Bach and Sons-Bridge theatre

How socially distanced is it still, I got my reminder email today and it said you may now be sitting next to someone thought this is a gap and I note on the plan when I looked the seat next to me is available for sale. Also my reminder said you can't bring any food or drink in with you, are they really going to confiscate my water bottle?

Am rather assuming someone will get pinged before I actually get there but good to know.

Commercial theatre doesn't have to prove it's relevance. It just has to entertain an audience who will buy the tickets. That's literally all it has to do.

In any event The Bridge recently staged Sir David Hare's play about Covid which could hardly have been more relevant and I bet the audience for it was exactly the same middle-class educated elite who went to the Bach play and who subsequently discussed it at a dinner party (along the lines that they agreed with every point Sir David made). 

The NT recently changed their mission statement (or whatever they call it) to include a "relevance" requirement - which seems to be loosely interpreted by them as meaning "no comedies". 

Do you have to complete test and trace to get in please?

Got sorted in the end thanks. Wasn't wild about this, it was fine just nothing amazing after all this time out and I suddenly had a none distanced person next to me and that made me really jumpy.

Tell me what you like floorshow and then I'll probably go and yes that was good and that and be forced to admit I quite liked it. It might be that it wasn't the most stretching part for SRB and I've been spoilt in the past.

SRB was at least playing his parts when at the keyboard not just fumbling away at the ivories trying to mime convincingly.
If I were to nitpick, the elder son was underwritten but it didn't really need him, if anything the unseen children had a lot more weight.

tbh, I thought the 'mechanical rooster' was a Carry On-type cock joke, but maybe that's me.

This felt somewhere between BBC4 and Radio 3. There's a market for it, but maybe not here.

I did feel a little beaten around the head with the idea of entwining family members with musical forms, unresolved and harmonised, unresolved and harmonised and ... unresolved and harmonised.

In the end I lost focus and strangeness ensued; SRB in a Barogue Elton John period, SRB as the well-known chaotic father Boris Johnson. A confusing evening, more unresolved than harmonised.

I saw this at the Saturday matinée, and although the play tells too much and shows too little, there was just enough in this to make me glad I saw it.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Basically, if you pierce the lid of oodles and oodles of extraneous history, this play is the Parable of the Prodigal son.

In that story, the most captivating character from a dramatic point of view isn't God, who makes mysterious, impenetrable and potentially capricious choices, or the Prodigal son, who gets everything handed to him on a plate, but the Dutiful son, who does everything right, but still gets shafted.

That's where the interesting human emotions are, and for me, in this, all the compelling drama is with how Samuel Blenkin's dutiful son deals with being relentlessly sidelined and unloved by SRB's Bach.

Whenever that is the drama on stage, this show becomes exciting to watch. When it isn't, it's like being back at Uni having a history lecture.

SRB is luxury casting that this show doesn't deserve, as the script mostly requires him to be inactive and grumpy. That's not right in my books, as Russell Beale is a master of reacting on stage. Whether it's knowing malevolent reaction, as in Collaborators, or tragic overreaction, as in Timon of Athens, or comic hysteria, as in The Hothouse, or gently touching and modest under-playing, as in Temple, I have found SRB to be electric on stage, reacting to situations. But this script gives him nothing to show, only to tell, and it never sufficiently plugs him in.

At least he will soon get to return to The Lehman Trilogy, which is a wonderful and topical play for our times.

Weirdly, the best speech in this play goes to Bach's second wife, about her miscarriages, and the actor delivers it brilliantly, but the show includes the scene as just one more historical incident instead of dramatising the heck of everything in and around it.


Anyway, this play is worth seeing for Blenkin's portrayal of a son heroically (I felt) coping with family injustice. Also, if you have an exam coming up on Bach, see it.

3 stars, for me.

I enjoyed it a lot, but I also agree with most of Steve's review, especially about Blenkin's character. I didn't know much about Bach or baroque music, so I found the informational aspect of it very interesting. I went with a friend who used to be a professional musician and she thought it was very average with too much lecturing, so maybe it depends on your level of knowledge? We both agreed that SRB was underused.

Tonight's performance has been cancelled. The text didn't give more details, but an email should follow.

Edited to add details from the email:
"Despite thorough precautions in place at The Bridge, we have become aware of a suspected positive case of COVID-19 within the team working on Bach & Sons. To ensure the safety of our audiences and colleagues, we are cancelling the performance you are due to attend today.



You are entitled to an exchange, account credit or full refund."

And so you decided to save the credit for something else?