatrical idol of mine since her superlative role as the Mama Cass-loving girl in the first run of Beautiful Thing (in which my good friend Simon's partner Patricia got to know her, playing no less superbly then). Stanton was a more consistently funny Falstaff than her predecessor from the Donmar original; even if we lost the sleep-babbling fear of burst balloons behind the arras, we got far more seeming ad libs. The central Eastcheap scene served as the central intermezzo of the day, played at the highest level from all concerned. For other touches, see my original thoughts; just need to add how superbly it was adapted for the gym pitch surrounded by seats on all sides. The only thing missing from the production pics is the audience, that crucial third dimension to add to playwright and players. Everyone in a healthily mixed crowd seemed gripped through each two-hours-plus, including a couple of young girls on the edge of their seats throughout.

Would The Tempest bring the redemption of romance, given the setting? Not only that; its context gave it extra poignancy. Prospero is played by 'Hannah' (Walter), a prisoner for life who drove a getaway car for a political organisation and would not plead for any mitigation of her sentence. Her huge imagination guides the action. Again, the kind of props the prison girls would use create magic. As in the other two plays, no gag or idea outstays its welcome; in that respect Lloyd is classically pitch-perfect.

The acting pleasures here were too numerous to mention, but apart from Walter's mesmerising speeches, there was the magic of true young love between Leah Harvey's Miranda and Sheila Atim's Ferdinand (pictured above) - their scenes usually ruined by mannered young thesps. Nor have I ever laughed so much at Caliban's romps with Stefano (Clune) and Trinculo (Dunbar, pictured with Stanton below).

Had expected perhaps a bit more from Joan Armatrading's specially composed Tempest score, but the music-making throughout, and the use of popular songs, was always apt and impressive (fine singing, consummate instrumentalists).

Here, of course, tears came to the eyes - predictably so at Caliban's 'the isle is full of noises', elsewhere not always when expected. There was magic in one of Prospero's last natural summons, when the lights went down and we all turned on the little torches we'd been given, like hundreds of glow-worms, and the ultimate heartbreak as Hannah hears the voices of all the girls thanking her on their releases and settles down to another night in prison. I get emotional just writing about it and just realised I haven't even begun to discuss the connections forged between the plays. Enough already. Try and get a ticket - if you live in or near New York, you stand a better chance after Christmas. Though Americans, who will find this the right sort of sustenance in a difficult January, won't get the full works, yet at any rate. One of the masterpieces of theatre; it will never be forgotten.

Great guests

'Great' is a term I hope I don't splash about too much, but it's always good to know who or what truly stands out, especially in the musical and operatic world where standards are generally so high already (one can't make the same generalisation about theatre).  I stick by the publicity blurb I wrote for the flyer to advertise Sioned Williams's lecture-recital at St Andrew's Fulham Fields: she IS one of the world's great harpists. And Graham Vick enters the pantheon of top directors - not that it's overstocked, in my opinion - above all for his pioneering work on opera involving the community in Birmingham. As chronicled here and on a BBC Radio 3 chat with Tom Service, I went for the first time this year, to see the Big Top Khovanskygate, and it was certainly up there with the most extraordinary operatic experiences of my life. A total immersive experience, on our feet for three hours plus and no compromises - full CBSO, no miking, quality singers, chorus bolstered by professionals.

Actually I also owe Graham a debt for introducing me to Britten's Billy Budd and tackling the crucial gay issues in it back in the 1980s. When we talked together at the Opera in Depth class the other week, I said it had such an impact because it was the first time I saw it. 'And do you not think that might have been because my production was actually rather good?', he said, not boastfully but with a secure sense of his own worth (it was; only Tim Albery's since has come close).

Sioned first, anyway. She came with harp to St Andrew's Fulham Fields, where I'm running monthly classes linked to the BBC Symphony Orchestra courses as before, chiefly because after the City Lit debacle I still very much wanted to cover the Nielsen symphonies Sakari Oramo is conducting this season. Some of the players also volunteered to make appearances as before: cellist Michael Atkinson is getting the Merchant Quartet back together to work on Sibelius's great Voces Intimae Quartet, possibly a Nielsen too. And Sioned wanted both to make up for the fact that when she'd last come to the City Lit, it was at the end of a serious illness and she hadn't the strength to bring the harp too, and to reflect on her brilliant Purcell Room concert of six new works for harp commissioned by herself (read the Arts Desk rave - which is absolutely not because I know and like her).

So this time we brave few got the benefit of her insights into the differing virtues of the commissions. The harp is perhaps the trickiest of all instruments for a composer to know the strengths and limitations thereof; Paul Patterson, who came along as stalwart supporter again, and perfectionist Michael Finnissy are masters of the art, where one of the other works had asked the impossible and impractical and a great deal of collaboration was necessary.

We heard movements and selections again, often with an illuminating running commentary on what was going on pedal and string-wise; and the biggest triumph was to get screen and sound working - if only you knew how brinksmanlike that was - for Dominic Murcott's Domestica. I found it even richer second time around, knowing now that the domestic sights and sounds were filmed, oh so artistically, by Magali Charier in Sioned's and Ali's home, and that the ticking clock slows down (you don't sense this, or at least I didn't, at the premiere, though you do feel that the harp contributions become more introspective and poetic).And, small in number though the audience was this time, St Andrew's turns out to be a wonderful venue for subtlety and magic.

