Howard Brenton’s Cancelling Socrates, review — a smart, sparkily topical drama

Cancelling Socrates Jermyn Street Theatre, London

The ancient world is making its presence felt on the London stage this spring. Already we’ve seen the grisly goings-on in the doomed House of Atreus take centre stage in Ivo van Hove’s searing Age of Rage and Punchdrunk’s epic new work The Burnt City. That story is back again in Marina Carr’s Girl on an Altar, while in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Britannicus it’s Rome under the spotlight for another ugly wrangle over power. In Howard Brenton’s Cancelling Socrates, we’re in the Athens of antiquity where the infant democracy is already feeling fragile. Perhaps there’s something in the air at the moment that makes stories about flawed leaders, hubris and backstage machinations feel apt.

To Athens 399BC first, birthplace of western drama and democracy, where the talk is of rickety voting, an exhausted populace and the danger of asking questions. Imagine. The person doing the asking in this sprightly, witty new play from Brenton (a coup typical of Tom Littler’s smart programming at this tiny venue) is Socrates, who has made the grave mistake of getting the youth of the city to think. His inability to turn off his own sharp, quizzical mind will literally be the death of him in this account of his shocking demise.

The playwright begins in playful mood in a scene inspired by one of Plato’s dialogues, with smooth citizen Euthyphro (Robert Mountford, very funny) introducing affairs and initiating a little philosophical debate of his own. “What is civilisation?” he asks an audience member in the front row, waving away a response. He’s outside the magistrates’ court bringing a case against his own father when up pops Socrates, who has a few problems of his own, being accused of sacrilege and corrupting the young.

Over the course of a series of sharp duologues, Brenton moves us towards Socrates’s fatal encounter with the cup of hemlock, meanwhile taking us nimbly through several huge and stubborn issues. What is justice, and who decides? Is the public or private life more important? How do you safeguard democracy from the corrosion of populism? How do you keep your integrity when others are playing dirty? How does faith sit with rational inquiry?

The play is clearly a tilt at our own culture wars and at a debating arena often shrunk to lobbing insults and manufacturing outrage. But on a deeper level it is a sharp interrogation of the dangers of easy certainties. It’s also mischievous, pertinent, deftly argued (if a little too on the nose in the final segment) and delightfully delivered by Littler’s cast on a tiny stage with all the playing room of a Portakabin.

Leading the fray is Jonathan Hyde’s magnetic Socrates, a twinkly-eyed, barefoot, pixie-like figure swathed in frayed robes that are crying out for the invention of the washing machine. His performance crackles with energy and with the restlessness of a penetrating mind. He is both beguiling and infuriating, refusing to play the game or take the easy way out that his supporters have wrangled for him. With fine support from Sophie Ward as his politically astute lover Aspasia and Hannah Morrish as his emotionally intuitive wife Xanthippe, this is a smart, sparkily topical evening.

★★★★☆

To July 2, jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

William Robinson as Nero in ‘Britannicus’ © Marc Brenner Britannicus Lyric Hammersmith, London

Next stop, Rome AD55, and the nest of vipers that is Emperor Nero’s domain. In Britannicus, translated by Timberlake Wertenbaker from Racine’s 17th-century drama, matters are coming to a head between the petulant leader, his shrewd mother, Agrippina, and his young stepbrother Britannicus. As we join the story, Nero has taken a fancy to Britannicus’s bride-to-be, Junia, and locked her up in his palace, to the fury of everybody, including Agrippina, who brokered the match.

The play follows the slow spiral towards atrocity, as Agrippina tries in vain to manage the volatile Nero and steer him away from actions that will set him on a downward path into degradation. Being Racine, however, it balances the excesses with a rigour of style that is hard to pull off on the modern stage.

Wertenbaker and director Atri Banerjee embrace this contrast skilfully, delivering a cool, stylised production that relies on the power of the acting to convey the creeping ugliness of the situation. Rosanna Vize’s design splices a contemporary boardroom aesthetic — office chairs, suits, a water cooler — with something more feral: a stuffed wolf, reminder of the founding myth of Rome, watches over proceedings.

The staging is sticky at first: it takes a while to acclimatise to this ascetic style and understated delivery. But gradually the performances assert themselves, most notably those of Sirine Saba as a ruthless, politically astute Agrippina, gradually panicking as she realises she is losing sway over her son, and William Robinson as Nero, a terrifying combination of chilling charm, sudden outbursts of violence and displays of soggy self-pity. As Nero drifts towards tyranny, Nathaniel Curtis’s gentle, guileless Britannicus — who gives the play its title but has no power — doesn’t stand a chance.

★★★★☆

To June 25, lyric.co.uk

Eileen Walsh as Clytemnestra and David Walmsley as Agamemnon in ‘Girl on an Altar’ © Peter Searle Girl on an Altar Kiln Theatre, London

Back in Greece, a large double bed dominates Tom Piper’s set for Girl on an Altar, a signal that Marina Carr’s telling of the Iphigenia saga will focus on the domestic. Clytemnestra is at the heart of this drama — one of many women maddened and mangled by the Trojan war. And where generally the gap is short between the victorious return of Agamemnon and his death at the hands of his wife, here it is the substance of the play as the characters deal with the emotional fallout of a girl sacrificed in the name of war.

David Walmsley’s Agamemnon returns from conflict pumped up by success and lost to a toxic, bellicose form of masculinity. He loses patience with a wife whom he still desires but who shrinks from him in horror. Eileen Walsh’s excellent Clytemnestra, meanwhile, cannot move on and it’s her frozen, tortured, intelligent mind that we spend most time with, as she fights with her feelings and tries to protect her remaining children.

As with Britannicus, the writing brings a cool rigour to the extremity of the events and emotions in the spotlight: Carr’s text is full of wonderful, muscular poetry, driven largely by monologues that paint vividly detailed pictures of battle and brutality. Sculpted by Amy Mae’s eloquent lighting, Annabelle Comyn’s mesmerising staging (presented in partnership with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre) draws you into a claustrophobic household seething with desire, damage and resentment. War-trophy Cassandra and powerless servant Cilissa, played with fierce integrity by Nina Bowers and Kate Stanley Brennan, add to the female voices caught up in the blood-soaked sequel to a gruesome war.

It’s tough, bleak and good. Another fierce, demanding production that dips back into the ancient world to ask how far we have come.

★★★★☆

To June 25, kilntheatre.com