A Bridge too far

In the year since it opened, the Bridge has given us the following: a harmless Karl Marx comedy by Richard Bean; a modern-dress Julius Caesar with Ben Whishaw playing Brutus as a frowning existentialist; a dreary rustic soap opera written by newcomer Barney Norris; and an enjoyable NHS romp by Alan Bennett. Not quite the string of triumphs everyone had expected from Nicholas Hytner who used to produce two dozen shows a year at the National but now manages one every three months at his bankside garret.

Time on his hands. But not enough to script-edit the efforts of fashionable wags like Martin McDonagh whose silly, mean-spirited skit about Hans Christian Andersen is a humiliating low point in the Bridge’s short history. The setting is Copenhagen. Hans Christian Andersen, played as a bumptious egomaniac by Jim Broadbent, nurtures a terrible secret. In a cage in his loft, he keeps a one-footed female pygmy (a dignified performance from Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles) and he uses her folk memories as the source for his world-famous tales.