Review: Imagine This ★★★ - Brave revival of a musical celebrating courage in the face of persecution across two millennia

Imagine yourself imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942, facing the dilemma of whether or not to stand up to your Nazi persecutors. You are one of a company of Jewish actors confined there, determined to stage a play about the siege of Masada in 66BC. The siege ended in the mass suicide of the Jews defending the mountain fortress as the Roman besiegers stormed it, so it has long been a symbol of valiant Jewish resistance to persecution. A poem telling this story is said to have inspired the Warsaw uprising, and it’s upon this premise that Shuki Levy (music), David Goldsmith (lyrics) and Glenn Berenbeim (book) based this valiant musical attempt to bring the two uprisings together. Sasha Regan’s award-winning Union Theatre has a fine track record of small-scale musical revivals and it certainly succeeds better than the full-blown 2008 New London Theatre premiere.

A Jewish theatre company confined in the Warsaw Ghetto performs a play about the Jews of Jerusalem retreating to Masada, drawing the obvious parallel between their Nazi oppressors and the Roman invaders. Their director Daniel manages to sell this subversive show to Nazi Captain Blick: “It’s got singing, dancing and all the Jews die in the end”. He even manages to hide Adam, a fugitive resistance fighter from the Nazis (Shaun McCourt), by casting him as the humane Roman commander who falls in love with Tamar, daughter of the Jewish leader (Lauren James Ray). Of course Adam falls for Rebecca, Daniel's daughter playing Tamar. And then the Jewish actors face an impossible dilemma, as Adam reveals the truth of the concentration camps…

Levy’s music can be attractive (the opening number recalling ‘The Last Day of Summer’ before the 1939 invasion of Poland, is a wistful earworm. The title song is a great vehicle for Nick Wyschna’s Daniel, keeping his company together against the odds and Wyshna himself is the vital heart of the production. The grim determination expressed in the defiant number Masada, though, becomes an unwelcome earworm, not least because it recurs once too often. Many numbers are simply too long, though all are beautifully played by the hard-working quartet of musicians (piano, fiddle, bass and drums), unaccountably not credited in the programme, apart from MD Alex Williams and musical supervisor Lee Freeman.

The 17-strong company work tirelessly in their roles both as Jews and Nazis and Jews and Romans. Kevan Allen’s choreography is a stunning example of what you can achieve on a simple set. Justin Williams’ multi-levelled platform makes a useful Masada and his terrific collection of crates make useful levels for that dynamic choreography. Harry Blumenau marshals his cast with verve and they tell the story with empathy and passion – and best of all, without microphones.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Nick Brittain

Imagine This runs until Saturday 18 November. 7.30pm (Tue-Sat), 2.30pm (Sat & Sun only). £25, £22.50 concs. Union Theatre, SE1 0LR. www.uniontheatre.biz

Review: Pinocchio ★★★★ - Israeli-born choreographer Jasmin Vardimon and her company create breath-taking stage pictures to enchant

If you want to introduce your child to the magic of live theatre, then the captivating combination of physical dance theatre and brilliantly imaginative staging with which Yasmin Vardimon and her company weave the story of Pinocchio should leave any theatregoer, new or experienced, eager for more.

Vardimon has an extraordinary imagination and with her collaborators, set designer and dramaturg Guy Bar-Amotz and lighting designer Chahine Yavroyan, she finds a fresh way of conjuring each scene in Collodi’s story of the wooden puppet boy who yearns to be a real boy. Perhaps the most distinctive signature of her style is the stunning and seamless way her eight performers work together to use their bodies – or often just one body part each – to create a whole.

Working together with precise discipline, three performers open the show by assembling the disturbing, dark, squat figure of the narrator (perhaps the Cricket) from their gloved hands. Meanwhile, within a brightly-lit conical tent, shadow-play creates the illusion of puppet-maker Gepetto fashioning the life-size puppet from his magical piece of wood. The Blue Fairy materialises and floats effortlessly upwards as the tent morphs into her gown, all blue light.

