Mikron is like a child’s dream of a theatre company: light-footed, quick-witted, free-wheeling. The tiny band of musician-actors, under the artistic directorship of Marianne McNamara, has its headquarters in a richly decorated narrowboat, with dressing-room space and dorms packed together like a piece of origami. Each summer they travel down English canals stopping at allotments, lifeboat stations or village halls to drop off new plays.
This year, Poppy Hollman’s Common Ground, about the right to roam, is paired with Lindsay Rodden’s musical celebrating Jennie Lee. A driving force behind the Open University, so well appreciated as minister for the arts in Harold Wilson’s government that audiences stood up when she went to the theatre, Lee was earlier this year glimpsed at the National in her subsidiary role as Aneurin Bevan’s wife in Tim Price’s Nye. McNamara’s production, which I watched from a deckchair in a pub garden, puts her centre stage. Sharply and with brio.
A cast of four spin from childhood as the daughter of a miner in Lochgelly to election, in 1929, aged 24; from reporting on the Spanish civil war to election as chair of the Labour party in 1967. The action flies on tunes from trumpet and accordion and violin, neatly rhymed, sometimes with a music hall tang (Lee was a fan of vaudeville star Florrie Forde, singer of Hold Your Hand Out Naughty Boy). It features Lee’s ardent oratory, her lovers, her adamantine principles and commitment – and her fox-fur coat.
She is not quite as forgotten as the play’s subtitle, “the radical MP you’ve never heard of”, suggests: Lee was still famous when I met her shortly before her death, imperious and immaculate in her bijou Chelsea house. She is, though, underpraised. Not least now when the Labour party should wake up to the fact that our PM playing the flute is as inspirational as his playing five-a-side. Lee belongs to a noble tradition of Labour MPs – Barbara Castle, Betty Boothroyd, Angela Rayner – who prove that political fervour can go hand in hand with a sense of humour and kicking up your heels. A chorus line to be magicked up by Mikron?
This is also a piquant time – actually its 60th-anniversary year – to be watching Fiddler on the Roof. The sinuous klezmer of Jerry Bock’s music, the story unwound through Joseph Stein’s book and Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics specifically conjure the life of Jewish villagers in imperial Russia of 1905. Yet its painful progression can suggest any group of people struggling with internal change, under threat from authorities, bullied into movement. It’s hard to imagine a production that would do so more powerfully than Jordan Fein’s. His is also the best use of the Open Air theatre I have seen for ages.
In his wonderfully illuminating design, the marvel-maker Tom Scutt does not try to build a naturalistic shtetl. His set responds to the idea of change, of people perched in a place, with a more abstract, provisional arrangement. The action takes place under a wedge-shaped roof curved upwards like a wave about to crash and planted with grass that seems to grow out of the park’s surrounding foliage. On it, commanding the stage at the beginning and end is a solitary musician: at first Raphael Papo’s vital male fiddle player; at the end a female clarinettist, Hannah Bristow, who plays the daughter who marries a gentile. No better illustration of change.
The dances are lively: oh those men with bottles on the heads, and the sudden galvanic moment when a daughter and her beau break precedent as they take to the floor together. Amid a whirligig of female assertion, Adam Dannheisser is finely, mournfully relaxed as the tradition-bound father who is slowly (mostly) won over to the idea of unconventional, love-propelled marriages. A brilliant stroke lights up the evening. As Papo (down from the roof) plays his fiddle, he swings himself close to, then spirals away from Dannheisser. He becomes the spirit of the piece and its characters: intimate and uncatchable, lingering long in the air.
It was the (correct) conviction that the brilliant deaf actor Nadia Nadarajah should play Cleopatra that ignited the idea of a bilingual production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Director Blanche McIntyre, working with associate director Charlotte Arrowsmith, who is deaf, saw that the cultural chasm between Rome and Egypt could be dramatically demonstrated, along with the vaulting power of the lovers’ intoxication, if all the Egyptians used British Sign Language (BSL) and all the Romans spoken English. Deaf and hearing members of the audience would for once be on an equal footing, with every line of the play being captioned.
The result is a decisive win for BSL and the Egyptians. Nadarajah, who has dazzled at the Globe before, licks around the stage like a flame: consuming, warming, shapeshifting: “Oh happy horse to bear the weight of Antony” becomes an equine enactment. I have never seen the complicity between the queen and her attendants so intricately expressed; the maids’ gestures echo Cleopatra’s, ironically, knowingly, fondly; Charmian’s coloratura wail at Iras’s death unforgettably rends the silence. As the sea battle is launched, the women sway together in ballooning blue gowns like waves.
The Roman scenes are less convincing. The battle scenes are clumsy and the suicides comically stiff. As Antony, John Hollingworth is often muted, explaining that the earth is bidding him to tread no more as if this were a nature note. Yet he beautifully supplies some much-needed intimacy when he starts talking to his lover in BSL, as if – like a carefully placed song in a musical – his emotion could not be contained in ordinary speech. It was for such moments that the curtain call was greeted on press night with silent jazz hands: the BSL sign for applause.
Star ratings (out of five)
Jennie Lee ★★★★
Fiddler on the Roof ★★★★★
Antony & Cleopatra ★★★
Jennie Lee tours the UK until 19 October
Fiddler on the Roof is at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London, until 28 September
Antony and Cleopatra is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 15 September
