Review: THE SCORE, Starring Brian Cox

Transferring from a successful run in Bath a few years ago, Oliver Cotton wants to marry politics and art to work his way up to the encounter between an ageing Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick II of Prussia. The marketing makes it out to be an explosive meeting between church and state, between a god-fearing, scripture-quoting composer and an atheist, belligerent, ruthless monarch.

That’s not exactly how it goes and the theatricality of the event is rather underwhelming. Trevor Nunn directs Brian Cox in a lengthy and inconsistent script that swiftly turns into a vehicle for anecdotal politics and bite-size philosophy. Too long into the action, we discover that the catalyst is Bach’s indomitable rage. He found out that a blind young girl was brutally raped by the military and he chooses to hold the king accountable.

Cotton introduces Bach as a man who cares - about his family, about his country, and about the inevitable hellfire that’s waiting to punish everybody for their wrongdoings. Will this be a lesson in empathy for Brian Cox? He’s been under fire in recent weeks for the views he shared in an interview for The i Paper. The actor revealed that he “Never found [his very close friend] Kevin Spacey abusive,” so why would the disgraced actor deserve to be cast out of the industry after he faced several very serious allegations of a sexual nature? “How dare you cancel anybody?” he asked the interviewer in a line that sounds like something Logan Roy, the coarse patriarch of his now concluded series Succession, would say. Not the best publicity in the run-up to the opening of a fairly boring play in the West End. 

Nunn breaks with contemporary custom and goes full period. His beloved drum revolve moves the painted backgrounds and lavish set pieces of Robert Jones’s design, which are indisputably gorgeous. The ornate rooms, though stripped down to a few essential elements, look straight out of a Menzel. Jones’s costumes are equally rich, featuring luxurious brocades and perfectly accurate ensembles. Visually, the project is stunning. Content-wise, it’s overlong with a blurry intent.

Cotton attempts to balance the offload of heavy factual information with light comedy, but dips into the first too liberally and the latter too sparsely. Unfocused, the piece is really neither about Bach nor about Frederick II and it’s certainly not about their confrontation, which comes during the second act as a truly delectable and utterly well constructed scene, but lasts too little. We wish Cotton had lent into the finer comic details and exploited the dramatic stress of that moment. It is, after all, the only wholly gripping instance.

Cox portrays an elderly man with a short temper who’s surprisingly affectionate. Blunt and direct, he challenges the king and criticises his doings openly, in spite of his son’s warnings. He applies a theological reasoning to Frederick’s rebuttals, but never overtly tries to convert the monarch, installing an intriguing dynamic that Cotton’s script sidelines too often. Stephen Hagan is a delight as the Prussian despot. Alongside Christopher Staines (Quantz), Toby Webster (Benda), and Matthew Romain (Graun), Hagan is the highlight. A precise comedic vein makes him just enough flamboyant and tyrannical as he surrounds himself with artists who are ready to compromise their artistic integrity for his benefit. 

Joining the composers at court is Voltaire, Peter de Jersey in a performance that belongs to a different show entirely. Overdramatic and vain, he flicks his wig for laughs, putting on an astonishingly bad French accent. There may be one too many personalities in the company for the cast to be cohesive. Some anachronisms in characters and language don’t help the outcome either. The many fiery philosophical arguments aren’t woven into any conversational tension, remaining bland statements.

Bach and Frederick start to pick apart the differences between political interference and violent invasion, creative inspiration and divine intervention, religion and atheism but these debates rarely come to any fruition. The play might want to be a large invective against war but stays safely sat on the fence as nothing more than a vehicle for historical review. Cotton asks his audience to peer beyond this meeting of minds and search for deeper meaning, but doesn’t add the juicy subtext or linguistic rhythm necessary to make this the theatrical colossus he expects it to be. As it is, it’s an old-fashioned production with an ambiguous raison d’être aimed at the grey pound.

The Score runs at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 26 April

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