Modern plays are not always disastrous but you sit in the stalls for two hours (they are usually short) at your peril.
Having Stoppard, Bennett or even Pinter up in lights outside is a good sign for the punter and at the box office. If you do write a play and want anybody to watch it then you must hook a star. Obviously there will only be slim pickings for the rest of the cast so hire them out of stage school when they are grateful not to be selling the ice creams and programmes.
This is what playwright, Nina Raine, has achieved. She has got Simon Russell Beale as box office gold and veteran theatre-film-opera director, Nicholas Hytner, (he pulls at the BO too) on board. But can she write a play? SRB and NH think so and who am I to disagree.
Her play, Bach & Sons, is a biography of Johann Sebastian, his two very different sons and the three women in his life. It is well-paced with changes of, in a theatrical context, chiaroscuro. You may not want to know about the musical tropes that JSB espoused but you will if you see her play. She weaves this into her story without either strand becoming dominant or boring. Stoppard would have complicated it a lot.
Although the small cast has plenty of experience one does not. There is an excellent scene when JSB visits his son (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach) at Potsdam. The boy is in the employ of Frederick the Great, played by Pravessh Rana. It is his stage debut after training at LAMDA outside my bathroom window in Barons Court. He makes the role his own, subtly referencing the Prussian King’s sexuality while dominating the stage with monarchical authority. Remember Pravessh Rana because he will go far; he can act and he has stage presence.
Bach & Sons is on at the Bridge Theatre on the south side of Tower Bridge. Unlike West End theatres there are great views and it looks like most of the Thames overflowed on Saturday morning.
