The week in theatre: The Welkin; Krapp’s Last Tape/ Eh Joe/ The Old Tune; The Sunset Limited – review

There is much to admire in Lucy Kirkwood’s new play, The Welkin, set in 18th-century Suffolk. It is filled with shocks of the best and worst sort, light and dark entertainment. Director James Macdonald, designer Bunny Christie and lighting designer Lee Curran have conspired to produce a show of elegance and force, and the opening is a coup de théâtre. After we read the word “Housework” – as though this were as much a book as a play – the curtain goes up on a dazzling double storey of women working, each occupying her own bright frame: ironing, beating the dust out of a rug, stitching a seam by candlelight. It’s a marvellous living cabinet of chores. It is also a revelatory novelty to be watching an ensemble piece with a huge female cast – 13 women to two men. There is, later, a great sense of space and depth in the room where the action – and inaction – takes place, with a classical mantelpiece, a malfunctioning fireplace and not much furniture (women are the furniture) surrounded by what it is fair to describe as Farrow & Ball walls.

A jury of matrons has convened to determine (as they historically did) whether Sally Poppy, who has been found guilty of murdering an 11-year-old girl, is pregnant (if so, she will avoid the hangman). And might she also be innocent? Watching the interactions between the women, their frustration at trying to arrive at a unanimous verdict, is absorbing and the cast top notch and divertingly varied. Maxine Peake compels as Elizabeth Luke, the midwife with an urgent personal agenda. Cecilia Noble has the audience eating out of her hand as Emma Jenkins, the prudish matriarch whose stifled laugh of disapproval brings the house down, while the accused is played with unsettling skill by Ria Zmitrowicz – her desperate lot has not extinguished her ragamuffin lust.

However, for all its quality, the evening left me tantalised and disturbed (and not in the way intended). One explanation might be that Kirkwood’s talented pen runs off with the play. Colourful, entertaining tangents are partly what make her the writer she is, but in this three-hour show, and particularly at its hideously violent moments (which I’ll not give away), she undermines her purpose, plays fast and loose with our emotions. Too often (listen to Noble’s speech about murdering a dog), she is not as decided as she needs to be about whether she is asking her audience to laugh, cringe or cry.

A tremendous Beckett triple bill – Krapp’s Last Tape, Eh Jo and The Old Tune – is playing in Jermyn Street, unerringly directed by Trevor Nunn. These little masterpieces are about old age as a memory test and the ways memory tests us. It is Beckett’s tormenting peripheral vision that counts. In Krapp’s Last Tape, a girl in a shabby green coat is briefly seen on a railway station platform; in Eh Joe, another girl, in lilac slip, wades – fatally we suppose – into a lake. The elegiac is used as a cudgel. Even in The Old Tune, the most entertaining piece in the trio (a warm-up for Waiting for Godot), two old gents on a bench find their ability to gossip dogged by their failure to remember or agree. Their past is seen in contested glimpses.

James Hayes gives us a recital of Krapp’s Last Tape so compelling that it seemed no one in this tiny theatre dared breathe – you could hear the whizzing tapes of his antediluvian tape recorder. He plays a recording (“Box 3, Spool 5”) made decades ago, an irregular and possibly tragic audio diary. Who knows what he is listening for? The play is a dark tease, and Hayes has us watching him like a hawk to gauge his reactions to what he hears: he fidgets and winces and faffs with the recorder and joins in with the mirthless laughter of his younger self. His concentration reinforces ours. Desolation and absurdity combine. “Spooool,” he says, unspooling the vowel, as though the word were a toy. You start to see how the details of the triste tryst of his youth only render it more mysterious. This is an outstanding performance and a tribute to Hayes that I never knew a Beckett play seem so short.

Eh Joe is a different skirmish with memory in which the recorded voice of incomparable Beckett supremo Lisa Dwan haunts Joe, who sits in a bedroom with tears in his eyes. Dwan uses her voice as a terrible, crackling caress. It blows in like high wind – husky reminiscence quickening into viciousness. Niall Buggy’s listening, alone yet taunted by the woman, reminds us that it is possible to give a great performance without saying a word.

Buggy’s voice is restored to him in The Old Tune and, as Gorman, he is warm, vulnerable and touching. Two old men congratulate each other on their sense of humour. They deliver wonderful, shorthand lines: “Ah yes, children – that’s the way it is” and are sorry that cigarettes – “gaspers” – are not what they were. Traffic noise interrupts their conversation. Gorman’s old acquaintance, Cream, is irresistibly played by David Threlfall, who looks like an indignant Irish sea captain (watch his left eyebrow at work). And although their reference to “the wisdom of the ancients” is ironic, this double masterclass in acting offers wisdom in abundance.

The new Boulevard theatre in Soho is a chic, lively addition to London’s theatre scene. But the gulf between the venue’s feelgood eatery and what is on its stage borders on the comic. Watching The Sunset Limited, I kept thinking of Turgenev’s joke in Fathers and Sons: “He wasn’t a nihilist for nothing.” Cormac McCarthy is one of the giants of American literature (All The Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road) and a magnificently desolating novelist. But he is not a natural playwright. Although influenced by Beckett, he lacks Beckett’s humour and the sorrow that depends on the hunch that love exists.

This is an encounter, capably directed by Terry Johnson, between White, a charmless, wiped-out professor (played with understandable resignation by Jasper Britton) who has been rescued from throwing himself under a train by Black, an ex-con, now Bible-basher (flawlessly natural Gary Beadle). Their eloquently depressing and stalled (might the play work better on radio?) conversation centres on whether life is worth living and whether God is listening. The only hopeful moment, the play’s best, is when Black serves up a stew (“This is soul food, my man”) and White repeatedly comments as he munches: “This is really good.”

Star ratings (out of five)
The Welkin ★★★
Krapp’s Last Tape, Eh Joe, The Old Tune ★★★★★
The Sunset Limited ★★

• The Welkin is the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London, until 23 May
• Beckett Triple Bill is at the Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 8 February
• The Sunset Limited is at the Boulevard theatre, London, until 29 February