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Rebecca Tyrrel reviews Women Beware Women, The Cut, The Exonerated and Hedda Gabler

Penelope Wilton OBE (although my finger lingers wistfully over the ‘D’ for ‘Dame’ button) had huge exposure last Christmas as Harriet Jones, Prime Minister and MP for Flydale North on Doctor Who.

Before that she was best known for hapless Anne in Ever Decreasing Circles; more recent film roles include villagey Ruth in Calendar Girls and kind Mrs Gardiner in Pride & Prejudice. She has in her time played so many good sorts there can have been little to ease her into the role of Livia, the ageing but horribly randy 17th-century Florentine widow in the RSC’s

Women Beware Women

Livia is an unspeakably bad human being. She makes that other Livia who plotted and poisoned in Rome 16 centuries earlier look like Wendy Craig. As I left the theatre I heard someone saying, ‘I told you Middleton was a misogynist.’ I don’t agree but it was an easy mistake to make because Wilton gives a spot-on portrayal of a smooth and dirty manipulator who is still, in late middle age, a sexual predator.

She is not a likeable woman but what this Jacobean tragedy really does is demonstrate tremendous understanding of a society where maidens, wives and mistresses were treated like children – except, of course, in the bedroom.

Livia, twice a widow and therefore no longer a chattel, with two lots of dead husband’s money, wreaks dark but gleeful revenge on this society and, under Laurence Boswell’s clever direction, dark gleefulness is the spirit of this beautifully staged production.

For all the incest: Livia arranges for her niece (Emma Cunniffe) to sleep with her brother (Rob Edwards); for all the brutality: Livia facilitates the rape of a young wife (Hayley Atwell) – and the gore: the play ends with a satisfying pile of bodies - there is a great deal of wicked fun to be had.

Tim Pigott-Smith is perfectly repellent as the Duke of Florence who rapes Bianca, and Atwell, his victim turned willing fiancée, is enigmatically beautiful. She is also admirably unperturbed when her first, impoverished husband is killed in a sword fight. Girl power, not misogyny, is what Middleton was into.

John, a young black man (Jimmy Akingbola) in prison/hospital clothes, with ironing creases so sharp they can only be the work of an institutional laundry, begs Paul (Ian McKellen), the civil servant in the grey three piece to give him the cut. ‘I want to be cut away from this body,’ he pleads, although the cut is clearly a painful thing, as Paul tells him: ‘They claw at me, they howl at the sky, it is barbaric.’

Paul’s job is his terrible secret.

The Cut

, the title of Mark Ravenhill’s Orwellian play directed by Michael Grandage at the Donmar, is a fatal, possibly ritualistic procedure administered in a ministry style building in a room with a desk and an operating table.

Paul describes his work as ‘the burden for men of my class’, and his wife, Susan (Deborah Findlay) vaguely understands the cut is evil while having no idea her husband is a cutter. She lies down every afternoon and worries, not about the cut, but that the clumsy eastern European home help – destined for the cut – is breaking too much crockery.

Change, however, is in the air; a working party is creating a dossier that will result in a better world – one in which Paul is imprisoned for doing his job.

Remarkably, there is humour everywhere in this brilliantly observed script, Ian McKellen’s acting is mesmeric and it is to Deborah Findlay’s great credit that she manages to steal a couple of scenes and a lot of the laughs. The Cut is a gripping, thought-provoking play, magnificently performed.

Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, the authors of

The Exonerated

, insist their play is not about anger or revenge but strength, hope, redemption and forgiveness.

This, given that the work is entirely made up of verbatim transcripts of interviews with real people who have spent years, even decades on death row in American prisons for crimes they did not commit, is hard to believe.

How can Kerry Max Cook (Aidan Quinn), now 45 but just 19 when he was wrongly convicted of rape and murder, not want revenge? He spent over 20 years in Texas’s notorious death house and to make things so much worse he was wrongly labelled a homosexual and was routinely raped.

How can Sunny Jacobs (Stockard Channing) – sentenced to death, in prison for 17 years, whose husband Jesse, also wrongly convicted, was sent to a faulty electric chair that took 13½ minutes to kill him, causing flames to leap from his head and smoke to come out of his ears – not be angry?

Of course this play is about anger and revenge; the anger comes out in bursts in the transcripts of the interviews with Kerry, Sunny and the four others portrayed. And the revenge is in the power of this production, which proves irrefutably to all those who saw it in Los Angeles, New York, last summer in Edinburgh, and now at the Riverside Studios in London, how very wrong and dangerous the death sentence is.

For this reason, as well as the sheer drama of the staging – spotlights rising and falling, and prison sound effects – The Exonerated is highly recommended.

Hedda Gabler

– the general’s daughter who marries a mediocre academic and, bored by the banalities of bourgeois life, amuses herself by manipulating the people around her – is one of theatre’s most intriguing heroines, writes Clare Brennan.

Even Clement Scott, The Daily Telegraph theatre critic who famously loathed Ibsen’s plays, wrote of the first production in 1891, ‘So subtle is [Ibsen’s] skill … that for a moment we believe Hedda Gabler is a noble heroine, and not a fiend.’

To mark the centenary of the playwright’s death, the West Yorkshire Playhouse (with the Liverpool Everyman) has commissioned a new adaptation of Hedda Gabler from Mike Poulton. Where Ibsen is subtle, Poulton is direct.

Hedda’s husband (Tom Smith), surprised to hear that his rival – the brilliant but dissipated Lovborg (Daniel Weyman) – has found work as a tutor, declares: ‘Let’s not beat about the bush – he drinks!’

But beating about the bush is exactly what the society that Ibsen satirises does best. Other translations prefer the indirect: ‘Then was he – I don’t know how to express it – was he – regular enough in his habits to be fit for the post?’

Hedda (Gillian Kearney) loathes this milieu of sly insinuation. She dreams of freedom, yet, lacking the courage to defy convention, sets out to destroy those braver than she is – Lovborg and his adulterous mistress (Polly Maberly).

Ibsen ratchets up the tension of the action notch by nerve-tautening notch, but director Matthew Lloyd sends his actors racing through the plot at such a pace that Hedda’s terrible machinations in the third act have audience laughing as if at a farce.

The final shot delivers a coup de grace instead of a tragic climax. Hedda Gabler – neither heroine nor fiend – has been reduced to a 19th-century prototype of today’s desperate housewife.