Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Should a man mollify a powerful, petulant leader who invites him to visit and then springs a trap? Or challenge him? That’s one of the questions running through Oliver Cotton’s play and it doesn’t take much of a stretch to spy contemporary resonances in it. The leader in this case, however, is the warmongering Frederick II of Prussia. The year is 1747. and the invited guest is Johann Sebastian Bach, the great composer, played as a man of profound and irascible integrity by a mighty, magnetic Brian Cox.When we first encounter Cox’s Bach he is rumbling around his house in Leipzig, enraged by Frederick’s invasion of Silesia and by the thuggish conduct of the army, and reluctant to take up the royal invitation. But his wife, Anna, who emerges as both warm and astute in Nicole Ansari-Fox’s portrayal, urges strategy: music needs patronage — and besides, Bach’s son Carl is at court.So it is that Bach and the play move to the grandeur of Potsdam, where Bach is tricked into a musical challenge: improvising a fugue upon a near impossible theme written by the king. In Cotton’s fictionalised account of this real-life meeting, events brew to a showdown in which the composer confronts the monarch with an appalling example of his troops’ brutality. That settling of scores, when it comes, is gripping, with Stephen Hagan’s king, glistening ominously in an all-silver suit, shocked and compelled by the moral clarity and rage of the older man. The play is rich with concerns, levelling pragmatism against principle, faith against atheism, certainty against doubt, and touching on the depravity of war, the difficulties of making art under duress and the dangers of speaking truth to power. But despite such promising material, it takes a strangely long time to get anywhere. The first act meanders by, and the second offers a very slow crescendo to the climactic face-off. Granted, we need to establish the backbiting swirling about the court: a trio of foppish rival composers (played by Christopher Staines, Toby Webster and Matthew Romain) preen and fawn and draw Bach’s son (a touchingly anxious Jamie Wilkes) into an ignominious wager on his father’s ability. But both the script and Trevor Nunn’s production would benefit from tightening and brisking up. There’s also some fairly unconvincing harpsichord miming and the show could make much richer use of live music. The tonal shifts are abrupt too, jumping from a more naturalistic opening scene to something closer to a satirical period comedy at the court, with the result that characters such as Voltaire, played with flourish by Peter De Jersey, lack the subtlety and depth that could bring real heft to the issues. Cox is great throughout, bringing pathos and passion to this ageing, mortal man with a transcendent gift. But sadly the play itself only sometimes hits the high notes.★★★☆☆To April 26, trh.co.uk
