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James Corden needs to be superlatively good to carry this show: make no mistake, Francis Hensahll, the “one man” of the title, is onstage virtually the whole time, and he carries a lot of plot and jokes on his shoulders. Lucky, then, that Corden imbues Francis with the energy to make him a  rogue while adding just enough pathos to keep him likeable. He is an extremely talented clown, adept at manipulating his audience and making sure we are rooting for him as he begs, borrows and steals his way from rags to, well, not riches, but at least a good dinner and a trip to Majorca.

The audience in the Lyttleton on a Sunday afternoon was kind to Corden – perhaps a little too ready to laugh: there is a tendency to be prepped to laugh when we know we are seeing a comedy and that a well-known comedian is in the title role. This can mean that the jokes don’t necessarily have to hold up to much scrutiny, they just need to be delivered by the right person. As I say, I have no doubt that Corden was the right man for the job, but I am not convinced that the jokes would fare as well in less capable hands.

Richard Bean has taken Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters and dragged it into the 1960s, complete with Beatnik actor-wannabe, a beehive-sporting proponent of Women’s Lib and a wonderful be-suited skiffle band. There are moments when the script could be sharper, but it has some nice flourishes and enough genuinely funny nods to the time to keep the punters happy. Dolly (Suzie Toase) declares at one point that in the next 20 years there will be a woman in 10 Downing Street and that caring for the poor, compassion and an end to foreign wars cannot be far behind. It’s adeptly done, but overall Bean’s script is not quite as deft as it could have been.

His characters remain a little two-dimensional, too. Pauline (Claire Lams) is thick. That’s about all we learn about her, through no fault of either Lams herself or Nicholas Hytner’s direction. Her wayward fiance, Alan (Daniel Rigby) is an Actor with a capital A, and flounces a lot. He is very funny, but  rather a slender character. Diminutive Jemima Rooper as Rachel/Roscoe is genuinely intimidating, and plays with a lightness of touch missing from some of the other cast members – she doesn’t become a caricature despite not being given a great deal to work with. Oliver Chris as Stanley is furiously channeling Hugh Laurie’s Bertie Wooster for much of the show, with a few more boarding-school jokes thrown in for good measure. He is hilarious, but one can’t help but wonder what the fiesty Rachel sees in his ugger-bugger Stanley.

Grant Olding’s musical interludes are wonderful: they set the mood nicely and provide entertainment during the scene changes. However, they become increasingly frequent and more bizarre as the show goes on, until it inexplicably turns into a musical in the last five minutes, as if Bean didn’t know what else to do with his story and demanded a big ensemble number as a finale. The cast have serviceable voices, including Corden, but it all gets a bit silly towards the end. The skiffle band, however, are great – good musicians and personable performers, and I enjoyed Corden’s turn on the metalophone wearing a rather natty fez.

The piece is predictable enough, but Bean/Goldoni work in enough clever set-pieces to keep it pacy, expertly directed by Hytner. The humour is slapstick in the extreme, and the fourth wall is broken frequently and with impunity. All-in-all it’s a silly, cheerful vehicle for Corden to clown – which he does superlatively well.

One Man, Two Guvnors is playing at the National Theatre until 19th September. See the website for more information.

There was a lot of talk at Shift Happens earlier this month about innovation and making mistakes, with soundbites such as “we learn more from our mistakes than our successes” flying around. Attractive though the rhetoric sounds, I wonder if it stands up to scrutiny. For a start, it ignores the question of funding: how can you justify asking for (more) money if your previous project flopped?

Failure is an expensive luxury. If you lose the confidence of funders, audience or staff – or, worse yet, all three – the way forward is less clear. NT Live! can run in the hope of widening audiences and eventually breaking even, because the National Theatre receives millions of pounds from Arts Council England annually, has an ongoing sponsorship deal with Travelex, received additional support from Nesta, and can absorb the loss, even though each broadcast costs around £150,000. For most artists and arts organisations, though, no matter how fantastic an idea is, a financial failure makes it harder to convince anyone to fund your next project – whether that’s Ace, sponsors or philanthropists. However eager the audience may be to experience a risky, exciting, innovative project, it has to get off the ground first.

