It is five years since David Eldridge started his dramatic dissection of the lives of couples. Beginning showed a man and woman in their 20s gradually, unexpectedly coming together in a dishevelled room. Middle, the second play in a trilogy, takes a different heterosexual pair, together for nearly two decades, falling apart in a plush house. Or are they?
Polly Findlay’s production is a subtle plait of the overstated and the unsaid. The opening dialogue is bald – too forthright to be altogether convincing. A wife (floating dressing gown) tells her husband (West Ham PJs) she no longer loves him. She wants to talk; he wants to get a joint of pork in the oven. She unfolds her buried discontent: the hard end of childcare, the not being listened to, the lack of brain life. He sniffs. Just as this begins to look programmatic – like a male playwright trying too hard to make a woman’s case – hubby turns. He is less posh and less voluble than his wife: “Am I just a geezer then?”
The real motor of the evening is the disappointment and the desire (neither really knows for what) behind the dialogue, terrifically performed by Claire Rushbrook and Daniel Ryan: she resolutely sad; he twitchily chirpy. The more she wants to spill her beans, the more he recoils; the more he thinks things can be fixed by adding “bits and bobs” to their sexual exchanges, the more hope drains from Rushbrook’s face. Fly Davis’s gleaming design – every memory pinned down in a photo – suggests the weight and glue of a shared history. Rushbrook pours milk from a saucepan into a mug with the resignation of someone making an habitual task into an occupation. Rushbrook and Ryan approach but never quite touch each other. When they move as if to embrace or comfort each other they leave a gap between their bodies, as if another couple were standing between them, hugging.
The thing no telly prepares you for is the way an actor moves across the stage, taking charge of whatever space is around; there are no edits when the action is live. Jodie Comer’s face has become familiar from Killing Eve – razor-keen, inscrutable. Much of the excitement in Justin Martin’s sleek production of Prima Facie is the way Comer leaps and scythes, up and down, from side to side of the stage, as if in imitation of her mental attack as a sharp defence barrister.
Miriam Buether’s design – looming walls stacked with files containing legal notes – is all black and white, like a lawyer’s suit. It ingeniously projects the clear-cut, adversarial legal definition of truth against which Suzie Miller’s play is punching. Her torrential monologue begins by looking at rape as a case study, moves into the lawyer’s personal experience and ends by denouncing legal procedures and assumptions as incapable of dealing with the human situations in which sexual assaults most often occur.
The argument is strongly made and forcefully delivered, though not all of it requires Comer’s skill. The more unusual parts of the evening touch on the double disadvantage in law of being female and not coming from a grand (that’s to say, moneyed) background. Comer uses a Liverpool accent (her own) and brings warmly to life the mother who turns up with a beach bag for a suitcase and makes jam sandwiches. Incidentally, jam and bread are having a playwriting moment: only last week David Eldridge announced them as a true sign of class division.
Swarming all over the stage, ivy makes the Globe’s pillars seem to bear fresh growth. Joanna Parker’s design tips us the wink. Lucy Bailey’s light-footed, meticulously considered production of Much Ado About Nothing bursts with new life. Set in the 40s, in an Italy ready to frolic but still shaking from the grip of fascism, it is full of verbal and visual colour: shimmering satin gowns, an orange scooter, and accordion music, breezy and wistful, weaving throughout the action.
Making full use of the Globe’s capacity to engage directly with its audience, Bailey’s show is buoyant with slapstick and teases: Dogberry, the comic policeman, threatens to skid into the groundlings on his bike. George Fouracres is glorious in the part, the verbal absurdities tumbling out with an edge of pathos. He is measured, watchful, solemn, bouncing the verse like a bobby bouncing on his toes.
All the men – including Ralph Davis’s finely bewildered Benedick – look slow-witted in comparison to the women. The transfixing Katy Stephens – her part gender-switched – is crucial to the success. Powerful, beautifully voiced, she is at once defiant and mercurial as governor Leonata. As Beatrice, Lucy Phelps spills over with words and exuberance. She is driven not by crabbedness nor self-conscious wit but by merriment: she slips around the stage like a madcap schoolgirl. Bailey’s central triumph is to feminise the play. Those accordionists are women. Tablecloths are snapped into the air, as if to say: farewell to war; now let us feast.
Star ratings (out of five)
Middle ★★★★
Prima Facie ★★★★
Much Ado About Nothing ★★★★
Middle is at the National Theatre, London, until 18 June
Prima Facie is at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 18 June
Much Ado About Nothing is at the Globe, London, until 23 October
