Like listening to Bach’s music, familiarity and old-fashionedness ring through Oliver Cotton’s play about the meeting between Frederick the Great and Johann Sebastian the Even Greater. It’s the feeling we’ve heard it before. It doesn’t help that there was another big play about Bach just four years ago in London, Nina Raine’s Bach and Sons, nor that star attraction Brian Cox has actually played Bach before, in a 1984 TV movie called The Cantor of St Thomas’s.
That familiarity and old fashionedness aren’t a bad thing. It’s actually quite fun, and pretty unusual, seeing a proper old period piece, wigs and all, on the West End stage. But while the play has lofty ambitions and director Trevor Nunn knows how to stage them grandly, and despite a towering Cox as the main man, unlike Bach’s music too often the whole thing clunks and flounders.
