Long may it lie in ruins. Wilton’s Music Hall, in the East End of London, is a wondrous slice of Victoriana which exploits its failing grandeur to the max. All visitors are implored to find a couple of quid for the restoration effort. But decay and dilapidation are the best things about it. Every wrinkled façade, every petal of tarnished gilding, is like a tear shed for an age that will never return. It’s wonderful. The administrators have realised this, too. Ruination is their main selling point. The cover of the brochure shows a heart-rending image of the terracotta entrance flaking and declining beautifully. If the renovation campaign were to find enough loot for a proper facelift, the place would go bust overnight. No one wants a squeaky-clean music hall.
Like a restaurant with a great view and lousy food, the venue is superbly indifferent to the quality of its drama. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s new version of Britannicus, by Racine, plunges us into the final years of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The young emperor Nero (Matthew Needham), still influenced by his spiky, scheming mother (Siân Thomas), wants to marry the fiancée of Britannicus, his stepbrother. First he needs to bump off the human impediment with a dose of arsenic hidden in a bread roll. This is a relentlessly cruel world where every character is either a heartless psycho or a bewildered victim.
Irina Brown’s production skips the Roman Empire by a couple of thousand years and sets the action in the present day. Which doesn’t help. The stage is wrapped in see-through plastic sheets. There are big arc-lamps standing around glaring at the stage, like Nosey Parkers. And with the cast togged up in cheap supermarket clothing, the whole thing feels like a photoshoot for the Primark winter catalogue.
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