In Geppetto’s workshop all eight dancers revolve around as figures in a clockwork musical box, each face a smiling mask, each body moving as precisely as clockwork as they rise in turn to the centre of their mechanical frieze, like paper cut-out dolls. Even the performers’ feet create ‘puppets’ and many hands make light work of Pinocchio’s nose.

The episodic nature of Pinocchio’s journey lends itself perfectly to this problem-solving teamwork. But of course the heart (beating rather than wooden) of the story is Pinocchio himself. Maria Doulgeri brings extraordinary physicality to the role, limbs revolving stiffly at first as if her joints are indeed awkwardly jointed with pins; flailing wildly and unnaturally to the scornful amusement of the nasty children in a playground who revel in excluding the little outsider; and gradually softening as he achieves empathy and selflessness – and so humanity.

The shape-shifting cast is uniformly excellent, equally at home as animals, puppet or humans, on the ground or in the air – or suspended on puppet strings. Scheming cat and fox are present and correct and banish any memories you may have of that Disney film.

The evocative music ranges from Shostakovitch to Beyoncé via accordion music from the Faroe Islands and the vocalising sighs and gasps from the cast add to the inclusive atmosphere. If some scenes are a tad long, the whole, at 90 minutes is just right. And it’s testimony to the show that despite there being no interval its young audience was spellbound throughout.

By Judi Herman

Pinocchio runs Friday 3 & Saturday 4 November. 7.30pm, 2pm (Sat only). £13, £8.50. Grand Theatre, Blackpool, FY1 1HT. www.blackpoolgrand.co.uk

Review: Young Marx ★★★★ - On your Marx for an exhilarating chase through 19th-century Soho (in 21st-century comfort)

Welcome to 1850 – a genuine welcome to political refugees from Europe, including 32-year-old Karl Marx. But is he in danger of outstaying his welcome as he goes on the razzle through Soho, funding his pub crawls by trying to pawn the family silver? His wife’s family that is, for Jenny von Westphalen is of aristocratic German stock, her relatives scandalised by her marriage to the penniless Jewish revolutionary. As young Marx himself puts it “at our wedding I was only invited to the reception”.

This is one of many knowing one liners from the collaboration of Richard Bean (of One Man, Two Guv’nors fame) with witty barrister/radio writer Clive Coleman. Their young Marx is a full-blooded “solipsistic, self-regarding prick”, in the words of his often exasperated, though always devoted sidekick Engels. They write Marx and Engels as a sort of early music-hall double act and Rory Kinnear and Oliver Chris are perfectly cast.

Kinnear’s Marx, hair and beard wild and out of control as his behaviour, is in the throes of writer’s – and thinker’s – block. He achieves the vital balance between infuriating as the reprobate hiding in cupboards when creditors come calling, and earning sympathy as the adoring father, anxiously tending his sickly son and listening proudly to his daughter’s prowess at the piano (before the broker’s men take it, along with the rest of the family’s furniture and clothes).

Chris’s Engels, equal parts admiration and frustration, convinces as the man whose unwavering self-sacrifice will lead to years of financing Marx’s project (and keeping his family going) by slipping him cash from the till of his father’s Manchester textile factory. In Chris’s performance, he is the vital moral heart of the play too; you can believe that he wrote passionately about the plight of workers observed first hand in those factories.

For all this is fact, Bean and Coleman have mined a rich seam of eyebrow-raising biographical detail and transmuted it into precious theatrical mettle (pun intended!).

They create a vibrant messy Victorian London, peopled by rival factions of émigré activists, German spies – and ‘peelers’.  Our odd couple’s run in with one of Sir Robert Peel’s prototype policemen is an ‘arresting’ example of the writers’ anachronistic, self-referential wit. The drunken pair, caught in possession of a wrought-iron church gate, are surprised and grateful to avoid a beating. “I’ve been on a course” explains the officer.

