“The Score” at Theatre Royal Haymarket
Simon Jenner in the West End
28 February 2025
Spring 1747. God-fearing late baroque father of music tells truth to the atheist son of the Enlightenment. Only the son happens to be Frederick the Great and enlightenment goes so far. Two major plays about J. S. Bach in four years: Nina Raine’s Bach & Sons was staged at the Bridge Theatre in 2021; Oliver Cotton’s The Score premiered at Theatre Royal Bath in 2023 and now transfers to the West End. They cover the same period with the same kind of Bach. Do we need both?
Jamie Wilke and Brian Cox.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
With Brian Cox’s dyspeptic Bach, we encounter a more emphatic, less mournful but more warmly demonstrative “Old Bach” than Raine’s and Simon Russell Beale’s. And a different Carl, his most gifted son who worked for many years for Frederick, who here receives more credit: for being the composer of genius who launched the classical style. Though in Cotton’s play strains between the two are ironed out. Carl (or C.P.E.) Bach deserves his own play. Jamie Wilkes embodies troubled loyalty, a courtier’s quick thinking and exasperation at his plain-speaking father. Cotton’s decided the historical Bach, always in conflict with Leipzig authorities, wouldn’t hold back if Frederick gives him licence to speak.
It’s a production and play that aesthetically might have been written at any time since the 1950s – though snappier dialogue and swift pacing makes it feel contemporary. With an ingenious set and period costumes by Robert Jones that drops screens and shifts harpsichords on a revolve (there’s a clavichord too, but it’s made to sound precisely the same) this feels oak-solid but not in the least wooden. There’s not a moment attention or energy drops here.
Bach’s summoned by Frederick, who greatly admires him (he did to a degree in reality). The nature of his admiration isn’t really explored, and given his actual treatment of Bach’s music, faintly puzzling. The real clash between the two hinges on, first, Bach’s outrage at the horrific behaviour of Frederick’s troops in Leipzig. And secondly their discussion of music and faith, which furnishes their best encounter right at the end of the play.
Nicole Ansari-Cox’s warm, warning Anna suffers Cox’s rebellious Frederick-avoiding Bach, and is given some sudden alternative future when Bach declares she could have been a great opera singer (we see her though not singing but synching a clavichord). Pointing out she was birthing and bringing up their children gives a rare glimpse of women empowered to speak at all. Happily one other woman does.
Jamie Wilkes, Brian Cox, Juliet Garricks.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
The play’s set around a historical event: Frederick challenges Bach to improvise initially a three-part fugue on his own tricksy theme, impossible to harmonize. “Unfugueable,” as one of the court composers declares. And they should know, they’ve embellished it for Frederick. The laying of a wager Carl takes up provides the drama (including incarceration should he warn his father), and its resolution couched in the confrontation between Frederick and Bach. And another where Bach explains the meaning of Frederick’s darkly chromatic C minor theme. It’s the play’s clincher, ranging over all three-part elements: music, faith, and who’s master.
When Cox’s weary 62-year-old, already going blind Kapellmeister arrives, he’s also confronted with the three court musicians, all substantial composers; his riposte is a blinder: he admiringly plays snatches of each composer’s music, noting when and where he heard or read it. Frederick’s entrance is adroitly managed late on in Act One.
The trio deride Carl’s assertion that his father is the greatest musician in the world, but are clearly nervous now. Chess-champion Quantz (Christopher Staines), eldest and appropriately most Machiavellian, writes endless flute pieces for Frederick, which the amateur flautist much prefers to Carl’s. He also delights in an atheist joke with outflung arms, his set-piece. There’s opera-composing Graun (Matthew Romain, a twittering, almost balletic performance) and the youngest Benda (Toby Webster, wittily puppyish) who, after Carl, pioneered both classical style and a musical dynasty that still exists. The unexpected climax of all this shows why Terry King is fight director.
Stephen Hagan’s elegant Prussian monarch has a backstory of harsh discipline: his own sexuality and terrible punishment has morphed into a vision of a greater Prussia, ever expanding, ever more efficient. Future history’s hinted. Hagan’s occasionally loud. Does he need to be? The world will hush for him. Hagan though carries Frederick like an elegant, rearing statue: it’s convincing. There’s a touch of the Amadeus brat about him, which seems ideal.
Frederick has “invited” exile Voltaire (Peter de Jersey) to attend him. De Jersey, in a mischievous flourish or three, shows Voltaire to be no pushover but extremely flexible, managing to defend Bach (he’s also a huge admirer apparently) by getting him out of verbal scrapes as best he may. There’s more work for him in Act Two, though he’s a little underused. It would indeed be a challenge to work in a profounder role: Bach’s world and his don’t in truth meet.
Servant Emilia (Juliet Garricks) gives a witty performance as truth-teller, with a heart-warming conclusion. She’s the only substantial female role at court. Here Emilia’s given her own organ recital. A door opens for Garricks suffused with light – Johanna Town’s lighting signature. Equally there’s exquisite effects on Bach’s bare pea-green-walled home, and shuttered windows. Composer and sound designer Sophie Cotton studs Bach’s music with snatches of her own to link it. The only discord is the difference between real playing and synched simulation on the harpsichord, which seems too piped.
Cox bestrides Bach and the play, alternating sudden warmth with Carl – Wilkes is particularly affecting in filial piety – and harumphs of mean temperament. Cox growls through a fugue of anxiety much as he picks out the bass notes as solution to Frederick’s fiendish theme. His sudden recognitions – of Emilia’s relations, of Voltaire, of family members – is like the sun parting rather stormy brows. Cox’s nuance of Bach is memorable: his doubts encompass everything but God, and even then ones he can’t entertain. Ansari-Cox, Wilkes, and Hagan match his craggy energy in different ways, and make memorable theatre with it.
As a double portrait and double conflict of composer and ruler, The Score carries uneasy lessons in how absolutism has only swapped wigs for caps; but also how at least the wigs could wield a flute, know a score when they saw it – and flinch.