Graham's visit to my Opera in Depth course at the Frontline Club has trailed a host of wondering messages from the students which have left me in no doubt of his special connection. He spoke very movingly on the sense of change since he first directed Prokofiev's War and Peace at the Kirov, as it then was, when he was still a relative youngster full of romantic idealism back in 1991 (thanks to Peter Maniura, that first visit when Leningrad was turning back into Petersburg proved a bridge for me to devoting middle life to great Sergey Sergeyevich).

Now he wonders at how modern the music is, and was keen to redress weaknesses he'd felt in the characterisation of Prince Andrey (this time played by Ukrainian Andrey Bondarenko, his Glyndebourne Onegin and the one singer on whom he actually insisted). He wanted to refer back to Austerlitz and to keep the war in the peace sequence, and the private scenes more prominent in the war half.

The second collaboration with Gergiev originated in a mad idea to do the opera on the Edinburgh Tattoo parade ground during the Festival. 'And just as when you have to think a low note when you sing a high one, or sit if necessary on stage as if you were rising up, I wanted to make it about three people.' The project failed for lack of money, but Gergiev was insistent on Vick coming back to the Mariinsky for his roughly ten-year reassessment of Prokofiev's opera (with Andrey Konchalovsky's beautifully realised but heavily cut version in between). Graham says he was surprised at Gergiev's request for an openly gay director with a track record of controversial productions.

And yet Gergiev gave him total carte blanche. Going for the contemporary meant endless meetings with lawyers about what could and couldn't be represented on the Russian stage, but Vick says he fought tooth and claw, and succeeded in nearly everything. Even, note, in the slipped-in yellow, white and blue of the screens above, played out to the choral ode in the New Year's Eve ball scene, and returning in the 'war' sequence spattered with blood.

Anyway, it all happened; he hadn't heard from Gergiev what he thought - according to Caroline of the Mariinsky Friends, he was delighted - because the conductor only appeared for the final rehearsal. Even so, Vick thinks that things have now gone so far in Russia that he would have to think twice about returning. I can't wait to see the whole thing at the Frontline on Monday week.

The other great personage who's been keeping us company through the ten two-hour classes on War and Peace - for we've been following Graham's 1991 production on DVD alongside Francesca Zambello's Paris Opera show - has been Dame Harriet Walter (seen above in the first of Helen Maybanks' photos for the Donmar Henry IV). As you'll have read if you've been following the blog, she consented to my amazement to read those chapters or sequences of Tolstoy's novel which parallel Prokofiev's more or less faithful setting of them, and she's done it beautifully. I was especially moved the other week, recording Pierre's confrontation with Natasha after the failed elopement and Natasha's encounter with the dying Andrey, to find her stopping, going back and finding a depth in the speeches that was moving to tears. We reach the last two scenes on Monday so I'm looking forward to editing her last contribution for that.

Since we would meet in the break between Saturday matinees and evening performances of Henry IV at the Donmar, I was very conscious of that background. Not that I'd have missed Phyllida Lloyd's production for the world, but I pushed that little bit harder to get tickets and finally saw it the other Saturday. Folk have been split down the middle about it, but I found it electrifying - perhaps all the more so since I hadn't seen, more fool me, the Julius Caesar also set in a women's prison; but the use of simple props and the evocation of the background seemed to me utterly fresh and always pertinent.

This was true ensemble work, rather unconventionally so since there were beautiful verse-speakers like Harriet's King, Jackie Clunes's Owen Glendower and the fabulous Ann Ogbomo as Worcester, seen here in confab with the 'enemy'

alongside new talent, in one way less experienced but in another thrillingly immediate. I couldn't get it out of my head that  Jade Anouka's Hotspur - even with an arm in plaster - wasn't some hyperactive, gifted but undirected black teenager from South London.

She was heartbreaking, especially so in the scenes with Sharon Rooney's Lady Percy, That's not a role that usually makes a huge impact, but as young, stressed, poor mother, the characterisation went straight to the heart- with an astonishing touch of physical knockabout added to the mix.

For me, there were no false notes. Falstaff, maybe, should be posh, but since he was being played by a prison inmate the take still worked in conjuring him as a sarf London wideboy; I laughed a lot not only at the fear of a burst balloon in the Gadshill episode, but the muttered remembrance of it as nightmare when Falstaff dozes behind the arras. The music was superbly placed and apt, the company routines brilliant, the whole thing pacy and vibrant. And the inclusion of two key scenes from Part Two added on to a fairly complete Part One was a fair compromise, short of having both in two performances - which I'll be seeing when the RSC production arrives at the Barbican, though I don't expect it to communicate quite as well as this.

A guest who will certainly be great has been staying with us in two spells. Eszter Bránya from Kecskemet, Hungary, Kitty Lambton's former classmate when the family spent a year out there, celebrated her 19th birthday here with a delicious cardamomy cake from the Swedish bakery Bagariet complete with a Carluccio's firework candle. Our young violinist came first for consultation lessons and then for auditions at the Guildhall and the Royal College of Music - successful in the first, waiting to hear about the second, though she went straight through to the scholarship second round - and all I'll say for now is that her tone is dark and powerful, from hearing her practise, her attitude incredibly quick and responsive, her dedication that of a serious artist. She'll go far, no doubt about that.

Tonight I have a great guest for 10 minutes of my 6pm talk before the BBC Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by one of the best, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, at the Barbican. He'll be presenting together the revolutionary Part Two of Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette,  Prokofiev's shattering Third Symphony and Dramatis personae by the BBCSO's Artist in Residence Brett Dean (pictured above). Brett will be joining me hot off the plane from Australia; I look forward hugely to meeting him.