Big set-pieces – a political meeting, a dawn duel on Hampstead Heath and best of all a deliciously transgressive brawl in the British Museum reading room – contrast nicely with these cameos and with the intimate family scenes cramped into the two tiny rooms where Marx lives with wife, children, and housekeeper Nym. Nancy Carroll is magnificent as passionate, put-upon Jenny and Laura Elphinstone’s quiet hard-working Nym, whose devotion to Marx ultimately gets physical, matches Carroll as Chris matches Kinnear.

Nick Hytner directs a uniformly superlative cast with wit, sensitivity and pace on Mark Thompson’s fold-out set in London greys and browns, lit by Mark Henderson’s atmospheric lighting and topped by Soho rooftops and chimneys, among which Marx climbs to evade the law, which still look much the same today.

It’s a terrific demonstration of the versatility of Hytner and project partner Nick Starr’s brand new Bridge Theatre and augurs well for future productions. Julius Caesar, complete with audience promenaders as the Roman mob, is up next in January. As befits this democratic vibe, seat prices start at £15 and the horse-shoe shaped, spacious auditorium is inclusive, with sightlines looking uniformly good and seats are especially comfortable. The whole is completed in golden leather and wood, and if there is currently a bit of a flow problem because the single doors to the auditorium are too narrow, this could be corrected. The public spaces are spacious, well-lit and welcoming – and ladies, you will be, er, relieved to find so many toilet cubicles with your name on them.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Manuel Harlan

Young Marx runs until Sunday 31 December. 7.45pm (Tue-Sat), 2.30pm (Wed & Sat), 3pm (Sun only). £15-£65. Bridge Theatre, SE1 2SG. https://bridgetheatre.co.uk

Also broadcast live to 700 UK cinemas and many more worldwide on Thursday 7 December. Visit www.ntlive.com for further details.

Review: Anything That Flies ★★★ - Soaring performances bring home a poignant message

I won’t reveal why novelist Judith Burnley gives her moving debut play this intriguing title. To find out, you’ll have to get to know Otto and Lottie, he a Holocaust survivor and she an aristocratic German with her own story of devastating wartime trauma. Otto’s viola-playing days may be over, as he is also a stroke survivor, but he has the consolation of listening to Brahms on state-of-the-art speakers he designed himself!

It’s 1991, so 46 years since the war and two years after the Berlin Wall fell. The latter has repercussions for both; the former changed their lives forever. Escaping Germany in time meant Otto suffered further displacement, interned on the Isle of Man, only to discover the fate of his family once the war was over. Lottie’s father was hanged (‘with piano wire’) for his part in a plot to kill Hitler, and after the war she herself fled life under Communism as Germany was divided.

All this comes out as the unlikely pair size each other up once the life force that is Lottie bursts into Otto’s Belsize Park flat, apparently sent to care for him by his daughter. Lottie explains they met in Israel, where Otto’s daughter now lives and where Lottie’s Israeli partner has just died. Daughter Erika wins him over by describing the traditional Mittel Europa dishes that are Lottie’s cooking credentials – of course it’s Otto we hear reciting, increasingly orgasmically, “Rostbraten? Schnitzel? Sauerbraten?” It’s a hilarious one-sided phone conversation, one of the more successful of a series of such phone chats that stud the action.

Lottie soon discovers Otto has other ways of attempting to reach orgasm – he is in short a transgressive randy old goat, so that by the time he has called Lottie a Nazi and a German shiksa (Yiddish for a non-Jewish whore), your sympathies are with her. And as much as he loves the dishes of his childhood, he despises that icon of Englishness, Christopher Robin. It’s his contemptuous dismissal of her recitations that leads Lottie to reveal that the great love of her life was the English nanny who introduced her to AA Milne.

Nonetheless the pair bond over their love of the English language. For him it means a yearning to fit in, to be part of the country where he’s made a new life, but nonetheless feels like an outsider: “Beneath the politeness … a dirty Jew.” For her it’s her concept that English children played poo sticks as “German children were being conscripted into Hitler’s Youth League."

