Tickets

Sharon D Clarke, eh? What force. And what a voice. In Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s musical – which started at Chichester last year before moving to Hampstead Theatre and now the West End – Clarke plays Caroline, a black maid for a white Jewish Louisiana family in 1963, stuck in a life of drudgery for $30 a week. As a single mother of four kids, it’s not enough. This domestic set-up is an unlikely one for a musical, and the character of Caroline is an unlikely lead. This is the brilliance of the show: Kushner burrows down into just two households, at a moment of huge global political change, to explore the realities of how change really comes about. Caroline’s life has ‘buried her alive’: you can feel the weariness in Clarke’s bones. Caroline is sore, and sorely tested when Rose (Lauren Ward), her well-intentioned but hideously patronising boss, tells Caroline to start keeping any – yes – change she finds in Rose’s stepson Noah’s laundry, to teach him the value of money. Caroline is affronted, but those quarters make all the difference. Indeed, it is this complete inability of the white folks to see this difference in need, accepting rank inequality as ‘the way things are’, that hits home so uncomfortably today. Kushner, drawing on his own childhood memories, continues to refuse the easy, obvious beats: there’s no tie-it-up-neatly moment of empowerment. At the end, Caroline’s struggle is still small – but it’s also huge. When Clarke, eyeballing us from the front of the

Make your friends green with envy with tickets to the world's favourite musical

Marianne Elliott’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy ‘Company’ was announced at what felt like some point in the late Cretaceous Period. And we knew from the get-go that the lead role of terminally single 35-year-old New Yorker Bobby (a man) would be gender switched to Bobbie (a woman), played by Rosalie Craig. The potential for this to be a novelty hung over it… but now that it’s here I’m going to cheerily declare that Elliott has found hidden depths in what was already a stone-cold classic. In 2018, when the borderline geriatric likes of Tom Cruise and Daniel Craig still regularly play sexy bachelors, the notion of a 35-year-old man being under any great pressure to settle down seems kind of quaint. But there is, of course, intense pressure for women to do so, before society deems them wanting for letting their youth and fertility run out. The nagging concerns heaped upon Bobbie for her singledom make total, crystal clear, perfectly realised sense. (NB Bobbie is straight, with the hopeless trio of lovers now men – a move that takes a certain misogynist sting out of the writing). ‘One is lonely and two is boring’ runs Sondheim’s most pithy summation of Bobbie’s dilemma, and it’s intentionally never resolved. Craig is immaculate as a hazy woman trapped in an existential funk. Her coupled-up friends have committed to things, and it hasn’t made them happy. So Bobbie remains an outsider in her own life, committed to nothing, a permanent glass of bourbon her