It’s not a knockout but Aspects Of Love is an absorbing evening full of great songs

Aspects Of Love  

Southwark Playhouse, London                             Until Feb 9, 2hrs 40mins

Rating:

Sandwiched between The Phantom Of The Opera and Sunset Boulevard, 1989’s Aspects Of Love was by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s standards a modest success, notable for launching Michael Ball’s career and for Love Changes Everything, which reached No 2 in the charts.

Roger Moore was to have topped the bill, but sadly it never happened: dear old Rog took fright when he realised that he’d have to act, sing and, worse still, do matinees.

With lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart, the show is based on David Garnett’s 1955 minor novella about bed-hopping bohemians, spanning 17 years and flitting from Paris to the Pyrenees. 

Aspects Of Love is all about passion - not least for the pleasures of the vine - centering on young lovers Rose and Alex (Kelly Price and Felix Mosse, above)

Aspects Of Love is all about passion – not least for the pleasures of the vine – centering on young lovers Rose and Alex (Kelly Price and Felix Mosse, above)

It’s all about passion, not least for the pleasures of the vine. Aspects remains the oenophile composer’s most plastered work.

When teenage Alex falls in love with the broke actress Rose, they embark on a steamy affair. Up crops Alex’s uncle George (an artist and forger), who also falls for the actress.

The triangle is finally squared when George and Rose’s daughter Jenny gives her young heart to Alex (the sort of cellophane guy who would have been played a generation before by Michael York).

It's the women who make Jonathan O'Boyle's small-scale production work with Madalena Alberto terrific as Giulietta...

and Eleanor Walsh a truly heartbreaking Jenny

It’s the women who make Jonathan O’Boyle’s small-scale production work with Madalena Alberto terrific as Giulietta (left) and Eleanor Walsh a truly heartbreaking Jenny (right)

With just two pianos but plenty of emotion, it’s the women who make Jonathan O’Boyle’s small-scale production work. 

Kelly Price is commanding and fabulously elegant as the not terribly likeable Rose (the costumes are by Jason Denvir). Madalena Alberto is terrific as George’s mistress Giulietta.

Eleanor Walsh is truly heartbreaking as the young Jenny, who falls for Felix Mosse’s uncompelling Alex, to the envy of her doting father (played with a rather pervy gleam by Jerome Pradon).

It’s not knockout. But it is an absorbing evening and a reminder that some of the show’s songs – eg, Seeing Is Believing and Anything But Lonely – are among Lloyd Webber’s best.

Approaching Empty

Kiln Theatre                                                                         Until Feb 2, 2hrs 20mins 

Rating:

This show had me thinking about a taxi home even at the interval. Ironic that, as the play turns out to have been written by a talented former cab driver, Ishy Din, who apparently wrote his hit play Snookered in between fares.

It’s set in a Middlesbrough cab rank on the day Margaret Thatcher died in 2013. The phones are pretty silent and the stage is dominated by a vast street map of the city. 

The manager is middle-aged Asian Mansha (Kammy Darweish), a genial but feckless leftie who loathes Mrs Thatcher – unlike all the cabbies I’ve ever listened to.

Rina Fatania as Sameena and Kammy Darweish as Mansha in Approaching Empty, a painfully dull play set in a Middlesbrough cab rank that will have you wishing for a taxi home

Rina Fatania as Sameena and Kammy Darweish as Mansha in Approaching Empty, a painfully dull play set in a Middlesbrough cab rank that will have you wishing for a taxi home

Mansha decides to use his meagre capital to buy – implausibly without checking its finances – an ailing business off his old friend Raf, a ruthless shark and an avowed Thatcher fan. 

Co-investors in this unlikely wheeze are his son-in-law Sully (Nicholas Prasad) and a feisty ex-convict (Rina Fatania, enjoyably gobby) who’s going straight. Her story – as a beaten wife who gave as good as she got – suggests a more interesting play waiting to be written.

Things liven up when the business, wholly predictably, turns out to have dodgy accounts. Recrimination is heaped on Raf (a sinister, spectral creep nicely played by Nicholas Khan) as assorted chickens come home to roost.