This is one of the best scenes in a timely play that poignantly explores what it is to be an outsider – reminding contemporary audiences what the refugees of the last century underwent as the asylum seekers of the 21st century strive to make new lives. Clive Merrison and Issy van Randwyck are pitch perfect in this two-handed performance.

By Judi Herman

Anything That Flies runs until Saturday 11 November. 7.30pm (Mon-Sat), 3.30pm (Sat only). From £15. Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1Y 6ST. www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

Review: The Toxic Avenger the Musical ★★★★ - This grungy green giant is on message loud and clear

Producer Katy Lipson (Aria Entertainment) has a sure eye – and ear – for a hit musical. Between a summer of new musical theatre at The Other Palace, including Some Lovers, Burt Bacharach’s first for years, and the imminent autumn transfer of a sell-out immersive version of tribal rock musical Hair arriving at London’s Vaults from Manchester’s Hope Mills Theatre, comes this West End transfer of a musical that had a hugely successful first outing at Southwark Playhouse.

It isn’t the first high-camp schlock horror movie to make it from screen to stage, though it may be the weirdest (and loudest). Like soulmate Little Shop of Horrors, it’s based on a movie with a musical score added here by David Bryan (yes, Bon Jovi’s keyboardist David Bryan Rashbaum!). In place of the film’s comic-book biffs and bangs – enough to employ an army of Foley artists and stunt-persons – Joe DiPietro’s adaptation of Lloyd Kaufman’s (with Joe Ritter) bracingly violent screenplay has Benji Sperring’s fast-moving, out and loud, in-yer-face direction; designer takis’ versatile three-tier set, incorporating huge vats, library, beauty salon and much more; a loud and lovely five-piece band led by musical Wunderkind Alex Beetschen – and just five extraordinary triple threats playing a cast of (almost) thousands.

In fictional New Jersey town Tromaville, the dastardly Mayor ruthlessly exploits local resources, dumps waste like there’s no tomorrow and is behind local crime syndicates. Meanwhile puny weakling Melvyn is bullied mercilessly until his tormentors crown their violence by throwing him into a vat of toxic waste, transforming him into the (admittedly hideous) superhero Toxic Avenger – green in colour and credentials – sworn to cleanse Tromaville of waste and bullies, including the Mayor; and soon, beloved of pretty, blind librarian Sarah, who ‘sees’ him not exactly for what he is, as she’s convinced ‘Toxie’ is an exotic French name.

Where the film split Melvin/Toxie between two actors, Mark Anderson curls up as Melvin and more than mans up for Toxie. Natalie Hope achieves a spectacular double as sexually predatory, vampish Mayor, her shocking pink décolletage an offensive weapon (the film has a man in suit!), with lightning changes into Melvin’s Mum in hairnet and housecoat – even actually duetting with herself! Ché Francis’ ‘Black Dude’ and Oscar Conlon-Morrey’s ‘White Dude’ morph miraculously into multiple pairs of thugs, henchmen, cops and hilariously, girlfriends. Emma Salvo just gets to be plucky Sarah, in mismatched pop socks, and constantly mislaying her white cane – she really goes for the gleefully politically incorrect, definitely ‘blind’ rather than ‘visually impaired’. All five and their hard-working swing/understudies, Sophia Lewis and Peter Bindloss, have huge, true voices to carry Bryan’s witty (and mostly audible) lyrics. An intoxicatingly tasty – and tasteless – treat.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Irina Chira

The Toxic Avenger the Musical runs until Sunday 3 December. 7.30pm (Tue-Sat; exc. 3 Oct), 3.30pm (Sat only), 3pm & 6.30pm (Sun only). £19.50-£59.50. Arts Theatre, WC2HL 7JB. www.toxicavengermusical.co.uk

Review: Oslo ★★★★ – Travelling hopefully towards Middle East peace proves an exhilarating journey

