Last Updated on May 22, 2025
A Finely Drawn Counterpoint of Spirituality and Politics
The Score at The Theatre Royal, Haymarket - Review - 4 Stars
The Score is a satisfyingly old-fashioned production of a play that ruthlessly interrogates the value of the new - a wonderful evening of theatre.
Event Type: Event
Event Attendance Mode: OfflineEventAttendanceMode
Event Status: EventScheduled
Performer: Organization
Start Date: 2025-02-27 19:30
End Date: 2025-04-26 22:00
Availability: InStock
Availability Starts: 2025-02-27T19:30:00
4
It was a big night in theatreland with the press launch for Oliver Cotton’s new play, THE SCORE at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Directed by Trevor Nunn and with Hollywood and TV megastar Brian Cox (Logan Roy in the HBO hit series Succession) in the lead role playing composer Johann Sebastian Bach, it is clearly a big deal for producing house the Theatre Royal Bath where the show originated. I’m intrigued to see if the drama about an inter-generational tussle in the spring of 1747 between the grandmaster of the High Baroque and the leading monarch of the Enlightenment, Frederick the Great, Frederick II of Prussia, feels relevant in the turmoil of our present historical moment.
Frederick was a complex figure. Fuelled by the ideas of Voltaire, he constructed a modern Prussian state built around the rights of citizens, and as an atheist, rejected the notion of the monarch’s divine authority. But in bringing about these reforms, there were many casualties as Frederick created pre-emptive strikes against the surrounding city states, driven by a belief in the moral justness of his cause. J.S. Bach, on the other hand, had lived his whole life in the service of his religious faith and saw his musical output as a way of paying homage to God.
The central point of tension in The Score is a wager between the monarch and his gaggle of young composer acolytes at his Potsdam Court on one side, and Bach’s son C.P.E Bach, himself a modernist and another of the court musicians. The challenge is for the elder Bach, who is unaware of this wager, to be able to extemporise a 3-part fugue on a theme composed by Frederick and then tweaked by composers Quantz, Benda and Graun, to a point of near compositional impossibility.
Cotton and director Trevor Nunn are very good at delineating the hierarchical divisions within the court. All the characters fear offending Frederick, as their very lives may be at risk. It is only J.S. Bach who is able to speak truth to power and challenge the young monarch. The others all live in fear of losing their position, livelihoods and even their lives.
Brian Cox is formidable as the irascible, aging composer in a maroon velvet frock coat. His face is monumental, bearing the granite scars of a life spent in musical servitude, but also not without humour. Genuine in his appreciation of the other musicians around him and daunted by the spiritual enormity of managing his faith, In The Score, Cox turns his considerable firepower on the casual morality of the Prussian military and their leader the king, who rape and take advantage of the local populace as they see fit.
Nicole Ansari-Cox plays Anna Magdalena Bach, the composer’s second wife. She also happens to be Brian Cox’s wife, and the German-born actor brings both steel and softness to the role in The Score. Having sacrificed much of her own career as a singer to care for the composer and his children, she comes to her own in a scene with James Gladdon as Helstein, a hapless young Prussian soldier trying to impose the billeting of soldiers in the dormitories of the choir school above the Bach’s lodgings. Gladdon is dispatched with a Teutonic flea in his ear as Ansari-Cox transforms from kind mother to the haughty aristocratic bearing of a woman whose husband has the ear of the king.
Stephen Hagan is excellent as Frederick, one moment foppish and at ease with the artists with whom he surrounds himself, the next clear-minded and brutal about the rectitude of his expansionist mission. The real Frederick was gay, which is only hinted at in the play, however, Hagan brings out both the emotional vulnerability of the character, who was treated brutally by his father, and also his intellectual clarity and understanding of realpolitik. He is both fascinated and annoyed by the father figure of Bach and his spiritual certainties, and Hagan’s characterisation of the monarch comes over like a less extreme version of the Rik Mayall character in The Young Ones.
Peter De Jersey goes joyfully over the top as Voltaire, creating a French caricature, navigating between the need to flatter his friend and benefactor Frederick and his genuine understanding of the universal genius of the old, out-of-fashion composer. Jamie Wilkes gives a subtle performance as C.P.E Bach, the most talented and successful of the old man’s many children. Torn between his need to satisfy the whims of his employer, survive financially, retain some artistic integrity and control his loose cannon of a father, it’s a fine account of a character caught in a whirlwind.
Juliet Garricks has an important role as the servant Emilia. Her character is there to represent the voice of the ordinary people who are the innocent victims of the power play that surrounds their lives. But she is also able to recognise the glory of Bach’s art, she brings an earthy humanity to the stage.
Christopher Staines as Quantz, Toby Webster as Benda and Matthew Romain as Graun make an agreeable trio of composers, bowing, scraping and fawning over Frederick as if their lives depended on it, which they probably did. Christopher Staines does a fine comic turn with a funny story about a man clinging to a tree branch on a mountainside for dear life.
Trevor Nunn’s direction of The Score strikes a fine balance between the narrative and the bigger ideas at play here. Set Designer Robert Jones has created a simply staged series of sets with era-appropriate furnishings and musical instruments, which are dropped or wheeled in and out at high speed as needed. With Imperial expansionism, powerful charismatic rulers and the way artists have to navigate those spaces very much back on our political radar, the themes of the play couldn’t be more current. This is a satisfyingly old-fashioned production in many ways of a play that ruthlessly interrogates the value of the new. It makes for a wonderful evening of theatre.
THE SCORE
Theatre Royal Haymarket
18 Suffolk Street,
London
SW1Y 4HT
Until Saturday, 26 April 2025
Looking for something different? We also recommend Much Ado About Nothing, currently showing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane
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