But it’s too little, too late. Where there should be some sharp comedy drama, you instead get nostalgia and lectures on the evils of Thatcherism. If you thought cabbies were bores, try this.

 

Coming Clean

Trafalgar Studios, London                                              Until Feb 2, 2hrs 15mins 

Rating:

The late Kevin Elyot wrote the award-winning My Night With Reg and screenplays of Agatha Christie for telly. This was his 1982 breakthrough. 

Set in a grimy north London flat – you can hear the actors’ feet sticking to the carpet – it’s about a gay couple who’ve been together for five years. All is (mostly) roses, until they hire a young cleaner, a handsome, out-of-work actor.

When Tony comes home early from a weekend away, he catches his partner Greg with the near-naked male char – and they clearly haven’t been dusting together. 

Coming Clean revs up the tired conventions of your average West End adultery drama. The cast is all good but Lee Knight (above with Elliot Hadley) is particularly memorable as Tony

Coming Clean revs up the tired conventions of your average West End adultery drama. The cast is all good but Lee Knight (above with Elliot Hadley) is particularly memorable as Tony

In a superbly written scene, Tony’s reaction to this infidelity (he bats it away with small talk) has a depth-charge effect. Indeed, a palpable fear of loneliness hangs over the proceedings, one of the hallmarks of this intriguing period piece.

The all-male play exploits and revs up the tired conventions of your average West End adultery drama, turning into a male study of human vulnerability. 

Of a good cast, Lee Knight is memorable as Tony, the struggling writer who is cuckolded. Stanton Plummer-Cambridge is his dour, cheating other half Greg, and Tom Lambert is the butter-wouldn’t-melt, pretty-boy cleaner. 

The comedy – and it’s pretty filthy – is supplied by a chatterbox ‘scene queen’ who, in sitcom fashion, pops in from next door: he’s played with camp relish by Elliot Hadley. 

The soundtrack features the bop disco of the early Eighties, in the days when lager was 90p a pint and shortly before the terror of Aids descended. In fact, the final scene has an encounter with a German stranger that seems thoroughly ominous in retrospect.

Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher does justice to a fine play brimming with confidence and early promise.

  

Witness For The Prosecution

County Hall, London                                                     Until Sept 1, 2hrs 15mins

Rating:

More than a year into its run, Agatha Christie’s courtroom is still packing them in. Indeed, this smash hit has just got better – there’s a superb new cast.

But the star remains the old London County Council’s circular debating chamber, all marble columns and mahogany benches. A perfect stand-in for the pomp and flummery of the Old Bailey.

Things don’t look good for Leonard Vole (Daniel Solbe). He is accused of smashing in the skull of a rich lady he befriended. As he is the chief beneficiary of her will, the hangman awaits. 

Over a year into its run, Witness For The Prosecution is better than ever. Daniel Solbe plays defendant Leonard Vole (above), who is accused of murdering a rich woman he befriended

Over a year into its run, Witness For The Prosecution is better than ever. Daniel Solbe plays defendant Leonard Vole (above), who is accused of murdering a rich woman he befriended

His only hope is his laser-brain defence counsel, Sir Wilfrid Robarts QC. Cue actor Jasper Britton, tossing arms and hair, wing collars poised for take-off. He rips into his part with relish and explosive energy.

Red herrings shoal around Vole’s dodgy foreign wife (Emma Rigby sporting an outrageous German accent), who turns against her husband in the witness box. 

William Chubb is Sir Wilfrid’s formidable, tetchy opponent, and Christopher Ravenscroft the dulcet-toned judge.

Emma Rigby (above) is Vole's German wife, who unsurprisingly betrays her husband in the witness box. It's a gripping production but the star remains the setting of London's County Hall

Emma Rigby (above) is Vole’s German wife, who unsurprisingly betrays her husband in the witness box. It’s a gripping production but the star remains the setting of London’s County Hall

Occasionally we leave the court: Sir Wilfrid makes a rather Holmesian expedition to the East End to meet a mystery woman at The Grapes pub (today owned by Ian McKellen).

Lucy Bailey’s gripping production – with eerie sound effects by Mic Pool and designs by William Dudley – reverberates with imaginative flair. The ending you might not believe. But the show still stands accused of being London’s guiltiest pleasure. 

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk