It is promoted as a dramatic encounter between God-fearing German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and the fearsomely godless Prussian monarch Frederick the Great. But that anticipated head-to-head does not come until the last hour of this uneven new play.
Under the direction of Trevor Nunn, The Score revolves around Bach’s trip from Leipzig to the king’s court in 1747. The first act is an extended prelude, scattered in tone and unsure of its purpose. There is an entertaining modernity in Oliver Cotton’s script, which strains towards the comic as the composer moans that he has to travel more than 1,000 miles to kiss the king’s arse. But it sounds rather too much like Bach by way of Blackadder.
The production is redeemed by its star billing in Brian Cox, who plays the genius musician with such magnetism that he almost singlehandedly saves this play. Where Simon Russell Beale, in Bach & Sons at the Bridge theatre, was moribund and lugubrious, Cox is crashingly loud and vigorous. He has a grumpy, argumentative and tormented vulnerability. A gruff Scottish lilt is mixed in with upper-class English vowels and there are comic inflections to his bad tempers but all of it works. As in Succession, he is a patriarch on the wane – elderly, ailing and thinking of his legacy. But Cox’s Bach is warmer than his Logan Roy and profoundly religious, his musical genius channelled directly from God, in his mind.
Even when the script is careening from period comedy to philosophical debate on doubt and salvation, Cox has the ability to dart from light to dark which the others can’t quite navigate. Voltaire (Peter De Jersey) pops up in court with the hammiest of French accents and sounds ridiculous. So do court composers Quantz, Benda and Graun (played respectively by Christopher Staines, Benedict Salter and Eric Sirakian), who look like Prussia’s answer to the Three Stooges.
King Frederick II (Stephen Hagan) is talked of as a dangerous figure but appears puppyish. When his conflagratory encounter with Bach finally comes, it is fierce, killing off the play’s joshing humour. This second act reveals the heart of the play: a clash of values between a warring king and a musician who petitions him to remember the young, sensitive artist that he once was.
Frederick has invaded and occupied Silesia, murdering half its residents. The tension is raised as the king weaponises Enlightenment values to justify his actions as “progress”. “We have a historic right to certain territories,” Frederick bellows, adding that there will “regrettably” be casualties, with chilling resonances of the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.
Robert Jones’s set revolves from the rustic interior of Bach’s home to court opulence. The composer’s relationship with Carl (Matthew Burns) contains tenderness but it is Cox’s scenes with Nicole Ansari-Cox, his real-life wife playing his fictional one, that blaze brightest. There is such ardent chemistry there that they smoulder even though their story is barely touched upon.
At Theatre Royal Bath until 28 October
