PATRICK MARMION reviews The Score: Succession’s Logan Roy plays a softer tone like Bach

The score (Theatre Royal, Bath)

Pronunciation: beautifully composed.

Assessment:

He has a rough face that looks like it was carved out of rock with a blunt chisel. And it’s a face that has played some pretty bad guys in its time: Logan Roy, the monstrous media mogul in the TV series “Succession” and the evil CIA puppeteer in the films “The Bourne Identity.”

But in Bath we get to see a very different side of Brian Cox: sad, tender and actually quite sweet like the great German composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

In a piece written by fellow actor and classical guitarist Oliver Cotton, Cox plays the musician in his autumn years when he is summoned to the court of King Frederick II of Prussia.

Apparently the king wanted to hear Bach play and asked him about his harpsichord collection. But he also wanted to catch him with a sneaky musical challenge.

At least Cotton’s script for the first half consists of cheerful, costumed banter, including an amusing appearance by the radical French philosopher Voltaire. But then it is about the musical challenge and Bach’s courage to confront the king about the fact that his army is allowed to rape and pillage.

Actor Brian Cox became a household name for his role as Logan Roy in the hit TV series Succession

There are echoes of the horrors of war in Russia and the Middle East, but the piece also deals with questions of faith and Bach’s belief in divine inspiration. Voltaire says, “Life is a shipwreck, but we must sing in the lifeboats.”

It’s a fairly leisurely stroll for Cox, and Trevor Nunn’s wonderful direction allows his leading man to spend much of his time on stage. But that doesn’t mean Cox doesn’t have power. His rich tenor voice glows like a homely fire and emits a strange spark of wonder in his falsetto. And he feels perfectly comfortable with his real wife Nicole Ansari-Cox, who plays Bach’s historical wife Anna.

The acting is consistently extravagant, with Peter De Jersey as Voltaire making sport of courtly manners. Matthew Burns plays Bach’s son Carl, who remains loyal to his father but also fears for his fortune, in an impressively candid manner. And Stephen Hagan, as King Frederick, is a rich but formidable warlord, despite looking like a drag queen in his silver satin and powdered wig.

The production is also impressive, thanks to Robert Jones’ design, with a fine collection of harpsichords, a series of backdrops with imperial portraits and a large pastoral tapestry.

It may be useful to distinguish your fugues from your toccatas (I don’t), but even without expertise this is a beautiful dream of regal rebuke, told from an admiring modern perspective.

To sing, even if the scripts are a bit preachy…

By Georgina Brown

Chorus boy (Bristol Old Vic)

Pronunciation: Harmony until the music stops

Assessment:

Nancy Medina’s first production as artistic director of Bristol Old Vic opens with a stirring gospel song sung by the choir of an all-black American boarding school. Unusual and extraordinary, but everything else in this school hall is strangely conventional, with boys in jackets and the headmaster in mortarboards.

In Medina’s well-staged production, the singing is breathtaking; but the writing between them remains disconcertingly flat

It’s also – sadly – ​​unsurprisingly intended that Bobby (a roving Alistair Nwachukwu) hiss “Cissy” and “Faggot” against unapologetically gay soloist Pharus (a convincing Terique Jarrett).

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy covers familiar ground: boys being boys, running, bullying, loving and hating each other… Pharus raises a more original cultural theme about black history in the classroom when he asks what spirituality means today. Are they just balm for the soul or can they give impetus and lead to an Obama-like cry for freedom: “Yes we can”? However, this argument is quickly disappearing.

In Medina’s well-staged production, the singing is breathtaking; but the writing between them remains disconcertingly flat.