Even those with the most genuine and generous philanthropic leanings might find their patience and pockets tested by failure. And, in the current economic climate, it feels somewhat irresponsible to be encouraging people to make mistakes, however useful the lessons might be. The risks that pay off may be worthwhile, but the risks that don’t could end careers. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, but it is a fact. The problem, in part, is the tick-box mentality associated with public funding, which requires you to know the outcomes of your project before you start.

Depressingly, this is borne out by a survey conducted by ArtsProfessional magazine and released last week, assessing the financial outlook for the sector. More than 500 people working across the arts and cultural sector responded, with around one in five self-identifying as the leader of an arts organisation. The survey revealed that 41% of respondents will be programming more “popular” work, and 37% will be reducing the amount of “challenging” work that they commission.

Risk in the arts is usually a good thing. Risky means creative, edgy or innovative. Can an artist who does not take risks be interesting? Maybe not, but this is at odds with the demands of public funders. Creative risk is good, but financial risk is bad. Let’s hope that risk-aversion is not contagious, and that those who are not planning to reduce the amount of challenging work they programme hold their nerve. Otherwise, audiences could have a dull few years ahead.

This article first appeared on the Guardian theatre blog.

For all the furore surrounding the premiere of Caryl Churchill’s new play at the Royal Court, this was more storm in a teacup than full-blown hurricane. Churchill has drawn some pretty clear battle lines, not only through the title of the play, but also through its epigraph: a play for Gaza. Not about Gaza, for Gaza. I’m not going to get into a pro/anti-Israel debate, but I think there needs to be a clear distinction between being anti-Israel, anti-violence, anti-militarism, or anti-Semitic. ‘Seven Jewish Children’ is firmly in the first three camps, but emphatically not in the last. More to the point, even if it were (and I am speaking as a Jew, here), it should still be given theatrical space. I firmly believe that theatre should have the same freedom of expression as the press, and no-one locks up Paul Dacre for inciting racial hatred. Calls for Churchill’s play to be banned miss the point, just as accusations that Nicholas Hytner’s ‘England People Very Nice’ is racist miss the point. Seeing something objectionable on stage does not translate directly into real life. If that were true, then the knife crime in Romeo and Juliet would be as much as cause for concern as the (possibly offensive) stereotypes currently on stage at the National. Censorship is foolish, and these two plays are a perfect case in point: the publicity whipped up by complaints and accusations has ensured sell-out runs for ‘England’, and Churchill’s play has been eagerly taken up by companies across the country for interpretation and performance.

The free tickets scheme for under-26s launches on Monday. My colleague and I are already plotting our assault on the website, and have every intention of getting as many freebies as is humanly possible. I will be blogging on our experiences – how easy/hard it is to actually get hold of tickets, how different theatres are handling the scheme, whether what we see is any good – on the ArtsProfessional website, and as usual, would welcome comments and information on other people’s experiences, too.

I am not filled with hope at the moment, I have to say. Call me a cynic, but there’s just not enough money behind it to give away tickets without damaging theatres’ revenue. I know that makes me hypocritical for using and abusing the system, but it’s free! And I’ve only not been a student for sixth months, and free stuff makes me happy. Very happy. I’ve noticed already, though, that the Young Vic are limiting people to one booking per year (although you can book up to six tickets at a time, provided each ticket goes to a named under-26 who turns up on the night with ID), and The National’s link from the Arts Council’s website doesn’t work and its own website strangely carries no mention of it. The National, the RSC and the Young Vic all already do their own cheap ticket deals (The National’s Travelex tickets are a tenner, and available to anyone, the RSC do £5 tickets for every show on a first-come first-served basis with at least ten available on the day, and the Young Vic offer £5 to Southwark residents and £10 to students and under-26s anyway), and it will be interesting to see whether these have more or fewer takers. I hope that people who try and book a freebie and miss out will be tempted to book for a small fee anyway, but we shall see.

I’m slightly annoyed that I’ve already booked, for real money, almost everything that I want to see at participating theatres in the next few months, but I only have myself to blame. There’s some good stuff coming up at the National, and a free ticket makes the prospect of paying the train fare to London and dashing to catch the last train home again much more appealing. I’m still upset that the only venue in Cambridge that’s participating is The Junction, when everything good seems to be at the Arts Theatre, especially given that the Arts Theatre’s student/young person reductions are pitiful and never seem to apply to anything I want to see. On a tangential note, the worst culprit for student deals that I have come across is the Theatre Royal, Bath, which takes a quid off prices. A whole quid. Unsurprisingly, it is not offering freebies, either.

This was a play that was almost too good for its own good. One needs something to look at if the play is dull or the acting poor, but no one could call this greatest of tragedies boring, and the acting outshone the bronzed set. The queasily tilted and revolving stage detracted from the sheer horror and power of the story. Ralph Fiennes’ charted Oedipus’ crushing realisation that he cannot escape his fate with style. His cocky Oedipus is gradually reduced to an animalistic howl of pain that re-echoes round the Olivier and cannot fail to move. Tireseis, played by Alan Howard, was unfailing in the mesmerising power of knowledge. His lisping, singsong voice was creepily effective, and his neat, bespectacled blindness uncomfortably foreshadowed the brutal and bloody portrayal of Oedipus’ self-inflicted blinding. His laughter made the idea that Oedipus could escape his fate laughable. The only woman in the piece, Jocasta, played by Clare Higgins (apart from a wordless sight of Antigone and Ismene to create a pathetic still of guilty man clutching innocent child at the very end) more than held her own. In amongst the chorus of suited older men she was fierce and loving and tender – uncomfortably motherly even as wife. Her realisation of who she was and what she’d done was heartbreaking. The idea that as a woman she had already lost a child (Oedipus) and husband (Laius) and then lost both again in discovering Oedipus’ identity was really hammered home. This was woman twice broken-hearted.

Creon is one of the less developed characters in the play, and I had a sense that he was struggling to understand why his character did some of the things that he did. This made some of them curiously unsatisfying, but then the Greek’s didn’t exactly go in for realism, and he could only work with the given script. The script lacked a strong sense of itself – approaching such a classic text I suppose one is torn between presenting Sophocles’ immortal words and stamping one’s own mark on it. This translation veered between archaic, almost Shakespearean diction (“blood will have blood” – someone should tell Macbeth that…) and much more modern, colloquial language. Either one is fine by my book, but make a decision and stick to it. Both together jarred. There were times when I wondered why the actors hadn’t rebelled and refused to say some of the clumsier lines. Also, on a personal quibble, the line “I am woe, I am agony, I am Oedipus” was replaced with “You know who I am”, which borders on sacrilege.

The play has spadefuls of dramatic irony, and with every curse that Oedipus heaped upon his own unwitting head the pantomimic desire to shout at him (he’s [behind] you!) was almost overwhelming. I controlled myself, fear not. The glittering set contrasted oddly with the National’s standard costume of plain black suits. This made the chorus into one ineffectual, indistinguishable mob. There were moments of course when the mob was needed. And there were moments when one wanted to knock their heads together. The music again sat oddly, with the chorus bursting into a capalla close-harmony, often prayers or lamentations – goodness knows there were enough moments that called for both. The noise itself was innocuous enough, but it was a mistake to have speaking over the singing, as words got lost. As with everything apart from the acting, it seemed an unnecessary decoration. The story is powerful enough and well acted enough to stand alone. I wanted Peter Brook to burst in the put them all in a white box. The phenomenal story and acting make everything else pale into insignificance and became a distraction.

This was woe, this was agony, this was Oedipus. Just not in so many words.

Director: Melly Still

Based on the book by Jamila Gavin, adapted for stage by Helen Edmundson.