You almost certainly know the venture ends in failure and tragedy but what a gloriously exhilarating and entertaining evening JT Rogers makes of the journey. It's 1991 and the US-sponsored Middle East Peace Conference is going nowhere, with the excluded PLO still ensconced in Tunis. Norwegian power couple Mona Juul, a diplomat posted to Cairo, and Terje Rod-Larsen, her foundation-running sociologist husband, get a chance to see first hand the conflict in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Witnessing a confrontation between a Palestinian stone-throwing youth and a similarly-aged Israeli soldier, they are struck by their similarities. They resolve to try and bring the two sides together in a fluid, non-confrontational way, luring them to a Norwegian country mansion where personal conversations over whisky and waffles work better than the institutional grandstanding of the official peace talks.

Director Bartlett Sher whisks his cast, as crisp as a Norwegian winter, through the back-channeling and clandestine meetings and the associated politics of the peace process that eventually lead to the famous handshake on the White House lawn between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Sensibly, Rogers focuses on the negotiators and not the hand-shakers and the actors seamlessly break the fourth wall to move the action through time.

Peter Polycarpou invests pugnacious but charming PLO Finance Minister Ahmed Qurie with both warmth and anger, a portrait of a complex and conflicted man, eager for peace but scarred by conflict. His opposite number is Phillip Arditti's cocksure, arrogant and domineering Uri Savir, a typical prickly Sabra (native Israeli), who finds an unlikely friend in Qurie.

Lydia Leonard’s determined, grounded Mona stage-manages the action with Scandinavian cool and style. Monochrome-clad, carrying a drinks tray, at curtain-up you might take her for waitress, till she confides in the audience. Toby Stephens’ flamboyant, self-centred Terje is plausibly likeable and infuriating – and on (peace) message.

The Norwegian contingent includes Foreign Minister Holst (Howard Ward), Mona’s boss and his wife Marianne Heiberg (Geraldine Alexander) who works for Terje. "Well, Norway is a very small country!” as Juul puts it in one of her deliciously dry asides. Ward and Alexander double as Finn and Toril, the domestic staff sworn to secrecy.

The negotiations play out on Michael Yeargan’s set, a curved wall that doubles as a canvas for 59 Productions' effective projections with Scandinavian-sharp lighting from Donald Holder.

As the action rolls through the various crunch points on the way to that handshake, your hopes are equally elated and deflated at the prospect – or not – of peace. The play ends with a brief round-up of the subsequent history, but Terje’s final appeal to the audience to see his beautiful vision leaves you, heartbroken, with the dream of what could have been.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Brinkhoff Mögenburg

Oslo runs Monday 2 October – Saturday 30 December. 7.30pm (Mon-Sat), 2pm (Thu & Sat only). £18-£85. Harold Pinter Theatre, SW1Y 4DN. 0844 871 7627. www.atgtickets.com

Click here to read our interview with writer JT Rogers and director Bartlett Sher from the July 2017 issue of Jewish Renaissance.

Review: Grand Finale ★★★★★ – Apocalyptic vision in Shechter's triumphant total dance theatre

If that title sounds ominous, Shechter told me in interview: “I wanted to capture a sense of our time…that out-of-control feeling that things are coming to an end. And how can this have a happy ending?” * Plus, in a programme note on what he does – or does not – expect of his audience: “It’s about what is happening to them in their head, how they feel, [not about getting] it right in some way.”

These ideas coincide with news bulletins of refugees fleeing fresh violence and natural disaster to colour my response to what I’m seeing – figures in a stark, imagined landscape fleeing, falling, supporting each other’s bodies, dead or alive – often hardly noticing when they drop their burdens. Sometimes the flight is collective, sometimes one or two isolated figures move and pause in the shifting tableaux.

Shechter’s own original percussive soundtrack, with Yaron Engler, combines with Tom Visser’s harsh white lighting and the shadows it throws to add to the atmosphere of ominous apocalypse as screens like monoliths or tablets hide and reveal the dancers who also move them swiftly around the stage. These and the dancers’ fluid costumes are designed by Tom Scutt. It’s the first time Shechter has worked with a designer and it works triumphantly for this is total dance theatre.