Those who perform at London’s National Theatre are accustomed to performing in front of a full house, so all credit to the cast for performing their first preview as though the place was packed. Given that the show doesn’t officially open until November 15th the audience was sizable but quite restless, which given how young most of the cast were makes their professionalism all the more admirable. Particularly of note was Akiya Henry, although she only appeared in the second half she really made her presence felt, without stealing focus from the others. For such a diminutive person her command of the stage, especially when alone, was impressive, and she was powerfully moving without being melodramatic. All of the young cast members managed to avoid melodrama, something that cannot be said for all their adult counterparts. Paul Ritter was brilliantly nasty as Otis Gardiner the Coram Man, and Bertie Carvel was excellent as the grown-up Alexander, but Eve Matheson was rather too hysterical as Mrs Millcote. She did not manage to pitch the dramatic moments right; they were overplayed and unnecessarily frantic given that they did not greatly contribute to the play as a whole.

For what is ostensibly a children’s show, ‘Coram Boy’ was quite spectacularly unpleasant in places, and not in a gleefully gruesome way that might be enjoyed by some children. The discovery of numerous dead babies buried in the woods was fully described on stage using puppets to represent the babies –and bits of babies- that were exhumed. While I appreciate that children can enjoy the macabre and being scared, especially in the odd unreality of a theatre, the acting and action is so well done and so convincing that the National might have problems marketing this as family Christmas entertainment. Disney it isn’t. The other problem with offering this as a family show is that is doesn’t have a traditionally happy ending, I won’t spoil the story, but even though this production has tidied up the ending a little it is still relatively sad. What was unsentimental in the book has become rather too sugary on stage, perhaps as compensation for the unexpectedly nasty scenes in the first half. The impact of the return of the lost son to his family is lessened by Edmundson’s changing of preceding events –much of the suspense is removed.

Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of Jamila Gavin’s excellent story ‘Coram Boy,’ directed by Melly Still, stayed mostly true to Gavin’s plot, even retaining snatches of the original dialogue. Edmundson has naturally changed certain points to make the story work better on stage, but while I understand the writer’s need to make her presence felt on the story, some of the details that she did choose to change struck a rather odd note, making the reasonably complicated plot harder to follow rather than clarifying things. For example, two characters that are killed off rather violently in the book were allowed to live in Edmundson’s adaptation. If she were generally softening the nastiness of the story to make it more accessible I could understand this decision, but given that there are far worse moments that have not been culled and that she has actually made some scenes more unpleasant it seemed a redundant move. For those who have read the book it is vaguely irritating, and for those who haven’t it must seem rather farcical that this particular character is dramatically stabbed but is apparently unscathed in the next scene. Personally, anything that shatters the fragile suspension of disbelief that is the theatre, whether is someone rustling sweet wrappers or a jarringly odd moment on stage, is intensely annoying. Fortunately, this moment came right at the end of the play, and the rest of it was great.

The music that accompanied the action was excellent, a live choir and string septet greatly heightened the atmosphere. Handel (Nicholas Tizzard) is both a character in the play and the composer of the ‘background’ music, I use ‘background’ for lack of a better word because the music is integral both to the story and the atmosphere. Strategic use of music from the Messiah was at times truly tragic; ‘Unto us a child is born’ while babies are being unearthed was incredibly powerful. Its recurrence throughout the play fitted excellently into the plot and served to re-emphasise the loss that mothers felt when they had to give up their children to the seemingly benevolent ‘Coram Man’ in the vain hope that he would deliver them safely to the hospital.

The Coram Hospital, named for its founder Thomas Coram, was established in 1739 to take care of some of the waifs and strays of London. It became an urban legend of its time, a place where unwanted babies could grow up safely and get some education, eventually being apprenticed out to honest respectable tradesmen. However, the stigma of illegitimacy called for secrecy when scared mothers entrusted their offspring to strangers in the hope of giving them a chance in life, which meant that it was an easy system to abuse. Paul Ritter’s sinister Coram Man exploits desperate mothers for his own gain. The play tells the story of 2 sets of friends, and Alexander (Anna Madeley), cathedral choir boys, and later Aaron, Alexander’s son (also Anna Madeley) and Toby (Akiya Henry), Coram boys, caught up in the deceit, secrecy and betrayal of estrangement and illegitimacy. ‘Coram Boy’ is a romp through London and Gloucester, taking in murder, music, hanging, dancing, love, betrayal, evil and angels, via the slave trade, Handel’s Messiah and lots of small boys (played by girls).