The dancers also share the stage with a string sextet, the use of live music making another entirely successful first for Shechter. At first they are placed at one side, later they take centre-stage as the stark lighting gives way to something more golden, celebratory; but always they are part of the stage picture, even the choreography and design, as well as the sound.

That they are in formal evening attire is significant as they play ‘found’ music, notably Franz Lehar’s 'Merry Widow' waltz, 'Love Unspoken' (could that title be significant too?), as well as chamber music by Tchaikovsky and a Russian tune from Jewish composer Vladimir Zaldwich.

Although there’s room for lightness of touch and levity too, it’s perhaps that feel of early 20th-century Mittel Europa, between the wars, which brings to my mind the apocalyptic poetry of TS Eliot and WB Yeats. ‘Things fall part, the centre cannot hold’ writes Yeats in The Second Coming, though of course the dancers’ centres of gravity can hold – they are characteristically centred and grounded, unless they are ‘playing dead’.

Sometimes they recall the opening of Eliot's The Hollow Men: ‘We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw’. The poem closes with the famous lines ‘This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper’. Shechter’s triumphant apocalyptic vision ends rather with a bang – and a standing ovation.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Rahi Rezvani

Grand Finale runs until Saturday 16 September. 7.30pm. £12-£32. Sadler's Wells Theatre, EC1R 4TN. 020 7863 8000. www.sadlerswells.com

Then tours overseas: 1 – 4 November Danse Montréal; 9 – 11 November BAM, New York; 24 - 26 November Dansens, Hus, Oslo; 12 December Scène Nationale d’Albi

More dates to be announced

*see Jewish Renaissance Magazine July 2017 issue page 28

Review: Follies ★★★★★ – Fabulous production proves this Sondheim/Goldman musical is no folly

Welcome to Weismann’s Follies. Dmitri Weismann himself presides and the old gang of gorgeous gals are back for one last reunion in the theatre where they showed a leg and sang their hearts out between the wars, before it’s pulled down. It’s time to reminisce (cue for a song-list of glorious pastiches) and take stock of the ravages of the years – physical and emotional. So it’s equally the cue for a range of mould-breaking Sondheim numbers that excavate the regrets and neuroses eating away at the two couples centre-stage, former showgirls Sally and Phyllis and the stage-door johnnies, Buddy and Benjamin, whom they married. The genius of Sondheim and book-writer James Goldman is to intertwine and meld these two strands, building to a climax of ‘follies’ point numbers which become the expression of all that angst and heartache, one for each of the four, surprising, distinctive, appropriate and devastatingly revealing. The haunting of all the returnees by their younger selves, the girls in their gorgeous costumes and their stage door johnnies, acting out the past and observing their future, is another stroke of genius, another layer to this rich, complex show.

Years of revision by the creators and their work with successive creative teams have polished this multi-faceted gem. Director Dominic Cooke and his NT team work their own collective magic to delight and ravish. Cooke and choreographer Bill Deamer move an extraordinarily talented cast effortlessly through Vicki Mortimer’s ghost of a theatre, shabby rows of red velvet seats and make-up mirrors perching among piles of rubble – demolition already in progress as surely as the demolition of those youthful hopes and dreams.

Imelda Staunton and Janie Dee are dream casting for Sally and Phyllis; powerfully supported by Philip Quast’s Benjamin and Peter Forbes’ Buddy, they are first among equals in this genuine ensemble. All the Follies’ girls’ delicious solos, equally homage and pastiche get pitch-perfect interpretations. Dame Josephine Barstow yearns gloriously as Viennese operetta star Heidi Schiller, Dawn Hope’s honey tones ask thrillingly ‘Who’s That Woman?’, backed by the ghostly chorus helping the returnees to recall their mirror routine. Di Botcher makes ‘Broadway Baby’ a ruefully self-deprecating private moment in her old dressing room and Tracie Bennett’s ‘I’m Still Here’ is genuinely the story of survivor Carlotta Campion’s life told to a couple of chorus boys at the reunion.

Staunton’s obsessive, neurotic Sally, heartbreaking and disturbed in ‘Losing My Mind’ and Dee’s acid, knowing Sally, scintillating in ‘The Story of Lucy and Jessie’ (rightly restored here), are outstanding, beautifully supported by Zizi Strallen and Alex Young, telling as their younger selves.

Nicholas Skilbeck supervises the sizeable orchestra (of whom we get only a ghostly glimpse rear stage – though perhaps that was the intention) through Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, always an integral, satisfying element of Sondheim’s sound. Unmissable.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Johan Persson

Follies runs until Wednesday 3 January 2018. 7.30pm, from Sep 2pm (Sat & various Tue/Wed only; check website for details). £20-£60. National Theatre, SE1 9PX. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Broadcast live in cinemas in the UK and internationally Saturday 18 November as part of NT Live.

Review: The Knowledge ★★★★ – A funny heart-warming ride through pre-Uber London

Chief examiner Mr Burgess, played with thrilling comic cruelty by Steven Pacey, sets his latest cohort of four would-be London Taxi drivers the task of committing to memory all 320 routes, 15,842 streets and all places of interest on the way within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. “No taxi driver in no other city in no other country in the world has to know a fraction of what you have to know. And not many brain surgeons neither.” The late Jack Rosenthal’s 1979 play for TV exploring the impact of this almost impossible challenge (70% drop-out rate then and some 25,000 streets now) is adapted for the stage by Simon Block and directed with comic verve by Rosenthal’s wife for 30 years Maureen Lipman, who appeared in the TV drama.

It’s a challenge that takes over every aspect of the aspiring cabbies’ lives as well as those of wives and girlfriends. The sacrifices provide the dramatic tension and much of the comedy. Simon Block channels Jack Rosenthal’s ability to imbue what might otherwise be comic stereotypes with genuine warmth and humour by homing in on the self-knowledge his characters acquire along the way. Wisely he does not attempt to deal with the television version’s affectionate paean to the streets of London or to update it. The parallels with today’s struggles for the man on the street are evident.

Ex-Eastender James Alexandrou invests Jack-the-Lad Gordon with a swagger and cockiness that doesn’t get entirely beaten out of him, even by his long-suffering wife Brenda (Celine Abrahams, abrasively assertive). Ben Caplan’s funny, heartbreaking Ted, with his photographic memory and desire to keep up the family tradition of go-to droshky drivers, is the sure cert to get his Green Badge, encouraged by his loving, supportive wife Val, whom excellent Jenna Augen invests with touching eagerness. The ‘one most likely to fail but you know he won’t’ is Fabian Frankel’s engaging nebbich teenage Chris, who physically and metaphorically undergoes the greatest personal transformations, egged on by girlfriend Janet. Alice Felgate invests her with a wonderfully sympathetic no-nonsense briskness that warms the stage.

Louise Callaghan brings a defiant laddishness to chain-smoking Miss Stavely, the sole female candidate. She feels a tad underwritten, perhaps because as a proudly independent young woman in a man’s world, she has no partner, supportive or otherwise.

Mr Burgess’s torture chamber/office dominates Nicolai Hart-Hansen’s split-level stage as his efforts to force his examinees off the road by questioning them with inhalers stuck up his nostrils or doing press-ups dominate the action. “Compared to people, The Knowledge is a piece of marzipan. They mumble. They can’t hear you. They don’t know where they want to go. They get up both your nostrils”.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Scott Rylander

The Knowledge runs until Saturday 11 November 7.30pm, 2.30pm (Wed only), 3pm (Sat only). £17.50-£42.50. Charing Cross Theatre, WC2N 6NL. 084 4493 0650. http://charingcrosstheatre.co.uk